Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald.
I guess I'm not saying it isn't worth reporting. Before the Boeing Narrative set in, these kinds of stories did get reported! But now they're tied into this long-running Boeing arc, and it's frustrating because there isn't enough in the story to know what's really going on.
Multiple whistleblowers have been raising concerns about Boeing safety and build quality issues for several years, so for you to say "so what, there have been issues on Boeing planes for several years" actually reinforces the "Boeing narrative". If there are multiple people on the inside raising alarm bells, there probably is some substance there. Finally the problems are getting big enough that they can't just be swept under the rug anymore.
I don't understand why people seem to be disregarding highly related facts and are ignoring the fundamental nature of how or why the facts are related. Correlation does not imply causation, but when the facts are of the same substance, additional concern is warranted.
It's hard to criticize a power structure your point of view depends on, so you get weird apologists for industry in general that pop up in conversations like these.
The funniest thing is that Boeing is barely industry, with all the two-way regulatory ties and of course the monopoly, it's like a nationalized company that just happens to be nominally owned by investors. The only ideology that Boeing makes look bad is the Soviet system! :-)
Yes, that's right. The free market has no horses in this race, it's a comparison of the relative corruption of different governments and societies. Our military-industrial complex, of which Boeing is an important member, is one of the most corrupt institutions in the world.
>The only ideology that Boeing makes look bad is the Soviet system!
Boeing is 100% a product of the American system. All the acquisitions, mergers, lobbying and loss of engineering culture in favor of short-term profit seeking that got it to where it is today happened under capitalism. Nothing resembling Boeing ever existed on the USSR, its airplane manufacturers worked very differently, with different incentives and under different constraints.
Seems sort of like the opposite—a lot of the regulation is done by people installed by lobbying, sort of like a privately owned and operated part of government.
Of course it's terrible for everyone but shareholders there isn't really any domestic competition.
It's great for the entrenched leadership, but bad for the shareholders who would benefit more from a variety of investment opportunities in a diversified and growing market. I don't think all of these problems are good for the airline industry.
The shareholders in a company have no reason to want the government to kill off the competition - they could just as easily invest in that competition. Shareholders care about the size of the whole market and corruption steals from them as much as it steals from anybody.
Worse, we’re only given a passenger’s recollection of what a pilot said. Which is of basically zero value.
I’m reminded of another thread on this site a few months back. One commenter talked about an incident where their flight circled in a holding pattern unable to land for whatever reason. The pilot got on the PA and informed the passengers that they might have to divert as they about 30 minutes of fuel. Around half an hour later, the plane made a desperate run for a nearby airport.
As the story was told, all the flight attendants were white as ghosts. The plane’s engines ran out of gas and shut off, but to the commenter’s existential relief they managed to just make it to the runway.
Of course this is ridiculous. The pilot’s announcement was either grossly misunderstood or very poorly chosen. The plane had plenty of fuel, they had thirty minutes before they would be forced to divert, not thirty minutes total. No cockpit crew with functioning self-preservation instincts would patiently circle around a pattern while their plane inevitably runs out of gas. The engines didn’t run out of fuel; they were brought to idle or low for the descent just like every other landing.
If the plane had truly run out of fuel, the cabin crew would have had the passengers brace for landing. There would have been emergency crews with flashing lights all along parallel taxiways. The plane would have come to a halt on the runway and been unable to taxi. An NTSB report would have been filed. The news would have reported on it.
People replied pointing all of this out, but to my (probably faulty, after all, I’m an eyewitness) recollection they remained steadfast in their telling of events.
And very timely, 737 Gear just published a video discussing Tucker Carlson’s retelling of an incident where his plane crashed[1]. By Tucker’s telling, there was an explosion and the wing broke off mid-flight. The plane crashed into the sand. In reality, the plane’s landing gear collapsed during landing. The plane rolled off the runway.
In short, a passenger’s recall of stressful events is generally worse than useless.
If you want to be a contrarian after a whistleblower is dead and 50 people were injured, maybe you should have some real data, stats or information instead of just saying "it happens all the time".
> Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald.
Exactly. But the takeaway here is that "notable" and "newsworthy" are slightly different ideas, and the latter is more subjective.
This is absolutely the effect of the "Boeing Narrative". If the media is faced with data like this[2] in the face of a frame that says "Aviation is extremely safe and getting safer every year", they'll likely skip over the outliers. If they need to sell articles into a market that knows "Boeing Planes are Unsafe", they're going to have a much harder time with that notability analysis.
