The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

Well, you can chalk the first 737 MAX crash up to greed, hubris, bad design decisions and a generally rotten culture in a once great, engineering driven company.

Not grounding the plane after that, despite the fact that Boeing must have had the knowledge of what have gone on is corporate mass murder for profit.

you take the point of view that nothing is good enough because it could have been better?

Yes, it would definitely had been better if 346 people wouldn't have been killed by a greedy corporate behemoth, which very obviously cares much more about profits than about the people they killed. This point is pretty obvious when you listen to their mealy mouthed pr bullshit.

I trust this answers your question.

Yes, exactly.

I attended a presentation by Captain Haynes back in the early 90's. He showed several photos of the DC-10's hydraulic system. In many places the triple-redundant hydraulic lines were parallel and in close proximity to each other, close enough to be taken out by a single piece of shrapnel from an uncontained engine failure.

Ah, I see I've misremembered which flight disaster this was. Apologies.

If you replace "capitalism" with "competition for low prices" then I think the comment is a little less inflammatory while still making a similar point. The fact that a capitalistic system is what gives rise to macro economics that facilitate building planes like this doesn't mean it's perfect and can't be improved upon, say with regulation that doesn't outsource the checks to the company making the planes. Capitalism is fantastic, but the extremes it gives rise to can be checked by assiduous oversight. I'm not saying the government is a paragon of efficiency here, but it's better than nothing, and with some reform could be much better.

A fundamental principle of capitalism -- the pursuit of financial profits, that is, revenues in excess of recognised costs -- leads directly to multiple practices which prove hazardous at scale and over time.

Financial and economic theory don't recognise ecological inputs including the time and replenishment rates associated with nonrenewable resource formation. (By definition, a "nonrenewable resource" is on whose extraction or extinction rate exceeds that of its formation.) It invokes utterly nonscientific principles such as Hotellings Rule (precisely zero geological references cited) and the Rule of Capture to justify pricing and business behaviours.

Capitalism relies on and exercises externalities of pollution, risk-shifting, and cost-burden shifting to increase firm profits at a cost of larger social burden.

The legal structure of incorporation is literally a risk-externalising engine, recognised by name in some cases ("limited liability corporation"), in which risk-based costs are externalised or stoplossed. This can be useful in cases, but can also be grossly overused.

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power" is among the shortest sentences in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a work not given to short sentences. Financial wealth leads to political and market power, including the power to distort markets. Much of Smith's book was a criticism of such practices. That lesson is largely lost by modern boosters of the work, who instead prefer stringing together synthesised passages across hundreds of pages of multiple sections of the book to advance their own, power-centralising ideologies.

Capitalism, finance, and business have a schizoid and faulty relationship with risk. "Cutting corners" is precisely a capitalistic measure, one which arbitrages a potential cost with a present realised savings. The bet is that the potential cost will never be realised. Sometimes that's not the case, but sometimes it is, and the firms which win that bet, based entirely on luck, are rewarded by the market. The market makes no distinction between profit gained by full realisation of probabalistic costs, and profit gained by ignoring those costs, in the individual case.

(In the aggregate profile case, the risks balance out, but specific performance matters and is independent of the profile returns.)

In market returns to various goods and services, pricing behaviours of commodities (undifferentiated bulk goods), services, labour, rents, assets, and highly differentiated specialty goods vary. In particular, the iron law of wages (tending to subsistence, or lower, levels) and the law of rents (capturing all consumer surplus value) mean that over time wealth accrues to rentiers and owners of capital, at a cost of labour.

Addressing these issues would require massive changes to accounting, risk premium, and legal regimes. That same "wealth is power" dynamic means that such reforms are exceedingly unlikely, because those who benefit by false models also benefit by ensuring that those models are protected and preserved.

Less experienced pilots, less reliable equipment, poorer planning, overconfidence.

Just one of many examples of what can go wrong: overreliance on instruments and information that is lagged vs. reality, around severe conditions, at night. Five souls lost. ATC had repeatedly advised the pilot against his course of action, to no avail.

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=83uvKWJS2os

Yes, you're right. I was referring to crashes where 1) there were mass fatalities, and 2) the airline was US based.

I love this quote by Sully after the incident:

"One way of looking at this might be that, for 42 years, I've been making small regular deposits in this bank of experience: education and training," said US Airways Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. "And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal."

Absolute legend.

Could be some survivor bias here. One 747 Max happened to have a jumpseat pilot who knew how to fix the MCAS issue and the plane flew on without issue and thus without much media coverage. [1]

Presumably, 2 other 747 Max's didn't have enough SME's on board to save them and crashed.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/03/jump-seat-pilot-an...

Yah. The thing is, long-period oscillation modes (phugoid, etc) exist in aircraft but are so readily controlled by pilots with conventional controls that they mostly don't matter from a certification standpoint (and would be difficult to avoid, anyways).

But jet engines are slow enough that any significant control of 10-30s period oscillations with engine thrust alone would be a real, real challenge.

They may have felt it would be too disrespectful to film the death of so many people.