Easy solution here is for every traveler to refuse to buy seats on a Boeing plane. If we honestly believe the company was at fault and has been negligent in their safety protocols, it seems like an easy answer to just not support their business.
In summary, this isn’t something we can really seriously attempt. Btw i say this as someone very disappointed in Boeing, not as a defender of their bad decisions.
I guess while the government is at it, they could mandate that Boeing refund all their money for those planes, which might save the airlines from bankruptcy, at the cost of Boeing itself going out of business, which thanks to being too big to fail (Nobody seriously would want Airbus to have a global monopoly on planes) would end up best-case as a GM situation where the government takes over ownership for a while.
Still, for the next couple decades, air travel would just be much more expensive due to scarcity of available seats on most routes.
There are basically zero good outcomes possible here, not with your plan, nor any other, to be honest.
It's almost like we shouldn't have allowed things to get to the point where the world's passenger jet liners are only built by two companies. The M-D merger never should have been allowed.
Boeing is a massive corporation with both public and private contracts, employing a huge number of almost entirely well meaning employees. The government has allowed too many carve outs and exceptions as the company grew and now have no choice but to stay mostly quiet while the cracks in the company leadership and potentially culture put not only passengers and the airline industry at risk, but the very military we may need to be at full fighting force if Russia, China, Iran and co, etc decide to escalate.
Why should we assume that air travel can't be meaningfully reduced and that passengers can't possibly decide to drive or stay closer to home?
Consumers wouldn't be asking airlines to replace planes, they would simply be saying they're unwilling to fly on the planes airlines are offering.
Consumers don't have a concept of "too big to fail" - that's a government concern. We individually decide what we want to spend our money on, its as simple as that. If people were actually concerned with Boeing they'd stop flying on Boeing planes.
> If people were actually concerned
Yeah, and tbh I think (and am glad) we aren't at that level of concern, yet. I really hope we don't get there. I can think of several ways we could get there, though. I really frigging hope that a lot of reinspections and triple-quadruple-checking of things avoids any further disasters that cost lives.
You are saying this as if it was a bad thing.
If it is safe enough to travel, we can all stop talking about Boeing and the news can let the story die.
Most travellers don’t care about this. (I’m a frequent traveller and have aerospace engineering and pilot training. I barely care about it from the perspective of a flier.)
The leverage is with the regulators and airlines. Calling your elected is orders of magnitudes more meaningful than complaining to the gate agent or silently re-booking. (And from what I’ve heard, barely anyone is calling.)
Elected officials will do almost nothing here. Any government led solution will take years and be heavily managed to ensure the stability of the airline industry, meaning the government will do very little as any meaningful change will cause economic and political damage.
Zero marginal effect.
> Elected officials will do almost nothing here
When did you last speak to your elected?
I had senior staffers from a few Senators in my house the other week. This came up. The number of calls logged on the issue was minimal. If there had been interest, something—like expanded NTSB powers—would have gone into the funding bill. That didn’t happen because it’s clear voting Americans want cheap flights, not a fight with Boeing.
If someone can’t bother to call, they won’ canvas or back a primary challenger. (They may not even vote.) That makes them safe to ignore. If someone is persistent, or more meaningfully, able to organise, that gets attention.
This is a worn drum for me because I regularly see bursts of brilliance on HN epitaphed with a political nihilism that guarantees its ignorance.
I'm not sure how customers deciding to stay home rather than fly on a Boeing plane would have zero marginal effect. That would leave something like half of the current flights empty.
> That didn’t happen because it’s clear voting Americans want cheap flights, not a fight with Boeing.
I agree with you here completely. My point is that there is an easy solution, if anyone actually cares. We get these news cycles of topics that people seem to get wound up about in the moment when they actually don't care at all.
Where we disagree here is that elected officials couldn't fix this if they wanted to. At best they could ground all Max's for a period of time, but that won't fix the company. The government can't afford to lose Boeing, even for a period of a few years while the company gets it's shit together. Boeing has too much of an impact on both the airline industry and the military for the government to have any real room to deal with the problem.
The people who would do that are small in number and not frequent fliers. They would be summarily replaced by others on the margin due to price alone.
> government can't afford to lose Boeing
We couldn’t afford to lose the auto manufacturers. Didn’t stop us from forcing them into bankruptcy, wiping their shareholders in the process.
When necessary, the U.S. government is incredibly powerful. It’s simply ordinarily restrained in its exercise. The problem is people don’t care about this issue, so an elected prioritising it over what voters do mobilise around is wasting political capital.