Nah the crashes were due to criminal negligence by Boeing when they added control and navigation features that the pilots weren’t trained on how to use, how to disable, or even the fact that these new features existed. They also made the new automatic control feature (called MCAS) reliant on a single sensor. Guess what, then they had sensor failures on that single point of failure and the planes flew themselves into the ground while the pilots had no idea what was going on. Oh and the warning lights that would tell the pilots that something was wrong? Optional equipment, sold by Boeing. Neither of the carriers whose planes crashed had purchased that ‘optional’ safety package.

The lack of parts issue blew out a door in flight, but the plane didn’t crash and nobody was killed thankfully. But that started the investigation that showed how badly Boeing has been fucking up safety inspections for years now.

This is a good article explaining the crashes which should have put several Boeing executives in prison. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/22/18275736/boeing-737-max-plane-crashes-grounded-problems-info-details-explained-reasons

Oh I’m aware of how small the issue is in comparison. It’s just ridiculous that there is an issue like this at this point. They’re almost a decade behind schedule, and received nearly double the funding of their direct competitor who has launched their comparable system nearly 30 times, with 13 crewed launches. They were supposed" to be the faster and more reliable option because of their legacy history, instead they’ve just shown that they really cannot compete in the modern launch market.

We need multiple options for redundancy, safety, and lowering or removing reliance on foreign launch capabilities… and this is just a terrible option in comparison.

And helium is the least bad thing to have leak into your ship