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FrustratedMonky

Door blow out

Engine on Fire

'Many loose bolts'.

etc..

Now This.

Have a flight in couple weeks? Time to worry?

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If you're on a 737-max-anything, then worry a _tiny_ bit, otherwise, no. All their other planes have excellent safety records.

For comparison, Russia had a 2.29 fatal accidents/million departures safety rating in 2021, which is terrible, worst of all operating regions. 737-maxes had a 3.08 in 2019 when they got grounded. Every other plane in North America is averaging about 0.20 right now.

Granted, the 737-max's stat is based on a fairly low number of crashes. Regardless, the odds of a fatal crash are still vanishingly low on any given trip.

I don't know if it's time to worry, but consider my experience last week on a 737-MAX9 on an Alaska Air flight. Alaska Air is advertising on their website the following:

"Systemwide flexible travel policy Due to Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft inspections, we are offering a flexible travel policy if you would like to change or cancel your flight."

My wife and I did not take them up on that last week. Instead, we took the flight. Remember the days when you'd occasionally only have two passengers in a three-seat row? Yeah, those were the days, weren't they? How about if not only did my wife and I have the (exit) row to ourselves, there were entire rows that were empty. A guy one row ahead of us had the row to himself, and at the back of the plane there were probably three completely empty rows. Plenty of others had either a row to themselves, or just two people in the row. We were flying like it's 1999.

Worried? Nah, we weren't. Though I will point out that I only took my seatbelt off to get up and hit the head. I wasn't worried, but I'm not stupid.

No, because the problems aren't worse than they were a few months ago before anyone was re-inspecting things for this.

And you wouldn't have worried about this months ago, so there is no reason your worry should be greater now.

If anything your worry now should be less since they are actually double checking these things now.

well technically.

We didn't find out about these things because of increased inspections.

We found out because it was in the news when there was videos of a door blown off, then a few days later an engine fire.

THEN, they started more inspections.

So, it seems more like a trend, where there were more and more problems until they piled up far enough to breach the surface.

So how many haven't been found, the ice-burg below the surface.

My only point was that hearing about the issues found by more inspections shouldn't change your mind about the safety because performing more inspections and reporting on the findings doesn't reduce the safety of what it already was (what you were presumably already OK with before simply hearing about the new inspections and issues found).

Your logic is absurd. We shouldn't worry because we weren't worrying before we knew the problem existed? Now we are educated about the problem what are we supposed to do? Put our heads in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist??

We weren't OK before, we were ignorant.

Nobody is saying to put your head in the sand.

But I don't see how the planes are any less safe than they were months ago.

If anything they are safer now that the issues are being fixed.

So if they aren't any less safe now, and I was willing to fly in one then, then logically I should be willing to fly in one now. That's how it seems to me at least.

Think we are arguing about a reaction to imperfect information, verus actual safety.

Yes, today, with increased inspections, planes are 'safer' than they were. If we take a baseline a few months ago, they are 'safer' now.

But

In the past, we had imperfect information about how worried we should have been. So a few months ago 'before knowing about defects' we weren't worried enough.

We didn't know how worried we should have been. Now that we know about defects, we are more worried. Even thought over-all safety is probably better.

EDIT: And, now that we see how much 'cost pressure' has lead to safety cuts, I think we can be more worried now, because we can see how much cost trumps safety. Those cost pressures will remain once the current crisis is past.

I guess I don't think we (travelers) weren't worried enough.

Looking at the overall historical safety and incident records it seems like it was still very safe. Less safe than we thought, sure, but still quite safe, safe enough to not be actively worried as simple travelers, at least in my opinion.

So for me if there were so few incidents with the unknown problems, then I don't see why I should be worried now that they know about and are checking and fixing the problem and even other problems.

No... It's hard to overstate how much safer flying (in well regulated countries especially) is than any other point in aviation history. It's incredible to look at the lists of accidents and incidents with aircraft from the 60s, 70s etc. - today the 737 Max is a huge outlier with the number of fatalities in two hull loss accidents, but if this was the 70s we'd probably have expected almost any model of plane to have had at least three or four similar accidents and a bunch more minor ones in the time the Max been around.

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