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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

This, combined with the recent news that Boeing wants to correct a design flaw on the engine nacelle anti-icing system by putting it on the pilots leads me to simply no longer trust this aircraft.

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.

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Here here I was just about to post the same thing!

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.

More than merely “investigated”. The FAA should indefinitely ground all Boeing 737 Max until Boeing has fixed them - at its own expense - and the FAA has certified the fixes on each and every one of them. Financial consequences on Boeing be damned. Or kill the plane by banning the Boeing 737 Max from ever flying over the United States ever again. Let Boeing go back to the drawing table and build a plane that works. Let the executives suffer from the years long decline in Boeing’s stock price. Let them lose billions. Tens of billions. I am out of fucks to give. It’s time for the government to draw blood over this corporate malpractice.

The board and C level should be held criminally liable for incentivising profit over safety.

Sorry, can't, capitalism.

No one is going to hold Boeing responsible because Boeing owns everyone in charge at the FAA.

And the US does not want to let Airbus take (further) the lead over Boeing.

That will make for fun final reports when they inevitably crash and kill hundreds of Americans.

There was an article literally 1-2 days ago (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...) about about Boeing asking for a certification exemption on the MAX7.

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.

"Boeing Repeatedly Burned By Outsourcing" - https://simpleflying.com/boeing-burned-by-outsourcing/

From 24 Aug 2023... "Boeing and a key supplier find a new manufacturing issue that affects the 737 Max airliner" - https://apnews.com/article/spirit-aerosystems-boeing-737-fus...

"...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..."

Spirit was Boeing - Boeing Wichita - which B sold off to bankers in 2005. It's not "burned by X", it's "sold the plumbing, burned down the restaurant for insurance money". Except not even Tony Soprano would expect to get fresh pizza from a burnt-out shell.

The passive voice shell game in this article is absurd.

> 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.

1. https://simpleflying.com/author/chris/

2. https://lt.linkedin.com/in/chris-loh-5b949040

What are you hoping people are going to do with the links you posted?

Linking to the journalist’s socials is seriously uncool man.

My ethical principles compel me to reject the use of passive voice in journalism and to identify those responsible.

The managers and the bean counters got cheap. I bet Chinese Comac airliners are safer than the Max.

There's been enough written about the cultural changes since MD and Boeing, and goes to show that incidents are unlikely just that. Indeed, incidents keep coming.

Statistically they're still rare, fortunately. There's a lot of these planes in the air every day, and it's far more likely to be involved in a car crash caused by somebody not paying attention, than it is to be on one of these flights.

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.

I feel the car comment, which is always mentioned when people talk about flying, is a whataboutism. We aren’t talking about cars, we’re talking about flying in a plane and how it seems a lot less safe today than even a decade ago.

I think additionally, many people feel there are very real factors skewing the rate of car crashes compared to what it'd be from only "good" drivers with how our bar for driver's licenses in America is so pitifully low. And beyond that, that they can generally have more agency about their fate as a driver than as a passenger in a plane, while it'd seem far simpler to imagine quickly stopping a car in response to a failure than managing to land a passenger plane.

Bonus multiplier if someone was then reading articles about pilots and ATC not getting any sleep.

I think also car crashes are generally caused by operator error. Plane crashes are more likely (maybe?) to be caused by mechanical malfunction.

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.

Planes are substitutes for cars. When talking about plane safety, it’s not whataboutism to put statistics into perspective by noting that choosing to drive instead of flying would be much riskier.

> Planes are substitutes for cars.

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.

More often a substitute for cars I'd say. I've ridden a bus long-distance on two trips.

I'm not sure why you think busses are more equivalent to planes other than holding more passengers.

> 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.

You’re pattern matching on how the two modes work, but that isn’t what economic substitution means. Substitution means people buy one product instead of another, like the way Beyond Meat products are a substitute for meat despite having essentially zero production or digestive similarities at any reasonable level of reduction.

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.

> You’re pattern matching on how the two modes work

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.

Having done both, I agree that they're more a substitute for busses. Perhaps trains.

I'm not sure why you think cars are more equivalent to planes, especially when they hold fewer passengers.

Because in general, at least in the US, the choice for most routes that people take is to fly or take their car. Taking a long distance bus isn’t on the table for most moderately well off people and train usually isn’t a reasonable option.

Of the top of my head:

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.

lol that was nearly 30 years ago. give it a rest. “heritage” Seattle screwed this up just fine on their own.

It’s feeling like Boing has been riding on its reputation for a little bit. I’m concerned that this is indicative of issues with any aircraft that they’ve designed in the last decade or two.

This plane was mangled by bean counter logic: drive down costs to the point where customers go elsewhere, doesn't work at 50,000 feet.

"bean counter logic" is literally just the logic of capitalism

Not quite. Cost savings is only one of the many things that can lure a customer toward a purchase. While Louis Vuitton would love to keep costs low, they wouldn't do it at the expense of their status as a luxury brand.

"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.

I flew in a MAX one time. It was a short hop between Burbank and San Jose.

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.

Is this aircraft designed to a less safe standard than other aircraft? Yes. Is flying on this aircraft also one of the safest modes of transportation I will use this year? Also yes.

> one of the safest modes of transportation

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.

What does the severity of the average incident have to do with whether I use a particular mode of transit?

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.

Hard to find up to date data, but looks like about two orders of magnitude, from ~5 deaths per billion miles to 0.05.

(Miles traveled is somewhat charitable to airlines and assumes trips are fungible between planes and cars.)

I'm not sure how you mean it's "charitable?" Could you explain?

Sure, sorry. Planes cover distance very quickly, and people use them for e.g. a six hour flight covering 4000 miles that they would not otherwise drive; this situation makes planes appear safer "per mile" than alternative valid metrics like "accidents per hour of travel" would.

I wonder how unreliable a specific model of commercial aircraft would need to be in order for it to no longer be the safest mode of transportation.

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...

> According to [1], commercial planes are about 3 times safer than buses per passenger mile.

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.

Someone pointed out that if you normalize from "fatalities per passenger mile" to "fatalities per trip" the airplanes don't look quite as good.

Fortunately, one normally doesn’t take a 737 to the corner store, drop the kids at school, or go out for lunch. The only thing normalizing by trip tells us is people take lots of car trips.

Well, yeah, because airliners are extremely large. If you do the same thing for cruise ships, they surely look horrifically dangerous! "Heart attack fatalities per trip" are off the charts.

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.

Surely no one is discussing dying of other causes here

Uh... it was an example showing the flaw in the logic. You can't compare a 300-seat jetliner to a motorcycle in a metric of "fatalities per trip", because that doesn't give you any useful information about the subject under discussion ("am I going to die on this trip?"). It's just bad risk analysis.

Luckily no one was doing that. By your logic we shouldn’t compare anything because far more people travel by car than plane in a given year.

> (...) leads me to simply no longer trust this aircraft.

aircraft -> company

> I simply do not trust the people who designed this aircraft.

Airbus is so much better than Boeing as of late. New Boeing planes are junk.

One very tiny thing (well, big) that I love about the A320 family compared to the 737 family is that the load floor on the 32x is a couple inches lower which increases headspace (both real and perceived) making it feel like a less cramped plane. Love it.

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