How has the Boeing 737 MAX crisis, and Boeing’s actions more broadly, impacted public trust in aviation safety, and what role does corporate accountability play in restoring confidence?

Imagine boarding a plane, unaware that a hidden software system—one you’ve never heard of—could override the pilot and send the aircraft into a nosedive. When Boeing introduced MCAS, it was meant to solve a problem. Instead, it created a deadly one. The truth is that this kind of event happened in the series of accidents involving Boeing 737 MAX airplane, which was found to have MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) linked as the main cause of two fatal crashes that killed 346 people. The impact spread widespread concern among the aviation world, raising questions not only about engineering decisions of the aircraft but also about regulatory and corporate responsibilities of Boeing itself. Investigations have since revealed that the crashes were not only failures of technology but failures in accountability and trust. However, there hasn’t been much particular research that has focused on how these failures affected public trust and perceptions of aviation safety, particularly through social media. Using BlueSky’s API, a dataset of 10,455 posts was collected and filtered from all of BlueSky’s posts using Boeing-related hashtags to ensure relevance. VADER sentiment analysis6 was applied to measure polarity scores across the dataset, using standard thresholds to classify positive, neutral, and negative sentiment. To measure public sentiment trends over time, posts from BlueSky dating back to 2021 were analyzed, revealing that average sentiment remained negative, with a mean composite score of –0.43 across the study period and sharp declines following major Boeing-related incidents. The Boeing 737 MAX crisis demonstrates how failures in corporate responsibility and inaccuracies can weaken public trust in aviation safety. This trust can only be rebuilt through better methods of transparency, enhanced regulation and enforcement, and a deepened commitment to accountability to ensure this trust is maintained by the aviation industry.