I’m a lover of movies of all genres, but documentaries always captivate my attention the most. I'm also a lover of airplanes. Since I was young, I’ve always been fascinated by airplanes and how they worked and at some point I even wanted to be a pilot, (but changed that out for a career in film). Combining these two, the Netflix documentary “Downfall: The Case against Boeing” was a perfect match for my viewing pleasure.
When you think of aircraft manufacturers, you will probably imagine the Boeing 737. This airplane is the most common commercial airplane you'll encounter. Beginning in the 1950s, Boeing was rising to the top in popularity for commercial aircrafts. The Boeing 7X7 series has overtaken airports by storm since arrival. However, in recent years Boeing has been hit with controversy of some of their airplanes crashing themselves.
The documentary begins by giving background on the manufacturing in Boeing's headquarters in Seattle. Since their beginning, the company has prioritized safety and innovation, always having multiple safety inspectors and engineers overseeing construction of commercial airplanes. This is why they got so popular. Boeing was safe and reliable, until it wasn't.
In the 1980s, Boeing's main competitor was Airbus, a European company. With new management, Boeing began to prioritize passing this company in revenue. Their main goal was to be better than Airbus within profit margin. With this, safety and reliability were down on the list of priorities and Boeing’s plane manufacturing began to decline behind the scenes. Planes were being made with cheaper materials, safety inspectors were lessened to one per team. One inspector cannot catch everything, so tools were being left on the planes, and other hazardous materials that impact the dependability of the planes. This trend kept going till 2017, when the Boeing 737 Max was released. This aircraft was supposed to be a new updated and better version than it's successor, the 737, but became something much worse.
Lion air flight 610 was an Indonesian flight scheduled to travel domestically in 2018. It was supposed to be a regular flight but crashed into the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia on October 29th, just 13 minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 passengers and crew. The airplane used in this flight was a boeing 737 Max. At first no one suspected that the crash could be the fault of the actual airplane. Many speculated that it was the pilots fault and that both pilots had made errors. When the blackbox of the plane was found, the cockpit voice recording and the flight data recorder. The cockpit voice recorder records the interactions between pilots and traffic control, and the flight data recorder shows the altitude, airspeed, and direction, and the throttles status as the plane flies. What this data showed investigators was extremely odd. The air traffic controllers warned the pilots they were too close to approaching terrain and that the plane was too low, however this was completely false from the pilots point of view. From his perspective, the flight was going smoothly. In simple terms, the planes sensors were wrong and were reading data falsely. Most planes now have automatic functions so this wrong data caused the plane to move upwards due to the mechanics. This was completely unnecessary and the pilot tried to fight this automatic function and it caused the plane to go down, and crash into the sea. This was not the only instance of this technical error. The documentary oves another example of an Ethiopian flight that encountered the same exact issue. This was an error in the plane's mechanics, not the pilot's fault.
The documentary goes far more in depth on the actual technicalities and also the aftermath of the tragedy and it's effects on families involved. Boeing took no responsibility for this faulty manufacturing issue that happened two times and families were left to fight for their lost loved ones. I really enjoyed this documentary and it shows how going the short way for money and status can sacrifice so much.
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