Norwegian Won’t Fly the Boeing 737 Max Again | Hacker News Reader

Norwegian Won’t Fly the Boeing 737 Max Again

simpleflying.com

110 pointsneverminder68 comments

Am I the only one who feels like this headline borders on Click Bait? More than once I've found articles on this website to be heavy in inferred meaning and light on actual content. Such is the case here. Take a controversial aircraft, form a headline around how an airline "won't fly" it again, and then gloss over the actual reason:

They're out of money.

Take this article for example:

https://simpleflying.com/spirit-airlines-a321xlr/

It does not read like an analysis, it reads like a gossip column about the latest airliner fashions, and at the end even asks "Do you think Spirit should order the Airbus A321XLR? Let us know in the comments!" which only supports my take on it: This site is an airline gossip site, not a aviation industry news site.

Yeah the title seems to take a side effect and make it the main story.

When really the main story is the cancelled 737 Max, and they cancelled their Airbus orders previously... and are just going to fly a different 737 from here on out.

Norwegian is dropping the 737 MAX because they're practically bankrupt and are significantly downsizing. I wouldn't read too much into this — it's a business and marketing decision, not a safety decision.

Safety is good business for airlines. The marketing aspect is good too, since people are not so easily fooled by product renames, once a couple of successive disasters have caught their attention.

Business decision AND safety decision. It can be both.

Now if I find out that they are planning to order the renamed model in the future.... for example if the 737NG is just a tweaked and renamed Max... then this would just be PR and nothing else.

NG is the previous generation to the MAX.

Thanks, so without the preposterous modifications that made the Max unstable... good to know.

The max didn't crash because of aerodynamic reasons, heck, without MCAS, it was a perfectly stable, flyable airplane. (It just didn't fly like a 737 without it)

The issue is the stability augmentation system (MCAS) pitched the thing into the ground in the most critical phase of flight, takeoff.

It doesn't fly like a 737 without MCAS, and has a tendency to stall under certain conditions ( unlike previous 737s), hence the MCAS was present ( and very poorly made).

You can say the 737 Maxes crashed due to aerodynamic reasons, since that was the only reason the buggy MCAS existed.

Xfinity would disagree with your remarks. All it takes is a name change to fool people.

Yes, safety is good for business. But there is no indication that safety was the consideration in this decision. The fact that they cancelled basically all outstanding orders of any airplane points to the simple fact that they just don't want to buy any new airplane. So putting the 737 Max in the headline produces exactly the wrong impression.

That’s fine.

I’ll feel safer flying their airline due to my perceptions about Boeing and that makes their business incrementally more likely to survive.

They know this, too, so I would not be surprised they want customers aware, regardless of any other underlying financial reasons.

By making customers aware of this as though it’s more of a safety thing than you believe it is, even if you’re right, which you probably are, everyone wins. Well, everything except Boeing. Too bad the article didn’t do that.

If anything the article bent over backwards way too far to assiduously avoid mentioning the safety issue at all, when it perfectly well could have since it is so glaring, so I don’t see what your concern is.

> putting the 737 Max in the headline produces exactly the wrong impression.

Perhaps you did not glance beyond the headline and fell victim to your own well-justified negative preconceptions about the Max.

No, you did. You consider this a safety related matter, not me. Personally, I think the MAX (after the fix) is the safest 737 available. If safety played a role in their decision, you should also consider Airbus unsafe, as they are cancelling also their Airbus orders.

> you should also consider Airbus unsafe

That would be a simplistic logic error, which you are making, not me, as evidenced by your suggestion here and by your previously stated belief that a headline simply mentioning an airline model caused an impression of unsafeness.

To me the deaths in Boeing 737 Max incidents and the revelations about mismanagement are much more reliable indicators of unsafeness.

I fly at least once a year across Canada to see family.

You'll bet I'll be keeping an eye whether that plane is going to be 737 MAX 8 or any renames of it.

Will Norwegian fly any plane again?

