Hacker News Reader

Comment by andjd | Hacker News Reader

Even if this is not a foolproof way to avoid flying on a 737 max, using it will provide a very _visible_ signal to the airlines. If they're losing ticket sales because people don't want to fly on a 737, the airlines will find a way to adapt. Even a marginal change of a few percentage points can shift a route from profitable to unprofitable.

Airbus is already outselling Boeing 2-1. If you're looking at a 5-10 year lead time anyways, they can expand production to eat further into Boeing's share if that's what the airlines demand.

View on HN

Planes get swapped out last minute pretty often, its pretty much the only way to avoid full airline meltdowns every time one flight is 60 minutes late to take off. Hell, there was no huge meltdown in the US once the 737 MAX was grounded, twice. They just swap them out, the system knows how to do it efficiently

An evil (but working) way to bypass this once 737s are flying again, would be to put a different plane with similar layout on every flight, then swap to the 737 on the itinerary the day before

Different plane, different seat, is pretty aggressively baked into TOS

You can book with Airbus-Only carriers though like JetBlue

Which is irrelevant to OP's point about airlines who currently use Boeing and Airbus

“ put a different plane with similar layout on every flight, then swap to the 737 on the itinerary the day before”

Question to True Believers in Free market, where is the line between free market and fraud?

Traveling in a different vehicle than originally intended is not fraud. Rental car companies do this all the time.

Large countries without free market capitalism have much worse safety records for flying from a historical perspective. To be clear, i’m referring to Russia and China.

In Russia they can sell you fake plastic cheese that catches fire, and you still have zero chance of winning a lawsuit. You compensation for wrongdoing or death will be minimal. So it’s more capitalist that US in this regard.

https://www.obozrevatel.com/curious/48293-zato-otechestvenny...

If I pay for beef, but you sell me pork, that’s fraud. If I pay for organic eggs, but you sell me ‘normal’ eggs, that’s fraud. Eggs are literally the same thing, but you can sell me the wrong airplane?

Why is the market freer for some than for others?

If you buy the airplane, you definitely get the airplane you bought. When you buy a ticket, you aren't buying an airplane, you're buying transportation on whatever airplane is most convenient for the airline

The contract says they just need to get you there

Does it really? Can they use an old Cessna piston powered biplane?

Usually the Cessna won’t be certified for commercial operation or make the time window but yes. A train/bus can be used as well

They are selling transportation from location A to location B via an airplane. The specific airplane, assuming it has the features the customer paid for, is more of a technicality.

It's different when it's a deliberate conspiracy to mislead consumers, especially when that consumer is choosing services that advertise that a safe vehicle will be used.

If they just stopped showing what plane would be used on the route, maybe they'd get away with using 737-MAX series.

If they say 'it's a 737-800 don't worry about it' and swap in a max every time, or 'fly with us on an airbus' and bring in a boeing death-tube after a purposefully misleading advertisement of a different service...

The line would be right at the point where the passenger has a contract that says the vehicle will not be a 737.

It's not fraud if it's in the Ts&Cs. But it is false advertising I suppose, if they advertise a flight on one aircraft _knowing_ that their plan is to swap it out, premeditation etc.

People exhibit abject apathy to these sorts of topics, lengthy Ts&Cs should be made illegal - edge cases that allow people to sue (in America I guess) companies for silly and stupid things should be dealt with by evolving the legal system, not with endless text nobody can or should have to read.

But even in an ideal no slippery Ts&Cs world, you'd still have to catch them making premeditated decisions to swap out equipment using that clause.

Here in Germany "surprising" clauses in T&C's are void in contracts with end customers as the legislators know that nobody bothers to read them

The history of which plane flew which route is public knowledge though. So sites like kayak can easily say 'this flight was an airbus 90% of the time over the last year'

"Alaska Airlines Ad - SNL" - https://youtu.be/IZf0bNDWH4s

> Airbus is already outselling Boeing 2-1.

