I’m not flying anymore. Between the GHG annual personal emissions and the stunning staggering massively deadly failures of rushed Boeing product launches. Finally I will note the whole damn process is dehumanizing and terrible.
If Boeing can't escape the perverse incentives that tempt every company, then what company can and why are we relying on this economic model to drive such a high stakes industry?
I don't see why that's "the worst part". Flying is the safest mode of travel, and among airliners the 737NG is one of the safest planes in aviation history. The fact that cracks have been discovered doesn't change that, and the routine inspections which have discovered these cracks and will lead to them being fixed is precisely the reason why these aircraft, and the aviation industry as a whole, are so incredibly safe.
So the system broke somehow, and the news will keep hammering it until someone somewhere learns their lesson. We hope.
Yes, they will go after a bunch of false positives too in the process, but the thing with weeding out the true negatives reliably is that you have to be paranoid about the false positives too.
Cutting the margins too fine and skipping the 'paranoid, inefficient' checks is how we got here.
Focusing a really big spotlight on the entire industry is part of the feedback loop.
Unfortunately this was not a routine check, it seems that routine checks did not found this issue and only after checks were done specifically to look for this issue more cracks were found.
By mile or by minute? It might seem pedantic, but it just means you're better off flying from New York to LA than driving. It doesn't mean you're better off than staying put.
Boeing's customers care a lot more than most automaker's customers. 1 in 4 cars on US roads have known unresolved safety recalls.
Aviation is the standard exactly because defects are identified and handled the way they are, they also tend to be remedied quickly. If not all affected aircraft are grounded, like the 737MAX.
These 737NG cracks can by no means be compared to the 737MAX clusterfuck. The former is pretty normal while the latter is a safety and certification issue of enormous dimensions.
If airplanes were like computers ...
See also: https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/crash.htm
I will agree though that the TSA has made things pretty dehumanizing.
I'm used to the european airports - they are unfortunately like shopping malls, and totally in your face about it. Enter through security right into a big display of perfumes and other overpriced goods, that's the standard thing.
What surprised me when I was over in Newark airport (and in NY JFK too) was actually how underexploited it was commercially. That's great, just surprising.
As a data scientist, I know the odds of something going wrong are extremely low, but unfortunately I'm not able to rationally control my emotions during flight; the fear is involuntary and difficult to suppress. It also doesn't help that I work at a large tech company and see how many bugs are in the codebase (even with some of the best software engineers in the world), and the fact that airplanes are increasingly run by software makes me feel kind of queasy.
Seriously I see the 737 Max debacle as an exception that proves the rule.
But the dehumanizing part can be fixed. We may in the future look on the TSA security theatre as an era of incredible FUD.
I feel the TSA will just continue to grow. It is being fed threats and has nothing else to do but grow.
I want security, but damn.
Turns out motor coaches (e.g. Greyhound busses) are the most efficient at pretty much any distance.
Germany's department of environment number for travel by rail: 38 gram/kilometer = 0.13 pound per passenger mile.
(Source (German): https://www.vcd.org/fileadmin/_processed_/8/9/csm_Emissionen...)
But your other points are 100% correct.