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Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

Nor any European carriers, nor EASA. I also notice that Canada is not interested in grounding them at this junction. I'd imagine that US pressure is preventing the Europeans and Canadians from grounding them. At least so far anyway.

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CASA (the Australian regulator) just did it https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-12/boeing-737-max-8-s...

UK CAA just grounded 737 Max, and not permitting overflight either.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-47536502

"The UK Civil Aviation Authority has been closely monitoring the situation, however, as we do not currently have sufficient information from the flight data recorder we have, as a precautionary measure, issued instructions to stop any commercial passenger flights from any operator arriving, departing or overflying UK airspace"

Banning overflight seems like a politically-motivated overreaction. Both incidents took place shortly after takeoff, and there's no current reason to believe the planes aren't safe at cruising altitude.

Dublin airport in Ireland is about as far from UK territory as both of the 737 MAX's were from their respective airports when they crashed into the ground.

It would be an unfortunate complication for the current discussion on a hard Brexit potentially happening within 3 weeks if the UK needed to work out what to do with an airplane strewn across that border on top of everything else.

Norwegian Airlines / DY just grounded their 737MAX, too.

Presumably as UK airspace was just closed to them.

Anyway - the ball is rolling; it is much easier being the [n]th airline/regulator to ground it than it is to jump first.

Maybe it's a confidence thing. Maybe small operators from these regions feel less supported/confident than their European or American counterparts. This might be a very pessimistic approach but I suppose a lot more phones go ringing when someone from Southwest or RyanAir calls and asks:"Yo, what's up with my planes?".

That just makes it sound worse. Why should Norwegian get better support from Boeing than Comair? While I have no doubt that FAA or EASA would have reacted with more expediency had the crash occurred in their jurisdictions, it scares me to think that Boeing treats its customers differently, depending on whether they are Western or not.

I think the idea is that Borwegian buys a lot more planes from Boeing.

the treatment is probably proportional to how many planes they order. Im sure if ANA or Singapore Airlines have some issue with their 787s, Boeing would respond immediately. Has nothing to do with western but everything to do with money.

See Lauda 004 for how Boeing treats a small Austrian airline. They only responded once the CEO (Niki Lauda) forced their hand by saying he would do a public stunt if they didn't respond.

Exactly. I didn't mean to imply that Boeing is discriminating based on the locality of an airline, but there is no denying that there is more money to be earned in places other than Indonesia or Ethiopia. That probably does reflect Boeing sells and airlines buy aircraft. This is just a strong hunch, I have no empirical evidence.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe Airbus is a charity in any way and their sales are different.

> Im sure if ANA or Singapore Airlines have some issue with their 787s, Boeing would respond immediately.

SilkAir, Singapore Airlines's regional subsidiary, is flying the 737 MAX 8 too.

But it isn't just operators. Singapore has banned all flights coming in and out. This is a busy, world-class airport (at least for passengers, but it's hard for me to imagine something that's run so smoothly at that scale for passengers would be a shit show for operators).

I do not think that RyanAir has many 737 Max jets. Ryan Air mostly flies with 737-800, but they want to migrate to 737 Max over the years:

https://www.ryanair.com/us/en/useful-info/about-ryanair/flee...

They try to only fly with a single jet or a maximum of two, to keep the costs down.

As per your link and also Wikipedia, Ryanair doesn’t operate any 737 MAX yet, but have placed orders for them.

There are very few of these in Europe currently. The UK has just grounded them, though.

I don’t think that is true. Even if there is a pressure, most probably it is only about not going public about it.

This accidents won’t harm Boeing reputation. The only thing that might hurt it is more accidents or even worse, putting pressure on Airlines to use it during investigation. So even if there is a pressure, it will be only about not going public with anything related to grounding 737Max.

Anything else would be stupid.

How can grounding not be made public?

How do you not go public about grounding it? Due to regulations you can't operate a scheduled flight without disclosing the aircraft type, so the moment you start operating with a different aircraft, everyone knows, even if the airline did not release an official statement.

Airlines can still do it without making a public announcement about it. For new schedules itbis easy, and for existing ones just an update on bookings or reschedule. It would take sometime for the news to go out and yet many wouldn’t consider it a grounding.

That’s way better than public announcements that gets picked up by media.

How would it take some time for news to notice? In the wake of this latest crash, news media and amatuers alike are constantly paying attention to what airlines with the 737 MAX-8 are doing. If they notice that airlines are starting to reschedule their flight plan to use other aircraft than the 737 MAX-8, the news will be out instantaneously.

Indeed, if they do it in secret (attempt to anyway), it will probably be a lot worse than a public statement. I just don't see how you can hide that major a change (I think flight plans are public anyway) without someone noticing immediately in this day and age.

You'd also have to cancel a lot of flights. Airlines don't tend to have a huge reserve of airworthy planes sitting idle as substitutes in case their regular fleet gets grounded.

>This accidents won’t harm Boeing reputation

It's already harmed and they longer they wait to take action the worse it will get. Their stock price is plummeting as we speak.

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