> The only viable solution is an independent safety board (paid for out of Boeing profits) that supervises every aspect of design and production at Boeing and its contractors until Boeing learns how to build safe airplanes again.
At this point I’d go further than that. Their ability to manufacture and sell aircraft should be at stake. This needs to be an existential threat for Boeing to take it seriously.
> If the regulatory process is broken, it needs fixing
This is true, but as long it isn't fixed, voting with your wallet is the only thing you can do. And definitely better than supporting boeing to go on with business as usual.
> Yes, Boeing was too aggressive about reducing cost to compete with Airbus and they need some major reform because hundreds of people are dead. But ...
"Yes, Boeing killed hundreds of people due to their negligence, but think of the cost savings!"
Boeing's not going anywhere as long as the US exists. It is the state monopoly on civil aviation. However, allowing these rogue MBAs to run amok with it over the last 20 years has been an absolute disgrace. Any sane, democratic, society that had not been beaten into the dust by regulatory capture and corporate lobbying would have cleaned house on them and sent people to jail after they killed hundreds of people through pure greed. It's a pathetic state we're in now to realize that it's probably going to take another 200+ dead Americans on a domestic scheduled flight before anything even remotely material happens about it.
> No company is safe. Boeing is exactly the type of company that won't know they're dying until they are dead.
Yes, but they're in a sufficiently protected region of state space guarded by landscape difficulty, moats, massive contracts and cash flows, the government, you name it.
You can't just build a better plane from zero and immediately start taking orders. You have to start with something small, tangential, and then grow into that market. That's still very hard to do in aerospace because the requirement is "don't kill people" yet the problem involves putting people in mortal danger.
I don't doubt that it could happen, but I think it's a very tall order.
>However, given the amount of Boeing planes out there, and the number of employees, the company dying would be harsh.
346 dead from wilful incompetence, followed by utter bullshittery, half-truths, outright lies and finally, when it has to admit what it has been doing, a desperate insistance that executives could not possibly have known.
And all the while fighting against them being grounded.
It bothers me that when lives are lost, our first response as a greedy capitalistic society is to cut funding, considering there aren't really many competitors, and the switch-over costs for airlines would be prohibitive.
We should be funding efforts to investigate the heck out of this and make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm not sure how one would structure such funds to make sure they aren't abused, but I certainly don't want Boeing cutting more corners and hiring less-competent lower-salary aircraft engineers because they are now low on funding and need to get the plane out before some damn quarterly earnings report.
> Not sure how Boeing kept its design org approval after that
That's an easy one. It's too big to fail. One way or another Boeing had to make it out the other end of the 737 Max disaster intact as an organisation. Anything else would have been unpalatable from the point of view of the American military industrial complex. I know that phrase is usually applied in a derogatory way but here I don't even disagree with the thinking.
> That is the effect that will cause Boeing management to do something about the safety problems.
And yet, here we are, it hasn't. The fact you can't get an Airbus for love nor money for the next decade doesn't help either.
> I dunno, someone would do something, these plane crashes are expensive and bad PR.
They are indeed. Largely for Boeing rather than the airline, at the moment.
> If you have enough money to hurtle through the air at a million meters per hour in a tin can, you have enough money to walk away from a plane ticket.
> They know they are too big to fail, and are cynically exploiting their position.
They aren't going to bust over this, sure, but this has still been a very costly black eye for them, no? Even if they get their FAA approval, I imagine fewer airlines will be buying Boeing. (Discounting the enormous impact of the pandemic, that is.)
> We are talking about an industry that consistently chooses safety above all else, regardless of profits and minor inconveniences. And for some reason that just doesn't seem to be the case here.
Or maybe it is the case here. We all seem to think it's obvious Boeing should ground this plane and yet they aren't. I hope Boeing aren't idiots and are making their decisions based on engineering factors we don't have.
>If what that commenter says is true, the whole company ought to be shut down.
No it won't. Boeing has reached too big to fail status.
They employ many millions of people directly and indirectly between commercial and military aerospace.
Boeing has reached PEAK too big to fail recently too when they announced that due to their too big to fail status, they are unable to estimate or control costs anymore and will no longer bid for any US military contracts that are fixed-price.
What you will see is billions in bailout funds given to Boeing shareholders.
> So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety
No we don’t. Other companies have followed the regulations. Boeing chose to value cost avoidance over risk to human life. The owners and management of Boeing are culpable.
> The safety of the aviation industry is by and large directly due to strict safety regulations, many of which Boeing pioneered
Isn't that rather self-contradictory? Having an unsafe airplane is bad for business. It put Lockheed out of the airliner business, for example (Elektra). Also DeHaviland (Comet).
>>>Given how cozy Boeing is with the US government, I fear that it will be the engineers and lower managers who are nailed to the wall, not Boeing’s leadership
Tricky, unless the management specifically told them to ignore safety. Otherwise, "I'm the CEO and that's why I have xx thousand engineers"
It obviously can. As long as it has regulators and legislators on a leash all this will always just be the cost of doing business.
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