> It isn’t like they are making decisions with the intent of compromising safety.
That really is actually exactly what they did and are doing. When you don’t do tests because you are confident something will pass, that doesn’t change that you aren’t testing, and you are compromising quality on the basis of productivity.
Here Boeing decided to go against the safe practice because that would have classified the plane as a different plane and incurred huge costs, but it would have increased safety and likely avoided the accidents.
They did compromise safety, they did so thinking that it wouldn’t matter because the overall safety would be good enough for no one to notice, but that gamble failed and others paid their lives to cover the bet.
>Boeing has made some fantastic planes. Their entire history shouldn’t be marginalized because of events in the past few years.
Yes it should. This is airworthiness; this stuff has to work.
You don't give someone a pass on safety-critical stuff because "they usually do a good job". The company's past processes are irrelevant because it's their current corpus of airworthiness procedures that affects the continued airworthiness of their products that are still flying today. The company has demonstrated a serious problem and until it has demonstrated sufficient corrective actions taken to correct the problems observed then everything the company touches should be considered suspect. The fact that Boeing also made B-29s 70 years ago means exactly nothing except for PR purposes or to fanboys.
Boeing has no doubt made some changes, but I'll reserve judgment as to whether or not those changes are sufficient because I don't work for a Regulator and don't have the complete picture.
> Still not a good times for Boeing, I'm not gonna be alone with this train of thought.
That's true. It's a critical thinking test. Some people will pass, many will fail. And another nail in the coffin containing the credibility of the media. It wouldn't have been newsworthy unless it were a Boeing plane.
> it is hard to say that the public has lost trust in Boeing
I've temporarily lost trust in them until they get their shit together. Airplanes are only safe because manufacturing and maintainence has been done diligently over the past couple decades and with sufficient attention to prevention of known hazards. As soon as that diligence disappears, airplanes can become unsafe, very quickly. If an accident could have been prevented by diligence, I lose trust.
I've been flying but avoiding Boeing aircraft in the past few months, until we get to the bottom of this. Many of my friends are doing the same.
I've also had multiple pilots explicitly announce that "this is not a 737 Max" or something to that effect.
> Yes but do the flight crew have the ability to tell if a plane is safe to fly?
Do you have the ability to tell if a street is safe to cross?
Most of the time, yes.
Sometimes, you can't tell for sure, but you cross anyways.
Sometimes, you are dead wrong about your judgement. Shit happens. Nobody expects 100% certainty.
The problem here may be that Boeing may be falling to meet the expectation of 99.????% certainty, and regressing down to 99.????% certainty, due to a broken corporate culture.
> I wish more of the world could function like the culture adopted by the western airline industry where every incident and investigation is treated as an opportunity to learn and improve the system rather than an opportunity to lay blame.
Unfortunately, the nature of US politics is such that it's impossible to have reasoned conversations about how to alter these extremely complex and dynamic systems. Entire areas of the solution space are rejected because of ideology, and those rejections, themselves, are highly politically charged.
In what should be no great surprise, later, when the problem isn't resolved, fingers get pointed at those who rejected those alternative solutions or pushed for solutions that did not work, while those who previously got in the way of a more fulsome discussion continue to do so because the foundation of their ideology cannot be shaken by real world data.
So, yes, it would be nice if the world could function as a reasonable and rational place, but when it comes to wedge issues like this, that simply will not happen without fundamental structural changes to the nature of US politics.
All that being said, given Boeing's recent performance, I'd be a little careful to hold up the airline industry as a paragon of rationality and preparedness...
> 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.
> You will say that until the day you will die in a crash.
For christ’s sake, this level of hyperbole is completely unjustified.
A supplier found a non-safety-critical flaw in a component they were manufacturing. It’s being fixed for new planes, and a plan is being devised to retrofit a fix on existing fleets. What more do you want?
Yes, the earlier issues with the MCAS and single AOA sensor were tragic and highlighted serious and inexcusable deficiencies within both Boeing and the FAA. And yet, since resolving this issue, the 737 MAX has returned to service with an exemplary safety record.
Flying on a 737 MAX—even including the fatal crashes due to MCAS—remains quite literally the safest way to travel by both time and distance.
> Air travel is very safe because the entire world of aviation has focused on analysis and improvement rather than infighting and blaming
Except you have one institution, the FAA, and one company, Boeing, who clearly no longer have a focus on maintaining regulatory processes to keep safety the main priority. While Boeing is cutting corners everywhere in order to save a buck, the FAA is looking the other way and letting Boeing do what they want. This is something that has already had serious consequences, and will continue to unless there are serious changes on a systemic level and there are punishments for those who are responsible for allowing these systemic changes to have occurred.
Also, I don't appreciate your underhanded insult. This isn't the place for it.
> I guess what I am saying is; there seems to be a deep unwillingness to criticize Boeing. This isn't recent or specific to this accident, Boeing is a very challenging topic to discuss without people getting tribal. Why is that?
