Boeing Crash Reaction Fascinates, Confounds

One of my football coaches used to have a saying;

“There are two kinds of people in the world.  There are wimps — and there are tough guys.”

This was a simple way of motivating young, aggressive males to understand their circumstances, playing in a violent and dangerous sport.  Naturally, no football team can operate when its players don’t understand and exercise mental and physical toughness.

I think this idea applies to Sunday’s crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, licensed to Ethiopia Airlines, and the world’s reaction to that crash.

Many people say the “safe move” for Boeing, is to simply keep the plane on the ground.  As we’ve learned — this is the move that’s being made.

Of course, there is always honor in preventing disasters, but this approach is getting lambasted as rather “wimpy” in some private conversations I’ve had.

These are private conversations with people who know much more about all this than I do.

They all seem to agree people are panicking about the 737 Max 8 when they likely shouldn’t be, at least not yet.

These experts admit there could be an issue with the aircraft, but they remind us — we don’t know that yet.  They are pulling out their hair, exclaiming, “the crash investigation is only three days old!!  We haven’t even seen the black box data!!”

And thus, here we are — “John and Jane-Q public”, engaging in a circular argument about whether or not to do something based on the likelihood of a disaster — when we have almost no idea about the likelihood of said disaster.

Watching all this unfold has been particularly fascinating for me, even frustrating to some degree.

It makes me imagine an argument between two parents…..over whether or not their kid should play football….