On Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing

When I traveled back in April to the east, the seat I got on the airplane was an emergency exit seat. I did not know because I was not the person who booked the flight. On seeing that seat, an inexplicable fear gripped me. In my subconscious, I said that I could not sit there. I was not thinking about what would happen if we crashed and I needed to assist in opening the door. It was much more than that. In hindsight, it was much more than that.

I remember I messaged my friend and asked her about this emergency door seat that I got. She said it was fine and that nothing was wrong. Now that I am watching this documentary, it dug up my previous memory and explained why I had that fear. On the Boeing 737 MAX, there was an incident in 2024 where the door plug blew out. The door opened mid-flight. I watched that documentary last year or two years ago, probably last year. It was rooted in my subconscious that this failure is a real possibility on these planes.

This situation leads me to think about human greed. The Wright brothers discovered and built the greatest breakthrough in human transportation. Aviation should still be the safest means of travel. A system that should have near perfect reliability is degraded by crashes that originate from greed and human error. At this stage, these are not machine errors. These are human errors.

Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. The management of McDonnell Douglas took over. That decision was irrational. How do you retain the management of a failing company and put them in charge of a company known for engineering excellence? People ask how they hold power while others do not. It is shareholder capitalism. Instead of maintaining the engineering standard that the company was known for, leadership replaced it with mediocrity to maximize short-term shareholder profits. There is no other explanation for why a high-performing company degraded to this level. Office Politics at its worst.

The earlier slogan at the company's peak was, "If it's not Boeing, I'm not going." Now, passengers state that if it is Boeing, they are not boarding. No one can blame them when these outcomes stem from operational failure. The quest for shareholder primacy, originated by economists and adopted across corporate leadership, fails when applied here. In many industries, human lives are not directly on the line when cutting margins. In aerospace, human lives are the cost. Certain industries must not operate on aggressive shareholder value extraction.

Commercial airplane manufacturing functions as a duopoly because capital costs and certification requirements are extremely high. High barriers to entry make market concentration understandable, but structural reform remains necessary.

CEOs responsible for these failures left with compensation packages exceeding one hundred million dollars. The book Power and Progress provides useful context on how institutional direction and elite interests shape technological outcomes. Human psychology in corporate governance repeatedly allows powerful innovations to be degraded by flawed incentives.

In the documentary, factory employees stated they would not fly on the planes they built. It is equivalent to a chef refusing to eat the food from their own kitchen. Employees faced intense pressure, silencing, and retaliation when reporting defects. Meanwhile, the traveling public remains largely unaware of internal governance failures, often attributing incidents to generic mechanical risks rather than leadership collapse.

Senior executives who receive tens of millions in annual compensation do not fly on commercial airliners. They use private aviation. The broader public bears the operational risk while leadership remains protected. I just... I just can't deal with this