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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

So this isn't just banning from airports, this is banning from their airspace? That's then more or less a total grounding of them in Europe.

As an example, Norwegian (who has 15 of them) said they weren't grounding them as late as this morning, but now they'll have no choice. They use them mainly for their medium flights between scandinavia and southern europe (Nice, Budapest, Tenerife etc). No way they can do that without flying over Germany and France. It wouldn't be very good optics if they swapped their MAX'es to domestic use to free up regular 737's for flying over the continent either.

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It looks like Norwegian is already asking its 737 Max flights to return to their departing airports, at least according to this recent screenshot I found on reddit [1]

[1] https://i.redd.it/6gtecemacpl21.png

Yikes. How would ya like to be a passenger on one of those planes: "We're returning to our departure airport because this airplane has been grounded."

Although if you'd realised it was a 737 MAX, you might already be clutching a medicinal gin & tonic ...

> Although if you'd realised it was a 737 MAX, you might already be clutching a medicinal gin & tonic ...

I wouldn't, haven't all the problems so far have been during takeoff? So once you're cruising you're safe from them?

12 and 6 minutes after take-off.

The MCAS problem cannot occur when flaps are deployed, and it happens when flaps are initially retracted. So if it hasn't happened by now, it's not going to.

It could also happen while resetting after a late missed approach.

I was on a Norwegian plane once going from Oslo to London, 3/4 into the journey, just before descending into Gatwick, we got told the plane is turning around due to fault on the plane. So deflating when you are nearly home. The pilot did a good job calming everyone down and explaining it was a minor fault, two duplicate sensors were showing different values, but still, enough to recall the plane.

So basically another 1.5h flight back to Oslo, a few hours wait, then on a replacement plane (thank god) with another flight back to London. A long day.

I can, however, understand it. As with this 737 Max-8s they did not want the plane grounded in an airport where they don't have a full service centre with parts etc. Had it only been a few years later we could have continued as they made Gatwick one of their major hubs with probably full stock of parts.

Though I do have a rule of preferring flying out from an airport with a "local" airline, as they are quite likely to have parts and chances of spare or frequent incoming planes to shuffle around to.

Related, Norwegian plane was stuck in Iran: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2019/01/10/norw...

I had the same experience with an Easyjet flight, which departed from the Easyjet hub (also Gatwick) and returned there.

The pilot strongly implied that had I been on the British Airways flight, we'd have continued to the destination: BA would have flown their spare pilot + spare plane + repair crew out.

But Easyjet didn't have a spare crew.

Wow. This is pretty ridiculous considering all three of these planes seem to have been closer to their destination than the origin, making it safer to just finish the planned flight.

Getting back is another story. Stranding a plane at an away-station can be costly.

Especially if there’s some repair required before next takeoff.

Both incidents have been in the first few minutes of flight and this is also a 'long term safety' thing. They're relatively safe to fly still.

On the other hand, if your plane gets stuck in a foreign country the bill just for parking the thing could be massive. Better to get it back while you still can.

Eventually the bill can get so high that it doesn't make financial sense to still attempt to claim to be the owner. As of January there was a McDonnell Douglas MD87 in Madrid thats abandoned. Three 747 were sold for scrap in 2017 after they were abandoned at Kuala Lumpur.

It can happen any time if it’s the MCAS issue again. Which we don’t know yet.

You have a lot more time and airspeed to work with when flying at altitude at full speed.

Do these groundings also apply to ferrying the plane?

Typically not. Ferrying without paying customers is probably allowed.

Yes. You’d have to seek an exemption from every country you’re overflying. Probably not worth it.

From the official reports mentioned elsewhere:

> From the effective date and time of this AD, do not operate the aeroplane, except that a single non-commercial ferry flight (up to three flight cycles) may be accomplished to return the aeroplane to a location where the expected corrective action(s) can be accomplished.

So they are allowed to be ferried in certain situations.

If the plane is going to get grounded, the operator absolutely wants that to happen at home base, not at an outstation.

edit: NVM missed that these were mostly Turkish Airlines not Norwegian.

2/3 of those planes are flying back to Istanbul vs their destinations. Does Norwegian have a maintenance hub there?

They got bitten by this recently: https://matadornetwork.com/read/norwegian-air-emergency-land...

(emergency landing in Iran, can't get parts there because of sanctions)

I speculate we’ll see more airspace closures once countries give enough time to avoid stranding their nationals.

I wonder if, say, Germany, waited until its planes had to chance to land before closing their airspace, while other countries/companies, like Norwegian got caught by surprise.

Convenience over safety?

Total speculation on my part.

The closest thing to a German 737 MAX are 15 owned by TUI, which seem to all be based in the UK.

There hasn't been much fleet renewal in the German market in recent years, just lots of consolidation (it's actually a bit of a lottery to buy a ticket in advance due to all the bankruptcies)

I didn’t single-out Germany for its fleet, just that it was one of the countries with a delayed closure of its airspace.

This is Turkish Airlines, not Norwegian...

Edit: Two are Turkish, only one is Norwegian

A potentially interesting tidbit from Norwegian's Wikipedia page:

> Diversion to Shiraz, Iran December 2018

> A Norwegian Boeing 737 MAX suffered an unspecified technical failure over Iran in December 2018. The pilot made a precautionary landing at Shiraz Shahid Dastgheib International Airport without incident. Spare parts required to make the aircraft airworthy were not available in the world outside the United States, which has prohibited exports of technology to Iran. Two months later, the almost-brand-new aircraft remained stranded in Shiraz and subject to seizure by the Iranian government.[86]

> On 22 February 2019 the plane was ferrried from Shiraz to Stockholm as DY8921

That seems like a disincentive to buy American aircraft.

