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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Having read many commments on HN and elsewhere since the crash, I know I’m in the minority here when I say this but to me it seems like the US airlines and FAA are following their procedures, the same procedures that make the US airlines the safest in the world, while the rest of the world is, I don’t quite want to use the word panicking, but at least giving into pressure from people who aren’t aviation safety experts.

I don’t think it’s a simple as saying the US airlines and FAA are simply being greedy and placing profit over safety. The obvious easy thing to do from a PR perspective is to ground the planes. That they aren’t doing so in the face of immense pressure tells me that they base their decision on facts and procedure, not what-ifs and public scrutiny.

Let the downvotes begin.

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The level of certainty required for an action changes depending on the downside risk of action vs inaction. For example, if I am 20% certain that you have a pulmonary embolism, the correct action is to start treatment immediately; the risks of treatment are low relative the harm of waiting for further testing.

The FAA and NTSB are rightly very conservative and cautious with respect to approving new designs, since the risk of premature approval is high and the harm of waiting a bit longer for more information is low. But this is the opposite scenario - the risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience, versus the harm of another plane crash.

The correct move here is to act even if they think the certainty is low.

> the risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience

Is it possible there is a safety risk to grounding the 737 Max that outweighs the risk of allowing it to fly?

Yes, if the alternative is even less safe. This is important when the alternative might be driving, as driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous. Safety measures that annoy people too much can end up with a net loss of life because of this.

If there are other airliners that can be put into service to take up the slack, though, they’re very unlikely to be more dangerous.

I doubt that enters into the FAA's calculus here. It is more likely that there is not enough information to show that the plane is unsafe (a sample size of 2 is not statistically significant). The FAA has already approved this design, and to say that there is a design flaw would cast a shadow on their own approval process, and by extension their authority.

Of course, over the last 10 years or so the FAA has delegated much of the approval process to the corporations themselves. Perhaps the system really is rotten?

No, it doesn’t enter into this decision because there are other planes that can step in, and grounding this type won’t encourage more driving. That was just an example of how safety measures can potentially backfire.

The FAA absolutely does consider this in general. For example, this is a major reason they don’t require child safety seats: their analysis is that the extra expense would shift some travel to cars and ultimately kill more kids than it saves. https://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?conte...

As for two crashes not being significant, I don’t buy it. Against such a low background rate (2017 recorded zero fatalities across all jet airliners of all types, for example), two crashes of the same type in a few months is huge. Six years ago, two non-fatal battery fires aboard 787s was enough for the FAA to ground the type until a fix could be made. In hindsight, that seems to have been the correct action. This 787 Max problem appears to be far more severe.

If I had to hazard a guess at the logic behind not grounding the Max it’s something like this:

We believe there may be an MCAS issue due to the preliminary Lion investigation but we haven’t seen it in our fleet and our pilots are confident they are prepared for it anyway. We don’t yet have enough data to draw any conclusion on the Ethiopian crash and so we’re currently treating it as an independent incident and a single incident doesn’t warrant grounding the plane.

Would I personally feel safer on a new Southwest Max or on an older Southwest 737? I don’t know. Statistically, there have been no 737 Max crashes in the US.

I think it's a fallacy that people compares chances of death/injury like a computer would. Things like being in control of your own fate matter too.

People in general do not, but agencies like the FAA absolutely do, and that’s what I’m talking about.

By the way, the difference between the safety factors of driving and flying are not quite so straightforward. This is one of my favorite charts, which shows that per-mile, flying is safer, but per-journey, driving is safer (which makes some sense, since flying journeys are much longer, but 80% of accidents happen in the 5 minutes during takeoff/landing, so really in some sense, takeoff and landing are more dangerous than driving to work).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...

Also, note the final entry in that table: Space Shuttle. Per-kilometer, it's hardly that much more dangerous than driving. But per Journey....

Those numbers are for the UK in the 1990s. Commercial aviation is much safer today.

The fatality rate per journey for US airlines over the last ten years is approximately 0.14 per billion journeys, several hundred times better than the number from your link. (Roughly 700 million journeys per year on average, one fatality during that period.)

Cars have gotten safer too, but not nearly as much.

Is there a point at which the statistics are too muddy to be useful? We have had 1 fatality in the last ten years, but in the last 10 years, 1 month, and 1 day we have had 51 fatalities.

