HN Explorer

Ask HN: Would you fly on a Boeing 737-MAX 8 today?

18 points by telesilla ↗ HN
I have a few flights coming up and checked that none of them, according to [1] are on a 737-MAX 8. I'm not sure what I'd do, if that was the case. What's your take? Are the MAX 9 and 10 safer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_operators

19 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] thread
ArtWomb
Yeah. It's just China (and Ethiopia) grounding flights due to geo-trade leverage. If $BA drops 30% it may even be time to load up. Besides, once its your time to go...
Someone1234
China (aka Comac) is manufacturing them in Zhoushan. How does it help China in "geo-trade leverage" when they're grounding planes Chinese workers are building and selling?
iruoy
This doesn't look good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Accidents_and_i...

> The 737 MAX's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) has come under scrutiny for faulty angle-of-attack readings in the Lion Air accident[126] and the apparent similarity of the Ethiopian Airlines crash.[127]

> On March 11, 2019, in response to the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) ordered the suspension of operations of the 96 Boeing 737 MAX 8s operated by Chinese-based airlines, citing the similarity between the two accidents. A number of airlines and regulatory authorities around the world followed suit, though some airlines still continued to operate the type as of this date.[128] On the same day, in response to the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, Indonesia ordered the temporary suspension of operations of eleven Boeing 737 MAX 8s operated by Garuda Indonesia and Lion Air.[129][130] Inspection is set to begin on 12 March, 2019.[131]

codegeek
I was just thinking about it yesterday and 2 major accidents in less than a year and both flights crashing within minutes of takeoff is a serious concern. I m definitely a bit scared. When we book flights, we generally don't check the aircraft model but going forward, I may.
sparkling
The thing that scratches my head: after the Lion Air incident, all 737 MAX operators should have been made aware and relayed relevant info on the problem to their pilots. Surely the Ethiopia pilots heard about the incident and were aware of the issue?
muzani
I'd go on one. The odds are still safer than driving a car. The worst that can happen is death, which is inevitable anyway.
nicholas73
This statistic always bothers me. The statement is made true by reporting deaths per mile, versus deaths per trip. Most of the risk is during takeoff and landing, with thousands of miles in between. In contrast car trips are short with most the risk during the actual miles. IIRC, going by deaths per trip makes a flight about 3x more dangerous.

Now that's not a whole lot still, and the per mile stat is still important in that one should not choose a cross state drive over a flight for safety reasons.

copperx
> Going by deaths per trip makes a flight about 3x more dangerous.

Do you mind sharing your back-of-the-napkin math? It seems wrong given the low probability of crash per airplane flight (e.g., there are about 100,000 flights daily and close to zero per day fatal crashes). In fact, about one fatal air crash happens every 7,000,000 airplane flights. I don't know anybody who knows anybody that has died in a commercial airplane crash. I had 2 friends that died in traffic accidents. Anecdotes aren't data, but no one would be surprised by these numbers.

Here are the odds of dying by cause: https://www.nsc.org/work-safety/tools-resources/injury-facts...

telesilla
I would also want to filter out plane crashes caused by interference: suicides, bombings, hijackings, birdstrike and the like. This is because I fly happier knowing that mechanical or electrical error is so very very low. This would include however cases such as Air France Flight 447, which was a combination of faulty readings and human error. So, the recent Ethiopia and Lion air crashes would definitely be included, though maybe these were avoidable if the pilots were better educated? So I guess I'd need to see three categories: outside interference, pilot error, mechanical/electrical error.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
rlanday
The average person makes far more trips by car than by airplane.
wahern
Feel free to tear into this. I know it's flawed. But FWIW here's some back-of-the-napkin math I put together when discussing in an e-mail thread. Note however that it's slightly conservative WRT road fatalities. You can choose not to drive drunk, drive defensively, etc, and substantially reduce your risk because a large fraction of deaths are the drunk and other reckless drivers themselves.

