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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

Aviation is safe. An issue happened and appropriate steps have immediately happened and in the end an already incredibly safe industry will be even safer. If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic. Yes, panic. This is not rational or helpful and is a huge reason why aviation is so antiquated. You want flying cars? Stop panicking at statistically minor issues. Panic and fear are why it was easier to heavily modify the already massively modified 737 design to create the 'max' instead of just designing a new plane. It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear. Over reporting and sites like this are increasing fear and panic when we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.

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Airlines aren't safe just because. Weakening FAA regulation, critical issues with flight controller shortages/exhaustion, culture changes at Boeing related to safety, etc all threaten to undo that safety record. The system is not working as it should and statistics don't magically maintain themselves at previous levels.

What's the evidence for weakening FAA regulation?

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, but I really am curious. It's extremely uncommon for government bureaucracy to roll back regulations, and as far as I can tell from some Googling, the FAA has not done so. So what regulations are being weakened?

Cozy relationships between the FAA and manufacturers, executive orders requiring them to 'collaborate' with manufacturers, evidence suggesting retaliation against whistleblowers, etc. there were significant investigations after the the MCAS tragedy. And they lost a lot of credibility as leaders in regulation when they waited to ground the max after the crashes while others took the lead.

Edit: Replying to the edit - oh come on HN dont downvote their question it's a reasonable question, my original response didn't link any articles.

The regulation doesn't specifically have to get rolled back. In this case a large part of weakening regulations is shifting to allowing the manufacturer (Boeing) to regulate themselves and allowing (or forcing) ties between regulator and manufacturer to get too close.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/politics/boeing-faa.ht...

Ah, so regulatory capture? I can see that.

It also seems like the ATC system is stretched thin, as well as the airlines themselves in terms of pilots. Though I may be biased since I'm much more aware of ATC problems given the various YouTube channels I watch covering aviation.

Yep that was what I was referring to with shortages and exhaustion - not great with the recent revelations of the near misses. It's a warning that if the work to maintain those safety numbers isn't done we can't expect them to stay the same. Air travel is still safe, and has a lot of headroom before it's as bad as cars. But even that argument is kind of scary to see people making. Going from "even a single failure is unacceptable" to "even with 2 planes falling out of the sky it's still safer than driving" is a shift in mindset that threatens to invalidate that latter argument.

> as far as I can tell from some Googling, the FAA has not done so

That's because Google has become useless, not because the info isn't there.

You should try and find some of the analysis articles close to the MCAS disaster that explain how it's not the FAA that certifies airplanes any more, but the manufacturer basically self certifies.

[Yes, they're FAA employees but paid by Boeing. Do you also believe in Santa Claus?]

Strong agree with this, although worth noting that a crude back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the 737 Max has a rate of fatal accidents per mile that is only safer than driving a car by a factor of ~10. (See below.) Since cars are one of the most dangerous forms of transportation, it's certainly not crazy that people would want to avoid an airplane model that's only 10x safer than a car. Bicycles are only ~3x as safe as cars, and people reasonably use the danger of biking as a reason to not commute that way.

(In comparison, air travel is usually safer than cars by a factor of 100 or more. It's hard to even estimate how safe it is because there are so few commercial airliner crashes.)

There's also an inherent difficulty in trying to attach a risk to a single model of airplane, rather than broad activities like driving cars or bicycles, due to lack of data and data inhomogeneity. It seems reasonable to me to put some Bayesian probability on the 737 Max being significantly more dangerous than it naively appears (say, by another factor of 3 or 5) due to Poissonian noise and factors we can't observe.

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> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe [1.5] years ([500] days) of flying to date per aircraft on average [in light of delivery dates and extensive groundings], giving a very rough estimate of a [~2] billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895004

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895077

> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes

How valid is this calculation for today? Presumably they fixed the issues with the two deadly crashes, so those arguably shouldn't be included in future forecasts.

If you think the problem with the 737 Max has been fixed, none of this is relevant. The crude estimate I gave is if you adopt the reasonable theory that the production/operation of the 737 Max is bad more generally, with the cause of the prior crashes being just one of the flaws discovered.

