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Air Industry Trends Safer, But 'Flukish' Second Crash Led Boeing to Mishandled Media Storm, WSJ Argues
There's actually "a global trend toward increased air safety," notes a Wall Street Journal columnist. And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emerge...
"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine). January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets.
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