That is as it may be but nonetheless, it is really poor and unwanted publicity for an aeroplane with a seriously toxic rep amongst the world's travelling public.
News channels carrying stories of emergency landings are not going to do anything to enhance confidence in the grievously tainted product.
No arguing with that at least on face value. There are other factors in the travelling public psyche at play though, principally money.
There is a concerted and ongoing effort to ease the term “MAX” out of the public consciousness and replace it with -8 etc. There is a precedent here dating back to 1989, if not further. A 737 crashed on the M1 just short of East Midlands. There are some parallels in that it was an early Classic 737-400 and a contributing factor was poor ergonomic design of instrumentation in an essentially new variant of an old design that had not been properly trained and the pilots consequently mishandled the emergency.
Can anyone name that accident?*
Meanwhile, passengers will get leary about flying on it and no doubt some shyster will try the “I was traumatised, the airline never told me
and it was only when the lawyer said I’d have a case that I realised, I fink it’s disgusting, I want compensation”. But people will still happily fly on it with RYR etc because it’s cheap. There are daily reports of how shit RYR are but people still beat a path to their door. Because they’re cheap.
As it happens, crew training is just ramping up in the U.K. at one airline and it is a hell of a lot more involved training package than previously mandated.
For the record, I’d happily get on one, certainly one operated by my employer because I have absolute faith in my colleagues and in the training system behind that. For sure, any idiot news outlet will get a hard on whenever there’s an incident for a few months but notice with this latest 737 crash in Indonesia, a -500 variant Classic as it happens, many news outlets have been at pains to say it is
not a MAX.
To put this in perspective, on a fleet of 60+ aircraft we probably have a tech divert or delay several times a week. That’s not indicative of poorly maintained aircraft, that’s indicative of highly complex machines with multiple redundancy built into every system that are required to be maintained at the very highest standards and the slightest degradation in that is cause for investigation and rectification. It also indicates that crews are willing and enabled to cause huge and expensive disruption to busy flying schedules because it’s the right thing to do, not the commercially preferable thing to do.
* How many of you correctly identified “The Kegworth Accident”? Except you didn’t correctly identify anything other than the location, it was The British Midland Boeing 737 Accident which happened to occur at Kegworth (47 people died btw, the second most serious loss of life in a U.K. air accident**). By some very clever PR, the airline, the aircraft type and the manufacturer have been essentially expunged from the record.
** The most serious loss of life was a British Airtours Boeing 737-200 Jurassic at Manchester in 1985 where a combustion chamber in an engine ruptured causing a devastating fire. 56 of the 137 on board died, mainly from smoke inhalation caused by burning cabin materials that had been designed in (by Boeing) because they were light, cheap and easily maintained. That accident is known as The Manchester Air Disaster, not the British Airtours Boeing 737 disaster at Manchester.
I can keep this up all day. The Munich Air Disaster / Manchester United Air Disaster in 1958. It was a BEA Airspeed Ambassador and it crashed because the pilots were concerned about delaying the flight still further after two previous take offs had been aborted because of, Yep, you guessed it, technical issues (boost surge in the engine). They then tried to take off on a slush covered runway without understanding the implications of that on Take Off Performance (because there was no understanding in the industry, nobody knew, a fact that changed in light of the accident).
In all these accidents there were lots of reasons they happened, if you boil it down, principally fault can be found in the airline, the manufacturer and the Regulatory Authorities. None are historically remembered in the name, that dubious distinction goes to an anonymous and shitty little village in the East Midlands, a fabulous city in the North West, a truly shit football team and possibly the best city in the world (if beer and women in Dirndls is your thing. It should be, Google it).
A very long winded but hopefully well illustrated way of saying “the MAX will easily shrug off its reputation”. A lot of people with a serious interest in it and very deep pockets are quietly but persistently working on just that as you read this.
uk.reuters.com
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