What choice do we have? Even if there is a choice, the majority of consumers don't have the luxury of choosing.
Dying once every 10 million flight hours instead of every 1000 million flight hours is a fair price to pay for 10 USD of savings.
I'm not sure that is a universal positive.
No information - They rarely have any information (you have to go through several menus to find out your plane on most sites). They don't know when / where the plane was last serviced [0].
No framework - Your average consumer of air travel is not equipped to accurately evaluate that information should they even have it. (c.f., 'if it's not Boeing I a'int going [1]). They cannot make rational and informed decisions without information and a rational decision making framework
No control - They have no control over whether that plane is changed for operational reasons even if they have the information and a framework to evaluate it. You may not even know until you are onboard with the door shut unless you are really well informed about airplanes that the plane model has changed (e.g., I avoid A321s because
No recourse - Even if they consciously choose a plane based on information and an informed framework and then it gets changed what can you do? Are you even going to know until you get on the plane at which point what do you do? Do you think you get a refund?
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
The odds of buying a JetBlue ticket and ending up on a Boeing are fairly low compared to flying Southwest.
In any case, even if 10% of people totally stopped flying on Boeing, which would be a wildly optimistic outcome for any organized consumer action, the airlines would just discount those flights ever so slightly and the other 90% of price-conscious consumers would immediately take up the slack. Nobody's going out of business in that scenario. This is, of course, why we rely on regulation rather than consumer choice to ensure safety, and why this is a failure of regulation, not of the market.
This presumes a perfect market where customers are rational actors with access to a variety of sellers whose product differs only on quality, which consumers have access to accurate information about and the time and expertise to precisely evaluate.
Of course the reality is we're just trying to book a flight to get home before Mom's chemo starts and all we know about each airline is the ticket price and how good the peanuts were the last time we flew on them.
Airlines are about the last industry on Earth where we should expect laissez-faire capitalism to produce optimal outcomes.
Regulation.
And thus no one will actually know that Boeing's planes are of lower quality, until a couple hundred people die.