They are basically bankrupt and are counting on government handouts to save them now. Luckily for Norwegian, they have been a popular investment for "normal people", putting their savings in the company. So when they did an re-issue of stocks last year peopled gobbled them up, thinking that they got it for a good price. Of course ignoring that it was a 50-1 split or something in there as well, so they won't become millionaires by the stock bouncing back to what it used to be.

As for bailouts by the government, they are banking on the rhetoric that they think Norwegian gov should "save the workplaces!" and "save the domestic flights!". I don't buy it, if those things are worth doing, someone else will pick it up when Norwegian fails. The risk of playing fast and loose with their loans and capital to expand so fast should be their own.

> So when they did an re-issue of stocks last year peopled gobbled them up, thinking that they got it for a good price.

At what price these shares were available for individual investors?

Airbus seems to be winning hard with their A320 line and especially the new XLR.

Arguably travelling in bigger planes will become less attractive as people find out that the virus will probably never quite go away and point to point flights in single aisle planes become more of the norm.

Meanwhile Boeing hasn't even decided what they will build next and in any case it will take 6-10 years to deliver the first plane. That's a long head start Airbus has.

The article says they cancelled their airbus orders...

As far as the 737 max cancellation:

>in favor of the 737NG series.

The article also says that they're under bankruptcy administration, so these decisions shouldn't be seen as a vote on the safety of a particular type, they're simply trying to cut their losses. For the routes they are still serving, using a single type of aircraft (the 737 NG) is the most cost-effective.

Well that's my point. The person I was responding to seemed to think this has something to do with Aribus and Boeing.

You assumed that. I was making an aside not directly responding directly to the article, but I thought that was obvious.

I really wish air ticket websites had a feature to request itineraries with Airbus aircraft only.

After what happened with the 737 MAX I'm not sure if I have faith in Boeing's handling of everything else.

You don't really have to have faith here. There are 176000 commercial flights per day, and Boeing planes are probably about half of those. That's about 80K per day or 29 million per year. So crashes are provably exceedingly rare.

For past planes that's fine, but it seems that they released the 737 Max knowing that there would be life-threatening safety issues, and has justice been served? Have the responsible parties been jailed for murder? Has the stock market been revised to prioritize safety and lives over "earnings"? What happened?

Oh, they just paid a big fine? I guess they now just have less money to correct safety issues and management issues, and probably need to cut some more budget corners after the fine. Should I trust a fund-starved aircraft manufacturer with my life?

The 737 Max flew millions of hours in North America and Europe before going down in Africa and Indonesia. I flew on it more than once.

The Max is no DC-10. It's a safe aircraft, provided the crews are properly trained.

My understanding is that there was no option to disable only the MCAS system without also disabling the buttons for the stabilizer?

Also, one would think that all automated controls on an aircraft should yield to manual inputs as the highest priority. It seems that was not the case with MCAS, and that alone was a grave design error.

Don't trust motives, trust results is what I'm saying. You could be 100% right about everything, but the results say that the planes are staying in the air, and that's what matters.

Two crashes with everyone on board dying within 2 years of introduction of a new plane due to a fundamental design issue are not good results, and the opposite of planes staying in the air.

why reward Boeing with more money? They knew about the problems and ignored them.

Voting with your wallet and feet works great.

It is very common for airlines to switch out the aircraft last-minute on any given route based on a thousand different factors and moving parts that are involved with running an airline. I don't think such a feature would be super useful, if it's personal safety you're concerned with.

I'm incredibly sad to see Norwegian struggling since 1year/6months.

They were my main cheap way to jump from France to Sweden and back. Multiple cancelled flights, impossible to book anything for months. Unless easyjet picks up that route, some of my required travel will become significantly more expensive with SAS or AirFrance.

I flew them from San Francisco to London all the time. Brand-new, comfortable planes, decent if no-frills service that I’d rate as far superior to BA and on-par with Virgin.

does anyone know if any american carrier is doing similarly? I am quitting Alaska Air because they leaned in to the 737 Max, I feel like I'll take any other carrier that at least gives me a fighting chance of not flying a MAX on a route that I care about?

