No, I don't think so.
I guess because air travel has become SO safe, people tend to forget that they are miles above the earth, in an environment in which they normally would not survive, ensconced in a thin, thin, thin aluminum tube made up of tens of thousands of parts manufactured by the lowest bidder and, now that we are so far advanced, in a machine which depends on millions of lines of computer code to get them safely to their destination.
I mean...what could possibly go wrong?
Take the Lufthansa flight; an AOA sensor problem (sound familiar?) quickly handled by the crew with good systems knowledge and procedural knowledge. Ground the fleet? No, issue an AFM change and keep on flying. Pretty much exactly what Boeing has done, right? The key here? The crew.
Now look at the AirAsia accident. The rudder travel limiters malfunctioned. "The crew ignored the recommended procedure to deal with the problem and disengaged the autopilot which contributed to the subsequent loss of control." This potential problem (rudder limiter) had been foreseen and a procedure developed and trained. The key here is again the crew. Ground the fleet? No, ensure the crews are properly trained and keep on flying. Pretty much exactly what Boeing has done, right?
Note, I am absolutely NOT (at this point) placing blame on the Lion Air or Ethiopian crews. There is NO DATA at present that would delineate all the causal factors in those two accident chains. Was it a runaway MCAS? No one knows yet. If it was runaway MCAS, did the crews apply the appropriate procedure? No one knows yet.
What do we know? Well, we know there have been about 350 (total) Boeing MAX deliveries, starting in 2017. We can guesstimate those aircraft are put into service almost immediately and given the type routes they fly, they probably fly 6 or more legs (cycles) a day. So maybe in the last 12 months a huge number of cycles have been flown, maybe 700,00 or 800,000 cycles. (350 aircraft, 6 cycles per day, 365 days per year). A guesstimate but you get the idea. Since introduced there have probably been well over a million cycles of this aircraft type.
Then you have two accidents and suddenly the aircraft is totally unsafe. Uh...yeah.
As mentioned there are a very large number of potential causal factors. Assume for one moment (and I'm not saying it is true or pointing fingers at these two crews) that it WAS the failure of the crew to apply appropriate procedural knowledge. Are we going to blame Boeing and the aircraft for a crew failure to act correctly? Is there no "pilot error" anymore? (I realize "pilot error" is the go-to in just about every investigation.) Should we ground the fleet for pilot error? As pointed out in the Lufthansa AOA problem, there was just an AFM change and the fleet kept flying. Again, Boeing has already put out a FCOB that reinforces crew knowledge of an already existing procedure to counter the runaway MCAS problem.
