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by cjbgkagh 833 days ago
Boeing being safe was the default, what we're seeing is the disillusion of this default. What's the alternative for the news; "plane lands successfully and without issue". As with any complex system things when things go wrong they go wrong in a myriad of ways with a great deal of uncertainty and randomness - which in and of itself makes them interesting. The erosion of the culture of safety at Boeing is a slow gradual process that has occured over several decades. Incidents that make it to the public are a lagging indicator, which suggests that there is much more to come. Culture is easy to destroy and very very hard to fix, like how cutting down a forest is much faster and easier than growing one. And a culture that has destroyed itself is very unlikely able to fix itself. So we could very well be witnessing a terminal decline. Boeing will make a ton of money providing drones for the US military so there is no real incentive to force leadership to do any course corrections - instead they will just have to act surprised each time a new Boeing issue pops up.
1 comments

These issues are killing people in hundreds. You are right that national security is more important, but world is not binary. Current execs could easily say rot in jail while company keeps churning whatever hardware military wants, nothing mutually exclusive there.

Now what will happen with civilian avionics is another story, for me they lost my trust for good but I & my family choices are insignificant forces on the market.

I'm not suggesting national security is more important, just that Boeing's leadership won't learn any lessons from this as they'll keep getting bailed out with sweet MIC contracts. I would probably feel much safer if we didn't have a MIC that is constantly trying to play a nuclear game of chicken with political adversaries. 'Russia will not use nukes because Russia has not used nukes' - what kind of effed up logic is that. I feel very unsafe being governed by morons. I can easily avoid flying but dodging nukes is much more difficult.
I prefer the term "national insecurity". The use of "national security" usually makes more sense if you would add the in prefix.