Originally Posted by
GrayAnderson
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).
How anybody specifically died or what the root cause was wasn't the point of the example. If you've seen the crash video, it could easily have ended in far more deaths - maybe a little lower into the edge of the wall or if the fuselage had landed upside down after the tumble and it could have been far worse. From a "things I need to prevent in the future" point of view it's not only just as bad as the MAX failures, but arguably worse, so very much should count as an equally significant crash. In the case of the MAX it's likely an engineering failure compounded by crew inexperience, but the Asiana crash was attributed mostly to poor CRM and confusion because they were over reliant on automation. Once identified, an engineering issue is much easier to correct across the entire fleet and know that it's fixed. CRM is harder to quantify and harder to ensure is fixed for any/every crew - this is what makes it potentially worse, because it's very culturally and training dependent and will vary significantly from company to company and crew to crew.