Alaska Airlines grounds Boeing 737 Max 9 planes after mid-air window blowout
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The first couple crashes were sobering, but I thought Boeing would recover and a single issue like that would get corrected and not happen again. The fact they are still trying to "blame" pilots for aircraft design flaws though is beyond the pale and shows they learned absolutely nothing.
I was trying to put my finger on it last night. I got on a MAX a few weeks ago and I absolutely noticed and felt mildly uncomfortable for a minute. I was chiding myself for feeling irrational fear.
The reason was in front of me the whole time. It's actually rational after all:
I simply do not trust the people who designed this aircraft.
That said, I don't really want to live with the nature of all these flaws. This is not their rocket science that is failing, but it rather reeks of complacency.
I still remember the wrenches found in early Dreamliners. Noone died, but I mean, come on.
Planes are more comparable to buses than to cars (unless it's a small general aviation plane). So a better comparison would be between the risks of flying and the risks of taking a long-distance bus.
I'm not sure why you think busses are more equivalent to planes other than holding more passengers.
The more I think about it, the more similarities I find. For instance, both long-distance buses and large airplanes are usually boarded only at dedicated places (bus terminals and airports); both have a separate baggage compartment below the passenger floor; both have built-in bathrooms; both are driven by trained drivers/pilots; both have a set schedule for departure; and so on.
I've taken plenty of long distance bus trips (12 hours or more in each direction), and I've also taken many airplane trips (usually on the 737 family), and I'd say the experience on both is very similar: taking a taxi to the bus terminal or the airport, looking for the correct spot or gate for boarding, putting most of the luggage in the lower compartment of the bus or airplane, waiting until the scheduled departure time, sitting still on your designated seat for most of the trip, arriving at the other terminal or airport, retrieving the luggage, taking a taxi to the actual destination. There are some differences, for instance on a bus there's a rest stop for food after several hours, while on an airplane they serve some food in the vehicle itself, but these differences are minor compared to the differences between an airplane trip and a car trip.
I often fly 300-400 miles (I’m in the US where trains are a joke). If airplanes became seriously unsafe, I would drive. There is no world where I would take a bus instead.
No, I'm going by my own experience. I've taken plenty of long-distance bus trips (I've just checked on a map site, one long-distance bus trip I've made many times is around 800 km). Several of them were to cities I could have taken an airplane to (and I did take an airplane to them in other circumstances), and the only difference is that the bus trip usually took longer (and was less expensive).
> If airplanes became seriously unsafe, I would drive. There is no world where I would take a bus instead.
If airplanes became seriously unsafe, I would take a long-distance bus. I can't say there's no world where I would buy a car and learn how to drive just to avoid taking a long-distance bus, but I can't see any advantage other than avoiding the short taxi steps to and from the bus terminal at either end of the trip.
You choose what car to buy, but the bus company chooses what us to buy. You maintain your own car but the bus company maintains the bus. You drive your own car, but a professional hired and vetted by the bus company drives the bus. You drive your car from a to b when you want, but the bus travels along predefined routes at specific times.
I'm not sure why you think cars are more equivalent to planes, especially when they hold fewer passengers.
Bonus multiplier if someone was then reading articles about pilots and ATC not getting any sleep.
The equivalent would be car crashes caused by mechanical failure where even an expert driver couldn’t have avoided catastrophe.
Though, maybe that’s balanced out by some large percentage of car crash deaths being the driver and/or passengers in the “other” car who were struck unexpectedly by a driver who was reckless, distracted or impaired.
Either way, I agree, it seems like a stretch to call plane and car crashes equivalent.
"...Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems said they discovered improperly drilled fastener holes in the aft pressure bulkhead — which maintains pressure when planes are at cruising altitude – on the fuselages of some models of the 737 Max. Wichita, Kansas-based Spirit said late Wednesday because it uses multiple suppliers, only some units are impacted and it will continue to deliver fuselages to Boeing.
Boeing said the issue does not affect safety of flight, and 737 Max planes already in service can keep flying..."
> Boeing Repeatedly Burned By Outsourcing
> Boeing's outsourcing strategy might be producing more problems than solutions.
No, no, no. Let me re-write them for you Chris Loh[1][2], since you've failed as a journalist.
Boeing's Decision To Outsource Repeatedly Harms Fliers.
Boeing's Decision To Outsource Causes More Problems Than Solutions.
