Of course they are. Any rational entity caught up in a situation like this will try to blame someone else. The cost of being liable for anything in today's society is very high so every party fights tooth and nail to make it 100% not their fault. This is especially amplified in a highly public case like this, the politicians will not rest until some entity has been punished, politicians are under a lot of pressure be seen "doing something". The incentive structure of modern society is simply not conducive to accepting responsibility for mistakes and is even less so when politics get involved.
We already know that crash #1 was caused by poor maintenance and communication (pilots not sufficiently aware of the implications of a questionable AoA sensor) of the plane's condition to the pilots combined with changes to how the plane responds to certain pilot inputs and how MCAS works which resulted in a situation the pilots didn't properly handle (Boeing and the airline's failure to train pilots combined with some amount of human error).
I will be very very surprised if the cause of the second crash is as simple as "yup, Boeing built a POS that fell out of the sky" or "yup, the pilots were idiots who flew into the ground".
Thanks to decades of incremental improvement we don't really have "single source" accidents in commercial aviation anymore.
It's worth noting that this particular plane was new. So 'poor maintenance' is not likely.
I don't think anyone serious literally thinks that 'Boeing built a POS that fell out of the sky', but there are indications that they built a plane that required substantially different handling and tried to abstract that fact via the onboard systems, which makes the pilots unable to handle the actual behavior of the plane when the systems were off for whatever reason, which to me does sound like a pretty big 'oversight' on the part of Boeing.
Now, perhaps the pilots could have handled the situation better, but it does seem like the FAA is trying to protect Boeing, (an American company with enormous lobbying power) and Boeing is sort of positioning this as "3rd world pilots" being at fault, the FAA potentially risking American lives here.
That does not look good to me whatever the cause is, (there's unlikely to be a single one and Boeing is unlikely to be completely clean here).
I would consider pilots not being made sufficiently aware of the implications of a faulty AoA sensor a maintenance failure.
Clearly people have fucked up because planes have crashed. We're basically just arguing over whether the responsibility split goes 33/33/33 or 20/20/60 or something else.
> I would consider pilots not being made sufficiently aware of the implications of a faulty AoA sensor a maintenance failure.
From what others have said, I gather there is a problem of this plane behaving differently than the rest of the family, which is being 'masked' by the on-board software so that it 'feels' similar to the other planes in a regular situation and thus requires minimal additional training. This however goes out of the window when the pilot cannot rely on the software and suddenly has to deal with how the plane 'really' behaves, which is substantially differently.
If that's the case, I'd consider the root of the problem to be significantly on Boeing's side.
>From what others have said, I gather there is a problem of this plane behaving differently than the rest of the family, which is being 'masked' by the on-board software so that it 'feels' similar to the other planes in a regular situation and thus requires minimal additional training
The problem that's (presumably) causing crashes isn't how the plane flies. It's perfectly flyable but has a tendency to pitch up more than other planes of the type. As a response, Boeing added functionality to MCAS to compensate.
The first crash likely wouldn't have happened had the pilots turned all the electronic nannies off and flown raw dog. The just didn't realize that was what they had to do for a combination of reasons.
Not knowing that they were flying with a screwy AoA sensor and what the symptoms of that would look like is a maintenance/communication/human systems failure.
The fact that a faulty AoA sensor can have those symptoms and the fact that the pilots didn't know about it well enough to make the connection themselves and disable the system is a failure on Boeing.
Think of it like having a crossover that wanders more than the comparable sedan at highway speed so the OEM silently turns on lane keeping when you use cruise control to compensate. There's a risk that if you're not paying attention it will find a lane that isn't a lane and drive you into a barrier at 70 and on this particular one the relevant sensor was faulty and more prone to doing that.
We already know that crash #1 was caused by poor maintenance and communication (pilots not sufficiently aware of the implications of a questionable AoA sensor) of the plane's condition to the pilots combined with changes to how the plane responds to certain pilot inputs and how MCAS works which resulted in a situation the pilots didn't properly handle (Boeing and the airline's failure to train pilots combined with some amount of human error).
I will be very very surprised if the cause of the second crash is as simple as "yup, Boeing built a POS that fell out of the sky" or "yup, the pilots were idiots who flew into the ground".
Thanks to decades of incremental improvement we don't really have "single source" accidents in commercial aviation anymore.