The evidence was irrefutable. Every credible intelligence agency agreed. Only idiots didn’t understand. Statesmen from both sides of the aisle and the enlightened countries of the world all saw the imminent threat.
Billions of dollars were spent. Lives were lost. Blood was shed. The problem was removed.
And yet the smoking gun was never found. Dead bodies were found, but those were created by the mayhem of hasty acts of fear and cowardice, not of solemn necessity. Not of rational deliberation. In the end, a larger problem emerged. More lives were lost than from the original problem itself.
I’m talking about the worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX, of course.
For every action, there is not an equal and opposite reaction. When decisions are made in fear and groupthink prevails, more lives end up being lost.
We have witnessed two tragedies involving the same aircraft under similar circumstances. Thus, the circumstantial evidence is strong that there is a link between the two incidents…and that link is the Boeing 737 MAX 8. But what do we really know?
It does seem like there is a design flaw in this aircraft. Boeing in a sense confirmed that directly. But it also true that after the Lion Air accident, pilots were specially trained in how to deal with sensor misreads. Was the Ethiopian Airlines pilot truly well-trained for the uniqueness of the MAX 8? We are not talking about a flying Pinto. Why does the American Airlines’ pilot union “remain confident in the Boeing 737 MAX and in our members’ ability to safely fly it”? Just like the pilots union at Southwest. And United. I strongly doubt it is because Boeing bought them off. Rather, it is because every pilot is carefully trained in how to handle a well-known issue on this aircraft type.
When we wage total war instead of precision attacks, more lives are often sacrificed. Chew on this, for a moment. If you’re an American, you have a 1 in 114 chance of dying in a car crash. If you fly, your chance of dying is 1 in 9,821. And that stat includes “risker” private aircraft. Airline accidents per one million miles flown occur at a rate of 0.0035. Put another way, even the crash of two aircraft is but a statistical blip compared to the higher likelihood of death through most alternate forms of transportation.
A Sad Anecdote
I had a client write to me last night stating:
You have me booked on one of those United Boeing 737 MAX from Houston to Ft. Lauderdale tomorrow. You either get me off that [expletive deleted] airplane or I’m driving. Help!
Little does she understand that if she drives, she is 86 times more likely to die. And maybe that is what regulators forgot as well. If all those 737 MAX groundings lead to people taking to the roads instead, the results will be more death, not less. Oh, those deaths will be spaced out so as not to draw much attention, but they add up…to the tune of 5,419,000 crashes, 2,239,000 injuries, and 32,999 deaths each and every year in the good ol’ USA.
Not to sound crass, but I’d rather take my family on a 737 MAX 8 any day of the week…
CONCLUSION
A well-meaning Iraq War supporter once offered a solution to win the war: “We should just nuke them all.” Yes, indeed…that would have won the war. And it would have hurt the very people the war aimed to help…or at least gave lip service to.
We could certainly ground all commercial aircraft…and all cars while we are at. That would keep us all safe. It would also ground commerce to a halt and hurt far more than it would help. Every life is precious, but we must think beyond the shallow confines of an enthralling incident and understand the ramifications of our actions.
I don’t subscribe to most conspiracy theories, but the flying public is nothing but a pawn in this game of global chess. Boeing should be held accountable for any design flaw. But the answer is not to ground aircraft out of an abundance of caution. Making moves cloaked in ignorance out of nothing but fear has a proven track record…and it is not pretty. Let’s all take a deep breath and learn from our past mistakes. Let’s not succumb to fear and hysteria.
#MissionAccomplished
to prove your point to your client, it may be a good blog article if you take yourself and your entire family on a Boeing 737-8 MAX flight this week and write about it.
+1
Your command of statistics, and how they apply to the real world, is not great. Yes, it’s far safer to fly than to drive but using that statistic to justify flying a plane which is relatively unsafe is egregious.
And your analogy of the Iraq war is absurd. The losses to society when it goes to war are absolutely enormous, both human and financial. The losses in temporarily grounding a plane are tiny. And that’s especially so when there are so few of them actually flying. Certainly it’s a financial hit to airlines, but they can probably get that back from Boeing, and it’s a financial hit to Boeing (perhaps deserved) but it’s merely an inconvenience for the traveling public.
The odds of being on a 737 MAX which crashes are absolutely tiny, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be grounded until at least the black box can be analysed to see if one of the causes of the crash lies in the same area as the suspect systems on the plane. If the two crashes are entirely unrelated, the ban can be lifted: if not, then even the government controlled FAA will have to impose a ban, and will have to admit it should have done so in the first place.
+1000
Also really enjoyed this straw man:
“We could certainly ground all commercial aircraft…and all cars while we are at. ”
Yes…because that is exactly what people are talking about doing.
