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Comment by nickserv | Hacker News Reader

At this point I'll pay a bit more to fly Airbus.

I said the same to my fiancée. We have gold status on Westjet (Canada’s second largest carrier and it has a hub airport close by) and I just put in the cancellation on my westjet credit card and will use up the rest of my credit. They use predominantly 737-800s and 787s in their fleet. AirCanada, their direct competitor, has a significantly larger airbus fleet. I’ll start using them from here on out just to decrease my odds of flying on a 737MAX

Rationally, this is an incredible overreaction.

The probability of encountering something like this is so astronomically low, you'd be better off buying a newer, safer car because you're more likely to be killed driving to the airport to get on a 737 MAX.

> Rationally, this is an incredible overreaction.

It's perfectly rational to decrease the probability of getting involved in such a scenario even if the probability is very low. It all depends on the (subjective) cost of this incremental improvement to OP. In addition there is the benefit of being able to send a signal, and the associated utility is likely non-zero to OP as well.

> The probability of encountering something like this is so astronomically low, you'd be better off buying a newer, safer car because you're more likely to be killed driving to the airport to get on a 737 MAX.

What if OP already has the newest, safest car?

You are statistically more likely to survive by sitting in the last row of the plane. That has a much larger effect than plane model.

I see people saying they won't fly on Boeing planes, but I see very few people saying that they are rebooking all of their tickets to fly the last row.

If you are willing to take such actions around the model of plane you fly, do you take similarly drastic actions around other more statistically dangerous risks? Do you wear a helmet in your car? Do you book the last row whenever you fly? Do you take transit instead of driving a car? Do you avoid traveling to countries with elevated traffic risks?

I get the idea of minimizing risks, but picking the model of plane you fly on has such a small marginal effect.

Although we can consider strategies for staying safe during a crash, I’d prefer to just not be in a crash at all.

Your brain is not a rational machine, and its irrational fears will bring you much more suffering, on average, than an actual accident you could have prevented because of how rare the accidents are.

Therefore it's very rational to take great care about your irrational fears and feelings.

Really? There have been plenty of high-profile crashes due to weird Airbus design decisions.

I'm thinking of this one primarily:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

>>Confused, Bonin exclaimed, "I don't have control of the airplane any more now", and two seconds later, "I don't have control of the airplane at all!"[43] Robert responded to this by saying, "controls to the left", and took over control of the aircraft.[84][45] He pushed his side-stick forward to lower the nose and recover from the stall; however, Bonin was still pulling his side-stick back. The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.<<

Airbus made some design decisions that, in hindsight, weren't great but the side sticks aren't one of them. The captain should have locked out the other controls but didn't. As Air France proved a couple years ago, even force feedback in the controls won't fix the problem of two pilots providing separate inputs and not communicating.

There is a huge difference between a failure due to a bad design detail (can be checked for and corrected typically) and an okay design with bad manufacturing (the problem could be literally everywhere).

In the worst case you might even have to disassemble and reassemble the whole plane to really make sure you are not sitting on a ticking timebomb. And this might not be straightforward given the amount of glue involved in modern airplanes.

Of "good design with shoddy implementation" and "bad design with good implementation"

- I'm not sure which is worse

Would you rather fly A) in the play where ten screws were misdesigned and later fixed or B) in the plane where the design was okay, but a unknown number of screws are missing, loose or wrong although there was a check?

There appears to be a manufacturing issue at Boeing. Missing bolts is not a design matter.

AF447 was clearly human error, not mechanical nor Airbus' fault. It was not because of bolts that were not tightened enough.

Have fun throwing money away for no reason I guess

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