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Comment by dustinmoris | Hacker News Reader

We need a website which will list all airlines which have at least one 737 Max in stock or on order and make it easy for customers to find out what % of the fleet is the 737 Max, so customers can take that into account when booking flights and so that airlines know that having a Boeing 737 Max has a direct negative impact on their sales figures.

Even if Boeing truly fixes the plane, they should never get away with this. The sheer ignorance and negligence which led to the unnecessary death of so many passengers is mass murder in my eyes.

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This page already goes a long way to fulfill your requirements: https://www.planespotters.net/special/boeing-737-max-groundi...

...however, if you don't want Boeing to "get away with it", you should boycott all their planes. Not saying we should do that though, because if Boeing goes out of business, we would be left with just one major manufacturer of passenger jets, and that's never a good thing. Already the Max issues are at least in part a result of the existing duopoly and US authorities being too lenient with Boeing because they don't want to disadvantage it against Airbus.

That's a pretty odd take when Boeing airplanes have superior safety ratings than their Airbus counterpars for the most part if we exclude the 737-Max variant. I need to find sources, I am writing from memory.

I understand the situation with 737-Max safety, Boeing entirely deserves it. But, I think we should also look at the data as well and hold off on knee-jerk reactions.

Edit: http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

Airbus seems safer from your link?

They never had a crash on any of their newer models, A380, A350 and neo variants. The vast majority of flights are performed in 737s and A320 variants and the crash rate is 0.09 for Airbus vs 0.24 for Boeing.

[edit]: actually excluding planes produced before the 737NG in 1984 and the 737 max, the 737 crash rate is 0.11 which is still slightly higher than Airbus.

Your link disagrees with your conclusion?

Do you mean the 0.07 "fatality rate" for Boeing 737-600/700/800/900 vs. the 0.09 for the A320 family? I would say they are both very safe aircraft, but I wouldn't read too much into the 0.02 difference, because that includes accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 (where the copilot intentionally crashed the plane) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 (which was 100% due to human error)

> which was 100% due to human error

Not sure how familiar you are with the airplane industry but nothing is ever "100% due to human error" in these events. We know humans are controlling these planes and the equipment can always gets better. Usually it comes down to UX, checklists and more to have multiple stopgaps to prevent issues. Just a quick scan of the Flight 522 page shows there were in fact many UX issues like why can you take off when the pressure system is turned to manual? Forcing a manual override if so would have helped. Same alert sound was also used for "take-off configuration warning" and "cabin altitude warning", leading to the pilots making the wrong decision. Attributing Flight 522 to only human error is not what the courts did (check the "Lawsuits and criminal proceedings" section in the page you linked) so not sure why you would.

Ok, if you want to get into the details of this particular accident... it can be argued that UX issues made it easier for the pilots to make the fatal mistake they made (and the lawyers representing the victims' families of course made that argument, because going after Boeing is far more promising than going after a small airline which declared bankruptcy soon after the accident), but in the end it was still human error. Aircraft are complex systems which can't be made 100% foolproof, that's why they are flown by qualified and trained pilots who have checklists for things that have to be done before take-off, and one of them was checking the pressurization system ("the flight crew overlooked the pressurization system state on three occasions: during the pre-flight procedure, the after-start check, and the after take-off check").

...and the courts ultimately had nothing to do with it, because the suit against Boeing was settled out of court. Which is not an "admission of guilt" on the part of Boeing, just "give them some money to make this unpleasant thing go away".

I appreciate your point about nothing ever being "100% due to human error", especially in regards to air travel. I recently read "The Design of Everyday Things", a book that devotes a lot of its time to discussing this same principle. We should blame the UX wherever possible before assigning any blame to the individual.

> because that includes accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

> He had set the autopilot to descend to 100 ft (30 m) and accelerated the speed of the descending aircraft several times thereafter.

That could have been avoided if the autopilot refused to crash the air plane. To be fair, I bet Boeing's autopilot also accepts commands to crash the plane. However this accident could have been avoided if the autopilot had refused to comply with an obviously deadly commands.

I'm skeptical that an AI for airplanes exists that can distinguish between "obviously deadly commands" and "trying to rescue the plane during a mechanical emergency".

A hypothetical system would actually function almost exactly the same as the much derided MCAS. If angle of attack sensors indicate an inappropriate angle of ascent/descent, overcompensate for or override the pilot inputs.

As we've learned at great cost, angle of attack sensors are wrong more often than pilots are homicidal though, which is part of the reason why the form of intelligence used to deter and attempt to prevent obviously deadly pilot actions is a lump of meat called a copilot.

