Today Boeing’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg released a statement, “We remain confident in the fundamental safety of the 737 Max”.
There we go, their “fundamental safety” remains impeccable. This “fundamental safety” is of course not to be confused with “apparent safety”. “Fundamental safety” is also the superior form of safety because it does not depend on a myriad of confusing stuffs such as facts on the ground. I realised this could be a bad pun because some of the planes crashed and the rest were grounded.
I have to say I am impressed with the linguistic. I guess this is why I am writing a blog instead of writing press releases for some mega corporation.
I will ignore the fact that the critical angle of attack sensors seems to fail more often than they like. I will also ignore the fact that they tried to save R&D cost by slapping a bigger and heavier engine onto an existing older design to compete with newer and more fuel efficient Airbus models, resulting in a poorer flight characteristic. I will also ignore that they conveniently failed to mention this to their customers.
Even to my untrained eyes, it appears that one of their core problems is that they have crappy programmers, which do not seem to fully grasp the concept of redundancy.
They have multiple angle of attack sensors on the plane, but some geniuses (I am sure there are more than one) decided that in the event of one of them gives erroneous reading, let’s just dive the plane solely based on that one bad reading and ignore all the other good sensors.
I’ll admit that I am not in the aircraft industry, but redundancy is a core principle of safety, regardless of which field you are in. Apparently this form of safety is not part of “fundamental safety”, or perhaps it is a premium add-on that those third world airlines can’t afford.
So apparently in the development stage everyone missed this flaw in their programming.
And apparently in the evaluation stage everyone also missed this flaw in their simulation.
Whoever wrote the takeoff checklist also missed including procedures that takes into account of this type of scenario.
Now they claimed to fix all their problems, despite there were none to begin with. There were none with the first crash, and they let it happen for a second time because there was absolutely nothing wrong with it the first time. But despite all your unreasonable demands they modified a perfectly functioning software anyway because your safety is so very important.
Of course, the changes were fully tested too, like the the first one.
Makes you wonder what else did everyone there missed?