LETTER: Boeing has a problem after multiple disasters

It took only a few tragic minutes for two Boeing 737 Max airliners to crash — one in October 2018 in Indonesia, the other five months later in Ethiopia — killing everyone on board each aircraft. But it took months after the first disaster for Boeing to be ordered by our Federal Aviation Administration to ground them.

During the interim, Boeing and the FAA claimed that the 737 Max was a safe plane. Only after other governments (China and Canada, to cite two) had grounded them did they stop flying.

More than a year after the first disaster, Boeing’s board of directors fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg. That happened in December after another Boeing project, the Starliner, designed to fly people into space, failed. Boeing has decided its chairman of the board, a longtime board member who has served through these catastrophes, is the appropriate replacement as CEO.

Who in their right mind would board another 737 Max (or a Starliner) on the basis of his assurance that it’s safe now?

Not I.