These crashes are captivating, especially given how astonishingly safe air travel has been in the past decade or so. If I remember correctly 2017 was the safest year in the history of aviation.
And airplanes, particularly modern jets, are fascinating no matter what they're doing. I remember twenty, thirty years ago looking out the towering floor-to-ceiling windows at the airport, marveling at how many different technological fields had to come together to make air travel possible: materials, energy, engineering, radio, logistics, physics, process control, weather prediction, mapping, software development—nowadays even spaceflight and the freakin' theory of relativity come into play where GPS is in use. As a budding geek it was (and still is) catnip.
And then these two MAX jets go down within months of each other. Three hundred and forty six people killed. Three hundred and forty six families shattered, forever. When I think about them, I'm reminded that these weren't just malfunctions to be debugged in my terminal, these were three hundred and forty six tragedies that will ripple out to their friends, families, coworkers, and beyond, for decades to come.
I wonder if we are being hasty in our speculation about the causes. I know we are all intensely curious—that intense curiosity is, I think, a defining feature of the community that frequents this site, and something a lot of us owe our successes to. I notice though a tendency for speculation to evolve into factual claims through repetition, and I wonder if we should be more careful not to allow repetition to take the place of evidence.
Accident investigation is a slow process, and slow processes are frustrating. Information comes in a trickle. It's natural to want to piece together whatever details we have, wherever we can find them. In our hunger to find out what happened, how these 346 people lost their lives, let's not lose sight of the fact that the information we have right now is incomplete.
Let's also not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about people. For the loved ones, this isn't an interesting puzzle; this is a gut-wrenching sorrow. I try to keep that at the center whenever someone asks me what I think about these crashes.
I'm glad the MAX is grounded. And I'm intensely curious about what happened. I try to temper my thoughts on the matter according to the amount and quality of information I have, and the degree of knowledge and experience I've acquired. I don't always succeed. But I can at least rest easy knowing that the investigative team has access to a wealth of information and experience, and that they will make their data and findings public when their work is complete.