Arms, aviation, and apologies: mapping the Boeing social media response to the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash

Abstract

Boeing is famous for aviation but also produces arms, making $29.2 billion from the latter in 2018. The role of the arms trade in facilitating death can be considered a ‘public secret’ - known, but socially unacknowledged. This allows Boeing to represent its role as one of ‘neutral’ technological advancement, obscuring violence engendered by certain products. This paper builds on works on public secrecy, which investigate how (un)acknowledgement obscures everyday security arrangements. How can we know the public secret? We argue that public apology and scandal are boundary-delineating practices, locating certain issues within the public secret and rendering others knowable and sayable. We examine Boeing’s Twitter response to the March 2019 Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crash. The content: 1) produced the crash as a tragedy, positioning Boeing as ‘sorry’ and capable of grief, 2) allowed Boeing to ‘take responsibility’, positioning safe operation of their products as a moral obligation. Within the wider political contexts of the arms trade and responsibility for safety in commercial aviation, we explain Boeing’s Twitter navigation of apology/scandal not as simply corporate face-saving, but as a practice of (re)confirming the public secret, positioning aviation deaths as knowable/grievable, and those lost to the arms industry as neither.