KC-46? That POS still isn't reliably refueling, and if I understand correctly USAF is rumored to be looking for a replacement.
F-15EX? It can't use conformal fuel tanks the F-15E has been using for almost 40 bloody years. No, that means it can't achieve its major selling point of carrying 22 missiles either.
737 MAX? Clearly maximum kek given this and that whole comedy about safety exemptions yesterday.
I want to like Boeing, but I feel it's justifiable to tell them to go fuck themselves at this point.
EDIT: I also forgot that V-22 Osprey that crashed into the sea off Japan back in November, killing all on board. As far as I'm aware, that led to a complete grounding of all Ospreys by all US military branches and also the JSDF pending investigation findings.
The number one reason the planes start to have issues is essentially a lack of effective oversight. Not sure how much blame boeing gets for this, but this is a prime example for a certain amount of effective regulation having a positive impact on the safety culture within a corporation.
The MAX should never have been accepted as being the same airframe as the original 737.
I agree that a lack of oversight is a core issue, but it also isn’t the job of the government to make your products good. The government can set same rules, but it’s on Boeing to execute.
Of course, besides that, Boeing itself is maybe THE major force reducing oversight.
> but it also isn’t the job of the government to make your products good
A century of progress in domestic automotive sector would disagree with your opinion, here.
If it wasn't for the gub'ment infringing on the liberties of the little guys (corporations), we'd still be driving cars without airbags, seatbelts, and proper fuel tank safety regulations.
I think we’re in agreement on that. I wasn’t saying that regulations shouldn’t exist. I was saying that if Boeing makes shitty products that kill people, then it is entirely their fault if they go out of business. The person I was replying to seemed to be shuffling some of the onus onto the government.
I think it’s to a significant degree the government’s fault that air travel wasn’t safe and people got killed, but it is entirely Boeing’s fault that their products suck and kill people and are losing them money.
Regulators getting cozy with the people they're supposed to regulate happens in every industry, in every country, and... understandably so. Those are people who have the same expertise, same training, who work together all their life.
It may be one of the most difficult problems to solve.
I guess the question I would have is: to what degree is this happening in the US versus other places like Europe or China, and what can we learn by examining this in those places.
I would hope FAA learned their lesson after being (rightfully!) publicly humiliated by Trump doing their job better and proceeding to lose their prestige as the leading authority of aviation authorities.
Or maybe he was talking about Trump nominating a new FAA head who illegally retaliated against a pilot who was a whistleblower at Delta regarding safety concerns.
Its not "getting cozy", its good old felony called corruption. You can tackle that, its not that hard if done correctly. But one needs to avoid conflict of interest from all angles
Number one reason is lack of meaningful competition (political buying decision Boeing vs Airbus) and industry monopolization. In the 1960s there were Douglas, Convair, Lockheed, Boeing domestically
Even funnier because Boeing tried being cute with the Canadian aerospace industry, and instead shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun.
Boeing tried to screw Canada's Bombardier out of the C series aircraft by getting the US Gov to throw on tariffs for an aircraft they had no competitor for. Everything was already done AFAIK that point too; certifications, and everything, the plane was entering into production to fufill US airline orders. It cost $1.3 billion Canadian to develop the plane.
I suspect Boeing thought that'd be the end of it. Airbus had other ideas. They got the whole Bombardier C series aircraft for about $550 million and opened an assembly plant in Alabama in Mobile, about 350 miles from Boeing's assembly plant in Huntsville. Along with the orders from US airlines (I think for 130 aircraft). No more tariffs because these planes are now US made.
As a Canadian it stings a little, but I can't help but cackle at the fact that Boeing execs handed their one major competitor several billion in revenue on a silver platter. And Boeing will need years if not decades to come up with a competitor.
Sad for Canada and Bombardier, but good for the plane: With Airbus's money, marketing, stability and reputation, the amount of planes made will, I think, be a multiple of what it would have been with Bombardier. It's a really good plane, too. Comfy, efficient, reliable so far.
And a spectacular own goal for Boeing that they deserved so much :D
This version of the story is too generous to Bombardier who really screwed up the development of the CS100/A220. Even if Boeing hadn't done anything they would have needed many more bailouts from the government to get anywhere.
Development costs doubled from 2 billion to 4 billion. Then when they went well over 5 billion and the federal government + Quebec had to bail them out to the tune of 1.5+ billion. Even without Boeing, had Airbus not stepped in, it's unlikely the CS100 would have succeeded. European buyers had already started to cancel orders seeing the debacle unfold.
Despite having many orders on the books, banks refused to lend to Bombardier because they expected them to make a loss on the airplane.
So yeah, screw Boeing who played really dirty and Trump helped them (the tariffs were reversed a year later when a more independent body reviewed them). But had Bombardier not been in a massive financial hole this wouldn't have mattered.
KC-46: The USAF had Airbus tankers on order, before Boeing sued and the cinzract was, surprise, awarded to Boeing again. So the USAF and Boeing share equal blame here.
I have to read up on the F-15EX, generally so these kinds of upgrades are basically new designs and as such prone to delays and a bunch of technical issues. Especially for military aircraft.
Nothing to add on the MAX that wasn't said already. Boeing sure has its work cut out developing a new version, the existing 737 design is beyond its design life by now.
Well, if a plane crashes for unonown reasons, it is quite normal to ground the fleet, nothing special about Boeig here.
USAF was (and I suspect still is, given KC-46) happy to go with Airbus, it was GAO[1][2] who intervened alleging corruption and mishandling to give Boeing the platter instead.
The problem is that the perverse incentives of the financial markets are pervasive across American society. The cancer of quarterly-driven management has even spread across Europe, particularly after the '00s.
> What is a contract for it can be broken with "no-fault"?
