If it’s Boeing, I ain’t going.

How far they’ve fallen, all due to a single acquisition.

For those unaware, the saying used to be “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going”. The reason for this was because Boeing had a well deserved reputation for quality, reliability, and overengineering. It was a company run by engineers. Another company named McDonnell Douglas, with the polar opposite reputation, went or was about to go bankrupt. It was a company run by salesmen. Boeing decided to buy McDonnell Douglas but instead of firing the entirety of MD’s executive branch, they decided to absorb them. In short order the MD virus that was their sales first executive team spread and eventually took over Boeing.

This is as I remember it so if I got something wrong, please correct me.

A business example of rotten apples spoiling the whole batch.

It’s mostly correct, but even before McDonnell Douglas in the early 90’s Boeing actually had repeat issues of 737 rudders reversing direction in flight, causing accidents. Their response was exactly the same as the MAX8 crashes, cover it up and blame the pilots. It even sounds to me like they tampered with evidence according to Admiral Cloudberg’s telling of it:
imgur.com/a/5wcFx8M

Boeing, which had packed the valve for shipping, did not explain why it kept the spring and the end cap. It instead tried to steer the NTSB toward a conclusion that the crash was caused by a wind rotor

I certainly still agree things got MUCH worse after the merger though

It’s actually worse than that. Boeing bought MD with stocks, which means MD essentially bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.

I’m calling it now, those folding wingtips on the 777x are going to be an unmitigated disaster.

I’m actually amazed the 787 hasn’t had similar issues given how shoddily built it is.

Whenever I think of the 787 I will forever think about the single survivor of the Air India crash. Imagine just unbuckling your seatbelt and basically walking out of a biblically accurate flaming hell unscathed and realizing you were like 1 out of 300 to survive.

The system is working: nobody is perfect, but we have redundancy in place to detect problems and fix them latter.

The real dangerous systems are the ones where problems are covered up and ignored. You will get a false impression that they are safe until it is too late.

The system is very much not working. The original max issue that caused the deaths of over 300 people were due to Boeing being allowed to self certify the Max with MCAS. The FAA just greenlit Boeing to continue self certifying.

More people will die because the FAA prioritizes the profits of airlines and Boeing above their regulatory duty to certify new aircraft.

The real dangerous systems are the ones where problems are covered up and ignored. You will get a false impression that they are safe until it is too late.

Like when Boeing covered up the 737 Max defects that caused them to crash?

That is an example of the system not working. That they are doing this implies that maybe the system has been fixed. It is hard to know.

It just means they’ve been caught again.

Uhhhh this seems to imply that the fuselages aren’t normally checked for cracks.

You know, I honestly was never afraid of flying. But the older I get, and the more damage capitalism does, I’m starting to think I’m not prepared to trust anyone to do their jobs properly anymore.

Those Max planes have been shit since they came out. Apparently we cut too many corners due to capitalism now.

And the internal cabin arrangement with the cramped plastic seating. This plane is ugly inside too.

Uhhhh this seems to imply that the fuselages aren’t normally checked for cracks.

They are checked. On a schedule. Sometimes it’s discovered that the original maintenance schedule was too spaced out, and the aircraft should be checked more frequently. This means that any that have exceeded the new length of time between checks have to be checked right away or be grounded until they are, which may be what happened here.

That doesn’t mean that even the new schedule for this particular aircraft is frequent enough, just that in general, someone does examine aircraft for structural damage and metal fatigue from time to time.

Boeing doesn’t actually want the aircraft to come apart in the air. That’s the kind of thing that makes airlines buy Airbuses instead. Their goal is to try to figure out what the cheapest, least-frequent maintenance schedule is that will still keep the planes from catastrophically self-destructing. Too bad they suck at it.