What's your source? I looked up the quarterly earnings report, and Boeing reports 528 planes delivered in 2023 vs 488 from Airbus.

Just curious to know if you're talking dollar amount or what?

I don’t know the source or veracity but that’s deliveries vs new orders.

Planes being delivered this quarter were probably ordered before COVID hit in my understanding so any order differences would take a long time to show up in the delivery numbers

"Airbus Vs Boeing: Who Won 2023?" - https://simpleflying.com/airbus-vs-boeing-who-won-2023/

"Airbus led in terms of aircraft orders, with Reuters reporting earlier this month that the manufacturer was on track to hit an all-time year-end order record of over 1,800. Boeing's order numbers were a little further behind, with only about 1,200 net orders logged.

When it comes to aircraft delivery targets, Airbus again pulled ahead. According to the latest analysis from Reuters, the Toulouse-based manufacturer is set to come out on top, with over 720 jets projected to be delivered to customers by the end of the year. Boeing also trails in this category, with delivery targets only sitting around 500."

FT article including charts and numbers: https://www.ft.com/content/c08642f5-3aa3-447b-9028-c1c84b8e1...

Airbus is backordered for years. Boeing is the only company that's actually got the capacity to take new orders for larger airliners.

Easy to have capacity if you outsource everything to manufacturers who aren't terribly diligent bolting down planes.

Orders and deliveries are two different thing. Orders taken today are for years in the future, and deliveries made today were taken as orders years ago. This is true from Cessna up to Boeing.

>the airlines will find a way to adapt

The industry's go-to method here will probably be lawyers and take-down notices to Kayak, before they adapt.

> they can expand production

This is MUCH, (and I must reiterate) MUCH harder than it sounds.

yeah i don't want them to do this and become as bad as Boeing in the process.

> using it will provide a very _visible_ signal to the airlines. If they're losing ticket sales

They’re not. And neither is Boeing. If someone using Kayak isn’t willing to contact their elected, they’re irrelevant. (Complaints might register if you’re a frequent flier who books through the airline and gives written feedback. But I haven’t seen evidence of that yet.)

I bet a few people at Boeing got heartburn about this option being added.

> bet a few people at Boeing got heartburn about this option being added

Sure. They’re just not the revenue folks. It’s a sign of a degraded brand. Not a per se threat.

Revenue folks will care about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39106480

> They're not

Boeings stock price is down 18% this month. Sure it's not because of Kayak, this is simply another data point that consumers are wary of Boeing. Boeing is massively fucking up and even though procurement cycles are extremely long, it definitely will have an impact. They are a plane and rocket company that can't build planes or rockets

> Boeings stock price is down 18% this month

Due to the threat of damages from airlines for the cost of groundings and regulation. Not passengers who book through aggregators checking a box.

I’ll quote wand3r back to you:

> Sure it's not because of Kayak

Neither is it because consumers are wary. They may be. But not in a market-impacting way.

“I won’t fly Boeing” is 2024’s Kony 2012.

For that to be true, the whole Boeing fiasco would have to be a hoax, when it instead seems to be becoming a very concerning pattern.

I'm very happy to learn that JetBlue is AirBus-only in this thread. I already am an anxious flyer with a trip coming up in six months and it'd be a lie to say I wasn't considering just driving, even though that's statistically more dangerous, it's a situation where I have more perceived control.

> an anxious flyer with a trip coming up in six months and it'd be a lie to say I wasn't considering just driving

Sure. But someone travelling once in six months, and actively weighing flying versus driving, isn’t a market-moving customer.

I have no doubt some demand destruction is happening. But it’s not along frequent fliers. Airlines are clamouring to get their planes recertified because they know they’ll be filled.

> “I won’t fly Boeing” is 2024’s Kony 2012.

I'm going to call BS on this. Airline passengers are willing to endure all manner of indignities just to shave a few bucks off their ticket price. I'll believe Boeing is in trouble after Spirit and Ryanair go out of business.