Most 737s will be a Max varient within ten years.

Norwegian is doing this for purely economic reasons; are there any American carriers in similarly deep financial strife to Norwegian?

Are there any american carriers, who have not gone through bankruptcy restructuring in the last 10 years? I thought some of them basically traded in the state semi-permanently.

Southwest, Spirit, Alaska, and JetBlue (and probably others, but I got tired of looking) all have _never_ gone through bankruptcy-- Southwest had even managed to turn a profit for 47 consecutive years before COVID came along last year and screwed that streak up.

Many of the other big, "traditional" national carriers (including American, Delta, and United) have been through Chapter 11 once. That's not really "trading in the state semi-permanently", though; none of the surviving big-name carriers have been through Chapter 11 more than once, and all are currently out of it.

Interesting. Thank you. in Asia, LCC are a mixed bag and many tank. I had assumed (wrongly) this was also true in the US, and beleived the C11 story. I was wrong: there are profitable LCC in the US and not all of the 2nd tiers are LCC in any case.

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

Delta has no max and no plans to acquire any that I’m aware of.

Thanks for the info!

JetBlue, Frontier and Spirit are all non-boeing.

American carriers tend to buy American aeroplanes, understandably but frustratingly.

Not at all true these days.

American Airlines has one of the largest Airbus fleets in the world. (A320 family and A330.)

United also has a fleet of A320s.

Spirit and Frontier are 100% Airbus, and JetBlue is all Airbus (Europe) and Embraer (Brazil.) Allegient is also 100% Airbus now.

Delta also has a huge Airbus fleet, and all of their recent fleet additions have been Airbus: the A321 and A321NEO, the A220, A330 and 330NEO, and the A350.

Even "Proudly all Boeing" Alaska Airlines is keeping a few A321s around for the long term after their merger with Virgin America (which ran a 100% Airbus fleet.)

I don't really think there's any correlation. For instance, Ryanair which is a solely European airline exclusively flies Boeings while Spirit and Jetblue, solely American airlines exclusively fly Airbuses.

I've not looked into this, but when you're buying the tickets won't it show you the plane you'd be flying?

E: Just checked on Google flights and it does say the airplane you'll be flying.

I believe you can, but I have read online in comments people saying that the plane can still change before the flight.

It shows you the plane that's scheduled (as of whenever you're looking).

Airlines can change their schedules without a lot of notice, and if you're flying an airline that has a lot of similar capacity planes, there's lots of ways you end up flying on something else.

If it's a big enough deal tobyou that you're willing to refuse to board when you see the plane's nameplate, you're probably not going to have a great travel day. It would be better to book a different airline than deal with the chances.

That's too bad. I really like Alaska Air, although they don't have a lot of available flights. They configure their planes with a good amount of leg room.

Didn’t Norwegian go bankrupt? Or was close to bankruptcy? Them offloading the planes may be due more to a need to offload aircraft than purely safety.

I flew Norwegian and I had a better experience than the major carriers. Would be a shame if they went under.

It really has nothing to do with safety at all; they're also cancelling Airbus orders and sticking with their existing 737NG aircraft. The 737 MAX orders would be being cancelled even if they were another type.

as far as the general public is concerned, "if its boeing I'm not going" is a viable message. There is almost no downside to them dropping the max, given they had to save money.

(I know that the 737NG are boeing. the point is, given a choice of which craft to drop, the one with tainted PR was the obvious choice)

Considering their supportive statements about Boeing ....I doubt any PR like you describe is at play here.

The MAX is a nice new aircraft that is more comfortable than the ageing NG series. More importantly, it's more fuel-efficient.

I don't think it's an obvious choice at all.

Unless they can sell on the craft they own, or can offload lease structures they are locked into, There is sunk cost. They'd have to wipe out a huge amount of (possibly paper) money to walk off the 737NG fleet. I believe the Max purchase was fed from growth, as well as replacement, but in shrinkage, It would be untenable to acquire a paper loss, and have to spend real money. Yes, the operating cost is lower, and its a nicer plane. But, it also has certification issues, and will now demand (probably) flight crew training and re-certification when previously had not existed. So its TCO cost has risen.

