Notes on 'Downfall'
When traveling by plane, friends and family often demand phone calls and texts from loved ones when they are boarding and when they have landed. There is an observable seriousness and concern that is applied to air travel that is not seen for other modes of travel, even though traveling by car is statistically less safe than air travel. This universal concern, one could argue, is an unnecessary remnant of a bygone era where plane travel used to be considerably more precarious. However, a new Netflix documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, directed by Rory Kennedy, expertly shows that, in reality, the concerns that loved ones show when people are traveling are not unfounded. Rather, the documentary reveals that traveling on a Boeing plane is almost akin to being in the Squid Game.
Downfall exposes the shocking neglect and imbecilic shortcuts that Boeing engaged in just to keep profits high. It tells the story about how failure of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) led to two crashes of their “new” 737 MAX plane, which was created in haste in order to keep up with Airbus’ A320neo plane, which happened to be one of the fastest selling aircrafts of all time. The 737 MAX was said to be an old plane that was quickly updated and rushed to the market to keep Boeing competitive. Between the first crash of the Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29th, 2018 and the subsequent crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019, a total of 346 people died.
One of the more interesting points in the documentary was the discussion of Boeing executives—rather than confessing that the plane had crucial manufacturing errors—deciding to blame the initial crash on the pilot not being Western-trained. It truly is astonishing how quickly people go to predictably blaming imagined non-Western incompetence for tragedies, rather than Western greed and shortcuts with plane designs. That there was no crash in America is only the result of ridiculous luck, not due to the inherent superiority of American pilot training. In fact, if nothing was done, multiple 737 MAX crashes would have occurred annually.
As expected, the documentary talks about how keeping Wall Street investors happy was key to Boeing’s decision making, and this focus on profits led to many foolhardy choices to cut corners and save money. The documentary also points out how there was a culture of clandestineness, where employees would be punished for leaving a paper trail regarding any identified problems within the company, particularly with respect to the manufacturing of planes. All of this is unconscionable and shows how deplorably people can behave in order to maximize profits, and how people will think of the spilled blood of hundreds of people as a minor inconvenience towards achieving that goal.
What is deeply puzzling in this whole case is that Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing at the time, and nobody else in Boeing’s executive leadership team engaged in a legitimate cost-benefit analysis of the damage that would be done to the reputation of the company if their flagship plane had multiple crashes due to cut costs. More importantly, at least to them, nobody considered what that reputational damage would do to the precious profits that the company would be taking in the long run. Such breathtaking myopia and incompetence would be astonishing and unacceptable from someone running a local mom-and-pop, not to talk of a global, billion-dollar brand responsible for international air travel and purportedly helmed by the finest business minds. Of course, cutting costs is necessary in order to increase profit, but basic common sense would suggest that cutting safety costs is not an option and is a recipe for disaster.
One may look at what happened with Boeing’s 737 MAX plane and the behavior of the executives and point out that the capitalistic system is what allowed this to happen. One may argue that the crashes are the ineluctable result of putting Wall Street investments and profits before people, and it shows how competition does not invariably lead to legitimate improvements—especially when there is only competition between a duopoly, as seen between Airbus and Boeing in the air travel space. However, while capitalism is far from perfect, there is no economic system that is. Rather than operating from the assumption that this situation can be seamlessly explained by an anti-capitalist analysis, it makes more sense to argue that this is the result of human nature.
While capitalism does allow for callous people to make some questionable decisions that affect people’s lives, it is vital to cognize that there is no economic system that eradicates human greed. For instance, a socialist economic arrangement simply means that there will be fewer people with the capacity to exercise their ravenousness, not that there will be no greedy people or death that results from their selfishness. Additionally, such a planned economy does not allow for the innovation necessary to get ever-improving air travel, as seen by the new productions delivered by Airbus. The notion that socialism would eradicate greed rests on a failed understanding of human nature.
Unfettered capitalism leads to people putting the health of their finances over actual human lives. This is why governments are needed in order to curb these excesses of human avarice. Congress introducing the Aircraft Certification Reform and Accountability Act, H.R.8404 was the right approach to dealing with this issue. There ought to be certain safety standards that are nonnegotiable with respect to aircrafts. Also, documentaries that expose the nefarious practices of companies are necessary to hold people accountable. Downfall is a must-watch for anybody who regularly travels by plane.