Hacker News Reader

Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Just putting the safety record into context.

Actually, I think if the planes can be fixed (and I'd be shocked if they couldn't), the two crashes before the fix will no longer be relevant for assessing safety.

View on HN

You're putting the safety record into chauvinist context, to be exact. An AoA failure is sufficiently rare for it to have only occured in a couple of occasions in - shockingly - only a couple of countries.

Okay, I probably should have calculated the number of successful flights to avoid this. But, nowhere did I say any country is better than any other. That's your inference.

I can help with that -- the MAX is suffering hull losses per flight completed at a rate about 100x that of comparable planes like the A320. Totally off the charts.

It’s such a weird statistic to use though. One crash takes a really long time to recover from in that score. So even if the 737 Max was magically fixed tomorrow, the score wouldn’t change.

It's not remotely a strange choice when it represents the current most reasonable prediction of risk.

If it were fixed tomorrow at that point we could discuss how it effects risk in the future.

> One crash takes a really long time to recover from in that score.

As it should be. That's how important safety is. Boeing brought this on themselves by letting a second airplane crash before responding properly.

Hundreds of people died. It should leave a long-term impact on Boeing's safety record. It should take them a long time to recover and regain trust.

What was your original motivation to bring up the country aspect?

This isn't a valid way to put it into context. It doesn't matter which countries the planes crashed in; the causes were the same and lives lost are lives lost. And air travel is so globalized these days that one crash anywhere can kill citizens of dozens of countries.

Yes, it doesn't matter which two countries it was, but it's fine to point out that many airlines in many countries didn't see these problems. The planes flew in many places every day with no trouble.

You are calling me out over nothing. This is uncharitable, to say the least. Why make trouble?

There were "only" two instances (which killed >300 people) before the plane was yanked from the air entirely. That means that, roughly speaking, it was only going to happen in two countries at all, or one really unlucky country. So there's no use in pointing out that it didn't happen in many more countries, because that would have required dozens more accidents with tens of thousands of deaths, which was simply never in the cards because the planes would've been yanked long before then. So there's no use in pointing out that it didn't happen in many countries, because that never would've happened.

You're explaining my own reasoning and then telling me how I'm wrong.

Talking about countries is just another way of saying that the plane was flying in many places all over the world and the risk of accident, despite these horrible accidents, was never very high. As you say, would never happen.

The risk of accident was very high relative to other airliners, by more than an entire order of magnitude. I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com