The part I found cringeworthy was
The Max’s creation took place in suburban Seattle among engineers and pilots of unquestionable if bland integrity, including supervising officials from the Federal Aviation Administration. Although Boeing’s designers were aware of timetables and competitive pressures, the mistakes they made were honest ones, or stupid ones, or maybe careless ones, but not a result of an intentional sacrifice of safety for gain.
… while the Lion Air ground and flight crews are portrayed as sleazy incompetents through the whole article.
It is a long article – took me an hour to read it – and one needs to read it whole to get a view of it.
It is critical of Boeing in various places.
The portrayal of incompetent pilots is unfortunately probably accurate. Speak to any FTO owner and he will tell you stories e.g. them scribbling the whole QB on the back of the airway chart used in the exam 
Dodgy maintenance, likewise. According to the article, the airlines have been banned from flying into Europe or the US (not that they do those routes anyway) but a 4BN USD order from Boeing is still 4BN USD…
Peter wrote:
It is a long article – took me an hour to read it – and one needs to read it whole to get a view of it.It is critical of Boeing in various places.
I’ve also spent the time to read the whole article. It is critical of Boeing all right, but in a very cautious way. As denopa quoted, it was said to be an “honest mistake” or “stupid” or “carless” but not “sacrificing safety for gain”. I would say that if you use a single AoA vane to control part of the flight control system when there is always two vanes available you are deliberately compromising safety. Not to mention hiding the existence of MCAS from pilots. Letting MCAS retrim repeatedly can perhaps be regarded as a “stupid” mistake.
The portrayal of incompetent pilots is unfortunately probably accurate.
No doubt. But we’ve seen some examples of that in Western airlines as well.
I have seen more examples of incompetent journalists. Just saying
Honestly the whole 737 MAX seems unfit for purpose: they are trying to turn an aircraft with parts that date back to the 707 (e.g fuselage section) which was designed for long skinny engines into what the Boeing 757 was out of commercial expediency. The whole plane seems like a bodge. Take a look at the monkey motion involved in the landing gear of the biggest 737 MAX so the tail doesn’t strike the ground on takeoff, but still allowing the landing gear to fit in that 1950s fuselage in landing gear wells designed for a plane originally designed for skinny JT8D engines. Many pilots report the biggest MAX has very poor braking performance – it just doesn’t have enough wheels for the size and weight of the plane. It’s a bodge and Boeing know it. It seems absurd that the type rating for a 737-200 is common with a 737-MAX.
On the other hand, Lion Air on average crash a plane once a year. It’s a very unsafe airline. Even with a classic 737 or an A320, they would have probably still crashed one that year. You can’t blame it on the pilots either, the faults are absolutely systemic right from the regulator and on up.
Ethiopian Airlines had 4 fatal events in seventy years of operations (yes 70), including two hijacks and 737Max, most would call that a very good safety record that definitely need “competent pilot and healthy corporate culture”
LeSving wrote:
I have seen more examples of incompetent journalists. Just saying
Oh yes.
Ethiopian Airlines had 4 fatal events in seventy years of operations
I find that astonishing. Just about everybody has crashed more than 4 planes in 70 years… African airlines tend to run at an order of magnitude above that. Well, there is Quantas but they avoided an official hull loss by a very expensive rebuild.
Honestly the whole 737 MAX seems unfit for purpose
Yeah, but how many have been crashed by “western” airlines? Close to zero in recent decades. It works just fine.
An Airbus pilot told me the other day that Airbus did a similar cockup. The difference was they documented it and the way to get out of it is by switching to direct law
The way the flight recorders were processed (according to the article) smells quite badly. One would assume they used the BEA to read them because the French (BEA = French Govt = Airbus) would normally hate the Americans (NTSB = US Govt = Boeing) so the result might be more “favourable”
Peter wrote:
Yeah, but how many have been crashed by “western” airlines? Close to zero in recent decades.
The MAX has only been in service since 22nd May 2017 (until March 2019)! There’s nothing wrong with the classic B737. It’s the MAX that has been pulled and stretched so far beyond what the original 737 designers envisaged back in the 1960s to the point that it’s now just an ersatz 757.
Peter wrote:
Yeah, but how many have been crashed by “western” airlines? Close to zero in recent decades. It works just fine.
Don’t confuse the MAX with other variants
