Air safety going down is a trend you want to stop ASAP. Not wait around until it's just as dangerous as something else like driving your car.
Contrary to this sentiment, air traffic safety continues to improve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
If anything, air travel is so safe now that non-fatal incidents such as this weeks' stand out more than they would have in previous decades.
And in comparison, driving is getting much more dangerous (at least in the US).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
What's wrong with pointing that out and being concerned?
Everything I do in life is a calculated risk. If you told me my toaster was 3 times as likely to kill me today I would still probably toast my bread knowing that the base rate was already pretty low.
If anything, knowing that all of the headline grabbing incidents has been confined to one product line at one company, and watching the amount of scrutiny they are receiving for it makes me feel safer overall.
"systemic failure within Boeing" isn't necessarily inconsistent with "air traffic safety continues to improve". For instance, better pilot training and safety regulations might make flying even safer despite Boeing creating more crashes.
We aren't. There were fatal issues with one system (MCAS) on one line of planes. This was addressed, and since then there have been zero fatalities (or injuries) caused by design and/or engineering issues by this manufacturer. Their safety record is not substantially different from that of Airbus (who have their own design issues, IMO, such as non-linked pilot controls which has also contributed toward hull loss and passenger deaths). The MCAS issue was, to be clear, completely inexcusable and both regulator and management heads should have rolled over this. I am not happy with our anemic response to this incident.
And yes, one or two people could have potentially died due to this latest incident. It should be investigated and fixed. Beyond that there are wider aspects of the MBA-ification of Boeing that ought to (and I hope but don't expect will) drive regulatory and business change in this country.
But the fact remains that once the issues with MCAS were resolved, Boeing-designed and -assembled airframes have resumed a track record of safety that eclipses that of any other transportation industry. Again, we can, should, and are expecting that every issue is a learning moment to improve the practices of the industry as a whole.
Could you please share some data to back this claim? For example comparison of the number of technical incidents per airframe in use for Boeing vs Airbus?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_in...
You'll note the last time a major carrier in the U.S. experienced a fatality due to an engineering, manufacturing, and/or design error attributable to Boeing was in 1996, when a spark in the center fuel tank in a 747 caused it to explode midair.
Before that, 1994. Then 1991, 1989, and 1988.
We did also see one fatality aboard a 737-700 in 2018, but this was due to an issue with the CFM engine and which isn't attributable to Boeing.
Given this, it's pretty obvious on face value that—however you slice it—flying on a Boeing airframe on a major U.S. carrier is safer than every other form of transportation, including literally just walking. Driving, buses, trains, trams, bicycling, scootering, ziplining, whatever. They're all less safe.
From your own source:
The aircraft experienced a contained engine failure with debris penetrating the fuselage; one passenger was partially ejected from the aircraft and later died of her injuries.
This is horrific. Boeing, of course and happened in 2018
> We did also see one fatality aboard a 737-700 in 2018, but this was due to an issue with the CFM engine and which isn't attributable to Boeing.
There is essentially no aviation industry expert who will place this failure at the feet of Boeing and not CFM. That said, the fact that engines are designed to completely contain debris from a failure is wild and speaks to the incredible standard of safety we hold aviation to.
To be fair Boeing literally fired their CEO because of the MAX fiasco.
“He was CEO from 2015 to 2019, when he was fired in the aftermath of two crashes of the 737 MAX and its subsequent groundings.”
Comparing Boeing's performance to other the performance of other industries is also apples to oranges, no? Why not compare Boeing to Airbus? I don't understand what you mean by that argument.
So, what design failures has Airbus suffered as of late? And what's your explanation for the specific hate on Boeing, if it's comparable to airbus?
https://www.ft.com/content/1588974e-db75-4a02-9aff-deb0b75ed...
Where is this for airbus?
But that's completely true! Not every driver on the road is at equal risk of a fatal accident. A significant percentage of all fatal accident involve speeding, reckless driving, and/or alcohol consumption, to say nothing of distractions like cell phone usage.
