Hacker News Reader

Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

That's true, but the question might be whether you personally should be worried if you find yourself on a 737 Max.

The first worry as an American is having a pillar of your country's economy managed by incompetents.

Sounds a lot like "yeah sure, fear over 737 Max is overblown, but the fact that I was thinking about it in the first place says something about the current state of affairs".

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

People are concerned because it seems irrefutable that there is corruption and a culture of cost cutting causing these issues.

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.

It sounds nothing like that. Boeing is going to lose deals because carriers don't want to deal with repeated groundings. The US economy will reflect that.

It doesn't matter. Nothing will change unless enough people begin voting with their feet.

Many airlines allow same day changes. If everyone scheduled on a Max reschedules for alternative flights consistently, they'll get the message soon enough. Refusing to board a Boeing plane at all is perfectly reasonable at this stage.

That's not true, and we'd get to a much, much worse place if we relied on that. The industry put the current system in place because it could see that airlines would make gruesome compromises if consumer choice was the only thing driving safety.

What do you mean "if", anyone can choose what plane to fly on anytime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com