"If Boeing knew about a problem with the MCAS, they'd have told the FAA and corrected it" is not a hypothesis in-line with their past behavior, should anyone be holding that hypothesis in their minds.
> Southwest operates a fleet of more than 750 Boeing 737s, and the 34 737 MAX 8 aircraft account for less than five (5) percent of our daily flights.
This allows them to save on maintenance costs since there's so much commonality among their fleet, but puts them in more peril when something affects the entire class of craft.
'we should label these switches like this and put them here', and southwest said,
'no, that will change the type and we will have to retrain pilots, we'd rather have things be the same type with an asterisks and just let our pilots know than retrain'
And because southwest is the largest consumer of the 8max, Boeing did it. From what I understand, that was a precondition of sale for the contract.
And the result it seems is that the plane can act in a way that is confusing to people who are expecting one behavior and seeing another, this comes right down to labeling switches as one thing, when they are kinda another.
My assumption, and this will probably be borne out in the investigation, is that, because southwest was part of the decision process here, they are at very little risk because of a little additional lite pilot training where they point out these switches are labeled wrong and this behavior will seem funny but this is what it's going to do. But not all airlines are going to train like that, it's the same type right?
either way, a customer requesting a design change doesn't make the customer part of the 'decision process' - customers request changes to the vendor, who then decides whether or not the change makes sense, and if necessary tries to influence customer expectations or at worst lose the business if necessary if it does not.
If Boeing had a reasonable expectation that the avionics changes for the new jets would impact flight characteristics to the point that the pilots needed to be retrained, then they should have dealt accordingly, even if this meant sticking to the original design you claim and insisting southwest 'suck it up' as far as pilot retraining, and the decision not to do this, if true, was solely theirs to make.
also, this wouldn't explain the 'buggy avionics software relying on a single sensor' which could also be part of the equation as I understand it.
Note that I'm not making a value judgment about regulation in the general case, just pointing out that you've misidentified the problem in this particular case.
The solution isn't to stop those companies from failing, it's to prevent companies from being "too big to fail"
At a very minimum they will have Boeing spares and maintenance ltd. Probably one in each country they operate in.
It's normalization of risk writ large over corporate lifecycle timescales. "Should we report this? Well, the last time we got 200 people killed, nobody went to jail, so..."
I don't think this is true, and I think that their cost/benefit analysis clearly agrees with me. Military and other large contractors go out of business when they run out of friends. For them to run out of friends, they would either have to have people fear for their jobs if they choose Boeing, or a competitor who offers more for friendship.
There will never be enough pressure from the public to not pick Boeing that people would be risking their jobs by choosing them. In addition, the US government is willing to sweeten any friendships they need sweetened. Boeing is a company of the size that taxpayers actively shill for them overseas, and that business for them is included in treaties and foreign aid.
I can't even imagine a situation bad enough that Boeing would even need to change its name.
... though I wouldn't say that this one-off rises to the claim of "demonstrable track record." They have some explaining to do about the working conditions of their warehouses.