So ,by your reckoning , the US=Canadian position is the ration, logical one and the rest of the world is engaging in knee-jerk “moves cloaked in ignorance out of nothing but fear”. I think not.
Boeing designed a plane with a greater potential for stall in some takeoff situations than the preceding model. Why? To accommodate larger engines, for greater fuel efficiency and to permit airlines to cram more people aboard. IE, for profit.
To compensate for these design flaws they added anti-stall software but failed to adequate inform, let alone train, customers. “Criminally inadequate” was how one pilot described the manual in response to the Boeing suggestion that everything had been covered.
Given the choice between abundance of caution and “let’s wait and see what unfolds”, I choose the former. And I choose Airbus.
Canada just grounded all 737-max and blocked the country’s airspace for the aircraft this morning.
Matthew,
I find your commentary, analyses, etc. generally well thought-out and insightful. Indeed, this is why I am a daily reader to the blog. On this particular post, I would posit that this is actually a false equivalency. The decision to invade a country and wage literal war, which is inherently a destructive act that everyone agrees will result in lives lost, is rather different than regulatory agencies taking a pause in the flying of a plane. Do you see how a temporary grounding is, in fact, the abundantly cautious thing to do? Yes, I understand driving is more risky than flying, but most of the flying public will not drive instead of fly on a Max-8.
Your own statistics cite how very rare air crashes are. Thus, it is statistically very very strange that a new plane would have two loss of aircraft incidents within months of each other. They may not be linked at all to the same failure mode, but again, aviation is inherently risk-averse with large conservatism in design and factors of safety. While I believe the Max-8 is probably perfectly safe, this abundance of caution is EXACTLY why crashes are so very rare. It is BECAUSE regulatory agencies always always always err on the side of airline safety.
From the perspective of a regulatory body ALWAYS erring on safety for air travel, and the statistical oddity that is two Max-8s crashing with all lives lost in the span of 5 months, I think it’s perfectly logical that there are groundings. Is it an overreaction? Perhaps. But in my opinion, I find it insulting that you liken decisions of safety and caution with decisions of war and body counts. Just my opinion.
^^^ THIS. Well said.
What Boeing has done is take a 40+ years old body and hang some overweight engines to it. They then realized the bloody thing was far from stable so re-programmed the software to compensate for the instability.
To make matters worse, they kind of ‘self-tested and self-certified’ as for some mysterious reason FAA allowed Boeing to test their own construct.
To me this is the summit of corporate and regulatory corruption and I don’t get how you guys in the US allow FAA and Boeing to get away with this.
Saddam Hussein had no real WMD’s but those 737’s on steroids come quite close to being real WMD’s.
Matthew, you make a solid and logical argument.
I think we will look back and see you were right. Time will tell.
As a fellow UCLA alum (I took the SATs on my own, had absolutely no sports extracurriculars, and still got in, go figure) I disagree with your statistical justification.
You claim air travel carries an 1-in-9,281 chance of death versus a 1-in-114 chance for automobile travel, therefore essentially you argue that everyone should fly as much as possible in order to stay alive and the fact that the same plane was involved in consecutive incidents amounts only to a statistical blip.
Well, the chance of death from shark attack is 1-in-264,000,000. However if a given beach had two deadly shark attacks within a short period of time your kind of logic dictates that the beach should stay open because after all it was just a statistical blip.
Obviously most municipalities would choose to temporarily close the beach until it was deemed that the offending shark(s) were no longer in the area. At the very least they would post signs advising people not to swim in the waters. No one is advocating shutting down all beaches everywhere.
This is all the public demands/deserves. Temporarily shut down the potentially flawed plane (737-Max8) that represents just a tiny fraction of the global fleet until it was deemed safe.
PS. The inconvenience to the public would be minuscule compared to the turmoil and suffering turning an entire country of 37,000,000 people into a war zone for decades has done.
Pretend a new car was introduced with steer-by-wire technology and there were only 400 of them on the road. Now, pretend that 2 of those cars suffered steering failure leading to death and evidence pointed to a software issue which was introduced to compensate for handling deficiencies. I can easily imagine an immediate recall and an advisory from the NHTSA to not drive that car.
Southwest alone has flown more than 41,000 flights on the 737 MAX without issue. Next?
Matthew, thank you for this post. I cannot believe all the fear mongering.
Did you end up changing the client’s flight?
Personally, I would not want to fly on a 737 Max for the time being. Yet, the fact that Southwest and AA pilots have continued to fly tells us a lot. If they really thought there was a danger, they would refuse. And they have strong union protections so they are not in danger of being punished for refusing.
I did.
There may be nothing wrong with the plane, just that pilots don’t know how to fly it. But it still needs to be grounded till the pilots learn how to fly it.
