Lion Air Flight 610 Crashed Into The Java Sea Shortly After Departing Jakarta
On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea shortly after departing Jakarta, killing all 189 passengers and crew aboard. In short order, questions emerged about the safety record of the Indonesian budget airline and the qualifications of its pilots. Few blamed the airplane itself, a hot-off-the-presses Boeing 737 Max jet.
After all, it was a Boeing, and the manufacturer’s reputation for quality was second to none. Boeing had been synonymous with safety for decades, since its 707 had taken off from Idlewild (now JFK Airport) and ushered in the Jet Age. “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going!” was a slogan for a reason; pilots and passengers alike felt the company had earned their trust and would continue to. But then, five months later, in Ethiopia, another 737 Max fell out of the sky.
“Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” (now streaming on Netflix) investigates both crashes and their aftermath while exposing the culture of concealment at Boeing that made them inevitable. As directed by Rory Kennedy and written by her “Last Days in Vietnam” collaborators Mark Bailey and Keven McAlester, the film is rigorously reported and short on melodramatic flourish, instead presenting the facts with a cold, furious clarity that better suits its subject.
A damning account of the tragedies caused by the manufacturer’s malfeasance and greed, “Downfall” goes deeper to contextualize Boeing’s culpability within larger trends of American corporate governance, succinctly laying out how the lure of Wall Street led what was once an almighty symbol of American aviation to self-sabotage.
We now know that both 737 crashes were caused by the flawed design of an anti-stall system known as MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), which misfired after receiving data from a faulty sensor, forcing the plane’s nose down repeatedly even as pilots fought desperately to bring it back up. Their efforts were doomed to fail. Boeing had placed pilots in the impossible position of having 10 seconds to override a system they hadn’t known existed and weren’t told was aboard, let alone taught to operate.
MCAS wasn’t mentioned in the plane’s pilot or flight deck manuals. Boeing had even pushed back on those who’d requested flight simulator training before flying the new jet, conspiring to mislead the Federal Aviation Administration about the system’s significance and get their best-selling jet cleared for takeoff. Investigators eventually uncovered message exchanges between Boeing employees in which they insulted regulators and discussed playing “Jedi mind tricks” on them. It’s all abhorrent, blood-boiling stuff—and all motivated, of course, by a desire to drive up Boeing’s stock price.
“Downfall” posits that a shareholder-first mentality crept into Boeing at the close of the century, after its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in 1997. That merger brought the latter company’s cutthroat managers into conflict with the former’s safety-conscious engineers, who’d founded Boeing to design the world’s best airplanes. They took pride in this work and feared it would suffer as executives focused less on manufacturing and more on financial engineering. Their fears were well-founded, but heavy-handed corporate tactics by company leadership gradually robbed the engineers of their voice at the company. All the while, executives doubled down on cost-cutting measures and courted stock market investors, sacrificing safety in the name of profit.
That approach continued after those tactics led to a tragedy, as Boeing sought to evade accountability while doing less than it could have to stop the next one. The company’s chilling apathy is framed as a matter of fact by the filmmakers, who know how to build a convincing case without losing their cool, but this is one element of “Downfall” that drives home how diseased Boeing has become.
https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/the-cursed-is-a-horror-film-set-in-the-18th-century/19012
Comments
Post a Comment