Some planes fly 3-4 times each day. Each time, they carry ~150-200 people. They are incredibly mechanically, electronically and software -wise complex machines, and fly under huge range of conditions (number of conditions and range of values for each), withstanding elements, forces of physics, material exertion / fatigue etc etc.
So if there's an airplane manufacturer, delivering hundreds of planes to airlines, where processes allow for something like this to happen to a plane, and it's confirmed that it wasn't a single exception, it really brings to question how many out of tens of thousands of parts/aspects of those planes do not meet the expected parameters/standards and how many disasters are waiting to happen.
Both. The risk to an individual passenger on an individual plane is overblown. The cultural changes at Boeing that led to a decrease in quality control that increased risk to all passengers on all planes is not overblown, and will take years and years to remedy.
Their reputation (and by proxy, United States’ manufacturing since Boeing planes are one of the most publicly known American products) will not recover for decades I think.
