Jail time is the only outcome I will accept.
I'd say some time after the first accident it was reasonably well understood what had happened, and the FAA (and many others!) concluded that it was still safe to fly the plane, as the pilots could easily interrupt the accident chain by doing the right thing quick (as the pilots on the Lion Air flight preceding the accident flight had done).
Why that assessment was wrong is a complicated story that has to be examined carefully.
From what I gather, in aviation safety circles "jail time" is very rarely considered a wise answer. As soon as you threaten jail, people will cover their ass and obstruct investigations. Instead, the goal is and should be to examine the entire system to ensure accidents don't repeat, and by and large, the system works exceedingly well.
The root cause here is "Boeing management wanted to get a plane out quick so they didn't lose market share". The way to examine the system and make sure this doesn't repeat (for now...) is to put someone in jail for it. Then the next time that some plane company wants to cut corners and get an unsafe plane out quick, some manager who doesn't want to go to jail will put a stop to it.
Show me the flaw in my logic.
In this case you're proposing to punish the smallest cog in the machine, some middle-manager or executive at Boeing.
It would be just as logical to throw every single American in prison for around 45 minutes (~1 person dead in 737 MAX crashes for every million Americans, 80 years (let's call that life in prison) / 1 million =~ 45 minutes).
After all those are the people responsible for electing the people whose job it was to oversee Boeing. Shouldn't we blame them for their disinterest in the activities of the FAA? Maybe give people who complained about the FAA's rubber-stamp regulatory policy before the 737 MAX parole?
All you'd accomplish by throwing people in jail is to incentivize these companies to restructure decision making to be more diffuse, and make all subsequent air crash investigations much more difficult due to everyone involved being afraid of having made some prison-worthy mistake.
Because the usual argument is that the C-suite and especially the CEO are personally responsible for the successes of a company.
So it's not unreasonable to hold them personally responsible for the failures too - especially when those failures amount to suspected criminal negligence.
This is not the same as assuming guilt. Due process should still apply.
But the risk of personal liability should absolutely be present as a deterrent.
And if some executives don't want to operate in that environment - that's absolutely fine. The system should encourage responsible actors, and allow the removal and punishment of those who prefer to act irresponsibly.
These people make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, truly obscene amounts of money compared to the workers they manage. Why should they live risk-free lives when the lives of so many people rest on their decisions in the C-suite office, and their decisions are clearly not made with safety in mind, but rather profit?
Your argument is like claiming that a taxi company owner should go to jail when one of his drivers rapes a passenger, even if there was no way the owner could have known the driver had this propensity. It's totally nonsensical.
The executives at Boeing are the ones ultimately responsible for the decisions that led to these crashes, because they prioritized profits over safety, and directed their engineers to work towards that end. For that, they should go to jail.
To survive a runaway trim, pilots had to know the rollercoaster maneuver and have enough altitude to aerodynamically relieve airloads off the jackscrew so they could manually trim the plane back. If FAA and many others knew this then they should have instantly communicated it to all boeing max pilots. Instead none of that happened.
On the MAX's, the switches only kill all electrical input. So those procedures literally didn't apply.
But the FAA and Boeing are worse than useless.
We have an drug problem that kills 40,000+/year from overdoses. Over a million people die driving in the world PER YEAR.
A small bit of perspective.
Plane flying used to be much MORE dangerous before the "corrupt" FAA got involved with the airplane companies to regulate things more closely. The 737 MAX has had no US passenger fatalities flying with US licensed pilots. The record of safety in aviation in the last few years within the US has been extremely strong.
Just interesting that big pharma walks free, but Hilary Clinton and the FAA are getting the "lock them up" chants.
If there's anything that's causing the pharma controversy to stall, it's that the cross section of companies involved have significant non pharmaceutical revenue bases to pull from in funding their defense.
Also, to be quite frank, pharma is getting legislative, not just judicial attention as well. There is a reckoning in the works for quite a few industrial verticals.
However, where things are different with aviation is that every last person on each plane had absolutely no ability to influence what ended up happening. The documentation around the process is also far better and more auditable than the collective sales activity of every actor in the pharmaceutical industry.
Give it time. These things require proof, and proof takes time to collect and sift through.
As a non-US citizen, I find that comment really disturbing.
> Just interesting that big pharma walks free
"Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson must pay $572m (£468m) for its part in fuelling Oklahoma's opioid addiction crisis, a judge in the US state has ruled."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49452373
I understand other states are lining up too.
The whole comment is whataboutism, so maybe this was just an intentional red herring.