Definitely! If you take the fatalities for the last ten years and convert that to a risk estimate, the result will have gigantic error bars. We can be confident that the real risk is greater than zero, and it's pretty clear that it's small, but the exact number is pretty much impossible to know.

The farther back you look, the less noise you get in your data, but you also incorporate data that's less and less relevant to the current environment. Ten years seems like a decent cutoff, although it is a cutoff that happens to have had a wild swing recently.

My original point still stands if you want to take the data back a bit further: even if you include Colgan, the resulting number is way below the 117 per billion listed on that Wikipedia page.

It is therefore important to use each statistic in a proper context. When it comes to a question about risks associated with a particular long-range travel from one city to another, the most suitable statistic is the third one, thus giving a reason to name air travel as the safest form of long-range transportation.

Also, for many (?) to most (?) people, flying is unnecessary, added risk, while for the same group of weasel word identified people, driving is an arguable necessity.

EDIT: Added more weasel words.

So the argument is to ground the Max because there is a known MCAS issue and have people fly on proven older equipment. But Southwest hasn’t seen the MCAS issue in its fleet and its own pilots union feels its prepared to handle an MCAS issue should it occur. Could the reasoning be the Max is believed to be safer with US pilots at the helm than flying on the older equipment the Max is replacing?

If the argument is that this is just about dollars and inconvenience to the airline, what would a 737 Max crash, now, cost Southwest in law suits and reputation? Maybe SWA is weighing this against the likelihood of another flight 1380 type incident.

The rationale could be that it’s still safer with a pilot who knows what to do. Given how safe other aircraft are, it seems unlikely.

As for financial damages, it’s human nature to underestimate risks that have a large cost to mitigate. Even if grounding the Max is more cost effective, I wouldn’t be confident in them reaching that conclusion.

There's an additional confounding factor: Now that this has happened not just once but twice, causing hundreds of deaths, every pilot on the planet is acutely aware of this issue.

Instead of Boeing publishing information about the systems and requiring pilots to receive training in the new models, the pilots themselves have essentially come up with their own pilot training course, and used the tragedies plastered across global news as the change notification system.

People are most likely going to be shuffled around to other planes. 737s use to be for a lot of short haul flights, but they're being used increasingly for mid and even long haul flights.

They're often far enough it's impractical to drive, and at least in the European market, trains are always a more expensive, but available alternative. If the FAA took action, in the US people would probably just postpone trips unless they had the personal days to drive instead (or a lot of personal days to AmTrak instead).

Most people will be shuffled onto larger flights to hubs with connections via smaller aircraft; so they'll be switching to airplanes with proven safety records. It increases demand for the seats and may raise cost, but safety would actually go up if it turns out there is a problem with the 737-max8.

Flying American or Southwest is going to be an absolute shitshow in the coming weeks, if they are truly losing such a large portion of their fleets it's going to be hard to accommodate so many passengers at once.

Who will be responsible for a crash FAA Boeing or the airline. Even if FAA doesn't ground them airlines might start doing it themselves although these are the same airlines that manhandle overbooked passengers out the plane so cant be sure they would.

You skipped a step: demonstrate that the risk estimate is real, and not merely a guess.

I can’t help but draw the parallel to anti-vax logic: ”if it’s at all possible that my child might be seriously injured from a vaccine, then I must avoid vaccines!”

Setting a standard of “any risk is unacceptable because the downside risk is absolute” is also incorrect.

> the risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience

I disagree. The EU grounded planes returned to their starting point, and will have to fly yet another leg: a double dose of flight risk.

How will airlines fill the gap from their MAX8 fleet? By dusting off their parked planes. Why are they parked? They could be lemons or reduced safety (e.g. Minimim Equipment Lists).

Or by deferring maintenance, which is done to keep planes safe.

Health care is trying to reduce its unnecessary testing habit: if they cost money and time without value, then resources are taken away from other life-saving interventions.

> How will airlines fill the gap from their MAX8 fleet?

Europe will probably be fine. Unfortunately here in the states, the Airlines colluded with "capacity discipline" [1]. If you've been on a US flight recently, you'll notice that a whole plane canceled would require another entire plane to be found. And since airlines don't seem to invest too much into their workforce, well they just don't have the extra captains and crew to run extra-hour flights late into the evening either.

1: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-antitrust-airlines-la...

American passengers, assisted by SV technology, have been encouraged to be and demonstrated that they are totally indifferent to anything but price and will book with whichever carrier is least expensive. So don't complain that in order to stay in business, airlines are cutting costs to the bone and not carrying extra capacity anywhere that it's not essential.

