assuming there's a statistically significant increase in these kind of accidents: what's your theory on why this is happening? what has change since e.g. 5-10 years ago?
Well, first of all I don't actually think there is? It's clear that the 737 MAX is a particularly problematic design, but industry-wide incidents and accidents vs distance flown continue to fall, and have for decades; even _absolute_ numbers of deaths are falling, despite vastly more planes in the air.
As to the problems with Boeing in particular, they mostly look like cost-cutting and short-termism; the 737 MAX, for instance, is transparently an attempt to squeeze a few more years out of an ancient no-longer-fit-for-purpose design. And the decisions that lead to that were probably made more like _20_ years ago; Boeing should have started developing the 737 replacement quite a while ago. This would suggest that Boeing has poor leadership.
(You could also argue that some of it's the unfortunate reality of the markets; the markets _might_ punish Boeing for making necessary investments with very long pay-off times.)
My personal theory would be that the change in Boeing management is catching up to them. But like the anti-DEI folks, all I have to base that on is rough correlation. I certainly wouldn't try to make a case based on that alone.
I 100% believe that there is a sizeable contingent of people that pay (more) attention to these things than they usually would. I am a tiny bit of a plane nerd. Weird shit happens with planes regularly, and not just Boeing ones. These events are increasingly making it to HN, and when they do, they’re getting far more traction than they usually do.
There is undoubtedly something fishy going on at Boeing, but that doesn’t mean that more commonplace accidents aren’t being comparatively overpublicised, or that they aren’t getting more traction than usual because there are now far more people waiting with baited breath to jump on anything that portrays Boeing negatively.
All I’m really saying that Boeing hate is now undoubtedly trendy, and that communities like HN are filled with people that have bought into the software engineer God complex enough to think that they can just intuitively understand something as complex as aviation. I’d barely consider myself anything more than a layperson but these Boeing incident threads are increasingly filled with people spouting BS. Again, there is certainly something going wrong at Boeing, but we are well into the territory where there’s a real need to separate signal from noise.
As to the problems with Boeing in particular, they mostly look like cost-cutting and short-termism; the 737 MAX, for instance, is transparently an attempt to squeeze a few more years out of an ancient no-longer-fit-for-purpose design. And the decisions that lead to that were probably made more like _20_ years ago; Boeing should have started developing the 737 replacement quite a while ago. This would suggest that Boeing has poor leadership.
(You could also argue that some of it's the unfortunate reality of the markets; the markets _might_ punish Boeing for making necessary investments with very long pay-off times.)