I agree, plenty of fault to go around. The airline has negligence in their response as well. That was the part where I said people make mistakes and there were warning signs prior to failure. The aircraft should have been grounded until the root cause was isolated instead of just not being allowed to fly over water. A lot of balls were dropped and someone needs to pick them up and make sure they don't get dropped again.
If a fault is know about should the manufacturer inform customers, or do they act unilaterally? Who pays the cost if an airline grounds all of its planes prior to any accident based on the possibility of an incident? If a fault is known about, should it be the manufacturer that provides advice on the best course of action?
I hoped to engage in a debate about the possibilites of liabilities in an interesting field, however this thread was not started to ascertain or debate the true cause of an air incident, but rather to whinge about how people could have the temerity to question the quality of 'murican' engineering. Perhaps America doesn't make the safest planes.
OP, to try to draw a comparison between today's aviation industry, regulatory standards, engineering testing and media reporting, to those following a crash almost a century ago, is like comparing apples to giraffes. They are worlds apart.
For a start, as well as perhaps less sensationalist reporting in 1931, there were less old male pipe smokers keen to tell us about Fokkers poor safety record on an Internet forum. It's hypocritical to post your feelings here after complaining about the publics use of modern technology to film and report such events.
Here's the plane involved in the 1931 crash you mentioned, along with a typical camera of the era
OP......'The press is waiting to report it.'
As are you, it seems.
You may consider Boeing to be hard done by here, however the aviation industry is held to high standards, and rightfully so. To quote the low number of aviation deaths in US, is to ignore safety records globally. Boeing don't fare overly well in that regard, although I am acutely aware, living 1/2 an hours drive from Lockerbie that not accidents are Boeings fault.
PS. Being a contributer to a few, mainly uk based forums, I have to say sometimes this place has me shaking my head in utter disbelief. As a Scot I find it an interesting take on a slice of American viewpoints on society. I perhaps naively felt this thread was about an interest in aviation safety. I have never been so dumbfounded at how an ignorant description of communism, or an uneducated viewpoint on modern 'wokery' can be segued into any topic, as has been shown previously in this thread.
