By Quentin Langley
At a restaurant you might order the Tuscan Pizza with no onions but with extra black olives. Alternatively, the whole menu might be a la carte, and you build your own pizza or salad. Either way, some sort of negotiation has happened between the customer and the restaurant over what, exactly, is going to be delivered, and while both bear responsibility for the result, the customer is the one ordering. We all understand the process.
If you are buying a car, however, the negotiation may not be equal. A car manufacturer would not usually make key safety features optional, but if it did - passenger airbags, for example - it would be transparent about it. The manufacturer will not make engine parts a la carte, because customers won't necessarily understand the significance of them or know which are essential to the operation of the car.
Purchasing aircraft is even more complex. But, in some ways, it has more in common with buying a pizza than buying a car. There isn't, or shouldn't be, the imbalance of information. An airline will have buyers who are just as expert in air safety as the manufacturer's sellers. But that only works if the manufacturer is transparent.
Brandjack News was not in the forefront of the first wave of commentators criticizing Boeing over recent crashes. It seems a little odd to offer an aircraft for sale without key safety features, which you then sell at a premium price. But how different is this from agreeing to sell an aircraft without those features at the request of the customer? Trying to fit either of these scenarios into a restaurant model is a fool's errand. The negotiations involve teams of experts, probably over some years, agreeing the specifications. Both sides are intimately involved but, ultimately, it is the customer who decides whether safety is important enough to be included in the order. If the manufacturer was being transparent.
But, it seems as if matters were even more complex than I assumed. The Wall Street Journal has reported:
Plane maker Boeing Co. didn’t tell Southwest Airlines Co.when the carrier began flying 737 MAX jets in 2017 that a standard safety feature, found on earlier models and designed to warn pilots about malfunctioning sensors, had been deactivated.
So, you can opt to have some new safety features excluded, but if you do, some existing features, which are actually installed in the plane, will be deactivated.
At present, it is not actually clear why this was even done. If, as the report suggests, it was done without telling Southwest, it cannot have been as part of pressure to get them to buy the additional features. More likely, the existing sensors interact with the new features, and were deactivated because the new features aren't present.
If anyone at Southwest knew about this deactivation, the information certainly didn't get to the people who actually needed it. Southwest's manuals for pilots were wrong, telling them that sensors would warn them of a problem when the sensors in question were turned off.
A separate report in the Journal tells of how investigators have now received information from several whistle-blowers at Boeing.
It is not yet clear what these whistle-blowers are saying about blame, but things are beginning to look very bad indeed for one of the most storied names in aviation.
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