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.

KEYWORDS:

• Public secret
• public apology
• scandal
• social media
• arms companies

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for sustained and detailed engagement with our work as well as the editors of Critical Studies on Security for an excellent publishing experience. We would also like to thank Katy Parry for kindly reading an early and very rough draft of this paper, as well as participants of the 2022 BISA panel at which this work was presented: 'Remembrance, War and Peace: Critical Approaches to Violence and Militarism’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2023.2267328

Notes

1. Twitter has undergone rebranding and is now known as ‘X’. However, we use ‘Twitter’ in this article to reflect the branding at the time of data collection.

2. As Pelkmans and Machold (2011) explain, the process of labelling something – whether secret, not secret, transparent, or conspiracy theory – is not neutral and functions as evidence of the aforementioned political work of knowledge production.

3. Family also appears outside of the context of the crash (tweet 1 ‘It’s like one big 787 #Dreamliner hug. Congrats @united on completing your Dreamliner family!’).

4. NASA have also had catastrophic safety failures, e.g. the Challenger Disaster, where crew have been killed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Jester

Natalie Jester is a Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. Her research focuses on militarisation and security discourses in digital spaces. Common themes include gender, state identity, and secrecy/transparency.

Emma Dolan

Emma Dolan is Associate Professor in Peace and Development Studies at the University of Limerick's Politics and Public Administration Department. She works on topics of Feminist IR, political apologies, gender-based violence, and cultural militarisation.