This isn't some stupid race. This is making a machine that can safely be flown.
The market doesn't need a risk profile that drops plane loads out of the bloody sky Because a company pushed their people into hiding things from their customers.
I'm normally all for free market optimization when it makes sense, and all actors act in reasonably good faith concomitant with the magnitude of lives they are endangering. That didn't happen here, and the regulatory agency responsible for making it happen was powerless to do it's job to stop or raise a red flag on it either.
By no definition of sound risk assessment should this plane have flown without training. Period. Boeing failed its job at being a trustworthy corporate citizen in a high-impact infrastructural industrial vertical.
Honestly, I'm not sure how to get over this one. I don't believe some sort of fine and move on is really sufficient in terms of contrition. It won't bring those people back, and it seems a bit too "cost of doing business"-like to successfully act as a deterrent to future malfeasance.
Breaking up maybe? Clearly competition in the sector seems to have devolved into a duopoly to some degree.
The type certification could have been a non-issue with proper communication. That didn't happen because someone at Boeing made a terrible call, and persists in asserting they've done nothing wrong, when the fact of the matter is that the error is so obvious in it's nature, that the rest of the world is capable of piecing the failure together even without having seen the actual data, which as it comes out, proves to only be reinforcing the case against Boeing.
Maybe it isn't enough to stand up in a court of law...yet. Everything that has been publicized thus far, however, paints a picture where criminal negligence is looking more and more like a foregone conclusion.
In short, rationality be damned. Someone made the irrational decision that the upside of getting to market sooner by cutting corners was worth risking 300+ innocent lives. People who put their faith in Boeing that they did their due diligence as required by law of executive and PE alike.
I agree with you ReptileMan. It isn't somehow beyond the human mind. Only a human being would put a financial windfall ahead of ensuring the safety of eventual passengers, have the decision blow up in their faces, then dig in and insist they did nothing wrong despite evidence to the contrary.
The corporation will be fine if they can manage to maintain goodwill. I don't envy those involved with approving the MAX however.
>Breaking up maybe? Clearly competition in the sector seems to have devolved into a duopoly to some degree.
You can't really break up a company like Boeing; they aren't even vertically integrated anyway. Just like a carmaker, they get their components from other companies. They don't even make their own engines (those come from Pratt & Whitney, GE, Rolls Royce, etc.) the way car companies do.
How we "get over" this is simple, though I don't see it happening in Trump's America any time soon: you prosecute Boeing executives and engineers (the PEs) for criminal negligence, and throw them in prison. The company goes under, and gets bought out by one of its competitors.
As for duopoly, that's currently the case, but China's aircraft manufacturer is working hard on getting their aircraft certified, so if that happens there will now be 3 big competitors in the market, which is generally the sign of a mature but competitive market. If Boeing gets bought out, it'd probably be 2. But I'd feel much safer with Airbus using Boeing's facilities to build Airbus-designed airplanes, which have been properly certified by European regulators.
In my estimation, a culture change is critical. There cannot be an attitude that sees airworthyness certification as something to be gotten around. There cannot be a tolerance for short cuts. The project isn't done until it is done. A baby takes 9 months as it were.
Perhaps review the practice of type certificate grandfathering? Seems like if anything, any new plane, even if based on an old design should still have it's own type, even if most of the data is the same as the old one.
Prove negligence as the facts allow, keep a thumb on Boeing until ample evidence of cultural improvement has taken place, and possibly tune up the regulatory framework to make sales oriented pitches like "no-retraining required" less likely? Or at least define some degree of modification that legally requires pilot/operator retraining?
Then just let the legal system resolve the remaining civil suits?
I don't think the entire company needs to be rendered no more, but a line in the sand was crossed, so I believe regulatory escalation is in this case both warranted and justified.
If foreign airlines all cancel their orders for 737MAX planes, they could very well be forced into bankruptcy.
No, they don't.
They deserve for their executives and PEs to be behind bars, and for the company to go out of business. Let Airbus or the Chinese buy it and take it over. We've shown that we're completely unable to properly regulate companies like this where safety is so critical, so we need to let someone else take over that task. Foreign ownership of Boeing would put those regulators in charge, which would only be an improvement.
Sounds a lot like America these days... Worse, regulation is seen as bad here, and Trump has directed everyone under him to eliminate as much regulation as possible, and then some. Why would you trust regulation from a country that explicitly doesn't believe in regulating?
As for airline expansion, Airbus can certainly pick up the slack and double their production capacity in short order. All they have to do is buy up the facilities from a now-defunct airplane manufacturer in the Seattle area. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of recently-unemployed engineers, technicians, and other manufacturing personnel happy to take a job there too.
Not saying they are right, but they just don't have many good moves.
Doing the Right thing leaves them years behind. It will also limit airline expansion. Airbus cannot pick up slack and there are no other players in the market.
It is a clusterfuck but like it or not 737 MAX is too big to fall(pun intended) .