The recent Ethiopian Airlines crash killed 157 people. Five months earlier, 189 died when a Lion Air (Indonesia) plane took a nosedive.
When the Lion Air flight was crashing, the pilots were frantically looking through the manual trying to figure out what to do. Not clear yet whether the Ethiopian Airlines pilots were doing the same.
But if airline manuals are anything like software manuals used to be, then frantically searching for a fix when in dire peril is unlikely to yield much of anything, other than continuing to be in dire peril. Until you’re no longer in dire peril.
The commonality between the Lion and Ethiopian crashes is that both involved a Boeing 737 Max plane.
It is not yet known what caused the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 and Lion Air Flight 610 five months earlier, both after erratic takeoffs. But investigators are looking at whether a new software system added to avoid stalls in Boeing’s 737 Max series may have been partly to blame. (Source: NY Times)
It turns out that Boeing had some safety features that might have helped pilots cope with the stalling problems. Unfortunately, they were optional. Unfortunately-squared, neither Lion nor Ethiopian opted to purchase these upgrades.
Oh.
Some blame, of course, goes to the airlines for not springing for these safety features. Not the items to cheap out on. Not a surprise, I guess, from Lion Air. They’re a budget airline and they cheap out on everything. But Ethiopian Airlines is the largest (and by some measures the best) carrier in Africa. What were they doing cheaping out on safety?
But Boeing, Boeing, Boeing. Why would you leave safety to chance? Seems really foolish, given that nothing’s going to hurt an airlines brand, reputation, stock price and finances than the appearance (not to mention the reality) of being hinky about safety.
Play around with charging airlines purchasing your planes for niceties. That would be things like more comfortable headrests, better fabric on the seats, device-charging stations, toilets that smell better.
After all, no one wants to leave any money on the table. If an airline is willing to pay a bit more for a heating system that does a better job than blowing pure hot or pure cold on passengers, or seats that recline without crushing the laptop of the person in the seat behind, then aircraft manufacturers should have at it.
Why should Boeing be any less of a nickel-and-dimer than the airlines themselves which, these days, squeeze every possible bit of extra revenue out of passengers. (It’s just a matter of time before the folks in steerage start getting charged for that miniscule bag of pretzels and gulp of soda. And would anyone be surprised by toilets that require swiping your credit card?)
Since the crashes, nothing good has happened to Boeing.
Airlines have grounded the 737 Max’s in their fleets. The first order cancellation for the Max’s just happened. Boeing’s stock price has plummeted. The FBI has gotten involved in an investigation to determine whether there was anything going untoward with the certification process for these planes. One can imagine that there’s litigation on the horizon. Maybe even a few Boeing heads will roll.
So, in return for the small-change revenue they clawed out of the airlines willing to pay for the extra safety features, Boeing lost big time.
Making some safety features optional add-ons probably seemed like a good idea when the product manager came up with it. Not so much any longer.
Safety features should be built-in features, not nice-to-have add-ons. Too bad Boeing had to learn this the hard way. Even worse, too bad the 189 Lion Air dead, and the 157 lost on Ethiopian Airlines, didn’t get to learn the lesson at all.
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