This example only serves to highlight how popular narratives take hold and get reinforced by laypeople.
Boeing absolutely deserves to be raked through the coals over MCAS, over their deteriorating engineering culture, and over regulatory capture. But blame them for the things they actually carry responsibility for.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o
It's the same airplane as the MRTT, A330.
In the case you're referring too, the focus was on poor training and failure to follow up on earlier incidents. It's not the same as designing a system based around a single sensor that is known to fail or forgetting to bolt a door.
The airbus A320 family is associated with 1,490 fatalities, there’s just a vast number of flights daily so tiny risks add up. Companies buying new aircraft care far more about maintenance to fuel efficiency than a few rare incidents due to already corrected issues.
What? The A380 has never had a single fatality or even injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Accidents_and_inci...
> Incidents are over five years old have minimal impact in terms of current competition between Boing and Airbus.
Airbus (and Boeing) has a decade-long backlog. They absolutely do. https://flightplan.forecastinternational.com/2026/04/14/airb...
The message here, and it’s granted if you’re not aviation, finance or political aware is Italy keeping their aviation sector EU based being In the EU themselves and most likely getting tremendously better financing.
While the Boeing incidents you mentioned are unfortunate and a true consequence of engineering culture eroding at Boeing, it does not dispel the true safety of aviation in general nor the high success of the 737 Max.
There's plenty of documentation to be found on the why and how, especially following the 737Max issues: https://team-fsa.com/insights/what-happened-to-boeings-cultu...
> Following the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing’s robust culture eroded. Subsequent safety issues with the Boeing 737 have put the company under international scrutiny and underscored the profound impact of a weakened corporate culture. As Forbes aptly put it, “Boeing’s current travails about safety issues with the 737 MAX 9 can arguably be traced to the company’s weak corporate culture.”
Or read https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/why-boeings-pr... for Harvard's take on the same situation.
It’s a checkmate of the American system. Boeing delegated construction in parts of the country that needed jobs (=politics), who then botched the job and didn’t get sanctioned because it was bad optics to accuse those providers (2013 airframes). More recent events are also a checkmate of the ultrafinanciarization practices, a checkmate of the consultancy / provider / controller model, and a failure of corruption (the FAA/Boeing dinners inherited from the Macdonnell management) in a context where USA rips at the seams (industrial failure, no-one can be trusted as trustworthy) and tries to renew its ideology (apogee with the Trump elections).
That is a fair bit of politics that made Boeing fail.