Have some balls, man.
aircraft -> company
According to [1], commercial planes are about 3 times safer than buses per passenger mile (edit: passenger hours, sorry). That doesn't sound like a large enough margin to prevent certain more accident-prone models from earning the "deadlier than a bus" badge of shame, especially since the average is skewed by extremely reliable widebody models like the 777, A340 and A380. Meanwhile, commuter planes already suffer from a higher fatality rate than pickup trucks, while private planes are second only to motorcycles.
[1] https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-transport-modes-ranked-by...
Uh... the "Fatalities by passenger miles" chart in that article says that fatalities per billion passenger miles are 70 times lower for commercial planes vs. buses.
And in fact if you normalize to actually comparable transportation modes, my guess is it's even worse. The overwhelming majority of bus miles are driven on urban transit routes at low speed. You'd want to split out long haul (Greyhound et. al.) buses to compare to aviation, and highway travel is always going to involve more fatalities.
Basically, even knowing that it's probably the most dangerous jetliner in decades, I'd still view a 737 MAX as an extremely safe travel option.
When a regular person asks "is this safe?" they mean "is it safe for me?", not whether someone else on the vehicle might get injured.
How far do standards have to fall before that's no longer true?
Recall also that aviation is the safest in aggregate, but the severity of each individual incident tends to be much worse than others.
We could add lots of fender-benders between taxiing planes to push down the average severity of each plane "crash." Then they would still be less deadly per mile travelled, but also less severe per incident on average than other modes of transit.
Boeing needs to be held responsible. Absolutely no way should the FAA grant Boeing an exemption for these planes under ANY circumstances. The planes have proven themselves to be dangerous and Boeing is doing nothing to fix them because it would hurt their bottom line.
This company needs to be investigated to the fullest extent by the FAA. The fact that this newest plane was only just rolled off the factory assembly line 2 months ago… a plane doesn’t just rip itself apart in less than two months. Something is seriously wrong at Boeing.
"Bean counter" logic implies putting cost savings above all else, like maybe Walmart or Amazon would do.
I hope airplane customers (the airlines) care as much about safety as they do cost savings, since their customers certainly do.
My friend and I were joking "well I'm sure they know what they are doing / hey if its not safe people won't fly it / they can just rename it again if it does crash / its all just big gubmint red tape / hey if it has X% risk of crash and Y already crashed then the next Z flight should be OK right?"
Within 24 hours they blow out a door on a new jet. Amazing levels of incompetence mixed with hubris.
There were maybe around 10-15 passengers, the crew asked us to not all sit at the front for balance. The plane had been sat on the ground powered down for hours, even though it was already late afternoon. I was first on the plane and it was very hot and stuffy but a flight attendant assured me the a/c would take care of that soon and indeed it got comfortable before we even pushed back.
Burbank has a very short runway so planes have to get to takeoff speed quick and then climb steep. This is quite an experience in a plane with huge powerful engines like the MAX with fuel for only a one hour flight and essentially no passengers or their luggage.
Later, the wifi didn't work.
This was shortly after they had been allowed back into the air and at no point did I relax into my seat. White knuckles the whole way.
On lower seat count configs (like on that incident flight) those extra door are still present but locked, hidden and not visible from inside.
Inside there is no exit: https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Alaska_Airlines/Alaska_Air...
Well that seems like a massive waste of weight...
Any mechanical component - even if unused - requires servicing and maintenance. No airline would want to pay for that and the fuel cost on every flight to carry a door they don’t want.
Not a maintenance issue. Or if it is, that's a seriously shocking amount of maintenance demand.
Do we know about permanent plug vs semi-permanent substitute door? According to some other posts both exist, both levels of permanency exist.
The one thing an airline likes less than carrying extra weight is not being able to change their minds later :) Or rather, for the option to be available for whoever they sell the plane to after they're done with it.
He told KPTV: "They said there was a kid in that row whose shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."
:D
Playing field size: https://youtu.be/XMZYZcoAcU0?t=49
( Bigger than US NFL handegg field )
The rest of the world uses a different size soccer field than the rest of the world. Not only do soccer field sizes vary country to country, they can vary from league to league within a country.
In American football the size is standardized, except for children's leagues. High school, college, and professional leagues all use 100 yards x 160 feet (91.44 x 53.3 meters).
