That is really bad misinformation statistically speaking. The "Max" aircraft (all variants) have literally many millions of miles of safe flight. If anything, it is the most scrutinized commercial aircraft in all of history.
I'm not going to comment on how it compares to other planes but it's certainly significantly less safe than the previous generations of 737:
> a fatal accident rate of four accidents per million flights, whereas the previous Boeing 737 generations averaged 0.2 fatal accidents per million flights
There was a recent blowout of a door, and now several problems were found in subsequent MAX planes. This is part of a larger saga with faults found in MAX planes that have caused some crashes, and the longstanding quality issues with Boeing.
Yes, but those parts in question exist only on the MAX 9, which is no longer flying. Right now the answer to: "Is my plane a 737 MAX 9?" is "no, it isn't"
When a plane crashes, twice, totaling 300+ dead, people are right to get skeptical.
When the investigation into those crashes reveals a shitload of corner cutting on safety regs, people are right to get skeptical.
When another version of the same plane made by the same company has an in flight blowout and the fleet is grounded AGAIN (yes i know just the 9s but remind me how many other companies have had entire lines of their plane grounded in the last 20 years), then yes I think it's reasonable to want to avoid any of their newer plane models as clearly the level of safety and quality appears to be declining.
Flying is still safer than just about any other form of travel, but that's basically because we mandated a shit ton of regulations and safety to make sure that even penny pinching corner cutting corps wouldn't have people dying in droves. Boeing has clearly decided to push that envelope and they deserve all the bad press they get for it and I fully understand people who already have a quasi irrational fear of flying freaking the hell out over this.
I would certainly not buy a car from a company that's clearly disregarded safety so badly, and would prefer avoiding being in one for any other reason (friends/rideshare/whatever).
> I would certainly not buy a car from a company that's clearly disregarded safety so badly, and would prefer avoiding being in one for any other reason (friends/rideshare/whatever).
That's a lot of cars. The standard in the auto industry is to design specifically for regulatory tests, and/or popular industry tests, in a specific region. All major automakers sell cars that intentionally lack safety features in regions that don't explicitly require them, if it will give their vehicle a price advantage in that market.
e.g. you can still buy vehicles without airbags made by major auto manufacturers.
Which seems totally irrelevant given that we're talking specifically about Boeing failing to meet US regulations (and a bunch of international ones as well).
Selling a car without an airbag in a country that's decided you don't need airbags is the choice of the country. If you wanted this to be similar it'd be selling a car in a country that wants you to have airbags, but yours don't work. Which would be a company I'd avoid.
You specifically mentioned automakers disregarding safety, which was why I entertained the topic.
We don't know why these doors are falling off yet. Any accusation that it was due to a disregard for safety isn't supported by any facts, yet. It is conjecture.
I spoke to someone who works there about a year ago.
I was trying to gauge how an insider viewed the Max problem related to the auto trim issue which caused two airplanes [1][2] to crash, killing 346 people. This was shortly after watching the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing [3].
The ignorance and non acceptance of fault made me cringe. I won't go into the details, but this wasn't a freak accident this was due to human decisions. They cut corners on how to modify an aircraft to compete with Airbus, and then doubled down to not pass down training to pilots on their hack of a fix, since it would be an increase in costs on their customers (i.e. the plane becomes more expensive to operate due to extra training for pilots).
I am doing my outmost to avoid any new planes from Boeing (higher risk with new airplanes). I've also simply started flying less.
The Boeing fiasco is what 2nd world / 3rd world corruption looks like in the west. profit interests above safety, and regulatory capture of the FAA. Also anti competitive or anti free trade practices by the US Department of Commerce [4].
All valid points, but I wonder if you've overshot your response to this (very slight) increase of risk to your personal safety.
The statistical safety of aviation is the best it has ever been - 2023 set yet another record low for commercial aviation deaths and injuries. Your automobile trip to the grocery store is far riskier.
Miketery isn't trying to rationally adjust their risk profile based on available statistics. They are trying to punish Boeing for being a corrupt institution that corrupts other institutions.
It doesn't matter how good the safety numbers are if any player is able to cheat and blame their safety problems on someone else.
>Your automobile trip to the grocery store is far riskier.
I feel it's important to provide complete information. Flying is safer per mile traveled than driving. Driving is safer on a per-trip basis.
So if you compare your trip to the grocery store to your flight to visit extended family, the trip to your grocery store is safer. But if you compare 10,000 miles of driving back and forth to the grocery store over many trips vs a single 10,000 mile flight, the flight is safer.
You can’t make this blanket statement and I would bet on average it’s the opposite still.
- Flying in the US is on average ~750x safer per mile than driving according to 2000-2010 data (it’s likely even larger a difference in the modern era).
- I would venture to guess that most US flights are in the 1000-2000 mile range and most US car trips are easily more than the equivalent 2-3 miles.
- Most fatalities from flying occur during takeoff and landing, so longer flights are actually safer per mile. Relating this back to the thread, the risk of catastrophic failure from your choice (or non-choice) of airframe only really affects the off-ground danger and not the higher danger you face on a taxiway/runway.
- All of these numbers are based purely on fatalities but I’m guessing your definition of “safety” includes being maimed or otherwise seriously injured. You have several orders of magnitude higher chance of being seriously injured in a car crash compared to flying since accidents in aviation are much more likely to end in death.
Depending on how you slice this problem, you will get a different result.
If you slice it up per mile traveled, airplanes win.
If you slice it up per trip taken, driving wins.
If you slice it up per hour spent traveling, driving and flying are about the same. (according to the book Freakonomics)
Flying is very safe. The statement "flying is safer than driving" is industry propaganda to help appease fears of flying. They cherry-picked the statistic that made them look best and flooded the whole world with it.
If you had a magic genie and you made your one wish to replace all passenger vehicle trips with commercial airline flights, including quick trips to the grocery store, you would kill a lot of extra people.
I think the critical thing to think about is the derivative of risk. How is risk changing over time.
We are in a trend where risk is increasing.
Boeing is a major institution responsible for building critical defense and civil technology. With many jobs on the line as well.
People need to be held accountable, and we need a culture that allows people to speak up earlier and more often. Otherwise this will continue to happen and not just at Boeing but across many more critical sectors of our society.
Is there any data supporting this? From what I can tell, the trend from both IATA [0] and ASN [1][2] data appears to be down. Any small YoY increase [3] in 2020 being attributable to PS752 shot down by Iran and an Embraer EMB-120RT shot down over Somalia. This downward trend seems to go for fatal and non-fatal accidents.
I completely agree with the need for oversight in this situation where corners appear to be cut and the FAA seems to be abdicating responsibility, but changing personal behavior requires some real data which I simply don't see.
Agreed! You don't see the data because it's not there. That was my point in response to the original comment - even with these dramatic high-profile examples, not only is commercial aviation orders of magnitude safer vs traveling by car, but it continues to improve. Meanwhile traffic safety has stagnated and by some metrics is getting worse.
Not sure what your comment really adds except a thinly veiled attack on my ability to empathize. Of course reasonable people desire increased safety all around. My point is that even with this disaster (in which nobody was harmed), aviation safety is the best it's ever been and is continuing to improve.
Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about ways to improve or hold Boeing accountable. But it's not a rational reaction to stop flying due to this incident.
It's not a rational reaction to stop flying on 737 Max, despite the daily news headlines in the New York Times over the last 3 days.
Or, it is a perfectly rational reaction for many people, it's just your theory of rationalism—based on coarse-grained probability of an event ("airlines are safer than ever"), rather than Expected Value or something else—is limited and unrealistic. Like, maybe there's some fancy Nash Equilibrium psycho economic rationality in which the empirically observed behavior is actually rational.
I read “actual” as modifying “concern” to the extent that it is a concern about something that carries real risk, not a concern that isn’t a real risk.
It's a domain registered yesterday and an account registered an hour ago expressly to post the website, so the barrier to entry isn't particularly high.
The unfortunate thing is that they can change it at anytime. So you basically have to avoid airlines that have the MAX in their fleet, such as Southwest.
And Delta has an outstanding order for 100 of them, with delivery scheduled throughout 2025. We'll see if these continued incidents alter that, but I think the inertia is that this is what boeing selling these days. Everyone will have them.
On the other hand, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Spirit, Allegiant and others are all strapped with Airbus A320neos that are going to be grounded shortly due to engine issues related to P&W's GTF engine.
This doesn't seem correct. I checked a few flights I have coming up and it identified a United flight as not being a MAX, when United itself tells me it is. And it identifies a Southwest flight as being a MAX when it isn't.
Yeah, the data source is imperfect. The flight information pulls the "nearest" (live, scheduled or landed) flight that matches that flight number, to give you a sense of the aircraft on that route.
Planes get changed, especially if the flight is far out.
If not enough people buy a ticket for a 737-8 sized plane, SWA will sometimes swap it out with a 737-700 with a smaller capacity. This also allows SWA to fly with one less flight attendant than they would on the larger plane.
If there is a maintenance issue with your 737-Max8, and there is a 737-800 sitting in the next gate not set to go out until a few hours after your plane, they'll swap it out to reduce the chance of having a late departure.
If the site is not scraping data every minute, there could be mismatches. It's unlikely this site is scraping data more than once a day to save costs.
Are you less safe on a 737 MAX than driving to the airport in a car? Genuinely curious, I’m trying to understand if this whole saga is statistically significant.
I've heard a lot of people say this in these comment threads, and I think this glosses over the actual issue: safety is getting worse, not better or even staying the same. So it's MORE statistically significant than it was. The trend is heading the wrong way.
Air safety going down is a trend you want to stop ASAP. Not wait around until it's just as dangerous as something else like driving your car.
Sounds a lot like "yeah sure, fear over 737 Max is overblown, but the fact that I was thinking about it in the first place says something about the current state of affairs".
People are concerned because it seems irrefutable that there is corruption and a culture of cost cutting causing these issues.
Incompetence is understandable, improperly modeling the physics due to lack of experience or knowledge is understandable, but repeated instances that point to corruption at the government regulator and bad culture at the manufacturer lend to fears that the situation will get worse for a while before it gets better.
It’s the same reason you might avoid flying on an Eastern European/Russian airplane. The perceived risks move from unforeseeable error or bad luck to systemic error.
It sounds nothing like that. Boeing is going to lose deals because carriers don't want to deal with repeated groundings. The US economy will reflect that.
Many airlines allow same day changes. If everyone scheduled on a Max reschedules for alternative flights consistently, they'll get the message soon enough. Refusing to board a Boeing plane at all is perfectly reasonable at this stage.
That's not true, and we'd get to a much, much worse place if we relied on that. The industry put the current system in place because it could see that airlines would make gruesome compromises if consumer choice was the only thing driving safety.
> safety is getting worse, not better or even staying the same
The only death in US major commercial aviation in ages was when a woman was partially sucked out of a window in 2018 when an engine failed and blew apart, breaking the window open.
Before that, we have the Asiana flight which crashed after landing short at SFO, striking the undercarriage on the edge of the floating platform and cartwheeling. Everyone survived the crash, but a woman was killed when a fire truck ran over her amidst the firefighting foam.
Prior to that we have to go to 2005 when a plane overran a runway and hit a car, killing one occupant… of the car.
We have to go all the way back to November 2001 to have a serious accident where an American plane crashed on takeoff, killing all on board. Technically this was due to pilot error due to over-responding to wake turbulence, breaking off the vertical stabilizer. But it’s arguably an engineering issue that the pilot was able to induce catastrophic structural failure through control inputs.
There has definitely been a worrying trend lately in operational error with pilots and ATC nearly causing accidents due to runway incursions, nearly landing on taxiways, etc. But it’s really hard to say with a straight face that major airlines have anything other than an exemplary safety record the likes of which has been completely unparalleled before now. We have had one single death aboard a major commercial aviator in the U.S. in more than twenty two years.
> only reason nobody was injured this time was nobody was sitting in the seats next to the door plug
This was a serious fuck-up. But it remains that there was at risk no more than one, maybe two, fatalities. That isn’t enough to justify the claim that “safety is getting worse.”
Statistically, there is no difference between a new plane and one that's been flying for 18 years [1].
Given dying because an installer fucked up feels mighty similar to dying because a maintenance tech fucked up, I don't see a rational reason to over-penalise fabrication errors to the extent that it overrules millions of successful flight miles. (Design mistakes are categorially different.)
I'm pretty sure if you personally drove a new car off the lot and the door fell off you would not believe that quality were unchanged from your prior impression of that car company.
Just because it's happening to other people doesn't make it okay to hand-wave away safety.
And by the way, so far NTSB believes it's not a fabrication error but an assembly error. NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in.
> if you personally drove a new car off the lot and the door fell off you would not believe that quality were unchanged from your prior impression of that car company
As a layman, no. Were I looking for more than a Twitter level of analysis, it would be an indication for investigation. Not grounds for conclusion.
More directly, even as a layman, if I were to use that anecdote as grounds to condemn the state of car manufacturing in summa, that would be irrational.
> NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in
Source? Last I saw, they couldn't find the bolts. It takes lab work to ascertain whether they ever existed.
NTSB are doing that lab work right now in Washington D.C.
You seem to not know the meaning of suspect, so here is the definition:
Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
sus·pect
verb
3rd person present: suspects
/səˈspek(t)/
1.
have an idea or impression of the existence, presence, or truth of (something) without certain proof.
"if you suspect a gas leak, do not turn on an electric light"
Suspicion doesn't mean baseless hypothesis, e.g. "Mars is an orange." The NTSB would never say (and has not said, as you've conceded) it "suspects" the "bolts were never screwed in."
Were there a lack of marks where the bolts should have exerted clamping force, there would be basis for suspicion. That isn't proof. But it's more than a hypothesis.
I mean you can believe what you want but NTSB literally had a guy at a podium say into the mic last night that there is so far no evidence "the bolts were ever there", around the 17-18 minute mark if you have nothing better to do. Good luck with your investments.
> NTSB literally had a guy at a podium say into the mic last night that there is so far no evidence "the bolts were ever there"
Where are you getting this? Crookshanks said the NTSB had "not yet recovered the four bolts" and "have not determined if they existed there" [1].
Your source, for which I'm genuinely curious, is categorically false in suggesting the NTSB "suspects" the bolts were never there, or that Crookshanks said "there is so far no evidence 'the bolts were ever there'". (The latter being particularly reprehensible, given it involves materially misquoting an aircraft investigator.)
"Only two people would have died, so it's really not that bad," is wild. What if it were you sitting at that seat and you died? Still not that bad an outcome?
> "Only two people would have died, so it's really not that bad," is wild.
Straw man. Nobody says even a single death isn't tragic. What I'm saying is it doesn't overwhelm trillions of miles of safe flight. Not flying a 737 Max 8, only to go onto a Spirit Aerosystems-assembled Airbus, doensn't make sense. (Note: not implicating Spirit. Just saying that the window of culpabilitiy extends more in their direction than it does across every 737 Max.)
more accidents is less safe, anyway you cut it. I really can't understand how you can view flying as not being less safe in this moment.
If you want to do integration over huge time spans to make your point, lets start at zero and go to infinity... human lifespan is 0 years long average over history, seeing as we didn't exist for some period of time. So any changes to human life in shorter time spans is completely meaningless to an average. Is this 0 year lifespan a useful statistic?
> more accidents is less safe, anyway you cut it. I really can't understand how you can view flying as not being less safe in this moment
You’re proposing crashes are autocorrelated. They’re not. They would be in a vacuum filled with spherical cows. But grounding and investigating takes care of that.
This is related to the fallacy of thinking if a coin has come up heads thrice in a row, it’s more likely to come up tails the fourth time. It’s not. We have a lot of innocuous flight miles as data from which to make robust statements, particularly when it comes to characterising the safety of the entire airline industry.
Put another way, on which day are you safer, the day before the accident or the day after?
From all photo evidence I’ve seen, some cushions were sucked off the seat. These cushions are designed to be removed. If a passenger was seated and wearing their seat belt, I have every faith that they would have been fine. Uncomfortable as hell but ultimately fine. I’ll bet money the NTSB report will say as much.
And the point stands that the only reason this story is noteworthy is because of airlines’ spotless safety record over the past two decades. Incidents like this are exceedingly rare.
It is trivial to see how someone sitting there not seat belted could have perished. You do understand that long stretches of flight allow you to be unseatbelted right?