You're not cutting costs by colluding with other airlines, you're keeping prices artificially high by ensuring you don't undercut each other.

But consumers are probably getting better pricing thanks to various platforms (Google Flights, Skyscanner, Flighthub, Expedia, etc.).

An up-start airline cutting fares can become ramen-profitable much quicker than ever before.

Signed, a Canadian that salivates at the pricing the American consumers can get for domestic flights.

>The correct move here is to act even if they think the certainty is low.

What is the correct action though? The root cause of the first crash is understood to be a complete lack of training on a single aspect of the flight control system in a particular set of circumstances (one that happens to occur in the most dangerous part of the flight envelope). From what I understand about this issue, the correct action is to institute an immediate crash course (pun intended?) to train pilots on how to recognize and manage the actions of this subsystem unless further, currently unspeculated issues with the sensors and software are discovered.

>(T)he risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience

I think you're overlooking the risks involved in adding significant pressure to flight schedulers (who have to get planes in place to make up for missed routes), maintenance crews (who have to provide more flight hours for the remaining fleet to make up for the missing planes), and pilots (who will have to fly something different than what they've recently been flying).

Think of how many opportunities for a mistake to happen would arise from changing something like the route, time, and (sometimes) vehicle used for the daily commute by every worker in a 2,000 person company. Tighter timetables, increased flight hours on the remaining fleet, and the need for pilot's to shake the rust off their skillset flying an airframe they haven't been in for a while are all significant risk factors that have played a part in the vast majority of flight accidents in the modern era of air travel.

- We have a preliminary report from Lion Air, including a Emergency Airworthiness Directive and a Airworthiness Directive suggesting MCAS (w/faulty single AOA sensor) was closely tied to the accident.

- The Lion Air flight had a certain aerial profile before the crash (a wave, as MCAS fought the pilots).

- The Ethiopian Airlines aircraft has the same tell tale aerial profile

It would be better to have the black box data from Ethiopian Airlines, but the local authorities have said they're going to take weeks. In the meantime given the facts we have, there are reasons to suspect that Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines had a similar cause.

Additionally Boeing has also implicitly admitted there are issues, they're actively working on improvements to MCAS due out in April.

At least according to Southwest’s pilots union SWA has seen no MCAS issues in its fleet (edit: this may not be correct - see reply from antsar) and its pilots are prepared to handle any MCAS issue were it to occur.[1]

I think a worse scenario is if the Ethiopian flight crashed due to some other not yet known issue specific to the Max.

[1] https://swaparesources.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/pdf...

Southwest is also a unique case, as they had their Max 8s fitted with a sensor and warning to indicate problems with the AOA sensor that it implicated with MCAS.

So Southwest's position is rational, but doesn't scale well to other airlines using the standard Max 8.

It’s kinda absurd that a single sensor malfunction can lead to an accident like the lion air one. It’s also kinda absurd that critical sensor failure monitoring be sold as an up-sale.

> SWA has seen no MCAS issues in its fleet

I don't see how your link supports this. Closest I found in the text:

> Southwest has compiled and analyzed a tremendous amount of data from more than 41,000 flights operated by the 34 MAX aircraft on property, and the data supports Southwest's continued confidence in the airworthiness and safety of the MAX.

That doesn't preclude having experienced MCAS issues while remaining confident in their pilots' ability to overcome the issues.

WaPo's lead fact checker who covered FAA for four years as a journalist disagrees with you:

https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/110585814000275456...

Quote: "I covered airline safety and the FAA for four years, and I cannot remember a time when the FAA was so alone among world regulators on a serious safety issue. "

Neither viewpoint is supported here. The anomaly is that there is a disagreement between the FAA and the other aviation authorities, but no evidence has yet surfaced that would vindicate either party.

at least quote it all please, "When a major accident like this happened, global aviation authorities conferred with the FAA -- which took the lead."

Maybe this is a reflection of the recent loss of respect the U.S. has been facing in the last couple years. Other countries are feeling less inclined to defer to our judgement.

Because that part of the quote it not only pointless, it's nonsensical.

The FAA DID take the lead by immediately issuing a notice in support of the airworthiness of the plane. Other aviation authorities then decided to contravene the FAA and ground the planes in their own airspace.