So you do have quite a bit of control on the road and exactly none in the air.
So you do have control, and can put yourself into a safer cohort of drivers, but the best you can do still falls wildly short of the state of aviation safety.
You may be 100% in control of a scenario where you are highly likely to die, and 0% in control of a situation where you could essentially live until you die of natural causes.
In this case, even if you exercise 100% of the control afforded to you by driving a car, you are more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane.
Record passenger miles flown [1] with years of zero fatalities since, I believe, 2020 [2][3] refutes this hypothesis.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM
[2] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
[3] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
Overall statistics improving doesn’t mean you have permission to start throwing a random person off the plane every year.
There’s an xkcd about an online seller and a bobcat…
You can maybe argue two, where a woman was killed after exiting an Asiana plane after it crashed at SFO. She was hit by an emergency vehicle responding to the scene.
Separately, major US airlines can reliably fly a daytime visual approach with a fully working airplane into a major airport.
I don't really care how safe driving is per mile, I care if I'm going to be dead at the end of the year.
For example the recent crash in Japan. Airbus isn't getting railed for that one.
I know several 737 pilots on US flag carriers. Even at the time they were saying that neither crash would be possible for their fleet as they had done simulator training of exactly those sorts of scenarios.
From wikipedia: While defending the pilots' actions, Sullenberger was also highly critical of allowing someone with only 200 hours of flight experience to be first officer.
I hate sounding like a Boeing apologist, but I do think it's worth being very clear about where blame lies for things so that we can both asses risk accurately and make appropriate corrections.
Boeing was rightly blamed for misleading everyone about the nature of the MAX8. It is a materially different airframe, and it required different systems to be created to be competently flyable with 737 type rating. Is Boeing misleading anyone here on the MAX9? Personally, I doubt it. It was probably a fluke non-conforming part, since that plug is a carryover from other 737s. The track record leaves a lot of us wondering if something's up, though.
Pilots I am personally friends with who fly for American, Southwest, and United, disagree. They feel they were fully prepped for the differences in the airframe from their first flight on it, pre-crashes, and have said that they blame the carriers that crashed for not prepping their pilots the same.
It's entirely possible that I missed some news, but I'm unfamiliar with the FAA or anyone else actually accusing Boeing of intentionally misleading or releasing incorrect information?
My analogy to to Japan, while poor, was just meant to illustrate that we should be very clear about the true causes of things. "Boeing lied" is a very different problem than "Boeing squeezed a new system in, advised that pilots should be trained, and airlines didn't perform enough training".
But yes, I agree that we should be wondering what's up, specifically with Boeing's assembly/QA processes...
Boeing noticed that the thing didn't fly like a 737, so they made some software to change its flight characteristics to be more like a 737. They failed to disclose this, and when it "activated" in 2018, a plane crashed. This is when FAA learned about it. Then another one crashed because of the same thing only a few months later.
The DOJ made a criminal complaint against Boeing, resulting in a deferred prosecution agreement and a $2.5 billion penalty. MAX was grounded for years.
> They feel they were fully prepped for the differences in the airframe
Your pilot friends are either wrong or they had inside information and probably should have blown the whistle. Realistically, they probably actually did feel prepared. This is the crux of the criminal fraud action.
What a bizarre comment to make. Why on earth would Airbus get railed for what happened in Japan?
We should be very careful to distinguish between actual airframe issues and issues that are related to politics and poor decision making or training.
There's nothing we know of that is fundamentally unsound about the 737 MAX airframe, there are mistakes that have been made in very small subset of the airframes/flights operating, and yet everyone is running around like you're taking your life into your hands every time one flies over your head.
It's hard to say if you're trolling or just very misinformed. Boeing was hiding the fact that MAX had additional system to correct the pitch from the pilots.
Car fatalities likely dwarf bus and train fatalities too. It's not that airplanes are particularly safe, it's that cars are particularly unsafe.