> a lump of meat called a copilot.

Looks like that's how they fixed the issue.

> aviation authorities in some countries implemented new regulations that require two authorized personnel to be present in the cockpit of large passenger aircraft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525#Regula...

An A320 already does much more crash-prevention than a 737 because of its FBW system. It’s impossible to stop someone who’s determined to crash the plane unless you make it fully autonomous.

You're onto something, keep on thinking about it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_2904

Please excuse the snark, but there is more to flight safety than a Hacker's "AI's the best"-mentality. We actually have a lot of experience gathered from accidents and non-accidents how these systems should behave in a general sense, and "overriding pilot-input" has proven not to be a good idea.

The discussion above was about details and UX.

I'm much more concerned by the operator than the aircraft on proven planes. Air France for example -- landing in Syria in a civil war due to a backup plan that prioritised money over safety [0], pilots ignoring stall warning for nearly a minute [1].

The Max does concern me about Boeing planes goign forward, but existing airbus and boeing planes are fine.

[0] https://www.independent.ie/life/travel/travel-news/air-franc...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

If you'd read the website you linked more carefully, you'd see the reason:

>Also excluded are aircraft models have no fatal events involving airline passengers:

>Airbus: A220, A319neo, A320neo, A321neo, A340, A350, A380

A300 and A310 are old planes, not in service in reasonable airlines.

> Not saying we should do that though, because if Boeing goes out of business, we would be left with just one major manufacturer of passenger jets, and that's never a good thing.

This is a strong argument to work with Boeing to correct both the engineering and company cultural issues that produced an aircraft that kills their customers' customers. What's happening now seems like the time elapsed in the penalty box for bad behavior and now they are back on the ice. As you've stated, Boeing is too important to go out of business. Should a crash happen in the western world they'll long for the difficulties and corrective opportunities they face now.

> Boeing is too important to go out of business.

I hear this a lot and I get it, but I'm not so sure it's true. If Boeing dies, their assets don't just evaporate with them. There are half a dozen companies in the US who could take over where they left off - hopefully with better leadership this time around.

> There are half a dozen companies in the US who could take over where they left off

Like who? Lockheed maybe? I'm not sure they'd be willing or able to take over without the US government stepping in with some serious incentives though.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, and Honeywell all spring to mind. Most of those companies do not presently manufacture entire aircraft, but they're all in a position to do so if they acquired only a fraction of Boeing's assets. Raytheon Technologies in particular already makes engines, avionics, and interior systems. All they'd need is a manufacturing plant to assemble everything onto a fuselage.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin get a lot of name recognition for handling the high-level design and manufacturing of aircraft. But in reality, their planes are an amalgamation of engines, avionics, and interior systems which are often contracted out to other companies like those I listed. Many of them could step up and fill Boeing's shoes if a good deal presents itself - especially if there was extra incentive seeing as it would be a matter of national interest.

> if Boeing goes out of business, we would be left with just one major manufacturer of passenger jets, and that's never a good thing.

Comac is getting to a point where it can give serious competition. This is corroborated by the fact that US has already established sanctions against them [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-comac-military-...

Comac C919 is not even in service yet. Sanctions are probably because of alleged IP theft:

https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2018/11/05/america-accuse...

They are slated to deliver in late 2021. And you and I both know their competitive edge is not coming from being good, its coming from being Chinese. China is a pretty big market and they will definitely favor Comac.

I will reserve my comments about IP theft.

C919 use CFM engine why they try to steal something they buy?

> why they try to steal something they buy?

Because they can’t manufacture it yet but are trying to learn to.

Because China wants to be able to manufacture everything so that they are beholden to no one. Seize the means of production as it were.

Most of China's innovations in aircraft stem from the fact that they lack the advanced metallurgy and engine manufacturing chops to make powerful engines. Their equivalent to the Blackhawk helicopter uses an advanced fly-by-wire system instead of heavy hydraulics systems because they can't produce an engine powerful enough to meet operational requirements and have hydraulic controls.

Comac was worth mentioning, I think. I hadn't heard of it and I appreciate being informed.

However, currently the "third largest producer of civil aircraft, after Boeing and Airbus" (Wikipedia) is Embraer. British Airways uses the Embraer 170 for some European flights: only 76 passengers, but Embraer also sells some larger planes, up to 146 passengers.

> "third largest producer of civil aircraft, after Boeing and Airbus" (Wikipedia)

Is that By number of planes?