There is an irrational assumption that has been injected into this argument, which is that all of a sudden the FAA's judgment should be subject to abnormal scrutiny (at a time when there hasn't been a single fatal accident on a commercial US airliner in 10 years), and the judgments of other civil aviation authorities should all of a sudden be held in higher regard.

immediately issuing a notice in support of the airworthiness of the plane

But the FAA has no idea right now what caused the crash. So this notice is nothing more than reminding everyone that it was previously determined to be OK. Nobody thought the 737-8s were flying around without an airworthiness certificate, so no new information is on the table.

If you run up to me and say 'Bad Thing just happened, what do' and I respond by saying 'I have previously determined that Bad Things are very unlikely' would you say I am being responsive to the problem?

> no evidence has yet surfaced that would vindicate either party.

Except for two brand new aircraft crashing within five months of each other with all souls lost.

But you're right, other than that, there's nothing.

lead fact checker? Who fact-checks the lead fact checker, I wonder?

"I covered airline safety and the FAA for four years"..."and I can't remember"... it's not a fact tweet, it's an opinion tweet.

That journalist is not disagreeing, they are simply stating that they don’t remember a time like this in the 4 years he covered them. That is very different from what you are implying.

> WaPo's lead fact checker ...

That's not the type of fact I would lead with.

Also, it's a bit ironic to blame the FAA for other countries not following it. The mistakes of other nations are theirs to bear.

My father used to work for Transport Canada (Canada's version of the FAA), and I've found it rather dismaying how little faith people seem to have in the FAA/NTSB despite many years of evidence as to their competence. They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment.

Ironically, if you were to dive into a thread about "Urban Air Transport", a hot topic in Silicon Valley, you'd likely see people decrying the FAA for being too conservative and stifling innovation.

What would it take for you to change your opinion of them? How do we know they're not current asleep at the wheel?

The FAA is not some singular, autonomous entity. It's real live humans with biases and potentially some level of political influence. No regulatory body is above suspicion.

There's no way for them to know at this point what caused the second crash. It might actually be a critical defect, something that was overlooked or blame mis-applied on the first crash investigation. We simply don't know at this point, and neither do they.

> They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment.

Aren't most of the safety statistics they publish basically fake? If you look at the star ratings they give for crash tests, there is an asterisk with fine print saying that they only compare vehicles within 250lbs of each other. Which means that when you're trying to figure out which car is actually the safest, a car that gets a 3-star crash rating might actually be safer than one that gets a 5-star crash rating.

NTSB isn't the NHTSA, totally different agencies.

NTSB also is not the FAA, just to be clear. The NTSB is one of the most respected safety and accident investigtation groups in the world.

Aviation safety is written with blood, a high cost for every safety measure conceived. It is one of the areas where it's better to be wrong and safe.

Aircrash investigations take a lot of time, and sometimes, well, sometimes you have to act on preliminary information or even guesses if it is on the safer side.

> the same procedures that make the US airlines the safest in the world

Citation needed?

> Let the downvotes begin.

Bracing for impact doesn't invalidate the cause of it.

> Citation needed

You’re probably asking for a citation that the US airlines are safest due to their procedures and not for other reasons. I don’t have a ready citation for that. But as to US airline safety:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-la...

> Bracing for impact doesn't invalidate the cause of it.

Fair, I should have left that out, but I won’t ninja edit it on you now. (And I have no idea why you’re downvoted. I’ve upvoted your comment.)

Your link does not really help prove your point at all. Do you have a real source proving your point?

That link does not support your statement. There are countries with the same safety record and with a higher percentage of their airlines ranking higher in safety than US airlines.

Lumping the US versus 'the rest of the world' together does not compare single countries against each other.

The US is safe for air travel, but that does not show that it is the safest.

My link may not be correct but it does say: the U.S. continues to have the lowest accident and fatality rates of any aviation market in the world

The primary reason is likely due to training requirements:

https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

Those requirements are due to US regulations.

Wouldn't something like this suggest that Europe and North Asia was safer in the period leading up to that forbes article?

https://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-02-22-01.aspx

And that greenspun article from 2009 is just special.

Countering my own claim about the FAA I’ll link to this piece from 2010 that doesn’t make the FAA look so great in that decade:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/etc/cro...

> the US airlines the safest in the world

Where do you people _get_ these ideas?!

Maybe from the fact that the last fatality in a US airline crash was over ten years ago?

