> I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.
Oh but now it's so unimaginably worse than that. Boeing lost the contract for commercial crew to SpaceX, who was indeed the lowest bidder. But Boeing has connections, and got Congress to make NASA also give them a contract. So they did. And Boeing's contract ended up being worth about 50% more than the contract SpaceX got. It was expected Boeing was going to be the first to start launching crewed missions by a fairly wide margin. SpaceX started in 2020. Boeing started, right now.
Oh and the build up to this finale is no less... odd. Boeing did their pad abort test - demonstrating the ability for their capsule to rocket off on its on, like it might do from a failing rocket. And that test failed with only 2 out of 3 of the parachutes opening. But insert 'Boeing influence' - NASA decided it was a clear success. And not just any success, but a success so clearly successful that they simply let Boeing completely skip the launch abort test (where you'd to the same escape test, but in flight) and moved right on to complete unmanned tests to the ISS.
So they launch their first mission to the ISS, and completely miss the station leaving the craft in a potentially catastrophic scenario, though it does eventually make its way back to Earth. So NASA just pats them on the back 'Happens to us all! Just give it another go!' So they do, and on this flight 1/6th of the thrusters on the approach module failed, but by some act of God (and backup thrusters), the craft somehow managed to mate with the ISS. So of course NASA said, "Brilliant! Success! Bring on the humans!"
And that's where we are right now. And that is the company behind the rocket that's under you right now.
Though, considering the culture of normalization of deviance that developed in NASA's human spaceflight division during the Shuttle's 30-year track record of near and not-so-near misses, it's hard to imagine why we should expect NASA to demand anything different. These two organizations were made for each other.
Despite headlines, air travel gets safer and safer every year. At least when measured by fatalities per departure. Boeing has had several high profile failures, but it's correlated with a huge increase in flights and a huge increase in expectations.
The problem is more that those failures were entirely preventable and caused by decisions that prioritised economic motives over security. And the manufacturer was squarely to blame, which is also not the case in most accidents.
Even when the industry overall is doing pretty well, we should still scrutinize every incident. There's no such thing as acceptable fatalities.
To be fair the airlines possibly share a slight proportion of the blame. They could have made sure that the pilots received proper training (or at least a fraction of it). There might be a reason why both incidents happened in third world countries...
Because Boeing deliberately withheld information about MCAS from the training. Especially because that would have led to breaking the shared type certificate. It could have happened in a western country just as well.
About the second incident it is a bit more debatable as some information was given after the first accident (though very sparse still) but for the first the pilots could not have been aware of the MCAS off-switch that would have solved all their problems.
In fact it was a bit nasty that Boeing even tried to play the "poor third-world airline" card for a while even though they knew exactly what had happened.
Don’t mistake the momentum of past success for current engineering and safety practices. If the MAX and 787 can get released with defects slipping out, there’s little certainty which other corners are being cut that can wipe out all progress of safety in the blink of an eye.
We all know air travel is safe. The concern is that the complacency involved with folks just parroting that argument is leading us to a world where that's no longer the case. Air travel isn't safe because of magic, it's safe because of decades of work, strong safety cultures, good regulations, etc. We're seeing Boeing had gutted it's safety culture, the FAA's made questionable safety decisions, overworked air traffic controllers leading to near misses, and so on. Despite the common refrain - the safety of air travel is a marvel of engineering, management, and regulation, not an innate law of the universe. If those pillars start cracking, we need to be clear eyed, take that extremely seriously, and fix it with high urgency
Yeah this morning I was thinking about what the astronauts must be thinking.
I would ride the Atlas/Centaur stack, it's been exceedingly reliable. Starliner itself? Not quite yet, given its checkered history.
Boeing brings up nothing but sadness in me these days. I really, really, really want that company to succeed and be awesome. Hopefully going forward Starliner will bring forward the excellence that has been Boeing in the past.
