Posted on 07/03/2021 12:53:08 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
On the second anniversary of the crash of Boeing 737 MAX in Ethiopia, killing all 157 aboard, it was clear to those attending a memorial at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. that the crash was preventable and those 157 would be with us today but for Boeing’s criminal actions and a beholden FAA management.
That point was driven home last month by FAA safety engineer Joe Jacobsen.
Jacobsen wrote a five page letter to the parents of Samya Stumo, who died that day two years ago in Ethiopia, and made clear that had he and the other top FAA engineers in the Seattle office been brought into the loop, lives would have been saved.
“I’m a Christian, and in early 2020, I began to fast, pray, and read the Bible for a few hours every Friday. This was new for me, but after beginning that process, I came to Isaiah 57 on one Friday. After reading Isaiah 57:1, my thoughts went to healing the families of the 737 MAX crashes. I wrote it down: The righteous perish, and no one takes it to heart; the devout are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.”
“I kept reading, and came to Isaiah 57:17, which drew my thoughts to Boeing leadership culture: I was enraged by their sinful greed; I punished them, and hid my face in anger, yet they kept on in their willful ways.”
“After that, I began to pray for you and the other families on a continual basis,” Jacobsen wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at corporatecrimereporter.com ...
I spent almost 21 years in Boeing Experimental Flight Test.
I helped certify most modern Boeing aircraft up to the 737 NG. I left Boeing before they did the MAX.
I had to certify my designs to the FAA.
I understand the process.
The MAX people failed miserably, not because they are bad engineers, but because “Share value” became more important than building the best aircraft in the world.
I left Boeing because of that change in focus of the Boeing product. I built the best aircraft in the world, the profits will roll in. I really didn’t care about making shareholders richer(although I was a shareholder).
Want to fix Boeing? Move Corporate back to Seattle.
Where I could walk across the street and make a complaint directly to the company president, if I thought something was wrong.
Still how could anyone be comfortable with an undisclosed, non-redundant, non-failsafe fly by wire control system?
I’m sure that Wall Street’s greed plays just as bigger role in that than does Boeing.
This article is purposely emotional and vague, it also assumes government is going to somehow fix the problem. Where was government in preventing it? And in terms of financial markets and our speculative, debt-fueled, financialized society, government is directly responsible
As you pointed out, it seems that aircraft engineering and quality took a back seat to marketers and especially financial engineering in a desire to boost stock prices. Certainly top management made out like bandits
I read somewhere that Boeing’s share buy-backs, which were in the end “wasted” by the crash in its share price anyway, would have easily paid for investment in 2 or 3 completely new aircraft programs which the company could ride for another 25 years
I suspect that the 777 was the last great airplane Boeing made. (I documented some of the avionics black boxes, back in the day.)
“Still how could anyone be comfortable with an undisclosed, non-redundant, non-failsafe fly by wire control system?”
Easy - don’t tell them about it.
Yep
“Where was government in preventing it?”
The problem was that government trusted Boeing to look out for its own interests...and it did work for decades. The idea being “Plane crashes are bad for all, so let’s do all we can to prevent them”
...that morphed into “Plane crashes are bad for those involved (and their families), but if we (Boeing) can blame the pilot (or airline), then we’ll get off unscathed”
Boeing should have figured out that didn’t work after the first crash, and had they, the damage to them would have been far less. Same for the FAA. In fact, the first country to ground the Max was China.
I’ve read the official accident reports for both the Indonesian and Ethiopian 737 Max incidents and although Boeing was cited for not sufficiently informing pilots on the potential flight impact of the MCAS system, the predominant cause was the failure to properly maintain the angle-of-attack sensors after they were reported as damaged and lack of flight crew training to handle the checklist required “runaway horizontal stabilizer” emergency procedure. The intended audience of the article was other trial lawyers who realize that the real money is in suing the deep pockets like Boeing.
Like many large companies that are highly regulated Boeing’s technical staff got too cozy with the FAA over time and when bad things happened it was natural for the government and press to make them the evil villain. The reality is that the causes of the crashes are much more complex than the simple “Boeing bad” narrative implies.
It's 2021. Complexity is not permitted.
B777 is probably the best civilian aircraft ever built.
All things considered.
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