Why is that getting downvoted? What the heck.
This subthread is clearly about gratifying rage, not intellectual curiosity. That makes it off topic for Hacker News. Yes, the rage is understandable and there are reasons for it. Nevertheless what's going on in this vortex of the discussion is not in keeping with the values of the site. To a weird extent actually.
If this it true then link? When was this confirmed? Who are the assholes?
Else this is just Reddit spam that contributes less than nothing.
There's a piece of additional flavor, which is that as I understand it Boeing proposed building a new type of plane as an a320neo competitor, and the airlines announced that they'd only buy it if it's a 737 subtype to avoid having to retrain their pilots. It's not just "Boeing doesn't want to pay for certifications", but also -- and perhaps primarily -- "Airlines don't want to pay for training".
So while Boeing's ultimately responsible for building unsafe aircraft, I could imagine people being angrier at the airlines than Boeing.
So if you stay with the airline for a long time you move up from first officer to Captain and then as years of seniority add up you start making a lot more.
The trouble is the pilots can't threaten to change jobs because if you move from one airline to another your seniority goes back to zero.
Also if an airline declares bankruptcy, all the union contracts are null and void. The airline then has a ton of leverage because the pilots are all out of work. The pay scale that comes out of bankruptcy is typically very low.
Similar if one airline acquires another airline. The pilots at the acquired airline typically get screwed in the pay scale and seniority calculation.
Also jobs like flying cargo planes or piloting for a commuter airline pay very low wages. It's mostly just the big airlines that pay well.
Varies with seniority and employer, but:
"The average Southwest pilot made $230,626 in 2015, according to the most recent data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Airline Data Project"
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/southwest-airlines/2016/...
And FAA is another sad excuse these days it seems. One doesn't let trivial things self certify and they let an airlines company self certify critical parts of a plane. What a joke.
Nobody should accept this attempt to excuse Boeing of its responsibility and even less the possible variant of it "we are all guilty we will buy the cheapest flight."
1) decided to move the engines forward making the aircraft dynamically unstable, but improve performance and potential sales
2) decided to counter the instability with a software system (MCAS) based on a single sensor, with zero redundancy or fail-safe mode, AND make a second sensor an optional extra cost for the airlines, AND bury the whole thing in a poor UI, in short: cheaping out on a band-aid fix to a critical problem of their own creation, to maximize profits
3) decided to evade normal requirements to make the airframe a new classification, so that airlines wouldn't need to spend money on retaining and separately qualifying pilots for the different airframe, again to reduce apparent costs of the new airplane and increase sales
4) minimized the training on the MCAS system and require no new training when they made changes to the system. AND make the MCAS system automatically re-engage, based on the single sensor to reduce customer costs
5) ensured that this cascade of bad decisions got implemented through the FAA and rolled out globally.
The effect of all of this was to overlook and minimize critical flaws in a complex human flight system, and do so in order to maximize sales and profits over safety.
They killed 346 people already, and nevermind the economic knock-on effects.
No, I'm not going to hunt back and provide a link to every bit of analysis I read gathering the above facts. It is all recent, non-obscure, and very google-able.
Yes, bad engineering and management decision that kill people will tend to get folks a bit riled up. This is a good thing. While this forum should indeed emphasize facts and intellectual argument, this is not a peer-reviewed journal, it is a forum for humans to discuss issues, and we should also keep here the human perspective on engineering.
This would be extremely egregious, but it's not what happened. Every MAX has two AoA vanes. Every MAX only hooks up the MCAS to one vane. The optional feature was just an "AOA disagree" light and display, which wasn't even hooked up to an error alarm. It's a red herring for these crashes, in my opinion. The pilots aren't going to hunt around the cockpit during an emergency and notice a disagree light and be able to conclude anything meaningful about what's happening to the plane and how to stop it.
I don't believe that's true. Per Mentour Pilot, the 737 MAX and the 737 NG are both very stable aircraft that are not prone to stalling[0]. That there is a difference in performance characteristics that creates a difference in how an escape from stall maneuver is to be performed, and the MCAS is meant to paper over that difference.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlinocVHpzk @16:25 "[...] The 737 MAX and NG are equally less indicative of getting stalled, okay? They are very good, very nicely flying aircraft. But once they're in a thrust stall, they have slightly different characteristics. [...]"
So, yes, if you;re actively flying the plane and staying on top of your trim & pitch, keeping it in the middle of the range is just a bit different. But, if it gets out of hand, it gets progressively worse at an increasing rate, which is what MCAS was apparently designed to prevent.
Of course, if they'd designed the MCAS with multiple redundant sensors, as well as integrating other data (thrust, accel, GPS trajectory, pilot inputs, etc.) into a complete image, or at least a solid series of sanity checks on then applied it, it could have been a great advance.
Instead, they cheaped out, with the result that they added to the design a single point of failure.
The result, within a year of its rollout, is 346 people dead.