Editorial

Those lives are, and must remain, in the forefront of our minds as we analyse the factors that contributed to their loss. So must the lives that will, by the hard work of investigators, be saved by the changes aviation will make as a result of their investigations’ recommendations.

Any aviation accident — indeed, any catastrophe on the scale of the 737 MAX — requires a chain of events to occur, each causing a failure of interlinked systems that were otherwise supposed to prevent that chain of events.

So it is with Boeing, where the ongoing dénouements of the tragedy of the 737 MAX are revealing, one by one, a series of errors by engineers, by executives, by regulators, and by those who were supposed to be working on the regulator’s behalf.

Nearly every revelation is radioactive: for Boeing, for the United States Federal Aviation Administration, for American politico-regulatory standing and for the industry. The contamination from the decisions that led to the deaths of those hundreds of passengers aboard 737 MAXes has yet to fully fall to earth, and it will be years, decades even, before the full impact of the story of the 737 MAX on aviation will be known.

Even this special edition of the World of Aviation, with its deep dive into the chapters of the MAX story as it unfolded, can only be a first volume of a history that will be present in the zeitgeist of aviation for the rest of our lives. Yet already we can see the shape of the tragic hubris that drove Boeing’s decisions, and the nemesis that is those decisions coming into the disinfectant glare of the world’s attention.

As with any aviation tragedy, our hope — indeed, our expectation — must be that the sunlight shone on the mistakes made will save lives in the future, as every air crash, near miss and safety incident before it has done.

Some of that work has already started, with ongoing discussions about the balance between increasing automation on the aircraft and flight deck on the one hand, and the consequences that has for pilot skills in terms of hand flying, the startle effect and a myriad human factors on the other.

Some of the work has yet to start, or even to be discovered. With the final report into the crash of Lion Air 610 now released and online for anyone to peruse, and US governmental investigations into Boeing livestreamed to our phones and tablets worldwide, one of the few things that is clear is that there remains a huge amount more to be discovered.

Those responsible for designing, building, certifying, and operating the MAX have a herculean task ahead of them

The scope of the work required, both to get the 737 MAX back into the air and to remedy the broken trust between airframer, regulator, flight crew, airlines and passengers, is immense, and it is ever-changing: even now, nobody knows exactly what will be required before the aircraft ever carries another passenger.

But one of the overwhelming impressions received from discussing the MAX within the industry is that those responsible for designing, building, certifying, and operating the MAX have a herculean task ahead of them — and that they are dedicated to it.

It will nonetheless be hard, and the target is by no means fixed yet. The world order in aviation is even more volatile, with the stability of the Boeing-Airbus, US-Europe, and FAA-EASA duopolies shaken to its core even as challengers to those duopolies continue their rise in the context of a global realpolitik that is characterised by fundamental instability.

The challenge is for everyone involved in aviation to learn the emerging and ongoing lessons of this tragedy, and to work our hardest to learn the lessons that will allow us to prevent it from happening again.

It has certainly been a challenge to write about, with the landscape changing underneath us seemingly daily, with uncertainties warring with three-hundred-page investigatory reports, with resignations and with condemnations. But those sort of challenges are what the World of Aviation is all about.

With deep-dive features from journalists spanning the globe from the UK to New Zealand via France and Hong Kong, our journalistic perspectives, our in-depth knowledge of the industry, and the people we talk to mean that you, the reader of this magazine, will know as much as anyone not directly involved in the MAX programme or the investigations into the crashes of JT610 and ET302.

That’s the promise of the WOFA: focussed, long-form articles telling the stories of aviation through engaging narrative and thoughtful analysis. We promise you more than just the news — we promise to explain the whys, the hows, the context, the history, the comparisons, and the alternatives.

I am enormously indebted to Tom Ballantyne, Victoria Bryan, John Bull and Will Horton for their thoughtful and thoughtprovoking work in this, our second issue and my first in the editor’s chair.

I look forward to bringing you many more issues, covering the wide gamut of topics that make up modern aviation, from technology and engineering to people and cultures, from the four corners of the globe and all the fascinating places in between.

As we continue to develop the WOFA and seek to cover the world of aviation, please let me know personally how we’re doing — and if you have any suggestions for how we can better serve you, I’d love to hear from you via email to [email protected], or on Twitter: I’m @thatjohn. I look forward to hearing from you, and to bringing you our next issue in two months.
Few would have imagined last March that the MAX would still be grounded at the time the WOFA goes to print. CLEMENS VASTERS

The contamination from the decisions that led to the deaths of those hundreds of passengers aboard 737 MAXes has yet to fully fall