Hacker News Reader

Comment by SftwrSvior81 | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right that highly competitive markets can push down quality but that happens because the customer accepts the lower quality. If air lines or the customers actually flying on these planes decided that they were not going to buy/fly on Boeing planes, the quality issue within the market would be resolved fairly quickly. Either Boeing would produce higher quality planes or they would go out of business and their market share would be taken over by a competitor with higher quality. Of course, I'm assuming that such a competitor exists. In case they don't, my argument becomes invalid.

View on HN

Nobody knew the 737 MAX was lower quality until it started falling out of the sky. I think we can agree that an ideal system wouldn't require people to die horrifically in the process of price discovery.

Absolutely, I 100% agree with this. I wasn't arguing that the current system is anything even close to ideal. I was trying to point out that now that we, the public, have paid this horrendous price, we are still not using the information gained. A company that shows that they will put profit above their customers' lives should be abandoned very quickly by its customers. That isn't happening and the fault for that lies with the customers, IMO.

> that happens because the customer accepts the lower quality.

What choice do we have? Even if there is a choice, the majority of consumers don't have the luxury of choosing.

In my opinion, we all have the choice of not flying on Boeing planes any longer. If a company shows that they are willing to put profits above their customers' lives, then customers should not do business with that company any longer. The customer has to provide an incentive to the company to not do this. Going out of business is a very powerful incentive, I believe. If a company can kill a couple of hundred of its customers and still continue to make money, then why should it do anything differently, especially if the decision that caused the deaths also caused higher profits?

Of course the customer accepts the lower quality.

Dying once every 10 million flight hours instead of every 1000 million flight hours is a fair price to pay for 10 USD of savings.

Also, air travel has actually got safer over time, not less safe - despite the massive increase in air travel, total deaths have actually gone down over time. The whole reason that the 737 MAX problems were such big news is that passenger airplanes are so safe these days that even one air crash is remarkable, let alone two which appear to have the same cause.

It's more like a $800 difference in ticket price. People forget just how expensive it was to fly back before deregulation. A ticket that cost $600 in 1980 dollars goes for $300 today.

Think about computers. Apple Machintosh costed $2000, now ... Why airplane industry cannot behave like computer industry?

According to Wikipedia, the original Mac 128k had a launch price of $2495 in 1984, equating to approximately $6100 in 2019 USD). I'd say they're behaving very similarly?

> A ticket that cost $600 in 1980 dollars goes for $300 today.

I'm not sure that is a universal positive.

If you're talking about airline passengers, they have no choice in which plane they fly in.

not only no choice...

No information - They rarely have any information (you have to go through several menus to find out your plane on most sites). They don't know when / where the plane was last serviced [0].

No framework - Your average consumer of air travel is not equipped to accurately evaluate that information should they even have it. (c.f., 'if it's not Boeing I a'int going [1]). They cannot make rational and informed decisions without information and a rational decision making framework

No control - They have no control over whether that plane is changed for operational reasons even if they have the information and a framework to evaluate it. You may not even know until you are onboard with the door shut unless you are really well informed about airplanes that the plane model has changed (e.g., I avoid A321s because

No recourse - Even if they consciously choose a plane based on information and an informed framework and then it gets changed what can you do? Are you even going to know until you get on the plane at which point what do you do? Do you think you get a refund?

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19780372

It's not hard to see which planes fly which routes.

It's also not guaranteed which plane will fly which route. Every airline has "substitution" rules in their conditions of carriage, and frequently use them.

Depends on airline. Southwest, for example, has Boeing-only fleet. JetBlue has only Airbuses and Embraers.

The odds of buying a JetBlue ticket and ending up on a Boeing are fairly low compared to flying Southwest.

Boeing just bought Embraer, but I assume that it will take some time until they the quality of products start to fall

Plus, flights get cancelled, and passengers get re-routed last minute.

I can't recall any plane crashes that also involved a plane switch. So getting bumped to a different plane type and crashing is incalculably rare.

A lot of routes have only one airline though.

Unless you are an aerospace engineer or pilot I don't think you can judge the quality of a plane under the surface. I note the leg space and if the plane is noisy or shakes much.

One doesn't need to be an aerospace engineer to know that Boeing planes crashed because the company leadership decided to forgo quality for the sake of profits. Before the crashes, I agree, there was no reason for customers to expect Boeing planes to be unsafe. However, now that this information has become public, any customer can decide to not fly on their planes.

Is it rational for a customer to not fly on a plane that is as safe as any other just because the same company later made another plane that was less safe? It seems like a lot to ask.

In any case, even if 10% of people totally stopped flying on Boeing, which would be a wildly optimistic outcome for any organized consumer action, the airlines would just discount those flights ever so slightly and the other 90% of price-conscious consumers would immediately take up the slack. Nobody's going out of business in that scenario. This is, of course, why we rely on regulation rather than consumer choice to ensure safety, and why this is a failure of regulation, not of the market.

This also assumes perfect knowledge, which isn't true.

> because the customer accepts the lower quality.

This presumes a perfect market where customers are rational actors with access to a variety of sellers whose product differs only on quality, which consumers have access to accurate information about and the time and expertise to precisely evaluate.

Of course the reality is we're just trying to book a flight to get home before Mom's chemo starts and all we know about each airline is the ticket price and how good the peanuts were the last time we flew on them.

Airlines are about the last industry on Earth where we should expect laissez-faire capitalism to produce optimal outcomes.

I wasn't suggesting that the customers could have known beforehand that the Boeing planes had issues that would cause crashes. However, we do know NOW that Boeing planes have quality issues. If customers still willingly get on those planes, then where is the incentive for Boeing to do anything differently? That's really the point I was trying to make. We don't need perfect information to now decide to not fly on Boeing planes. That would send a very strong message to the entire industry that putting profits above customers' lives will be met with very negative consequences such as reduced or loss of profits and possibly the company going out of business.

> where is the incentive

Regulation.

A further complicating factor is that quality can be masked from the customer, and indeed will be if that's less expensive than actually improving the quality.

And thus no one will actually know that Boeing's planes are of lower quality, until a couple hundred people die.

if US allowed foreign airlines to serve domestic routes, that would be the case

Reply on news.ycombinator.com