Plenty of contracts end when one party wants out for whatever reason. A contract is just setting the rules. One of the rules can be that it can be dissolved at the demand of any party.
Interesting. What would be the point of a contract written as such?
So a contract can be, I pay you $100 then you do the work, but either party can walk away with "no-fault" at anytime. So I pay, then you walk away without doing anything? What would be the point?
It's been every year at a all time high since 1970... and it's been decades already that we know it won't get repaid.
> Our government and judicial systems are now governed by money.
Weren't they always or did you believe in fables before?
> Collapse is inevitable
Collapse it inevitable if other countries lose trust in the US and its economy. We are not there yet because many other options are still worse. Everything is measured relatively to other things.
The explanation that, "people have nowhere better to invest/go" is my favorite explanation for who the US will stay strong. It comes off to me as very authoritarian and almost a threat.
Can the rest of the world step up for once and produce something worthwhile? It’s entirely pathetic that 8 billion people have so little to show that we have to constantly be in this situation.
It was not a "window and chunk of fuselage blowout" but a safety door blowout. In case 737MAX-9 is configured with maximum possible seat count then additional safety door have to be added.
On lower seat count configs (like on that incident flight) those extra door are still present but locked, hidden and not visible from inside.
The fuselage opening for the door is still present as it’s a common part. The door is replaced with a window panel to seal the space, there is no door there.
Any mechanical component - even if unused - requires servicing and maintenance. No airline would want to pay for that and the fuel cost on every flight to carry a door they don’t want.
Why would it need replacing? It's a permanent element, unless the aircraft is refitted in the future when they can remove the panel and fit a door. The door's connection to the fuselage isn't a service item, just the mechanism itself.
The patent was not claiming this was a maintenance issue. They were pointing out that if there were indeed a hidden exit door here that it would still require maintenance, which is why there wasn’t actually a hidden exit door here. Instead it’s a solid panel of some kind.
It's not a permanent welded-in plug, rather it's a door-shaped panel that is secured in using the fastenings where the door would be fastened. That's why you can see the outline.
The one thing an airline likes less than carrying extra weight is not being able to change their minds later :) Or rather, for the option to be available for whoever they sell the plane to after they're done with it.
I recall that following the 2019 deaths that Boeing was going to rebrand the Max with some number series or similar, so that passengers didn't get nervous flying in it.
How do I as a passenger identified all the rebranding permutations of the Max so that I make sure my family is not flying in them?
Not sure if you are serious, but I agree. I like to take a train+ferry whenever possible even if it adds a day or two to the journey. Did lots of trips on the Amsterdam-Newcastle and Sweden-Poland routes. Uncomparably good memories compared to plane travel which is uniformly awful.
I have been scouting cruise websites for ways to also replace transatlantic flights, but they are way too sparse.
Ferry routes have really taken a pounding in the UK over the past decade or two unfortunately. Combination of the channel tunnel and low cost airlines I would making former routes uneconomical to run is, I would imagine, where the majority of the blame lies.
One example: I've always wanted to do a motorcycle tour around Scandinavia, particularly Norway, but it's a heck of a ride from Calais all the way up there. For many bikes, far enough that you'd need to organise a service and tyre change at least once whilst on the trip. At the time when I was first thinking about this I had a bike with a 3750 mile service interval, although I could generally squeak 4000 - 5000 miles out of tyres.
So my plan back in 2014 had been to ride up from East Anglia to Aberdeen, get on the ferry to Lerwick, and then get a ferry from Lerwick to Stavanger in Norway to cut off a lot of "transit" riding. Unfortunately it turned out the website with this ferry route listed was lying to me, and that actually it had been retired in something like 2008. (You can still find this route listed on some websites today, but it's long since gone.)
Nowadays I'm not even sure it's possible to get a ferry from the UK to Germany. I've never done it but you used to be able to get a ferry from Harwich (very convenient for me) to Bremerhaven: no more, sadly.
There was a ferry from Emden, Germany to Kristiansand, Norway which might have been interesting. But it recently got shut down[1] due to financial difficulties.
Some of these ferries still run for freight-only, e.g. link below. I'm not sure if they'd take a motorbike (or car) as freight though, except on a trailer.
> One example: I've always wanted to do a motorcycle tour around Scandinavia, particularly Norway, but it's a heck of a ride from Calais all the way up there.
Hah, that brings back memories: in the early 80s I did a bike (not motor-) journey from home (in the south of England) to Sweden, taking the Dover-Calais ferry and then via France-Belgium-Netherlands-Germany-Denmark. Must've been ~900 miles of pedalling.
But I didn't attempt a tour of Scandinavia once I got there! (I was headed over there to stay with relatives for a few months.)
There’s basically only one ocean liner in the world although cruise ships do reposition and there are some other options. Trains are more practical in Europe although long distance can involve a fair number of changes and time spent in train stations.
I don’t love plane trips but they generally get the trip over fairly quickly if the journey isn’t the goal. And longer haul comfort is mostly just a matter of money.
There's plenty of places where geography means they are, especially in Europe — around Scandinavia, Greece, the British Isles, Spanish islands etc. Presumably the Caribbean and some of South East Asia is the same.
The journey is obviously slower, but that can either be a way to rest on a long road journey (truck drivers in Europe sometimes use longer ferry routes so they get their mandatory rest period), or an opportunity to sleep in a fairly decent bed.
I quoted some one verbatim who works at Airbus who said Airbus Australia was exclusively supporting Defences helicopter fleet. I must have misunderstood what they said and Qantas/Jetstar are flying Airbus but are being supported by another party.
Google says "737 dash 8 through 10" — and Ryanair at least (who has huge order of MAX's) uses "737-8200" or "737 MAX 10."
However, considering how common it is for an airline to switch product, it would be quite difficult to ensure your flight isn't on one of these aircraft without double-checking during boarding — then refusing to board.
