So it's a slightly less safe (in the grand scheme of things) airliner that's vastly more fuel efficient and cheaper to run than any in the past. Obviously this is of no comfort to the families of the people who died in the crash!
But to suggest that Boeing has somehow regressed decades in technical capabilities is just plain wrong.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
Boeing being better now than in the 90s doesn't mean that the stock shouldn't drop, because competitors and expectations are higher now than in the 90s.
The fact that two brand new MAX's crashed killing all aboard within 2 years of its commercial introduction (out of only ~600 models flying at the time) is a brutal safety record for the jet age, especially as the cause of the crash was the plane itself. That list you post includes any and all reported incidents that merely involve 737s (and involve incidents that were caused by factors that aren't necessarily related to the safety of the place itself).
It's misleading to say they prioritized making it fly like its predecessor over safety.
In theory there was absolutely nothing wrong with a system LIKE MCAS. In fact the 737 MAX is still approved to fly with it.
The flaws were in the specific implementation and documentation around it, not with the idea of the system itself.
> The fact that two brand new MAX's crashed killing all aboard within 2 years of its commercial introduction (out of only ~600 models flying at the time) is a brutal safety record for the jet age, especially as the cause of the crash was the plane itself.
If you want to be pedantic about it, the reason for the crashes is that the pilots failed to recognize trim runaway during takeoff. The trim runaway was caused by MCAS, but this is not a new failure mode for ANY aircraft and pilots get extensive training on how to manage it [1].
MCAS failing was not an unrecoverable error [2]. It failed several times in the US, as well, but American pilot training standards are very high compared to the places where there WERE disasters and the pilots recognized and recovered quickly.
I say this not to deflect blame from MCAS. Its original implementation was unsafe and should never have been approved.
A large part of why modern jetliners are so safe is exactly because of flight control augmentations like this - both Boeing and Airbus have been implementing these for decades and they have made flying much safer. Your suggestion that any system like MCAS is always unsafe (or that Boeing was somehow doing something wrong by adding it) is totally wrong.
1: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/july/pilot... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...
The internal Boeing emails literally say otherwise.
> In theory there was absolutely nothing wrong with a system LIKE MCAS. In fact the 737 MAX is still approved to fly with it.
I never said that MCAS had any issues in theory. And the 737 MAX was mostly "approved" by Boeing's self-regulators, where emails trails (again literally) had anybody raising questions or concerns sidelined.
> The flaws were in the specific implementation and documentation around it, not with the idea of the system itself.
Yes, because Boeing's top priority was making it so that no expensive extra training was required to fly the MAX, despite the fact that MCAS was designed to deal with some situations that could cause the plane to fly differently.
> If you want to be pedantic about it...
Yes, I am being pedantic about it. The trim issues in the crashes were (intermittently) caused by MCAS, but there was no specific documentation or specific training as to how to deal with it in the case of faulty MCAS sensors. There were indeed several MCAS incidents in western flights, but they were different as the failures were different. The two crashed pilots did indeed attempt disabling MCAS but the intermittent failures masked the problem and there were insufficient checklists by boeing, because had they existed it could have allueded to the fact that such situations may need new simulator time.
The MCAS issue was totally and completely recoverable if it were properly documented, but doing that would have almost certainly guaranteed the simulator time that was Boeing's top priority to avoid.
Almost all the reports about pilot capability differences had more to do with experience than it did training. These "developing" countries have younger airlines and pilots who don't have the same pipeline of pilots with decades of experience, including the military like in the US. MCAS "acted up" on several other Lion Air flights that the pilots corrected for as well, but again those were different failure modes.
The fact that the Ethiopian Airlines had perfectly acceptable safety record on other planes negates that these are "poorly trained" pilots. They've had one major accident in 2010 that was attributed to pilot error, but most of the rest were due to bad luck (eg bird strikes) or hijackings.
> A large part of why modern jetliners are so safe is exactly because of flight control augmentations like this...
I never even mentioned MCAS by name. Yes, modern jetliners are safe because of these kinds of systems. Airbus planes will not allow pilots to do many things no matter what, even. But these systems are documented, pilots trained on them, and go through rigorous testing because in most cases they're designed to make a plane safer, not try to deal with aerodynamic changes.
Boeing wanted no new simulator training despite the MAX being a very different aircraft due to changed engine placement. That was the cause. If Boeing wasn't trying to avoid new simulator training the 737 MAX is a perfectly fine aircraft as far as we know.
The 787 had similar issues as the overriding goal of the program was to get as much capital expenditure off of Boeing's books, but all of the outsourcing led to a nightmare when trying to assemble the plane and there was no unified quality control program, or even a straight line of responsibility.
The common person often doesn't realize this at all. Every modern plane is flying itself essentially, with hints from the pilot on what to actually do.
>MCAS failing was not an unrecoverable error [2]
Also this is frustrating, especially in the case of the second crash where every max pilot knew the procedure (including the one that crashed), they even performed the procedure but then disabled it a minute later. Both the NTSB and the BEA (French equivalent) agreed pilot error/CRM played a role in the second.
Did our quality and capability get worse or did everyone become a journalist that can document every flaw and distribute it globally in minutes?
Hmmm....
All this discussion assumes that Boeing engineers didn't catch this stuff and weren't banging the alarm bells over how these completely failed inspection. The problem was the people in power ignored it. This is an entirely social issue constructed by business demands, not one lacking expertise nor standards.
30 years may be a stretch but 20-25 certainly isn't.
Incidentally this also applies similarly to risk issues. The biggest risk in a flight is not in flying, but in takeoff/landing. This is why the commonly cited deaths/mile metric is not only misleading but completely disingenuous by the people/organizations that release it, knowing full well that the vast majority of people don't understand this. If some person replaced their car with a plane (and could somehow land/take off anywhere), their overall risk of death in transit would be significantly higher than if they were using e.g. a car. 'Air travel being safer than cars' relies on this misleading and meaningless death/miles statistic.
When I see those statistics I think about flights like Austria to Finland and I imagine that is indeed safer by plane.