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Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

Let me try a sanity check. I fly a lot for work, have eleven tickets booked now. There's nothing stopping the airline in one of those eleven cases.

For five flights, the airline would have a problem swapping out the planes because there's likely only one plane on hand at that airport at that time. For three, I think the population of the country would be quick to disapprove if the airline did it with any frequency. For two, the airline can't very well swap because it's that airline's biggest aircraft and the route is usually nearly full.

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I used to fly a lot for work. I think I encountered "equipment change"[0] maybe once a month. The idea that an airline would do it as some sort of ploy to attract passengers afraid of a particular airframe seems...unlikely.

0 - the airline term of art for this.

I think the idea that passengers would be afraid of a particular airframe is a relatively new one, so I'm not sure how useful past data is here.

It happened to the 1970 MAX 8, which was grounded permanently before Kayak could filter it, but "sales never fully recovered" as Wikipedia says. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet

Hard disagree.

First, when I was flying regularly, it was during the height of the original 737 Max scare, which also occurred within a few years of the CFM56 fan blade problems and the 737NG pickle fork fatigue cracking problem. It was a rough couple of years for the 737 family, yet I didn’t notice any serious uptick in equipment changes, and I was flying on airlines with a bunch of 737s in their fleets.

Second, the idea of some conspiracy involving falsely advertising which airframe an airline intends to use for a flight, which would involve submitting false flight plans and publishing false flight data, is patently absurd to anyone who has been exposed even as an end-user to the tech stack of the airlines, such as it is.

Between getting licensed employees to lie to the government and the airlines antiquated software, I don’t believe they could do what is being suggested, even if they wanted to.

Look up the history of the DC-10. People have been afraid of specific airframes for many decades.

I'm old enough to remember this, can confirm that the general public was afraid of the DC 10- the entire model was banned for a time when the FAA pulled its certificate. We're one deadly US crash from the end of the MAX and from a Boeing bankruptcy.

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/AvWeek%20-%2...

I used to fly a lot and it's not common in my experience though it does happen. Far more common is a flight is canceled or delayed and you have to take a different flight, possibly even on a different airline.

If someone's objective is to reduce their likelihood of flying a particular airframe, these tools can probably help albeit at the possible cost of higher prices or less convenient schedules.

But there are no ironclad guarantees if someone feels that strongly.

"the population of the country would be quick to disapprove" - now you've got me curious. Who would be disapproving? I doubt US population would care much for a Boeing Swapout, or Europe for an Airbus one. Embraer is from Brazil, but I don't think LATAM even has any. Does the Eastern world care more?

Or is it a model thing? Noise/pollution thing? Are you flying to some small island nation with special planes?

> Or is it a model thing?

Yes, this is very likely about avoiding the max 8.

737 Max in general [1], but especially recently the Max 9 [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Alaska_Airlines...

Germans would.

It's difficult to explain, you have to live here a while and experience it. Some things are tolerated, some things NOT. Occasionally flying other aircraft than planned? OK. Skewing the occasional swaps, deceptively using an aircraft type that the general public distrusts? NOT OK. That would turn niché distrust of an aircraft type into wide distrust of the airline.

Off topic but because you seem to be a frequent flyer: Have you come across a program that sustainably offsets emissions caused by one's air travel? I did the calculation the other day and a single flight to Hawaii caused as much CO2e as my entire household for a year (electricity, LNG, gas). I'm reducing flying to a minimum but I wonder if there's an actual measurable thing I could do to reduce the damage.

> For five flights, the airline would have a problem swapping out the planes because there's likely only one plane on hand at that airport at that time.

This is disingenuous at best.

Assuming you're talking about flights where an aircraft operates an outbound flight from its base to airport XXX and then an inbound flight back "home" again.

If the airline decides to swap on outbound (base-XXX) flight, you'll get exactly that aircraft on the inbound (XXX-base) flight. It won't be completely last minute, because as soon as the outbound flight is swapped you know you'll be flying that aircraft on the inbound leg, but still, unless you change your flight to another, you'll be flying the swapped aircraft nevertheless. You just get a few more hours' notice.

FWIW, exactly this happened to my wife on Friday (Lufthansa transatlantic flight scheduled as A350, operated by an A340 due to disruption in Germany earlier last week due to freezing rain). For her that was the second late aircraft swap of 4 flights in the last 14 days.

True. Sorry. GP wrote "last minute", I suppose I was a little too narrowminded. I should have considered a swap at the last hub as well.

My wife once got bumped off the last flight out of DC one night because the airline decided to switch to a smaller plane. There was no mechanical or logistical reason given.

Hopefully its rare but it can and does happen.

Obviously there were aforementioned reasons.

For technical reasons.

I'm sure the airline had a reason, though at a minimum it wasn't shared with the passengers. In all likelihood that means it wasn't a mechanical issue as those are always shared in my experience.

My best guess was that, given it was the last flight of the day, the airline decided they needed to move planes around differently for the next morning.

I'm not sure what you're saying, as you using "aforementioned" to mean "not mentioned" rather than "previously mentioned"?

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