I personally don’t think safety equipment should be optional when they are relatively inexpensive for the manufacturer to implement. Boeing were clearly viewing this as an opportunity to get a bit more money out of a customer as pure profit margin.
That's part of the problem with the debate about this though: that's a never ending slope. What constitutes relatively inexpensive for the 1,000s of parts in an aircraft?
There's a cost to human lives. We can quibble about what it is, but there's clearly a point where it is unreasonable and worse for society as a whole to make planes safer but more expensive.
They got it wrong here. But it's non-trivial to figure out without hindsight.
But who defines "inexpensive"? Is a $1000 feature inexpensive on a $30,000 car? Is an $80K feature inexpensive on an $100M airplane?
That's $4M across a fleet of 50 jets (Ethiopean's 737 order size) - so it's not exactly insignificant.
Japanese authorities required the feature, while the FAA and others did not. Should all of the onus be on the manufacturer? There's definitely an argument to be made that Boeing didn't reveal the full nature of MCAS to the FAA, but if that weren't true, is it Boeing's fault that they didn't bundle the feature, or is it the FAA's fault? And why did the Japanese require it, did they have information that the FAA did not have?
I guess I meant from the manufacturer's perspective. I doubt it costs Boeing 80k to implement, though that was apparently the list price for the feature. This comment also really belongs within the context of the safety expectations of your industry. For planes, there is a high safety expectation. For a hardware feature that costs Boeing maybe $1k (wild ass guess here) to implement, I would expect them NOT to view that as an opportunity to squeeze someone for more profit. They would obviously have to increase the selling price somewhat.
From a purely business case I can see why Boeing did what they did but I'm just philosophically opposed to profit being the only goal. Even if it was the only goal, this case pretty clearly shows that it wasn't 'worth it' for Boeing to skimp on safety features with what, 20B wiped off their valuation.
The problem with this is as that $4m sounds like a lot of money to pretty much everyone on the planet but if you are buying 50 medium size commercial jets it's literally a rounding error.
