Comment by miketery | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miketery | Hacker News Reader

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I spoke to someone who works there about a year ago.

I was trying to gauge how an insider viewed the Max problem related to the auto trim issue which caused two airplanes [1][2] to crash, killing 346 people. This was shortly after watching the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing [3].

The ignorance and non acceptance of fault made me cringe. I won't go into the details, but this wasn't a freak accident this was due to human decisions. They cut corners on how to modify an aircraft to compete with Airbus, and then doubled down to not pass down training to pilots on their hack of a fix, since it would be an increase in costs on their customers (i.e. the plane becomes more expensive to operate due to extra training for pilots).

I am doing my outmost to avoid any new planes from Boeing (higher risk with new airplanes). I've also simply started flying less.

The Boeing fiasco is what 2nd world / 3rd world corruption looks like in the west. profit interests above safety, and regulatory capture of the FAA. Also anti competitive or anti free trade practices by the US Department of Commerce [4].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...

All valid points, but I wonder if you've overshot your response to this (very slight) increase of risk to your personal safety.

The statistical safety of aviation is the best it has ever been - 2023 set yet another record low for commercial aviation deaths and injuries. Your automobile trip to the grocery store is far riskier.

I think the critical thing to think about is the derivative of risk. How is risk changing over time.

We are in a trend where risk is increasing.

Boeing is a major institution responsible for building critical defense and civil technology. With many jobs on the line as well.

People need to be held accountable, and we need a culture that allows people to speak up earlier and more often. Otherwise this will continue to happen and not just at Boeing but across many more critical sectors of our society.

> We are in a trend where risk is increasing

Is there any data supporting this? From what I can tell, the trend from both IATA [0] and ASN [1][2] data appears to be down. Any small YoY increase [3] in 2020 being attributable to PS752 shot down by Iran and an Embraer EMB-120RT shot down over Somalia. This downward trend seems to go for fatal and non-fatal accidents.

I completely agree with the need for oversight in this situation where corners appear to be cut and the FAA seems to be abdicating responsibility, but changing personal behavior requires some real data which I simply don't see.

[0] https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/pressroom/fact-sheet...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fatalities-from-av...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...

[3]

Agreed! You don't see the data because it's not there. That was my point in response to the original comment - even with these dramatic high-profile examples, not only is commercial aviation orders of magnitude safer vs traveling by car, but it continues to improve. Meanwhile traffic safety has stagnated and by some metrics is getting worse.

You are right. I also checked out NTSB incidents per year, also down or flat over last decade.

Miketery isn't trying to rationally adjust their risk profile based on available statistics. They are trying to punish Boeing for being a corrupt institution that corrupts other institutions.

It doesn't matter how good the safety numbers are if any player is able to cheat and blame their safety problems on someone else.

>Your automobile trip to the grocery store is far riskier.

I feel it's important to provide complete information. Flying is safer per mile traveled than driving. Driving is safer on a per-trip basis.

So if you compare your trip to the grocery store to your flight to visit extended family, the trip to your grocery store is safer. But if you compare 10,000 miles of driving back and forth to the grocery store over many trips vs a single 10,000 mile flight, the flight is safer.

> Driving is safer on a per-trip basis.

You can’t make this blanket statement and I would bet on average it’s the opposite still.

- Flying in the US is on average ~750x safer per mile than driving according to 2000-2010 data (it’s likely even larger a difference in the modern era).

- I would venture to guess that most US flights are in the 1000-2000 mile range and most US car trips are easily more than the equivalent 2-3 miles.

- Most fatalities from flying occur during takeoff and landing, so longer flights are actually safer per mile. Relating this back to the thread, the risk of catastrophic failure from your choice (or non-choice) of airframe only really affects the off-ground danger and not the higher danger you face on a taxiway/runway.

- All of these numbers are based purely on fatalities but I’m guessing your definition of “safety” includes being maimed or otherwise seriously injured. You have several orders of magnitude higher chance of being seriously injured in a car crash compared to flying since accidents in aviation are much more likely to end in death.

Depending on how you slice this problem, you will get a different result.

If you slice it up per mile traveled, airplanes win.

If you slice it up per trip taken, driving wins.

If you slice it up per hour spent traveling, driving and flying are about the same. (according to the book Freakonomics)

Flying is very safe. The statement "flying is safer than driving" is industry propaganda to help appease fears of flying. They cherry-picked the statistic that made them look best and flooded the whole world with it.

If you had a magic genie and you made your one wish to replace all passenger vehicle trips with commercial airline flights, including quick trips to the grocery store, you would kill a lot of extra people.

Other people don't just care about themselves, they care that 400 people might randomly die in the future for no valid reason.

It's a sophisticated form of empathy, not everyone growing up learns it.

Not sure what your comment really adds except a thinly veiled attack on my ability to empathize. Of course reasonable people desire increased safety all around. My point is that even with this disaster (in which nobody was harmed), aviation safety is the best it's ever been and is continuing to improve.

Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about ways to improve or hold Boeing accountable. But it's not a rational reaction to stop flying due to this incident.

It's not a rational reaction to stop flying on 737 Max, despite the daily news headlines in the New York Times over the last 3 days.

Or, it is a perfectly rational reaction for many people, it's just your theory of rationalism—based on coarse-grained probability of an event ("airlines are safer than ever"), rather than Expected Value or something else—is limited and unrealistic. Like, maybe there's some fancy Nash Equilibrium psycho economic rationality in which the empirically observed behavior is actually rational.

Now do car-centric infrastructure that kills 50k people per year.

Current stats do not predict future outcomes.

Especially since the FAA and transport dept are getting more corrupt/captured as time progresses.

There is a strong correlation between current state and future outcomes. Especially with physical objects that are, in average a decade old.

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