Comment Yay! Lets blame the pilots .... (Score 5, Interesting) 78
"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash.
The point is not so much that the second crash was avoidable, the real point is that the first crash was entirely avoidable. If Boeing had connected two AoA sensors to the MCAS system so it could figure out when one of the AoA sensors broke down and issue a warning or react in some other way (Airbus uses triple redundancy) those pilots wouldn't have had to master yet another 'simple remedy' for something that greedy and incompetent executives at Boeing screwed up. On top of that the AoA Disagree message was 'unintentionally disabled' and the AoA DISAGREE display on the pilots displays that the (defective) MCAS software relied on was a 'paid optional extra' which quite a lot of airlines did not pick up on because including one was considered a no brainer. They can blame the pilots as much as they want. After all, the pilots are not here to defend themselves so they are easy targets and I suppose blaming them is good business strategy, but in the end it was still Boeing management that made the conscious choice have the MCAS built with a single point of failure by an inexperienced contractor purely out of geed. In an industry where redundancy in everything is a basic requirement, quality is king and you stand and fall with your safety reputation, all of Boeings fuckups in this sorry story are basically unforgivable.