Heck, soccer fields can even vary within a single league. Take the UK Premier League for example. A few years ago their fields ranged from Fullham's 100 x 65 meters to Manchester City's 107 x 73 meters. They have since tried to standardize on 105 x 68 meters but aren't there yet.
Premier league clubs not yet using 105 x 68 are Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), Nottingham Forest (105 x 70).
For international play, the requirements are 100-110 meters for the long dimension and 64-70 meters for the short dimension.
There are some things that are standardized on a soccer field and so could be used as length references. The funny thing is that those things are all round numbers when expressed in feet or yards.
E.g., the radius of the circle around the center mark is 10 yds. The penalty area is 44 x 18 yds. The penalty mark is 12 yds from the from the goal. The goal area is 20 x 6 yds. The goal posts are 8 yds apart and the crossbar is 8 ft off the ground.
That's because these things were standardized before the UK switched to metric. I guess they didn't want to change the sizes just to keep the numbers round.
[1] there are two places where they say that the assistant referee should "face the pitch", and one place where they say the assistant referee should use his flag to indicate on what area of the pitch offside occurred.
State-by-state in the US, obesity varies between 35-50% IIRC.
There are also significant differences by race (black or hispanic highest, white non-hispanic slightly less, and Asian a LOT less).
If we're being honest, Europe has exactly nothing to brag about -- 1 in 5, or 1 in 4 obesity rates are still amazingly high. Just saying "not as high as the US" is a pyrrhic victory.
It might be used more commonly in some places, but I was baffled by the joke as well.
Observable: the entire lateral structure of the aircraft has disappeared next to the seat.
( From related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38887840 )
What a mess.
For folks who want to feel worse: Highly recommend "Flying Blind" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08P98854S) - its a good book about how Boeing's engineering culture went to shit after the MD merger and the shortcuts used to get the Max delivered.
Boeings problems were long in work before the MD merger. Many commercial aerospace people in Seattle, particularly ones with parents who worked at Boeing, have struggled to come to terms with that, and there are a lot of rose colored glasses around here of what 1995-1997 Boeing looked like.
Quality control degradation in my experience and from stories i've heard are exclusively the fault of bean counters and exec pushing for cost cuts (unlike design flaws where the engineers share the blame). I've heard a story about an industrial machine amputating someone because the new joints couldn't handle the pressure (in france, pre 2019, i don't have the specifics). The maintenance guy wanted to replace the joints with high quality one (like the original were), but they were deemed "too expensive" so they bought new joints at half cost, to gain 10€ on the maintenance of the 400k machine. Less than a week later, the machine broke, someone lost an arm or something (don't have specifics), and a new machine had to be shipped and given for free, i don't know who paid the the amputated guy.
QA is always the very first neck on the chopping block when the bean counters take over. Seen it time and time again.
Until a week ago, I had't actually flown with a MAX; but on January 1st, I took an Air Mexico flight which happened to be one. I wasn't scared (in the sense I know about myself when I'm scared), but rather curious, so, funnily enough, I came to HN and searched for the MAX articles from back then, because I expected that I'd find insights, good technical conversations and in-deep articles about the topic.
On the other hand, I do have one fear.
On longer flights, the large aircrafts that have three batches of seats per row, I prefer an aisle seat in the middle: there is a lower chance that I'm gonna be the one woken up when the middle seater has to go to the bathroom. On a smaller aircraft (that usually fly for less than 3h, so I don't have to use the bathroom myself) I always prefer a window seat (1)
My nightmare is that once the window breaks, or a panel (that you can see the sealing points of) gets ripped off. This only ever happened a couple times, so I very well know there is practically zero chance that this would happen to me.
And now this, in the news, coincidentally.
(1) and I always check which side that window seat should be so I have the better view(2), like more mountains etc
(2) but honestly, I usually don't have a good view, since I prefer a seat oat the middle of the wings' height so that my ride is less bumpy.
"Boeing 737 MAX 9 Production List" - https://www.planespotters.net/aircraft/production/boeing-737...
The need for this post, shows the pathetic of the situation.
When I started regularly flying, I would actually search NTSB reports for the airframe in question in the airport lounge. I don't really know why exactly, but I think the engineering related discussion and the dryness of those accident reports were quite comforting - reading about those crashes really drove home how safe air transport really is. I'm sure I raised a few eyebrows though for anyone glancing at my screen.