JetBlue flys Embraer 190s in the USA for shorter haul trips as well. Single aisle 2x2 type configuration.

I doubt Comac airplanes will be allowed to land in any european or american airports.

Why do you say that? I understand America has sanctions since a week or so ago, do you expect Europe to comply to them?

> if Boeing goes out of business, we would be left with just one major manufacturer of passenger jets

The former US president certainly helped with that, as his misguided tariffs on aluminium killed Bombardier's C-Series plane. Bombardier had to _give_ it to Airbus so it had a chance to see the light of day. It's now known as the A220.

I was under the impression that had more to do with this episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo... - basically Boeing complained that Bombardier was selling the CSeries at dumping prices, the US International Trade Commission agreed and threatened additional duties on the imported planes, so Bombardier partnered up with Airbus to be able to (partly) build the planes in the USA and thus avoid paying the additional tariffs.

Yeah, Boeing was complaining that Bombardier was receiving subsidies (which it did, at great expense to Québec taxpayers), while it was receiving many times that amount in subsidies as well from the US gov.

> US International Trade Commission agreed

If you think that wasn't from political pressure, I have a bridge to sell you.

The ruling didn't hold up in court.

What's interesting is how Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways).

I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Now Europeans are reaping the benefits.

Why didn't he step up?

The tariffs really struck me as contradictory to their intent. They said the tariffs would bring factory jobs back to America, but they seemed specifically designed to make most manufacturing more expensive.

Most finished products weren't taxed but raw materials were. So if someone wanted to setup a TV factory it would cost more to import the necessary parts.

>The tariffs really struck me as contradictory to their intent.

Welcome to the post-1980 Republican party.

> Most finished products weren't taxed but raw materials were.

This is kind of a simplistic summary. The tariffs were targeted to ensure certain industries remain solvent in the US so we're not dependent on foreign imports. In some cases, that meant products farther down the manufacturing chain, and in others, closer to the source.

For example, steel was one of "raw materials" we targeted. We might not be so concerned about finished products using steel at the moment (e.g. cars), but we want to ensure we can create tanks and fighter jets in wartime. So you'd expect we would tariff imported steel, but not cars, because the cost of the steel in a modern car (which is more than half its weight) is not that significant compared to the other components.

Bombardier has a long history of incompetence. Just google "Bombardier delays" or "Bombardier defects". They have been bleeding money for years and sucking up billions in corporate welfare to stay afloat.

Oh, no need to google here; I have some friends that worked there that have confirmed this on multiple occasions. It's just frustrating as a Québec taxpayer to see this plane program bailed out from Bombardier's incompetence with my tax money, only for the US & Boeing to force it to be given to Airbus. I feel like we really got shafted in that saga.

Québec taxpayers actually made money with the deal, strangely enough.

Bombardier basically split the CSeries program from it's main division and placed all assets (factories, IP for the plane) in a separate company. The government then invested in that company and got shares in return. So it's really more like VC.

These shares also get a part of the profits from the CSeries and the government can sell them if it wishes.

Rail or airplanes? The two companies have been distinct for many years now.

Rail projects are a political nightmare, as every buyer is a government (municipal, state, national) and wants their rail equipment to be manufactured in their jurisdiction. So they can make a big announcement that the X millions they just paid is actually creating good jobs. Then a few years later the job dries up for a designated site (project completed) so the local government keeps bailing it out else they'll get voted out for getting rid of all these jobs!

Plus, of course, every project is custom hardware. And is long enough that it will span at least two municipal, state or national administrations so expect a feature creep/change of requirements in the middle.

I made that! https://airlinelist.com still in beta but try the filter No 737Max in fleet

Very cool. Nice job!

Even it were not for the MCAS problem, the 737 is the worst plane on the market -- it is hamstrung by 1960s design decisions, struggles to take off under good conditions, is loud on the inside and outside, etc.

Newer smaLl jets like the E195 and A220 are smaller on the outside but feel bigger on the inside the same way Japanese cars felt in the 1970s compared to American 'boats'; in the short term it is easy for airlines to keep with the 737 but because the business is a cosy duopoly passengers will be spending more in the long term, we will get more climate change, more noise at the airport,

Boeing doesnt have a real business plan unless it includes replacing the 737 someday. In particular Low Cost airlnes like Southwest have built businesses around airplanes designed for mainline airlines, if one of them got a plane designed for them it could turn the industry upside down.

That's funny, i thought about making just that, but there area already a bunch of sites ( planeapotters, flightradar, etc.) which contain the data, so a dedicated website would add little value. I might still make it, especially if more airlines decide to "rename" it ( e.g. Ryanair with their 737-9200).