Unfortunately I think Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 in 2018 counts as resetting that streak. It wasn't a crash but it did result in a death. I think your point still stands though. Very few of the incidents on this list are US airlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

As far as I could find, there were no Canadian airline crashes in the same time frame. Unless you include small charter-airline type crashes, which would mean some american crashes would be counted too (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Rediske_Air_DHC-3_Otter_c... )

With less than 1/10th the number of passengers, that’s significantly less meaningful. It does indicate they’re about on an equal footing, though.

That means nothing. All airlines based out of France and Germany are ISOA certified, never had a fatality, and are rated 7/7 by AirlineRatings [0] (industry leader on airline safety ratings), for example.

[0] https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/

I assume you mean they haven’t had a fatality in the last ten years, not that they’ve never had a fatality?

AF447 was less than ten years ago. So OP is mistaken either way.

Sure, because extended suicide by pilot was excluded, but as a passenger I don't care much whether I die because there was a mistake somewhere or because the pilot was criminally insane.

It's downright comical to list Germanwings as "Fatality Free".

That web site is nice but it does not correctly rate US-only carriers.

Also, Air France 447 was less than ten years ago. So your data may be suspect.

That's hardly a unique thing about US airline safety. You're building one heck of a fragile claim there to superiority, a number of other countries can make similar claims, including countries that have similar or better safety records.

Just out of a quick wiki trawl over the last ten years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_1354 UPS airline plane crashed in 2013, killing all onboard.

In the same year, a commercial flight by Rediske Air crashed in Alaska, all 10 people on-board died.

While not technically a crash, there was a fatality involving US airline just last year, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380, making the US airline safety record worse than a good number of countries.

Are you really going to use a UPS crash as an argument here? You actually raise some good points but I can’t get past that one.

"UPS Airlines Flight 1354 was a scheduled cargo flight from Louisville, Kentucky, to Birmingham, Alabama"

  U.S. Airline
  U.S. origin
  U.S. destination
  European aircraft (A320)

Seems that the cause was problems with American trained pilots, so it's a strong refutation to the assertion "Maybe from the fact that the last fatality in a US airline crash was over ten years ago? "

Despite the name, UPS Airlines is a cargo company, not an airline. If you want to quibble over semantics, just pretend I specified “passenger airline” since that’s what I was talking about and that’s the relevant category.

Cargo companies come under the same regulations. You can't ignore them just because it's detrimental to your narrative.

The regulations are considerably less strict for cargo flights, and they’re notorious for being significantly more dangerous. I’m ignoring them because cargo safety is irrelevant, not because it’s inconvenient.

It's partially true: Qantas held the accolade of AirlineRatings' world safest airline from 2014 to 2017, but took joint honors in 2018 when the website chose not to rank its top 20. For 2019, Qantas is singled out as the best, while the remaining 19 safest airlines haven't been ordered and are instead listed alphabetically. The top 20 are: Air New Zealand, Alaska Airlines, All Nippon Airways, American Airlines, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Emirates, EVA Air, Finnair, Hawaiian Airlines, KLM, Lufthansa, Qantas, Qatar Airways, Scandinavian Airline System, Singapore Airlines, Swiss, and United Airlines and Virgin group of airlines (Atlantic and Australia). Source: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-safest-airline...

There has been one death in the past decade of US commercial flights. One in a decade of over 90 million flights.

But if you extend the time frame by a month and a day, it's 51.

I otherwise agree.

Yes, because that was the exact crash that led to a number of improvements in air safety in the US...

Care to offer evidence to the contrary to support your incredulity?

I understand and agree that we don't want knee-jerk reactions on the part of regulators.

I'm only an aviation enthusiast and by no means an expert, and fully admit that I could be wrong, and even with my natural inclination to reserve judgement, to me it seems obvious that grounding is warranted purely from a statistic viewpoint.

Compare the release of the 737 MAX 8 with the release of other recent-ish models like the 777 and 787. It was 14 years before the 777 suffered even a single hull loss, and 20 years before a crash of the magnitude of the 737 MAX 8 (loss of all souls). The 787 is almost a decade old and has zero hull losses or fatalities.

The 737 MAX 8 is less than a few years old and already has two catastrophic crashes? I know that it's hard to draw too much information from just two data points, but that's pretty compelling to me.

Also, don't forget that the 787's were also grounded when they were new for their battery problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_...

It's a bit of a different situation, but they were grounded for a problem that I don't believe caused a single fatality, but had more incidents in a shorter time period.

By this argument, all Boeing 777s should have been grounded after the loss of Malaysia 370 and Malaysia 17. Same plane, both incidents within 5 months of each other.

