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Comment by hansthehorse | Hacker News Reader

There is a 9 year old documentary on two Boing whistleblowers describing cracking probability on the 737ng. It's an hour long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaWdEtANi-0

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Extremely interesting. Especially, around 19-21 minutes, we find the same problem as on 737 Max: Boeing has the delegated authority from the FAA to certify their own processes and parts.

I’m never flying Boeing again. They were hammering crucial parts to fit, provoking crackling; redrilling holes when the hole was 3 inches apart, endangering the whole structural integrity; painting it all green and sending that to production.

The documentary is about the circles of the airframe structure, not about the wing forks of today’s article, so that makes one new type of botched work from Boeing.

> I’m never flying Boeing again

I suspect you were intending this to be obvious hyperbole, but also this will be very difficult if you’re flying at all regularly. While you can have a look at the equipment the airline thinks it’ll be flying at booking time, there’s no guarantees about which plane will actually show up, and the airline isn’t going to refund your ticket because they decided to swap out their A350 for their 787 for operational reasons.

All this plane talk makes me curious, if there are any airlines that tell you ahead of time what planes they are using for a route? I guess they'd now be even less inclined to tell.

The information is almost certainly available on the page where you see the search results and choose your flights. Probably right next to or near the flight numbers. It is on every major US carrier's search results. I don't know about any of the OTAs: Expedia, Kayak, etc.

It’s there but it isn’t guaranteed nor part of the sales contract.

According to the fine print (and carriers' past actions), nothing on an airline ticket is guaranteed as part of the sales contract; not the plane type, flight numbers, arrival/departure times, baggage handling, connections, and, thanks to overbooking, not even the fact that you have a seat on the plane.

Virtually every airline will tell you on their bookings pages. If you’re flying in the front of the plane, there can be major differences in the hard product between different planes of the same carrier. Qatar Airways kept some crummy slanted recliner chairs in business on their A340s for a long time after the A380 had a great fully-flat bed and a bar onboard, and would fly it on the same route. FinnAir have some great seats on their Asian fleet A350s, but you’ll have a nasty shock if you fly Tokyo-Helsinki-New York as they have some truly dated and shabby A330s flying the latter part.

But: it doesn’t form part of the contract, so no complaints if you get shafted with an old plane.

If you have airplane preferences, it's best to fly on airlines that only use planes you like, or never use planes you dislike. That means avoiding the largest airlines, as they are most likely to mix and match.

Budget airlines sometimes use one type of plane, eg. Ryanair only flying Boeing 737-800 (so I guess the original poster would want to avoid them!)

I'm usually flying Alaska or United or Southwest, but yes, they do tell you which plane.

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