The sites you mention seem oriented towards discovering what any given plane currently in air is, and who operates it.

What GP is talking about is a site that lists airlines operating that particular plane. A simple, dedicated interface. Drop in an airline, get a probability estimate you'll be flying on a 737 MAX. Or, better, drop an airline, start/stop points and time, get an answer whether you'll be flying 737 MAX.

EDIT: https://airlinelist.com/ has a feature I was thinking about, though not prominently visible. There's a button "No 737 MAX in fleet", which you can use as a filter. So a dedicated website could be just that, with this filter always on.

Perhaps using satellite imagery to count the number of 737 MAX airplanes sitting on the runways of major airports, in addition to traditionally available data.

Voting with your wallet is not the way to go when there are actual lives involved. As a consumer, I should absolutely not have to keep up to date with what airline buys which airplane models, and which airplane models are considered safe. That's what regulatory bodies are for. If the regulatory process is broken, it needs fixing, but there does not need to be a second market-driven layer here.

You know if there was a discount for flying on US-based 737 max planes - with american pilots who never had an accident - yeah, market forces would win.

Chesley Sullenberger had a pretty high profile accident but I think I’d still prefer to fly with him at the controls (if he hadn’t retired). I don’t think this is a good metric to measure pilots by.

So I had a friend who was an actuary.

I remember asking if they charged extra for sports cars because they could.

I was told that they were actually pretty accurately priced.

The only time actuarial tables did not reflect reality was after a car accident. Statistically after an accident drivers are much safer, but the insurance fees (have to) go up.

> If the regulatory process is broken, it needs fixing

This is true, but as long it isn't fixed, voting with your wallet is the only thing you can do. And definitely better than supporting boeing to go on with business as usual.

That's an interesting idea in principle, but IME it wouldn't be as helpful as you might think initially.

This is because airline choice isn't much of a market. I live in a major US city (Houston), with excellent air service available in two airports. However, as with nearly all such cities, we are VERY VERY VERY well served by the carriers that "hub" here (Southwest and United). Choosing them usually means a direct flight, and more options for departure times, and probably lower fares.

There are situations where choosing something else is viable, but usually only if you're picking an airline that hubs in the city you're going to -- for example, choosing Delta to fly to Atlanta, or American to fly to Dallas.

The tl;dr is that avoiding the MAX from here would be hard without creating a materially worse experience. (Of course, crashing is an even WORSE experience, so...)

You can usually see the aircraft being flown when booking a ticket.

They can change it last minute and will certainly do so if they know that people look for it during booking. I rather book only with airlines which don't even have a 737 max in their hanger.

Many airlines will have a fleet page like this one [1] so you can tell exactly how many they have of each model/variant.

If somebody less busy than me wants to find all these and scrape them into a "howmany737maxesdoesyourairlinehave.io" app, knock yourself out.

[1] https://www.lufthansagroup.com/en/company/fleet.html

It may be rational to try to minimise your use of the Max, particularly if you fly frequently (though not convinced myself). But I think it is irrational to refuse to board the plane on the rare events when there is a last minute change of plane.

Even before the fixes, the accident rate relative to the flight hours was extremely low. Unacceptably high for the crew flying these all year long, but not something worth worrying about for an occasional flyer. Worrying about it after the fix is worrying about “winning the jackpot at the national lottery” level of low probabilities. There are many other things you will do during that day that carry orders of magnitude more risk to hurt or kill you.

If you fly a few times a year, the flight crew only spend 1-2 orders of magnitude more than you on the plane. That's not enough to move a risk from "unacceptably high" to "national lottery" levels.

"National lottery" is after the fix. "Unacceptably high" was before the fix.

> Even if the odds are low, it's still an unnecessary additional risk of dying. You can't avoid all risks in live but not flying a 737-MAX shouldn't be too hard.

It has the additional benefit of not supporting an obnoxious corporate culture....

> There are many other things you will do during that day that carry orders of magnitude more risk to hurt or kill you.

Indeed, the additional driving you might end up doing (if you reschedule your flight for a different day, for instance) is likely much more dangerous than boarding the plane.

You'll see "737" or "737-8200" or somesuch. There are reports airlines are hiding this info.

Usually airlines fly the same plane on a given route. Just look on any flight tracking website the model of the plane flown the current day or week for that flight number, it will give you a very good indication.

The US government could be one such organization capable of doing this, and even going one step further - they could bar these companies from operating max in our airspace or they could bar Boeing from selling them. I know this solution may be too likely to succeed, some may call it crazy ...

Does an average passenger have the luxury of doing so? Plane tickets can get quite costly.

Probably not.

When I travel for work, my tickets are constrained by time/location and cost.

When I travel for pleasure, I have more flexibility for date/location, but become much more price sensitive.

That said, I have enough price flexibility in both cases to mostly avoid unreasonable layovers (>1 layover, or >3 hours, roughly).

Is there somewhere I can check whether a particular flight number is usually served by 737 Max? I would certainly use it for shopping flights.

I'd choose to fly on a 737 Max over any other plane, personally. Because no other plane in operation has ever received the amount of scrutiny the Max has.

I don't like seeing comments like this downvoted, especially with zero comments responding to it.

It seems a totally legitimate viewpoint, even if it's one that many of us disagree with.

Downvoting just to signal disagreement is against the guidelines, isn't it?

Reddit have the same rule and see how that is going. No one should be able to downvote. Only upvotes are needed.

HN is not Reddit

Strawman, no one said HN is reddit.

Very reddit-like comment for someone saying HN isn't reddit though.

Ok, guilty as charged, though I'd say my comment is valid all the same!

It isn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Ok, now that I've checked, I'm the one who broke the guidelines by commenting on downvoting. Sorry!

I applaud your faith in Boeing and the authorities, but the article we are commenting on gives some pretty believable arguments that the scrutiny may not have been in fact enough...

"Received a lot of scrutiny" != "Is actually safe/problems all fixed because of said scrutiny".

Aviation is like software. "Safe" just means redundancies and failsafes. No plane is 100% safe because no plane has experienced all possible edge cases. Usually when a plane encounters a mechanical failure or experiences an incident (whether that be a crash or something less serious), it's because the plane was operating in a case that had never been considered or encountered before.

So no, I don't think every conceivable problem has been worked out because that's an impossibility. Unknown unknowns of aviation prevent that from ever occurring.

However, this plane in particular has had multiple independent regulators and thousands of independent pilots involved in the process to clear it. Additionally, pilots will receive new Max-specific training on the MCAS software so they'll be more aware of it and its operating modes from now on.

I would fly on a 737 Max and I'd have no problem taking family with me. You're more likely to be in a car accident by a substantial margin.

Safe does not mean redundancies and failsafes.

Back in the days, when we had much simpler systems, and the primary type of safety problem was component failure. Then yes, safety was about redundancies and failsafes. That is actually fairly easy: bring me a list of all components and I can come up with reasonable redundancy schemes for them.

Modern systems (including the operation of commercial airliners) are generally already built with reliable and redundant components. Safety problems tend to arise in the interaction between subsystems. That is a problem that can't be redundancied away.

That is also why it's close to impossible to work out every conceivable problem, as you say. The number of components is comparatively small compared to the number of ways in which subsystems interact. Especially considering some of those subsystems are in fact humans.

>Because no other plane in operation has ever received the amount of scrutiny the Max

From this article(reality might be different) it seems to me that only MCAS related stuff was investigated and issues like the ones reported were dismissed that are not related so we should assume that other investigations were already done for those issues and nothing major was found.

We have no idea if the scrutiny resulted in the plane actually being safe or if the agencies rubber stamped it yet again.

It was tested by thousands of independent pilots, though. That doesn't mean it's "safe" but then you haven't defined what "safe" means to you. To me "safe" means extremely unlikely to encounter any incidents, not impossible.

We have the same definition.

My issue is that the FAA already rubber stamped this once. They've lost any credibility they have with regards to this plane.

As the other agencies I have no idea if they're susceptible to the same influence that caused the FAA to rubber stamp this the first time around.

Nice. And because of people like you boeing gets away with what they did...

PS: I want to add why i think they shouldn't.

Using a single sensor to control a plane is a mistake, which not even an undergraduate engineer would do. There is no way this was just accidentally badly designed.

They made this on purpose to change lives for $$

No. Initially, MACS was conceived with insufficient control authority to endanger the plane. It was therefore classified as insufficiently critical to necessitate redundancy. Later, the scope of MCAS was extended, but the assumptions weren't revisited.

Furthermore, pilots were assumed to quickly identify and fix a "runaway horizontal stabiliser trim condition", providing the necessary backstop in case of system failure.

It's absurd to say that they made this on purpose to save some money. The aircraft already has two AoA sensors, but only one was used for MCAS. How is that saving money?

