Why are Boeing planes prone to accidents? With the fall of the Boeing 737-800 passenger plane of China Eastern Airlines, people can't help but start to doubt the safety of Boeing aircraft again. This incident not only ended the history of China's civil aviation safety flight for more than 10 years, but also aroused great concern about aircraft manufacturers, operation and maintenance issues. While hoping for a miracle, people seem to no longer trust Boeing.
In the more than 10 years from 2010 to the present, the Boeing 737 series airliners have had a total of 20 accidents, including 11 crashes, resulting in a total of 907 deaths, the highest in history, or even unprecedented.
On March 10, 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft crashed in the local area, killing all 157 people on board. Just a few months later, Indonesia's Lion Air Flight 610 suffered the same fate, killing 189 people. The aircraft in both accidents were the same model, both Boeing 737 MAX 8, and its engine was responsible for so many such aircraft accidents.
Vicious competition between the two major airlines
Airbus and Boeing are the world's two largest aircraft manufacturers, and their competition is fierce. If one of them can make a better aircraft, the other side will lose a lot of money. Fast forward to 2010 when Airbus announced that it was upgrading its most popular model, the A320, a narrow-body aircraft widely used in domestic aviation. Airbus made an important upgrade to it, fitting it with a new engine that was many times larger than the original, thus increasing fuel savings by 50%. What's more, the aircraft can be upgraded without making too many changes, and pilots only need some additional training to fly the newly modified aircraft. Airbus named the new airliner the A320 neo series and saved the company a fortune through it, an operation that completely disrupted Boeing's position.
To compete with Airbus, Boeing also had to upgrade the engines of its own narrow-body aircraft, the Boeing 737-800. But they found that the bottom of the 737 plane was closer to the ground than the Airbus A320, which meant the A320 could fit the new engine under the wing, but the 737 was not positioned enough. A few months later, however, Boeing's production and development department made big news, claiming that they had found a way to install a larger engine under the wing, and their solution was to move the engine up, eventually making the engine position higher than the wing, and Boeing called this model of aircraft the 737 MAX.
However, this seemingly inconspicuous change caused big trouble for Boeing.
Although Boeing's upgrade made the 737 Max the hottest model on the market at that time, and even surpassed Airbus. But there are huge hidden dangers in this change.
Raising the engine position will cause the aircraft to deviate from the upward angle of the nose when the take-off is fully advanced, resulting in the aircraft stalling and stopping. Meanwhile, to solve this problem, Boeing didn't redesign the appearance of the 737 Max, but simply installed software on the plane that automatically pressed down when it detected that the nose was too high, which they called the ManeuverAbility Enhancement System, or MCAS.
But Boeing basically sells the 737 Max as a 737, so they don't emphasize the new MCAS system. Many pilots just watched a two-hour video tutorial on their iPad before flying the plane, and the MCAS system was not mentioned at all in the tutorial.
Several pilots reported to the government in 2018 that the 737 Max had a problem with the nose suddenly downwards, and the problem caused by this MCAS system became the main culprit that directly led to the two subsequent air crashes.
Now, all 737 Maxes have been banned, and the Federal Aviation Administration has come under scrutiny because they let the planes pass the qualification test too quickly.
Behind the fall of Boeing, in addition to technical reasons, there is also the greed of capital looming. How many innocent lives have written a heavy page in the history of human aviation with blood. Vicious competition between airlines may still be staged, for ordinary people, it does not matter who loses and who wins, we just hope that such tragedies in the future can be avoided as much as possible.