If you're a reasonably sized international airline, it seems like a reasonable possibility that you'd have to (or want to) land in a territory that the US in unfavourable toward. Why take the risk?

This is somewhat true, but to be fair there are only a few countries the US and it’s allies don’t do business with - as long as you don’t land in Iran or North Korea you’d be in pretty good shape.

Not so sure about that. The US Government lists 13 places as “Do not travel” and 15 as “reconsider travel”. Looking at the list, it doesn’t seem unreasonable advice. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

A travel advisory is something completely different than economic sanctions.

The grandparent comment was talking about landing in Iran or North Korea. I assumed this was about travel rather than economics.

Many of those countries are friendly (extremely so) to the US. For example, the US is perfectly happy to ship aircraft parts (and even fully functional military aircraft) to Afghani buyers; they just give non-binding advice to US citizens that traveling to a war zone is maaaaaybe not the safest idea.

In the Iran case, there are similar sanctions from the EU, so the Airbus A320 family are also out of the question.

And if you want something the size of the best selling variants of the A320 family and 737 MAX you have essentially no choice.

And whats more, even the Russian jets are 'not russian enough' so Iranians could buy them[0].

"The US approval for the transaction was needed, as Sukhoi aircraft contained more than 10% (22%, according to state news RIA) of American-made parts."

[0] https://www.aerotime.aero/ina.hladyshava/22228-not-russian-e...

Maybe, but in the specific case of an Norwegian airline, it seems less likely there would be a 'mismatch' of interests, with the rest of Europe, compared with the US.

And I thought Europe were lifting their Iran sanctions? They're trying to get a non USD payment system sorted so they can continue trade after the US pulled out of a deal.

https://www.gtreview.com/news/mena/analysis-will-europes-new...

> In the Iran case, there are similar sanctions from the EU

Nope, since the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, Europe has no sanction against firms that commerce with Iran. However, since USA pulled out of the agreement, USA threatens european firms that commerce with Iran. The agreement is however still in place.

A good podcast episode about that: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/06/692155923/epis...

Banned in the entire EU now: https://www.easa.europa.eu/newsroom-and-events/news/easa-sus...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19370835

Austria also closed the airspace for 737 max planes, while not the largest country in Europe together with France and Germany that adds quite a bit of extra detour coming from Norway.

Indeed. Norwegian is doing this because the optics now force them to do so, not self-assessment of the risk. They, and the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority, failed in that regard.

At least it’s not the country bound and determined to prop up the brand at all costs. If it was 2 A320s that went down, you can bet we’d be banning them instantly in the states.

Do you have a reference to confirm that this was a knee-jerk/optics reaction, out of interest? (definitely curious to see how airlines/authorities are reaching these decisions)

The MCAS system and the way it was introduced sound a little like a patch, and slightly haphazard.

While training & runbooks and procedures are important, take-off is a busy time, and the Max-8 is (afaik) intended to operate very-nearly-like a standard 737, so it's not inconceivable that pilots wouldn't have time or intuitively know how to handle this situation.

Ultimately any vehicle/software/tool is going to be safest when the responsible designer makes it intuitive and reduces the possibility of failure cases rather than adding workarounds or runbooks to patch over them and/or disclaim the liability.

Anyway, it seems like it could be early to strongly assign blame or critique until we know how serious the issue is.

Over 300 people dead sounds pretty serious to me. It's probably safest to ground the plane model until we know more.

I should have been clearer here; I was responding to the parent post's assignation of blame towards the airline/air authority.

Generally do agree with grounding the Max 8 fleet as a precaution, and also given the poor engineering smell around the MCAS.

But not keen to assign blame/failure and damage reputations until there are credible investigation results, or without providing references.

I've seen a number of people pointing at this likely being more an issue with untrained pilots than the plane itself. EI, the flight crew on the crashed planes may have had considerably less experience than the minimum requirements most major airlines and all US airlines set for flying these planes.

This seems like corporate PR blaming "3rd world pilots" and am not sure it's such a smart move. If your plane requires substantially different handling & the interface does not accommodate it, it seems to me the problem is not the pilot.

It seems more likely that the plane suffers from some elemental design problems that were insufficiently patched over to pass inspection in order to protect the already invested capital.

Huge number of third world pilots are flying other models of Boeing 737, they obviously didn't crash that often.

They are just blaming the victims, trying to let those already killed pilots to take responibility for their faulty designs.

If it was 2 freighters, would we have done the same?

>Do you have a reference to confirm that this was a knee-jerk/optics reaction, out of interest? (definitely curious to see how airlines/authorities are reaching these decisions)

Considering that pretty much any criticism can be dismissed with "better safe than sorry, also everyone else was doing it, we had to consider the optics" it makes perfect sense to step in line and ground them like everyone else. Not doing so would just be stupid when there's near zero downside to the people making the call.

It's like highway traffic. Sure you can obey the letter of the law but when everyone else is doing something drastically different your exposure to risk is minimized if you just do what they do whether it's right or wrong.

UK CAA reasoning:

https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/12/caa-suspends-boeing-737-...

http://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/SD2019001.pdf

Norwegian Air and Norwegian authorities had the same information (or indeed lack thereof), but did not act until now. Given the known similarities, and the lack of data that rules out a problem with the B737 MAX, the responsible thing is to err on the side of caution.

Thanks!

"very nearly like" is also extremely dangerous when it comes to risk prevention.

People are pattern-matchers, and if 99% of flying the plane is the same except the part that will kill you if you don't do it the new way--well, people will do it the old way and die. That's infinitely more true in an emergency situation where you tend to fall back strictly on training and instinct.

If you want to jar people into different behavior, the interface needs to be different as well. Otherwise it looks like the same old contract.

I think many of us kind of know this from GUI/API/whatever design, but there's no reason jet planes would be any different.

Norway also closed the airspace 40min ago

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