1. The seat was not destroyed.
2. The door blowing off would not be the only reason; a second reason would be that the person failed to wear the seatbelt.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I don't believe in blaming the user for manufacturing and maintenance errors. I think that makes a bad programmer too, actually.
They allow you to, but on every single flight I’ve been on in ages, the pilot makes a note that they recommend keeping your seatbelt fastened whenever you’re seated. People have been injured due to sudden and unforeseen turbulence, and it’s just a good idea in general.
That said this incident occurred during the initial climb-out where seat belt use is mandatory.
So yes, if a passenger was seated there and if their belt was unbuckled, I can see how somebody would have died. Nobody is saying that this isn’t a serious fuckup that doesn’t need to be investigated and remedied.
What I am saying is that major airlines in the U.S. have a more or less unblemished safety record for twenty two years, the likes of which has not only been unparalleled in aviation, but by any other form of transport. Literally walking is more dangerous than flying a major commercial airline in the U.S.
The MAX line of planes in particular has had their share of problems, but with the MCAS situation resolved there is no reason to believe that it in particular is any less safe than any other airframe operated by the majors. The issue with the door plug is unlikely to be related to the MAX (the same part and design have been in service without issue since well before the MAX). It will be investigated, fixed, and we will in all likelihood go back to flying gajillions of passenger miles without serious incident.
I’ll put this another way: if all of this gnashing of teeth and doom and gloom causes enough anxiety over flying that a few hundred people choose to drive instead, it will inevitably cause more injury and death than if every airline went all-in on a fleet of 737 MAXes.
I think you’re misunderstanding the comments. This was a problem, it needs to be investigated and fixed, but the overreaction to this is bordering on insanity.
Commercial aviation in the U.S. is still incomprehensibly safe. It is not getting measurably less safe. The 737 MAX line are not death traps.
Mechanics routinely forget to bolt the wheels onto cars, which has caused and continues to cause actual traffic deaths.
Nobody floods into the comment sections on HN when this happens because people dying in cars is depressingly normal but planes are so unimaginably safe that a person hypothetically getting sucked out of a plane is strange and terrifying.
I was watching a video, I believe this one (https://youtu.be/WhfK9jlZK1o?si=goQBueaF-5So3U0X) that seemed to make the case that due to the door design it is much less likely, if not impossible, for the presumed failure here to occur at cruising altitude because of the higher pressure differential.
There's a reason they tell you to always wear your seatbelt though, ranging from sudden turbulence/downdraft to sudden depressurization.
A child in the middle row had his shirt sucked off his body.
They were only at 16,000ft, maybe half the cruising altitude? I forget if it's 35,000 or 50,000 usually.
Because other countries have—in general—a demonstrably poorer track record than major airlines in the U.S. for a wide variety of factors, including poorer training programs, maintenance regimes, operational expectations, and sometimes cultural norms that interfere with good CRM (crew resource management).
I'll address the elephant in the room and say that I don't think it's coincidence that the two airframe losses in the MAX 9 were with Indonesian and Ethiopian carriers and not American or European ones, despite American and European carriers having received—as far as I can tell—the bulk of the deliveries of this airframe and at least a plurality (if not majority) of hours in use (if someone else can find good data on this I'd be grateful). I suspect that more resources put toward pilot training played a meaningful difference here. For example, the first officer of the Ethiopian flight had less than 200 hours of flight experience. This would be completely unacceptable for a U.S. major.
I want to be clear that I am not saying that it's the pilots' fault, but that the swiss-cheese model relies on multiple overlapping failures. The additional resources spent on training, maintenance, operations, and CRM at American and European airlines in general ensures fewer overlaps and thus fewer incidents.
After watching Downfall, Lion air asked multiple times for additional training but was refused as this would cost boeing money. To me, that looks like Lion Air was more aware of issues than US operators. Boeing never even bothered to inform pilots of the MCAS system's existence before the first grounding.
But, we're seeing fatal issues with one specific company over and over again. Knowing that there is some systemic failure within Boeing must change your priors, no?
What's wrong with pointing that out and being concerned?
Everything I do in life is a calculated risk. If you told me my toaster was 3 times as likely to kill me today I would still probably toast my bread knowing that the base rate was already pretty low.
If anything, knowing that all of the headline grabbing incidents has been confined to one product line at one company, and watching the amount of scrutiny they are receiving for it makes me feel safer overall.
> But, we're seeing fatal issues with one specific company over and over again. Knowing that there is some systemic failure within Boeing must change your priors, no?
"systemic failure within Boeing" isn't necessarily inconsistent with "air traffic safety continues to improve". For instance, better pilot training and safety regulations might make flying even safer despite Boeing creating more crashes.
> But, we're seeing fatal issues with one specific company over and over again.
We aren't. There were fatal issues with one system (MCAS) on one line of planes. This was addressed, and since then there have been zero fatalities (or injuries) caused by design and/or engineering issues by this manufacturer. Their safety record is not substantially different from that of Airbus (who have their own design issues, IMO, such as non-linked pilot controls which has also contributed toward hull loss and passenger deaths). The MCAS issue was, to be clear, completely inexcusable and both regulator and management heads should have rolled over this. I am not happy with our anemic response to this incident.
And yes, one or two people could have potentially died due to this latest incident. It should be investigated and fixed. Beyond that there are wider aspects of the MBA-ification of Boeing that ought to (and I hope but don't expect will) drive regulatory and business change in this country.
But the fact remains that once the issues with MCAS were resolved, Boeing-designed and -assembled airframes have resumed a track record of safety that eclipses that of any other transportation industry. Again, we can, should, and are expecting that every issue is a learning moment to improve the practices of the industry as a whole.
> Boeing-designed and -assembled airframes have resumed a track record of safety that eclipses that of any other transportation industry.
Could you please share some data to back this claim? For example comparison of the number of technical incidents per airframe in use for Boeing vs Airbus?
You'll note the last time a major carrier in the U.S. experienced a fatality due to an engineering, manufacturing, and/or design error attributable to Boeing was in 1996, when a spark in the center fuel tank in a 747 caused it to explode midair.
Before that, 1994. Then 1991, 1989, and 1988.
We did also see one fatality aboard a 737-700 in 2018, but this was due to an issue with the CFM engine and which isn't attributable to Boeing.
Given this, it's pretty obvious on face value that—however you slice it—flying on a Boeing airframe on a major U.S. carrier is safer than every other form of transportation, including literally just walking. Driving, buses, trains, trams, bicycling, scootering, ziplining, whatever. They're all less safe.
Can't say if you missed this on purpose or by omission but there's a few more after 1994.
From your own source:
The aircraft experienced a contained engine failure with debris penetrating the fuselage; one passenger was partially ejected from the aircraft and later died of her injuries.
This is horrific. Boeing, of course and happened in 2018
> We did also see one fatality aboard a 737-700 in 2018, but this was due to an issue with the CFM engine and which isn't attributable to Boeing.
There is essentially no aviation industry expert who will place this failure at the feet of Boeing and not CFM. That said, the fact that engines are designed to completely contain debris from a failure is wild and speaks to the incredible standard of safety we hold aviation to.
Why should you expect every moment to be a learning moment?
Is that true in any circumstance you've ever seen?
Is it ok to learn with the blood of others?
> The MCAS issue was, to be clear, completely inexcusable and both regulator and management heads should have rolled over this. I am not happy with our anemic response to this incident.
To be fair Boeing literally fired their CEO because of the MAX fiasco.
“He was CEO from 2015 to 2019, when he was fired in the aftermath of two crashes of the 737 MAX and its subsequent groundings.”
two planes had to fail due to MCAS before it failed. Now, we've seen a blowout, which never happens, from planes that were also recently designed and produced by Boeing. That's a pattern of poor performance which is ocuring recently. It used to be "if it's not Boeing, I'm not going", which they achieved by being very good at what they do.
Comparing Boeing's performance to other the performance of other industries is also apples to oranges, no? Why not compare Boeing to Airbus? I don't understand what you mean by that argument.
So, what design failures has Airbus suffered as of late? And what's your explanation for the specific hate on Boeing, if it's comparable to airbus?
You'll sometimes see this dismissed almost derisively as, "people think they're in control when they're driving, but lack agency while flying, so that's why they fear the latter more."
But that's completely true! Not every driver on the road is at equal risk of a fatal accident. A significant percentage of all fatal accident involve speeding, reckless driving, and/or alcohol consumption, to say nothing of distractions like cell phone usage.
So you do have quite a bit of control on the road and exactly none in the air.
Even "safe" drivers who aren't speeding, driving recklessly, or consuming alcohol are at greater risk of death and injury than on any major U.S. air carrier.
So you do have control, and can put yourself into a safer cohort of drivers, but the best you can do still falls wildly short of the state of aviation safety.
In this age-of-big-data, it seems like you should be able to find data on each traffic fatality for the past ten years. Things like time of day, ages/demographics of drivers, demographics of victims, street address/gps coordinates, make/model of vehicles involved, blood alcohol level of impaired drivers, court determination of responsible party, etc.. Does anyone know where to find this?
This isn't an argument about control, it's about safety. Control is completely irrelevant to the absolute probability of dying when taking one form of transportation vs another.
You may be 100% in control of a scenario where you are highly likely to die, and 0% in control of a situation where you could essentially live until you die of natural causes.
In this case, even if you exercise 100% of the control afforded to you by driving a car, you are more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane.
Okay, but I'm not sure fearmongering is the way to go. There are already people in this thread afraid of taking a flight in one of these machines.[0] My mother is terrified.
A subthread about the actual personal risk when flying the MAX is perfectly valid.
This is more or less equivalent to the little old lady in this comic saying "I'm wearing this to ward off A." Laypeople are notoriously crap at judging any kind of risk.
That is a big statement. Since 2019 there have been 32 fatalities connected to commercial aircraft. Most of those were iv very small aircraft like seaplanes and helicopters. 32 deaths in 4 years compared to ~40k/year in cars. We need to keep things in perspective.
To keep things in perspective we should compare fatalities per person trips or person miles. Total deaths doesn't mean as much when a lot more people travel by car.
We do, and there has been one death due to an incident on a major U.S. airline since November 2001.
You can maybe argue two, where a woman was killed after exiting an Asiana plane after it crashed at SFO. She was hit by an emergency vehicle responding to the scene.
eh. To a certain extent you should compare based on distance traveled, maybe. But total miles driven in the USA are quite high compared to other countries. Lots of driving simply doesn't need to happen, but occurs because we induce it by the way we design the places where we build.
I don't really care how safe driving is per mile, I care if I'm going to be dead at the end of the year.
There's a big difference between an unsafe airframe and pilot error/poor-training though.
For example the recent crash in Japan. Airbus isn't getting railed for that one.
I know several 737 pilots on US flag carriers. Even at the time they were saying that neither crash would be possible for their fleet as they had done simulator training of exactly those sorts of scenarios.
From wikipedia:
While defending the pilots' actions, Sullenberger was also highly critical of allowing someone with only 200 hours of flight experience to be first officer.
I hate sounding like a Boeing apologist, but I do think it's worth being very clear about where blame lies for things so that we can both asses risk accurately and make appropriate corrections.
The was no pilot error or equipment malfunction in that incident. (I suppose you could look at the pilot of the dash 8 and wonder why he didn't hold short, but he could have been driving a golf cart and still made an runway incursion.) It didn't even happen in the air.
Boeing was rightly blamed for misleading everyone about the nature of the MAX8. It is a materially different airframe, and it required different systems to be created to be competently flyable with 737 type rating. Is Boeing misleading anyone here on the MAX9? Personally, I doubt it. It was probably a fluke non-conforming part, since that plug is a carryover from other 737s. The track record leaves a lot of us wondering if something's up, though.
> Boeing was rightly blamed for misleading everyone about the nature of the MAX8
Pilots I am personally friends with who fly for American, Southwest, and United, disagree. They feel they were fully prepped for the differences in the airframe from their first flight on it, pre-crashes, and have said that they blame the carriers that crashed for not prepping their pilots the same.
It's entirely possible that I missed some news, but I'm unfamiliar with the FAA or anyone else actually accusing Boeing of intentionally misleading or releasing incorrect information?
My analogy to to Japan, while poor, was just meant to illustrate that we should be very clear about the true causes of things. "Boeing lied" is a very different problem than "Boeing squeezed a new system in, advised that pilots should be trained, and airlines didn't perform enough training".
But yes, I agree that we should be wondering what's up, specifically with Boeing's assembly/QA processes...
You missed the whole fiasco. Boeing intentionally deceived everyone involved, from the FAA engineers certifying the MAX to the pilots that were told that they were equipped to fly them.
Boeing noticed that the thing didn't fly like a 737, so they made some software to change its flight characteristics to be more like a 737. They failed to disclose this, and when it "activated" in 2018, a plane crashed. This is when FAA learned about it. Then another one crashed because of the same thing only a few months later.
The DOJ made a criminal complaint against Boeing, resulting in a deferred prosecution agreement and a $2.5 billion penalty. MAX was grounded for years.
> They feel they were fully prepped for the differences in the airframe
Your pilot friends are either wrong or they had inside information and probably should have blown the whistle. Realistically, they probably actually did feel prepared. This is the crux of the criminal fraud action.
My point is that Boeing will take the flak for what is arguably a pilot error situation with the MAX crashes.
We should be very careful to distinguish between actual airframe issues and issues that are related to politics and poor decision making or training.
There's nothing we know of that is fundamentally unsound about the 737 MAX airframe, there are mistakes that have been made in very small subset of the airframes/flights operating, and yet everyone is running around like you're taking your life into your hands every time one flies over your head.
> My point is that Boeing will take the flak for what is arguably a pilot error situation with the MAX crashes
It's hard to say if you're trolling or just very misinformed. Boeing was hiding the fact that MAX had additional system to correct the pitch from the pilots.
I forgot to say 'in the united states'. Thanks for the correction. The car statistics would go up massively if they were worldwide and getting those is harder (and less accurate) than in the US alone. Additionally, the regulatory framework for aviation isn't the same everywhere so it is a bit apples to oranges to compare outside the US although it is clear that the issues leading to the two MAX crashes were design and training in nature and directly point back at Boeing as a root cause.
People spend so much more time inside cars than inside airplanes every year, that such a comparison seems disingenuous. You should normalize the deaths by time travelled.
Though I agree flying is extremely safe, keep in mind that of those 4 years, two of them were while the 737 MAX was grounded, and much of it was while air travel was much lower due to COVID.
If any other mode of transportation were nearly as dangerous as roadways in the US, it would be made illegal. The fact is that the 737 MAX has, by its own flaws, killed hundreds of people in recent memory. People don't want to deal with this clearly cursed line of airplanes at all.
I also think comparing air travel to car travel is a bit unfair -- it's better to compare air travel to Bus travel (the driver has a CDL) or Train travel (The engineer is specially trained)
Car fatalities likely dwarf bus and train fatalities too. It's not that airplanes are particularly safe, it's that cars are particularly unsafe.
When issues are repeatedly found for years the question is not whether a few planes with loose bolts are still safe in theory, but how many other issues weren't discovered yet that may be far worse. This isn't just a single mistake that could happen to anyone and it's clearly not limited to a single category of flaws - if they messed up with tightening bolts, messed up the software and also forgot tools in fuel tanks etc, in what areas can Boeing still be trusted?
Look at the data. Over more than 22 years of flying in the U.S. we've seen one fatality aboard a major carrier. That one, single fatality was caused by an entire engine rapidly disassembling itself mid-flight. The engine mostly—but sadly not entirely—contained this failure. That engine was not designed or built by Boeing, but by CFM.
The next prior fatality aboard a major carrier was when an Airbus A300 crashed on takeoff in Nov 2001, killing on on board. The pilot overreacted on the controls, causing catastrophic failure of the vertical stabilizer.
The last time we saw a fatality in the U.S. due to a design and/or engineering error of a Boeing plane was in 1996 when a 747's center tank exploded due to a short circuit. Globally, Boeing and Airbus don't have meaningful differences in their track record of safety. Both have had experinced design and engineering flaws. Both have worked to fix those flaws.
Should we accept the ongoing regulatory capture in the U.S.? Of course not. Should we continue to hold these companies accountable for improving their designs every time an incident like this happens? Of course, and we do.
What isn’t significant about Boeing consistently failing in the construction and quality of the 737 MAX? How does comparing it to driving to the airport prove anything? Scratch that, it proves nothing. What are you getting at?
