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.
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...
Mentioned in this film:
* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/boeings-fatal...
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.
"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.
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 │
└──────────────────┴──────────────────┘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.