| > The people who say things like "crude" or "stupid" mistakes are literally making the implication that the decision-makers were idiots. No, it really is just stupid, and that's not a claim that any individual cog in the machine is stupid. As the saying goes: "None of us are as dumb as all of us". You can have dumb outcomes even though every individual step of getting there wasn't that dumb. I touched on this in an upthread comment, but if airplanes worked like cars then your driving license would only be valid for one model of car. Now, you're a Ford F-150 owner who got his license in the mid-80s, and you'd like to buy a new car today. So of course you're going to be biased towards the 2024 F-150, because Ford's implemented a complex system to have the newer model pretend it's a 40-year old car. It'll handle like your 1986 F-150, even though the length, weight etc. of the car is drastically different. This is going to work really well, right up until it doesn't, because something's going to have to give when you've got a driving simulator on wheels. Type ratings should exist, because it makes sense to treat minor iterations in design as the same airplane, and e.g. only re-train pilots on the specific things that were changed. But if you look at the evolution of the 737[1] there's just no way to claim with a straight face that a 2024 model of that airplane is in any meaningful way the same airplane as the original 737. It's got 109% more thrust, it's over 50% longer, almost 30% wider, and has >75% more takeoff weight. Once you peel back the layers of obfuscation that claim is the reason for the 737 MAX disasters. The system that failed (MCAS) doesn't need to exist in the first place, it only existed to maintain this continuity of type rating. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737#Specifications |