Let me remind you of why we're all still talking about Boeing.
Not once, but TWICE, software taking readings from faulty sensors caused the airplane to nosedive into the ground, killing every single person on board, with the pilots powerless to take over.
It happened once, Boeing and the U.S. government reassured everyone that it wasn't going to happen again, then it happened again.
When nations around the world began to issue emergency orders to ground the 737 MAX, the U.S. was the last to do so.
The leaked emails from Boeing indicate clearly that this was not a freak accident, but a product of a corporate culture of irresponsibility and recklessness at Boeing reaching mind-boggling proportions. [0] Here are some quotes from said emails:
"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."
"We'll probably have to go to other regulators around the world to Jedi-mind trick them into accepting the FSB findings, but that shouldn't be too hard."
"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't."
"I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year."
> What do people propose? Shut down Boeing?
No. What I propose is what I'm doing; I don't fly on Boeing planes anymore. If I see a flight change to a Boeing plane, I call the airline and demand to be switched to a different flight. It worked once, and I plan to keep doing it.
> Want carriers to just scrap their 737 MAX tails? Right now? That's the same thing as just declaring bankruptcy. The investment in a commercial aircraft takes years of steady use to pay off, and no one in the industry is in a financial position to take that hit.
I don't care what carriers have to do. At this point, I would consider it justice to see Boeing go bankrupt. And I really don't care if every airline that runs Boeing planes goes bankrupt. Companies come and go. Money is made and lost. But human lives cannot be returned and corruption like this can't be allowed to continue.
But that won't happen. What will happen is that the government will continue to bail out all the above, indefinitely. But if enough customers begin showing concern over Boeing, the airlines will purchase their planes less and less, and we can expect things to get better, either with Boeing's demise or its reform.
>Not once, but TWICE, software taking readings from faulty sensors caused the airplane to nosedive into the ground, killing every single person on board, with the pilots powerless to take over.
I believe technically if they followed the runaway trim in memory checklist the system would have been disabled? This is how the pilot of the Lion Air flight the day before prevented disaster.
>At this point, I would consider it justice to see Boeing go bankrupt.
And what when this happens to Airbus, is that the end of air travel? As long as humans are involved, there will be issues. Airbus still averages pilot input, rather than providing feedback to each pilot, which has led to more than one accident (AF447 being one example, where one pilot tried to pull up out of a stall warning).
>I believe technically if they followed the runaway trim in memory checklist the system would have been disabled? This is how the pilot of the Lion Air flight the day before prevented disaster.
Yes, but the failure they experienced feels absolutely nothing like runaway trim. It's great that some pilots were able to troubleshoot the failure in time, but that's not something you can really expect from everyone. Adequate training may well have prevented the mishaps, but the airplane as a system was still poorly designed.
I agree and they should fix the process as well as the causes (as they have).
But there was a way to stop it is all I'm saying (the claim was that there wasn't). The Ethiopian Air pilots also tried, but missed a crucial step when running the checklist.
If your interest is understanding what happened and how it could have been prevented, you would do far better to read the accident reports, in their entirety, carefully. A half dozen cherry-picked and context-free lines from a store of thousands of emails and other documentation are useful for getting clicks and stoking reader emotions to drive social media reposts but are typically less dispositive in failure analysis.
If I went trolling through all the emails about any multi-billion project, you don't think I could pull out a few to support whatever narrative I wanted to push? Especially if it was a nice juicy one that I could count on much of my audience to really want to be true?
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. Before the fact, they're mixed in with an awful lot of other concerns and warnings and complaints that will turn out to have been about nothing.
The main difference with this particular incident of corporate malfeasance and systemic failure is that the we have a process that will identify and publish what happened, why it happened, and what can be done to correct it. Now, that certainly doesn't generate a nice simple narrative with cartoonish villains that even the most vapid readers will cherish, but it does generate an incredibly safe commercial aircraft industry.
Lashing out at Boeing and its customers isn't cost free. Removing Airbus' competition won't make its aircraft safer. Destroying the major commercial carriers won't encourage small carriers to expand into the new hulls and training and maintenance standards that safe travel requires. Making air travel more expensive and balkanizing the industry into a maze of low-cost carriers will make it less safe, less tenable, and do enough damage to the world economy that inequality and unavailability will cost far more lives and livelihoods than even the most gratuitously simplistic narrative about Boeing could begin to compass.
> 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.
You absolutely have the right to not board an aircraft if you don't feel safe, and should exercise it. Laurence Gonzales has a story about declining to fly on a DC-10, which saved his life. But even he admits that that decision wasn't rational: you can't judge a decision by what you know after the fact. Even at its worst, a flight on a DC-10 was much safer than his morning commute.
You'll have less luck getting a refund for that decision, but I do appreciate your admitting that the decision is about your feelings, not demonstrable evidence.
Not once, but TWICE, software taking readings from faulty sensors caused the airplane to nosedive into the ground, killing every single person on board, with the pilots powerless to take over.
It happened once, Boeing and the U.S. government reassured everyone that it wasn't going to happen again, then it happened again.
When nations around the world began to issue emergency orders to ground the 737 MAX, the U.S. was the last to do so.
The leaked emails from Boeing indicate clearly that this was not a freak accident, but a product of a corporate culture of irresponsibility and recklessness at Boeing reaching mind-boggling proportions. [0] Here are some quotes from said emails:
"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."
"We'll probably have to go to other regulators around the world to Jedi-mind trick them into accepting the FSB findings, but that shouldn't be too hard."
"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't."
"I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year."
> What do people propose? Shut down Boeing?
No. What I propose is what I'm doing; I don't fly on Boeing planes anymore. If I see a flight change to a Boeing plane, I call the airline and demand to be switched to a different flight. It worked once, and I plan to keep doing it.
> Want carriers to just scrap their 737 MAX tails? Right now? That's the same thing as just declaring bankruptcy. The investment in a commercial aircraft takes years of steady use to pay off, and no one in the industry is in a financial position to take that hit.
I don't care what carriers have to do. At this point, I would consider it justice to see Boeing go bankrupt. And I really don't care if every airline that runs Boeing planes goes bankrupt. Companies come and go. Money is made and lost. But human lives cannot be returned and corruption like this can't be allowed to continue.
But that won't happen. What will happen is that the government will continue to bail out all the above, indefinitely. But if enough customers begin showing concern over Boeing, the airlines will purchase their planes less and less, and we can expect things to get better, either with Boeing's demise or its reform.
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[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/outrageous-messages-from-boe...