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Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

This is about Airbus bribing to get more deals, which is abhorable but common practice in any multinational corporation even these days, be it soda, weapons or banking. Boeing is about utterly incompetent management killing 300+ civilians +-knowingly, and acting like little children. Still refusing to take blame, still refusing to actually fix the source of the issue. As a passenger, I and my family are in direct risk from this incompetence.

Yes, in almost duopoly in civilian flying, I will take Airbus anytime. And never, ever, fucking ever 737 Max.

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What I was trying to say was: yes, you probably shouldn't fly the 737 Max in particular (and perhaps 787), no doubt about that. But to write off the entire company's fleet of airliners when they still obviously have planes that continue to maintain excellent history seems kind of extreme and unwarranted. Like presumably you think they somehow compromised on safety on their other models too, despite their safety records, to bring them into the market. Shouldn't that give you pause on Airbus too, given they've actually gone so far as to to bribe people to get their planes into the market?

I've more critical of Boeing than some folks here in the past, but if your goal is safety, you're just limiting your own options by rejecting planes with provably good safety records. (Or if you somehow think that's warranted, then there seem to be plenty of reasons to question Airbus's integrity too.) OTOH, if your goal is to just do this as some kind of economic retaliation (a "vote with your wallet" thing), in which case, never mind, I misunderstood your goal as being safety-related. Though you're not the person who wrote the initial comment, so I guess your reason could be different.

With the current leadership of Boeing I wouldn’t really trust anything they do or say.

This is a loss of confidence situation, not one based on deep fundamental analysis.

As much as all other Boeing airframes can be safe, I'm not confident at all with the way Boeing's management runs the company. What other cost-cutting measures have been implemented? How can they affect current airframes maintenance and reliability? It probably doesn't affect them much but it's been blunder after blunder from Boeing, from the 777 built at Charleston, the 737 MAX fiasco and the 787.

As an airline customer I'm completely dependent on trust that Boeing was doing things correctly, from a safety standpoint at least. I don't have that trust anymore and it'll take decades to earn it back.

You're also forgetting the fact that Boeing still maintain the current aircraft. What if they cut corners in some updated manufacturing design or material? What if a new update to an FMS introduces faulty design into how something or other works. Yes, you're totally right if planes rolled out of the factory and was never touched by Boeing again, but that's not necessarily how it works.

I mean, if they were going to do that, why would they start doing that now? By most accounts I've read, their culture supposedly changed with the McDonnell-Douglas acquisition in 1997. They could've and would've already started doing so long ago before all this mess burnt their reputation, and we would've seen its effects on other planes' track records, yet I don't think we've seen anything to indicate this. And it seems to me like they have far less of an incentive to start engaging in these shenanigans now.

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