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Comment by firethief | Hacker News Reader

Different countries have different standards of safety, and different budgets. Boeing got more $$$ from airlines in the US by making planes in Ethiopia and Indonesia less safe. Yay capitalism.

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Maybe should have run adds in the cockpit

That’s weird to say. Lion Air is a sloppy, cheapskate airline — look at their horrible maintenance and crash history for evidence of that. That they didn’t want to pay slightly extra for additional options on the plane was their choice. And Ethiopian is a flag carrier: they could have easily gotten the extra option, but likely some accountant thought it wasn’t necessary. Who spends over $100 million on an airplane and then declines a $1 million safety option?

Yeah, blaming the airlines and not the obvious flaws in the plane and the way it got its security certifications is the way to go...

People should have paid for the "warning when auto-crash enabled" option and I'm sure Boeing advertised their plane as absolutly unsafe without it...

> Who spends over $100 million on an airplane and then declines a $1 million safety option?

Someone being pitched 30 different $1 million safety options?

Someone who wants to buy 100 of those airplanes, but knows that the safety option reduces the risk of incurring a $100 million total hull loss by less than one percent, thus saving less than the $100 million extra cost for the option? Obviously the numbers are different, but see the oft-quoted 'Fight Club' line about product recalls for similar logic.

Who ships safety-critical features as an optional extra?

There's levels to safety-criticality so these aren't binary decisions. Often they are based on severity/probability/detectability measures.

For example, airbags on your car may be mandatory but automatic emergency braking not so much.

I agree, but was responding to a post that was heavily criticising Lion Air for not paying for the option and implicitly laying the blame for the crash at their door. Either the option was safety critical, in which case Boeing had no business making it optional, or it wasn’t, in which case blaming Lion Air is unreasonable.

Given that thanks to Boeing, the Lion Air crew didn’t even know the MCAS subsystem existed, and that MCAS would continue to rely on the single faulty sensor however many extra redundancies were installed, the decision not to buy seems kind of irrelevant.

> Either the option was safety critical, in which case Boeing had no business making it optional

This is the part I was trying to clarify. I don't know Boeing's internal processes, but there certainly could be options that are safety-critical but still optional because they are ranked low enough on the severity/probability/detectability scale.

I agree that it's wrong to blame Lion Air as the consumer. The fault seems to be in Boeing misapplying the risk categorization.

Southwest didn't buy the option either until after the Lion Air crash:

In manuals that Boeing gave to Southwest Airlines — the biggest operator of both the MAX and 737s in general — the warning light was depicted as a standard feature just as it is on older 737s, according to Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King.

After the Lion Air crash, Ms King said, Boeing notified Southwest that it had discovered the lights did not work without the optional angle-of-attack indicators, so Southwest began adding the optional feature too.

(quotes from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-06/boeing-knew-737-probl... )

You appear to assume that the 20% of aircraft with the optional feature are in the US. That's possible, but... Citation needed.

It's not a random assumption. I read in some recent article that the airlines in the US have the feature--sorry I don't remember which, but you can look it up as easily as I.

How can I look that up?

You're the one who made the factual statement. I'm not the one that's obliged to back that up.

Wikipedia lists the customers, and the number of aircraft delivered to US airlines is a good match for the 20% of aircraft that are said to have that feature. However, that assumption implies that 0% of leasing companies ordered it, that 0% of Canadian customers did, that the American airlines bought all their aircraft and didn't lease any, etc. Might all be true but you can see why I asked for a citation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...

Not less safe. Perhaps not as safe at others. Such as of those where the front doesn't fell off.

Well, it's not built of cardboard and rubber...

Does everyone know this delicious skit? "Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

I mean less safe relative to shipping the same hardware with the warning feature enabled, which they could have done at no cost except the loss of loss of price discrimination (which I'm sure was substantial, but probably not enough that they don't now regret it)

Since the 737 MAX also has military customers, it may be more likely that Boeing's design of the modular components was compromised by the need to accommodate military specs, which often leave off 'unnecessary consumer safety options' ..

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