Unless the legal fram work changes, it won't work. Airlines are totally allowed to book passeneges on other flights and to switch aircraft anytime the have to, want of feel like it. None of which is a reason to be reimbursed as a passenger. So what do you wanna do, when you book a non-Boeing flight, the Airbus plane has technical peoblems and the airline uses one of the available Boeing planes instead? The airline won't reimburse anyone, so it woupd be up to the website doing so, if they sold this service.
By the way, Boeing planes are generally speaking perfectly fine. I'd rather avoid certain airlines with bad safety records.
Airlines can and do switch like aircraft at the last minute all the time. Do all the planning you like, but you won't know for sure until you're seated and look at the safety card.
So unless you intend to have a "Qantas never crashed" tantrum in the airport, you may be out of luck because the only airlines in the US that have not ordered the MAX are Spirit/Frontier (Greyhound with wings) and JetBlue, and they don't fly everywhere.
People can say what they want about Spirit but I still think they’re the best airline to get around the US if you buy one of the big front seats. And the fact they don’t fly a MAX is even better.
I somewhat agree with this when they’re running smoothly: you can pay for a few quality of life upgrades and get an experience only a little bit worse than a more expensive airline for somewhat less money.
When things go wrong, though, I feel like Spirit does a pretty awful job. I had them cancel a flight on me at the last minute, and the only thing they would offer was a much later flight to an airport three hours from my destination or a flight to my destination in five days.
As a result, I’d much rather fly something like Southwest. Buy a ticket at the right time and they’ll sell it to you dirt cheap, you’re pretty much guaranteed a decent experience, and if something goes wrong they have enough flights and routes and customer service policies to get you taken care of.
It's performative, but I think next time I get a last minute equipment change to a MAX and nowhere urgent to be I might simply refuse to board and let them know exactly why.
I understand it will cost money and time, and really just mostly annoy the gate agents. But at some point the actual customers need to push back on Boeing and I can't really think of any other way. The FAA has clearly failed.
I'm not so naive to think I can continue air travel and not be taking the MAX quite often as time moves on, but the lack of any consequences for Boeing is rather annoying.
If you’re public enough about it, other passengers who overhear might decide to join you. If that becomes even semi-regular and trends on social, that might be the most effective change agent.
Right now regulators are increasingly broken (under-resourcing, revolving doors, political pressure, etc), so grassroots refusals are potentially the only proactive pressure we can put on airlines to demand more from their vendors. Otherwise we’ll just have to wait for reaction after there are too many incidents to ignore.
I used to refuse to go through the airport scanner, which required a physical pat down. Unfortunately, not enough people did so, and eventually I gave in.
My concern was that I wasn’t reassured that the devices had been adequately tested. I also consider them to be mostly security theater.
So, what I’m saying here is don’t count on others sharing your concerns and following suit.
I only really fly Delta and they don’t have any MAX aircraft, so that makes things easy. The majority of Delta flights I’ve been on are Airbus aircraft. I’ve only flown on one Boeing (737-800) in the past two years and that was from a non-hub Delta airport.
then you should be concerned that your airline of choice (delta) has already paid for and taken delivery of dozens of over 100 737 max's.
They made this purchase years after the initial 737 max issues, and ofc years of issues Post MD merger. They also are putting about 30 percent of the seats as premium/high cost seating. for some reason.
Delta and especially boeing do not have your safety at heart, they have the bottom line at heart and will put you in whatever is most cost effective.
Can’t answer this with data, although I’m not sure how many more headlines we need to see before we can collectively accept that something is very, very wrong with this plane at a fundamental level.
Given the number of airframes that rolled out over the decades that didn’t have this issue, I’m inclined to believe there isn’t necessarily an issue with the aircraft. Now Boeing’s manufacturing quality over the last 5-10 years though, that seems to be a major problem. Look at the issues the US Armed forces have had with receiving incomplete aircraft with missing parts and misplaced tools.
The entire industry seems to be under strain since COVID. There was a massive brain drain across the entire system and it’s causing issues at all levels. Many working in the industry are on edge trying to maintain safety.
Very high. The incident suggests that there will be many more incidents in the years to come with different parts of the plane. It's a quality control thing.
There have been zero incidents involving passenger injury or death since the MCAS issue was fixed.
Meanwhile there are something like 1,300 of them in regular service.
You’ll note, maybe, that pilots continue to fly the plane without raising a stink. If there was a serious concern for their own safety, you’d hear something about pilots refusing to fly them.
If you have a free account on https://www.expertflyer.com/ and attempt to create a seat alert (but don't go through with it) the Aircraft type will be displayed above the seat map once you type in the flight details.
This will also work for aircraft swaps (including last-minute ones) all the way until the plane leaves.
Much more of this sort of thing, and any rebranding might have to do something about the 'Boeing' part of the name. I suppose they could bring back the 'McDonnell Douglas' name... but that is associated with a far worse door-coming-open problem.
If Boeing wants to rehabilitate its reputation, showing more respect for the regulatory process would be a good start.
> How do I as a passenger identified all the rebranding permutations of the Max so that I make sure my family is not flying in them?
The 737 MAX series has a better safety track record than whatever car your family drives.
Note that since the MCAS issue has been fixed, there have been zero incidents that have caused passenger injury or death.
Note further that pilots—a cohort of self-interested humans like any other—continue deciding to crew the plane. You don’t hear about pilots backing out of flights or refusing to fly in them. Pilots and air crews aren’t threatening to walk out en masse.
This plug design has been in use without incident at least since the -900ER in 2007 and prior to the MAX models. The NTSB report will be worth reading, but I will be good money it won’t have anything in it that warrants the kind of wild frothing at the mouth response here.
Several, including recently Toyota and Subaru who have been making cars for more than half a century.
