Then they need to do the one thing that will get Boeing's attention: ground the fleet.
Their personal reputations are still largely intact.
> Their personal reputations are still largely intact.
Well person who would be attending country club would know that they raised shareholders value and more than likely helped to them to gain X millions of Dollars.
Force the members of the board to constantly fly on the affected models until questions are answered and fixes are delivered.
Call it "ultimate dogfooding".
Either they're being hyperbolic and there's zero risk to the board members, or they aren't and thus the board members have a vested interest in making sure the planes become a lot safer a lot quicker.
It's a win either way.
Execs will 100% do the dangerous thing to make more money even if it puts themselves in immediate danger. Execs rarely have a well developed understanding of risk, and will happily take an 80% risk with the downside being dying.
They are gamblers, not rational.
Grounding planes to satisfy a desire for vengeance is petty and a bad precedent. Let the regulators make the fly/no-fly call. I’d prefer the politicians explore a break-up of Boeing’s commercial and military wings.
It's out of a desire for them to actually prove the aircraft is safe to fly and operates the way they've claimed it does.
A standard the 737 MAX has already flunked multiple times, with deadly cost.
Modern US Aviation is so incredibly safe it only makes the MAX more abhorrent.
And, importantly, the process of providing that proof must be open to the notion that it is not safe to fly. It is possible (and IMO very likely) that this aircraft is fundamentally unsound, by design, and that no amount of tweaks and fixes can change that. They made a dangerous aircraft, bullshitted their way through the approval process for commercial travel, and now must pay the price.
Don't forget the MCAS fiasco, as well.
Or the engine deicing you can’t leave on for more than 5 minutes because it might start a fire.
That's the point.
The problem isn't specific, it's systemic.
But the 737 MAX Process/Program is known to be defective. I'll take possibly bad over surely bad any day.
┌──────────────────┬──────────────────┐
│ Bad Design │ Bad Design │
│ │ │
│ Good Process │ Bad Process │
├──────────────────┼──────────────────┤
│ Good Design │ Good Design │
│ │ │
│ Good Process │ Bad Process │
└──────────────────┴──────────────────┘"Fundamentally unsound" seems like a subjective judgement in an area that clearly requires numbers.
Wikipedia tells me there are 1445 of these planes in the air each flying, what, 3000 miles a day on average? The existing accident statistics would argue strongly that this plane is "safe" in an absolute context, even if it's clearly "more dangerous" than other models. The big reason people are so upset about this is that it's a safety outlier in an industry that has been extremely safe, and getting inexorably more so, over the last half century.
Mentioned in this film:
* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/boeings-fatal...
At this point I'm more concerned about Boeing's ability to live up to it's obligations as an aerospace company and maker of safe, compliant, no corners cut hardware.
Because even their operational characteristics are such that I'm beginning to strongly doubt that capability. If there is this much smoke...
However, this failure seems to have not followed a strategy; the result was just luck.
Hyperbole also makes it easy to dismiss the real severity of an issue by detractors.
It's not vengeance. It is a legitimate fear that Boeing currently lacks the processes in design, development, self-certification, production and quality assurances to reliably produce airworthy aircraft, backed by a number of incidents in the last years - the Dreamliner battery fires, the deadly MCAS disasters (and how they came to be), the loose rudder control screws and now the door plug incident - as well as whistleblower reports alleging widespread QC issues.
Maybe Boeing execs are sure their FAA buddies are not going to do anything drastic like that anytime soon? It’s not like Boeing the main US military supplier can be allowed to fail right?
If you’re being serious, I genuinely wonder if you realize the consequences of this drastic a decision.
Aviation, for a long time, administratively speaking, has been very buddy-buddy. Lots of self-attestation and self-certification. That works as long as you can trust the mfg to actually do it. Boeing has proven with the continuous series of failures of the 737 MAX program - from top to bottom - that they are not trustworthy in that regard.
From here on out they can do everything on that airplane by not just the letter of the law, but the serif. They killed hundreds of people through greed and laziness. Simply put, fuck 'em. If they go under it's because they deserve to. Too big to fail is not a situation that should be allowed to exist. The long term resiliency of the system is worth short term pain.