I also have the semi-irrational fear of where I sit. However mine is in relation to the engine nacelle - I don't want to be within 4 or 5 rows from where the fan blades are in case they explode into the cabin. Same with prop aircraft - I highly prefer to not be seated in the aisle next to the prop.
So, there are at least two of us out there!
I haven’t researched enough to be certain, but it seems like shielding yourself from being hurt by an uncontained engine failure is probably the only thing that an individual can affect by their own choices on a modern commercial jet. Most other accident types seem to be either not tied to any specific area of the plane or so large/non-survivable that there’s nothing a passenger can do.
It’s silly since the odds of literally anything happening are so low, but it makes some part of my brain happier so I do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
Also, many passengers don't keep their seat belts closed during flight, which scares me too
I recall that following the 2019 deaths that Boeing was going to rebrand the Max with some number series or similar, so that passengers didn't get nervous flying in it.
How do I as a passenger identified all the rebranding permutations of the Max so that I make sure my family is not flying in them?
Choose airlines which don’t fly Boeing or don’t fly the route.
don't even mention nasty cruises which only cover coastal routes, like some paleolithic dingy.
I have been scouting cruise websites for ways to also replace transatlantic flights, but they are way too sparse.
One example: I've always wanted to do a motorcycle tour around Scandinavia, particularly Norway, but it's a heck of a ride from Calais all the way up there. For many bikes, far enough that you'd need to organise a service and tyre change at least once whilst on the trip. At the time when I was first thinking about this I had a bike with a 3750 mile service interval, although I could generally squeak 4000 - 5000 miles out of tyres.
So my plan back in 2014 had been to ride up from East Anglia to Aberdeen, get on the ferry to Lerwick, and then get a ferry from Lerwick to Stavanger in Norway to cut off a lot of "transit" riding. Unfortunately it turned out the website with this ferry route listed was lying to me, and that actually it had been retired in something like 2008. (You can still find this route listed on some websites today, but it's long since gone.)
Nowadays I'm not even sure it's possible to get a ferry from the UK to Germany. I've never done it but you used to be able to get a ferry from Harwich (very convenient for me) to Bremerhaven: no more, sadly.
Maybe it gets resurrected at some point...
[1]: https://reiseliv1.no/reiseliv/2023/rederiet-holland-norway-l...
https://www.dfds.com/en/freight-shipping/routes-and-schedule...
"Low emission cruise travel . save more than 50% energy compared to.. the last vessel operating the same route."
BERGEN STAVANGER NEWCASTLE - planned to start 2026
Hah, that brings back memories: in the early 80s I did a bike (not motor-) journey from home (in the south of England) to Sweden, taking the Dover-Calais ferry and then via France-Belgium-Netherlands-Germany-Denmark. Must've been ~900 miles of pedalling.
But I didn't attempt a tour of Scandinavia once I got there! (I was headed over there to stay with relatives for a few months.)
I don’t love plane trips but they generally get the trip over fairly quickly if the journey isn’t the goal. And longer haul comfort is mostly just a matter of money.
The journey is obviously slower, but that can either be a way to rest on a long road journey (truck drivers in Europe sometimes use longer ferry routes so they get their mandatory rest period), or an opportunity to sleep in a fairly decent bed.
I quoted some one verbatim who works at Airbus who said Airbus Australia was exclusively supporting Defences helicopter fleet. I must have misunderstood what they said and Qantas/Jetstar are flying Airbus but are being supported by another party.
My mistake.
However, considering how common it is for an airline to switch product, it would be quite difficult to ensure your flight isn't on one of these aircraft without double-checking during boarding — then refusing to board.
By the way, Boeing planes are generally speaking perfectly fine. I'd rather avoid certain airlines with bad safety records.
A 20% probability of ending up in the plane is better than a 75% probability.
Airlines can and do switch like aircraft at the last minute all the time. Do all the planning you like, but you won't know for sure until you're seated and look at the safety card.
So unless you intend to have a "Qantas never crashed" tantrum in the airport, you may be out of luck because the only airlines in the US that have not ordered the MAX are Spirit/Frontier (Greyhound with wings) and JetBlue, and they don't fly everywhere.
Huh? Sing-alongs? What does this mean?
When things go wrong, though, I feel like Spirit does a pretty awful job. I had them cancel a flight on me at the last minute, and the only thing they would offer was a much later flight to an airport three hours from my destination or a flight to my destination in five days.
