This example only serves to highlight how popular narratives take hold and get reinforced by laypeople.
Boeing absolutely deserves to be raked through the coals over MCAS, over their deteriorating engineering culture, and over regulatory capture. But blame them for the things they actually carry responsibility for.
NTSB seems to think it’s Boeing’s responsibility to redesign the cowl to prevent this.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
That’s not the point regardless. The post I replied to made the claim that Boeing has no responsibility here. The NTSB clearly disagrees.
"Therefore, the NTSB recommends that the FAA require Boeing to determine the critical fan blade impact location(s) on the CFM56-7B engine fan case and redesign the fan cowl structure on all Boeing 737NG-series airplanes to ensure the structural integrity of the fan cowl after an FBO event. The NTSB also recommends that, once the actions requested in Safety Recommendation A-19-17 are completed, the FAA require Boeing to install the redesigned fan cowl structure on new-production 737NG-series airplanes. The NTSB further recommends that, once the actions requested in Safety Recommendation A-19-17 are completed, the FAA require operators of Boeing 737NG-series airplanes to retrofit their airplanes with the redesigned fan cowl structure."
Is your position that somewhere in this 193 page document, the NTSB buried a line that says "just kidding, Boeing is faultless here"?
The engine is built by CFM, and it's CFM who will have to actually design the required fix. Boeing doesn't have the skills for that because the complexity of a modern turbofan is more similar to a microchip than the rest of the airplane. They certainly cost more than the rest of the airplane put together!
The public loves fire-and-brimstone responses to safety issues but the honest truth is that sometimes airplanes crash for stupid reasons and vaporizing all of the accumulated experience a company has following a crash is not going to make things safer.
Even with MCAS, even with the doors falling off, Boeing aircraft are incredibly safe because the US has spent nearly a century working with the company to improve things. This is a tricky thing to get right, because the FAA and NTSB have to unilaterally decide on a system that will make airplanes safe while also keeping them affordable enough to be flown.
From what I can tell, Boeing designed the existing cowl and NTSB says they need to redesign it. The complexity of the jet engine itself doesn’t seem particularly relevant because the cowl isn’t needed to make the engine function. It’s needed to catch shrapnel if the engine fails and flies apart.
> The public loves fire-and-brimstone responses to safety issues but the honest truth is that sometimes airplanes crash for stupid reasons and vaporizing all of the accumulated experience a company has following a crash is not going to make things safer.
No idea why you are saying this in response to my comment. All I said is the NTSB wrote that Boeing needs to redesign the cowl and you seem to think I said Boeing needs to be liquidated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o
It's the same airplane as the MRTT, A330.
In the case you're referring too, the focus was on poor training and failure to follow up on earlier incidents. It's not the same as designing a system based around a single sensor that is known to fail or forgetting to bolt a door.
Right, they designed the their system with two sensors, and if they disagree, the system gives misleading indications to the pilots! That’s so much better!
I'm not a pilot and I don't know that much about planes, but I've read/watched enough about crashes to know that these sensors fail way too often. To rely on only one already sounds like a bad idea, but it's irresponsible not to tell pilots and train them on how to deal with the new "feature".
That wasn't possible in the 737 MAX because the airplane is an older design with hydraulically connected control services, so a separate system had to be added to force the nose down using the trim.
No other airliner make on earth could have suffered that accident. It would have been extremely obvious what the issue was, and how to solve it on any other aircraft I can think of. This was like a car crash caused by the computer changing how the steering wheel worked mid drive.
I still have no idea how Airbus didn’t catch more flack for that design.
Flying airplanes is not a natural fit for the human brain. It's very helpful to have a computer mediating inputs to keep the aircraft stable.
If you go full stick back in any other airliner, the other pilot will know it immediately, and can physically correct the input. Other planes have stall prevention and awareness in the form of stick shakers and stick pushers that give the pilot physical feedback, and in the case of a pusher makes the pilot physically fight against the safe action (in the case of the MAX, trim adjustment - a roundabout way of stick pushing - was implemented in an exceptionally stupid way that made it overpower the pilots)
The airbus A320 family is associated with 1,490 fatalities, there’s just a vast number of flights daily so tiny risks add up. Companies buying new aircraft care far more about maintenance to fuel efficiency than a few rare incidents due to already corrected issues.
What? The A380 has never had a single fatality or even injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Accidents_and_inci...
> Incidents are over five years old have minimal impact in terms of current competition between Boing and Airbus.
Airbus (and Boeing) has a decade-long backlog. They absolutely do. https://flightplan.forecastinternational.com/2026/04/14/airb...
It’s a checkmate of the American system. Boeing delegated construction in parts of the country that needed jobs (=politics), who then botched the job and didn’t get sanctioned because it was bad optics to accuse those providers (2013 airframes). More recent events are also a checkmate of the ultrafinanciarization practices, a checkmate of the consultancy / provider / controller model, and a failure of corruption (the FAA/Boeing dinners inherited from the Macdonnell management) in a context where USA rips at the seams (industrial failure, no-one can be trusted as trustworthy) and tries to renew its ideology (apogee with the Trump elections).
That is a fair bit of politics that made Boeing fail.
There's plenty of documentation to be found on the why and how, especially following the 737Max issues: https://team-fsa.com/insights/what-happened-to-boeings-cultu...
> Following the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing’s robust culture eroded. Subsequent safety issues with the Boeing 737 have put the company under international scrutiny and underscored the profound impact of a weakened corporate culture. As Forbes aptly put it, “Boeing’s current travails about safety issues with the 737 MAX 9 can arguably be traced to the company’s weak corporate culture.”
Or read https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/why-boeings-pr... for Harvard's take on the same situation.
I just pointed out in a different thread that software is going through that right now.
The message here, and it’s granted if you’re not aviation, finance or political aware is Italy keeping their aviation sector EU based being In the EU themselves and most likely getting tremendously better financing.
While the Boeing incidents you mentioned are unfortunate and a true consequence of engineering culture eroding at Boeing, it does not dispel the true safety of aviation in general nor the high success of the 737 Max.