It's been pointed out they've cancelled Airbus purchases too. This also strongly suggests what I thought about PR value is irrelevant: its not about marketing, its about real money. They may well want the Max. they can't afford it.

That is the angle the linked article chose to take, but Norwegian themselves have never taken that position, and they're cancelling Airbus orders too.

Gonna have to agree with you there. I used to fly back and forth between London/NYC all the time on Norwegian 787 Dreamliners. Fantastic value for money.

Indeed. I flew from LA to Stockholm for less than LA to Boston and on a branded 787! Just like most budget airlines, you need to come prepared (no free food or drinks) but it well worth saving $1000 for flights.

Is there a page where I can see post-recertification Boing MAX safety statistics? I know that it will take years to get to comparable confidence levels than other planes, but it would be still good to be able to track it.

Statistics is probably the wrong word. If a safety incident happens you'll hear about it. They're so rare across the board that they almost always make the news and the max is especially exposed in this regard. I wouldn't be worried about it from a personal safety perspective. That said, if you must or are just curious, stats and incident reports can be found here:

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

It didn't make me feel safer for the MAX flights :)

I guess I have to wait for the number of flights with MAX to go over 1-2M flights to feel safe enough to fly on.

That's a better way of putting it. What I mean to say is the events are rare and the number of recertified MAX miles flown is still quite low.

I fly ga so my risk tolerance is different but if you want to wait a year that'll give you a better picture of the situation. Napkin math says about 5 million flights should give it a better risk profile on a per trip basis than the drive to the airport (risk for flying is better defined per trip than per mile).

This site looks a bit more serious and has information on more non-fatal incidents:

https://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Boeing-737-8-MAX/...

However, the airlines that continue flying the 737 MAX now have a shared interest with Boeing to not make it look unsafe, so I guess that future minor incidents that may occur will be kept under wraps as far as possible. OTOH, if something really worrying happens, it's likely to leak out anyway, after all the pilots' lives are in the balance too...

No, future "minor incidents" will not be kept "under wraps". The FAA has strict guidelines on what is and is not reportable, and those guidelines arent skirted by any commercial operator of a size that would be flying 737s.

The commercial aviation industry, particularly in the US, has a stellar safety record over the past several decades. This track record isnt a fluke, it's the result of systemic safeguards that the carriers, FAA, and manufacturers have put in place.

When there are problems, the root cause is found, and it is fixed not just in one carrier but in all of them. No system is perfect, but the conspiratorial thinking and tone here is just not justified.

> The FAA has strict guidelines on what is and is not reportable, and those guidelines arent skirted by any commercial operator of a size that would be flying 737

Like it has strict guidelines on when a new version of a plane needs to be recertified and what specific tech needs specific certification and testing ( if failure can crash the plane, and if failure is possible at more than X rate). Boeing completely ignored that when self-certifying the 737Max, so what makes you think airlines will listen to the FAA more?

> The commercial aviation industry, particularly in the US, has a stellar safety record over the past several decades. This track record isnt a fluke, it's the result of systemic safeguards that the carriers, FAA, and manufacturers have put in place.

Baring the latest huge safety problems, like the 737Max.

I wasn't saying that incidents that have to be reported won't be reported, but for minor things at the limit between what is and is not reportable, the decision-makers at the airlines will be more willing to ignore them.

Sorry if the tone sounds conspiratorial, but after the whole affair with Boeing, the FAA and also the airlines failing to properly address the 737 MAX's MCAS issue before it was far too late, I have grown a little bit skeptical of the system you describe...

And United just bought more 737s. The dynamics here are more complicated.

Boeing is going to get companies to buy the max one way or another.

Yeah, if that means lowering the asking price they WILL clear that inventory.

The economics and efficiencies offered by the Max series of aircraft are very appealing and competitive.

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