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The outrage mob over this has made it difficult for the whole truth to surface. For months, many people have said exactly what Walter is saying in this thread,
by jquery 7y ago
The outrage mob over this has made it difficult for the whole truth to surface. For months, many people have said exactly what Walter is saying in this thread, Walter just happens to be more eloquent and qualified than other people who have made generally the same points.
Most of these people receive insults and downvotes so they stop talking about it. This leads to the classic “spiral of outrage” and the truth becomes lost.
I’m tooting my own horn here, but I’ve said what Walter has said in previous threads, and my comments were often downvoted into invisibility and I eventually gave up trying to point out that the pilots, the airlines, and the maintenance staff of the 737-MAX deserve some portion of the blame in addition to Boeing. Planes have become so safe that some airlines skip out on pilot emergency safety training, and Airworthiness Directives were ignored by the two airlines which had a 737-MAX crash.
This doesn’t mean that Boeing has no culpability, but it does mean that Boeing is not the sole party at fault. For everyone saying “Boeing cut costs and cost lives”, this is equally true for the airlines which skimped on pilot training and skimped on maintenance. The 737-MAX crashes were the result of a series of bad decisions and mistakes, not merely the result of bad MCAS system design.
Note: my late father worked at Boeing for 25 years so I have some personal reasons for wanting to defend Boeing. My mother’s widow pension is also dependent on Boeing stock not cratering into the ground.
- jacobush 7y agoI may be bigoted, but I expect very little from certain countries, but quite a lot from Boeing.
- jquery 7y ago>The paradox is that the failures of the 737 Max were really the product of an incredible success: a decades-long transformation of the whole business of flying, in which airplanes became so automated and accidents so rare that a cheap air-travel boom was able to take root around the world. Along the way, though, this system never managed to fully account for the unexpected: for the moment when technology fails and humans — a growing population of more than 300,000 airline pilots of variable and largely unpredictable skills — are required to intervene. In the drama of the 737 Max, it was the decisions made by four of those pilots, more than the failure of a single obscure component, that led to 346 deaths and the worldwide grounding of the entire fleet. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c... In a way, these accidents were inevitable. When safety is so assured, some airlines will begin to take a casual approach to training their pilots. Post-accident, this leads to Boeing/Airbus making their planes even more immune to poor airmanship, and the virtuous cycle continues until another accident inevitably happens, and Boeing/Airbus get fingered instead of the airline (because we want to blame the agents we think we can change, rather than the agents we cannot change).