Doneul:

I'm not here to defend Boeing. Far from it. But I feel that the bulk of the evil was a departure from the high ideals of pride of design and safety (engineering) to the concentration of profits at the expense of the former.

If you listened to the interview on Fresh Air, you would have heard that the reporter emphasized that. If you read a book like Sutter's "747" you would have eperienced first hand the kind of decisions that a great aeronautical engineer went through in designing and bringing to production a great product went through.

Meanwhile, Boeing had made horrible decisions before. A famous case I can recall was the loss of a Boeing 747 cargo jet in Japan due to a faulty repair. At that time we were aware of it because Boeing Corporate took responsibility fairly quickly. This was also brought up in the Fresh Air broadcast.

Unfortunately, power in the company shifted to a less morally committed type of executive. And a slide to degradation occurred. It is all too true and all too scary when this occurs. It is NOT and indictment of Capitalism nor any other formalized 'ism so much as it is a reminder that honor and standards are always with us, and we lose sight of them at our peril.

The other major failure was the embedding of federal oversight into Boeing coporate. This was understandable to an extent. If there is a high standard of quality and ethics with the manufacturer, their people are the most understanding of the product. But the principle of oversight is for a second or third party to be competent and observant. Clearly, the demarcation was muddied here.

What happened was outrageous and Boeing has fallen greatly in the moral universe. It is not unlike Volkswagen's emissions testing scandal, only Boeing has immediate blood on its hands, whereas Volkswagen has merely succeeded in poisoning the planet.