Flight/Risk

Films like this tug at your emotions. Afterall, how dare a huge corporate entity, with government oversight, murder hundred of people with the potential to kill many more? Well, if every story has multiple sides this film pretty much narrows it down to incriminating Boeing, only topically exploring the hubris, callousness, and possible criminal actions of the Boeing corporate management.

No one went to jail curiously...and, I deduce by various sources on the web, the lawyers for the victims made off individually much better than bereaved relatives. As dark as the corporate greed was, it turns a blind eye to the equally questionable supposed compensation process.

The viewer, and I believe, victims would be better served by a surgical and methodical look into the many aspects creating the perfect storm where Boeing went from being the premier producer of safe and dependable aircraft to a company making sub-standard, and un-safe, aircraft in service of milking Wall Street, and airline clients, for obscenely massive monetary gain.

This was preventable, yet all of the early employees sounding quality control issues were literally erased by Boeing (see an pre-Max expose on CBS 60-Minutes where alarm bells over the 787 "Dreamliner" quality predicted future deadly crashes). In this film we see a few latter-day Boeing employee whistleblowers - basically too little, too late to stop the deadly wheels already in motion. The whole terrible tragedy could have been caught earlier, much earlier. This is a big ommission to a better understanding of a deadly corporate climate.

As such, Flight/Risk simply makes Boeing look evil and the lawyers seeking compensation like some kind of saints. I hardly believe this serves the victims in the most reverent sense. And, the Max is back in the air, perhaps safer, yet still highly flawed, which no one seems to want to explore in depth. Something still smells bad in this whole terrible tragedy and this film ignores it. Maybe one day a really hard-hitting, courageously in-depth probe will tell a more balanced accounting. One that truly exposes how a revered and respected Boeing became a criminal organization able to reduce the FAA to the level of a lachey accomplice.