Also don’t be like trump. We have no respect for that dymbfck and his stupid, uneducated supporters. He thinks he knows everything. Most educated people have humility because they know how little they know. Most uneducated stupid fcks like trump and his supporters have no humility.
Leave the statistics and probability theory to the experts.
This is wrong
” If you fly, your chance of dying is 1 in 9,821. And that stat includes “risker” private aircraft.”
You will need to talk an expert why.
You’re free to explain. I was pulling stats from the linked article. I certainly understand that the figure could be broken down further by aircraft type. Like the 737 MAX, which has had 100K+ flights and two incidents.
If you know you are flying on a riskier plane you can’t use the stats for the general aviation.
The problem with the article is that they use distance as the metric and do not consider time spent while driving (or riding) vs flying. If you consider the total amount of time flying for everyone vs the total amount of time driving/riding the result is not the same.
Stats are also incredibly misleading. I can just as easily point out that there are about 400 of this type of plane in service and there have been about 350 deaths on this type of plane which correlates to just under 1 death per plane. See what I mean?
Actual numbers can be twisted in many ways. But will anyone dispute flying the 737 MAX 8 is less safe than driving to the airport?
Well, yeah. 2 out of about 400 planes have crashed leading to the death of about 350 people. I’ve driven (or ridden) to the airport many more times than that in many different vehicles and I’m still alive.
As you say, “Stats are also incredibly misleading”
Its all about trust and perception. Corporate America has the regulators in their pockets across numerous industries (and this has got worse in current administration).
People have seen time and time again where big companies screw up, but the govt have their backs and the little people suffer. This is all exacerbated by fake news / social media trends, so there is now a total absence of trust among the general public.
It has also spread to other countries. Many countries that probably had an unconscious bias to trust and follow US guidance no longer think this way. The past two years have made them think a lot deeper about their relationship to the US, and whether or not they need to set their own path.
Comparing Boeing, Trump, and the FAA to those opposed to the Iraq War is truly entering bizarro world where everything is opposite.
What strikes me in this situation is that comparing to the 787. The FAA did force a grounding when the batteries were catching on fire, though no loss of life had occurred. And the 787 fleets with Trent 1000 engines are being grounded due to cracked blades and again no loss of life. So, why wouldn’t they ground the 737Max in this situation.
For context – I spent 10 years in the aerospace industry having worked on a major component of the Trent 1000 engine and most of the time in spacecraft having found a manufacturing flaw and stopping an AF launch with 10 hours to go (we did clear it for launch).
But that is exactly the point – why does everyone assume the FAA is in Boeing’s pocket when they have shown multiple times before that they are willing to err on the side of caution and ground an aircraft type for problems that have not even produced fatal crashes?
The very fact that they are so adamantly unwilling to ground the 737-Max suggests to me that they really don’t feel there is a reason to believe the flaw is in the aircraft.
I’m not taking a strong side on whether the FAA is in Boeing’s pocket, but you absolutely cannot pretend as though an agency stays the same between two presidential administrations. They answer to the president and the people running the agency are picked by the president. Obama-era FAA Trump-era FAA. Trump is an open hater of regulation, it’s not at all a reach to assume that the people he installs are also thinking in the same ways.
Let’s keep the conversation in the limits of lounges, seats, or why my nuts are not warm and the amenity kit doesn’t have a La Prairie antiwwrinkle cream.
Otherwise I can just turn on the tv and watch the kardashian giving us their deep philosophical thoughts about the state of the world.
We’ll soon return to regularly scheduled programming, but this is too interesting a topic to pass up.
Matthew, your article is spot on. As soon as Facebook starts working again, I’ll be sharing it to a big aviation group I’m in on there where people are losing their minds.
I flew a 7M8 from LHR-YHZ on the day of the crash, and it was one of the best flights I’ve taken in recent history. I felt far more scared by the shuttle I took to my hotel afterwards. This sensationalism has got to stop.
Too much of the same behavior before the crashes + multiple complains about unexpected nose-down on autopilot from US pilots to be a coincidence. Canada just grounded all 737-max. Looks like US isn’t doing so to protect its crown-jewel airspace manufacturer. In case of Boeing it’s profit vs safety looks like.
Well, this hastily written post did not age well. Although the analogy was weak to begin with, if anything, the quick jump to conclusions makes you sound more like the Bush administration and the people who supported the war on faulty information.
Mission accomplished?
It wasn’t hastily written and I stand by my assertion. I was not the one calling for jumping to conclusions.
Rubbing salt to the wound.
Faa and potus finally follows trends. However, the fact remains that PRC is the first who put safety of its people or notice the potential danger of an american made plane.
Maybe the day will come when chinese tech are much better and reliable than us tech.
Your “fact” is but a conjecture, but your last points may well come. Huawei certainly makes nice phones.