What's Gone Wrong at Boeing | Hacker News Reader

What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

theatlantic.com

46 pointskqr286 comments

So, I think this article, like many others, does not really answer the question? Everyone can agree that "well, this airplane almost dropped from the sky because we apparently forgot to tighten some bolts" is a really really bad thing, but the cause seems less than clear?

1. Yeah sure, outsourcing bad, union-busting worse, but the fact remains that Spirit AeroSystems (the contractor that Boeing outsourced to, possibly for union-busting reasons) also assembles lots and lots of airframes for Airbus. Apparently without major issues?

2. The MCAS disaster was also really, really bad, but seems mostly unrelated, at least from a process point of view, from what has happened here (since it was fixed by updating the documentation, pretty much, and ultimately possibly not that different from initial Airbus struggles with flight automation)?

3. The 737-MAX (and 787, which is assembled using pretty much the same supply chain) seem, statistically speaking, much safer than older aircraft generations. It surely does not feel that way, but incidents-per-flight, not to mention incidents-per-flight-hour and incidents-per-flight-mile, strongly disagree.

The only facts that I can gather from amidst the wreckage of speculation, are that, yes, Boeing does seem to have an issue with basic tooling, which should definitely be corrected ASAP, but they're in the process of doing so, and then will be be pretty much as good and/or bad as their competition for the foreseeable future?

I would like to see the deep-dive on the cause of this (which we definitely will get, some months or years from now) before judging. And, for the record: I'm a huge Embraer 19x-E2 fan, love the A22x as well (engine issues notwithstanding), and will fly any version of the 737 as required.

Lot of strong opinions based on feelings and bad research. There are even books and leaked internal studies that describe the change of culture and engineering at Boeing. You can't just use the last incident and it's circumstances to come to a conclusion. It's systemic failure.

Look up interviews of Spirit AeroSystems CEOs or their counterparts at Airbus and Boeing and you'll see that they get handled differently.

The information is out there you'll just need to take it. 5 mins of googling is just not enough for a topic like this.

Spirit does smaller assemblies for Airbus, whose production is mostly in Europe. They don't do whole airframes for them afaik.

The client still has the responsibility of doing quality controls at reception, or have good reasons to lighten them. Boeing has a lot to answer, especially since FAA gave them (after a ton of lobbying) the right to self-control themselves.

> Boeing has a lot to answer, especially since FAA gave them (after a ton of lobbying) the right to self-control themselves.

Then the FAA has a lot to answer for as well.

Assuming FAA's final safety check would've caught the issue at the time of inspection and not during the operating period when it malfunctioned.

FAA's delegation is common. For this instance, FAA has already launched a probe and revoked Boeing's DOA for final safety checks.[0]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-manufacturing-7...

FAA's delegatory structure used to involve Boeing-paid employees that reported to the FAA but that changed in 2004 (ODA instead of DER) such that the FAA put itself out of the loop. Here's the pre-2004 situation:

> "Since at least 1927, the FAA has delegated certain safety certification responsibilities to qualified individuals within the aviation industry. Until 2004, the FAA regulated the production of new Boeing aircraft through a web of Designated Engineering Representatives (DERs), employees of Boeing charged with ensuring that new aircraft met regulatory standards. These DERs, though paid by Boeing, were selected by and reported to the FAA, which signed off on all certification decisions. “We knew we’d lose our livelihood if we didn’t maintain the integrity of making decisions the way the FAA would do it,” said a former DER. The FAA retained final authority and possessed a clear view of new aircraft’s certification process."

Regulatory Capture at the FAA By Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy, Leo Kalb Bourke, November 12, 2021

https://www.5clpp.com/?p=4026

Rolling back that 2004 ODA program to the DER structure would be the rational response at this point.

> Rolling back that 2004 ODA program to the DER structure would be the rational response at this point.

What's the rationale, again?

I'm not seeing any root cause analysis or justification in your text that reverting to a (still conflicted) secondee concept would prevent similar outcomes.

The rationale is that Boeing got an exception from best practices, so they should revert to best practices.

Respectfully, you're repeating the parent and not addressing my question.

What "best practice" from before, albeit which had a secondee structure, would've caught this malfunction?

