Not only will I never fly this plane again, but I'll do my best to avoid Boeing altogether. Given that I'm European, it should be fairly easy.

Seems excessive. Most of Boeing plane families have been flying for decades. We're unlikely to discover new major failure modes in them at this point.

If anything, I'd wait before flying any recent Boeing designs.

Why does this change anything? Every major European carrier flies Boeing aircraft. Some exclusively.

Two Boeing 737max out of a total close to 400 crashed in the span of around a year before being grounded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

The FAA predicted that the Boeing 737max would cause about 15 crashes during the next 30 years.

The right figure to look at is how many plane crashes there are with other commercial flight planes of the same class due to design defects covered up like Boeig did, which is zero.

You seem to have mistakenly believe that I'm defending Boeing here. I'm not. The following two things can be simultaneously true: The 737 MAX is less safe than other aircraft, and the 737 MAX is still safer than driving.

Look at how many car crashes leading to fatalities there were over those two years and it's a lot more than the mere 2 with the 737 MAX. The point still stands; the only reasonable way to make comparisons here is not by absolute number, but per passenger distance traveled. Any other comparison isn't correctly normalizing the things being compared.

That's your personal decision, and one you feel you meet to be vocal about on public forums.

Others feel the exact opposite, and flying Boeing is a risk not worth taking due to the company's track record.

Think about it for a second: your decision comes down to either fly with company A or company B, who have pretty identical offers, and company B flies planes with known safety problems. Not a hard decision.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-probe/airbus-bribe...

Yes, in almost duopoly in civilian flying, I will take Airbus anytime. And never, ever, fucking ever 737 Max.

I've more critical of Boeing than some folks here in the past, but if your goal is safety, you're just limiting your own options by rejecting planes with provably good safety records. (Or if you somehow think that's warranted, then there seem to be plenty of reasons to question Airbus's integrity too.) OTOH, if your goal is to just do this as some kind of economic retaliation (a "vote with your wallet" thing), in which case, never mind, I misunderstood your goal as being safety-related. Though you're not the person who wrote the initial comment, so I guess your reason could be different.

As much as all other Boeing airframes can be safe, I'm not confident at all with the way Boeing's management runs the company. What other cost-cutting measures have been implemented? How can they affect current airframes maintenance and reliability? It probably doesn't affect them much but it's been blunder after blunder from Boeing, from the 777 built at Charleston, the 737 MAX fiasco and the 787.

As an airline customer I'm completely dependent on trust that Boeing was doing things correctly, from a safety standpoint at least. I don't have that trust anymore and it'll take decades to earn it back.

> A conversational tactic in which a person responds to an argument or attack by changing the subject to focus on someone else’s misconduct, implying that all criticism is invalid because no one is completely blameless

> Excusing your mistakes with whataboutism is not the same as defending your record.

This was emphatically not what I was doing.

That said, GGP post did not point out similar actions. Airbus did not risk passengers' lives. That is the issue here: public safety.

Doesnt mean Boeing shouldnt restructure or disappear.

and how is highlighting airbus misconduct not a textbook example of this?

you even linked the explanation sentence, but did you read it?

I think we disagree on what whataboutism means. I think we're just gonna have to agree to disagree, because we're having a meta argument at this point.

The takeaway here is that the FAA is dysfunctional, so any plane certified by them in recent years is potentially unsafe.

The FAA has to demonstrate how they fixed their process, then re-certify every plane tested under the old, broken, process.

One plane model being obviously defective is just a symptom.

That is a common IMHO misconception. Since the new version with "fixed" MCAS requires additional training, it does not follow that MCAS exists simply to avoid retraining and non certifying it the same. In that case, Boeing should have simply dropped MCAS and did the certification and training. Instead they opted for the near financial disaster and disruption to their supply chain AND failure to avoid additional training.

I suspect MCAS is covering for a very bad corner case in the flight dynamics.

FAA rules require on all planes that the control stick takes more and more pressure to pull back as the plane approaches stall.

The 737 MAX doesn't meet this requirement, apparently it gets easier to pull the stick back as it approaches stall due to engine nacelles. This is what MCAS fixes, as the plane approaches stall, it adjusts trim to provide that extra back-pressure on the stick.

No amount of additional pilot training will allow the plane to fly without MCAS, because this is a hard rule and it's not certifiable without it.

This is only superseded in absurdity by the fact there are two switches to disable the stabilizer trim motors, thereby making the airplane no longer airworthy while in flight.

How would you make that happen in a fly-by-wire airplane? In fact, how would you implement it at all in a digital fly-by-wire system without software?

If you feel that using software to control an airplane is perverse, you might want to avoid flying.

Airbus fly-by-wire have an alternate law mode where yoke input has matching control surface deflection, just like cable or hydraulic planes. I did not say no software anywhere ever. I said using it to mask aerodynamic deficiency is wrong.

These are transport category aircraft. Not fighter jets. Positive static and dynamic stability is required. All of this is reviewable. Is the software?

yeah, much larger, stronger, and more forward positioned engines so the thrust leads to pitch up stalls in worst case scenarios.

I cannot judge the severity, but it covers for rule 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall characteristics", see http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm#background

The MAX is a bad aeronautical design that Boeing made more "controllable" through additional control system engineering. Problem is, the additional control system engineering was pretty bad.

Yeah, it's really frustrating that the solution was already a band-aid, and they didn't even bother to do that properly so they covered up what was questionably fraud (the lazy way of not getting a new certification) with what was unquestionably fraud (lying about the MCAS system).

What's really sad though is it exposes just how defanged the FAA has become over the years, so now who the hell do we rely on to tell us what's safe for aviation?

I flew an airplane that was getting ready to be retired after it's been in service for ~30 years and we had a lot of emergency procedures and memory items (items that pilots have to memorize) that were add over the years after various incidents.

The 737 MAX wasn't necessarily an unsafe airplane, it's pilots were not made aware of how everything worked, which led to the two crashes.

A human pilot properly informed in advance could paper over an act of sabotage by a flight control system, but that does not make the airplane safe.

A single sensor reporting bogus data was used by a system to automatically take dangerous action. Both are dangerous. But in particular the latter, because it permits an excessive reaction to what is supposed to be merely stall avoidance, not recovery. Even stall recovery does not require anywhere near the kind of nose down amount MCAS was permitted to induce. That behavior is sabotage. If a human pilot did the same thing, with the same available bogus information, it would be incompetency. And if it lead to death, it would be manslaughter.

I understand that aircraft are complex systems, and they need to be used by experts, and that those experts are aware of, and have to work to mitigate a lot of catastrophic failure scenarios. Is the unstable flight caused by the forward-mounted engines a particular example of a 'typical' quirk of a commercial airliner?