Is There Really a Problem at Boeing?

Over at Vox is an article questioning how aircraft safety news has been reported lately:

Image by mr_t_77, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

Ever since the shocking January 5 incident in which a door plug fell out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 in midair, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane, many fliers have been jumpy. Their fears have been fueled by news sites that have been serving up incident after incident: a Boeing 737 Max 8 sliding off the runway in Houston, another 737 in Houston making an emergency return after flames were spotted spewing out of an engine, yet another in Newark reporting stuck rudder pedals, a Boeing 777 losing a tire shortly after takeoff from San Francisco, a 777 making an emergency landing in Los Angeles with a suspected mechanical issue. And so on and so on.

So what's actually happening? Are more planes having incidents than ever before? Or are we just hearing about more incidents? bold added]

Kelsey Piper argues that it is the latter, and has the statistics to back up that contention. In fact, this year, we're having about the usual number of the type of incident she ticks off above.

Overall, flight remains a remarkably safe mode of travel:

[W]hile the January door plug incident revealed some genuine and glaring failures in processes at Boeing, it's really hard to overstate how safe aviation is. In all of the incidents involving regularly scheduled US commercial aircraft over the 15 years from 2010 to 2024, there have been two passenger fatalities -- in about 8.75 trillion revenue passenger miles. That's a safety record of about one or two passenger fatalities per light-year traveled. [bold added]

In light of this context, Piper asks whether journalists have a responsibility to not report such non-newsworthy events as the occasional lost tire or in-flight malfunction.

It's a good question, and it reminds me of the analysis of our society's knowledge system in Alex Epstein's Fossil Future. Here, we're seeing serious issues with how research and dissemination are going wrong.

(These parts of the knowledge system are interrelated: Piper's attempt at synthesis -- of reported incidents and actual safety -- is helping expose the other two problems here.)

Piper doesn't touch on how evaluation is also going wrong right now, at the political level, but that's easy enough to see. Stories about the Boeing safety scandal discuss the real problem of Boeing having lost many experienced engineers and technicians over time -- but with some version of the profit vs safety canard, popping up, completely unquestioned, like a refrain.

The dubious premise that having a deserved reputation for safety isn't a legitimate consideration for someone wanting to turn a profit will predictably cause a demand for more government oversight -- as if we'd be better off taking a page from the Soviets and running the industry like Aeroflot.

(This doesn't mean that Boeing hasn't been badly-run in some respects, but blaming that on the profit motive is lazy, and will cause more trouble if the problem is in some way caused by government interference in the industry, such as its past "encouragement" of the merger of Boeing with MacDonnell-Douglas.)

As with climate change and energy policy, so it is with aircraft safety and the economy: A problem has surfaced, but is being misreported and analyzed incorrectly. And the government is getting involved and, due in part to misevaluation, is in danger of causing real damage by applying an inappropriate, ham-fisted remedy to what could well amount to a fictitious problem, or the wrong problem.

-- CAV