An illustrative example: suppose there was a plane model with 100 flaws that each cause a crash every 100B miles, and after each crash that particular flaw is fixed completely. The "correct" fatality rate would still be ~once per billion miles even after several crashes, and would only approach the standard airplane background rate asymptotically after dozens of crashes.

Do these calculations assume all miles flown by ANY max variant are the same?

Sort of. It averages over them. If you want to dig up some data and make a more detailed estimate, please do so.

Nope I was hoping to point out what is to me a failure of logic, that since previous versions of the plane flew safely, newly manufactured max 8 and 9s somehow have trillions of miles of safe flight. Should we combine all ford mustang car miles driven since the 80s to calculate the safety of the newest version?! Obviously the analogy doesn't hold completely, but the versions of the 737 are different. If I put a jet engine on a ford mustang, is it still a ford mustang? It's the same car, but I mounted a bigger engine!

Oh mean, should we look at the 2021 model year Ford Mustang to estimate the risk of 2024 model? What about different 2024 cars that were manufactured in winter vs summer? I'd say yes, but you're welcome to do what you want.

i'm shocked you would say yes to that, but consider all the 737 miles the same

> It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear.

No, it's because of greed and managerial and executive rot. They could innovate as much as they want, nearly as fast as they want, and still be safe - as they and other airliners have done in the past! - but then they wouldn't save the "max" amount of money doing it. How dreadful.

Boeing's failures are all Boeing's fault alone. They rightfully deserve the pillorying.

> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone

That is more of an argument for stricter requirements around automobiles and that entire industry than anything else.

The industry is littered with defunct companies that couldn't financially afford to spend ten+ years bringing a new design to market. It took nearly 14 years to bring the 787 to market, what company can afford a timeline like that? This is more the norm than the exception. Innovation is massively stifled in aviation.

> That is more of an argument for stricter requirements around automobiles and that entire industry than anything else.

I agree that cars should, and could, be safer. But my argument was about the reaction people have to accidents. In cars we have several orders of magnitude more deaths and we don't bat an eye at that but in aviation we have a scary incident and it is wall to wall coverage.

Boeing is obviously in decline. 2 maxs crashed in the last few years, now this, boeing recommended other airlines examine their max 9s and found several loose bolts[1]. So the airlines had to absorb the cost of inspection and maintenance due to poor boeing integration. Maybe, instead of paying boeing to fail, we just... let them fail? Or the government should privatize and fire the managers who are cutting safety costs for profit.

[1]https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223517098/door-plug-boeing-7...

" Innovation is massively stifled in aviation."

Flying is also a pretty mature technology by now. We've done it for more than 100 years and the physics is well understood. Massive leaps in capabilities are unlikely, much like no one will develop a pistol with a 2 mile range or a coffee machine that produces an espresso in a blink of an eye.

What you can do is add more sensors and software, but the increasing complexity may not be worth it.

I would argue that aircraft are massively inefficient. Lets just look at the biggest cause, pilots. When flying the aircraft has to deal with cruse and takeoff and landing. Basically, the less you have to re-work the aircraft for takeoff/landing the more you can optimize it for cruse. Looking at just one thing, flaps, it becomes obvious how much aircraft could be improved by radical changes. When taking off, flaps are set much less aggressively than when landing. This is because most of the additional lift and subsequent reduction in stall speed, come with just a little flap extension. In landing however the flaps are extended considerably more. This is not for stall issues, but just so the pilots can see the runway. By increasing the flaps we are increasing the angle of attack of the aircraft and that allows the pilots to drop the nose, so they can see the numbers better. Land flaps are a huge change to the configuration of the aircraft and require a lot of structural changes to happen, just so pilots can see. Those changes cost cruse performance massively. There are many other things like this in air frame design, materials, etc. Just look at the experimental aircraft world compared to certified designs. The differences in performance are massive but they don't come to market because the industry is so stuck in its rut.

100 years is not a long time. Compare a railroad now to a railroad we had 100 years after the invention of railroads.

