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?
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.
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.
If Boeing wants to rehabilitate its reputation, showing more respect for the regulatory process would be a good start.
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.
This will also work for aircraft swaps (including last-minute ones) all the way until the plane leaves.
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.
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.
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.