As a result, I’d much rather fly something like Southwest. Buy a ticket at the right time and they’ll sell it to you dirt cheap, you’re pretty much guaranteed a decent experience, and if something goes wrong they have enough flights and routes and customer service policies to get you taken care of.
I understand it will cost money and time, and really just mostly annoy the gate agents. But at some point the actual customers need to push back on Boeing and I can't really think of any other way. The FAA has clearly failed.
I'm not so naive to think I can continue air travel and not be taking the MAX quite often as time moves on, but the lack of any consequences for Boeing is rather annoying.
Right now regulators are increasingly broken (under-resourcing, revolving doors, political pressure, etc), so grassroots refusals are potentially the only proactive pressure we can put on airlines to demand more from their vendors. Otherwise we’ll just have to wait for reaction after there are too many incidents to ignore.
My concern was that I wasn’t reassured that the devices had been adequately tested. I also consider them to be mostly security theater.
So, what I’m saying here is don’t count on others sharing your concerns and following suit.
They made this purchase years after the initial 737 max issues, and ofc years of issues Post MD merger. They also are putting about 30 percent of the seats as premium/high cost seating. for some reason.
Delta and especially boeing do not have your safety at heart, they have the bottom line at heart and will put you in whatever is most cost effective.
The entire industry seems to be under strain since COVID. There was a massive brain drain across the entire system and it’s causing issues at all levels. Many working in the industry are on edge trying to maintain safety.
Meanwhile there are something like 1,300 of them in regular service.
You’ll note, maybe, that pilots continue to fly the plane without raising a stink. If there was a serious concern for their own safety, you’d hear something about pilots refusing to fly them.
This will also work for aircraft swaps (including last-minute ones) all the way until the plane leaves.
If Boeing wants to rehabilitate its reputation, showing more respect for the regulatory process would be a good start.
The 737 MAX series has a better safety track record than whatever car your family drives.
Note that since the MCAS issue has been fixed, there have been zero incidents that have caused passenger injury or death.
Note further that pilots—a cohort of self-interested humans like any other—continue deciding to crew the plane. You don’t hear about pilots backing out of flights or refusing to fly in them. Pilots and air crews aren’t threatening to walk out en masse.
This plug design has been in use without incident at least since the -900ER in 2007 and prior to the MAX models. The NTSB report will be worth reading, but I will be good money it won’t have anything in it that warrants the kind of wild frothing at the mouth response here.
You just don't hear about them because negative news about Tesla is heavily amplified on HN, Reddit and in the media, and bad news about other carmakers is buried.
If it was widespread, the NHTSA would have forced Tesla to recall the cars. Tesla sold 1.8 million cars just in 2023. It's hard to impossible to hide accidents, injuries and fatalities resulting from wheels falling off.
I generally don't see any news about other car makers at all unless there's a major issue.
Maybe you trust pilots as some sort of supra-human. I do not. They are humans just as much as the rest of us, and they need to get paid, and I wager they'd fly a bucket of bolts if that was the only thing that people were willing to pay them to fly long after sane passengers opted out of riding along.
None of the car models I've ever driven have any recorded in-flight incidents. I highly doubt any of them were ever involved in an FAA investigation.
You can't beat the flight safety record of most automobile makers.
Ground safety, sure, some cars are worse than others. But even the MD-80 has a pretty good record on the road. All that use and only a few traffic collisions.
- Yesterday (Friday 2024-01-05): "Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air" (417 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358
Fixing this should be trivial: Fit passengers with VR headsets to simulate there not being a giant hole in the fuselage.
And also, airlines can switch planes at any time, you won't find out for sure what plane you are taking until you sit on it.
Sadly the majority of people will choose the cheapest result and voting with your wallet doesn’t work. Which is why we need regulation and can’t leave things to the free market, despite what the libertarians say.
Until they install a half-assed update coded by some underpaid Indian freelancer.
Unless—how often does an airline company ground a particular model?
Starliner? Delays and cancellations.
KC-46? That POS still isn't reliably refueling, and if I understand correctly USAF is rumored to be looking for a replacement.
F-15EX? It can't use conformal fuel tanks the F-15E has been using for almost 40 bloody years. No, that means it can't achieve its major selling point of carrying 22 missiles either.
