Why Boeing let 346 passengers die

Let me ask you a question not a difficult one Would you put your money into a company that was performing stunningly well in the stock exchange but had recently been exposed as unethical corrupt and deceptive compromising quality and safety by taking shortcuts and making a dangerous productYes you would I know You donrsquot care if the company has the morality of Satan himself as long as your investment makes you richer Wersquore all big boys yoursquod tell me we understand that corporations are driven by profit and nothing is golden even if it shines One shouldnrsquot judge a company from one scandal you say everyone has secrets everyone makes mistakesAs an example yoursquod tell me that earlier this month US regulators detected cancercausing chrysotile fibres a type of asbestos in a sample Did I really believe people would stop using that wonderful JampJ baby powder because of thatBut what if a corporationrsquos dark deeds led to hundreds of people dying Would you still back that horse Irsquom thinking of Seattlebased Boeing once makers of the worldrsquos safest airplanes and famous for its focus on engineering and excellence Until its new CEO decided that money was more importantIn the five months after the company launched its Boeing 737 Max in 2018 two planes crashed shortly after takeoff 346 people died The yearslong investigation that followed revealed that Boeing had known in detail about this fatal flaw but had made a decision to keep quiet about it so that their sales and share value would not sufferEven after news of the first crash in 2018mdasha Lion Air plane taking off from IndonesiamdashBoeing refused to ground the 737 Max fleet They blamed the pilot calling the airline ldquostupidrdquo in an internal memoWould you put your money into this companyrsquos stocks todayIrsquove always argued with aviophobes citing statistics proving that yoursquore more likely to die crossing a road than flying Thatrsquos still true But what happened at Boeing was not the result of bad engineering but human greed The company decided that excellence cost too much money and took too much time they needed quicker returnsThatrsquos not a quality of just Boeing but every other corporation in a capitalist economic system that glorifies moneymaking as a worthwhile goal in itself The trait that made Boeing greedy exists in every other corporation whatever it manufacturesMakes me want to travel by horse carriage the rest of my lifeThe story in briefmdashBoeing was once a revered iconic American company that respected and valued engineering excellence Its thousands of employees and the aircraft they made were Americarsquos pride However when the European Airbus Corporation began to lead in market share Boeing decided to grow by merging with McDonnell Douglas another aviation company though with a dramatically different cultureThat companyrsquos CEO Harry Stonecipher ended up as Boeingrsquos CEO He disdained engineers as arrogant and went on a costcutting spree A company where anyone could air a concern and everyone learned from each otherrsquos mistakes became one where speaking up could cost you your job When Airbus launched a brand new fuelefficient plane called AIRBUSneo Boeing decided against developing their own new fuelefficient planemdashit would take a decade and cost billionsInstead they decided to fit more fuelefficient engines on their old Boeing 737 planes which had been flying since 1967But the new engines were larger and heavier and had to be fitted higher and more forward This created a flight problem when the plane was climbing steeply To counter this Boeing installed a small piece of software called the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System MCAS that would override the pilot and push the nose down if it thought the planersquos angle was too sharpBoeing decided to keep MCAS secret from everyone including pilots because revealing it would have meant costly simulator retraining for the worldrsquos 34000 or so pilots But it was MCAS that kicked in after the Lion Air and the Ethiopian Air planes took off pushing the planesrsquo noses down no matter what the pilots did to climbNo one knew it was the MCAS No one had told them Death was quick and devastatingIt is a sign of the times that Boeing which lost 11 billion in two days on Wall Street back then and was fined 250 billion is thriving again Mumbaibased startup Akasa Air recently announced an order for 72 Boeing 737s worth 9 billion SpiceJet announced that it would resume taking deliveries from its 155strong orderAs for me I wonder what new secrets airplane manufacturers are hiding Should you even fly at all You probably wonrsquot be able to avoid it but herersquos my advicemdashDonrsquot relaxDonrsquot sit backDonrsquot enjoy the flightHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper