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Comment by iso947 | Hacker News Reader

This is an example of where “vote with your dollar” and “invisible hand of the market” falls down, and why we need strong regulations.

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Airliners are very much regulated already. If you want to set a personal standard above and beyond the regulation, there might not be a market for you. Supposing it could be worked out, do you plan to review the safety record of all your potential rides, or just go by headlines?

The issue many people will have on hn is that the design flaws (not just software issues) have been discussed at length along with mismanagement that has shown little to no regard for design flaws. This has eroded trust in Boeings ability to make a new plane.

Time without incidents will be needed to earn many of our trusts back.

You talk of the regulation but posts on HN have shown how the regulators have failed and even why it's happened.

How do you know Airbus' software is better than Boeing? Maybe Boeing is overall better, but bad luck caught them? Maybe Boeing has learned a lesson and while their past software was bad they have spend the last year making significant changes and all future airplanes will be much better?

You are getting downvoted, but your points are fair. It wasn't that long ago that people criticized Airbus for some surprisingly similar reasons.

Sure we can imagine a scenario where Boeing is still the best choice. But if we actually want to make the best decision possible with the information available at this point in time add probabilities to your cases.

Who is more likely to have quality control issues? The company that has had more planes crash or the company that has had fewer planes crash?

They clearly aren't regulated sufficiently. The lack of FAA oversight is what allowed the whole 737 Max fiasco to happen in the first place.

I think the "vote with your dollar" is already working. How many 737 MAX contracts have been cancelled?

Cancelled because the planes aren’t available.

Meanwhile companies like IaG are buying more 737-Max, knowing full well their customers will base their purchase on the cheapest hit on skyscanner.

Regulation can't help when management is willing to sacrifice safety for profits. Ultimately, the penalties for violating those regulations and loss of customers could kill Boeing, but lives have already been lost.

Except that didn’t happen with the Max. The engineers thought MCAS was safe. Nobody in management told the engineers to design MCAS do be dependent on a single sensor with no sanity check and nearly physically impossible to override.

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