Incompetence is understandable, improperly modeling the physics due to lack of experience or knowledge is understandable, but repeated instances that point to corruption at the government regulator and bad culture at the manufacturer lend to fears that the situation will get worse for a while before it gets better.
It’s the same reason you might avoid flying on an Eastern European/Russian airplane. The perceived risks move from unforeseeable error or bad luck to systemic error.
Being fucking murder by a car when walking is way more dangerous.
A subthread about the actual personal risk when flying the MAX is perfectly valid.
This is more or less equivalent to the little old lady in this comic saying "I'm wearing this to ward off A." Laypeople are notoriously crap at judging any kind of risk.
Is it?
The only death in US major commercial aviation in ages was when a woman was partially sucked out of a window in 2018 when an engine failed and blew apart, breaking the window open.
Before that, we have the Asiana flight which crashed after landing short at SFO, striking the undercarriage on the edge of the floating platform and cartwheeling. Everyone survived the crash, but a woman was killed when a fire truck ran over her amidst the firefighting foam.
Prior to that we have to go to 2005 when a plane overran a runway and hit a car, killing one occupant… of the car.
We have to go all the way back to November 2001 to have a serious accident where an American plane crashed on takeoff, killing all on board. Technically this was due to pilot error due to over-responding to wake turbulence, breaking off the vertical stabilizer. But it’s arguably an engineering issue that the pilot was able to induce catastrophic structural failure through control inputs.
There has definitely been a worrying trend lately in operational error with pilots and ATC nearly causing accidents due to runway incursions, nearly landing on taxiways, etc. But it’s really hard to say with a straight face that major airlines have anything other than an exemplary safety record the likes of which has been completely unparalleled before now. We have had one single death aboard a major commercial aviator in the U.S. in more than twenty two years.
This was a serious fuck-up. But it remains that there was at risk no more than one, maybe two, fatalities. That isn’t enough to justify the claim that “safety is getting worse.”
Statistically, there is no difference between a new plane and one that's been flying for 18 years [1].
Given dying because an installer fucked up feels mighty similar to dying because a maintenance tech fucked up, I don't see a rational reason to over-penalise fabrication errors to the extent that it overrules millions of successful flight miles. (Design mistakes are categorially different.)
[1] http://awg.aero/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/analysisofimpact....
Just because it's happening to other people doesn't make it okay to hand-wave away safety.
And by the way, so far NTSB believes it's not a fabrication error but an assembly error. NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in.
As a layman, no. Were I looking for more than a Twitter level of analysis, it would be an indication for investigation. Not grounds for conclusion.
More directly, even as a layman, if I were to use that anecdote as grounds to condemn the state of car manufacturing in summa, that would be irrational.
> NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in
Source? Last I saw, they couldn't find the bolts. It takes lab work to ascertain whether they ever existed.
You seem to not know the meaning of suspect, so here is the definition:
Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more sus·pect verb 3rd person present: suspects /səˈspek(t)/ 1. have an idea or impression of the existence, presence, or truth of (something) without certain proof. "if you suspect a gas leak, do not turn on an electric light"
Have a great day sir.
Suspicion doesn't mean baseless hypothesis, e.g. "Mars is an orange." The NTSB would never say (and has not said, as you've conceded) it "suspects" the "bolts were never screwed in."
Were there a lack of marks where the bolts should have exerted clamping force, there would be basis for suspicion. That isn't proof. But it's more than a hypothesis.
Where are you getting this? Crookshanks said the NTSB had "not yet recovered the four bolts" and "have not determined if they existed there" [1].
Your source, for which I'm genuinely curious, is categorically false in suggesting the NTSB "suspects" the bolts were never there, or that Crookshanks said "there is so far no evidence 'the bolts were ever there'". (The latter being particularly reprehensible, given it involves materially misquoting an aircraft investigator.)
> Good luck with your investments
Wat.
[1] https://airwaysmag.com/ntsb-as1282-exams-all-12-door-plug-st...