To clarify, as it's slightly ambiguous, Spirit has two factories in the UK that do most of their work for Airbus. They were originally British businesses. It's easily possible for there to be a very different culture there.

https://www.spiritaero.com/company/programs/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems

The MCAS problem also involved:

• developing MCAS in the first place as a scheme to deny pilots simulator time on the novel flight characteristics introduced by the changed engine size and position (as a matter of marketing policy)

• deliberately failing to document the MCAS system to avoid attracting regulatory attention

• designing the system such that it only received data from the current pilot seat's ipsilateral air speed sensor, instead of reading redundantly from both air speed sensors, creating a single point of failure

it was a case of engineering incompetence upon moral incompetence.

Deny is a strong word. If Boeing's customers ask for a product that minimizes their staff retraining costs, is it simply Boeing at fault here? They found a clever way to shove a square peg into a round hole, which worked most of the time. Where it failed is when competing demands of "make it cheaper too" conflicted with the "minimize pilot training." The lowest cost trim was not designed to meet that demand.

Yes. Boeing customers ask for a lot of things and it's Boeing's legal obligation to only provide them safe airplanes, no matter what they ask for.

When you're in the aviation industry, you're not allowed to "minimize pilot training" and "make it cheaper" if it interferes with the safety of the airplane.

I'm not eliminating Boeing's culpability here, merely pointing out a systemic problem in the industry. Boeing is competing with other aircraft manufacturers. The airlines are competing with other airlines. The standards bodies are comprised of individuals that in large part either belong to a manufacturer, or a supplier or the airlines themselves, with a few seats reserved for academics and the public sector.

Boeing did not break any rules with the MCAS. The implementation was in accordance with existing aviation regulations, passed inspection and was safely implemented throughout most of the world.

Yes they did break rules. They misclassified it's failure as hazardous instead of catastrophic, and deliberately implemented a SPOF architecture that had to get refactored to include both sensors. Then they misrepresented it as requiring no additional training.

There was a lot done against regulations at a minimum, and damn well don in bad faith with respect to the public.

What's the proof that they broke any rules? Is the FAA charging them with a regulatory failure? None, and no. The NY Times has a nice expose on the matter [1].

Quote from TFA: Boeing did not submit a formal review of MCAS after the overhaul. It wasn't required by F.A.A. rules.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/business/boeing-737-max-f...

two planes fell out of the sky.

If you are to be believed, that they broke no regulation, rules, or laws, that's a damnation on the existing body of regulation, rules, and laws, not a defense of Boeing.

That's exactly what I'm trying to say. It's not a question of belief, but rather of fact. If Boeing had broken laws and regulations, they would be charged with a crime.

Also worth mentioning that the Air Alaska flight revealed more undocumented functions, with the cockpit door opening as a pressure relief.

MCAS didn't cause the whole fleet to be grounded for months on end due to a simple documentation error. There were several instances of misconduct by Boeing, including misleading pilots about how the aircraf works, pressuring internal staff to certify procedures without enough time to validate them, offering configuration with only one angle of attack sensor. Worst of all, the whole MAX program was only intended to sidestep pilot and aircraft certification requirements by pretending that this brand new aircraft is just a small iteration in a 40 year old model.

It's wild that no one went to jail for this.

Was there ever an answer about why the one AoA sensor failed, on each of those planes? Even though there was only one per plane, it was basically new.

Well, the resolution of the MCAS disaster was... pretty much a documentation update?

There is now a warning sticker on the 737-MAX that says "CAUTION: this aircraft is equipped with a stick pusher. See owners manual (updated versions only) for details. MAY CAUSE DEATH OR OTHER SIDE EFFECTS."

Oh, and possibly the stick pusher has been made less aggressive in situations that only occur outside North America. But the public record is, eh, sketchy on that. Best-case, pilots now at least know about it.

The number or the configuration of the air flow/angle-of-attack sensors on the 737-MAX was not changed, nor were there any changes to how these sensors are connected to the flight control systems. And probably rightfully so: the 737 platform is simply not about fly-by-wire, and retrofitting is not a realistic option. Whether the MCAS update(s) fit within those constraints remains to be seen, but has no bearing on the current discussion.

Spirit AeroSystems’s plant in Wichita was previously owned and operated by Boeing until they divested it in 2005. This plant builds airframes for Boeing but not Airbus. It’s a culture issue through and through.

> statistically speaking, much safer than older aircraft generations. It surely does not feel that way, but incidents-per-flight, not to mention incidents-per-flight-hour and incidents-per-flight-mile, strongly disagree

777 enters that chat. Over the 30 year lifetime of the aircraft there have been a total of 242 fatalities excluding terrorism. The first major incident resulting in a hull loss, happened over 10 years after the aircraft was introduced.