You just don't hear about them because negative news about Tesla is heavily amplified on HN, Reddit and in the media, and bad news about other carmakers is buried.
> systemic attempt to dodge responsibility for the problem.
If it was widespread, the NHTSA would have forced Tesla to recall the cars. Tesla sold 1.8 million cars just in 2023. It's hard to impossible to hide accidents, injuries and fatalities resulting from wheels falling off.
Pilots will go to irrational lengths to continue to fly, up to and including doing everything possible to hide any hint of medical problem to continue to do so.
Maybe you trust pilots as some sort of supra-human. I do not. They are humans just as much as the rest of us, and they need to get paid, and I wager they'd fly a bucket of bolts if that was the only thing that people were willing to pay them to fly long after sane passengers opted out of riding along.
> The 737 MAX series has a better safety track record than whatever car your family drives.
None of the car models I've ever driven have any recorded in-flight incidents. I highly doubt any of them were ever involved in an FAA investigation.
You can't beat the flight safety record of most automobile makers.
Ground safety, sure, some cars are worse than others. But even the MD-80 has a pretty good record on the road. All that use and only a few traffic collisions.
I think their point is that this incident and the incident in Japan aren't comparable as that one was caused by a runway incursion and this was caused by some sort of failure in the aircraft itself.
Part of me wants to never get on any of the Max variants, on the other hand, so many have been ordered around the world that it's impossible to avoid the plane.
Perfect use for VC money: Reimburse customers when the airline switches planes or flights in perfectly legal manner and customers end up with a Boeing plane anyways.
Unlikely an airline that doesn’t own or lease a max will swap one in.
Sadly the majority of people will choose the cheapest result and voting with your wallet doesn’t work. Which is why we need regulation and can’t leave things to the free market, despite what the libertarians say.
Passenger Diego Murillo, who had been on his way to Ontario, California, said the gap was "as wide as a refrigerator" and described hearing a "really loud bang" as the oxygen masks dropped from above.
He told KPTV: "They said there was a kid in that row whose shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."
In practice, they're very similarly sized. 90m vs 91.5m in length (on average). Widths are different but that's usually not relevant when describing the size of things as "half of a football field".
Football/Soccer, American/Gridiron Football, and Rugby all descend from the same class of sport that was just called football back in the middle ages (you played it on foot instead of on horse). Etymologically, neither sport called football really has any more claim to it than the other.
(I'll use "soccer" for "Association football" below to avoid confusion. I'll use "field" rather than "pitch" because the FIFA "Laws of the Game" use "field" except in 3 places [1]).
The rest of the world uses a different size soccer field than the rest of the world. Not only do soccer field sizes vary country to country, they can vary from league to league within a country.
In American football the size is standardized, except for children's leagues. High school, college, and professional leagues all use 100 yards x 160 feet (91.44 x 53.3 meters).
Heck, soccer fields can even vary within a single league. Take the UK Premier League for example. A few years ago their fields ranged from Fullham's 100 x 65 meters to Manchester City's 107 x 73 meters. They have since tried to standardize on 105 x 68 meters but aren't there yet.
Premier league clubs not yet using 105 x 68 are Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), Nottingham Forest (105 x 70).
For international play, the requirements are 100-110 meters for the long dimension and 64-70 meters for the short dimension.
There are some things that are standardized on a soccer field and so could be used as length references. The funny thing is that those things are all round numbers when expressed in feet or yards.
E.g., the radius of the circle around the center mark is 10 yds. The penalty area is 44 x 18 yds. The penalty mark is 12 yds from the from the goal. The goal area is 20 x 6 yds. The goal posts are 8 yds apart and the crossbar is 8 ft off the ground.
That's because these things were standardized before the UK switched to metric. I guess they didn't want to change the sizes just to keep the numbers round.
[1] there are two places where they say that the assistant referee should "face the pitch", and one place where they say the assistant referee should use his flag to indicate on what area of the pitch offside occurred.
I've been to a few countries outside of Europe and the US. Obesity and lesser but unhealthy fatness may not be as widespread yet there, but they're not that far behind. Also, what some cultures consider "not fat" isn't actually "not fat." Plenty consider "chubby" to be perfectly normal (and even attractive).
Russia is also technically in Europe but a lot of Westerners don't consider Russians Europeans. So I see no reason why continental Europeans could't consider the British as non-Europeans. In fact, there are plenty of Western Europeans that don't even consider Eastern Europe as 'real' Europe.
Russia indeed spans both Europe and Asia but almost all Russians live in the European part and majority of all Russian history and culture happened or is linked to Europe, not Asia. Similarly Turkey technically is also in Europe (small part of Turkish territory) but nobody seriously claims that Turkey is a European country based on this technicality. Another example would be Israel which technically is not in Europe but is considered to be more European than Middle Eastern. So the Brits not being European is not really such an outlandish claim. Especially that there is a growing tendency for 'European' to actually mean 'related to European Union' instead of its original, geographic meaning.
Not only that, but the continent-level statistics aren't useful for much other than scoring Internet points.
State-by-state in the US, obesity varies between 35-50% IIRC.
There are also significant differences by race (black or hispanic highest, white non-hispanic slightly less, and Asian a LOT less).
If we're being honest, Europe has exactly nothing to brag about -- 1 in 5, or 1 in 4 obesity rates are still amazingly high. Just saying "not as high as the US" is a pyrrhic victory.
The BBC article notes that this section of fuselage can optionally include an extra emergency exit, but that Alaska does not select that option. Still, it may be constructed with a false opening the same size as the exit door which could have been there.
It seems odd to me that an emergency exit can be optional. Like I get that airlines reconfigure seating, number of bathrooms, storage, etc, but emergency exits seem like there should be a fixed number based on maximum distances between all exits or something.
Another comment elsewhere says it's not really optional, it's just down to the number of seats the plane has. For certain seat configurations it's required.