Straw man. Nobody says even a single death isn't tragic. What I'm saying is it doesn't overwhelm trillions of miles of safe flight. Not flying a 737 Max 8, only to go onto a Spirit Aerosystems-assembled Airbus, doensn't make sense. (Note: not implicating Spirit. Just saying that the window of culpabilitiy extends more in their direction than it does across every 737 Max.)
OP said air safety is going down broadly [1]. So yes, considering all air transport miles is valid given the context.
There has been one passenger fatality aboard a major U.S. airline since November 2001.
You’re proposing crashes are autocorrelated. They’re not. They would be in a vacuum filled with spherical cows. But grounding and investigating takes care of that.
This is related to the fallacy of thinking if a coin has come up heads thrice in a row, it’s more likely to come up tails the fourth time. It’s not. We have a lot of innocuous flight miles as data from which to make robust statements, particularly when it comes to characterising the safety of the entire airline industry.
Put another way, on which day are you safer, the day before the accident or the day after?
From all photo evidence I’ve seen, some cushions were sucked off the seat. These cushions are designed to be removed. If a passenger was seated and wearing their seat belt, I have every faith that they would have been fine. Uncomfortable as hell but ultimately fine. I’ll bet money the NTSB report will say as much.
And the point stands that the only reason this story is noteworthy is because of airlines’ spotless safety record over the past two decades. Incidents like this are exceedingly rare.
That said this incident occurred during the initial climb-out where seat belt use is mandatory.
So yes, if a passenger was seated there and if their belt was unbuckled, I can see how somebody would have died. Nobody is saying that this isn’t a serious fuckup that doesn’t need to be investigated and remedied.
What I am saying is that major airlines in the U.S. have a more or less unblemished safety record for twenty two years, the likes of which has not only been unparalleled in aviation, but by any other form of transport. Literally walking is more dangerous than flying a major commercial airline in the U.S.
The MAX line of planes in particular has had their share of problems, but with the MCAS situation resolved there is no reason to believe that it in particular is any less safe than any other airframe operated by the majors. The issue with the door plug is unlikely to be related to the MAX (the same part and design have been in service without issue since well before the MAX). It will be investigated, fixed, and we will in all likelihood go back to flying gajillions of passenger miles without serious incident.
I’ll put this another way: if all of this gnashing of teeth and doom and gloom causes enough anxiety over flying that a few hundred people choose to drive instead, it will inevitably cause more injury and death than if every airline went all-in on a fleet of 737 MAXes.
TIL half the people commenting here are nobody :)
Commercial aviation in the U.S. is still incomprehensibly safe. It is not getting measurably less safe. The 737 MAX line are not death traps.
Not an overreaction. Not bolting on a door on a brand new plane is past bordering into full-on insanity.
Nobody floods into the comment sections on HN when this happens because people dying in cars is depressingly normal but planes are so unimaginably safe that a person hypothetically getting sucked out of a plane is strange and terrifying.
There's a reason they tell you to always wear your seatbelt though, ranging from sudden turbulence/downdraft to sudden depressurization.
You're kind of making my point for me when clothing being removed from a person is the most harrowing part of an aviation incident.
I'll address the elephant in the room and say that I don't think it's coincidence that the two airframe losses in the MAX 9 were with Indonesian and Ethiopian carriers and not American or European ones, despite American and European carriers having received—as far as I can tell—the bulk of the deliveries of this airframe and at least a plurality (if not majority) of hours in use (if someone else can find good data on this I'd be grateful). I suspect that more resources put toward pilot training played a meaningful difference here. For example, the first officer of the Ethiopian flight had less than 200 hours of flight experience. This would be completely unacceptable for a U.S. major.
I want to be clear that I am not saying that it's the pilots' fault, but that the swiss-cheese model relies on multiple overlapping failures. The additional resources spent on training, maintenance, operations, and CRM at American and European airlines in general ensures fewer overlaps and thus fewer incidents.