The safety chain in the US has an absolutely incredible record. And there have been PLENTY of design and other failures along the way even in the US BTW
> If you think folks [...] should be in JAIL
Who is 'folks' here - the entirety of the FAA and boeing? Or more likely just the very few at the top who messed up; those in the FAA who didn't do their job (maybe, maybe not) or those at boeing that took advantage of self-certification to cut corners?
Top boeing executives probably earn millions a year, basically they are paid to make the right decisions. That's key. Seems they didn't.
FAA probably less. Now you mention it, it seems likely FAA's share of the blame is the lesser, maybe.
> which has an incredible safety rate among ALL modes of transit
True, and still does, but we now have a case of 2 planeloads of people dead, and a very major US manufacturer that's... well, I don't know but having 5,000 orders frozen for an unknown time can't be good. If that could have been avoided then it should have.
Those responsible, should there be a penalty? If so, in your view, if not jail then what? There are plenty of people in US jails far more trivial things. Can this be right?
I won't get into all the reasons - many understandable, many addressable. But one small point - it generally takes a chain of issues (from design to maintenance to PIC) to result in an fatality these days.
Paying fines is not jail time. The big white collar criminals never seem to actually do jail time. Many don't even pay back their bonuses or sell their second homes. A guy selling MJ can get jail time and someone killing 10K people get's a vacation home in the bahamas.
Do you have facts that say that the probability of this happening in US was 0 ?
What is different about the US? (Other than we had fewer MAX-8 deliveries than the rest of the world)
>What is different about the US?
Thats the question that I asked.
And you even got an answer to your question. The number of deliveries is different. What's your point?
My statement is not a fact ? okay
>And you even got an answer to your question. The number of deliveries is different
And I didn't refute or deny that either.
There was no crashes in Canada or X country , what conclusion can you make from this?
Those parties continued to assure the public that the aircraft were completely safe until the entire rest of the planet ground the aircraft and the US President ordered the FAA to ground the aircraft.
A number of possible answers (and no, pilot skill not the only one - though everyone is focusing on that and boeing).
Maintenance.
This issue develops IF the computer gets bad data from a sensor.
Question - would this sort of thing get fixed more quickly in the US?
For the Ethiopian crash we have in days leading up to crash errors in the system - all different flights
* Capt side altimeter erratic, showed a decent and lower level then back to normal.
* During approach at 1000' the aircraft started to roll right with the auto pilot engaged.
* During approach at 8K altimeter rapidly descended and returned to normal - caused autopilot problems.
* During takeoff altitude and vert speed on both PFDs showed erratic indications
For Lion Air in days leading up an increase in warnings. Some excerpts.
* Speed trim fail light and mach trim fail light * Auto throttle diconnect * Speed and Alt flag * Feel diff pressure - fail light illuminated * Maintenance light illuminated during landing
Regulatory regime
What's the local situation in terms of check rides, maintenance monitoring and cross checks, airline procedure monitoring etc. Ethiopia has a relatively stronger reputation here.
Training
The memory item in this situation is basically a revert to manual flight. There is a possibility that manual flight is not as common in some countries, particularly if they don't have a large General Aviation pool to pull from. This is a concern in US as well (automation reliance).
The path to getting onto a jet in US is currently different than other places. To be a first officer takes 1,500+ hours and an ATP. That's a pretty high bar.
This is a design issue I think as well -> should Boeing reasonably consider that there may be differences between pilot groups in terms of training pathways. I would suggest obviously yes. Is the FAA at fault because other countries may choose different approaches? That's less clear to me. BTW the FAA did a terrible job for a while with small charter operators in financial distress with bad maintenance for example - so the FAA has blindspots but their Part 121 stuff has a good record so far.
The US system has had some amazing saves -> failures with airport bird control -> capt sully etc. Often these pilots aren't jet fighter pilots but have things like glider or small plane experience that is helpful. So systems break down in US, but saves happen.
My US worries are maintenance given cost pressures and actually Air Traffic Control (given fatigue and some weakening of standards there around new hiring).
Also Southwest certainly did not have all of the indicators at first, because they added some: https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/southwest-airlines... (note that pretty much nobody used that kind of indicator before, so I don't say that to put blame on Southwest)
It was also my understanding that some alarms including the AoA disagree were optional and for a fee even though probably activated by only needing to switch a bit somewhere in the software. So if Southwest had AoA disagree from the beginning (I don't know), well that's cool, but my interpretation is more like: that's not cool that some other airlines did not have it because of the dubious commercial practices of Boeing.
The design redundancy was the pilot in the loop - ie, in a stab trim situation pilot would follow a memory item. So this meant much less automation protection compared to systems without pilot in loop.
Imagine how many more people choose to drive to their destination? Or who have to keep using older models of plane which pump out more tons of CO2, killing the environment and people who might not even be born yet?