On the other hand, Kony is apparently still walking around free. So maybe the comparison is apt.

> Boeings stock price is down 18% this month.

I hear Warren Buffet’s voice over my shoulder telling me “Boeing stock is on sale.” Boeing is a huge defense contractor that is never going away. Maybe this is the bottom of their current crisis and it is a good time to buy?

Boeing is an institution. Boeing shareholders are not. If the problems are systemic, the government can put Boeing into bankruptcy to wipe the slate clean.

just like the automobile industry...

> like the automobile industry

Yes. GM and Chrysler went bankrupt [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_re...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Chapter_11_reorgani...

A stock falling prices doesn't mean it is cheap. Buffett sold J&J just because they changed management, and he probably wasn't confortable with the new bosses. They don't have any other know drawbacks, and if you read investment media each one of them has one theory.

OTOH Buffett has said many times that stocks related with flying are usually a bad investment. And even when he invest, he says that he doesn't know why he keep doing it, as he knows it's a mistake.

And finally, he usually says that he no longer buy "cheap companies to take a last puff of a cigar butt", but "great companies that are going to do great forever".

Now do the aggregate: bad management + air stock + company in decline = not cheap for Buffett. The small investor could cash a rebound if it happens, but a behemot like B&H is not interested.

> Boeings stock price is down 18% this month.

Sounds like a good time to buy it then. There's a 0% chance the government would let Boeing go down so it will rebound just like it did with the last 737 issue a few years ago.

Just because the government won't let Boeing go bankrupt doesn't mean Boeing shares will provide the exact same return to investors no matter what. An incident like this should reduce our expectations of how much Boeing will pay investors in dividends/buybacks, so the share price should be lower.

> because the government won't let Boeing go bankrupt

This keeps being repeated. It isn’t true. The government won’t let Boeing go under. It’s fine letting it go bankrupt.

The goverment might try to give Boeing back from McDonnel/Chicago to Boeing. As it should have happened years ago already. It's critical infrastructure for them.

> it will rebound just like it did with the last 737 issue a few years ago

I’m eyeballing the boeing 5Y stock graph and I’m not seeing that rebound. It was around USD 330 when the MCAS issue grounded them. Then it was riding above 300 until the march of 2020. Collapsed there presumably due to Covid and then the highest ever it climbed was last year december with USD 260.

It seems if you bought stock just after their grounding you are very much in the red with that to this day. So where is the rebound?

Lion Air 610 crashed October 29, 2018. BA closed at $357 that day. It continued to go down to $304 on December 17th 2018. By February 25 2019 it hit a high of $440. A month later Ethiopian Airlines 302 crashed sending BA down again. The larger issue beyond this was covid sending the stock plummeting so it didn't really have a chance to rebound after the affected 737 models were recertified and not grounded anymore.

But you're coming at this from a long term investing point of view. If you're day trading or swing trading (which is likely given it's an individual stock and buying individual stocks for a long term investment is rarely a good idea) then it presents an opportunity. Of course, nothing is a sure bet in the market but seeing something like Boeing down 18% can present a short term opportunity for speculators. Would I put BA in my retirement funds? Absolutely not. Would I try to swing trade BA in a case like this? There's a good chance.

This Kayak filter is not new, it's been there for a few years (maybe they added more models, not sure, but you've been able to filter out the MAX planes since the crashes).

I sure hope a new competitor pops up. Monopolies are bad.

Popping up takes about two decades in commercial aircraft.

Lockheed might in theory be able to get back in. Not sure they would want to.

see that's why I am worried

There’s COMAC in China, not sure if that’s the competition you’re seeking

> If they're losing ticket sales because people don't want to fly on a 737, the airlines will find a way to adapt.

Yep, by suing the shit out of Kayak and anyone else doing this.

That's not going to do anything but create even more PR nightmare. If airlines sue Kayak, they'd generate a media storm which will further compel people to do it.

It's not hard to see what plane your flight is using. Super easy. Every booking site shows it.