Rather, it was a convoluted concatenation of circumstances, pressure, occasional lapse in competence that gave rise to the problem.

If they would have used both sensors the plane would have needed recertification, because redundant systems are safety critical. Therefore they only used one sensor and declared the system non saftey critical.

Interesting. Do you have a source for that claim?

You should see some of the taxis at the rank here at Newark airport, they're much more dangerous than the Max.

> sheer ignorance and negligence which led to the unnecessary death of so many

.. has been totally obscured by the ignorance and negligence which led to the unnecessary death of so many from coronavirus. The UK is running at about seven 737-MAX passenger loads of deaths per day.

Really I'm surprised that Boeing hasn't bunged a few dollars to the denialism industry to ask "how many of those passengers would have died within a few years anyway" or to assert that oxygen masks on planes are an unnecessary infringement of liberty that actually makes it hard to breathe.

I'm unsure if your comment is actually serious or sarcastic. If Boeing came out and said "how many of those passengers would have died within a few years anyway" they would be in a much worse situation (PR wise) than today, where they have taken responsibility for the accidents that lead to people dying.

And yeah, the handling of coronavirus around the world is really sad also, but in no way obscures Boeings fucked up handling of the 737 Max and its (re)certifications.

Deeply sarcastic, but I suppose no sarcasm is so obvious that it can't be missed in text. I'm contrasting this with the bizarrely blase approach to far higher death numbers that can be seen everywhere relating to COVID. Even here on HN in the vaccination numbers thread on the front page.

38,000 people die annually in auto accidents. Car manufacturers should never get away with it. Two incidents with 200+ fatalities indeed is tragic, but automobiles are nearly two orders of magnitude worse in death counts. We should be 100x more serious about automobiles.

How many of them die because the car is malfunctioning?

Some non-zero amount, though not 100%. But if a life is a life, and we can only lobby politicians for so many things, we could probably reduce more deaths by having higher standards for licensing. And our lobbying efforts could save magnitudes more lives.

What really shocked me when speaking to my american colleagues is that you guys have no equivalent of an "MOT". In the UK, for a car to be road legal it needs to hava passed some safety checks. From what I understood, that doesn't exist over there?

Anyone can go, buy a $100 car from some guy on craigslist and drive it around. I'd wager that makes a big difference to road fatalities.

That and the drunk driving. I guess it depends on the place, but in Austin it was awful. I was out drinking with some guys from work, we had maybe 6 beers? Then they all walked back to the office, got their cars and drove home. It made me much more paranoid about crossing the road.

> you guys have no equivalent of an "MOT"

It depends on the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

I'd say a more fair phrasing would be "how many of the die from reasons out of their control"? At first I thought this would even out the car and plane fatalities, but actually you can greatly reduce your risk in plane fatalities by avoiding 737 Max while you cannot know who is going to drive into your lane

Are you saying 38,000 automobile deaths are caused by defects that the manufacture neglected to fix or warn customers about?

Of course not. So that's a false parallel i.e. whataboutism.

Uh, isn’t “whataboutism” more like: replying with a totally different subject that supposedly has more merit to discussion? False parallel feels a different thing to me

I’m not sure. Perhaps one is a descendant of the other?

I think whataboutism is like

She says The storming of the Capitol was wrong because people died and our institution’s citadel was trashed

And he says

What about the BLM protests - xxx people died and yyy buildings were vandalised at a cost of zzz millions

It seems to be some kind of parallel, but not to draw an analogy - rather to excuse an action by making a distraction out of a superficially similar form(?)

Hmm, seems like your take is more correct: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

While the numbers don't lie, your response is in another domain. Are these 38k deaths (which is USA only) caused by manufacturer error, preferably the same model? If not, you're polluting any meaningful discussion.

I think you are conflating causes here. A faulty aircraft where design issues led to a rare incident is something completely different than the quite common traffic deaths mostly originating from asverse conditions an reckless driving of a traffic participant.

Traffic accidents are not mainly caused by a certain car model being sold with faulty breaks, and airplane crashes are incredibly rare occurances.

I don't think it's a conflation because it's a moral question and a judgment of how we view death. I know multiple people that have died in car accidents. I know nobody who's died in a plane crash. Even if the FAA made the wrong call here, why do we give outsized influence and attention to events that cause relatively few deaths?

In other words: what is the greater moral tragedy, losing 40,000 of your fellow citizens at the hands of aggressive or uneducated or unskilled drivers, or 400 deaths largely due to corporate cost cutting? My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice.

400 because they grounded the 737 Max. Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. BTW count the hours people drive and compare them to the hours people fly and than look at the death rate.

> Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer.

We don't need to imagine this. There's a car called a Tesla which sometimes unexpectedly and fatally decides to steer in a different direction, and its management invariably blame the driver. Weirdly, HNers not only generally don't want Tesla's entire management and design team to be fired, they actually tend towards defending their approach...

Edit: would love it if the people who apparently disagree could make some arguments why Tesla's fatality-inducing electronic driver support system deserves a different response to Boeing's

We had the BMW SUV that hardened the wheel to prevent roll over and that meant lower chances of avoiding heads on collision.

for an analogous situation, it would be a car manufacturer that removed some previously-included safety feature, and made the car autopilot against your command when it malfunctioned

> My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice.

Who says we aren't?

Modern cars have much, much better passive safety systems and active safety systems are light years of what was available before, and improving rapidly.

One random example: I have a Volvo V40 and I can barely see around the A pillar. And I see this in all modern cars. I don't remember feeling the same way about cars from 20-30 years ago. I'm quite confident that if the V40 would roll over, even at somewhat high speed, my chances of getting out relatively unscathed would be better than even those in a sports car from, say, 30 years ago.

And if you look at deaths by drowning it dwarfs those numbers. Though people get worked up with terrorism, plane crashes and rare diseases.

Deaths from rare diseases are "fat tailed". Meaning that if you found out there were millions of excess deaths in a given year, then a new disease is a lot more likely to be the reason than car crashes.

Are deaths from terrorism fat tailed? Terrorists can get access to biological weapons, the electricity grid, the water supply, a skyscraper with thousands of people in it, the parliament building of a country... I think it is fat tailed.

If a disease causes millions of deaths it is not a rare disease. There has been a grand total of about 200-ish cases of the mad cow disease cumulatively. Though it terrorized people for years.

Maybe you're right, but I heard similar claims about Covid and Ebolavirus when they were still rare. People were saying early last year that you're more likely to die from a car accident than from Covid. So your earlier comment reminded me of that. Perhaps I misunderstood you.

Are they actually safer?

"In cars, one person died per 5.5 million passenger hours traveled, versus one death per 6 million passenger hours in commercial airline flights-a slim difference at best!"

Also , I can't cross london by plane, so what do I do with that information?

This whole argument smells of whataboutism of sorts 'well if cars kill so many people we shouldn't give boeing such hard time for killing a few"

https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat...

Do we generally use cars and planes to pass time (if so, measure deaths per hour) or to transport people to a different location (if so, measuring deaths per mile seems a lot more sensible)?

I am approaching it from the scientific standpoint - which of the two measurements is an actual independant variable, and which is an artifact of the measurement? If the planes go twice slower, would their deaths per kilometer stay the same, or would deaths per hour? I am willing to bet it's the latter.

In that case planes have the same chance of failing (mechanically or through human error) as cars do. It is very difficult to increase that safety factor, maybe impossible.

The conclusion to draw from that, is that you can't point at car manufacturers and blame them for producing unreliable / bad quality machines.

On the other hand, measurement per kilometer implies that as a traveller you should use a plane where possible, but obviously they can't replace car in a daily commute.

Airliners rarely crash in cruise, so doubling the hours in cruise is likely to almost halve the crash rate per hour with no significant change in crashes per flight (and therefore per kilometer).

Maybe it makes the crew a little more fatigued on descent and approach to landing, likely partially offset by it making air travel less appealing to pax, resulting in fewer people per fatal accident.

[0] https://www.theglobalist.com/when-do-planes-crash/

Your 'scientific standpoint' misses out the fact an average commercial aircraft has two orders of magnitude more people on board than an average car. Based on your deaths per hour stats we can reasonably assume the chance of fatality-inducing failure from a given flight hour is roughly two orders of magnitude less than an hour in the car.

When I'm boarding an aircraft, I care more about that than how many people would die with me.

I am not clear on that - are you saying that if you were to somehow hypothetically replace all your car travel with plane travel for an equivalens amount of time, your chance of death would go down by 100x? I am just thinking about it, and I don't think that it works out that way.

tbf I'm assuming that what the article calls "passenger flight hours" is more accurately described as "flight hours by a passenger airliner", based on the figure looking very wrong otherwise. Looking at ICAO's figures for that year there were 0.03 fatalities per 100m passenger km from airliners, so dividing through by a sensible average kph figure gives something in the region of 0.2 fatalities per passenger hour, or 30x safer than the car with sober driver. (You get to 100x quite easily by avoiding using airlines based in regions that contribute disproportionately to aviation accidents)

This is of course abstracting away from details like the aircraft travelling 10x further and walking to the airport, but the real problem is aircraft not serving the routes you want to drive. General Aviation is a lot more dangerous than commercial flights, especially when it involves clumsy pilots ;-)

I'm reading the article as an airliner flying for 1 hour and carrying 100 passengers as counting as 100 "passenger flight hours" (not 1).

