At the gate at PDX in June, the woman beside me asked the agent what kind of plane we were flying. Not nervously. Flatly, the way you would ask whether a restaurant uses peanut oil. The agent said an A320 and she said good and went back to her phone.
Two years ago nobody in a boarding area knew what aircraft they were sitting on. Now plenty do, and they know one model by name, and it is not a name Boeing chose to make famous.
Lion Air in October. Ethiopian in March. Three hundred and forty-six people. The fleet grounded worldwide since spring with no date to fly again.
What came out afterward is the part that matters to anyone who works on brands. A flight control system most pilots had never been told about, triggered by a single sensor, with the alert that would have flagged that sensor's failure sold as an optional extra. Training kept minimal because minimal training was the sales proposition: your pilots can fly this one without a simulator.
The crashes are what people remember, but they are not what destroyed the trust. What destroyed the trust was the sequence of ordinary commercial decisions the crashes made visible.
I keep thinking about the crew of the Nostromo. For most of that film they believe they and the company want the same thing, and the belief is not naive, it is simply how anyone survives a job. Then Ripley pulls the special order off the science officer's screen and reads the priority list: return the specimen, all other considerations secondary, crew expendable. The creature is loose either way. What breaks the crew is finding out the ranking existed the whole time, written down, in a document they were never meant to see.
Every organization has a version of that ranking, and the brand is the promise that you would not like what it says if you saw it. Boeing's ranking put a delivery schedule and a competitive answer to the A320neo above a disclosure it had already decided pilots did not need. That is not villainy. That is a series of reasonable-sounding meetings, which is worse, because it means it is reproducible anywhere.
Every organization has a version of that ranking, and the brand is the promise that you would not like what it says if you saw it.
There is no communications fix here, and I say that as someone who has watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Boeing's brand was never advertising. It was an assumption carried by people who never thought about the company, and an assumption that quiet takes decades to build and one document to break. It gets rebuilt in years of uneventful flights, not in statements.
I booked a flight last week and checked the equipment type before I paid. I have never once done that before.