In college we learned about the engineering & product decisions that led to the challenger disaster. There's a famous line that is rumored to have been said at one of the last design meetings before the disaster: "lets take off our engineering hats and put on your management hats". Personally, I doubt this sentence was uttered, but even the rumor conveys the point.
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/singapore-t...
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/australia-grounds-...
You're assuming that being "on edge" is sufficient to prevent a systemic design flaw. Without a proper investigation, it's not clear that is true at all.
https://youtu.be/4h8GTXK3e2g?t=220
With the Lion Air flight there was only about 20 seconds from the plane nose diving to impact -- and for a significant fraction of those 20 seconds their fate was sealed.
https://geeksprinkles.com/search-for-cause-of-deadly-737-lio...
There is no information about the cause of the second crash as of yet. You’re making a claim about the purported alignment of Boeing, the FAA, and the “American media/industrial complex” (whatever that is) but I’m not aware that there is such a thing. What do you know that the rest of us don’t?
And in case it's not totally clear, the caution should be for the passengers, not shareholders.
> "its AOA sensor was known to be faulty."
The plane was what, two months old? It should have been non-lethal even if a troop of rabid baboons was hired to maintain it.
Clearly, there are no answers yet. There is no known cause for this recent crash yet. But there is some evidence. And that scant evidence might be coincidence, but it also has well-informed people concerned.
[1] https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1104668693613764609
What are the interactions between an automated system and the pilot?
Specifically, can a plane quickly switch from flyable to out of control?
There's a huge number of unknowns here, but I thought most pilot assistance systems were designed to be disengaged if needed.
[1] https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/03/11/six-similarit...
It makes it sound like there's some toxic debris Boeing is still racing to clean-up, when in fact the story is just about financial/reputational after-effects.
(NYT's original print headline for this story, "Crisis for Boeing As Safety Worry Grounds New Jet", at least avoided the problematic toxic-debris implication – though it somewhat implied the jet was grounded everywhere, or by Boeing, when it's just been grounded by some jurisdictions and carriers.)
It doesn't make it sound like that at all. I don't think anyone except maybe you reads it that way. "Fallout" well-understood to mean "effects" or "results".
Substitute xbox 360 with PLANE, substitute microsoft with BOEING, substitute "weary about paying full price" with "dying in a horrible fiery death".
I'm not sure why this is contentious. Be on the safe side and wait for the investigation to complete in case there's some kind of unexpected single point of failure caused by mechanical defects.
Paying full price and dying a fiery death don't exactly seem like comparable substitutions.
When microsoft faced an issue with statistically increased failure rates they initially played the plausible deniability game ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems#Re... ). In fact this is the only response you will ever get from a public company with short term looking stockholders.
I definitely wouldn't buy that xbox for $300 if I heard similar news reports, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy that $300 plane ticket and bet my life on boeing's words.
When was the last major airline downed by a pilot error stall anyway?
Making something worse in an attempt to make it better. As an engineer I'm often concerned about committing such a fallacy.
But I'd be surprised if it were that simple, especially given the airtime of all planes flown. Airtime which I'd assume passed largely without incident, as by now some news agency should have drug up any similar close calls.
If we're doing wild speculation, I'd bet on something like the Tesla battery punctures (where it turned out high-energy impacts from pointed road debris were more common than expected).
E.g. a maintenance issue, coupled with a specific configuration, coupled with pilot behavior
Or, it could just be a poorly maintained plane and a freak accident. But that's what root cause analysis and black box recordings are designed to ascertain.
