I encourage Southwest, the main airline I have flown for two decades, to begin transitioning to an all Airbus fleet, due to the dirty and criminal behaviour of Boeing with regard to the 737 MAX 8. Boeing put engines that were considered too large for a 1960's low-to-the-ground plane on the MAX 8, by an unusual wing mounting. They didn't want to re-design the plane to correctly handle the larger engines, due to the time delay that would likely cause customers to move to the Airbus short-range fuel-efficient planes which would be available before a new Boeing plane could be completed. The new wing mounting of the larger engines only worked some percentage of the time. Under certain conditions, it was causing the plane to go up at too large of an angle, risking a stall and falling out of the sky. So they decided to fix this with an automatic system to move the nose back down. Although they had two sensors to determine the angle of the plane, they decided to use one, with saving development and testing money being the likely reason. So if the sensor was bad, the system would fail. They put in an indicator to tell you if the sensor was potentially bad (by showing it disagreed with the other sensor), but made it an $80,000 optional upgrade. The planes that crashed did not have this upgrade. They told the government that the automatic system would change the rear wing control by a max factor of .6, which was 25% less than what it actually could do in one iteration: 2.5. Had the government known how much it could change it, they would have likely rejected that system/amount. They didn't advise that pilots get re-trained to learn how to handle the non-simple sequence of things they had to do to disable this automatic nose-down system (MCAS) because they were selling the plane as "more of the same" and didn't want to also advertise that they had a new critical system that could fail. It was supposed to be a "non-catastrophic" addition. A "non-catastrophic" system that moved the plane in giant amounts - it only had to be done twice to hit the max - and was dependent on a single sensor. And the system would continue to keep pulling the plane down even if the pilots were repeatedly trying to pull it up. Boeing needs to pay for this horrible and fatal set of business decisions made in the name of profits. If the government or courts won't do it, the airlines need to. The applicable leadership of the FAA and Boeing also should be fired and imprisoned.
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