You mentioned that you're a huge Embraer 19x-E2 fan. I'm not well informed on that airframe, but a former co-worker of mine (two different companies -- one of them Boeing) told me about a horrible lack of engineering oversight, failure to meet specifications, and a lack of concern for insufficient test coverage on the Embraer. He swore that he would never fly in one.

> “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

Both Boeing and Intel did this.

They reduced the number of people in C-suite who had STEM background until they didn't know how to make big technical decisions, or allocate money for R&D and production.

Scientists and engineers learn how to do business all the time, but you rarely see a lawyer or sales person getting STEM degree.

Except patent lawyers.

Perhaps it's time to have regulations like the medical industry has where the care providing organization must be run by someone with a medical license?

Patent examiners working in patent office are engineers and scientists.

Albert Einstein was patent examiner in Swiss Patent Office in Bern for 7 years.

I agree, but I don't know that I'd use Einstein as an example for 99.999999% of humans. Now I'm also curious about Einstein's work product as a patent examiner.

That's a brilliant idea. 60% of the board + the CEO needs to have engineering degrees to run an aircraft company.

> They reduced the number of people in C-suite who had STEM background until they didn't know how to make big technical decisions, or allocate money for R&D and production.

This is not on its face a bad thing, however if you're in the C-suite of an engineering company and you're not an engineer, you should probably have engineers close by that you trust, and listen to them. It's as bad for the business to have engineers put into the finance office with no finance expertise as it is to have accountants run an engineering firm with no engineering expertise available.

Relevant degree and expertise is needed just to listen to experts. Sitting trough dumped down power point representations is not enough.

Those who are competent to make decisions should be given leadership positions. Everything else is just bad corporate governance.

A law degree is a graduate degree - you should probably focus on what they did before becoming a lawyer. Lawyers with STEM undergrad aren’t likely to be advertising on billboards along the side of the highway or chasing ambulances, but are well-represented in the ranks at major law firms and in corporate law jobs. Probably over represented compared to the population as a whole.

> Lawyers with STEM undergrad aren’t likely to be advertising on billboards along the side of the highway or chasing ambulances

We STEM people are very impressed with ourselves, but really nobody is getting a job at a major law firm without major law credentials, just like nobody is getting a job as a FAANG developer without major developer credentials - could you imagine trying to sell your law degree to them as a substitute?

I don't think they were saying that STEM undergrads are getting law firm jobs without law credentials, they're saying that STEM undergrads are not likely to go into personal injury (for example) after law school - that they're going to be working on issues at least somewhat related to their undergrad field of study.

I get that. I meant (and should have said) that there's no reason to think STEM undergrads are going to have better law school credentials than anyone else. They may want to do IP at a a major law firm, but may end up in personal injury.

Also, undergrad degrees in anything do not signal much expertise in the field, only that you could manage to get a degree. Nobody will base their decisions on someone saying 'I have a BS in X and I think ...'; they will want to hire an experienced, successful professional for advice. There are IP lawyers with masters degrees, and/or who worked for years as professional engineers.

In fact, all else equal, I'd expect STEM undergrads to do worse in law school, which is a humanities endeavor. For example, an essential skill is writing at a high level.

I didn't read Kon-Peki's point as being about the quality of their law degrees & jobs at all—merely the subfields they go into. "Major law firms" may hire dozens of lawyers with credentials that aren't as hyperoptimized for law to work as clerks, paralegals, and lower-level lawyers (even if they're less likely to make partner), and corporate law jobs will span the spectrum in multiple axes.

This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

What's wrong with a great engineering firm? And is it possible to somehow reflect that greatness in the stock price better so that people don't feel a need to come in and change it?

As with a business the CEO gets a nice golden parachute when the plane crashes.

Maybe he believes that a great business makes more money for the shareholders than a great engineering firm

Boy was he wrong!

https://valustox.com/BA

Not an issue if one can do both but when there's a conflict, a great engineering firm will prioritize safety & quality over profit, whereas a business will prioritize profit & stock price over safety & quality.

Heaviest Boeing threads over the past several days:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002255 (26 comments, today)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 (145 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979196 (293 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705 (310 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969466 (350 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38956323 (345 comments)

Beware a major bias in these Boeing analyses:

They bring to light long-term problems, flaws, critics who warned about the problems, etc. But those things are not correlated with the outcome.

Remember that correlation requires both if A then B and if not A then not B. In this case, every enterprise of the scale and complexity of Boeing has problems, critics, flaws, etc. - there is no 'not A' condition, there is no correlation.