Only if you consider the total amount of time during which the plane has been in business an irrelevant detail.

Which it is not, of course.

That's a deceptive argument. We know the reason why Malaysia 17 was lost. So we positively know that there is no reason to ground them.

Ignoring the fact of MH-17 having been shot down by missile (which took time to prove but was suspected from the outset) really hurts your argument.

> I don’t think it’s a simple as saying the US airlines and FAA are simply being greedy and placing profit over safety.

No. It all comes down to as simple as "better safe than sorry" philosophy. FAA have generally very conservative about air safety tolerance as they should. The normal response should be "we know 737 is safe", because we have data showing that over 10k+ deliveries and less than 3% had hull loss. Can FAA say that to Boeing 737Max8 today?! So instead of being conservative they are being bold and saying "we don't know if 737 Max is not safe because investigation has not been concluded." You see the difference now?

More and more evidence revealing that FAA/Boeing are placing profit over safety. Do you think FAA have a problem grounding AirBus planes with non hull loss accidents? Absolutely Not! In fact, they did exactly that in 2018 to AirBus 320neo [1]

> Let the downvotes begin.

This is the behavior to directly violate the HN rules. But having a minority opinion doesn't.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/pratt-sai...

Let the downvotes begin.

HN guidelines ask that you don't bait people this way, it's toxic to discussion.

While you're trying to field a rational argument, doing so using pejorative language (panicking, giving in to pressure) preemptively delegitimizes other points of view and thus undercuts your own credibility. Certainly facts and procedure are great but it's also a fact that a large number of people just died in circumstances that are uncertain; you're essentially arguing that the uncertainty should not be considered absent a causal mechanism.

Why is it so important not to adjust our course while investigations proceed? After all we have an elaborate financial services industry devoted to the mitigation of economic risk, so why shouldn't we allow that to operate? Voluntary risk-bearers (insurance and reinsurance firms, option issuers etc) can do their thing and shoulder the financial burden of the disruption rather than expecting passengers to shoulder vital risks which they're not qualified to assess.

I didn't see any comment that countered the narrative that the 2 planes that crashed had an erratic altitude before crashing.

We have a natural and simple scenario to explain both, and a serious reason to suspect that any left side angle of attack indicator could have a mishap because those things happen and it's normally not a big deal.

Even if the investigation deem that the root causes are different, it is the most natural explanation of those accidents absent more information, and it is even a nominal chain of event that was planned by Boeing.

I agree and I don't think you deserve the downvotes. The FAA is an institution with a deep sense of safety first and independence from (and even dominion over) private industry.

They are also a body of experts, with more collective knowledge than any other similar body of domain experts in world.

If we believe in institutions of experts who study and make recommendations regarding complex systems, we owe it to the FAA to trust they are charting a prudent course based on the evidence they are gathering and analysis they are doing.

Regulatory capture happens. Top level leadership starts overruling career professionals and then that dominion gets reversed. Not saying that's what has happened hear but boy did Boeing pull one over on the Faa with this planes release. And Faa leadership has incentive to hold the line. Faa fucked this up long ago.

An attitude of “damn the regulations, we need to help business” flows from the very top of this administration, too. That, and blatant corruption. How much has Boeing spent at Trump properties in the last few years?

The FAA should be independent but it doesn’t always work that way, and this sort of thing can tip the balance.

It's interesting you put it this way. I just heard on NPR this morning that the FAA and NTSB is actually in partnership with private industry (like Boeing and the airlines) for cooperative self regulation because the FAA and NTSB just doesn't have the resources to provide adequate inspections without their help. I'll see if I can find that interview.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/13/702908761/why-did-a-boeing-73...

I listened to this interview and it's interesting the way you put it:

Steve Inskeep rephrases a statement that Goelz makes to make it seem like the FAA is short staffed and that airline compliance is on the honor system.

Goelz then says what he means is that there cannot be an independent FAA inspector in every single corner of a manufacturer or maintenance shop, but by then it's too late because the seed has been planted listeners mind.

So here you are saying the "FAA and NTSB just doesn't have the resources to provide adequate inspections" and that the overall compliance model here is "cooperative self regulation" which... I guess barring the FAA having a 1:1 staff for every employee in the airline industry we are indeed going to have "cooperative self regulation".

The FAA is great, and I'd agree it's probably better than any other individual agency in other countries. But better than all of them together? Maybe, maybe not.