Maybe that it would be interesting to know what the numbers actually are. There is the common saying that you are more likely to get in an accident on the way to the airport than traveling on the plane, but knowing what the likelihood of both of those as well as the likelihood of an accident on a max could show this all to be hysteria or actually well founded.
But we can't be sure unless we know the actual stats. A lot of news operates by driving sensational stories, the more hysteria and doom they invoke, the more views they get. Are we talking 1% more likely or 0.00000001% more likely to get in an accident?
Take it like this: If you have to ride share and you hear that a common car used by drivers of Uber is having an increased failure rate, not passing inspections and have been temporarily banned from being on the road until more is learned; I think a pretty fair response is to try and avoid entering that car regardless of the ratio of incidents when driving that car, and when biking to the dealership to get it
>I think a pretty fair response is to try and avoid entering that car regardless of the ratio of incidents when driving that car, and when biking to the dealership to get it
"avoid" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here though. If doing so doesn't cost me anything, then avoiding that car is a non-brainer. However in real life nothing is really costless. Avoiding that car at the very least would cause you to wait longer. If that car is your daily driver, and you don't have a backup, then avoiding that car might cost you hundreds per month. That's why you need to factor in statistics and figure what the absolute risk is, and whether it's worth "avoiding".
Right it would be a bigger problem if I owned and depended on this hypothetical car but my hypothetical self only needs it for Ubers. Maybe I’ll switch to Lyft or local Taxi service. That might make me wait more but the point is that this isn’t a hysterical response, much like monitoring and avoiding the 737 MAX until further notice isn’t hysterical. It’s simply sensible.
To not first consider the actual absolute safety level before considering reasons that might change relatively is not sensible. You can't just come up with reasons to fear something and conclude it's therefore best to avoid, that's completely sidestepping any reasoning about the actual risk and replacing it with emotion.
Taken another way: That your Uber driver is not as safe as others is not, in itself, a reason to reschedule your life to avoid them on the principle there is a safer option somewhere else. It's reason to ask the question how unsafe are they actually and is that level of difference vs normal something the extra inconvenience is worthwhile for. The point of someone mentioning cars is, if you actually quantify the risk change, it's likely you're rescheduling your flights around a risk which is less concerning than the rest of your day to day life and things you accept for getting to the airport in the first place. Without quantifiably discounting that you're letting news headlines dictate your life by fear instead of acting sensibly.
It's possible for quality of the 737 MAX to be significantly below the typical bar for aviation standards while still being significantly above the bar of things people should be personally concerned about. Demand aviation standards stay high if you value it, by all means, but don't become part of a hysteria around worrying if your plane is a 737 MAX purely on the basis it made the news instead of thinking about how unsafe it actually has been or is compared to your normal safety baseline.
After the Lion Air and Ethiopia Arlines crashed, the FAA calculated that on average, the Max fleet would suffer a fatal incident once every 2 years and that was based on the existing number of craft.
That's such an unbelievably ridiculous number to ignore. People saying this is insignificant are really putting their blinders on and I don't know why.
Again, that number is almost certainly an insignificant risk for an individual taking a random flight to worry about. That does not imply or relate to being an insignificant number airline safety regulators should not worry about or force improvement on. Air safety has been successfully held to a much higher standard than the vast majority of other safeties, and we should definitely try to maintain that, but that's unrelated to whether it's reasonable to be personally concerned about which plane model you take your flight on due to personal risk avoidance.
I didn't bother calculating the rate for driving to the airport, but eyeballing the figures for cars, it's probably as about as dangerous if you assume that the 737 Max were 10x more dangerous than average flying. Cars are still more dangerous than planes on a per-mile basis, but at the same time you're also traveling less miles on the car trip compared to the flight. Regardless if you hit a 5 minute traffic jam, you'd lose about the same amount of life as flying in a 737 Max (again, assuming it's 10x more dangerous than regular air travel).
And the door either has a goat or a car. But before the event takes place (opening the door), it is perfectly reasonable to do risk analysis with odds and fractional goats.
Chances of dying because you flew on a MAX are still insanely low. Maybe worse than if it was an A320, but the absolute numbers have so many zeros between the decimal point and the value that they're basically the same: 0.
Yes you can. People take minuscule amounts of risk everyday, by driving or even walking. While I agree there's a point where the risk isn't worth it even if the expected value is positive (eg. russian roulette to win a billion dollars), but we're nowhere near that point with 737 Max risk.
Why would I care about per mile stats? What matters to me is the safety of the contraption and crew I'm putting my faith in each time I step foot into the machine. Airplanes shouldn't get a higher safety rating simply because the trips are 100x longer on average.
>Airplanes shouldn't get a higher safety rating simply because the trips are 100x longer on average.
Note that you can take those stats and multiply by how many miles you're traveling to figure out your per-incident risk (ie. risk for the whole flight). Even if you do that you'll find they're quite safe, compared to other activities you do every day. Sure, the averages might not be applicable for edge cases (eg. very short flights), but for the average traveler it's a pretty good estimate.
You would care because, presumably, you're deciding on a mode of transport to travel those miles. Otherwise, the measure is deaths per trip, which would prompt the conclusion that cars are thousands of times safer than air travel.
It doesn't work that way. When I fly, it's typically the only feasible option. I've never in my life sat down and calculated flying vs driving. It's more something like >400 miles, then fly, otherwise drive.
Per mile is a ridiculous metric when comparing two totally different modes of transportation. Think about how many car trips a single flight represents.
>Cars are still more dangerous than planes on a per-mile basis, but at the same time you're also traveling less miles on the car trip compared to the flight.
1. That doesn't make any sense. You're not flying as some sort of recreational activity to pass the time. You're flying because you want to get from point a to point b. If you're making that journey, it makes sense to compare which method is the safest for the entire journey, not for 1 hour of it.
2. Even if we ignored the above, applying this adjustment doesn't change the conclusion that planes are safer than driving by a fair margin. The 737 MAX cruise at 521 mph. Cars top out at around 60mph. If we round that off to planes being 10x faster and normalize for that (ie. 10x the death rate), you still get 0.57 for a car vs <0.01 for a plane.
Fallacy of Relative Privation in this case. The correct question is: “Are you less safe on a 737 MAX than any other commercial aircraft?” The answer to this question for a properly functioning airline industry should always be “no.” Given the recent incidents, the answer to this question is, unfortunately, “yes.”
Depends what you measure. To keep things grounded in reality we can use measures involving “things about planes that airline customers universally consider bad”: the number of people killed by a model or the number of passenger items ejected from the plane during the flight.
I would hop on a MAX right now and be perfectly happy about it. That’s not to say I don’t hope we get some good lessons from this event, but this could end up being a contractor maintenance issue rather than a manufacturing flaw, for example. Given the MAX series is flying many, many routes per day without incident, I wouldn’t make any decisions to, say, avoid a particular plane based on this incident.
It's significant because it exposes that Boeing's assembly/QA process is not as bullet-proof as it was in the past. Assuming things work the way they should, this (combined with the other loose-bolts situation that recently happened) should trigger that process to be tightened up, much like the earlier crashes triggered a bunch of pilot training to make sure everyone was aware of the changes in the MAX. But it's not at all a sign that Boeing planes are at risk of falling out of the sky onto your house.
You're still safer on the plane than you are in your car, statistically speaking.
Something I find interesting is that this plane, with the door-sized hole in it, took the extra ~10 minutes required to run all the checklists to do a maximally safe landing before coming back in. The videos of the plane flying with a hole in it are interesting, there's a flight attendant standing talking to the people seated near the hole.
If I understand correctly, this video seems to make the case that this event wouldn't actually have happened at cruising altitude, where the depressurization blast would've been worse, which is also interesting to know. https://youtu.be/WhfK9jlZK1o?si=g2QDFWSgEwkGvuiS
> Are you less safe on a 737 MAX than driving to the airport in a car?
I don't think that's a meaningful comparison. The 737 MAX problems are related to the airplane itself. The dangers of driving are mostly related to the performance of the drivers, not the cars themselves.
If you estimate the risk by just taking the number of fatal crashes and dividing by the number of miles traveled by all 737 Max'es, it's roughly 10x safer per mile than car. (And almost certainly more dangerous than cars per trip rather than per mile.)
> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe [1.5] years ([500] days) of flying to date per aircraft on average [in light of delivery dates and extensive groundings], giving a very rough estimate of a [~2] billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.
For the most reliable info, you can look up your flight number in Flightaware or Flightradar 24 -- those use actual flight plan data, so will take into account any last minute aircraft changes.
> doubt people are that afraid of 737 Max that they'll cancel a flight (and forfeit their ticket) over it
Nobody rational will. But there are plenty of people with an understandable fear of flying who will create a customer-service kerfuffle over it. On the margin that might not do anything. But in aggregate it could affect how the airlines negotiate settlements from Boeing.
> people want to vote with their feet, and inflict damage to Boeing for abhorrent behavior
People want to express outrage. That’s understandable.
Most flight revenue is from frequent travellers, and they understand the business enough to know histrionics won’t change Boeing’s incumbency. A couple people who fly twice a year swapping airlines isn’t going to move the needle. And I doubt a material fraction of them are likely voters who would bother their electeds about this.
> their histrionics won’t change Boeing’s incumbency
You seem to entirely miss the possibility that this has nothing to do with "punishing" anyone, and that people simply don't want to stress out about dying during their flight.
You can call it irrational if you like, that feeling of superiority and a few bucks will get you a snack. The brain worm is there, I know I'll be thinking about it next time I book tickets.
> people simply don't want to stress out about dying during their flight
Sure, and as I point out elsewhere, that's reasonable [1]. It's irrational because it doesn't actually change anything, about your situation or systematically.
Not flying a 737 Max to feel better is reasonable. Doing it to be safer, or because it's going to punish Boeing or whatever, is not.
> what's irrational in not believing that 737 Max is safe?
The millions of miles they've flown without incident.
The key difference this conversation demands is a design versus fabrication or maintenance error. MCAS was a design error. It called into question the entire 737 Max fleet. This looks like a fabrication or maintenance mistake. That calls into question all of the planes similarly fabricated or maintained--those have been grounded. It doesn't affect a 737 Max of a different type, that has been flown for years and been through routine inspections, including of the very bolts suspected to be the cause of this accident.
Caveat: I strongly suspect more than the type 9 need to be looked at. But we do not have evidence that they are unsafe.
> But at that point it's too late. I doubt people are that afraid of 737 Max that they'll cancel a flight (and forfeit their ticket) over it.
Luckily the airlines I travel with only use Airbus, but if they were using 737 Max, I'd definitely book tickets that I can change at the last minute, and refuse to board if it turns out to be a 737 Max.
Yes, that's probably illogical. And probably much of life is illogical. But I rather have to wait some hours for the next flight than take the risk to die because of Boeing.
"A lot of people don't realize that the fuselage of this plane isn't even made by Boeing, it's made by Spirit AeroSystems which also makes components for Airbus.
We don't really know who to blame here until the investigation concludes."
Except Airbus doesn't have planes falling apart in midair even if they are using the same supplier. This is clearly an issue during assembly regardless of the supplier of the parts.
In 2010, an Airbus A380 engine exploded. The fact that it landed safely was a miracle. [1] In 2017, an Airbus A380 lost an engine (literally, fell off the plane). [2] In 2018, a cockpit windshield blew out in an Airbus A319. [3]
Don't get me wrong, the culture at Boeing has changed (for the worse). The 737 Max is not without issues. It's horrific that hundreds have died due to both ignorance and deception on behalf of Boeing.
But Airbus isn't some sort of flawless golden goose either. Any time something like this happens, failure modes are identified and things will get safer.
Not trying to move the goalposts, but how old were these Airbus planes at the time of their incidents? Were they months old off the assembly line, or were they several years in where slips in maintenance and inspections came into play?
But in all cases there was no subsequent news that inspection of all airbus planes proved most engines were bolted to the wing wrong... or that all the windshields were glued wrong.
And this loose bolts thing shows up on a plane model where the "driving controls" were designed wrong.
Note that no one is complaining about the other Boeing 737 models.
It’s pretty wordy but all the information is there.
> That includes a new spacer design for the engine inlet with increased fastener capability, changes to the fan cowl and fan cowl support beam, and the implementation of new exhaust nozzle structural stiffening elements.
> According to the National Safety Transportation Board’s (NTSB) executive summary of the incident, parts “of the left engine inlet and fan cowl separated from the airplane, and fragments from the inlet and fan cowl struck the left wing, the left-side fuselage, and the left horizontal stabilizer”. One of the fragments of the cowl struck the fuselage near a cabin window, with the window departing the 737-700 and resulting in rapid depressurization.
Technically, the Osprey can loose one engine and continue to fly too. They have linkage connecting each engine to the other rotor specifically for this.
The blame could be with a single individual, a group of people, the politics at Boeing or the engineering at AeroSystems.
The point is that none of the Airbus planes had the same sort of in-flight extreme ventilation as the Boeing plane just had, nor are any entire series of airplanes from Airbus currently grounded because of lose bolts.
As I said, it's not logical, it's not based on reason nor numbers. It's just a feeling.
>I'd definitely book tickets that I can change at the last minute, and refuse to board if it turns out to be a 737 Max.
E̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶f̶l̶e̶x̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶i̶c̶k̶e̶t̶s̶,̶ ̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶r̶i̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶c̶e̶l̶ ̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶2̶4̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶r̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶p̶a̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ Also, airlines would most likely charge you the difference between the fare price, which for a last minute ticket is might be a significant price difference.
>But I rather have to wait some hours for the next flight than take the risk to die because of Boeing.
So you'd rather lose a few hours of your life waiting at an airport, than losing a few minutes of your life over the risk of dying from a 737 Max? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Yes, that's right, that's my current feeling which may or may not change in the future.
Thanks for the summary!
Edit, as you added more content to your comment rather than just a one-liner snark:
> Even with flexible tickets, most carriers don't allow you to cancel less than 24 hours prior to departure
I guess my typical airline isn't in your personal category of "most carriers" as they allow me to change any dates for my ticket up until I've boarded the first flight. YMMV obviously.
> you'd rather lose a few hours of your life waiting at an airport, than losing a few minutes of your life over the risk of dying from a 737 Max
I’ve chosen a less-than-ideal itinerary for comfort (e.g. lay-flat seat or direct flight).
Flying is stressful for a lot of people. As OP admits, it’s irrational. But if it means you avoid spending the flight in a panic, it’s not unreasonable to swap planes or even eat the ticket cost. (It might be a sign to talk to someone about anxiety.)
> Even with flexible tickets, most carriers don't allow you to cancel less than 24 hours prior to departure.
They definitely do! It's usually until just before departure - but some flexible tickets you can just no-show and get a refund. In some cases, there may be some no-show penalty, but definitely not universally. I can't think of any US carriers that impose a 24 hour cancelation restriction. I'm sure there's some international ones.
> Also, airlines would most likely charge you the difference between the fare price, which for a last minute ticket is might be a significant price difference.
Usually within the US, you can do a same-day change or same-day standby for some nominal, fixed amount of money on any ticket (free with status) and swap to any flight within ~24 hours (specific restrictions vary).
> So you'd rather lose a few hours of your life waiting at an airport, than losing a few minutes of your life over the risk of dying from a 737 Max? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
On this we completely agree. I ran the numbers and your likelihood of dying on a 737 NG is 1/400 the risk of dying in a car on a per-mile basis. Based on the median distance from home to a US airport of 17 miles, you're more likely to die on the road to and from the airport than a 16,500mi flight on a 737. And infinitely more likely to get injured.
Point of order, because this is HN and I get to be pedantic here: the 737 Max is cursed; the 737 and 737NG are proven good by their long track record of reliability through thousands of units produced and in service
The 737NG has a known issue with the nacelles being insufficient to contain engine failures. This actually happened in 2018 and a woman was sucked out of the plane and died.
It may be illogical from a strictly individual point of view. But from a broader societal view we'd all be better off if we did it and it is pro-social and pro-civic to be willing to sacrifice a little of your personal convenience to make a point like this. Nothing but nothing will get Boeing's attention like what is essentially an end-customer strike.
In general quite a lot of the chains wrapped around us that drive so many people to complain are really only kept there by raw personal selfish convenience. To be clear, I am absolutely not saying that they are not real as a result. They are perfectly real. But in many cases they are still really nothing more than personal convenience holding you. For instance, as I write this, almost all of the dangers of smart phones can be kept at bay just by refusing the conveniences. (Not quite all. But really quite a lot of them.)