That would be a use of the term more consistent with aviation norms, but then the quoted figure would be very wrong (or based on a very different category of aircraft than the commercial airliners we're discussing here

> I know multiple people that have died in car accidents.

Did they die because the car had issues or was it some other reason?

Does it matter how they died if the outcome is the same, is the question I wish I would've posed earlier. One was due to drunk driving. The other two, I'm not privy to the full details. It could have been, but statistically I would suppose not; most are human error, I'd presume.

I'd further suppose that simply put, it's easier to stop 400 deaths due to a failure to regulate than it is to change the driving habits of citizens, and that's why --even if one is 100x worse-- it doesn't draw the attention, and it makes me feel like my loss doesn't matter, even though others are far more likely to experience the loss I did, rather than the main post subject, and I will admit that shaped my view entering the discussion.

> Does it matter how they died if the outcome is the same,

That is like saying oranges and apples are the same because they are fruits.

It matters how they died because the car victims died due human error not because the car was defective, the plane victims died because of the plane itself was defective.

If the planes were not ground many more people who have died and people on ground if the plane fell on them.

Would you drive in a car which is known to crash into walls?

The deaths stopped because 'we' demanded that they stop flying. Who would make that choice in your model?

It is not just a numbers game. The suits in the offices of Boeing and FAA wantonly misled and hid data that undermined the safety of a plane which was clearly a bad idea to begin with. If a similar incident is uncovered in the auto industry they should also be held accountable to the same extent. Automakers are constantly forced to recall their cars for faults which are not even deliberate so it looks like that system is at least somewhat working. We cannot excuse Boeing with such whataboutism especially safety is at stake.

Flying on an absolute sense is an insane activity. As Louis CK put it, you're "sitting on a chair, IN THE SKY!" The only reason we take it for granted is the Stellar safety record (which is even better than cars?). If all you do is just match the safety profile of ground transportation, the optics of the combination of perception and real events would just grind this industry down. In some ways it's actually bad for the industry in the long term but these suits and their next quarter bonuses don't care about that! Only the public can.

> 38,000 people die annually in auto accidents...

This argument is nonsensical. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

The vast majority of car crashes are user error, not manufacturer fault. If it were the latter, you bet there would be inquiries.

That is totally different. Boing did lots of bad decisions to try to fight the Airbus Neo which was much more fuel efficient than their current airplanes.

All of the decisions led to huge changes on the MCAS. But basically nobody was told about it, so pilots didn't know how to react to the changes.

I won't repeat the whole thread, but you can check here:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106934362531155974.html

> 200+ fatalities

It was 355 people killed plus one on the response dive team for JT610.

Most car accidents are private vehicle use. So it makes sense to compare those against GA (General Aviation, ie not commercial) accidents.

The accidents are much more similar, both in frequency (they happen all the time, with little public interest) and causes.

People fly their planes while drunk or ill, they fly planes that haven't been properly maintained, they fly when the weather is awful and it's recommended not to, they don't have good plans for what they'll do if anything goes wrong, they haven't practised skills they know they might need... and most of the time they came back down safe. But not always.

When people say "Plane crash" they're normally thinking about Scheduled Aviation, at the far end of the safety categories from GA. If you bought tickets to go from one place to another at a particular time, that's scheduled aviation, the aeroplanes used, the crews flying them, even the company operating them is far more closely regulated and as you'd expect the result is far greater safety.

I'd suggest comparing these accidents to bus crashes. A crash in which a greyhound smashes into a gorge and everybody dies would make the TV news, just as a crashed jetliner would. Like the plane, that bus was required to be properly maintained, its driver underwent training including periodic refreshers, and the company operating it is under much more scrutiny than some random guy in a pick-up.

So nothing about pilot training or maintenance? Ethiopian and Lion Air deserve a non-zero percentage of the blame for “mass murder.” That percentage is debatable. As a commercial pilot (who doesn’t fly 737s) and someone with close friends who are 737 captains for a major US carrier, my opinion is that the airplane itself was not the core problem. The design of the airplane was such that it enhanced the glaring deficiencies in pilot training and maintenance practices.

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