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Comment by Sirizarry | Hacker News Reader

What isn’t significant about Boeing consistently failing in the construction and quality of the 737 MAX? How does comparing it to driving to the airport prove anything? Scratch that, it proves nothing. What are you getting at?

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It's possible for quality of the 737 MAX to be significantly below the typical bar for aviation standards while still being significantly above the bar of things people should be personally concerned about. Demand aviation standards stay high if you value it, by all means, but don't become part of a hysteria around worrying if your plane is a 737 MAX purely on the basis it made the news instead of thinking about how unsafe it actually has been or is compared to your normal safety baseline.

After the Lion Air and Ethiopia Arlines crashed, the FAA calculated that on average, the Max fleet would suffer a fatal incident once every 2 years and that was based on the existing number of craft.

That's such an unbelievably ridiculous number to ignore. People saying this is insignificant are really putting their blinders on and I don't know why.

Again, that number is almost certainly an insignificant risk for an individual taking a random flight to worry about. That does not imply or relate to being an insignificant number airline safety regulators should not worry about or force improvement on. Air safety has been successfully held to a much higher standard than the vast majority of other safeties, and we should definitely try to maintain that, but that's unrelated to whether it's reasonable to be personally concerned about which plane model you take your flight on due to personal risk avoidance.

Maybe that it would be interesting to know what the numbers actually are. There is the common saying that you are more likely to get in an accident on the way to the airport than traveling on the plane, but knowing what the likelihood of both of those as well as the likelihood of an accident on a max could show this all to be hysteria or actually well founded.

Voting with wallets to counter negative trend in an industry made safe by regulations written in blood, seems more reasonable than hysterical.

But we can't be sure unless we know the actual stats. A lot of news operates by driving sensational stories, the more hysteria and doom they invoke, the more views they get. Are we talking 1% more likely or 0.00000001% more likely to get in an accident?

Take it like this: If you have to ride share and you hear that a common car used by drivers of Uber is having an increased failure rate, not passing inspections and have been temporarily banned from being on the road until more is learned; I think a pretty fair response is to try and avoid entering that car regardless of the ratio of incidents when driving that car, and when biking to the dealership to get it

>I think a pretty fair response is to try and avoid entering that car regardless of the ratio of incidents when driving that car, and when biking to the dealership to get it

"avoid" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here though. If doing so doesn't cost me anything, then avoiding that car is a non-brainer. However in real life nothing is really costless. Avoiding that car at the very least would cause you to wait longer. If that car is your daily driver, and you don't have a backup, then avoiding that car might cost you hundreds per month. That's why you need to factor in statistics and figure what the absolute risk is, and whether it's worth "avoiding".

Right it would be a bigger problem if I owned and depended on this hypothetical car but my hypothetical self only needs it for Ubers. Maybe I’ll switch to Lyft or local Taxi service. That might make me wait more but the point is that this isn’t a hysterical response, much like monitoring and avoiding the 737 MAX until further notice isn’t hysterical. It’s simply sensible.

To not first consider the actual absolute safety level before considering reasons that might change relatively is not sensible. You can't just come up with reasons to fear something and conclude it's therefore best to avoid, that's completely sidestepping any reasoning about the actual risk and replacing it with emotion.

Taken another way: That your Uber driver is not as safe as others is not, in itself, a reason to reschedule your life to avoid them on the principle there is a safer option somewhere else. It's reason to ask the question how unsafe are they actually and is that level of difference vs normal something the extra inconvenience is worthwhile for. The point of someone mentioning cars is, if you actually quantify the risk change, it's likely you're rescheduling your flights around a risk which is less concerning than the rest of your day to day life and things you accept for getting to the airport in the first place. Without quantifiably discounting that you're letting news headlines dictate your life by fear instead of acting sensibly.

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