We'd all be better off if there were more of us willing to take this kind of stand, and by that standard, it is Vulcan-grade logical.
Also true! And if the mood strikes the media complex to kick a wounded gazelle for profit, which they are known to do, a site like this getting featured on the news may well feed back into their stock price too.
The market (correctly) assumes that the FAA won't make any decisions that might endanger Boeing financially in any really significant way that might turn into an existential threat.
> willing to sacrifice a little of your personal convenience
It's not convenience, it's that the ONLY reasonably priced flights are non-refundable ones, and not everyone can afford another flight ticket just to prove a point. Another idiotic thing that we need to change.
Although I really do wish there were an "Airbus only" option when booking flight tickets. And as much as I don't normally like to stereotype things, when it comes to safety I feel I've consistently seen much better safety standards in EU than the USA. Safety seems more drilled into the European culture. I just somehow have this gut feeling that some random dude at Airbus crimping some wire probably actually did everything correctly and to specifications.
Not to mention they have stricter work hour limits in Europe, so I don't have to worry about someone doing a shoddy job due to lack of sleep.
Because the idea that airplane travel is safer than passenger vehicle travel is propaganda/marketing. Flying is safe, but in practical terms the sentence "flying is safer than driving" is not only nonsensical but also false.
If you could magically replace every passenger vehicle trip with a commercial airline flight, including the quick trips down the street to the grocery store, there would be more fatalities. Because, statistically, flying is less safe per trip.
The reason why flying is safer for long trips is because the "danger window" of a flight is generally takeoff and landing, while the "danger window" for driving is basically the whole drive.
You can slice this another way. In the book Freakonomics, they discuss that "per hour spent traveling" the passenger vehicle and the airplane are approximately the same risk level.
i'm not 100% sold on the automation that airbus provides. true that when all the sensors are working well it's fine and probably safer than boeing's methodology. however, when things go south there are something like 5 different layers of degraded "laws" of flight that have different levels of protection and can make what is an already cloudy situation even more stressful and dangerous. coupled with the blended control that each stick has can and has caused disasters before. with boeing the pilot flys the plane and there is less automation outside of the standard autopilot systems found on both methodologies.
I am usually a very practical person but looking at the catastrophic failures specifically of 737 MAX and not one but many in short period, it is way too many for a plane. Yes planes crash but the probability is extremely low in general except for 737 MAX. Officially it is now on my no fly list. I will not board a plane if it is 737 MAX. And yes, I will suffer the consequences of that.
The planes only start transmitting when they are ready to go (not sure if they do it after pulling out of the gate or when doors close or thereabouts). So by the time you see the flight data you're most likely boarded already. So yes, too late.
The planes are all flying IFR flight plans which are submitted in advance and include airplane type. How far in advance is a little bit random but still in advance of leaving the gate.
I don't think this is true, in any case you can extrapolate, e.g. if you're leaving from gate 34, see which flight of this airline is arriving at gate 34 just before, then you can check that flight's details, including plane model, on the tracking websites
My kid is a huge fan of flightradar so we spend way too much time watching it. I don't know the exact timing, but it is a consistent behavior that planes pop onto flightradar only a little bit before pulling out of the gate. But I'm not sure if there's a standardized point in the sequence when they turn it on or it's up to each pilot.
But you're right, watching the incoming plane to that gate would be a good way to know earlier!
Final aircraft assigned to the flight can be changed until the last minute. The info is most useful when booking. Presumably people might switch if the price/schedule is reasonably close while very few would turn away at the gate if they discover a max (I sure wouldn’t and I belong to the tiny minority that even think about aircraft models ever). So the info is most useful when booking.
Flying an airline that doesn’t operate a specific model is the most (and almost only) reliable way to avoid one.
> Flying an airline that doesn’t operate a specific model is the most (and almost only) reliable way to avoid one.
Even that could make you end up on a 737 Max, if the airline you have your ticket via actually "outsourced" (simplified and not the right word) the actual flight to another airline, which happens sometimes.
Yes, if I was a perfectly reasonable and logical robot, I'd agree with you.
But I'm a 30+ year old human, with plenty of experiences that "should never have happened" and "that was once in a million odds" that I won't risk it.
I'd love it if I could turn off the lizard parts of my body, but I cannot. I try my best, but when it comes to life/death, I just trust my gut over anything else.
Anyone who would turn away from a MAX at the gate when they already bought the ticket, IF the relevant authorities (both US and elsewhere) say its safe enough, is probably not acting completely rationally but more on a gut feeling. That's fine. But it shouldn't be seen as some kind of demonstration of virtue or safe behavior (Especially if you get back in the car and out on the highway which is probably more likely to kill you)
Sure, once you're in the plane and can look at the emergency pamphlet that provides the airplane model number, that's when you'll know...or just ask the crew? Either way, ticket info by the airline seems to be all you can work with until you're on the plane. If your concern is the potential type of plane, you'll need more statistical analysis of the route (and any public data about the airlines' fleet).
yeah, cause with all of the fun that traveling through random airports is to the average traveler, adding crutches just to avoid sitting at the door of a MAX is exactly what we would prefer to do!
Have they though? Boeing is the least trustworthy company on planet earth these days. The airlines aren't far behind. The regulators don't seem competent.
I say this as a capitalist - Boeing should be torn apart and sold for scrap metal.I'm sure there are some decent folks there, but that place has turned into a mess.
The Max line is clearly cursed, and I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of all of the variants in it. That they've taken the newly discovered problematic ones out of service doesn't imply that the ones left in service are good -- particularly since it seems that the problems stem from systemic quality control issues rather than something special about those particular variants.
Really bad UI. Clicking on the placeholder text in the textbox doesn't do anything. I thought it was broken until I just starting clicking randomly and found that clicking outside the placeholder text works.
I agree that clicking on what appears to be a placeholder but instead acts as a label should at the very least focus the input box so you're prompted to type in it. However the UI overall is pretty simple and clean.
Uhh.. damning praise. I think that can be rephrased as: "It's pretty, but despite being almost the simplest thing you can imagine, it still has ridiculous, unnecessary usability problems"
Same! At first I thought it might be a Firefox problem, but it's equally broken in Chrome.
Predictably it's a React site, using some widget library (MUI) that is going out of it's way to provide a text input that is inferior to what's built in to any modern browser. Great!
Aviation is safe. An issue happened and appropriate steps have immediately happened and in the end an already incredibly safe industry will be even safer. If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic. Yes, panic. This is not rational or helpful and is a huge reason why aviation is so antiquated. You want flying cars? Stop panicking at statistically minor issues. Panic and fear are why it was easier to heavily modify the already massively modified 737 design to create the 'max' instead of just designing a new plane. It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear. Over reporting and sites like this are increasing fear and panic when we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.
For the majority of drivers, the risk is primarily out of their control. This is because the majority of risk is due to a minority of drivers (the highly accident prone and the drunk, who are often 10x as risky or worse).
The goings on at Boeing this past decade or so suggest nothing is "working as it should". They killed hundreds of people trying to play silly games with safety regs. Hundreds of them.
I don't think it's worth celebrating an emergency door being blown off a plane that already killed 300+ people years prior. This is not how the system should work.
The fact that defects (such as "the doors falling off") are being found in planes that have rolled off the assembly line MONTHS ago causes me to second guess my priors for anything that is coming out of a Boeing factory.
> It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear.
No, it's because of greed and managerial and executive rot. They could innovate as much as they want, nearly as fast as they want, and still be safe - as they and other airliners have done in the past! - but then they wouldn't save the "max" amount of money doing it. How dreadful.
Boeing's failures are all Boeing's fault alone. They rightfully deserve the pillorying.
> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone
That is more of an argument for stricter requirements around automobiles and that entire industry than anything else.
The industry is littered with defunct companies that couldn't financially afford to spend ten+ years bringing a new design to market. It took nearly 14 years to bring the 787 to market, what company can afford a timeline like that? This is more the norm than the exception. Innovation is massively stifled in aviation.
> That is more of an argument for stricter requirements around automobiles and that entire industry than anything else.
I agree that cars should, and could, be safer. But my argument was about the reaction people have to accidents. In cars we have several orders of magnitude more deaths and we don't bat an eye at that but in aviation we have a scary incident and it is wall to wall coverage.
Boeing is obviously in decline. 2 maxs crashed in the last few years, now this, boeing recommended other airlines examine their max 9s and found several loose bolts[1]. So the airlines had to absorb the cost of inspection and maintenance due to poor boeing integration. Maybe, instead of paying boeing to fail, we just... let them fail? Or the government should privatize and fire the managers who are cutting safety costs for profit.
Flying is also a pretty mature technology by now. We've done it for more than 100 years and the physics is well understood. Massive leaps in capabilities are unlikely, much like no one will develop a pistol with a 2 mile range or a coffee machine that produces an espresso in a blink of an eye.
What you can do is add more sensors and software, but the increasing complexity may not be worth it.
I would argue that aircraft are massively inefficient. Lets just look at the biggest cause, pilots. When flying the aircraft has to deal with cruse and takeoff and landing. Basically, the less you have to re-work the aircraft for takeoff/landing the more you can optimize it for cruse. Looking at just one thing, flaps, it becomes obvious how much aircraft could be improved by radical changes. When taking off, flaps are set much less aggressively than when landing. This is because most of the additional lift and subsequent reduction in stall speed, come with just a little flap extension. In landing however the flaps are extended considerably more. This is not for stall issues, but just so the pilots can see the runway. By increasing the flaps we are increasing the angle of attack of the aircraft and that allows the pilots to drop the nose, so they can see the numbers better. Land flaps are a huge change to the configuration of the aircraft and require a lot of structural changes to happen, just so pilots can see. Those changes cost cruse performance massively. There are many other things like this in air frame design, materials, etc. Just look at the experimental aircraft world compared to certified designs. The differences in performance are massive but they don't come to market because the industry is so stuck in its rut.
100 years is not a long time. Compare a railroad now to a railroad we had 100 years after the invention of railroads.
There are massive improvements still possible in the engine. Like the currently in design RISE engine. And other engines as well. And if you combined the technology you can get even further. We are not close to the end on any of this. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkHKet7rp4o
There are various aero-dynamic concepts that have not yet been fully or even partially explored. Trust brace wings, blended wings or my personal favorite, Prantdl Wing. A Prantdl wing might allow you to remove the whole tail, another huge potential boost. You can even combine all these concepts potentially.
I would guess we can get 40% more efficiency just based on those things.
Strong agree with this, although worth noting that a crude back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the 737 Max has a rate of fatal accidents per mile that is only safer than driving a car by a factor of ~10. (See below.) Since cars are one of the most dangerous forms of transportation, it's certainly not crazy that people would want to avoid an airplane model that's only 10x safer than a car. Bicycles are only ~3x as safe as cars, and people reasonably use the danger of biking as a reason to not commute that way.
(In comparison, air travel is usually safer than cars by a factor of 100 or more. It's hard to even estimate how safe it is because there are so few commercial airliner crashes.)
There's also an inherent difficulty in trying to attach a risk to a single model of airplane, rather than broad activities like driving cars or bicycles, due to lack of data and data inhomogeneity. It seems reasonable to me to put some Bayesian probability on the 737 Max being significantly more dangerous than it naively appears (say, by another factor of 3 or 5) due to Poissonian noise and factors we can't observe.
---
> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe [1.5] years ([500] days) of flying to date per aircraft on average [in light of delivery dates and extensive groundings], giving a very rough estimate of a [~2] billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.
> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes
How valid is this calculation for today? Presumably they fixed the issues with the two deadly crashes, so those arguably shouldn't be included in future forecasts.
If you think the problem with the 737 Max has been fixed, none of this is relevant. The crude estimate I gave is if you adopt the reasonable theory that the production/operation of the 737 Max is bad more generally, with the cause of the prior crashes being just one of the flaws discovered.
An illustrative example: suppose there was a plane model with 100 flaws that each cause a crash every 100B miles, and after each crash that particular flaw is fixed completely. The "correct" fatality rate would still be ~once per billion miles even after several crashes, and would only approach the standard airplane background rate asymptotically after dozens of crashes.
Nope I was hoping to point out what is to me a failure of logic, that since previous versions of the plane flew safely, newly manufactured max 8 and 9s somehow have trillions of miles of safe flight. Should we combine all ford mustang car miles driven since the 80s to calculate the safety of the newest version?! Obviously the analogy doesn't hold completely, but the versions of the 737 are different. If I put a jet engine on a ford mustang, is it still a ford mustang? It's the same car, but I mounted a bigger engine!
Oh mean, should we look at the 2021 model year Ford Mustang to estimate the risk of 2024 model? What about different 2024 cars that were manufactured in winter vs summer? I'd say yes, but you're welcome to do what you want.
Airlines aren't safe just because. Weakening FAA regulation, critical issues with flight controller shortages/exhaustion, culture changes at Boeing related to safety, etc all threaten to undo that safety record. The system is not working as it should and statistics don't magically maintain themselves at previous levels.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, but I really am curious. It's extremely uncommon for government bureaucracy to roll back regulations, and as far as I can tell from some Googling, the FAA has not done so. So what regulations are being weakened?
Cozy relationships between the FAA and manufacturers, executive orders requiring them to 'collaborate' with manufacturers, evidence suggesting retaliation against whistleblowers, etc. there were significant investigations after the the MCAS tragedy. And they lost a lot of credibility as leaders in regulation when they waited to ground the max after the crashes while others took the lead.
Edit: Replying to the edit - oh come on HN dont downvote their question it's a reasonable question, my original response didn't link any articles.
The regulation doesn't specifically have to get rolled back. In this case a large part of weakening regulations is shifting to allowing the manufacturer (Boeing) to regulate themselves and allowing (or forcing) ties between regulator and manufacturer to get too close.
It also seems like the ATC system is stretched thin, as well as the airlines themselves in terms of pilots. Though I may be biased since I'm much more aware of ATC problems given the various YouTube channels I watch covering aviation.
Yep that was what I was referring to with shortages and exhaustion - not great with the recent revelations of the near misses. It's a warning that if the work to maintain those safety numbers isn't done we can't expect them to stay the same. Air travel is still safe, and has a lot of headroom before it's as bad as cars. But even that argument is kind of scary to see people making. Going from "even a single failure is unacceptable" to "even with 2 planes falling out of the sky it's still safer than driving" is a shift in mindset that threatens to invalidate that latter argument.
> as far as I can tell from some Googling, the FAA has not done so
That's because Google has become useless, not because the info isn't there.
You should try and find some of the analysis articles close to the MCAS disaster that explain how it's not the FAA that certifies airplanes any more, but the manufacturer basically self certifies.
[Yes, they're FAA employees but paid by Boeing. Do you also believe in Santa Claus?]
I don’t want innovation that comes at the expense of human lives. The same thing is going on with self driving cars right now. It is wild to me that they aren’t required to follow the same regulations as airliners.
The safety record of commercial airliners should be help up as an example of how the system works. It’s proof that we can set aside corporate greed and design systems that are safe if we want to. The way that Boeing has gone downhill and the FAA has allowed it to happen is shameful.
> I don’t want innovation that comes at the expense of human lives. The same thing is going on with self driving cars right now. It is wild to me that they aren’t required to follow the same regulations as airliners
If self driving cars follow the airline model we won't see them for, at best, decades. That is decades of 40k deaths a year in the current human driven model. Self driving cars have the potential to drop that dramatically, but only if we actually develop them.
Everything has a cost. Not changing has a cost. Changing has a cost. Weighing those two is important. If you only cite the costs of changing without considering the costs of not changing you will never change and always believe you are making the right choice.
self driving cars have a theoretical and unproven potential to save lives, but are proven to fail, require human assistance, etc. There's no certainty self-driving cars will ever be safer, and we shouldn't let companies kill people to get feedback for improvement!
Why is 737 MAX having so many issues then ? In a short period of time since 2019, it had way too many incidents for an aircraft. I am never flying 737 MAX and yes I am a very practical person.
Nope. I used to fly as a day job though. I have dreams of owning my own plane some day but it is so ridiculous to own one that that it is at best a dream. Also, I really do think Boeing is a source of issues in the aviation industry. This is all about ruts. Aviation is in a huge one right now and Boeing has a lot of the blame for creating that rut. Ruts are inevitable though for math reasons beyond this post so I don't fully blame them. I do have a prediction. The math of ruts says that the deeper the rut the more energy required to get out of it. This means that when aviation finally does break out it will be followed by massive innovation and change. I personally think that point is nearly here. Electric aviation is my bet on the source but it could be one of many other sources too. I can't wait to see it happen.