737 MAX? Clearly maximum kek given this and that whole comedy about safety exemptions yesterday.
I want to like Boeing, but I feel it's justifiable to tell them to go fuck themselves at this point.
EDIT: I also forgot that V-22 Osprey that crashed into the sea off Japan back in November, killing all on board. As far as I'm aware, that led to a complete grounding of all Ospreys by all US military branches and also the JSDF pending investigation findings.
https://blog.geaerospace.com/technology/second-boeing-777x-m...
The MAX should never have been accepted as being the same airframe as the original 737.
Of course, besides that, Boeing itself is maybe THE major force reducing oversight.
A century of progress in domestic automotive sector would disagree with your opinion, here.
If it wasn't for the gub'ment infringing on the liberties of the little guys (corporations), we'd still be driving cars without airbags, seatbelts, and proper fuel tank safety regulations.
I think it’s to a significant degree the government’s fault that air travel wasn’t safe and people got killed, but it is entirely Boeing’s fault that their products suck and kill people and are losing them money.
Besides, Boeing as the only US aircraft manufacturer is too big to fail, especially with China aircraft increasing in number globally.
Regulators getting cozy with the people they're supposed to regulate happens in every industry, in every country, and... understandably so. Those are people who have the same expertise, same training, who work together all their life.
It may be one of the most difficult problems to solve.
But stupider things have happened.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-tru...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/business/stephen-dickson-...
Boeing tried to screw Canada's Bombardier out of the C series aircraft by getting the US Gov to throw on tariffs for an aircraft they had no competitor for. Everything was already done AFAIK that point too; certifications, and everything, the plane was entering into production to fufill US airline orders. It cost $1.3 billion Canadian to develop the plane.
I suspect Boeing thought that'd be the end of it. Airbus had other ideas. They got the whole Bombardier C series aircraft for about $550 million and opened an assembly plant in Alabama in Mobile, about 350 miles from Boeing's assembly plant in Huntsville. Along with the orders from US airlines (I think for 130 aircraft). No more tariffs because these planes are now US made.
As a Canadian it stings a little, but I can't help but cackle at the fact that Boeing execs handed their one major competitor several billion in revenue on a silver platter. And Boeing will need years if not decades to come up with a competitor.
So from Canada: Get fucked sideways Boeing.
And a spectacular own goal for Boeing that they deserved so much :D
Development costs doubled from 2 billion to 4 billion. Then when they went well over 5 billion and the federal government + Quebec had to bail them out to the tune of 1.5+ billion. Even without Boeing, had Airbus not stepped in, it's unlikely the CS100 would have succeeded. European buyers had already started to cancel orders seeing the debacle unfold.
Despite having many orders on the books, banks refused to lend to Bombardier because they expected them to make a loss on the airplane.
So yeah, screw Boeing who played really dirty and Trump helped them (the tariffs were reversed a year later when a more independent body reviewed them). But had Bombardier not been in a massive financial hole this wouldn't have mattered.
I have to read up on the F-15EX, generally so these kinds of upgrades are basically new designs and as such prone to delays and a bunch of technical issues. Especially for military aircraft.
Nothing to add on the MAX that wasn't said already. Boeing sure has its work cut out developing a new version, the existing 737 design is beyond its design life by now.
Well, if a plane crashes for unonown reasons, it is quite normal to ground the fleet, nothing special about Boeig here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Not to say that Airbus military plane record is spot less, but the A330 MRTT seems to be a decent plane.
I hate to see Boeing having all these problems, most of which are totally unnecessary.
Forget the fines. Leadership at Boeing needs to be criminally prosecuted. Send them to a federal penitentiary. Send a message to those wanting to cost cut on mission critical items. Regulators in this country are asleep at the wheel
So Southwest is all-in on not just Boeing, but 737s. That's their entire fleet. It makes a lot of things simpler. Could they boycott and switch to Airbus? Possibly, but at massive cost and logistics nightmares. Given their logistics failures elsewhere, they'd be fools to try to exit Boeing over this.
It’s an interesting question. Something seems clearly rotten at Boeing related to their recently designed 737 variants. Does the rot extend to older variants of the airframe? It has historically been considered very capable and reliable… the U.S. military still uses it to fly VIPs around the world.