I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive

My expectation is that its going to take a serious accident to get anything to change.

I’m unaware of a highly utilized yet significantly broken system (Tacoma Narrows anyone?) that was able to improve iteratively without catastrophic failure driving improvement (Space Shuttle)

Most human systems don’t seem to have the ability to build fourth order forecasting into system design across all individual and integrated components

The idea of a “factor of safety” seems to be just completely missing in most engineering systems because tolerances mean waste and shareholders won’t allow waste that doesn’t go into their pockets

Please qualify 'serious accident' in the wake of 2 crashes and a decompression event forcing landing.

Those two accidents didn't "happen here" and our news is very isolated from the rest of the world. Maybe that's what he means?

My definition:

Everyone on the plane has to die in a way that the plurality of citizens are horrified enough that they can put public pressure on a public figure powerful enough to force structural change

This is the same idea as the cynical idea of “taking advantage of a crisis”

What I’m not saying here is that this is what should happen or that this is how things should happen in a normative way. I’m simply describing that humans make progress almost exclusively in response to disaster rather than proactively preventing it.

So watching the FAA lurch to life after it delegated/abandoned its regulatory mission isn't a horrified response?

Or is that business as usual in your estimation?

I’m not really aware of any meaningful change happening so no, seems to be business as usual

> plurality of citizens are horrified enough that they can put public pressure on a public figure powerful enough to force structural change

So basically only 9/11 or Perl Harbour would qualify.

Great Depression takes the cake here

Pearl Harbor for sure

Ozone Layer hole and the subsequent Montreal Protocol (banning of CFC) was notable in its speed and efficacy

9/11 is questionable - the response was bad and counter productive so I’d say no it doesn’t count

No one died or was seriously injured in the decompression event. But people die in car wrecks on the highway everyday

How does PTSD factor into your empathy radar? Is that not a serious injury and impediment to a life lived unabated?

>>I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive

50 years ago civilian aircraft deaths were, on average, 400% higher per year than now. You might want to rethink your comparison; it has never been safer to fly commercial airlines.

IIRC, less than 5 people have died in the USA in commercial airline crashes since 2010.

I'd be willing to bet it was safer to fly right before the 737 MAX was introduced than right now.

Just a gut feeling.

Gut feelings are anxieties and biases.

...and in this case provably wrong - there have been (in the USA) just 2 deaths, in all of commercial aviation, since the 737-max was introduced in 2015 - thats 2 deaths in 9 years.

In the 9 years before (2014 back to 2006) that there were ~100 deaths, so 5000% higher deaths in the 9 years before the 737Max was introduced - and even that is very, very low historically.

(and for the record, not claiming the 737Max is directly responsible for those lower deaths, just that in general - and across the board - aviation has never been safer than it is now).

In 2015 and 2016 there were 0 deliveries of 737 Max's. They were also grounded for a good part of 2019 and you are only counting one country, so your statistics should be revised.

Covid makes for a very strange divot in all aviation statistics.

Maybe a better way to state my position is that, while it is currently the safest time to fly, I expect regression to the mean for airline safety over the next several decades. To such a degree that the increase in fatality risk is going to go up not down

Very unsafe? In the past 14 years there have been 72 fatalities involving US Air Carriers, out of around 250 million flight hours flown[1]. That’s fewer fatalities in 14 years than there are US motor vehicle fatalities in a single day (on average).

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/StatisticalReviews/Pages/CivilAv...

Humans are bad at statistics. For example the incident at three mile island in 1979 didn't kill anyone, but the accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, and accelerated the decline of efforts to build new reactors.

requiring events to kill anyone as evidence of danger of death is a foolish standard, obviously.

People are "bad at statistics" in the sense that the very real evidence coming from, e.g. 3 mile, is hard to bring into statistical models appropriately, not in the sense that there was no evidence there.

