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Sure. But the Ray Miller quote suggests that the issue was not that a modification to make the rudder mechanism more reliable was itself prohibitively expensive
by jfk13 8y ago
Sure. But the Ray Miller quote suggests that the issue was not that a modification to make the rudder mechanism more reliable was itself prohibitively expensive from an engineering point of view. Rather, the concern was that making such a modification could open up liability issues, as it would be an acknowledgement that the plane was faulty, and the FAA and Boeing were anxious to avoid being held liable.
That is what I think people find offensive.
- BoorishBears 8y agoI think that’s also extended from the same mentality of treatingives as numbers, but I read it as Boeing didn’t want to fix it because of cost and the fact they’d be admitting there was a problem, and the lack of payouts was due to not wanting to accept legal liability separately of admitting there was a problem. Which honestly is Ben worse, adding insult to the families of the people their actions killed.
- smsm42 8y agoThis looks like a system set up for catastrophic failures. I mean, if everybody involved that has means and knowledge to do anything about safety faults has a huge incentive to not do anything about them, how we expect not to have very bad outcomes? I think it'd be smart to move on from "boo selfish people, how could they!A" to "we must redesign the system so people are not hugely disincentivized from doing the thing we want to be done"? Otherwise we have hopeless war against human nature on our hands here.
- jfk13 8y agoSure. It seems to me that if a company has followed established "good practices" for design and engineering in its field, and the appropriate checks and approvals have been granted, this should go a long way to mitigate its liability for unforeseen problems that may later appear, despite the good intentions and best efforts of all concerned. This may well be applicable to the earliest B737 rudder incidents, for example. Acting to rectify the (previously unsuspected) fault should not increase the company's liability for a problem it was unable to anticipate. But once a problem has been discovered/reported, if the company does not act to rectify it in a timely way, its liability for any further problems that occur should rise rapidly. And once several serious in-flight emergencies related to the B737 rudder had occurred, it seems (judging by the story as presented here) like Boeing was probably guilty of this and should be severely penalized.