You seem to assume they will magically get out of their rut for some reason. If cutting costs is the rut boeing is in, what will cause them to get out of it? For a poorly functioning company, bankruptcy is the usual, but mcdonell douglas and boeing are strategic assets, so bankruptcy isnt allowed, and they can take our tax money and deliver death.
Aviation is in a rut. Boeing isn't all of aviation. Rut busting generally happens from something new. Electric aviation has all the hallmarks of that thing. Basically, everything about designing and operating an electric aircraft is at a lift-off point (pun only partially intended). We are nearing break-even at short distances and likely within a few years long distance aircraft will be possible. When that happens jet engines will die, quickly, and the entire economic structure of every part of aviation will change. (Don't bet on big airports and massive cattle car planes in that new world) This is a recipe for rut busting if I ever heard one. But I can (easily) be wrong and the change may come from other places. I highly doubt however that the change will come from Boeing. They aren't implementing the strategies needed to bust ruts in their practices so they aren't likely to be the source of the change and quite possibly will fail as a company when that change hits.
Safety comes in levels, and Boeing MAX 8-9, relatively to Airbus, is less safe than the standard we have come to expect in the 21st century.
I don't doubt that this will be reflected in their future market shares, and panic won't be the underlying reason. No one wants to buy worse stuff for about the same price as better stuff.
> Aviation is safe. An issue happened and appropriate steps have immediately happened and in the end an already incredibly safe industry will be even safer.
Nobody is questioning the safety of aviation in general. This is a focus around a company that has taken a nosedive in terms of quality of planes delivered for the sake of the mighty dollar.
Insiders have confirmed numerous cost cutting measures from the C-level executives. To my awareness, nobody has gone to jail. Fines issued.
> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic
Recalls are issued yearly across a wide number of manufacturers and models. I don’t get your point here. This is not panic. This is poor design and/or quality making it’s way into production with high probability of causing bodily harm to driver and/or others.
> You want flying cars? Stop panicking at statistically minor issues. Panic and fear are why it was easier to heavily modify the already massively modified 737 design to create the 'max' instead of just designing a new plane. It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear. Over reporting and sites like this are increasing fear and panic when we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.
Yea let’s just ignore decades of safety requirements because we wAnT tO iNnOvAtE. GoVeRnMeNt ReGuLaTiOn BaD.
> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic.
We don't lose people to the cars themselves. We lose people to reckless driving and traffic: two problems that are fundamentally solved for aircraft.
If the door of a 5-year-old car fell off on the highway, and every car of that make and model were recalled for having loose factory-installed bolts, then people most certainly would panic.
Aviation in general is very safe. However, there is clearly something wrong in Boeing's design and manufacturing process that's persisted for many years. I would not feel comfortable flying in any of the new 737 MAX's and will avoid flying in one as much as possible.
About statistics, another nice app based on the same ideas and fears is the Am I Going Down app. It lets you know how often you need to take the trip before you crash and die.
Yes, Aviation is safe. However, specifically the 737 MAX model is not. Too many incidents since 2019 killing hundreds of people. No Thanks. I will rather go back home than fly a 737 MAX.
Aviation is safe, the design and production of the 737 MAX is sloppier than most current aircrafts. Better compare to other aircrafts than to cars or bicycles. ;-)
Counterpoint: Boeing clearly has cultural issues around safety and as consumers this is the only way to financially push back on the company. If Alaska and United start feeling the pressure because people start to avoid flying on them entirely due to the MAX issues then that should be enough consumer leverage to affect Boeing and Boeing's behavior.
I'm literally going to hop on a cross country Alaska MAX flight tomorrow (if the flight doesn't get cancelled) and I'm not much more worried about it than any other flight, but I'm tired of our country being run by MBA culture and having to make these kinds of risk-reward tradeoffs while considering that the management class of this country seems hell bent on turning us into a third world kleptocracy. We need to start punishing some of them for bad decisions. Otherwise they'll keep on gambling with our safety in favor of their profit margins and aviation may become a whole lot less safe.
And in the process it might just improve the long-term outlook of their company. Boeing could decide to become an engineering-led culture again rather than a short-term-profits-led company which would be more sustainable.
A door came flying off at 16k feet. They found a bunch of planes with loose bolts. On a plane with a history of problems built by a company with a history of problems. No one died this time. But hundreds died last time.
Nothing will stop Boeing except money. People not wanting to fly this plane will change airlines purchasing decisions. Boeing will feel the pain.
> People not wanting to fly this plane will change airlines purchasing decisions.
It actually may not, much, unfortunately; there's only one real competing line of products, and they're so massively backlogged that people will buy this anyway.
Given that every affected 737 MAX has been grounded for inspection already, this seems a bit hyperbolic. If you are still worried about some hitherto unknown new problem from Boeing, it could just as likely come from any of their airframes.
> If you are still worried about some hitherto unknown new problem from Boeing, it could just as likely come from any of their airframes.
Eh... not sure about that. The 737 Max is quite new, and this is catastrophic/near-catastrophic problem 2 in a couple of years. One could be forgiven for being more suspicious of this family than their others.
Like, maybe these were the only two problems, and everything else is a perfect as could be, but at this point it's not ridiculous to be concerned that it's just a shoddy product.
A lot of people don't realize that the fuselage of this plane isn't even made by Boeing, it's made by Spirit AeroSystems which also makes components for Airbus.
We don't really know who to blame here until the investigation concludes.
And, importantly, it's entirely consistent to hold off on blaming any singular party until the investigation is complete, while simultaneously not wanting to personally fly on a 737 Max!
An airline is responsible more for safely operating the aircraft (including most maintenance). An airline really isn't in a position to verify every design detail of an aircraft any more than you're responsible for verifying there are no potential design flaws in your (much simpler) car that could potentially cause someone injury.
I think airlines are a lot more responsible for verifying design flaws in their airplane than I am in my car. First, they are a giant business which has way more resources to do this. Second, they are selling a service.
If I was running a US taxi service and bought a fleet of flawed Indian cars that caused crashes, I think I would be partially responsible.
They're responsible for using street legal cars, yes. But I don't see any taxi company being responsible if they used GM cars that turned out to have a defective ignition switch back in the day for example.
I assume airlines do some degree of due diligence and, I believe they choose the engine type if there are options available but you probably overestimate the ability of a business whose primary job is to ferry passengers from point A to point B to do a serious design verification of every tiny detail of an aircraft. And those details can be tiny; take the case of the Airbus engine disassembly mentioned elsewhere on this thread.
Car manufacturing is a regulated industry. When I buy a car in the USA, even for my taxi business, I shouldn't need to hire a team of engineers to verify that it was properly designed and won't spontaneously combust. I should be able to assume that if the car is being legally sold to the public in the USA, the manufacturer has demonstrated that it meets some basic safety requirements set out by the government. I obviously have some _operational_ responsibilities (e.g. taking my taxis out of service if they're recalled for a design flaw), but I wouldn't consider myself responsible at all if my taxi happened to be the first 2025 Toyota Camry that spontaneously combusted from some design flaw.
Regulators aren't perfect but this is one reason they exist. The FAA has a set of requirements for manufacturing and selling planes in the USA and they have a set of requirements for operating an airline. If I'm operating an airline and the FAA tells me that the verification of an airplane's design and its assembly is the manufacturer's responsibility and not mine, I don't think it's fair to hold me responsible if my brand new airplane falls from the sky because of a design flaw.
> I wouldn't consider myself responsible at all if my taxi happened to be the first 2025 Toyota Camry that spontaneously combusted from some design flaw.
Not that it is relevant to the overall relevance to the aviation argument here, but just in regards to cars in the US -- you often would be held liable for that, depending on which specific liability we are talking about, what the damages are, and in which jurisdiction you are operating in.
The US justice system has a notion of "joint and several liability", where we say "both parties are guilty and both are liable for the damages". I think that applies here:
- It's the assembler's responsibility to make sure the exit door bolts are properly tightened, and
- It's the manufacturer's responsibility to find assemblers that correctly tighten door bolts, and the manufacturer's responsibility to design doors that don't explode, and
- It's the airline's responsibility to find manufacturers that design planes with not exploding doors, which are assembled by assemblers that correctly tighten door bolts, and checked by the airline's own maintenance teams during regular servicing of the planes.
Everyone should be looking over and double-checking everyone else's work. But that's not how the 737 MAX was designed or built.
The submission doesn't seem to try to assign blame to either Boeing or Spirit AeroSystems, but tries to just give you a true/false depending on if they airplane you're going with is a 737 Max.
Just because the website happens to be about 737 Max, does it mean absolutely everything related to Boeing is on-topic in this submission? Especially discussions related to who to blame for (the recent) mishaps?
Umm, yes? This website is obviously on the front page because of the recent mishaps so that's literally the most on topic possible topic to discuss lol
This is like someone trying to argue the reason they like looking at breasts and sucking on nipples has nothing to do with being breast-fed as a child, and they are completely separate things and the correlation between them is irrelevant to bring up.
Regardless of who is ultimately at fault, this is about people not wanting to fly on these planes. They don't care if it was Boeing or if it was a subcontractor, they just want the information they need to cancel their flight or demand a different plane from the airline.
Those other planes aren't experiencing active safety disruption events at the moment, so no. We might not ultimately know whose fault it is, but we know which planes are faulty. 737 MAX has a history of problems, and I'm shocked they weren't shelved the first time.
The planes listed on the website in this submission aren't experiencing any safety issues at the moment, either. The plug doors are only on MAX 9s, which are currently all grounded.
Because I know I'd feel much more miserable during the flight compared to being on an A320. (Not that I'll feel comfortable then, I hate flying on single-aisle planes in general.)
Sure, but the implied motive for spinning this up is that people care to know if their flight is on a 737max or <anything else>, and because Boeing put its name on this Russian roulette with wings, commenter is attempting to align perception with reality?
Also, first flight number I could find is a 737max according to google but this thing says it isn’t a 737max. AC565, January 9, 2024.
Boeing is the one delivering the product, right? Why would it be not boeings fault they don't qa the bolts on their parts? If a cars doors kept falling off Noone would accept ford saying sorry it's the factory we bought it froms fault
We do in fact blame third parties for their components in regards to recalled components that are subbed out by final manufacturers. e.g. Takata airbags.
Who is response for the QA of components and workmanship? It looks like its was loose bolts from information released from United Airlines and there was a notice to check for loose bolts on the Max.
We know that Boeing has a lot of Q&A problems with these planes and are taking all kinds of shortcuts. It seems the blame should be placed squarely on Boeing.
From what I heard is that Boeing does the final assembly , they get that door out and put it back in, then at the end pressurize the interior to 1.5X the normal pressure and test the plane. Since this also was a new plane I do not see how Boeing can find a different scapegoat.
> Spirit AeroSystems which also makes components for Airbus
True, but the main Spirit Aerosystems factories making Airbus components are in the UK, except for "central section panels" of the A350, which are made in the USA.
The British factories used to be BAE and Bombardier factories, so it's very possible for there to be different working methods, culture etc.
1 - it really doesn't matter, delegating your manufacturing to a subcontractor doesn't absolve you of ensuring the product is made properly
2 - it's made in a former Boeing plant, that boeing sold to an investment fund and then contract work to, so if your point is "that's not how REAL boeing manufacturing is done" well that's certainly where boeing is heading its manufacturing.
3 - The plane is designed, certified, assembled, inspected and then sold by Boeing. If I buy a ford and the door falls off randomly after two weeks, I don't care which subcontractor made the door, I give ford an angry warranty call.
I understand all of that. My point is that people avoiding all 737 MAX variants over an issue specifically on plug doors that are no longer in the air, that we don't even know why they failed, are illogically filtering their flight options.
Oh yes but that's a different type of MAX though ! No, not the one with the engine nacelle falling potential issue that we don't have a fix but want the FAA to ignore, the other one !
Out of the 3 current MAX types, one killed people two times and the other two have unresolved issues (one that make it fail FAA certification, and the other that make it lose parts of fuselage in flight ...). And then Boeing ask for fast track certification on the 4th type, because they've been doing such a great job so far.
But virtually no one really is avoiding it over that, they're avoiding because of the multitude of various faults and issue over the entire MAX line that makes it highly unlikely that there isn't something else coming.
I really don't understand what you're getting at. I don't disagree with you.
The difference between this website existing for MAX and not for others is the repetition of issues though, to the point that now more people have had enough.
When the glass spills, the last drop might be the trigger for the glass finally spilling but it's the accumulation of water that's the issue, not just that one final drop.
The bottom line is that I think it is absolutely silly for people to try to make their own judgement about the safety of aircraft they get on based on news stories about different variants of models which have had issues that are already identified.
This is a relevant topic for regulators to address, with specificity to the actual offending parts, procedures, and processes in place. Avoiding all MAX variants is a very hamfisted attempt to address a very tiny difference in observed safety.
There are regional airlines flying much more sketchy things. Where's "isMyPlaneACessna208BeingFlownByANewPilotInPoorWeather.com"?
The 737 fuselage is shipped from Spirit to Boeing without an interior. The door plugs are removed by Boeing during the interior installation. It is up to Boeing to reinstall them properly.
This type of delay is of strategic value to the status quo.
"We need to wait until all the facts are in," "investigations take time," "We're still looking at root causes and it is premature to..." These statements may be factually true, but the time it takes allows people to be distracted by something else, passions to cool, and urgency to dissipate.
It's no brainwave for Boeing or anyone else (e.g. the NTSB, on Boeing's behalf) to realize that the slower and more methodical the investigation, the lower the final penalty (of whatever kind) will probably be, at least for one-off incidents. When the track record gets long, the actual quality of the investigations may start weighing against them...eventually.
Public opinion isn't a functional way to increase transportation safety anyway. All measurable increases in any form of transportation safety are due to regulatory reasons. The people who matter on this issue aren't going to forget.
Spirit AeroSystems may have it's own subcontractors, they may have their own, etc... and buck needs to stop somewhere.
The the airliner is called "Boeing 737 MAX" and not "Spirit AeroSystems - Boeing 737 MAX" which makes it pretty clear where overall accountability sits.
Right, but this website isn't for regulators to assign accountability. This website is for people to choose what plane they fly on.
Choosing to not to fly on a MAX 8 because a MAX 9 has a part that is failing, is jumping to conclusions. If someone wants to jump that far, maybe they should avoid the Airbus A220 because it has wings made by Spirit AeroSystems. There's a lot of finger pointing going on when nobody knows why the doors are falling off yet.
People are angry, concerned and not willing to wait for NTSB to complete their investigations and see what if anything the FAA will do with the conclusions.
People are applying a heuristic and for many the outcome (correct in my opinion) is that Boeing should not be trusted.
> People are applying a heuristic and for many the outcome (correct in my opinion) is that Boeing should not be trusted.
That's how I see it. Boeing has already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice safety and even human lives in exchange for greater profits and stock price increases. They then showed a willingness to lie and try to cover up their actions after it came to light that they caused the deaths of hundreds of passengers. They've also shown that they'll fight to avoid taking responsibility for the lives they took (https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-max-crash-victims...)
That's because the failure was entirely internal to the airbags. If the problem were with the installation of the airbags in the vehicles, then we'd have looked at the carmakers.
Boeing has been selling off various parts of its manufacturing for years to investment firms, then contracting out to what used to be their own factories. They are intentionally de-integrating (disintegrating?).
Some say this is for union-busting. Others say it's "just" boardroom financial engineering.
Whatever the reason, Boeing clearly hasn't cared about being a manufacturing company for a long time.
According to their wikipedia page, at least, Spirit AeroSystems are a Boeing spinoff in any case, and something like 85% of their sales is only to Boeing. It seems like corporate budget maneuver, and a distinction I, a member of the flying public, don't really care about.
I said this before in another thread about the MAX a few months ago and got downvoted but I'll stand on this: I won't actually fly on any 737 MAX and actively avoid Boing airplanes altogether. I understand statistics but already hate flying and this whole debacle doesn't help.
You are not alone. I am literally going to ask the flight attendants before boarding if this is a 737 MAX. If they cant answer or the answer is yes, I will not step on that plane.