(Edit: And as dylan604 pointed out in a sibling comment, the 737 MAX fleet has already been grounded on mulitple occasions)
The consequences of continuing to fly this aircraft is likely to continue to find issues of varying severity. It's like playing Russian roulette with 2 bullets loaded.
That those seats were coincidentally empty doesn't lessen the seriousness of the event.
If 2 people has died, it would have been a more serious event. By definition, no?
nope for me
I slip on a puddle, but I'm young and nimble so I catch myself. No harm done to me, not a serious incident right? I don't report the puddle. Then another guy comes alone, he's older, his reflexes aren't so good. He bounces his head off the concrete and dies. This is why all workplace safety policies tell you to treat near misses like the real thing. The only difference between them is circumstantial luck.
Especially since I’m not saying it isn’t serious. Just pointing out that 0 < 2 < 189.
Which is quite literally true, is it not?
I thought it was serious, just less serious than those that actually killed people, because it does show system issues at Boeing related to actually doing safe changes to their planes.
Which is a scary operational problem, but at least not a major plane design problem.
Which will kill someone (or a lot of someones!) eventually.
And got called a psychopath for it, apparently? Which doesn’t seem very polite.
Yes, you've been very confused in this entire thread. No, I did not say what you think I've said. In fact, I stated the exact opposite. You seem to have an agenda and are attempting to read that into this entire thread.
There were zero fatalities in this incident. I personally thought it was serious, but less serious than incidents which have fatalities.
Are we agreeing? Who is confused here? Am I a psychopath?
what do you mean unlike the MAX problems? do you think this is a different model aircraft. The MCAS related crashes with 300+ casualties was an earlier version of the MAX. The door flying off was still a MAX.
So at this point, we should be well past viewing incidents on a per incident basis, and now just see each one as yet another example of the failure/lack of Boeing's prowess on designing a safe airplane.
This was an ops problem.
The common element is Boeing, not the model of plane.
Notably, this type of ops issue (managers pushing for high velocity - paperwork and quality of work be damned) is inevitable when output numbers must go up or stay the same even in the face of other pressures increasing.
We’ve all been there for sure - too many bugs coming in, so mark them ‘can’t reproduce’ the first pass through, or if we can’t figure out what is going on in the first couple minutes. Or put a hack into production to fix it now, with an actual real fix ‘on the backlog’ indefinitely. Or playing whack a mole with problems instead of investigating root causes.
It’s a burnout/realism problem.
Very tempting in ops/QA for the business - and then when something breaks, or a customer gets angry because they’re getting blown off, blame the engineer/tech/QA person and fire them instead of fix the actual cause, which is unrealistic workloads, or bad process, or management prioritization failures, etc.
Well, among other things, an increase in the general public safety vis-à-vis commercial air travel. Plus, I suppose, some kind of material incentive for Boeing and other airliners to take quality control seriously.
Seems like a win.
Only reason I see for it is a punitive incentive for Boeing. Anything else requires more of an argument, in my perspective.
As to whether this "punishes" Boeing I have to confess that I absolutely, positively, do not give a shit if this counts as "punishment" and quite frankly the entire C-level of the company and any board members / stockholders that had a hand in degrading their QC to this degree, should be held criminally liable and punished as such. So that's where I stand on punitive incentives: they're a good thing.
A poorly installed door plug may be a one-off mistake. Missing required documentation on the installation of that door plug is a more serious systemic issue. Failing to cooperate with a safety investigation is an even deeper rot. If that's not something that should result in aircraft grounding then what is? Genuine question - how bad does it have to get?
More importantly, this was only the MAX generation of the 737 fleet. Only ~15% of all 737s in service.
I interpreted the poster as suggesting that we ground all Boeing commercial airplanes. If they just meant the 737 MAX fleet, I still think this would be unproductive now that the acute MCAS issue has been addressed, but it's not as ludicrous as grounding ~60% of the world's airplanes.
> If you’re being serious, I genuinely wonder if you realize the consequences of this drastic a decision.
It would be best for everyone who isn't Boeing. But we all know that the second it would happen, Boeing would run crying to politicians they own how unfair this action is/how it endangers their market position/how it threatens national security.