Maybe the reporter should have asked "do you mean a European sized fridge or American?". Obviously if it was a European fridge size hole I wouldn't have even bothered putting on my seat belt on. Heck, why didn't they just fly on to California if it was only European sized?!
Football field? It was the size of a smallish door. Better analogies would be commonplace things like bathtubs or car doors, not dramaticlly oversized objects like fields or office towers. It was about exactly the size of the emergency exit doors we all see when lucky enough to be seated in an exit row.
As an American, I have never once in my life used a football field as a size comparison, nor have I heard it used as a size comparison for anything that wasn't roughly football field sized.
It might be used more commonly in some places, but I was baffled by the joke as well.
I actually think the stereotype comes not from normal Americans but rather from American journalism. It is in the news and magazines all the time. I am sure Google nGram could support this but I am heading out the door and can’t look it up until later.
Almost every flight that doesn't cross the ocean on Air Canada is on a Max. Great to see this as they are not going to ground them as well...
PS: the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing was very eye opening, and really shows what happens when a company goes from a Jobs-like CEO to a Ballmer-like CEO, lesson to keep in mind
You mean when they replace an aerospace engineer experienced with the actual business operations and administration with someone who doesn’t know anything about aerospace engineering and learned about business management purely from a financial perspective that quality suffers? Next you’ll tell me that EBITDA isn’t a good metric for internal accounting and value costing!
Lmao you think Jobs was focused on technical/safety stuff. He was a marketing guy. Read Woz's biography, they shows glimpses of the real jobs, even tho it's still toned down since they were "friends".
Not much? What’s your damage claim? Delay? Stress? The airline should probably give you some bonus miles/free tickets as a sign of goodwill, but not sure why they’d owe you beyond that.
If you get sucked out and die, or injured, there’s a claim. But neither happened here.
Emotional distress can reward a lot. Although there were no casualties on this flight, having a near death experience is certainly stressful, and can result in ptsd. This can end up costing a lot in therapist bills.
It was a fuselage failure, those dont happen all too often. Back then it was because of a lack of maintenance.
It was before i read it was the door though.
edit: In case its not obvious, would be great if you could post other examples. These events in the air are rather rare and i am rather curious for the upcoming ntsb report of this one.
I fly quite frequently, 320 flights so far based on my diary. The MAX accidents back then obviously made me a bit uncomfortable.
Until a week ago, I had't actually flown with a MAX; but on January 1st, I took an Air Mexico flight which happened to be one. I wasn't scared (in the sense I know about myself when I'm scared), but rather curious, so, funnily enough, I came to HN and searched for the MAX articles from back then, because I expected that I'd find insights, good technical conversations and in-deep articles about the topic.
On the other hand, I do have one fear.
On longer flights, the large aircrafts that have three batches of seats per row, I prefer an aisle seat in the middle: there is a lower chance that I'm gonna be the one woken up when the middle seater has to go to the bathroom. On a smaller aircraft (that usually fly for less than 3h, so I don't have to use the bathroom myself) I always prefer a window seat (1)
My nightmare is that once the window breaks, or a panel (that you can see the sealing points of) gets ripped off. This only ever happened a couple times, so I very well know there is practically zero chance that this would happen to me.
And now this, in the news, coincidentally.
(1) and I always check which side that window seat should be so I have the better view(2), like more mountains etc
(2) but honestly, I usually don't have a good view, since I prefer a seat oat the middle of the wings' height so that my ride is less bumpy.
This is somewhat amusing, and at risk of a "me too" low value post...
When I started regularly flying, I would actually search NTSB reports for the airframe in question in the airport lounge. I don't really know why exactly, but I think the engineering related discussion and the dryness of those accident reports were quite comforting - reading about those crashes really drove home how safe air transport really is. I'm sure I raised a few eyebrows though for anyone glancing at my screen.
I also have the semi-irrational fear of where I sit. However mine is in relation to the engine nacelle - I don't want to be within 4 or 5 rows from where the fan blades are in case they explode into the cabin. Same with prop aircraft - I highly prefer to not be seated in the aisle next to the prop.
I haven’t researched enough to be certain, but it seems like shielding yourself from being hurt by an uncontained engine failure is probably the only thing that an individual can affect by their own choices on a modern commercial jet. Most other accident types seem to be either not tied to any specific area of the plane or so large/non-survivable that there’s nothing a passenger can do.
It’s silly since the odds of literally anything happening are so low, but it makes some part of my brain happier so I do it.
Well you can feel better knowing that planes are designed to have tear off strips so if a piece ever rips off it only tears to a maximum small area and shouldn’t keep tearing. At least that’s how Boeing designed it…
Sudden decompression at high speed and altitude is dangerous to both humans and airframes, regardless of "tear off strips". A common pattern in explosive decompression accidents is that e.g. the cargo door opens and then the cabin floor caves in and severs vital control surface cables.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadUnless—how often does an airline company ground a particular model?
Starliner? Delays and cancellations.
KC-46? That POS still isn't reliably refueling, and if I understand correctly USAF is rumored to be looking for a replacement.
F-15EX? It can't use conformal fuel tanks the F-15E has been using for almost 40 bloody years. No, that means it can't achieve its major selling point of carrying 22 missiles either.
737 MAX? Clearly maximum kek given this and that whole comedy about safety exemptions yesterday.
I want to like Boeing, but I feel it's justifiable to tell them to go fuck themselves at this point.
EDIT: I also forgot that V-22 Osprey that crashed into the sea off Japan back in November, killing all on board. As far as I'm aware, that led to a complete grounding of all Ospreys by all US military branches and also the JSDF pending investigation findings.
https://blog.geaerospace.com/technology/second-boeing-777x-m...
The MAX should never have been accepted as being the same airframe as the original 737.
Of course, besides that, Boeing itself is maybe THE major force reducing oversight.
