To me it says their lawyers don’t trust Boeing enough. My cynical side says companies never give a shit what their customers think in an industry like aviation where they have so few or no other real options.
* there's a piece of news about Southwest, i think, saying they'll start considering alternatives to Boeing.
Much easier to get everyone in a room and say, "We're going to starve Boeing of revenue until it walks into Chapter 11, at which point we'll be ready to recapitalize and install new folks." Absolutely not my preferred thoughts on fixing a rotting enterprise, but you go to work with the tools you have.
And then there's, y'know, the whole DEI angle. Being acquired by the US Government isn't going to make them more likely to promote white male engineers to sort things out.
But most of us know driving isn't safe, and still do it daily.
https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
It is less clear if the choice is driving to a beach two hours away or flying to a different beach two hours away by air.
What an attitude. That's their attitude during working hours too? I just don't want to use code written by those HNers.
the code i write at work is open.
A corporation is a legal fiction. It doesn't actually do anything, it doesn't make decisions. The people who work for the corporation do. Liability should not stop with the corporation but with the actual human beings making the decisions.
There is also a corporate greed, which is leaking into tech with commoditization, problem in America where fewer and fewer companies treat their employees as assets and rather treat them as cogs. People are loosing their tolerance.
Things are just as bad in big tech. Ever tried to get support from Google? Many modern companies cut customer support to the bare minimum.
Then there's stuff like the 23andMe saga (also on the front page of HN right now), where the company actively blames their customers for their fuck up.
Sure if you fly to some very small destinations you will have very limited choices, but almost definitionally that's a small fraction of the total trips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiant_Air
which works on a fundamentally different model from other airlines (limited network, fewer flights per week.) It is getting harder and harder to see the difference between traditional airliners like Delta and "low cost" airlines like Southwest.
People do compare prices on competitive routes. Airlines, in the US at least, try pretty hard not to compete on quality and the mediocrity of the 737 is part of that. Every other commercial airliner built today has a modern fly by wire system which can accomplish what MCAS was supposed to do in a safe way. The 737 is noisy for its size
https://www.aviationfile.com/noise-pollution-levels-by-aircr...
not just in the passenger cabin and on the ground but particularly in the cockpit (years back I wrote a comment on an av blog about the noisy 737 and pilots joined in.) The 737 struggles to take off under good conditions and has to be grounded under conditions that other airliners handle easily. The 737 also lacks the anti-turbulence feature of the A320 which uses the fly-by-wire system to smooth out the ride.
People are so used to the dismal 737 and only somewhat better A320 that they have a hard time believing that modern airliners like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family
can be much smaller but much more comfortable than the 737 but people who fly it become believers, the more people who get to experience them the more people will demand them. They cost less to operate too and being a little smaller could support a more efficient network just as 2-engine widebodies replaced 4-engine widebodies.
I've seen many products and services clearly making their products worse in order to make more money. Airlines have done similar things with passenger space and various fees, it's not so hard to imagine them cutting corners only to be surprised that they've gone too far and inadvertently impacted airplane safety.
Sure they care about customer wellbeing but isn't making money higher on their list of priorities?
Boeing in general seems to have a serious culture problem that we should condemn, but it’s not like the “they” that set cultural norms is the same “they” that’s out there on a supplier’s factory floor with a torque wrench.
Being reductive can be a good rhetorical tool, but in this case I think it’s better to view the problem as culture and system rather than a single personality with ill intent.