The company has acknowledged its wrongdoing and some of the money is reportedly for the families of the victims. With better, more comprehensive training, MAX pilots are now informed and equipped to fly the plane more safely than they were before.
But, as always, customers have a choice whether or not to take flights on the Boeing MAX—right? Sure, sort of. Many passengers book travel weeks in advance and airlines may decide which planes to use where on an often nightly basis.
Note, however, that Boeing is not the manufacturer of the engine itself. However, preliminary reports indicate that fan-blade metal fatigue has already been cited by authorities as a significant factor in the engine failures. One-time thing? Maybe not. Sound familiar? In the U. In other words, the engines have been determined safe after proper inspection.
Aviation safety statistics tell us that fatality by commercial airplane accident remains extremely unlikely worldwide by most standards, but in a world that seems ever more dangerous, how do we decide what is and is not safe? Still, flight instructors often use crash reports and statistics as teaching material for student pilots; much is to be learned from any crash in which human decision making led to the loss of life.
Often, reports show us that crashes are caused by a series of wrong decisions creating a snowball effect. This seems to hold true in the case of the two fatal MAX crashes.
The reports indicate a complex series of reasons for failure. Pilot error may not be the main or only cause of the critical failures or a cause at all , but errors made long before the pilots came to work were still human.
The U. Congressional hearings and report on the MAX, in addition to featuring prominent politicians and pilots blaming or defending dead pilots, also featured the voices of family members of crash victims, who pointed out the cultural emphasis on profit over safety at Boeing may have led to corner-cutting that ultimately cost lives. The safety of the MAX is undoubtedly improved, but what about the motivations Boeing and the FAA have to make the process of designing these systems safer in the future?
But the controversy surrounding the crashes and the ensuing fallout leads us to ask bigger questions about how we as a society value our safety when traveling around the globe. What is safety? How do we evaluate the risks we take when traveling and how can we do better to protect everyone?
What are the dangers we face when our systems value profit over human life? How can we guard against systematic failures like these in the future? The unfortunate reality is that there are no clear answers. The Covid pandemic has raised similar questions about how we as a society value human life over continued profit margins and how differently our perceptions of risk are from our neighbors.
In the last year, many have rightfully questioned the safety in leaving home at all. Protests have erupted over mask wearing, the legitimacy of concern and the restrictions governments have put in place to combat the spread of the virus. Just take a look at Boeing shareholders circa March, But how should we measure trust when the story one troubled aircraft has to tell is as much about corporate culture and lack of effective government oversight as it is a faulty sensor?
Chauncey grew up on a farm in rural northern California. At 18 he ran away and saw the world with a backpack and a credit card, discovering that the true value of any point or mile is the experience it facilitates. He remains most at home on a tractor, but has learned that opportunity is where he finds it and discomfort is more interesting than complacency. She's a credit card enthusiast and digital nomad who has leveraged credit cards to travel around the world for next to nothing, often in style.
Prior to working for Forbes, she contributed to other leading publications in the credit cards and rewards space. She would like to visit every country and try as many different local culinary specialties as possible. Select Region. United States. United Kingdom. Chauncey Crail, Caroline Lupini. Contributor, Editor.
Editorial Note: Forbes Advisor may earn a commission on sales made from partner links on this page, but that doesn't affect our editors' opinions or evaluations. Fear not, weary traveler—the now infamous Boeing MAX has been cleared for takeoff. What happened? Why did it happen?
How was it fixed? Is it safe now? What about the ? What is safety, anyway? Was this article helpful? Share your feedback. Send feedback to the editorial team.
Rate this Article. Thank You for your feedback! Something went wrong. Please try again later. The most recent U. Five years before that, an Asiana Airlines plane, from Korea, had a misjudged-landing accident in San Francisco, in which three passengers died.
Before that had been another multiyear stretch of no fatalities in U. Hannah Giorgis: The Western erasure of African tragedy. But it helps explain why it can take so long to determine the cause. So no one knows, yet, what happened in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, and anyone who feigns certainty now should be viewed with wariness.
But here is an initial guide to the kinds of questions air investigators will be asking. The main known similarity at this point is that they both involved the same, relatively new model of airplane.
This is a new version of the workhorse Boeing , known as the Max 8. Both of the planes crashed shortly after takeoff—not mid-flight, like the Air France disaster over the Atlantic 10 years ago, and not on approach for landing, as with the Colgan commuter-airline crash en route to Buffalo in The is the most familiar and popular commercial airliner in the world.
When I was working for Texas Monthly , back in the s, I interviewed the late Herb Kelleher, a founder of the then-nascent Southwest, who stressed that with a single model of aircraft, everything about running an airline became simpler. Any pilot who worked for the airline could fly any plane the airline owned. Any mechanic at any Southwest repair facility would have the right parts for any plane that arrived, because all the planes were the same. Aircraft makers themselves have obviously invested in an evolutionary series of airplanes for different markets and circumstances.
Airlines like it because it is standardized. But airlines also want constant improvements: better and more efficient engines, improved avionics and other systems, and of course, more and more crammed-in seats.
Thus the range goes from the early models, meant to hold about passengers, to the latest models, which depending on layouts can hold or more. The s have gotten physically longer over the years, to hold more passengers, and that is part of the drama involving the latest model, which went down in both the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes. These new Max airplanes have different engines from previous models—more powerful, and more efficient.
But because these new engines are physically bigger than previous versions, they are mounted in a slightly different place on the wings than on previous lines of s. The ramifications of this shift are highly complicated and very well laid out in this detailed New York Times account by James Glanz, Julie Creswell, Thomas Kaplan, and Zach Wichter, published only last month. But the crucial point is that the new positioning of the engines seems to have changed the handling characteristics of the airplane in a very, very precise way:.
Despite the unfortunate similarity of the term, an aerodynamic stall has nothing to do with stalls as people usually encounter them, with cars. An automotive stall involves something that stops the engine. An aerodynamic stall occurs when the nose of the plane is pointed too steeply up against the oncoming wind. The oncoming air no longer flows over the wing, as part of the process that provides lift and keeps the airplane up.
Instead to oversimplify , it starts beating against the bottom side of the wing, and in other ways stops keeping the plane aloft. When an aircraft stalls, it stops flying or gliding, and begins just falling, like a rock, out of the sky. For a crude parallel in automotive technology, you could think of an antilock-braking system in a car, which detects when a driver is mashing down too hard on the brakes, and intervenes to keep the car from going into a skid.
Or, in upcoming models of autonomous vehicles, consider a system that might prevent a car from drifting out of its lane, or across the center line into oncoming traffic, or entirely off the road.
With airplanes except fighter planes in combat, aerobatic pilots, the Blue Angels, etc. When something goes wrong, you usually have time to think for a minute, rather than instantly respond.
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