[iClaudiusX]

The root problem is the culture at Boeing and the FAA has shifted from safety first to profit first.

The investigative reporting from The Seattle Times[0] indicates that safety engineers were pressured to avoid delays to rush out a competitor to the A320. Furthermore, their safety analysis was based on flawed assumptions to meet an artificial constraint of not requiring pilot simulator training in order to appease the airlines they were selling to. Finally, the FAA is allowing industry to self-certify critical systems with lax oversight.

It is easy to get lost in the technical details of why a particular catastrophe happens. The common throughline is a broken culture where deviance is normalized and those who speak out are ignored. It's the same story with Chernobyl, Fukushima, the El Faro, the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain, Air France 447, and now the 737 Max.

[0] - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...

[_Codemonkeyism]

"The common throughline is a broken culture where deviance is normalized and those who speak out are ignored."

The must read on the issue says so too.

"The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies", Marianne M. Jennings

[phs318u]

Thanks for the steer. Wasn’t aware of this. Just read her presentation and loved it.

[lkrubner]

Fukushima? That doesn't belong on the list. There is some limit to any engineering decision. Complaining about MCAS is totally reasonable, but it would be unreasonable to argue "The Air Max is not safe because if I hit it with enough Stingray missiles it won't fly anymore." Like, yeah? No kidding?

Fukushima was designed to survive the earthquake, and it did, it just wasn't designed to survive the earthquake and also the tsunami.

[mikekchar]

Fukushima survived the earthquake and even survived the tsunami. The generator got wiped out, but even that wasn't what ultimately led to the disaster. It was that the battery backup eventually ran out of power (not unexpected) and the connectors for recharging it were old and of a format that isn't used any more. There was no way of recharging the battery backup and so the pumps eventually failed.

It's one of those problems where there are literally a million things that could go wrong and since the emergency system is not used normally, it's easy to overlook a critical problem.

So I agree with you. Fukushima was not a design error -- or at least not a design error that could have been reasonably fixed at the time that the reactor was originally designed. It was an error in maintenance. Obviously better to have a design where loss of power doesn't cause a melt down, but I don't think that these were available when Fukushima was built. CANDU reactors existed at that time, but I think they were still considered experimental. Pickering came online in 1971, so basically at the same time as Fukushima. I'm not familiar with other passive designs, so possibly someone else can make an observation.

But basically, as far as I can tell, Fukushima was a reasonably normal nuclear power plant for the time it was designed. The Air Max seems to have suffered from problems because of design decisions that are not considered normal.

[dreamcompiler]

But it could have been quite easily by simply siting the backup generators above ground. That was a stupid design error. Tsunamis are not unknown in Japan after all.

[lispm]

> Fukushima was designed to survive the earthquake, and it did

untrue

It was designed to survive both a tsunami and an earthquake. Tsunamis often are caused by earthquakes.

That Fukushima survived the Earthquake is a myth. The plants had an emergency shutdown and there was very little time for a damage assessment, which would have taken weeks or months.

Whether the plant would ever have been restarted after the earthquake is unknown. It could have been a full loss, like several reactors in Japan, which will never be restarted.

[phs318u]

Though one might argue that the risk of tsunami is not independent of the risk of (certain kinds of) earthquake for pacific rim nations. Failure to take that into account might be considered a design decision.

[the_mitsuhiko]

There were enough reports over the years that were buried which alerted about the earthquake and tsunami risk.

[Aeolun]

> The root problem is the culture at Boeing and the FAA has shifted from safety first to profit first.

So the same problem that pervades society everywhere now? I’m not sure if that wasn’t the case before, but it feels to me that people previously wanted to make lots of money by building great products, and they’ve just left the ‘building great products’ part behind.

[tluyben2]

There are still companies that do that; the ones I'm aware off are mostly from Germany and Japan. Like assembly line robots, but also Panasonic (and maybe Fujitsu; haven't tried them for a while, but I used to be a big fan of their 2-in-1's P1510 rang) laptops (especially the Japan-only ones). They would not sell anywhere else because they are crazy priced, but they are virtually indestructible and go on forever.

[shaki-dora]

Despite the 737 Max fiasco, airplanes today are far safer than ever before. Since 1970, annual deaths have been cut by >80%, while air traffic has increased by a factor of 10.

Cars have seen similar improvements. So have food hygiene, workplace safety, and most any measurable safety record I can think of.

[mycall]

That is exaggerated. It doesn't pervade everywhere.

[karl_schlagenfu]

The difference is, most products aren't safety critical like aeroplanes.