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Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by briandear on Monday May 06, 2019 @03:03AM (#19837380)
That’s weird to say. Lion Air is a sloppy, cheapskate airline — look at their horrible maintenance and crash history for evidence of that. That they didn’t want to pay slightly extra for additional options on the plane was their choice. And Ethiopian is a flag carrier: they could have easily gotten the extra option, but likely some accountant thought it wasn’t necessary. Who spends over $100 million on an airplane and then declines a $1 million safety option?
Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by boudin on Monday May 06, 2019 @04:32AM (#19837719)
Yeah, blaming the airlines and not the obvious flaws in the plane and the way it got its security certifications is the way to go...

People should have paid for the "warning when auto-crash enabled" option and I'm sure Boeing advertised their plane as absolutly unsafe without it...

Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by thaumasiotes on Monday May 06, 2019 @04:36AM (#19837739)
> Who spends over $100 million on an airplane and then declines a $1 million safety option?

Someone being pitched 30 different $1 million safety options?

Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by grkvlt on Thursday May 09, 2019 @11:10PM (#19874725)
Someone who wants to buy 100 of those airplanes, but knows that the safety option reduces the risk of incurring a $100 million total hull loss by less than one percent, thus saving less than the $100 million extra cost for the option? Obviously the numbers are different, but see the oft-quoted 'Fight Club' line about product recalls for similar logic.
Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by caf on Monday May 06, 2019 @08:12AM (#19838646)
Southwest didn't buy the option either until after the Lion Air crash:

In manuals that Boeing gave to Southwest Airlines — the biggest operator of both the MAX and 737s in general — the warning light was depicted as a standard feature just as it is on older 737s, according to Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King.

After the Lion Air crash, Ms King said, Boeing notified Southwest that it had discovered the lights did not work without the optional angle-of-attack indicators, so Southwest began adding the optional feature too.

(quotes from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-06/boeing-knew-737-probl... )

Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by marksweston on Monday May 06, 2019 @07:02AM (#19838298)
Who ships safety-critical features as an optional extra?
Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by bumby on Monday May 06, 2019 @10:43AM (#19839852)
There's levels to safety-criticality so these aren't binary decisions. Often they are based on severity/probability/detectability measures.

For example, airbags on your car may be mandatory but automatic emergency braking not so much.

Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by marksweston on Monday May 06, 2019 @11:59AM (#19840599)
I agree, but was responding to a post that was heavily criticising Lion Air for not paying for the option and implicitly laying the blame for the crash at their door. Either the option was safety critical, in which case Boeing had no business making it optional, or it wasn’t, in which case blaming Lion Air is unreasonable.

Given that thanks to Boeing, the Lion Air crew didn’t even know the MCAS subsystem existed, and that MCAS would continue to rely on the single faulty sensor however many extra redundancies were installed, the decision not to buy seems kind of irrelevant.

Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by bumby on Monday May 06, 2019 @01:25PM (#19841667)
> Either the option was safety critical, in which case Boeing had no business making it optional

This is the part I was trying to clarify. I don't know Boeing's internal processes, but there certainly could be options that are safety-critical but still optional because they are ranked low enough on the severity/probability/detectability scale.

I agree that it's wrong to blame Lion Air as the consumer. The fault seems to be in Boeing misapplying the risk categorization.