Boeing is a large employer in the United States, people will get defensive when it threatens their livelihood. That said, as evidenced by the internal AA email Boeing fucked up. Rational or not I'm not planning on setting foot on a MAX anytime soon (and was fully prepared to get a refund if Southwest were to sub a MAX on my last flight).
But... you've also got the Indonesian aviation industry to contend with. Indonesian air travel is notoriously unsafe and in fact all Indonesian airlines were banned from EU airspace for a while. Lion Air, as well, stands out as being less safe than the Indonesian average.
Watch the second landing. I'm not a pilot but I'm pretty sure that the pilot not flying is NOT supposed to adjust the control surfaces in an unannounced manner. Likewise I'm pretty sure you're supposed to arm the speed brakes BEFORE you touch down. Shit like that is why people pile onto Lion Air (and Indonesian airlines).
> Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?
For my entire life, the most pervasive theme in executive leadership is that the _only_ responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders.
Boeing may reach a point where it has to stop killing passengers, but dead passengers aren’t an issue at all until it creates a major threat to their bottom line.
If you think it shouldn’t take many downed planes before that happens, then given the situation, the real question is why it hasn’t threatened their business enough yet.
> This is how airline travel, an inherently dangerous activity, has become so incredibly safe
Indeed. The tragedy with Boeing though is that they seem to have greatly regressed when it comes to safety. We all thought planes plunging down to the ground, doors getting ripped off of the fuselage were a thing of the past but they have reappeared.
> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time.
Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of driving.
> Do you honestly think that there was anyone at Boeing that thought, "well, this aircraft is definitely unsafe and is going to kill a bunch of people, which will likely destroy this company and greatly damage the entire industry I've spent my whole career on, and that I and everyone I care for will regularly board and fly in, but hell, my stock options are due, so what the fuck, I think I'll organize a conspiracy to commit mass murder"? These were human and systemic failures that, like most human failures, were perhaps not innocent but understandable. Of course, there were warnings. There always are. The problem is that the real warnings are easy to pick out of the noise after the fact.
No, that would indicate thoughtfulness & deliberation. Everything that seems to have emerged indicates recklessness and a lack of commitment (at the company level) to sound engineering processes, bordering willful disregard.
>> I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning! Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people, so that I can get slightly richer”.
It is the other way around. People should understand that adding pressure on teams delivering mission critical systems is dangerous. Intentions matter very little in this context, the outcome does.
> They put a plane into the air that flies itself automatically into the ground after all, with no opportunity for the pilots to save the plane. You can't fuck up more.
Though Boeing has significant contribution, if you read the report on the Ethiopian Air 737-Max crash, I think it's easy to see several places where there was ample opportunity for the pilots to save the plane, particularly in light of the LionAir crash. Even in the LionAir case, a prior LionAir crew did save the airplane on an earlier flight by following the manufacturer provided checklist.
Boeing made a serious design error here. However, it's not nearly as serious as the quoted sentence, IMO.
> You may choose to not fly on a boeing plane for political reasons
These are not political reasons. I'm for many years now trying to avoid flying on the 737 MAX and 787. Not because I dislike the planes even as a passenger, or because I worry about crashing, or because I have a political agenda. I want to use the little bit of voting with the wallet I have. This is the core of how our system works.
I understand that in the grand scheme of things this is not really doing anything, but if a sufficient number of people make airlines uncomfortable they will increase the pressure on Boeing to improve their processes.
The current duopoly/monopoly on aircraft manufacturers is preventing innovation in the space and I do not appreciate this a single bit.
> Your safety first rhetoric doesn’t hold up against any sort of practicality.
Wow. I don't know how to respond to that. People who thought like you kept the planes in the air and the result was the completely preventable deaths of so many more.
> Should the 777 have been grounded immediately when Asiana crashed? What about the 777 after Malaysia or its second which we still don’t know the cause of?
Nope. Those aircraft have a very long history of safe flight, completely unlike a 737 MAX. The FAA isn't made up of laymen watching the news to find out about the planes. They knew before the first MAX took flight that it had been heavily modified to make bigger engines on an airframe that wasn't designed to support it. It knew about the MCAS hacks that were implemented to make sure the plane fought the pilots under certain circumstances. They knew that pilots hadn't been taught about MCAS. The moment the first plane went down and they got a look at the planes behaviour before it crashed, they would have suspected the cause. Yet they did nothing.
They did the bidding of Boeing to ensure they'd have jobs when their stint with govt was over. It's the revolving door. Regulatory capture. Utter corruption leading to completely avoidable mass deaths.
>because right now it looks like they cut some corners, the FAA let them, and families are mourning. Pilot error isn’t really the issue, it’s engineering, process, and training.
That doesn’t seem like engineering, process, nor training.
That looks like something connected to large scale corporate profit.
How did Boeing manage to gain self reporting to the FAA?
It is a safety critical industry. Did you expect something different? Would we be "better served" by acting differently?
The goal of someone flying is to get there alive, not win the war against bias.
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