To me, more dangerous, is that some safety systems are considered optional. Surely the plane either needs a safety feature or not, and it shouldn't be down to someone at an airline to make a decision on?
Who should make the decision whether an airplane is "safe enough"? Should it be the buyer who wants the safest plane? If you did that then rich airlines could keep out new competition by specifying safety features that make airplanes more expensive than they need to be. Should it be the country where the airline is based? But different airlines are based in different countries. Should there be options so that one country can specify higher standards than others?
Basically, that's how you get where we are I think. I'm not sure how you avoid that.
How about these guys? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Aviation_Safety_...
I think that changes the calculus of "Do you pay 10x the price of an aircraft to reduce the chances a problem so that it goes from happening once every 100 years to once every 1000 years"
They had already invested the money to develop the feature. Delivering a plane with or without it to a customer had the same cost. If the customer paid more, they got the safety feature turned on, the end.
Not exactly, surely. The ongoing/recurring costs to Boeing would be increased with the feature enabled - it's another thing that can go wrong and must be monitored, it changes support requirements and the overall software runtime complexity. I assume that would get factored in, somehow...
Does everyone know this delicious skit? "Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off"
People should have paid for the "warning when auto-crash enabled" option and I'm sure Boeing advertised their plane as absolutly unsafe without it...
Someone being pitched 30 different $1 million safety options?
For example, airbags on your car may be mandatory but automatic emergency braking not so much.
Given that thanks to Boeing, the Lion Air crew didn’t even know the MCAS subsystem existed, and that MCAS would continue to rely on the single faulty sensor however many extra redundancies were installed, the decision not to buy seems kind of irrelevant.
This is the part I was trying to clarify. I don't know Boeing's internal processes, but there certainly could be options that are safety-critical but still optional because they are ranked low enough on the severity/probability/detectability scale.
I agree that it's wrong to blame Lion Air as the consumer. The fault seems to be in Boeing misapplying the risk categorization.
In manuals that Boeing gave to Southwest Airlines — the biggest operator of both the MAX and 737s in general — the warning light was depicted as a standard feature just as it is on older 737s, according to Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King.
After the Lion Air crash, Ms King said, Boeing notified Southwest that it had discovered the lights did not work without the optional angle-of-attack indicators, so Southwest began adding the optional feature too.
(quotes from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-06/boeing-knew-737-probl... )
You're the one who made the factual statement. I'm not the one that's obliged to back that up.
Wikipedia lists the customers, and the number of aircraft delivered to US airlines is a good match for the 20% of aircraft that are said to have that feature. However, that assumption implies that 0% of leasing companies ordered it, that 0% of Canadian customers did, that the American airlines bought all their aircraft and didn't lease any, etc. Might all be true but you can see why I asked for a citation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
Fuel loads, critical airspeeds, and maneuvering characteristics are indeed governed by weight and balance. That has nothing to do with AoA reading mismatch indicators.
Was there a separate question about automatic weight and balance measurement as a feature?
To you own the safest car that is available?
However, I'm not transporting passengers for money and accepting liability for passengers' lives; airlines do, so their financial calculation should be very different from Joe Blow private car buyer.
Finally, if I understand correctly, these extra safety features were software only, meaning they don't cost the manufacturer anything to add on, so there's no excuse to not make them standard. On cars, the extra safety features require expensive sensors, so they really do add to the BOM cost of the car, and putting them on an economy car really could push the price too high for buyers to afford, so carmakers put them in higher-cost models to help make them more commonplace and then move them into lower-cost models as the volumes increase and economies of scale make costs lower.