So what are you basing it on if not deaths/flight hours

Scary news reports per minute

For Three Mile, indeed there is some disagreement on the long-term non-fatal health effects. That any causal effect is unclear does not mean it does not exist, but does suggest that, even if it does, it is likely small. (Admittedly, I have not done a thorough review of the data on this). Nevertheless, your point carries to the true comparison of nuclear power: fossil fuel power and its long-term economic and health impact.

For the airline risk example: US Airline Carriers in past 14 years: 268 serious injuries (same source as above). Depending on the year, that’s about the same or less than the number of road traffic related injuries in the US in just one hour (on average)[1].

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191900/road-traffic-rela...

Don’t underestimate the direct effects.

Three mile island directly cost well over 1 billion in 1979 dollars (2+B today) just in terms of destroyed assets and initial cleanup costs. The wider impact was even more expensive.

Such a visible failure changed the risk/reward calculations which then hurt the nuclear industry quite a bit. We did keep building US nuclear reactors afterwards, but they were never that profitable in the first place making the industry very sensitive to disruption.

Timeline of US reactor construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#/me...

Looks like Chernobyl really killed nuclear.

Compare active reactors + reactors in construction during three mile island vs where nuclear production stabilized.

Things stabilizing like that is very suspect. It probably has to do with capacity factors and the long lead time, but I wouldn’t assume there’s no correlation.

Yeah, I'm not saying there's no correlation, just that you see the full-on halt kick in after Chernobyl. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Even though our reactors were very different from Chernobyl, the incident was so much more extreme and the distinctions were probably largely lost to the general public.

You have it backwards. Industries that are profitable are subject to disruption.

Wrong kind of disruption. If your profit margins are 0.5% then a tiny dip in demand, 2% spike in interest rates, or spike in steel costs etc can be devastating.

If you’re a software company with profit margins over 40% then you don’t care much about rent etc.

The problem as I see it is that the costs of Three Mile are acute and fairly direct. Whereas fossil fuel power may have even an even bigger cost (from the environmental impact), but as they are slow, chronic, and indirect, they’re easily overlooked.

Humans just seem to be disproportionately responsive to rare, acute events.

To "slow, chronic, and indirect", I would also add "spanning most of a human lifespan." For these kinds of things we often don't realize something is brand new as of our lifetime. Said in another way, if something changes in our life when we are 2, we will tend to think that thing was always that way, even though it is very recent.

An example, forest fires in the West (coast US). They have always been around. So, many say, nothing new here. Yet, we don't quite grok that they are 10x worse than 50 years ago [1]. Thus, if you look at it across multiple human lifetimes we can see there is a radical difference. Across one lifetime and it might not seem like it is so different.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/24/climate/fires... (has several graphs that indicate magnitude more fire & magnitude more burn area)

Those differences need to be prices in via Coal taxes or the market doesn’t care.

However, the market does care if something has proven to be a risky bet. Meltdowns involve actual money on the line.

This question sort of answers itself, but why skirt the real concern, just add a "Chance of crashing" filter to the flight search? Bonus jobs for data scientists and takes the consumer out of the odds calculation.

the impact of violence vs other causes of death is similar, 9/11 killed 3K people and we went to war for 20 years and spent trillions as a result. Meanwhile 100K Americans died from opioids last year and the government does nothing

> I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive

General aviation* is expensive and dramatically less safe than commercial aviation. I'm not sure what that has to do with Kayak's offering model-filtering in their UI (Kayak is selling commercial aviation tickets, which has nothing to do with general aviation).

* - Civil aviation, minus commercial air carrier minus aerial application, pipeline patrol, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_aviation

General aviation is and always has been unsafe, due to the prevalence of single engine aircraft and unskilled pilots.

Did you mean commercial aviation?

Yeah I did. I’m a private pilot so sometimes i mix em up. Thanks

Commercial aviation is incredibly save. Yes there are accidents, but there are accidents in every human system. Commercial aviation is the safest way to travel even with all the mistakes Boeing has been making lately.

You are far more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com