| Everyone hears you, most have taken your words into comsideration but I think the part you're missing is the fact that it was impossible for pilot and airline themselves to remediate problems because knowledge of the system wasn't there until it was too late, and even when information began trickling out from Boeing, it's been so slow, and so insubstantive, as to be worthless, likely because of concerns with legal exposure on Boeing's part. The pilot's absolutely agreed to fly the plane. As far as they knew, it flew like a 737, and they knew everything they needed to know. Boeing revealed as little as they did about MCAS to spare pilot's the "gory details" because the plane was allegedly "just another 737". Information does not perfectly diffuse, and doesn't diffuse at all without effort. Half the outcry over this probably isn't from pilot's or aerodynamicist's at Boeing at all, but from people passionate and informed enough to get the word of the colossal fuck up out in as many ways as possible to the people who need to know it most. I've been in these threads on Hacker News since the Lion Air incident, and held my tongue at many times. Cautioning more and more that new information will drive the development, but in all likelihood, given the facts we have access to, the problems will have occurred in X, Y, Z spots, all of which have origins within Boeing and the FAA as organizations. The FAA delegated responsibility for vetting to Boeing. Boeing CHOSE to accept that mantle of trust, then discarded the integrity part as soon as the bottom line was threatened by a competitor. Airlines fly planes. They don't make them. That was Boeing's job, and they cashed in on the better part of a century of goodwill, and torched the entire pile by delivering a complete failure in terms of their own responsibility to the public. We get it. You think the pilots and airlines should shoulder the blame too. Understood. Many though, myself included, understand that the world runs on incomplete information transfer between designers and operators, and given that, an enormous responsibility is put on designers of industrial scale systems to take extra care to make sure that "unintuitive designs" are very clearly documented and made known to their operators who will have lives and property on the line. Buying the planes from Boeing came with an implicit trust on the part of airlines that anything different to look out for would be clearly communicated. That didn't happen. They relied on Boeing doing that part. Boeing failed. The fact that armchair aeronautics engineers got to the root cause in such a short time, with so little information beyond the FDR means that it is not unreasonable for the professional engineers at Boeing whose raison d'être is to design safe planes to have caught it. I don't think anyone here has such a severe grudge against Boeing's existence to just go after them for merely existing. Many, or at least I, am just awestruck at the magnitude of collective failure that occurred. The data all points to them. Of everyone involved, they alone had both the means and onus to prevent what happened. But it didn't. So here we are. Something needs to be done, we have very specific rules about how to do it, but nevertheless, something has to changed. We owe at least that to the lost that their unwitting and tragic sacrifice shall not have been in vain. The families that have been broken; the sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandparents who will never arrive at their destination demand it. Our integrity, "Our" being those of the will, hubris, and capability to take the lives and fates of others in the embrace of our works, demands it. Somewhere, at some point, complacency, and cultural degradation happened for whatever reason. It must be exposed. The historical annals decorated once more in blood, that we never lose sight of the cost of any shirking of our responsibility again. How else than this, and the penance/contrition of any directly involved, can justice truly be served? |