A century of progress in domestic automotive sector would disagree with your opinion, here.
If it wasn't for the gub'ment infringing on the liberties of the little guys (corporations), we'd still be driving cars without airbags, seatbelts, and proper fuel tank safety regulations.
I think it’s to a significant degree the government’s fault that air travel wasn’t safe and people got killed, but it is entirely Boeing’s fault that their products suck and kill people and are losing them money.
Besides, Boeing as the only US aircraft manufacturer is too big to fail, especially with China aircraft increasing in number globally.
Regulators getting cozy with the people they're supposed to regulate happens in every industry, in every country, and... understandably so. Those are people who have the same expertise, same training, who work together all their life.
It may be one of the most difficult problems to solve.
But stupider things have happened.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-tru...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/business/stephen-dickson-...
Boeing tried to screw Canada's Bombardier out of the C series aircraft by getting the US Gov to throw on tariffs for an aircraft they had no competitor for. Everything was already done AFAIK that point too; certifications, and everything, the plane was entering into production to fufill US airline orders. It cost $1.3 billion Canadian to develop the plane.
I suspect Boeing thought that'd be the end of it. Airbus had other ideas. They got the whole Bombardier C series aircraft for about $550 million and opened an assembly plant in Alabama in Mobile, about 350 miles from Boeing's assembly plant in Huntsville. Along with the orders from US airlines (I think for 130 aircraft). No more tariffs because these planes are now US made.
As a Canadian it stings a little, but I can't help but cackle at the fact that Boeing execs handed their one major competitor several billion in revenue on a silver platter. And Boeing will need years if not decades to come up with a competitor.
So from Canada: Get fucked sideways Boeing.
And a spectacular own goal for Boeing that they deserved so much :D
Development costs doubled from 2 billion to 4 billion. Then when they went well over 5 billion and the federal government + Quebec had to bail them out to the tune of 1.5+ billion. Even without Boeing, had Airbus not stepped in, it's unlikely the CS100 would have succeeded. European buyers had already started to cancel orders seeing the debacle unfold.
Despite having many orders on the books, banks refused to lend to Bombardier because they expected them to make a loss on the airplane.
So yeah, screw Boeing who played really dirty and Trump helped them (the tariffs were reversed a year later when a more independent body reviewed them). But had Bombardier not been in a massive financial hole this wouldn't have mattered.
I have to read up on the F-15EX, generally so these kinds of upgrades are basically new designs and as such prone to delays and a bunch of technical issues. Especially for military aircraft.
Nothing to add on the MAX that wasn't said already. Boeing sure has its work cut out developing a new version, the existing 737 design is beyond its design life by now.
Well, if a plane crashes for unonown reasons, it is quite normal to ground the fleet, nothing special about Boeig here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC-X
Not to say that Airbus military plane record is spot less, but the A330 MRTT seems to be a decent plane.
I hate to see Boeing having all these problems, most of which are totally unnecessary.
Plenty of contracts end when one party wants out for whatever reason. A contract is just setting the rules. One of the rules can be that it can be dissolved at the demand of any party.
So a contract can be, I pay you $100 then you do the work, but either party can walk away with "no-fault" at anytime. So I pay, then you walk away without doing anything? What would be the point?
It's been every year at a all time high since 1970... and it's been decades already that we know it won't get repaid.
> Our government and judicial systems are now governed by money.
Weren't they always or did you believe in fables before?
> Collapse is inevitable
Collapse it inevitable if other countries lose trust in the US and its economy. We are not there yet because many other options are still worse. Everything is measured relatively to other things.
[0]https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1625378887617363968
On lower seat count configs (like on that incident flight) those extra door are still present but locked, hidden and not visible from inside.
Inside there is no exit: https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Alaska_Airlines/Alaska_Air...
Well that seems like a massive waste of weight...
Any mechanical component - even if unused - requires servicing and maintenance. No airline would want to pay for that and the fuel cost on every flight to carry a door they don’t want.
Not a maintenance issue. Or if it is, that's a seriously shocking amount of maintenance demand.
Do we know about permanent plug vs semi-permanent substitute door? According to some other posts both exist, both levels of permanency exist.
The one thing an airline likes less than carrying extra weight is not being able to change their minds later :) Or rather, for the option to be available for whoever they sell the plane to after they're done with it.
I recall that following the 2019 deaths that Boeing was going to rebrand the Max with some number series or similar, so that passengers didn't get nervous flying in it.
How do I as a passenger identified all the rebranding permutations of the Max so that I make sure my family is not flying in them?
Choose airlines which don’t fly Boeing or don’t fly the route.
don't even mention nasty cruises which only cover coastal routes, like some paleolithic dingy.
I have been scouting cruise websites for ways to also replace transatlantic flights, but they are way too sparse.
One example: I've always wanted to do a motorcycle tour around Scandinavia, particularly Norway, but it's a heck of a ride from Calais all the way up there. For many bikes, far enough that you'd need to organise a service and tyre change at least once whilst on the trip. At the time when I was first thinking about this I had a bike with a 3750 mile service interval, although I could generally squeak 4000 - 5000 miles out of tyres.
So my plan back in 2014 had been to ride up from East Anglia to Aberdeen, get on the ferry to Lerwick, and then get a ferry from Lerwick to Stavanger in Norway to cut off a lot of "transit" riding. Unfortunately it turned out the website with this ferry route listed was lying to me, and that actually it had been retired in something like 2008. (You can still find this route listed on some websites today, but it's long since gone.)
Nowadays I'm not even sure it's possible to get a ferry from the UK to Germany. I've never done it but you used to be able to get a ferry from Harwich (very convenient for me) to Bremerhaven: no more, sadly.
Maybe it gets resurrected at some point...
