Originally Posted by
chrisl137
This one only killed 3 out of 307, and might have killed fewer if seatbelt compliance during landing had been better and the fire trucks driven a little more carefully. Does it not count the same as a crash that killed 150?
Of the three killed, one was due to being struck by a door. A tragedy to be sure, but probably not preventable by any changes to design or practice beyond "don't crash the plane". One was dead when they hit the ground (one of the seatbelt cases). One was run over by a fire truck (the other seatbelt case), but IIRC there's a split decision as to whether they were dead when they hit the ground or killed in the collision with the truck between the relevant authorities. Moreover, I believe that I recall reading that the two were either totally or almost totally obscured by firefighting foam, and this was in the context of an emergency situation. There's a difference between saying ".... happens" in that context (where slowing down overall vehicle speed might complicate putting out the fire/averting an explosion) and in the context of "normal" operations. From what I recall there wasn't an assertion of gross negligence in that case, and the fact that the truck very plausibly "just" hit two dead bodies that weren't obviously visible suggests that the firefighters' practices weren't anymore at fault than the tangled "on the ground" facts of the situation. Moreover, poor seatbelt compliance, particularly if the customer obscures that they've undone their seatbelt, is a problem that can't be entirely averted. That's under the category of "you can't fix stupid".
As to the Boeing side of things...from what I can tell from the Wikipedia article, most of the issues come down to "the crew screwed up". Bad communication among the crew, etc. came into the mix, with errors on Boeing's part being contributing factors but not the sole factor (unlike in the current cases, where it's looking pretty cut-and-dried that Boeing screwed up a bunch of stuff and there are no other major factors in play).
Originally Posted by
BB2220
They didn’t “hide” anything. Boeing thought the difference wasn’t that big of a deal, I mean Airbus has had the same system since 1986. There’s hundereds of other differences between the MAX and NG that Boeing probably doesn’t feel are pertinent to the operation of the plane, so they don’t make it part of their training. It doesn’t mean that Boeing hid some kind of known crash trigger in their plane and then decided not to tell anyone. That defies all logic. What happend with MCAS wasn’t expected. It wasn’t anticipated. I’m sure there are difference with the NEO that airbus feels isn’t necessary to make a pilot aware of . It’s an unfortunate growing pain of technology. Avaition history is littered it. But for some reason humans forget the past and love to laser focus on the present.
However, when the problems do manifest themselves, and people are trained to mitigate issues by said problem, and then don’t follow through on that training then there’s a issue.
Per the reports I've seen so far, Boeing submitted one set of specs with the FAA for certification and then changed them without telling anyone. I'm not sure of the exact contextual definition of "hide", but that comes pretty close to a reasonable definition of it for me.