And that's 100% on Boeing, not the media. At the end of the day if your business depends on people believing your products are good products[1], cutting corners on the reality undergirding that perception is a disaster. Boeing had almost a full century of goodwill they've now flushed.
[1] Which is true for almost every business where the consumer sees the competition. Maybe not if you manufacture gaskets or capacitors, but airplanes and laptops for sure.
[2] Editted to add: it also hands out an easy scapegoat. We really don't know if there was an instrument failure here or if it was pilot culpability. We just know what the pilot said. And we have to recognize that the pilot might have lied knowing that Boeing made an easier target.
Do you know that or do you just feel it? If you know it, how do you know? Is that knowledge reflected in the reporting?
If you camped avherald watching for incidents, and you had an inciting incident like the door plug (indisputably a major story!) to start from, could you create the same narrative for Bombardier? I think you could.
Does it matter? At this stage it's just ridiculous that there's no more uproar towards Boeing or even direct intervention into it. Maybe because it's one of the 2 disfuntional members of the duopoly at the foundation of global air transit with massive geopolitical consequences if major changes are suggested.
Definitely both. You never really want to stop understanding, but understanding in public interest cases serves to inform advocacy, and any story can cross the evidence threshold where advocacy becomes the primary concern. I think we're there with Boeing.
Does it sell more ads? Does it get more eyeballs? Do people click on the story? Does the writer get promoted? A bonus? Is this a conspiracy against Boeing? Is the owner of the newspaper short Boeing and long Airbus? (those last four questions are /s the first two maybe less so.)
I used to laugh at those pushing "mainstream media" wild stories (e.g. from a certain portion of Americans) but Journalism isn't what it used to be, and maybe it was never what it used to be.
I do think that focus on Boeing is somewhat warranted but it's a good question how do we get a real unbiased picture. Especially given that accidents are a low probability event and it's hard to determine what happens by chance, within reason, or is really reflecting something concerning that has to be addressed and how it should be addressed. Your average Journalist is lacking the training and tools to think about these things and they wouldn't even know who is the right expert and what is the right data to look at.
Whether time proves that out - and whether 'more than a narrative' (meaning..safety culture) is actually related to this incident matter and are independent of it emerging as a narrative.
A very similar thing happened post Air France 447's crash into the Atlantic ocean. The reporting on it began to include any incident involving any airbus plane for quite a while until it was determined the crew was primarily at fault. There was a narrative building simply because of our tendency in media to have extreme recency bias.
Airbus has had any number of incidents (here's one: https://safetyfirst.airbus.com/landing-with-nosewheels-at-90... ) - and for awhile their approach to autopilots was widely argued back and forth (Airbus wouldn't let you put the plane outside of the envelope, basically), and there's some disagreement on how competing sticks should be handled.
Right…there are always going to be concerns, no manufacturer is perfect…some are bad, some good, soon change with time, some don’t.
What the conversation was pointing out that coverage of such issues tends to shift with the closeness in time to something really bad. If your one of your planes crashes, anytime your planes has an issue for a whole the coverage is going to be amplified. The manufacturer is irrelevant…it’s the nature of media coverage and human biases
Not a control issue but there was a Hawaiian flight that had 36 injuries from turbulence. Edit to add: it would be unsurprising if turbulence was the cause here and the passenger quoted had their facts wrong.
An airplane doesn't suddenly drop out of the sky because its controls stops responding. So I agree that on the face of it it's either turbulence or some sort of aggressive manoeuvre, either initiated by the pilots accidentally or somehow initiated by the airplanes control systems, not simply "stopped responding to controls".
“Flight control issues” is a passenger’s retelling of what they remember a pilot saying.
I have heard a lot of passengers recount events from incident flights. I have seen vanishingly few where there was much overlap between what actually happened and what they believe happened.
Especially given that the Bayesian numbers are that most incidents (especially long haul) will happen on Boeing frames purely because Boeing is everywhere.
Perfectly good diesel engines and the carbon dioxide they saved with these cars. Madness, pure madness. Should have just ignored the scandal to protect the local car industry..
It feels irresponsible to me to report some random thing a layperson passenger said without verifying the information.
The passenger could have misheard or be lying. Even if the pilot did say that, he may have just said that to save face, when it was pilot error all along. Hopefully the FDR data will be made public.
