Boeing 737 slid off the runway and fell into St. Johns River in Florida

Neither do I, but people still keep using the damn thing.

It makes no difference to the average consumer. They see 'Boeing' having an accident, they immediately think, "another problem? this airline sucks!".

But it cuts much deeper than that because the problem with Max involved the lives of hundreds of people. Whichever way you look, this adds an enormous dose of fuel to an ongoing fire.

I am an aeroplane geek, and would be comfortable flying Boeing. But I don't think the average consumer can be blamed for thinking differently. The general brand news is the only real information they have to go on. At the very least it is a useful heuristic in the absence of actual understanding. And we can't really expect people to understand thoroughly every product and service they use.

Big companies put a lot of effort into branding, and it can have positive effects for them. The flip side is that people will see bad news with a similar lack of nuance.

It was pilot error to try landing with a tailwind in torrential rain.

May have been the safest. Doesn't matter. There were two disasters hitting the same airline - Malaysian Airlines - both of them spookier by orders of magnitude than your average flight calamity. And then, in the last days of the year, an Air Asia Airbus plummeting into the sea. That was out of Indonesia, but still... Psychology does matter. I remember my daughter, as hardnosed and rational individual as ever was, shortly afterwards going Air Asia in and out of Kuala Lumpur, and being slightly perturbed, however irrational she knew it to be.