That article was excellent. It lays bare the problem that the media has played in fanning the flames of public hysteria about the 737 Max 8.
Our airlines are safer flying than they have ever been in the history of commercial aviation. America in particular sees heavy flight volume because of the geographic expanse of this continent and the population totaling over 350 million. There is also the lack of any adequate rail or canal system, or even interstate buses for alternative modes.
The reason why air travel is currently so safe is the work, year after year, crash after crash, analysis after analysis by the FAA, aircraft manufacturers, and untold hours of design and safety engineers.
The grounding of entire fleets has been done previously at the conclusion of a specific defect identified and implicated in a systemic failure. Things like stress and metal fatigue caused planes to break up mid-air. The fleet was grounded once the cause was understood. A cargo door design was correctly identified as the cause of a fatal in-flight blow-out and decompression. The fleet was grounded to correct the cargo door latching systems.
What one of the pilots writing in to The Atlantic wisely noted, is that now we have a kangaroo court of public opinion, fanned by all the sincere, pained-expression news anchors, who have decided that cherry-picking factoids pre-supposed to be the definitive critical evidence, is the only way to understand two crashes. And that is a very relevant point: this is a data set of TWO points, not a trend, not a data set of the many 737 Max 8 flights that have occurred.
Although the pilots have no love for Boeing's failure to adequately train all certified pilots (via the airlines) down to the weakest pilot in the system, the same pilots are well aware of the rigorous analysis that leads to assignment of cause and the grounding of a fleet.
What has just happened with the 737 Max 8 is the equal of a kid announcing he will hold his breath until you do things his way. It's foolish. It's illogical. It's theatrical. And it's going to end in embarrassment.
The article ended with the rebuke of the news media for creating the situation. No, they didn't crash any planes, but they did characterize the crashes irresponsibly with little more than internet gossip. The concluding paragraph of the second pilot letter in The Atlantic article:
737 pilot/ FAA investigator said:
I’ll add that while this has been going on, we also have an open investigation into the Atlas 767 crash at Houston. [This was a cargo flight crash, near Houston, last month that killed the three crew members aboard. But it was in a type of plane, a Boeing 767, also used by airlines.]
In that case, we know that some manner of elevator deflection led to a pitch down to 49˚. There are plenty of 767’s still flying passengers, so this, too, is a very critical investigation. Yet, as far as I can tell, the NY Times has not run a single story on this that has not been authored by either Reuters or the AP. [JF note: The Washington Post has also mainly run AP coverage; the Wall Street Journal has had some stories by its own staff.] This is incredibly disturbing, as it strongly suggests a primary interest in body count and sensationalism, as opposed to genuine public interest.
The red font is my emphasis. The role of news telling has always been, and continues to be, tantalization. The CBS video I posted MUST use the phrase "deadly" in its description, to ensure no one thought a commercial airliner just ditched with no fatalities. What utter crap.
It's all well and good to sneer at the president's ongoing simpleton comments, but the vast majority of the listening, viewing, and reading public has just as weak a grasp of how failure investigations work in the flight industry.
