Originally Posted by
MechEngr
Ok then - as soon as this latest action was brought, Boeing should have offered $1 Billion per passenger and $1 Billion per extended family member. Wipe the company clean, all the retirement funds, every supplier, every employee bankrupted, and pull Boeing as manufacturer of record for every plane they have built. This will wipe out American and Southwest and maybe even Ethiopian. Revenge will only be complete when Boeing no longer exists.
But is $1 Billion each enough? Maybe it should be more.
Because pain is immeasurable and cannot be offset with cash, the families will still hurt - and they will always hurt. And this latest legal action will not extinguish that pain - it will enhance it. Both sides representing this are cynical and cruel. Neither side will admit a dollar value to place on human life. They each have a number, but they know that making that evaluation is morally corrupt. If the defense makes an offer, the plaintiffs will reject it as "too little." So they intend to compel a jury to make that decision for them, a jury forced to take the immoral task of picking a monetary value for human life and human suffering.
I see no mention of that monetary value here either. Why not?
I agree - it "looks bad" because that is the goal of the plaintiffs lawyers. They made an infinite demand without evidence. What would the typical reaction be?
I don't question lead counsel's ability. His is an appealing, if lacking in concrete evidence, argument, the sort lawyers are rewarded for making. And it is helped that it is fueled by outrage from a false story - of brave pilots doing everything correctly and per the procedures and still the plane's control was wrested from them as certainly as if the wings had been cut off. Based on that falsehood there could be only one source of the event.
The claims for Ethiopia are heavily weighed by their acceptance and operation of a plane with a known defect by pilots never trained to manage the documented defect, nor for management of long recognized, unrelated problems. We could know exactly the names of the people who made that sequence of decisions, perhaps discover the reasons they had. But there's no money to be had from them.
"(The fact that the DC-10 was a "perfectly flyable airframe" ... " It was not - why this gross misrepresentation?
Originally Posted by
tdracer
Apples and Oranges.
Ethiopian was flyable using the processes and techniques that Boeing had recommended (as one of the Indonesian crews had demonstrated) - something that the pilots failed to do for whatever reason.
The AA 191 DC-10 was NOT flyable using the processes and techniques that were recommended at that time. Yes, it was flyable - but not with the processes and techniques that the manufacturer recommended, and the crew had been trained with. The crew followed their training to the letter - training that did not account for the type of failure they experienced which had dramatically altered the stall characteristics of the aircraft.
Originally Posted by
WillowRun 6-3
Quite.
I only referred to 191 for the point that awareness of imminent and untimely death is a form of damage that could be compensated at law. The detailed discussions of what the ET302 passengers experienced led me to think, "wonder what the state of mind was of those aviators in Chicago as the final moments flashed before them - would they not have experienced something quite similar to the type of pain at issue in this case?"
If I may,
WR 6-3 is making a comment on 191 and in a perfect world, with better information to the crew, the aircraft was indeed able to fly, but the crew were not in possession of that information, and they followed accurately their training, and that failure in SA that had nothing to do with the crew put a flyable aircraft into an impossible position.
ME & TD, your objections are valid, but WR's indication of the importance of information to the crew to permit them to effect a viable response is indicative of the complex nature of aviation.
In 191's case, the lack of cues to the condition of the left slat, and the abruptness of the subsequent stall on one wing only was not the crews fault, all 3 of you believe that, it is the NTSBs findings and it happens to have the weight of truth. The 191 case is germane in the same way as 302 and co are to the question of crew comprehension, and that leads to the emotional trauma inflicted on the crew as well as all others on board. I personally think the emotional harm in those seconds to. a crew that have an absolute comprehension that the aircraft they are responsible for along with the welfare of all on board, is about to be destroyed, they know with certainty what is about to occur and would know that their endeavours for reasons they usually do not fully comprehend, is going to fail. There is extreme mental pain in that, mercifully only for a short period of time.
As for Boeing, it is time to eject their corporate management that has destroyed the fabric of a once proud and capable engineering company while chasing short term values to boost their own pocket change. The takeover of Boeing by MDD management, those that had led MDD from being a pioneer to a corruption plagued company, who then oversaw the corruption of Boeing from 95 onwards, they need to be sacked wholesale, and held accountable for the damage. The debacle has cost Boeing billions, and yet they cannot find the moral fortitude to give generously to the victims of their negligence, which stems from the greed and short sighted policies of the company. That there would be a disaster such as this was forewarned by the disgusting action that Boeing took against the QA staff that identified the falsification of production on the B737NG back in the early 2000's, where the ring frames were disclosed to Boeing management as being falsely produced by hand instead of complying with the CNC production, a method that Boeing demanded and got an extended fatigue life for the B737 for. The corruption of that included the mute accessory to the falsification by the FAA, and the courts, the pillars of jurisprudence, dismissing the suits by the QA staff who were sacked by Boeing for doing their job.