There are massive improvements still possible in the engine. Like the currently in design RISE engine. And other engines as well. And if you combined the technology you can get even further. We are not close to the end on any of this. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkHKet7rp4o

There are various aero-dynamic concepts that have not yet been fully or even partially explored. Trust brace wings, blended wings or my personal favorite, Prantdl Wing. A Prantdl wing might allow you to remove the whole tail, another huge potential boost. You can even combine all these concepts potentially.

I would guess we can get 40% more efficiency just based on those things.

Found the frequentist.

The fact that defects (such as "the doors falling off") are being found in planes that have rolled off the assembly line MONTHS ago causes me to second guess my priors for anything that is coming out of a Boeing factory.

The goings on at Boeing this past decade or so suggest nothing is "working as it should". They killed hundreds of people trying to play silly games with safety regs. Hundreds of them.

Counterpoint: Boeing clearly has cultural issues around safety and as consumers this is the only way to financially push back on the company. If Alaska and United start feeling the pressure because people start to avoid flying on them entirely due to the MAX issues then that should be enough consumer leverage to affect Boeing and Boeing's behavior.

I'm literally going to hop on a cross country Alaska MAX flight tomorrow (if the flight doesn't get cancelled) and I'm not much more worried about it than any other flight, but I'm tired of our country being run by MBA culture and having to make these kinds of risk-reward tradeoffs while considering that the management class of this country seems hell bent on turning us into a third world kleptocracy. We need to start punishing some of them for bad decisions. Otherwise they'll keep on gambling with our safety in favor of their profit margins and aviation may become a whole lot less safe.

And in the process it might just improve the long-term outlook of their company. Boeing could decide to become an engineering-led culture again rather than a short-term-profits-led company which would be more sustainable.

> Aviation is safe. An issue happened and appropriate steps have immediately happened and in the end an already incredibly safe industry will be even safer.

Nobody is questioning the safety of aviation in general. This is a focus around a company that has taken a nosedive in terms of quality of planes delivered for the sake of the mighty dollar.

Insiders have confirmed numerous cost cutting measures from the C-level executives. To my awareness, nobody has gone to jail. Fines issued.

> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic

Recalls are issued yearly across a wide number of manufacturers and models. I don’t get your point here. This is not panic. This is poor design and/or quality making it’s way into production with high probability of causing bodily harm to driver and/or others.

> You want flying cars? Stop panicking at statistically minor issues. Panic and fear are why it was easier to heavily modify the already massively modified 737 design to create the 'max' instead of just designing a new plane. It is nearly impossible to bring innovation to market because of panic and fear. Over reporting and sites like this are increasing fear and panic when we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.

Yea let’s just ignore decades of safety requirements because we wAnT tO iNnOvAtE. GoVeRnMeNt ReGuLaTiOn BaD.

Why is 737 MAX having so many issues then ? In a short period of time since 2019, it had way too many incidents for an aircraft. I am never flying 737 MAX and yes I am a very practical person.

737 MAX now sends alarm bells blaring for me. The MCAS debacle has me questioning what other shortcuts Boeing will take.

I don't think it's worth celebrating an emergency door being blown off a plane that already killed 300+ people years prior. This is not how the system should work.

I don’t want innovation that comes at the expense of human lives. The same thing is going on with self driving cars right now. It is wild to me that they aren’t required to follow the same regulations as airliners.

The safety record of commercial airliners should be help up as an example of how the system works. It’s proof that we can set aside corporate greed and design systems that are safe if we want to. The way that Boeing has gone downhill and the FAA has allowed it to happen is shameful.

> I don’t want innovation that comes at the expense of human lives. The same thing is going on with self driving cars right now. It is wild to me that they aren’t required to follow the same regulations as airliners

If self driving cars follow the airline model we won't see them for, at best, decades. That is decades of 40k deaths a year in the current human driven model. Self driving cars have the potential to drop that dramatically, but only if we actually develop them.

Everything has a cost. Not changing has a cost. Changing has a cost. Weighing those two is important. If you only cite the costs of changing without considering the costs of not changing you will never change and always believe you are making the right choice.

self driving cars have a theoretical and unproven potential to save lives, but are proven to fail, require human assistance, etc. There's no certainty self-driving cars will ever be safer, and we shouldn't let companies kill people to get feedback for improvement!