Can someone tell what stack is used to build this website? I am new to FE and looking to understand how to create simple websites like this, where is the database, how are they connected/hosted, and how much it takes to run them monthly.
578 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
They (the comedians) posted similar comedic takes on politics for many years; eg this one about Australia's energy market https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ELaBzj7cn14
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Accidents_and_i...
> a fatal accident rate of four accidents per million flights, whereas the previous Boeing 737 generations averaged 0.2 fatal accidents per million flights
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeings-o...
(The most recent problem is missing yet)
https://simpleflying.com/safest-airliners-all-time/
Some previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38917820
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893909
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38889774
When the investigation into those crashes reveals a shitload of corner cutting on safety regs, people are right to get skeptical.
When another version of the same plane made by the same company has an in flight blowout and the fleet is grounded AGAIN (yes i know just the 9s but remind me how many other companies have had entire lines of their plane grounded in the last 20 years), then yes I think it's reasonable to want to avoid any of their newer plane models as clearly the level of safety and quality appears to be declining.
Flying is still safer than just about any other form of travel, but that's basically because we mandated a shit ton of regulations and safety to make sure that even penny pinching corner cutting corps wouldn't have people dying in droves. Boeing has clearly decided to push that envelope and they deserve all the bad press they get for it and I fully understand people who already have a quasi irrational fear of flying freaking the hell out over this.
I would certainly not buy a car from a company that's clearly disregarded safety so badly, and would prefer avoiding being in one for any other reason (friends/rideshare/whatever).
That's a lot of cars. The standard in the auto industry is to design specifically for regulatory tests, and/or popular industry tests, in a specific region. All major automakers sell cars that intentionally lack safety features in regions that don't explicitly require them, if it will give their vehicle a price advantage in that market.
e.g. you can still buy vehicles without airbags made by major auto manufacturers.
Selling a car without an airbag in a country that's decided you don't need airbags is the choice of the country. If you wanted this to be similar it'd be selling a car in a country that wants you to have airbags, but yours don't work. Which would be a company I'd avoid.
We don't know why these doors are falling off yet. Any accusation that it was due to a disregard for safety isn't supported by any facts, yet. It is conjecture.
I was trying to gauge how an insider viewed the Max problem related to the auto trim issue which caused two airplanes [1][2] to crash, killing 346 people. This was shortly after watching the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing [3].
The ignorance and non acceptance of fault made me cringe. I won't go into the details, but this wasn't a freak accident this was due to human decisions. They cut corners on how to modify an aircraft to compete with Airbus, and then doubled down to not pass down training to pilots on their hack of a fix, since it would be an increase in costs on their customers (i.e. the plane becomes more expensive to operate due to extra training for pilots).
I am doing my outmost to avoid any new planes from Boeing (higher risk with new airplanes). I've also simply started flying less.
The Boeing fiasco is what 2nd world / 3rd world corruption looks like in the west. profit interests above safety, and regulatory capture of the FAA. Also anti competitive or anti free trade practices by the US Department of Commerce [4].
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...
The statistical safety of aviation is the best it has ever been - 2023 set yet another record low for commercial aviation deaths and injuries. Your automobile trip to the grocery store is far riskier.
Especially since the FAA and transport dept are getting more corrupt/captured as time progresses.
It doesn't matter how good the safety numbers are if any player is able to cheat and blame their safety problems on someone else.
I feel it's important to provide complete information. Flying is safer per mile traveled than driving. Driving is safer on a per-trip basis.
So if you compare your trip to the grocery store to your flight to visit extended family, the trip to your grocery store is safer. But if you compare 10,000 miles of driving back and forth to the grocery store over many trips vs a single 10,000 mile flight, the flight is safer.
You can’t make this blanket statement and I would bet on average it’s the opposite still.
- Flying in the US is on average ~750x safer per mile than driving according to 2000-2010 data (it’s likely even larger a difference in the modern era).
- I would venture to guess that most US flights are in the 1000-2000 mile range and most US car trips are easily more than the equivalent 2-3 miles.
- Most fatalities from flying occur during takeoff and landing, so longer flights are actually safer per mile. Relating this back to the thread, the risk of catastrophic failure from your choice (or non-choice) of airframe only really affects the off-ground danger and not the higher danger you face on a taxiway/runway.
- All of these numbers are based purely on fatalities but I’m guessing your definition of “safety” includes being maimed or otherwise seriously injured. You have several orders of magnitude higher chance of being seriously injured in a car crash compared to flying since accidents in aviation are much more likely to end in death.
If you slice it up per mile traveled, airplanes win.
If you slice it up per trip taken, driving wins.
If you slice it up per hour spent traveling, driving and flying are about the same. (according to the book Freakonomics)
Flying is very safe. The statement "flying is safer than driving" is industry propaganda to help appease fears of flying. They cherry-picked the statistic that made them look best and flooded the whole world with it.
If you had a magic genie and you made your one wish to replace all passenger vehicle trips with commercial airline flights, including quick trips to the grocery store, you would kill a lot of extra people.
We are in a trend where risk is increasing.
Boeing is a major institution responsible for building critical defense and civil technology. With many jobs on the line as well.
People need to be held accountable, and we need a culture that allows people to speak up earlier and more often. Otherwise this will continue to happen and not just at Boeing but across many more critical sectors of our society.
Is there any data supporting this? From what I can tell, the trend from both IATA [0] and ASN [1][2] data appears to be down. Any small YoY increase [3] in 2020 being attributable to PS752 shot down by Iran and an Embraer EMB-120RT shot down over Somalia. This downward trend seems to go for fatal and non-fatal accidents.
I completely agree with the need for oversight in this situation where corners appear to be cut and the FAA seems to be abdicating responsibility, but changing personal behavior requires some real data which I simply don't see.
[0] https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/pressroom/fact-sheet...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fatalities-from-av...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...
[3]
It's a sophisticated form of empathy, not everyone growing up learns it.
Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about ways to improve or hold Boeing accountable. But it's not a rational reaction to stop flying due to this incident.
Or, it is a perfectly rational reaction for many people, it's just your theory of rationalism—based on coarse-grained probability of an event ("airlines are safer than ever"), rather than Expected Value or something else—is limited and unrealistic. Like, maybe there's some fancy Nash Equilibrium psycho economic rationality in which the empirically observed behavior is actually rational.
People are prone to being concerned about a lot of things that aren’t a real risk to them. People aren’t logical.
There will be specific planes scheduled for the flight in advanced, but it changes frequently up until departure due to regular airline logistics.
(just kidding. This is a cool project. Good job)
If not enough people buy a ticket for a 737-8 sized plane, SWA will sometimes swap it out with a 737-700 with a smaller capacity. This also allows SWA to fly with one less flight attendant than they would on the larger plane.
If there is a maintenance issue with your 737-Max8, and there is a 737-800 sitting in the next gate not set to go out until a few hours after your plane, they'll swap it out to reduce the chance of having a late departure.
If the site is not scraping data every minute, there could be mismatches. It's unlikely this site is scraping data more than once a day to save costs.
Air safety going down is a trend you want to stop ASAP. Not wait around until it's just as dangerous as something else like driving your car.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Incompetence is understandable, improperly modeling the physics due to lack of experience or knowledge is understandable, but repeated instances that point to corruption at the government regulator and bad culture at the manufacturer lend to fears that the situation will get worse for a while before it gets better.
It’s the same reason you might avoid flying on an Eastern European/Russian airplane. The perceived risks move from unforeseeable error or bad luck to systemic error.
Is it?
The only death in US major commercial aviation in ages was when a woman was partially sucked out of a window in 2018 when an engine failed and blew apart, breaking the window open.
Before that, we have the Asiana flight which crashed after landing short at SFO, striking the undercarriage on the edge of the floating platform and cartwheeling. Everyone survived the crash, but a woman was killed when a fire truck ran over her amidst the firefighting foam.
Prior to that we have to go to 2005 when a plane overran a runway and hit a car, killing one occupant… of the car.
We have to go all the way back to November 2001 to have a serious accident where an American plane crashed on takeoff, killing all on board. Technically this was due to pilot error due to over-responding to wake turbulence, breaking off the vertical stabilizer. But it’s arguably an engineering issue that the pilot was able to induce catastrophic structural failure through control inputs.
There has definitely been a worrying trend lately in operational error with pilots and ATC nearly causing accidents due to runway incursions, nearly landing on taxiways, etc. But it’s really hard to say with a straight face that major airlines have anything other than an exemplary safety record the likes of which has been completely unparalleled before now. We have had one single death aboard a major commercial aviator in the U.S. in more than twenty two years.
This was a serious fuck-up. But it remains that there was at risk no more than one, maybe two, fatalities. That isn’t enough to justify the claim that “safety is getting worse.”
Statistically, there is no difference between a new plane and one that's been flying for 18 years [1].
Given dying because an installer fucked up feels mighty similar to dying because a maintenance tech fucked up, I don't see a rational reason to over-penalise fabrication errors to the extent that it overrules millions of successful flight miles. (Design mistakes are categorially different.)
[1] http://awg.aero/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/analysisofimpact....
Just because it's happening to other people doesn't make it okay to hand-wave away safety.
And by the way, so far NTSB believes it's not a fabrication error but an assembly error. NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in.
As a layman, no. Were I looking for more than a Twitter level of analysis, it would be an indication for investigation. Not grounds for conclusion.
More directly, even as a layman, if I were to use that anecdote as grounds to condemn the state of car manufacturing in summa, that would be irrational.
> NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in
Source? Last I saw, they couldn't find the bolts. It takes lab work to ascertain whether they ever existed.
You seem to not know the meaning of suspect, so here is the definition:
Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more sus·pect verb 3rd person present: suspects /səˈspek(t)/ 1. have an idea or impression of the existence, presence, or truth of (something) without certain proof. "if you suspect a gas leak, do not turn on an electric light"
Have a great day sir.
Suspicion doesn't mean baseless hypothesis, e.g. "Mars is an orange." The NTSB would never say (and has not said, as you've conceded) it "suspects" the "bolts were never screwed in."
Were there a lack of marks where the bolts should have exerted clamping force, there would be basis for suspicion. That isn't proof. But it's more than a hypothesis.
Where are you getting this? Crookshanks said the NTSB had "not yet recovered the four bolts" and "have not determined if they existed there" [1].
Your source, for which I'm genuinely curious, is categorically false in suggesting the NTSB "suspects" the bolts were never there, or that Crookshanks said "there is so far no evidence 'the bolts were ever there'". (The latter being particularly reprehensible, given it involves materially misquoting an aircraft investigator.)
> Good luck with your investments
Wat.
[1] https://airwaysmag.com/ntsb-as1282-exams-all-12-door-plug-st...
Straw man. Nobody says even a single death isn't tragic. What I'm saying is it doesn't overwhelm trillions of miles of safe flight. Not flying a 737 Max 8, only to go onto a Spirit Aerosystems-assembled Airbus, doensn't make sense. (Note: not implicating Spirit. Just saying that the window of culpabilitiy extends more in their direction than it does across every 737 Max.)
OP said air safety is going down broadly [1]. So yes, considering all air transport miles is valid given the context.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38929237
There has been one passenger fatality aboard a major U.S. airline since November 2001.
You’re proposing crashes are autocorrelated. They’re not. They would be in a vacuum filled with spherical cows. But grounding and investigating takes care of that.
This is related to the fallacy of thinking if a coin has come up heads thrice in a row, it’s more likely to come up tails the fourth time. It’s not. We have a lot of innocuous flight miles as data from which to make robust statements, particularly when it comes to characterising the safety of the entire airline industry.
Put another way, on which day are you safer, the day before the accident or the day after?
From all photo evidence I’ve seen, some cushions were sucked off the seat. These cushions are designed to be removed. If a passenger was seated and wearing their seat belt, I have every faith that they would have been fine. Uncomfortable as hell but ultimately fine. I’ll bet money the NTSB report will say as much.
And the point stands that the only reason this story is noteworthy is because of airlines’ spotless safety record over the past two decades. Incidents like this are exceedingly rare.
That said this incident occurred during the initial climb-out where seat belt use is mandatory.
So yes, if a passenger was seated there and if their belt was unbuckled, I can see how somebody would have died. Nobody is saying that this isn’t a serious fuckup that doesn’t need to be investigated and remedied.
What I am saying is that major airlines in the U.S. have a more or less unblemished safety record for twenty two years, the likes of which has not only been unparalleled in aviation, but by any other form of transport. Literally walking is more dangerous than flying a major commercial airline in the U.S.
The MAX line of planes in particular has had their share of problems, but with the MCAS situation resolved there is no reason to believe that it in particular is any less safe than any other airframe operated by the majors. The issue with the door plug is unlikely to be related to the MAX (the same part and design have been in service without issue since well before the MAX). It will be investigated, fixed, and we will in all likelihood go back to flying gajillions of passenger miles without serious incident.
I’ll put this another way: if all of this gnashing of teeth and doom and gloom causes enough anxiety over flying that a few hundred people choose to drive instead, it will inevitably cause more injury and death than if every airline went all-in on a fleet of 737 MAXes.
TIL half the people commenting here are nobody :)
Commercial aviation in the U.S. is still incomprehensibly safe. It is not getting measurably less safe. The 737 MAX line are not death traps.
Not an overreaction. Not bolting on a door on a brand new plane is past bordering into full-on insanity.
Nobody floods into the comment sections on HN when this happens because people dying in cars is depressingly normal but planes are so unimaginably safe that a person hypothetically getting sucked out of a plane is strange and terrifying.
There's a reason they tell you to always wear your seatbelt though, ranging from sudden turbulence/downdraft to sudden depressurization.
You're kind of making my point for me when clothing being removed from a person is the most harrowing part of an aviation incident.
I'll address the elephant in the room and say that I don't think it's coincidence that the two airframe losses in the MAX 9 were with Indonesian and Ethiopian carriers and not American or European ones, despite American and European carriers having received—as far as I can tell—the bulk of the deliveries of this airframe and at least a plurality (if not majority) of hours in use (if someone else can find good data on this I'd be grateful). I suspect that more resources put toward pilot training played a meaningful difference here. For example, the first officer of the Ethiopian flight had less than 200 hours of flight experience. This would be completely unacceptable for a U.S. major.
I want to be clear that I am not saying that it's the pilots' fault, but that the swiss-cheese model relies on multiple overlapping failures. The additional resources spent on training, maintenance, operations, and CRM at American and European airlines in general ensures fewer overlaps and thus fewer incidents.
Contrary to this sentiment, air traffic safety continues to improve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
If anything, air travel is so safe now that non-fatal incidents such as this weeks' stand out more than they would have in previous decades.
And in comparison, driving is getting much more dangerous (at least in the US).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
What's wrong with pointing that out and being concerned?
Everything I do in life is a calculated risk. If you told me my toaster was 3 times as likely to kill me today I would still probably toast my bread knowing that the base rate was already pretty low.
If anything, knowing that all of the headline grabbing incidents has been confined to one product line at one company, and watching the amount of scrutiny they are receiving for it makes me feel safer overall.
"systemic failure within Boeing" isn't necessarily inconsistent with "air traffic safety continues to improve". For instance, better pilot training and safety regulations might make flying even safer despite Boeing creating more crashes.
We aren't. There were fatal issues with one system (MCAS) on one line of planes. This was addressed, and since then there have been zero fatalities (or injuries) caused by design and/or engineering issues by this manufacturer. Their safety record is not substantially different from that of Airbus (who have their own design issues, IMO, such as non-linked pilot controls which has also contributed toward hull loss and passenger deaths). The MCAS issue was, to be clear, completely inexcusable and both regulator and management heads should have rolled over this. I am not happy with our anemic response to this incident.
And yes, one or two people could have potentially died due to this latest incident. It should be investigated and fixed. Beyond that there are wider aspects of the MBA-ification of Boeing that ought to (and I hope but don't expect will) drive regulatory and business change in this country.
But the fact remains that once the issues with MCAS were resolved, Boeing-designed and -assembled airframes have resumed a track record of safety that eclipses that of any other transportation industry. Again, we can, should, and are expecting that every issue is a learning moment to improve the practices of the industry as a whole.
Could you please share some data to back this claim? For example comparison of the number of technical incidents per airframe in use for Boeing vs Airbus?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_in...
You'll note the last time a major carrier in the U.S. experienced a fatality due to an engineering, manufacturing, and/or design error attributable to Boeing was in 1996, when a spark in the center fuel tank in a 747 caused it to explode midair.