To turn your concluding argument around, what is imprudent about grounding these planes until we have a clearer answer? It's going to cause some economic loss, but this seems like a much lower priority.

The thing people aren't looking at is the condition of the planes. Both crashes happened with planes of third-world nations, and might not have been held to the same rigorous standards. I'm glad America is trying to get the black box, because I'm not sure I'd trust the Ethiopian govt not to tamper with it just to protect their image (and their tourism industry).

Last I heard they are looking for a European country to analyse it, because they don't trust America to fully and honestly investigate.

That's pretty unheard of. But I can't blame them.

Lion, maybe, (I don't know anything about them to say), but Ethiopian Air is a top-rated airliner.

It's kind of ironic that this story is on front page at the same time as the one about internet mobs shutting down researchers. It really feels like internet mobs are succeeding in pressuring regulatory bodies to ground the airplane, even though those bodies have determined by their normal evaluation criteria that it's not necessary to do so.

At this point that is a regulatory 'body', singular.

They have more than 5000 orders for this model of aircraft. Each one costs approx 120million. Which means there are approx $640 billion dollars on the line. It is imperative that Boeing keeps it's reputation and grounding flights would destroy it.

Another 737 Max crashing in the face of the current scrutiny would destroy it even worse, wouldn’t it? Is that just a calculated gamble?

It is a calculated gamble. We've seen this so many time in so many industries.

Is that just a calculated gamble?

Yes, because by now, every pilot still flying that plane has been trained to deal with the issue.

As were, I'm guessing, the Ethiopian pilots.

That was the Lionair aftermath.

If this issue did occur again (and that's not proven), the question is why didn't the pilots deal? Were they operating past their limits for whatever reason, like with UPS1354? Or is it that the problem isn't something that can reasonably be dealt with.

Would grounding it really destroy their reputation? Grounding it doesn't mean indefinitely.

If anything, it's a huge positive if they grounded it until they knew for certain what's wrong because then it's a double win. Firstly, on the ground the plane has a 0% chance of killing anyone (unless someone decided to jump off the top of a parked plane and commit suicide, etc.), and secondly Boeing's reputation goes up because now people have a chance to think "ok finally, they actually care about safety instead of profits".

Also, Southwest is the largest US flyer of this plane and it only makes up about 5% of their fleet, so it's not like the entire world's flight traffic gets disrupted. Lastly, I would think most people who are scheduled to fly on one of these planes will cancel or demand a plane switch, so the delays and flight traffic issues are still going to happen to some degree.

Currently, all I'm reminded about from this situation is how insanely corrupt the US govt is (I'm from the US btw) and how little Southwest cares about people because they won't even let you cancel without paying out of pocket, which is totally insane. You only have 1 life.

Had Boeing grounded the fleet in the hours following the second crash (we're confident there's no problem however due to the highly unlikely coincidence we are proactively taking this step out of an abundance of cation), sure. When the truth comes out they'd be respected regardless of the outcome.

Too late now though. If the truth comes out and it's not a Boeing problem, their reputation suffers for "what might have been". If it is, their reputation suffers for "profits over safety"

Southwest, for what it's worth, were offering free changes of ticket for those on a max. American weren't.

At first I didn't agree with your "too late now" remark but now that the US grounded them, you were spot on.

Now it feels more like a calculated reaction based on profits (ie. enough people cancelled MAX flights or asked for a flight change that grounding the plane is now a better decision financially).

In any case, it's a good result that they are grounded until everyone knows what happened during the crash and have an iron clad solution to prevent the same thing from happening in the future.

See, and I thought the aviation industry’s stellar safety reputation has been built on their willingness to ground planes at the smallest glimmer of a problem. It’s what tells the public, “hey, we don’t mess around.”

>The obvious easy thing to do from a PR perspective is to ground the planes

I don't think that is the case. The FAA and Boeing both said this plane is safe and approved it for use. They would look like complete idiots if they now turn around and say they were wrong and it would put a lot of focus on why and how they came to that initial conclusion that the plane was safe.

They are doubling down on their safety claim and are refusing to admit they could have made a mistake at the expense of potentially hundreds of lives.

There is reason to believe that the FAA has bad actors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Elwell

Trump has appointed people in various areas of the government based on their contentious views with the departments they would oversee. This makes many in the international community question Dan Elwell's position and influence at the FAA.

Trump gave into the pressure: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/business/canada-737-max.h...

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