  > > > > > In 2017 there were 0.06 deaths per million flights of large,
  > > > > > commercial airliners:
  > > > > > 
  > > > > >   https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aviation-safety/2017-safest-year-on-record-for-commercial-passenger-air-travel-groups-idUSKBN1EQ17L
  > > > > > 
  > > > > > By contrast, in 2009 white people averaged 1,500 trips per year:
  > > > > > 
  > > > > >   https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/2010cpr/chap1.cfm
  > > > > > 
  > > > > > Multiply 1,500 trips/person by 360 million people (2009 U.S.
  > > > > > population), divide ~35,000 road fatalities by the number of trips,
  > > > > > and multiple by 1,000,000, and you literally get 0.06 fatalities per
  > > > > > million trips. Even if the numbers are slightly inaccurate
  > > > > > (different years, different demographics, wrong cohorts), the point
  > > > > > is that strictly speaking flying really isn't that much safer than
  > > > > > driving. Certainly nothing like the several orders of magnitude
  > > > > > claimed; not when using the more meaningful metric of fatalities per
  > > > > > trip.
  > ...
  > > > > I don't think that normalizes for the number of people on the plane,
  > > > > though.
  > > >
  > > > Hmmmmm. Good point... I think.
  > > >
  > > like, does a flight of 100 people count as a single "trip", or as 100? If
  > > it only counts as one, then you should normalize, because I'm sure they
  > > don't count each crash as a single fatality.
  > 
  > Here are numbers from 2018 from the original source:
  > 
  >   https://news.aviation-safety.net/2019/01/01/aviation-safety-network-releases-2018-airliner-accident-statistics/
  >   https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SDp7p1y6m7N5xD5_fpOkYOrJvd68V7iy6etXy2cetb8/edit#gid=1448957446
  > 
  > That's 0.39 fatal *accidents* per million flights, based on 15 fatal
  > flights and 38,100,0000 departures. There were 556 total deaths from those
  > 15 fatal flights.[1]
  > 
  > The question, is how many passengers on average per flight. If we divide
  > the number of deaths (556) by the number of fatal flights (15), we get 37
  > on average. If we divide the number of total passengers for 2018 (4.3
  > billion[2]) by the total number of flights (38,100,000), we get 112
  > passengers on average.
  > 
  > So average number of fatalities per departure could be somewhere between
  > 0.01 and 0.003. Definitely lower than 0.06 but nowhere close to 750x
  > lower.
  > 
  > [1] I'm using passenger+cargo because there's only one figure given for
  > total number of departures and I assume that's the aggregate. Counting
  > just passengers we get 0.36 instead of 0.39 which isn't much of a
  > difference, probably because cargo flights have only 2 people on board.
  > Still, it would be nice to know the total number of passenger-only
  > departures.
  >
  > [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/
chatmasta
I think the better question is, assuming you need to fly somewhere, given the choice between a 737-MAX 8 and another plane, how much more money would you pay to ride on the other plane?
atmosx
Oh, so instead of pushing flight safety for everyone, all we have to do is lower the price “enough to make the risk acceptable”?
shakkhar
Yes. Like most things in life, flight safety is not a binary choice. To complete what you said - "we have to lower the price enough to make the risk acceptable _to enough people so as to operate the flight at break even point_".
quickthrower2
How often do you “need” to fly somewhere. Almost never for most people. Unless you do a travelling job, then hopefully your company isn’t a cheapskate.
Someone1234
Today? Yes, I'd fly on one. Next week? We'll have to see.

We know very little about the Ethiopian Airlines crash (and yes I've see flightradar24 data). The speculation is worried it is related MCAS like the Lion Air crash, but until we know that even in a preliminary way it feels a little knee-jerky to boycott 737-MAX 8s.

Assuming the flight data recorders are recoverable, we'll hopefully learn more and can discover if there's any similarities between the two accidents. If they are both MCAS related I suspect we'll see a international grounding of the aircraft class.

dev_north_east
Nope. I've double checked all my booked flights for the rest of the year to ensure I'm not going on any of them.

I think this is gonna be a big issue and we'll see the entire fleet scraped.