[1]: https://reiseliv1.no/reiseliv/2023/rederiet-holland-norway-l...
https://www.dfds.com/en/freight-shipping/routes-and-schedule...
"Low emission cruise travel . save more than 50% energy compared to.. the last vessel operating the same route."
BERGEN STAVANGER NEWCASTLE - planned to start 2026
https://bergencruiseline.no/ourmission/
Hah, that brings back memories: in the early 80s I did a bike (not motor-) journey from home (in the south of England) to Sweden, taking the Dover-Calais ferry and then via France-Belgium-Netherlands-Germany-Denmark. Must've been ~900 miles of pedalling.
But I didn't attempt a tour of Scandinavia once I got there! (I was headed over there to stay with relatives for a few months.)
I don’t love plane trips but they generally get the trip over fairly quickly if the journey isn’t the goal. And longer haul comfort is mostly just a matter of money.
The journey is obviously slower, but that can either be a way to rest on a long road journey (truck drivers in Europe sometimes use longer ferry routes so they get their mandatory rest period), or an opportunity to sleep in a fairly decent bed.
I quoted some one verbatim who works at Airbus who said Airbus Australia was exclusively supporting Defences helicopter fleet. I must have misunderstood what they said and Qantas/Jetstar are flying Airbus but are being supported by another party.
My mistake.
However, considering how common it is for an airline to switch product, it would be quite difficult to ensure your flight isn't on one of these aircraft without double-checking during boarding — then refusing to board.
By the way, Boeing planes are generally speaking perfectly fine. I'd rather avoid certain airlines with bad safety records.
A 20% probability of ending up in the plane is better than a 75% probability.
Airlines can and do switch like aircraft at the last minute all the time. Do all the planning you like, but you won't know for sure until you're seated and look at the safety card.
So unless you intend to have a "Qantas never crashed" tantrum in the airport, you may be out of luck because the only airlines in the US that have not ordered the MAX are Spirit/Frontier (Greyhound with wings) and JetBlue, and they don't fly everywhere.
Huh? Sing-alongs? What does this mean?
When things go wrong, though, I feel like Spirit does a pretty awful job. I had them cancel a flight on me at the last minute, and the only thing they would offer was a much later flight to an airport three hours from my destination or a flight to my destination in five days.
As a result, I’d much rather fly something like Southwest. Buy a ticket at the right time and they’ll sell it to you dirt cheap, you’re pretty much guaranteed a decent experience, and if something goes wrong they have enough flights and routes and customer service policies to get you taken care of.
I understand it will cost money and time, and really just mostly annoy the gate agents. But at some point the actual customers need to push back on Boeing and I can't really think of any other way. The FAA has clearly failed.
I'm not so naive to think I can continue air travel and not be taking the MAX quite often as time moves on, but the lack of any consequences for Boeing is rather annoying.
Right now regulators are increasingly broken (under-resourcing, revolving doors, political pressure, etc), so grassroots refusals are potentially the only proactive pressure we can put on airlines to demand more from their vendors. Otherwise we’ll just have to wait for reaction after there are too many incidents to ignore.
My concern was that I wasn’t reassured that the devices had been adequately tested. I also consider them to be mostly security theater.
So, what I’m saying here is don’t count on others sharing your concerns and following suit.
They made this purchase years after the initial 737 max issues, and ofc years of issues Post MD merger. They also are putting about 30 percent of the seats as premium/high cost seating. for some reason.
Delta and especially boeing do not have your safety at heart, they have the bottom line at heart and will put you in whatever is most cost effective.
The entire industry seems to be under strain since COVID. There was a massive brain drain across the entire system and it’s causing issues at all levels. Many working in the industry are on edge trying to maintain safety.
Meanwhile there are something like 1,300 of them in regular service.
You’ll note, maybe, that pilots continue to fly the plane without raising a stink. If there was a serious concern for their own safety, you’d hear something about pilots refusing to fly them.
This will also work for aircraft swaps (including last-minute ones) all the way until the plane leaves.
If Boeing wants to rehabilitate its reputation, showing more respect for the regulatory process would be a good start.
The 737 MAX series has a better safety track record than whatever car your family drives.
Note that since the MCAS issue has been fixed, there have been zero incidents that have caused passenger injury or death.
Note further that pilots—a cohort of self-interested humans like any other—continue deciding to crew the plane. You don’t hear about pilots backing out of flights or refusing to fly in them. Pilots and air crews aren’t threatening to walk out en masse.
This plug design has been in use without incident at least since the -900ER in 2007 and prior to the MAX models. The NTSB report will be worth reading, but I will be good money it won’t have anything in it that warrants the kind of wild frothing at the mouth response here.
You just don't hear about them because negative news about Tesla is heavily amplified on HN, Reddit and in the media, and bad news about other carmakers is buried.
If it was widespread, the NHTSA would have forced Tesla to recall the cars. Tesla sold 1.8 million cars just in 2023. It's hard to impossible to hide accidents, injuries and fatalities resulting from wheels falling off.
I generally don't see any news about other car makers at all unless there's a major issue.
Maybe you trust pilots as some sort of supra-human. I do not. They are humans just as much as the rest of us, and they need to get paid, and I wager they'd fly a bucket of bolts if that was the only thing that people were willing to pay them to fly long after sane passengers opted out of riding along.
None of the car models I've ever driven have any recorded in-flight incidents. I highly doubt any of them were ever involved in an FAA investigation.
You can't beat the flight safety record of most automobile makers.
Ground safety, sure, some cars are worse than others. But even the MD-80 has a pretty good record on the road. All that use and only a few traffic collisions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38884778
That said, no one died in this incident either.
> That said, no one died in this incident either.
In that incident 5 people died (+1 injured).
Meanwhile the Boeing falls apart randomly in the sky.
Market will fix it after lots of people die and people return to using buses and boats for long-distance travels.