Before that, 1994. Then 1991, 1989, and 1988.
We did also see one fatality aboard a 737-700 in 2018, but this was due to an issue with the CFM engine and which isn't attributable to Boeing.
Given this, it's pretty obvious on face value that—however you slice it—flying on a Boeing airframe on a major U.S. carrier is safer than every other form of transportation, including literally just walking. Driving, buses, trains, trams, bicycling, scootering, ziplining, whatever. They're all less safe.
From your own source:
The aircraft experienced a contained engine failure with debris penetrating the fuselage; one passenger was partially ejected from the aircraft and later died of her injuries.
This is horrific. Boeing, of course and happened in 2018
> We did also see one fatality aboard a 737-700 in 2018, but this was due to an issue with the CFM engine and which isn't attributable to Boeing.
There is essentially no aviation industry expert who will place this failure at the feet of Boeing and not CFM. That said, the fact that engines are designed to completely contain debris from a failure is wild and speaks to the incredible standard of safety we hold aviation to.
To be fair Boeing literally fired their CEO because of the MAX fiasco.
“He was CEO from 2015 to 2019, when he was fired in the aftermath of two crashes of the 737 MAX and its subsequent groundings.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
Comparing Boeing's performance to other the performance of other industries is also apples to oranges, no? Why not compare Boeing to Airbus? I don't understand what you mean by that argument.
So, what design failures has Airbus suffered as of late? And what's your explanation for the specific hate on Boeing, if it's comparable to airbus?
https://www.ft.com/content/1588974e-db75-4a02-9aff-deb0b75ed...
Where is this for airbus?
But that's completely true! Not every driver on the road is at equal risk of a fatal accident. A significant percentage of all fatal accident involve speeding, reckless driving, and/or alcohol consumption, to say nothing of distractions like cell phone usage.
So you do have quite a bit of control on the road and exactly none in the air.
So you do have control, and can put yourself into a safer cohort of drivers, but the best you can do still falls wildly short of the state of aviation safety.
You may be 100% in control of a scenario where you are highly likely to die, and 0% in control of a situation where you could essentially live until you die of natural causes.
In this case, even if you exercise 100% of the control afforded to you by driving a car, you are more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane.
A subthread about the actual personal risk when flying the MAX is perfectly valid.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38929336
This is more or less equivalent to the little old lady in this comic saying "I'm wearing this to ward off A." Laypeople are notoriously crap at judging any kind of risk.
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif
You can maybe argue two, where a woman was killed after exiting an Asiana plane after it crashed at SFO. She was hit by an emergency vehicle responding to the scene.
Separately, major US airlines can reliably fly a daytime visual approach with a fully working airplane into a major airport.
I don't really care how safe driving is per mile, I care if I'm going to be dead at the end of the year.
For example the recent crash in Japan. Airbus isn't getting railed for that one.
I know several 737 pilots on US flag carriers. Even at the time they were saying that neither crash would be possible for their fleet as they had done simulator training of exactly those sorts of scenarios.
From wikipedia: While defending the pilots' actions, Sullenberger was also highly critical of allowing someone with only 200 hours of flight experience to be first officer.
I hate sounding like a Boeing apologist, but I do think it's worth being very clear about where blame lies for things so that we can both asses risk accurately and make appropriate corrections.
Boeing was rightly blamed for misleading everyone about the nature of the MAX8. It is a materially different airframe, and it required different systems to be created to be competently flyable with 737 type rating. Is Boeing misleading anyone here on the MAX9? Personally, I doubt it. It was probably a fluke non-conforming part, since that plug is a carryover from other 737s. The track record leaves a lot of us wondering if something's up, though.
Pilots I am personally friends with who fly for American, Southwest, and United, disagree. They feel they were fully prepped for the differences in the airframe from their first flight on it, pre-crashes, and have said that they blame the carriers that crashed for not prepping their pilots the same.
It's entirely possible that I missed some news, but I'm unfamiliar with the FAA or anyone else actually accusing Boeing of intentionally misleading or releasing incorrect information?
My analogy to to Japan, while poor, was just meant to illustrate that we should be very clear about the true causes of things. "Boeing lied" is a very different problem than "Boeing squeezed a new system in, advised that pilots should be trained, and airlines didn't perform enough training".
But yes, I agree that we should be wondering what's up, specifically with Boeing's assembly/QA processes...
Boeing noticed that the thing didn't fly like a 737, so they made some software to change its flight characteristics to be more like a 737. They failed to disclose this, and when it "activated" in 2018, a plane crashed. This is when FAA learned about it. Then another one crashed because of the same thing only a few months later.
The DOJ made a criminal complaint against Boeing, resulting in a deferred prosecution agreement and a $2.5 billion penalty. MAX was grounded for years.
> They feel they were fully prepped for the differences in the airframe
Your pilot friends are either wrong or they had inside information and probably should have blown the whistle. Realistically, they probably actually did feel prepared. This is the crux of the criminal fraud action.
What a bizarre comment to make. Why on earth would Airbus get railed for what happened in Japan?
We should be very careful to distinguish between actual airframe issues and issues that are related to politics and poor decision making or training.
There's nothing we know of that is fundamentally unsound about the 737 MAX airframe, there are mistakes that have been made in very small subset of the airframes/flights operating, and yet everyone is running around like you're taking your life into your hands every time one flies over your head.
It's hard to say if you're trolling or just very misinformed. Boeing was hiding the fact that MAX had additional system to correct the pitch from the pilots.
Record passenger miles flown [1] with years of zero fatalities since, I believe, 2020 [2][3] refutes this hypothesis.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM
[2] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
[3] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
Overall statistics improving doesn’t mean you have permission to start throwing a random person off the plane every year.
There’s an xkcd about an online seller and a bobcat…
Car fatalities likely dwarf bus and train fatalities too. It's not that airplanes are particularly safe, it's that cars are particularly unsafe.
Being fucking murder by a car when walking is way more dangerous.
Look at the data. Over more than 22 years of flying in the U.S. we've seen one fatality aboard a major carrier. That one, single fatality was caused by an entire engine rapidly disassembling itself mid-flight. The engine mostly—but sadly not entirely—contained this failure. That engine was not designed or built by Boeing, but by CFM.
The next prior fatality aboard a major carrier was when an Airbus A300 crashed on takeoff in Nov 2001, killing on on board. The pilot overreacted on the controls, causing catastrophic failure of the vertical stabilizer.
The last time we saw a fatality in the U.S. due to a design and/or engineering error of a Boeing plane was in 1996 when a 747's center tank exploded due to a short circuit. Globally, Boeing and Airbus don't have meaningful differences in their track record of safety. Both have had experinced design and engineering flaws. Both have worked to fix those flaws.
Should we accept the ongoing regulatory capture in the U.S.? Of course not. Should we continue to hold these companies accountable for improving their designs every time an incident like this happens? Of course, and we do.
"avoid" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here though. If doing so doesn't cost me anything, then avoiding that car is a non-brainer. However in real life nothing is really costless. Avoiding that car at the very least would cause you to wait longer. If that car is your daily driver, and you don't have a backup, then avoiding that car might cost you hundreds per month. That's why you need to factor in statistics and figure what the absolute risk is, and whether it's worth "avoiding".
Taken another way: That your Uber driver is not as safe as others is not, in itself, a reason to reschedule your life to avoid them on the principle there is a safer option somewhere else. It's reason to ask the question how unsafe are they actually and is that level of difference vs normal something the extra inconvenience is worthwhile for. The point of someone mentioning cars is, if you actually quantify the risk change, it's likely you're rescheduling your flights around a risk which is less concerning than the rest of your day to day life and things you accept for getting to the airport in the first place. Without quantifiably discounting that you're letting news headlines dictate your life by fear instead of acting sensibly.
That's such an unbelievably ridiculous number to ignore. People saying this is insignificant are really putting their blinders on and I don't know why.
I didn't bother calculating the rate for driving to the airport, but eyeballing the figures for cars, it's probably as about as dangerous if you assume that the 737 Max were 10x more dangerous than average flying. Cars are still more dangerous than planes on a per-mile basis, but at the same time you're also traveling less miles on the car trip compared to the flight. Regardless if you hit a 5 minute traffic jam, you'd lose about the same amount of life as flying in a 737 Max (again, assuming it's 10x more dangerous than regular air travel).
Chances of dying because you flew on a MAX are still insanely low. Maybe worse than if it was an A320, but the absolute numbers have so many zeros between the decimal point and the value that they're basically the same: 0.
Note that you can take those stats and multiply by how many miles you're traveling to figure out your per-incident risk (ie. risk for the whole flight). Even if you do that you'll find they're quite safe, compared to other activities you do every day. Sure, the averages might not be applicable for edge cases (eg. very short flights), but for the average traveler it's a pretty good estimate.
>Cars are still more dangerous than planes on a per-mile basis, but at the same time you're also traveling less miles on the car trip compared to the flight.
2. Even if we ignored the above, applying this adjustment doesn't change the conclusion that planes are safer than driving by a fair margin. The 737 MAX cruise at 521 mph. Cars top out at around 60mph. If we round that off to planes being 10x faster and normalize for that (ie. 10x the death rate), you still get 0.57 for a car vs <0.01 for a plane.
Genuinely - trying to understand the point here.
You're still safer on the plane than you are in your car, statistically speaking.
Something I find interesting is that this plane, with the door-sized hole in it, took the extra ~10 minutes required to run all the checklists to do a maximally safe landing before coming back in. The videos of the plane flying with a hole in it are interesting, there's a flight attendant standing talking to the people seated near the hole. If I understand correctly, this video seems to make the case that this event wouldn't actually have happened at cruising altitude, where the depressurization blast would've been worse, which is also interesting to know. https://youtu.be/WhfK9jlZK1o?si=g2QDFWSgEwkGvuiS
They should stop worry about airplanes and traffic accidents altogether! :-)
I don't think that's a meaningful comparison. The 737 MAX problems are related to the airplane itself. The dangers of driving are mostly related to the performance of the drivers, not the cars themselves.
> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe [1.5] years ([500] days) of flying to date per aircraft on average [in light of delivery dates and extensive groundings], giving a very rough estimate of a [~2] billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895004
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895077
But at that point it's too late. I doubt people are that afraid of 737 Max that they'll cancel a flight (and forfeit their ticket) over it.
Nobody rational will. But there are plenty of people with an understandable fear of flying who will create a customer-service kerfuffle over it. On the margin that might not do anything. But in aggregate it could affect how the airlines negotiate settlements from Boeing.
I mean not even every army general in every country has killed as many as Boeing.
People want to express outrage. That’s understandable.
Most flight revenue is from frequent travellers, and they understand the business enough to know histrionics won’t change Boeing’s incumbency. A couple people who fly twice a year swapping airlines isn’t going to move the needle. And I doubt a material fraction of them are likely voters who would bother their electeds about this.
You seem to entirely miss the possibility that this has nothing to do with "punishing" anyone, and that people simply don't want to stress out about dying during their flight.
You can call it irrational if you like, that feeling of superiority and a few bucks will get you a snack. The brain worm is there, I know I'll be thinking about it next time I book tickets.
Sure, and as I point out elsewhere, that's reasonable [1]. It's irrational because it doesn't actually change anything, about your situation or systematically.
Not flying a 737 Max to feel better is reasonable. Doing it to be safer, or because it's going to punish Boeing or whatever, is not.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38929638
So what's irrational in not believing that 737 Max is safe?
The millions of miles they've flown without incident.
The key difference this conversation demands is a design versus fabrication or maintenance error. MCAS was a design error. It called into question the entire 737 Max fleet. This looks like a fabrication or maintenance mistake. That calls into question all of the planes similarly fabricated or maintained--those have been grounded. It doesn't affect a 737 Max of a different type, that has been flown for years and been through routine inspections, including of the very bolts suspected to be the cause of this accident.
Caveat: I strongly suspect more than the type 9 need to be looked at. But we do not have evidence that they are unsafe.
I think Boeing /engineers/ would argue that statement and instead tell you that Boeing /management/ is self certifying the planes.
Luckily the airlines I travel with only use Airbus, but if they were using 737 Max, I'd definitely book tickets that I can change at the last minute, and refuse to board if it turns out to be a 737 Max.
Yes, that's probably illogical. And probably much of life is illogical. But I rather have to wait some hours for the next flight than take the risk to die because of Boeing.
"A lot of people don't realize that the fuselage of this plane isn't even made by Boeing, it's made by Spirit AeroSystems which also makes components for Airbus. We don't really know who to blame here until the investigation concludes."
So I guess you just shouldn't fly.
Don't get me wrong, the culture at Boeing has changed (for the worse). The 737 Max is not without issues. It's horrific that hundreds have died due to both ignorance and deception on behalf of Boeing.
But Airbus isn't some sort of flawless golden goose either. Any time something like this happens, failure modes are identified and things will get safer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32
[2] https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/news/the-latest/photos-airb...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuan_Airlines_Flight_8633
And this loose bolts thing shows up on a plane model where the "driving controls" were designed wrong.
Note that no one is complaining about the other Boeing 737 models.
But why not? The 737NG has a known issue that killed someone in 2018 and the fix isn’t even planned to be in place until 2028.
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/faa-mandates-boeing-737ng...
> That includes a new spacer design for the engine inlet with increased fastener capability, changes to the fan cowl and fan cowl support beam, and the implementation of new exhaust nozzle structural stiffening elements.
> According to the National Safety Transportation Board’s (NTSB) executive summary of the incident, parts “of the left engine inlet and fan cowl separated from the airplane, and fragments from the inlet and fan cowl struck the left wing, the left-side fuselage, and the left horizontal stabilizer”. One of the fragments of the cowl struck the fuselage near a cabin window, with the window departing the 737-700 and resulting in rapid depressurization.
Modern airliners can glide tens miles with complete loss of power. (It's why they have RATs [1].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_air_turbine
The point is that none of the Airbus planes had the same sort of in-flight extreme ventilation as the Boeing plane just had, nor are any entire series of airplanes from Airbus currently grounded because of lose bolts.
As I said, it's not logical, it's not based on reason nor numbers. It's just a feeling.
E̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶f̶l̶e̶x̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶i̶c̶k̶e̶t̶s̶,̶ ̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶r̶i̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶c̶e̶l̶ ̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶2̶4̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶r̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶p̶a̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ Also, airlines would most likely charge you the difference between the fare price, which for a last minute ticket is might be a significant price difference.
>But I rather have to wait some hours for the next flight than take the risk to die because of Boeing.
So you'd rather lose a few hours of your life waiting at an airport, than losing a few minutes of your life over the risk of dying from a 737 Max? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Thanks for the summary!
Edit, as you added more content to your comment rather than just a one-liner snark:
> Even with flexible tickets, most carriers don't allow you to cancel less than 24 hours prior to departure
I guess my typical airline isn't in your personal category of "most carriers" as they allow me to change any dates for my ticket up until I've boarded the first flight. YMMV obviously.
I’ve chosen a less-than-ideal itinerary for comfort (e.g. lay-flat seat or direct flight).
Flying is stressful for a lot of people. As OP admits, it’s irrational. But if it means you avoid spending the flight in a panic, it’s not unreasonable to swap planes or even eat the ticket cost. (It might be a sign to talk to someone about anxiety.)
They definitely do! It's usually until just before departure - but some flexible tickets you can just no-show and get a refund. In some cases, there may be some no-show penalty, but definitely not universally. I can't think of any US carriers that impose a 24 hour cancelation restriction. I'm sure there's some international ones.
> Also, airlines would most likely charge you the difference between the fare price, which for a last minute ticket is might be a significant price difference.
Usually within the US, you can do a same-day change or same-day standby for some nominal, fixed amount of money on any ticket (free with status) and swap to any flight within ~24 hours (specific restrictions vary).
Here's American's policy on same-day changes [1]. Here's Delta's [2]. United's [3].
> So you'd rather lose a few hours of your life waiting at an airport, than losing a few minutes of your life over the risk of dying from a 737 Max? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
On this we completely agree. I ran the numbers and your likelihood of dying on a 737 NG is 1/400 the risk of dying in a car on a per-mile basis. Based on the median distance from home to a US airport of 17 miles, you're more likely to die on the road to and from the airport than a 16,500mi flight on a 737. And infinitely more likely to get injured.
[1] https://www.aa.com/i18n/plan-travel/extras/same-day-travel.j...
[2] https://www.delta.com/us/en/change-cancel/same-day-flight-ch...