> If a car has an issue we don't blink and we loose nearly 40k people a year in the US alone, but a plane has an issue and we panic.

We don't lose people to the cars themselves. We lose people to reckless driving and traffic: two problems that are fundamentally solved for aircraft.

If the door of a 5-year-old car fell off on the highway, and every car of that make and model were recalled for having loose factory-installed bolts, then people most certainly would panic.

About statistics, another nice app based on the same ideas and fears is the Am I Going Down app. It lets you know how often you need to take the trip before you crash and die.

[1] https://www.fearofflying.app/

Just bought that, thank you.

> Stop panicking at statistically minor issues

Um there are like 215 Max 9s and a door plug blowing out on one seems statistically significant.

> we should instead be celebrating a system working as it should.

Is the way Boeing facilitated the Max's approval "the system working as it should"?

Airbus seems to get by just fine.

Yes, Aviation is safe. However, specifically the 737 MAX model is not. Too many incidents since 2019 killing hundreds of people. No Thanks. I will rather go back home than fly a 737 MAX.

Safety comes in levels, and Boeing MAX 8-9, relatively to Airbus, is less safe than the standard we have come to expect in the 21st century.

I don't doubt that this will be reflected in their future market shares, and panic won't be the underlying reason. No one wants to buy worse stuff for about the same price as better stuff.

Aviation in general is very safe. However, there is clearly something wrong in Boeing's design and manufacturing process that's persisted for many years. I would not feel comfortable flying in any of the new 737 MAX's and will avoid flying in one as much as possible.

This comment misses the mark so badly it's actually hilarious.

The main problem here is Boeings steady decline in QA.

And no, panic and fear were not the drivers behind MAX inception. Greed was

How many cars had their door fall off? More general, how many of those 40k were caused by defects in the car?

When you or I wreck, how many people are injured? How much control did we have over those situations?

When a plane crashes, how many people are injured? How much control did the passengers have?

Ummm, mostly when 'you' wreck, it is definitely out of your control.

For the majority of drivers, the risk is primarily out of their control. This is because the majority of risk is due to a minority of drivers (the highly accident prone and the drunk, who are often 10x as risky or worse).

Aviation is safe, the design and production of the 737 MAX is sloppier than most current aircrafts. Better compare to other aircrafts than to cars or bicycles. ;-)

> An issue happened

IIRC three issues happened

Boeing manager I imagine?

Nope. I used to fly as a day job though. I have dreams of owning my own plane some day but it is so ridiculous to own one that that it is at best a dream. Also, I really do think Boeing is a source of issues in the aviation industry. This is all about ruts. Aviation is in a huge one right now and Boeing has a lot of the blame for creating that rut. Ruts are inevitable though for math reasons beyond this post so I don't fully blame them. I do have a prediction. The math of ruts says that the deeper the rut the more energy required to get out of it. This means that when aviation finally does break out it will be followed by massive innovation and change. I personally think that point is nearly here. Electric aviation is my bet on the source but it could be one of many other sources too. I can't wait to see it happen.

You seem to assume they will magically get out of their rut for some reason. If cutting costs is the rut boeing is in, what will cause them to get out of it? For a poorly functioning company, bankruptcy is the usual, but mcdonell douglas and boeing are strategic assets, so bankruptcy isnt allowed, and they can take our tax money and deliver death.

Aviation is in a rut. Boeing isn't all of aviation. Rut busting generally happens from something new. Electric aviation has all the hallmarks of that thing. Basically, everything about designing and operating an electric aircraft is at a lift-off point (pun only partially intended). We are nearing break-even at short distances and likely within a few years long distance aircraft will be possible. When that happens jet engines will die, quickly, and the entire economic structure of every part of aviation will change. (Don't bet on big airports and massive cattle car planes in that new world) This is a recipe for rut busting if I ever heard one. But I can (easily) be wrong and the change may come from other places. I highly doubt however that the change will come from Boeing. They aren't implementing the strategies needed to bust ruts in their practices so they aren't likely to be the source of the change and quite possibly will fail as a company when that change hits.

/end of thread

You can apply this same argument to literally fucking everything.

I disagree. Also language.

THIS EXACTLY!!

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