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We are analyzing accidents that killed hundreds of people and most people are skeptical of Boeing and the FAA for the engineering and certification decisions th

We are analyzing accidents that killed hundreds of people and most people are skeptical of Boeing and the FAA for the engineering and certification decisions they took. Saying "I don't know but surely better informed people were ok with this so it's fine" is well below most people's burden of proof. I'm not saying the plane is fatally flawed, I'm saying we don't know the fundamental things to have an opinion on that topic.

sgc 8y ago
Since there is no evidence the problems you are bringing up are actually problems, even after a lot of information has been made public, I think it is more reasonable than not to presume the problem is where most everyone is looking for it. This does not seem to be a great mystery and a fix was already underway before the second accident. In the strict sense of the term, we the public will never know. The same people who built the plane will provide a fix, the same people who certified the plane will do so again, the same people who were flying them will do so again, and we will trust them or we won't. Some more people will have their eyes on it, but again, we still won't know. That is the way most science and technology works. Everyone has their small domain of expertise and must trust others in their own. Mistakes were made, and most mistakes look stupid/obvious on hindsight, but they don't negate the capacities of the parties involved. All car manufacturers have safety recalls extremely regularly and we don't make them out to be criminals, nor do we make the certifying agencies pariahs. I personally find it an exaggerated response to lose all trust in everyone involved - especially since new models of planes regularly have more accidents in their first few years of flight, because they are hard to make and they have bugs. It also seems unreasonable for me to criticize a manufacturer for taking economic/market concerns into account when historically even the largest manufacturers are on the verge of bankruptcy semi-regularly. Realistically, they must. At the same time this specific decision does not appear to have been the correct one, but I don't demonize them for making it and even at my most cynical, they obviously did not think people would be dying because of it.
- pedrocr 8y ago
  I agree with everything you mention here. There just seems to be a disconnect here: > Since there is no evidence the problems you are bringing up are actually problems I didn't bring up any problems. I just said that the things you were claiming were true are not things we actually know to be true. >In the strict sense of the term, we the public will never know. The same people who built the plane will provide a fix, the same people who certified the plane will do so again, the same people who were flying them will do so again, and we will trust them or we won't. This is precisely true. Which is why I responded to you by describing the bunch of things we don't know. Chances are this will be fully fixed and we will get a very nice detailed report on how that was done. The actual engineering tradeoff of more inherent stability versus more control is something we don't even know enough to conjecture well about. That's what I responded to in your comment.

sgc 8y ago

Since there is no evidence the problems you are bringing up are actually problems, even after a lot of information has been made public, I think it is more reasonable than not to presume the problem is where most everyone is looking for it. This does not seem to be a great mystery and a fix was already underway before the second accident. In the strict sense of the term, we the public will never know. The same people who built the plane will provide a fix, the same people who certified the plane will do so again, the same people who were flying them will do so again, and we will trust them or we won't. Some more people will have their eyes on it, but again, we still won't know. That is the way most science and technology works. Everyone has their small domain of expertise and must trust others in their own. Mistakes were made, and most mistakes look stupid/obvious on hindsight, but they don't negate the capacities of the parties involved. All car manufacturers have safety recalls extremely regularly and we don't make them out to be criminals, nor do we make the certifying agencies pariahs. I personally find it an exaggerated response to lose all trust in everyone involved - especially since new models of planes regularly have more accidents in their first few years of flight, because they are hard to make and they have bugs. It also seems unreasonable for me to criticize a manufacturer for taking economic/market concerns into account when historically even the largest manufacturers are on the verge of bankruptcy semi-regularly. Realistically, they must. At the same time this specific decision does not appear to have been the correct one, but I don't demonize them for making it and even at my most cynical, they obviously did not think people would be dying because of it.

pedrocr 8y ago
I agree with everything you mention here. There just seems to be a disconnect here: > Since there is no evidence the problems you are bringing up are actually problems I didn't bring up any problems. I just said that the things you were claiming were true are not things we actually know to be true. >In the strict sense of the term, we the public will never know. The same people who built the plane will provide a fix, the same people who certified the plane will do so again, the same people who were flying them will do so again, and we will trust them or we won't. This is precisely true. Which is why I responded to you by describing the bunch of things we don't know. Chances are this will be fully fixed and we will get a very nice detailed report on how that was done. The actual engineering tradeoff of more inherent stability versus more control is something we don't even know enough to conjecture well about. That's what I responded to in your comment.