Vox youtube 737 max scandal software upgrade#
Vox youtube 737 max scandal series#

If one company were to gain a clear technical advantage over the other, it would be a minor catastrophe for the losing company.Īnd that’s what Boeing thought it was facing. But because there are only two players in this market, and because their offerings are so fundamentally similar, the competition for this slice of the plane market is both intense and weirdly limited. Southwest Airlines, for example, simplifies its overall operations by exclusively flying different 737 variants.īoth the 737 and the 320 come in lots of different flavors, so airlines have plenty of options in terms of what kind of aircraft should fly exactly which route. Importantly, even though there are many different flavors of 737, they are all in some sense the same plane, just as all the different 320 family planes are the same plane. Some of them are also extended-range models that have an ER appended to the name and, as you would probably guess, they have longer ranges. The 320 family competes with a group of planes that Boeing calls the 737 - there’s a 737-600, a 737-700, a 737-800, and a 737-900 - with higher numbers indicating larger planes. These four variants, by design, have identical flight decks so pilots can be trained to fly them interchangeably. One is the European company Airbus’s 320 family, with models called A318, A319, A320, or A321 depending on how long the plane is. There are lots of different passenger airplanes on the market, but just two very similar narrow-body planes dominate domestic (or intra-European) travel. But the big picture is coming into view: A major employer faced a major financial threat, and short-term politics and greed won out over the integrity of the regulatory system. The specifics of what happened in the regulatory system are still emerging (and despite executives’ assurances we don’t even really know what happened on the flights yet).

Vox youtube 737 max scandal series#

The story begins nine years ago when Boeing was faced with a major threat to its bottom line, spurring the airline to rush a series of kludges through the certification process - with an under-resourced Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seemingly all too eager to help an American company threatened by a foreign competitor, rather than to ask tough questions about the project.

Vox youtube 737 max scandal software upgrade#

Executives claimed Wednesday, March 27, that the cause was a software problem - and that a new software upgrade fixes it.īut this open-and-shut version of events conflicts with what diligent reporters in the aviation press have uncovered in the weeks since Asia, Europe, Canada, and then the United States grounded the planes.

Boeing executives are offering a simple explanation for why the company’s best-selling plane in the world, the 737 MAX 8, crashed twice in the past several months, leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, in October and then Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March.