"as the pilots could easily interrupt the accident chain" -- No they couldn't!

To survive a runaway trim, pilots had to know the rollercoaster maneuver and have enough altitude to aerodynamically relieve airloads off the jackscrew so they could manually trim the plane back. If FAA and many others knew this then they should have instantly communicated it to all boeing max pilots. Instead none of that happened.

This jives with what I've seen from blancolirio, MentourPilot and others sources. The pilots should've had memory items to disable automation control of trim for the duration of the flight rather than all electric control of trim (including yoke-mounted switches), because aerodynamic forces were too large and altitude was too low to manually spin the trim wheels. I do hope Ralph Nader sues the pants off Boeing for murdering his goddaughter through negligent homicide. The FAA is also culpable for failing to oversee self-certification properly and getting too cozy (regulatory capture) with Boeing. As a consequent, equipment models including the whole line of 737 NG (-600 to -900; 2010 Ducommun structural parts scandal), 787 Dreamliner failures and 737 Max 8 and 9 are models I would not step foot on without a gun to my head.

I have read some of the earlier reports that they changed how the electric trim works. On earlier 737's, there were two switches: one to kill automated input, one to kill all electrical input.

On the MAX's, the switches only kill all electrical input. So those procedures literally didn't apply.

I've never quite understood that argument that only little people benefit from jail time and important people do not. Surely if we can put someone in jail for a year for having a forbidden plant in their pocket then we could put someone in jail for - how about a week? Three days? An hour? - for choosing to cut corners on safety and smashing two planes full of people into jelly?

The root cause here is "Boeing management wanted to get a plane out quick so they didn't lose market share". The way to examine the system and make sure this doesn't repeat (for now...) is to put someone in jail for it. Then the next time that some plane company wants to cut corners and get an unsafe plane out quick, some manager who doesn't want to go to jail will put a stop to it.

Show me the flaw in my logic.

This idea that there's one guy or set of people to be found whose fault it is that you have a systemic problem is so uniquely American.

In this case you're proposing to punish the smallest cog in the machine, some middle-manager or executive at Boeing.

It would be just as logical to throw every single American in prison for around 45 minutes (~1 person dead in 737 MAX crashes for every million Americans, 80 years (let's call that life in prison) / 1 million =~ 45 minutes).

After all those are the people responsible for electing the people whose job it was to oversee Boeing. Shouldn't we blame them for their disinterest in the activities of the FAA? Maybe give people who complained about the FAA's rubber-stamp regulatory policy before the 737 MAX parole?

All you'd accomplish by throwing people in jail is to incentivize these companies to restructure decision making to be more diffuse, and make all subsequent air crash investigations much more difficult due to everyone involved being afraid of having made some prison-worthy mistake.

The simple answer is to make the entire C-suite criminally liable - collectively and individually.

Because the usual argument is that the C-suite and especially the CEO are personally responsible for the successes of a company.

So it's not unreasonable to hold them personally responsible for the failures too - especially when those failures amount to suspected criminal negligence.

This is not the same as assuming guilt. Due process should still apply.

But the risk of personal liability should absolutely be present as a deterrent.

And if some executives don't want to operate in that environment - that's absolutely fine. The system should encourage responsible actors, and allow the removal and punishment of those who prefer to act irresponsibly.

I'd recommend using monetary penalties, including clawbacks, for motivational purposes. I suspect jail isn't quite the same level of deterrent as money for people who value those extra 0s on their net worth. Civil litigation is easier to win, too.

I would kinda like to see them get bullets in their heads. That's what China does to corporate executives convicted of corruption.

These people make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, truly obscene amounts of money compared to the workers they manage. Why should they live risk-free lives when the lives of so many people rest on their decisions in the C-suite office, and their decisions are clearly not made with safety in mind, but rather profit?

Yup, jail or prosecute them all. Maybe some of the lower-level people will want to cut plea deals to limit their exposure. We need to apply pressure to get people to flip.

Actually, that idea is pretty interesting--throwing a whole group of people in jail for some trivial amount of time. A symbolic slap on the wrist, but maybe at scale it would actually cause some group shame without resorting to draconian collective punishment.

The voters elected people whose job it was to oversee Boeing, but those elected people failed at their jobs. Why should the voters be held responsible for that? It's not the voters' job to oversee Boeing, that's why they elected people to choose other people to run that agency. The whole purpose of representative democracy is that laypeople aren't qualified, nor do they have the time, to make every decision collectively needed to run a society, so they select qualified people to do that full-time for them. If those people can't do the job properly, or do an especially negligent job of it, they can rightfully be punished or even prosecuted.

Your argument is like claiming that a taxi company owner should go to jail when one of his drivers rapes a passenger, even if there was no way the owner could have known the driver had this propensity. It's totally nonsensical.

The executives at Boeing are the ones ultimately responsible for the decisions that led to these crashes, because they prioritized profits over safety, and directed their engineers to work towards that end. For that, they should go to jail.

Jailtime for those in management who are responsible for cover-ups and cut corners. Not jailtime for those who actually design and handle the equipment.