In my own view, leadership should be held criminally responsible for the loss of lives. Of course it will never happen, but that's what ought to happen.
Hopefully they'll at least be responsible for liability in a lawsuit by the victims' families. They deserve being taken to the cleaners, well and proper.
However, given the amount of Boeing planes out there, and the number of employees, the company dying would be harsh. What needs to happen is a fundamental shift of culture; this is why I think that leadership should be held responsible for what's happened, and that this (with leaders in jail, new ones would have to take their place) would help force the changes that need to happen for safety and engineering quality again to be the number one drivers - not just profits and bean counting.
It's an opportunity for them to fully reset the company. Fingers crossed, it will happen.
346 dead from wilful incompetence, followed by utter bullshittery, half-truths, outright lies and finally, when it has to admit what it has been doing, a desperate insistance that executives could not possibly have known.
And all the while fighting against them being grounded.
Break the damn thing up already.
I dont think any US politician has the guts to take down Boeing, if it goes down there wont be any major US aircraft manufacturer.
It would be, but it needs to happen. And it wouldn't be as bad as people think.
The same thing happened when GM was on the verge of going under 10+ years ago. Why does everyone somehow think a giant manufacturer going out of business somehow means that thousands of employees will suddenly be destitute and unable to find another job? Do people really think that enormous manufacturing facilities are somehow going to go unused forevermore?
No, what happens is the company's competitors swoop and and buy up all the assets for cheap, and put them to work, because now there's suddenly not enough manufacturing capacity to meet global demand, but there's all these assets and a highly-skilled workforce suddenly available to be put to use.
For the same reason bailing out Chrysler and GM was wrong, Boeing should not be allowed to survive. The company can be broken up and all its assets sold to (hopefully foreign) competitors, who can then build better planes with them.
If you read the article, that's not what happened.
The warning message was meant to be supplied by default. Boeing though it was supplied by default. The airlines thought they were receiving it.
But they later discovered they had a bug which disabled the warning message unless another feature (an optional luxury feature) was enabled.
This situation is still bad. Boeing should have done something back when they discovered this bug: released a software update, given everyone the optional feature for free, or at the very least notified the pilots.
But it's not "charging for safety features" bad.
> This situation is still bad. Boeing should have done something back when they discovered this bug: released a software update, given everyone the optional feature for free, or at the very least notified the pilots.
Do you feel like the failure to do this qualifies as malicious behavior?
Edit: tense.
I still feel like a distinction needs to be made. According to this article, at no point before the grounding were airlines aware that they needed to pay extra to get this safety feature. Infact, they thought they already had it.
Boeing got no benefit, it was clearly a mistake.
Maybe you could argue the coverup was malicious behaviour, but such coverups can also result from incompetence.
The reason I think a distinction is necessary, is I think incompetence is much more dangerous than maliciousness.
A Malicious company evaluated each corner it cuts. It decides "Can I get away with this particular thing" and it will only cut the corners it thinks it can gets away with, leaving the more dangerous corners un-cut. A Malicious company will have notes on each corner they cut, or at least people who remember, so we can go in later and re-evaluate everything.
On the other-hand, an Incompetent company has no idea where it went wrong. It made random mistakes without realising. The mistakes could be anywhere along the risk-spectrum. They aren't documented. Nobody knows where they are. The only way to be sure you caught all these mistakes it to completely re-examine the whole design.
Plus, even if their attention does wander there are other safety systems (like stall alerts) that will kick in to help them.
It's not like the MCAS disengagement makes the plane uncontrollable.
Hopefully it doesn't disable itself when it's needed.
This is retrospective ass-covering, to distract us from the fact that the the pilots were never informed as to the existence of MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) and therefore could not even know how to disable it. The presence of or lack thereof of a warning light being rendered specious. And MCAS read only the one AoA sensor, from the captains side.
So to summarize, the pilots don't know about MCAS, MCAS is still engaged even when the auto-pilot is disengaged. A single AoA sensor failed, triggering the MCAS into a nose-down mode, the pilots begin ignorant of this, repeatedly tried to regain level flight using the trim wheel. This they failed at.
“The warning light notifies pilots of a disagreement in the sensors that measure which direction the plane is pointed”
This wouldn't even work in the way described, in a two sensor system, the computer can't tell which sensor is giving false readings. That's why they hooked up MCAS to only the one sensor. And Boeing didn't tell the FFC or the pilots as they would of had to get the plane re-certified and the pilots retrained.