Yeah, based on all the info we have so far it appears MCAS was the root cause. Mounting bigger engines higher up and forward changed the plane's center of gravity and made it more likely to go too high AoA under acceleration and stall. MCAS was installed to fix that, but was sloppily implemented, misinterpreted AoA sensor data under some conditions, and was not pilot-overide-able.
Major fuckup by Boeing that cost many lives. They've already lost the narrative on this. The CEO's equivocation isn't helping.
> Step 1 in enlightened crisis management: accept responsibility.
Agreed completely, but let me be devil's advocate here.
If he accepts responsibility then boeing is presumably fully and immediately legally liable. I guess that, particularly under US culture of suing anything that moves, everyone will try to cash in to the maximal extent possible. Including airlines possibly cancelling their existing orders - might they cancel 4,700 plane orders? What would that do to the company? By how much would boeing's liability increase on a straightforward "mea culpa"?
I can't agree with his butt-covering but I can see why it's happening. There seems to be little upside to accepting the blame. Could it destroy boeing? How many jobs lost?
"Boeing employs more than 153,000 people across the United States and in more than 65 countries" <https://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/> and a whole long-tail of US jobs indirectly.
How would it affect the US economy and standing in the world (I mean, more than it's already doing now)? I'm sure he's being leant on from above.
etc.
(please note I'm presenting a possible explanation, not endorsing it. There seems no moral way out of this. The real cause is the historical stupidity that allowed this to occur, for which he should definitely swing, and a few more suits. I am NOT endorsing these things I wrote but they seem things he will have considered. NB am a brit so I'm looking at this from the outside).
I suspect this is exactly what's happening - butt covering up and down the chain of command to avoid blame and legal liability.
This makes sense in a short-term, myopic view limited to first-order effects.
Enlightened crisis management isn't about the moral way out just for the sake of morality. It's about looking ahead to the second- and third-order effects.
When Tylenol was poisoned with cyanide, Johnson & Johnson could have taken the short-term, myopic approach. They could have held press conferences to explain how this wasn't their fault, it wasn't their responsibility, that many factors contributed to the catastrophe. They could have lobbied regulators to leave Tylenol on store shelves because it was an isolated incident.
Instead, Johnson & Johnson took responsibility. They communicated continuously. They to the initiative to remove all Tylenol products from the shelves. They redesigned the product to make it tamper-evident. And they led a campaign to educate people to inspect the seal and return any product where it was broken.
This was very expensive. In the short term, Johnson & Johnson would have made more profit just concerning themselves with first-order effects.
But in the long term, second- and third-order effects dominate. J&J enhanced their image, they made the Tylenol brand more valuable, and they built a deep reservoir of trust.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. In the Tylenol case, it seemed clear that the cause wasn't neglicance on the part of J&J, and the remedy of clearing all product off the shelves probably cost them somewhere in the millions of dollars.
In Boeing's case, the issue almost certainly is due to intentional actions taken by a number of people, and buying back existing 737 MAX8s + cancelling all future orders would amount to billions and could very well sink the company.
I think the parent comment is spot-on. Boeing is playing a game of damage control, and they're presumably being advised by some smart and experienced people. They're not accepting blame, an act which we can assume is motivated by the legal implications of doing so.
Of course there are always multiple factors, but all the evidence points to the MCAS system as a major contributor to these catastrophes.
I don't know who's advising Boeing on their crisis management and media strategy, but they're doing it wrong.
Every time Boeing attempts to sidestep or minimize this it makes me trust them less.
Take a lesson from the Tylenol poisonings [0] and the Rogers Commission investigation of the Challenger disaster [1].
Step 1 in enlightened crisis management: accept responsibility.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report