Airbus has those issues too - they are in the 'A' state - but they didn't lose a door plug. What we're seeing is that when something goes wrong, a sufficiently well-examined enterprise (even sports teams) will have someone to say 'I told you so'.

Their analysis may be no more worthwhile than a stopped clock. And even to the extent flaws are true, that's not at all conclusive. Anyone who has had to manage anything of a certain scale - not even a very large scale - knows that such flaws are inevitable; there is not enough time, labor, or money in the world to fix them all (and imagine doing that on the scale of commercial airliners!). The art to expert, technological management is to deliver results despite the flaws, to know how to make sausage.

The question is not, why was Boeing in the 'A' state; that's inescapable. The question is, why did Boeing management fail to do their job, which is to deliver results while in the A state? If it was an IT business, I might have some perspective. Making airplanes - I have no clue how the sausage is made. We need an industry expert.

(I'll also add that one failed door plug on one plane, out of all the planes Boeing flies, is questionable data for this analysis. It's not ok, it's a failure, but it may not be data. I'd guess that more planes will be struck by lightning this year.)

Today it’s Boeing.

What if we’re approaching a complexity crisis and practically no one sees it happening?

I make things. I think I can see it.

But what would it look like if we are making systems so complex that it is exceeding the gasp of any one human to understand it, and at the same time exceeding the ability of humans to even explain parts of it effectively to other humans? What would that look like?

I can give you a clue. The headlines would look like “What’s gone wrong at xxxx”.

It’s not The Issue (tm) of course. It’s complexity, it’s the MBA-ification, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, it’s all the things that aren’t going to get better.

This article gets it mostly right. It was the Douglas culture that damaged Boeing's corporate ethics. Boeing has had a continuous streak of ethical breaches ever since the Douglas "merger" occurred.

https://sites.tufts.edu/corruptarmsdeals/the-boeing-tanker-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/business/boeing-chief-is-...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/21/nasa-doug-lo...

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2603EZ/

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...

https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/08/the-ethical-failures-b...

How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"?

What's gone wrong, is what goes wrong at most major corporations -- a focus more on "business" (which itself falls victim to fashion/fad such as image and perception of "fairness", KPIs, "mission statements", and other easy-to-measure-yet-made-up BS) rather than the main purpose : execution of engineering and ABSOLUTE INSISTENCE on quality. Boeing used to have an engineering-driven culture, but that has been destroyed. The CEO has deliberately driven the pendulum away from quality as #1 task to more concern over costs. Why is anyone surprised that they are now getting less quality?

It's not just Boeing, it's the buyers (the airlines). They are customers too. They want Good, Fast AND Cheap. But they can't get it. They're forgetting what the final consumers (the flying public, and the private airlines such as UPS & FedEx that fly packages) want -- a reliable aircraft that doesn't fall out of the sky. That decision to buy a crappier aircraft to save a few bucks is being made. By whom? Board of Directors? C-class decision makers whose bonuses are based on saving millions of dollars. Accountants? Middle management?

But the "savings" are a temporary sugar-high. Once the reputation is damaged, it will costs many times any savings to restore confidence, if ever.

No-one ever falls out of the sky in a shoddily designed/built aircraft coming apart mid-air and thinks "well at least they saved a few bucks on manufacturing." I just hope enough of the old-guard engineers are still around to try to restore the old culture and save this company from itself.

How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"?

The two of those that are easy to measure will always get chosen. It's not that people don't want "good", it just takes a lot of effort to figure out if you are getting something good or not.

Reputation is one way, but that can be, and often is, spent for short-term gain.

This "good, fast, cheap, pick two" thing is peddled often, but it skips over the fact that costs also come down over time as technology improves. As an aerospace example, SpaceX's F9 is better, faster and cheaper than the competition.

The issue at Boeing is allowing things to swing deep into maximizing profit margins rather than forward-looking investment in technology improvements which reduce costs while maintaining or improving quality.

Waiting for technology to catch up to what you want is exactly what it means to be the sacrificing "fast".

They wouldn't have to be waiting for things to catch up if they were investing into R&D in the years leading up to the current failures. Boeing already isn't fast.

Investing in R&D usually eliminates cheap.

But you cannot apply any of Good, Fast, Cheap to the Boeing products.

And they know airlines are going to buy their planes anyway. What are the alternatives? To wait 10 years to get Airbus? And hire second set of technicians and maintenance bases for Airbus while have the same for existing Boeing fleet?