Do all US carrier rally have Max planes?
- Yesterday (Friday 2024-01-05): "Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air" (417 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358
And also, airlines can switch planes at any time, you won't find out for sure what plane you are taking until you sit on it.
Sadly the majority of people will choose the cheapest result and voting with your wallet doesn’t work. Which is why we need regulation and can’t leave things to the free market, despite what the libertarians say.
Until they install a half-assed update coded by some underpaid Indian freelancer.
He told KPTV: "They said there was a kid in that row whose shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67899564
:D
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
Playing field size: https://youtu.be/XMZYZcoAcU0?t=49
( Bigger than US NFL handegg field )
The rest of the world uses a different size soccer field than the rest of the world. Not only do soccer field sizes vary country to country, they can vary from league to league within a country.
In American football the size is standardized, except for children's leagues. High school, college, and professional leagues all use 100 yards x 160 feet (91.44 x 53.3 meters).
Heck, soccer fields can even vary within a single league. Take the UK Premier League for example. A few years ago their fields ranged from Fullham's 100 x 65 meters to Manchester City's 107 x 73 meters. They have since tried to standardize on 105 x 68 meters but aren't there yet.
Premier league clubs not yet using 105 x 68 are Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), Nottingham Forest (105 x 70).
For international play, the requirements are 100-110 meters for the long dimension and 64-70 meters for the short dimension.
There are some things that are standardized on a soccer field and so could be used as length references. The funny thing is that those things are all round numbers when expressed in feet or yards.
E.g., the radius of the circle around the center mark is 10 yds. The penalty area is 44 x 18 yds. The penalty mark is 12 yds from the from the goal. The goal area is 20 x 6 yds. The goal posts are 8 yds apart and the crossbar is 8 ft off the ground.
That's because these things were standardized before the UK switched to metric. I guess they didn't want to change the sizes just to keep the numbers round.
[1] there are two places where they say that the assistant referee should "face the pitch", and one place where they say the assistant referee should use his flag to indicate on what area of the pitch offside occurred.
State-by-state in the US, obesity varies between 35-50% IIRC.
There are also significant differences by race (black or hispanic highest, white non-hispanic slightly less, and Asian a LOT less).
If we're being honest, Europe has exactly nothing to brag about -- 1 in 5, or 1 in 4 obesity rates are still amazingly high. Just saying "not as high as the US" is a pyrrhic victory.
It might be used more commonly in some places, but I was baffled by the joke as well.
Observable: the entire lateral structure of the aircraft has disappeared next to the seat.
( From related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38887840 )
What a mess.
PS: the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing was very eye opening, and really shows what happens when a company goes from a Jobs-like CEO to a Ballmer-like CEO, lesson to keep in mind
If they use the same kind of plug on their Max aircraft then I'd say grounding is merited. But if not then it shouldn't matter.
Unless it's an unknown issue or possibly too generic (like the case of the MCAS) then ADs/grounding/etc take into account the specific failure.
“If the plane has a hole, the airline must dole!”
If you get sucked out and die, or injured, there’s a claim. But neither happened here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
edit: Earlier door failures happened to two McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 after they changed their locking mechanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_96
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981
Situation back then was made worse as it sucked part of the floor out with the door.
It was before i read it was the door though.
edit: In case its not obvious, would be great if you could post other examples. These events in the air are rather rare and i am rather curious for the upcoming ntsb report of this one.
edit1: Apparently the newer one is a 737 from Southwest from 10 years ago, also maintenance issues. But like similar ones it was rather small https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_812
Until a week ago, I had't actually flown with a MAX; but on January 1st, I took an Air Mexico flight which happened to be one. I wasn't scared (in the sense I know about myself when I'm scared), but rather curious, so, funnily enough, I came to HN and searched for the MAX articles from back then, because I expected that I'd find insights, good technical conversations and in-deep articles about the topic.
On the other hand, I do have one fear.
On longer flights, the large aircrafts that have three batches of seats per row, I prefer an aisle seat in the middle: there is a lower chance that I'm gonna be the one woken up when the middle seater has to go to the bathroom. On a smaller aircraft (that usually fly for less than 3h, so I don't have to use the bathroom myself) I always prefer a window seat (1)
My nightmare is that once the window breaks, or a panel (that you can see the sealing points of) gets ripped off. This only ever happened a couple times, so I very well know there is practically zero chance that this would happen to me.
And now this, in the news, coincidentally.
(1) and I always check which side that window seat should be so I have the better view(2), like more mountains etc
(2) but honestly, I usually don't have a good view, since I prefer a seat oat the middle of the wings' height so that my ride is less bumpy.
"Boeing 737 MAX 9 Production List" - https://www.planespotters.net/aircraft/production/boeing-737...
The need for this post, shows the pathetic of the situation.
When I started regularly flying, I would actually search NTSB reports for the airframe in question in the airport lounge. I don't really know why exactly, but I think the engineering related discussion and the dryness of those accident reports were quite comforting - reading about those crashes really drove home how safe air transport really is. I'm sure I raised a few eyebrows though for anyone glancing at my screen.
I also have the semi-irrational fear of where I sit. However mine is in relation to the engine nacelle - I don't want to be within 4 or 5 rows from where the fan blades are in case they explode into the cabin. Same with prop aircraft - I highly prefer to not be seated in the aisle next to the prop.
So, there are at least two of us out there!
I haven’t researched enough to be certain, but it seems like shielding yourself from being hurt by an uncontained engine failure is probably the only thing that an individual can affect by their own choices on a modern commercial jet. Most other accident types seem to be either not tied to any specific area of the plane or so large/non-survivable that there’s nothing a passenger can do.
It’s silly since the odds of literally anything happening are so low, but it makes some part of my brain happier so I do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
Also, many passengers don't keep their seat belts closed during flight, which scares me too