[3] https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/travel/trip-planning/flight...
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/faa-mandates-boeing-737ng...
In general quite a lot of the chains wrapped around us that drive so many people to complain are really only kept there by raw personal selfish convenience. To be clear, I am absolutely not saying that they are not real as a result. They are perfectly real. But in many cases they are still really nothing more than personal convenience holding you. For instance, as I write this, almost all of the dangers of smart phones can be kept at bay just by refusing the conveniences. (Not quite all. But really quite a lot of them.)
We'd all be better off if there were more of us willing to take this kind of stand, and by that standard, it is Vulcan-grade logical.
Boeing will listen to the airlines and the markets.
It's not convenience, it's that the ONLY reasonably priced flights are non-refundable ones, and not everyone can afford another flight ticket just to prove a point. Another idiotic thing that we need to change.
Although I really do wish there were an "Airbus only" option when booking flight tickets. And as much as I don't normally like to stereotype things, when it comes to safety I feel I've consistently seen much better safety standards in EU than the USA. Safety seems more drilled into the European culture. I just somehow have this gut feeling that some random dude at Airbus crimping some wire probably actually did everything correctly and to specifications.
Not to mention they have stricter work hour limits in Europe, so I don't have to worry about someone doing a shoddy job due to lack of sleep.
If you could magically replace every passenger vehicle trip with a commercial airline flight, including the quick trips down the street to the grocery store, there would be more fatalities. Because, statistically, flying is less safe per trip.
The reason why flying is safer for long trips is because the "danger window" of a flight is generally takeoff and landing, while the "danger window" for driving is basically the whole drive.
You can slice this another way. In the book Freakonomics, they discuss that "per hour spent traveling" the passenger vehicle and the airplane are approximately the same risk level.
"if it's not Boeing, I'm not going" (See '79 bumper sticker: https://www.ebay.com/itm/332131135342)
Starting to look like it might be the other way around...
But you're right, watching the incoming plane to that gate would be a good way to know earlier!
Flying an airline that doesn’t operate a specific model is the most (and almost only) reliable way to avoid one.
Even that could make you end up on a 737 Max, if the airline you have your ticket via actually "outsourced" (simplified and not the right word) the actual flight to another airline, which happens sometimes.
But I'm a 30+ year old human, with plenty of experiences that "should never have happened" and "that was once in a million odds" that I won't risk it.
I'd love it if I could turn off the lizard parts of my body, but I cannot. I try my best, but when it comes to life/death, I just trust my gut over anything else.
They tend to be sold at a premium these days due to slightly more legroom.
They never seem to identify the questionable ones until after something goes to shit.
I say this as a capitalist - Boeing should be torn apart and sold for scrap metal.I'm sure there are some decent folks there, but that place has turned into a mess.
Predictably it's a React site, using some widget library (MUI) that is going out of it's way to provide a text input that is inferior to what's built in to any modern browser. Great!
When a plane crashes, how many people are injured? How much control did the passengers have?
The fact that defects (such as "the doors falling off") are being found in planes that have rolled off the assembly line MONTHS ago causes me to second guess my priors for anything that is coming out of a Boeing factory.
You can apply this same argument to literally fucking everything.
No, it's because of greed and managerial and executive rot. They could innovate as much as they want, nearly as fast as they want, and still be safe - as they and other airliners have done in the past! - but then they wouldn't save the "max" amount of money doing it. How dreadful.
Boeing's failures are all Boeing's fault alone. They rightfully deserve the pillorying.
> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone
That is more of an argument for stricter requirements around automobiles and that entire industry than anything else.
> That is more of an argument for stricter requirements around automobiles and that entire industry than anything else.
I agree that cars should, and could, be safer. But my argument was about the reaction people have to accidents. In cars we have several orders of magnitude more deaths and we don't bat an eye at that but in aviation we have a scary incident and it is wall to wall coverage.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223517098/door-plug-boeing-7...
Flying is also a pretty mature technology by now. We've done it for more than 100 years and the physics is well understood. Massive leaps in capabilities are unlikely, much like no one will develop a pistol with a 2 mile range or a coffee machine that produces an espresso in a blink of an eye.
What you can do is add more sensors and software, but the increasing complexity may not be worth it.
There are massive improvements still possible in the engine. Like the currently in design RISE engine. And other engines as well. And if you combined the technology you can get even further. We are not close to the end on any of this. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkHKet7rp4o
There are various aero-dynamic concepts that have not yet been fully or even partially explored. Trust brace wings, blended wings or my personal favorite, Prantdl Wing. A Prantdl wing might allow you to remove the whole tail, another huge potential boost. You can even combine all these concepts potentially.
I would guess we can get 40% more efficiency just based on those things.
(In comparison, air travel is usually safer than cars by a factor of 100 or more. It's hard to even estimate how safe it is because there are so few commercial airliner crashes.)
There's also an inherent difficulty in trying to attach a risk to a single model of airplane, rather than broad activities like driving cars or bicycles, due to lack of data and data inhomogeneity. It seems reasonable to me to put some Bayesian probability on the 737 Max being significantly more dangerous than it naively appears (say, by another factor of 3 or 5) due to Poissonian noise and factors we can't observe.
---
> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe [1.5] years ([500] days) of flying to date per aircraft on average [in light of delivery dates and extensive groundings], giving a very rough estimate of a [~2] billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895004
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895077
How valid is this calculation for today? Presumably they fixed the issues with the two deadly crashes, so those arguably shouldn't be included in future forecasts.
An illustrative example: suppose there was a plane model with 100 flaws that each cause a crash every 100B miles, and after each crash that particular flaw is fixed completely. The "correct" fatality rate would still be ~once per billion miles even after several crashes, and would only approach the standard airplane background rate asymptotically after dozens of crashes.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, but I really am curious. It's extremely uncommon for government bureaucracy to roll back regulations, and as far as I can tell from some Googling, the FAA has not done so. So what regulations are being weakened?
Edit: Replying to the edit - oh come on HN dont downvote their question it's a reasonable question, my original response didn't link any articles.
The regulation doesn't specifically have to get rolled back. In this case a large part of weakening regulations is shifting to allowing the manufacturer (Boeing) to regulate themselves and allowing (or forcing) ties between regulator and manufacturer to get too close.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/politics/boeing-faa.ht...
It also seems like the ATC system is stretched thin, as well as the airlines themselves in terms of pilots. Though I may be biased since I'm much more aware of ATC problems given the various YouTube channels I watch covering aviation.
That's because Google has become useless, not because the info isn't there.
You should try and find some of the analysis articles close to the MCAS disaster that explain how it's not the FAA that certifies airplanes any more, but the manufacturer basically self certifies.
[Yes, they're FAA employees but paid by Boeing. Do you also believe in Santa Claus?]
The safety record of commercial airliners should be help up as an example of how the system works. It’s proof that we can set aside corporate greed and design systems that are safe if we want to. The way that Boeing has gone downhill and the FAA has allowed it to happen is shameful.
If self driving cars follow the airline model we won't see them for, at best, decades. That is decades of 40k deaths a year in the current human driven model. Self driving cars have the potential to drop that dramatically, but only if we actually develop them.
Everything has a cost. Not changing has a cost. Changing has a cost. Weighing those two is important. If you only cite the costs of changing without considering the costs of not changing you will never change and always believe you are making the right choice.
IIRC three issues happened
I don't doubt that this will be reflected in their future market shares, and panic won't be the underlying reason. No one wants to buy worse stuff for about the same price as better stuff.
Nobody is questioning the safety of aviation in general. This is a focus around a company that has taken a nosedive in terms of quality of planes delivered for the sake of the mighty dollar.
Insiders have confirmed numerous cost cutting measures from the C-level executives. To my awareness, nobody has gone to jail. Fines issued.
> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic
Recalls are issued yearly across a wide number of manufacturers and models. I don’t get your point here. This is not panic. This is poor design and/or quality making it’s way into production with high probability of causing bodily harm to driver and/or others.
> You want flying cars? Stop panicking at statistically minor issues. Panic and fear are why it was easier to heavily modify the already massively modified 737 design to create the 'max' instead of just designing a new plane. It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear. Over reporting and sites like this are increasing fear and panic when we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.
Yea let’s just ignore decades of safety requirements because we wAnT tO iNnOvAtE. GoVeRnMeNt ReGuLaTiOn BaD.
We don't lose people to the cars themselves. We lose people to reckless driving and traffic: two problems that are fundamentally solved for aircraft.
If the door of a 5-year-old car fell off on the highway, and every car of that make and model were recalled for having loose factory-installed bolts, then people most certainly would panic.
[1] https://www.fearofflying.app/
Um there are like 215 Max 9s and a door plug blowing out on one seems statistically significant.
> we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.
Is the way Boeing facilitated the Max's approval "the system working as it should"?
I'm literally going to hop on a cross country Alaska MAX flight tomorrow (if the flight doesn't get cancelled) and I'm not much more worried about it than any other flight, but I'm tired of our country being run by MBA culture and having to make these kinds of risk-reward tradeoffs while considering that the management class of this country seems hell bent on turning us into a third world kleptocracy. We need to start punishing some of them for bad decisions. Otherwise they'll keep on gambling with our safety in favor of their profit margins and aviation may become a whole lot less safe.
And in the process it might just improve the long-term outlook of their company. Boeing could decide to become an engineering-led culture again rather than a short-term-profits-led company which would be more sustainable.
The main problem here is Boeings steady decline in QA.
And no, panic and fear were not the drivers behind MAX inception. Greed was
Nothing will stop Boeing except money. People not wanting to fly this plane will change airlines purchasing decisions. Boeing will feel the pain.
It actually may not, much, unfortunately; there's only one real competing line of products, and they're so massively backlogged that people will buy this anyway.
"One door closes, another one opens" Boing
Eh... not sure about that. The 737 Max is quite new, and this is catastrophic/near-catastrophic problem 2 in a couple of years. One could be forgiven for being more suspicious of this family than their others.
Like, maybe these were the only two problems, and everything else is a perfect as could be, but at this point it's not ridiculous to be concerned that it's just a shoddy product.
We don't really know who to blame here until the investigation concludes.
If I was running a US taxi service and bought a fleet of flawed Indian cars that caused crashes, I think I would be partially responsible.
I assume airlines do some degree of due diligence and, I believe they choose the engine type if there are options available but you probably overestimate the ability of a business whose primary job is to ferry passengers from point A to point B to do a serious design verification of every tiny detail of an aircraft. And those details can be tiny; take the case of the Airbus engine disassembly mentioned elsewhere on this thread.
Car manufacturing is a regulated industry. When I buy a car in the USA, even for my taxi business, I shouldn't need to hire a team of engineers to verify that it was properly designed and won't spontaneously combust. I should be able to assume that if the car is being legally sold to the public in the USA, the manufacturer has demonstrated that it meets some basic safety requirements set out by the government. I obviously have some _operational_ responsibilities (e.g. taking my taxis out of service if they're recalled for a design flaw), but I wouldn't consider myself responsible at all if my taxi happened to be the first 2025 Toyota Camry that spontaneously combusted from some design flaw.
Regulators aren't perfect but this is one reason they exist. The FAA has a set of requirements for manufacturing and selling planes in the USA and they have a set of requirements for operating an airline. If I'm operating an airline and the FAA tells me that the verification of an airplane's design and its assembly is the manufacturer's responsibility and not mine, I don't think it's fair to hold me responsible if my brand new airplane falls from the sky because of a design flaw.
Not that it is relevant to the overall relevance to the aviation argument here, but just in regards to cars in the US -- you often would be held liable for that, depending on which specific liability we are talking about, what the damages are, and in which jurisdiction you are operating in.
- It's the assembler's responsibility to make sure the exit door bolts are properly tightened, and
- It's the manufacturer's responsibility to find assemblers that correctly tighten door bolts, and the manufacturer's responsibility to design doors that don't explode, and
- It's the airline's responsibility to find manufacturers that design planes with not exploding doors, which are assembled by assemblers that correctly tighten door bolts, and checked by the airline's own maintenance teams during regular servicing of the planes.
Everyone should be looking over and double-checking everyone else's work. But that's not how the 737 MAX was designed or built.
The submission doesn't seem to try to assign blame to either Boeing or Spirit AeroSystems, but tries to just give you a true/false depending on if they airplane you're going with is a 737 Max.
The MAX 8 had the crashes due to MCAS problems. The underlying MCAS issue affected all 737 MAX variants.
Also, first flight number I could find is a 737max according to google but this thing says it isn’t a 737max. AC565, January 9, 2024.
Boeing bad, mkay. Always has been.
For a different part of the aircraft, yes. I don't think airlines check for every loose bolt ever when the bulletin says something specific.
So, how then is Boeing rewarded with this website and Airbus not if they are using the same supplier?
Next step will be a plugin that filters these 737max from Kayak.
True, but the main Spirit Aerosystems factories making Airbus components are in the UK, except for "central section panels" of the A350, which are made in the USA.
The British factories used to be BAE and Bombardier factories, so it's very possible for there to be different working methods, culture etc.
https://www.spiritaero.com/company/programs/
2 - it's made in a former Boeing plant, that boeing sold to an investment fund and then contract work to, so if your point is "that's not how REAL boeing manufacturing is done" well that's certainly where boeing is heading its manufacturing.
3 - The plane is designed, certified, assembled, inspected and then sold by Boeing. If I buy a ford and the door falls off randomly after two weeks, I don't care which subcontractor made the door, I give ford an angry warranty call.
... on the same type of plane that had the controls wrong enough to cause two crashes?
People can see a pattern there...
Out of the 3 current MAX types, one killed people two times and the other two have unresolved issues (one that make it fail FAA certification, and the other that make it lose parts of fuselage in flight ...). And then Boeing ask for fast track certification on the 4th type, because they've been doing such a great job so far.
The difference between this website existing for MAX and not for others is the repetition of issues though, to the point that now more people have had enough.
When the glass spills, the last drop might be the trigger for the glass finally spilling but it's the accumulation of water that's the issue, not just that one final drop.
This is a relevant topic for regulators to address, with specificity to the actual offending parts, procedures, and processes in place. Avoiding all MAX variants is a very hamfisted attempt to address a very tiny difference in observed safety.
There are regional airlines flying much more sketchy things. Where's "isMyPlaneACessna208BeingFlownByANewPilotInPoorWeather.com"?
Sure it would be. Commercial jetliner incidents are so rare that incidents with zero fatalities are routinely headline stories.
It's the line that's making the news, and this dot forms that line.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38920716
However, you are correct. Until the final NTSB report comes out, we don't know.
"We need to wait until all the facts are in," "investigations take time," "We're still looking at root causes and it is premature to..." These statements may be factually true, but the time it takes allows people to be distracted by something else, passions to cool, and urgency to dissipate.
It's no brainwave for Boeing or anyone else (e.g. the NTSB, on Boeing's behalf) to realize that the slower and more methodical the investigation, the lower the final penalty (of whatever kind) will probably be, at least for one-off incidents. When the track record gets long, the actual quality of the investigations may start weighing against them...eventually.
> "Yes, We Have No Bolts" 9 Jan 737 Max-9 Update
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubCQZtLTAug
The the airliner is called "Boeing 737 MAX" and not "Spirit AeroSystems - Boeing 737 MAX" which makes it pretty clear where overall accountability sits.
Choosing to not to fly on a MAX 8 because a MAX 9 has a part that is failing, is jumping to conclusions. If someone wants to jump that far, maybe they should avoid the Airbus A220 because it has wings made by Spirit AeroSystems. There's a lot of finger pointing going on when nobody knows why the doors are falling off yet.
People are angry, concerned and not willing to wait for NTSB to complete their investigations and see what if anything the FAA will do with the conclusions.
People are applying a heuristic and for many the outcome (correct in my opinion) is that Boeing should not be trusted.
That's how I see it. Boeing has already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice safety and even human lives in exchange for greater profits and stock price increases. They then showed a willingness to lie and try to cover up their actions after it came to light that they caused the deaths of hundreds of passengers. They've also shown that they'll fight to avoid taking responsibility for the lives they took (https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-max-crash-victims...)
Why should anyone trust them now?
Why would a company with the resources of Boeing choose to contract out such an important part of their planes, rather than vertically integrate that?
Some say this is for union-busting. Others say it's "just" boardroom financial engineering.
Whatever the reason, Boeing clearly hasn't cared about being a manufacturing company for a long time.
Thanks in advance