Following the "John Deere" style brand lock-in strategy: "Sure the Kubota is half the price and I can fix it myself, but all of my implements work with my Deere." And unless I switch over the tractor, the combine, the baler. I'll have to maintain both brands. I guess I'll just stick with JD one more season..."

You CAN get all three, but it depends on your definition of “good.”

In free market/bean counter ideology, nothing a private company does can be wrong because competition will correct all mistakes in the long run. This meshes perfectly with the ultimate bean counter goal of having all companies in an industry owned by the same 4 bean counter-run hedge funds and run by the same bean counter executives. That way the bean counters can squeeze the public dry and have maximum leverage when society has no choice but to start handing out bailouts.

A private company makes mistakes. Competition corrects it by either forcing the private company to adapt or driving them out of business. There are issues with that plan when there are not enough competitors.

There also are problems with having too many competitors. For example having much less money (due to lower margins) to hire and pay your employees and creating lengthy processes to ensure quality. Competition isn’t necessarily the best solution or even a good one.

More competition is similar to “defunding” all the competing companies.

Yes. There is literally never enough competition for bean counter arguments to matter. Saying “competition” is the solution to a problem is just a bad excuse to not fix it. In the real world, large organizations make decisions based on political pressure from governments and the public.

I think of the WW1 Christmas Truce and wonder how many competitors are able to stop competing for mutual benefit. It's good when competition in war ceases, but it's not good when several "competing" companies decide to cease competition for mutual benefit. If people can do it in the highly charged situation of trench warfare, why can't companies do it to? Could a market with 10 competing companies cease competing for mutual benefit? What about 20?

Competition is not enough. It must be easy for new competitors to enter the market to ensure a nefarious trust doesn't form between companies.

Ceasing competition for mutual benefit is generally illegal.

Not everything is zero sum. The important element is not whether or not it is mutually beneficial to the companies, but whether it is detrimental to some other party.

Price fixing, wage suppression, monopolizing etc are all detrimental to the customer, employees, or other businesses, but it is possible to collaborate or “cease competition” in certain areas for mutual benefit in ways that are not detrimental (and in fact, are also beneficial) to others.

If it's organized, but what if it's just an unspoken rule in the industry? The result would be an unchanging status que with little innovation.

If this were true I'd expect to see industries where innovation usually comes from new companies in the market. The existing companies have stopped trying, stopped competing, and thus you only see innovation from new companies. Do we see this pattern often?

My point is the number of competitors is less important than how easy it is for new competitors to enter.

I agree, but I'm not sure how that relates.

You said it's illegal, and I claimed it happens all the time, that's how it relates.

Sorry, I still don't quite follow. Can you give an example of companies ceasing competition for mutual benefit?

Boeing and Airbus work together on the CAD standards that they use to build their products.

I get what you're trying to say, but the context of the Christmas truces is more complicated than just mutual benefit:

There was a huge disconnect between the leadership of the respective armies and the rank-and-file soldiers dying in the trenches. So it wasn't just "its Christmas, we shouldn't be killing each other", it was also "we have no idea why we are fighting in the first place, and our leaders think it more important that we die than that we win." It was deliberate insubordination to what the soldiers understood was pointless wasting of their lives.

I think the correct analogy is if the workers of Airbus and Boeing both struck because the two companies had both adopted new business practices in the name of business competition, that simply killed workers and passengers without providing either with any kind of competitive advantage.

The only real competition is for shareholder "investment" and returns.

In the absence of effective external oversight and regulation - clearly a problem across the economy, never mind here - you can guarantee a race to the bottom where only the beans matter.

If the company stops making quality products that usually creates a bonus, because cheap. Lower headcount? Bonus. Union busting? Bonus. Low wages? Bonus. Indifference to worker welfare? Bonus. Cosy revolving door relationship between lawmakers, regulators, and senior management? Mega payout!

The incentives are all aligned towards making payouts for owners bigger, while lowering objective quality of service, worker conditions, and worker pay.

Airbus is less terrible because the EU regulatory regime isn't quite as toothless, and the EU has a very slightly less competitive and exploitative financial culture.

You find the same human-hostile forces right across the economy - from landlords who send rents into an exploding price spiral, to utilities that monopolise infrastructure while investing as little as possible, to pork barrel government spending at inflated prices, to startups whose only real USP is an app and a plan to sidestep existing regulations, to tiny restaurants that expect customers to tip generously, because they're certainly not going to pay waitstaff a living wage.

> nothing a private company does can be wrong because competition will correct all mistakes in the long run

There must be real competition for this to work. In reality their are 2 large plane builders, Airbus and Boeing. And I believe Airbus also as issues too.