Read these emails and chats from Boeing employees in charge of safety and compliance, who brag to each other about pulling a "Jedi mind trick" on the regulators and how they deserve to get paid more for all the money they're saving the company.
https://fortune.com/2020/01/10/designed-clowns-supervised-mo...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4316117-are-disturbing-inte...
(If this means refusing to board after an aircraft swap then at least in my case: so be it, I don't trust Boeing's safety record on these aircraft anymore)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
edit: Earlier door failures happened to two McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 after they changed their locking mechanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_96
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981
Situation back then was made worse as it sucked part of the floor out with the door.
It was before i read it was the door though.
edit: In case its not obvious, would be great if you could post other examples. These events in the air are rather rare and i am rather curious for the upcoming ntsb report of this one.
edit1: Apparently the newer one is a 737 from Southwest from 10 years ago, also maintenance issues. But like similar ones it was rather small https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_812
When reading the multiple stories of crazies, that show up in the news once in a while, where someone tries to open doors or emergency exits mid flight ...There is always a reassuring expert comment, that he/she would not be able to, due to the higher pressure inside the airplane, and the fact these devices only open inwards.
It seems for the MAX they blow outwards as easily?
Also in this case it didn't open inward, it fell off.
Contrast recent products like the 737MAX with the absolute workhorse and nearly unbreakable 777 designed 20 years earlier.
Really a shame.
+1 for the Downfall documentary on Netflix. Answers a lot of questions.
So we no longer over design with random “engineering factors” added in for the unknown, saving on costs. This of course falls apart when reality differs in some unexpected way from our modeling and it turns out our “just cost optimally regulation safe enough” design actually “just shy of being actually safe”.
The 737max debacles seem like patches on patches on patches trying to thread that needle.
Market will fix it after lots of people die and people return to using buses and boats for long-distance travels.
Do all US carrier rally have Max planes?
Doubtful much will happen though. The FAA allowed Boeing to do the FAA inspections on the MAX planes they produced, and the FAA rubber stamped the certifications.
Fuck Jack Welch and fuck his devil spawn, the likes of Boeing CEO's Dave Calhoun and James McNerney, and sycophant Dennis Muilenburg.
I’ve seen this in my role in a large company in cybersecurity. I also worked at Boeing early in my career and I remember them having a pretty cut throat leadership ladder where reporting an issue might get you passed over for that promotion.
PS: the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing was very eye opening, and really shows what happens when a company goes from a Jobs-like CEO to a Ballmer-like CEO, lesson to keep in mind
If they use the same kind of plug on their Max aircraft then I'd say grounding is merited. But if not then it shouldn't matter.
Unless it's an unknown issue or possibly too generic (like the case of the MCAS) then ADs/grounding/etc take into account the specific failure.
"An emergency exit and whole panel at the left hand side of the aircraft was missing."
Check for further detail and pictures: https://avherald.com/h?article=51354f78&opt=0
Come to think of it, I bet that's something the NTSB investigators will track down so they can do forensics on the debris
Note that USA has extremely safe airplanes, probably the safest in the world. But when a singular design (737 Max) has so many issues, it means we need to look at our safety process and think how Boeing could let so many mistakes through.
The only difference is an uptick in risk aversion. It took multiple serious incidents to trigger the grounding of the comet, but here we see grounding after one moderate incident. Then again, the greedy and selfish decision by Boeing executives to install only a single angle of attack sensor without redundancy as a cost cutting measure, which caused fatal crashes when paired with poorly designed software - on this very model, I believe - took multiple fatal crashes before a grounding occurred.
Lest Alaska airlines be given too much of a free pass: they had a deadly incident due to lack of maintenance, where a DC-9-family jet lost elevator control entirely.
Regardless, an incident like this is not the worst outcome: nobody was hurt, and the aviation industry can learn lessons from the situation. That includes learning whether this is an isolated incident, or a systemic one, and where the issue actually came from.
If you were sitting inside, you probably wouldn’t notice a difference.
That said, no one died in this incident either.
> That said, no one died in this incident either.
In that incident 5 people died (+1 injured).
Meanwhile the Boeing falls apart randomly in the sky.
“If the plane has a hole, the airline must dole!”
If you get sucked out and die, or injured, there’s a claim. But neither happened here.
It's seems impossible that on some routes we do not have alternative to Boeing planes. Consumers should be allowed to decide with their wallet. Isn't that the whole purpose of the Capitalist system?!