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Comment by leowoo91 | Hacker News Reader

As a passenger do I have choice for not riding a particular aircraft model?

If you can choose the airline you know what fleet the plane comes from. If you search on the flight number on e.g Flightradar24 you can see what model they used on the flight for several recent flights.

But in the end I suppose the reality is that even an un-fixed MAX-8 is orders of magnitude safer than your car ride to the airport. So before picking aircraft models, ensure you ride the train to the airport and not a taxi...

> an un-fixed MAX-8 is orders of magnitude safer than your car ride to the airport.

Of the 346 people that died in the last two plane crashes, not a single one of them died in a car on the way to the airport.

Impeccable logic

Just as logical as the statement I was poking fun at.

I was assuming the person was trying to avoid dying, not trying to avoid plane crashes in particular. Someone who wants to avoid a plane crash but would ride a motorcycle without a helmet to the airport obviously needs to use a different strategy.

The reverse can be said about the hundreds of thousands of car crash casualties last year.

"The odds of winning the lottery is 1 in 292 million." "But for that one person it is 100%!" sigh

Of all the people who died of the Spanish Flu, not a one died in World War One before that.

Also check out https://flightaware.com

Looks like we can at least have a guess, makes sense.

Not really, though they are all grounded until this is fixed anyway. I'd expect them to be safe after this if for no other reason than any pilot of this aircraft is going to end up with special training before they fly.

Indeed, they won't be allowed to fly until they are likely safer than the older planes in the air today. There was reason to be concerned when the US was hesitating to ground it, but there is no reason to be concerned now that it has been grounded.

After the first crash, I heard a lot of people predicting it would lead to 100% pilot awareness of the defect and its symptoms. The second crash proved that assumption wasn't true :(

It was largely true in the US and EU. Unfortunately everyone is so happy to crap on Boeing (in some cases deservedly, in some cases not) that they forget the carriers bear a significant share of the blame here, particularly after the first accident. If Ethiopian Air had put the same emphasis on pilot and mechanic training/awareness following the first accident that the US carriers did, the second crash would have likely never happened.

Do you know if Boeing sent new training material for the pilots? If not how would non american pilots get new training ? I assume not by browsing the web. Also consider the fact that a pilot that never pilot a MAX could be asked from nowhere to fly this new plane since it is supposed to be no difference from the regular plane and they were never trained for it and maybe did not expected to fly it.

Yet it is still Boeing's refusal to assure that the requisite information ended up in front of the pilots. The manual must be sold with the plane and it must be accurate, containing enough information to instill in an average pilot an accurate understanding of all safety critical aircraft systems, which MCAS, through Boeing's failure to reclassify during certification, wasn't acknowledged to be.

Boeing doesn't get a pass, and the Ethiopian Air pilot was just as capable if only a bit less informed.

If you cannot safely deploy your product/documentation, then you aren't done. Boeing should have known and recognized that.

The certification process is meant to be proof against a failure like this, which goes to show that there are deeper problems in the organization that need remediation.

You could pick an airline that does not use the plane you don't want to fly. In the US Delta does not fly the 737MAX nor does it have any on order. Delta has ordered 100 of the A321neos in place of the 737MAX.

https://airwaysmag.com/airlines/delta-orders-100-airbus-a321...

You can use something like SeatGuru before you book a flight to confirm the model. For instance, the LH490 flight on 4/9/2019 will be a 747-400: https://www.seatguru.com/findseatmap/findseatmap.php?airline...

The airlines can and do switch planes at the last minute, though. And I imagine part of the selling point of the MAX not requiring any recertification is that it meant they should be able to also swap a MAX for a non-MAX 737 like this.

Certainly there have been reports of pilots complaining that they didn't find out they'd be flying a MAX 8 until the last minute, and having to get "trained" on it during their ride to the airport.

Is someone forcing you to buy the ticket?

I'd be more concerned about flying particular airlines than the aircraft model.

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