Plus, you know that old saying, "In the long run, we are all dead" :)

Competition makes a lot of things better, but it's not super clear that safety is one of those things.

I mean, sort of... but with something as complex as aviation, the feedback cycle into the market is slow and noisy.

The root of the problem is that it's hard to quantify engineering quality. That means it's hard for shareholders to hold it to a high standard to preserve long-term value. But it's just as hard for socialist planners to do that.

It's not about "socialist planners" but about market regulation and a thorough supervision. And sufficient deterrents.

But there is a lot of regulation and supervision. It kicks in late in the cycle, though, because doing so early is a hard problem (e.g. detecting rot in the engineering culture).

> when society has no choice but to start handing out bailouts

"Too big to fail" works if they're making the right people rich but were otherwise being seen to do their job, then suddenly external factors seem to threaten their existence and money can get them back to making the right people rich. The pandemic was a good example of that. However, when they're publicly failing to do their job due to a broken or corrupt internal culture then instead of bailouts they might get broken up or more drastically changed because money can't solve the problem at that point.

You definitely get the idea that the activities of large firms are political and not driven by competition but I don’t think “too big to fail” required the public to think the banks were doing a good job in 2008. There was general agreement that the banks themselves caused the 2008 financial crisis. The bailouts happened because the bankers who would have lost their fortunes were powerful enough to order the elected officials to bail them out anyway.

> “too big to fail” required the public to think the banks were doing a good job in 2008

The analogy to the banking crisis doesn't quite work. For years the banks didn't have any major snafus, banking in general was working great for most people and making many (and crucially, all the right people) rich. Also, the previous problems had been papered over pretty effectively and 2008 was a particularly bad crash. Boeing on the other hand has had a string of major crises for a few years in a row. It'd be comparable to the banks if savings and loan, the dot com crash, and 2008 all occurred within 5 years. By that third one very few politicians would have the political capital left to spend on bailouts.

They presume something is wrong when I don't think that's at all been established fact. Airline travel has been steadily safer by the year[1]. Accidents and engineering snags have been a part of every single mode of transit since the Industrial Revolution, and it's low-sample-size populist fodder like a door blowing off that fear mongers people, but has no statistical significance in the grand scheme of safety.

Is there room for improvement? Sure. But some of y'all are acting like this is a fundamental failure of capitalism when the small handful of accidents over the past few months is actually evidence of how good planes are--not how bad.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

> evidence of how good planes

How good other planes are. The MAX record is abysmal. https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

So, there is one single model of airplane being manufactured that reaches 10% of the Max kill-rate, and it's a quite old one.

One model, representing a nearly infinitesimally small percentage number of miles for Boeing. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is the 737MAX tried to do some relatively innovative things that backfired. And that product is now just as bad in terms of safety as the average plane was 30 years ago (but many times more efficient).

It is far from a condemnation of Boeing and capitalism that one of their more innovative products is suffering some setbacks, and those setbacks amount to it being as unsafe as the average plane 30 years ago. Think about that: in 1970 the average flight was 2x worse, and still people chose to accept that risk voluntarily. Today, that level of risk just means Boeing will try to refine the product.

Failures of "-isms" are when millions starve in famines--not when a new product suffered a pushed back timeline for being a relatively unsafe compared to other contemporaneous models.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-...

People used to take more risk, so everything fine? Refine the product after innovation, so everything is fine? What corporate double think is this?

> Failures of "-isms"

And that's a very weird diversion, since this isn't about any ideology, but go ahead, travel by MAX 8.

By now Boeing has had enough embarrassing engineering failures in recent years that it's pretty clear there's something wrong at the company.

The safety of air travel is not due to current Boeing's practices, if anything, it's despite the efforts of their leadership to cut costs. Air travel safety is due to operational procedures, airline maintenance personnel and safety regulations.

I agree that this isn't a fundamental fault of capitalism, particularly since the way Boeing is propped up is not very capitalistic.

seems they were more interesting in making money before making good planes. that's short term : sure, you make more money by lowering standards, putting pressure on workers and sending their jobs to smaller off-site companies. you do make more money.

but now that planes have issues, crash, kill people and companies have customers telling them there is no way they are going to buy tickets if the flight goes on a boeing plane....

reputation is gained by tea-spoon. lost by the liter.

the damage to boeing's reputation is gonna take DECADES. if boeing does not die from it.

so.. how does that short-term stupid money before safety view feels now ?

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