Every inch of every plane combed over, every engineering decision re-examined, every system and sensor double-checked for redundancy and reliability, the pilots alert for any sign of problems.
They should have been doing that since the beginning and it doesn't deserve a medal the same way we don't deserve a medal to do the job we agreed to do.
But I'm not even that optimistic:
- What's the point of combing over the plane when the microscope is broken and nobody seems to care?
- How about stop putting lipstick on a pig and retire the whole 737 entirely? A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?
Clearly people care. They are literally checking every bolt for proper torque. When they found a few undertorque bolts it becomes a national news, it gets shared so much it ended up on Hacker News, and you cared enough to comment.
It seems to me that we’re only at the start of statistical changes to the 737’s historic accident to operating hours ratio.
Do I want to be an unexpected data point or death and injury there? Not so much. A320-series or 737NGs for me for the foreseeable future I think, and those flights don’t generally cost a penny more.
I'm probably going to switch airlines to one that has a majority-Airbus or 737NG fleet unless I hear about heads rolling at Spirit.
What? The 737 NG family (along with the Airbus A320 series) have been the workhorse of short to medium haul air travel for decades now. Throwing out the 737 entirely is a nonsensical, knee-jerk reaction suffering from serious recency bias.
> A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?
And your solution to that is to throw out all the perfectly functional and flight-proven-over-decades aspects of the design and start completely fresh? If you're concerned about the process which produced the Max, what gives you any confidence that a fresh design wouldn't have 10x the issues that the Max does?
You're making the bold and naive assumption that a clean-sheet design would be bug free.
People here were saying the same thing a few weeks ago about the CVR with 2 hour storage. "It's the tech! Use cloud storage! Just buy more flash! Blah blah"
Well supposedly newer aircraft like the A350 and B787 have newer recorders with much more storage - that were later found to have software bugs in service writing garbage data. Imagine that.
So sometimes going with an old reliable design that is approved and rigorously tested for 25 years is the prudent decision when you have no requirement to upgrade.
With the current issues being manufacturing-related and not an engineering error, how would a new design help that? It's like saying let's scrap all the code because your ops team is incompetent and can't deploy VMs properly.
It already has two crashes under its belt, compared to other models that never had any crashes (like the A380).
But I guess if we put the disclaimer "From today on!" then it might be accurate.
You’re acknowledging that the safety record is just a proxy for safety. That’s what I’m saying too.
I would argue that using the number of incidents as a proxy for safety ignores the trend.
Meanwhile, a plane with a bad track record right now may never have another incident from now on.
So, the 737 MAX may have 2 crashes now... but every other major plane might have that many crashes (or more) over the next 30-40 years. This would make the 737 Max "One of the safest planes" generally speaking.
You can't come to any conclusions from simple math like that because it isn't corrected for flight hours and exposure. There are literally 10x more 737 Max's delivered so far than there are total A380s left flying, and they're constantly booked doing short to medium haul flights all day long rather than a single long-haul flight per day. And given that takeoff and landing are the riskiest phases of flight, it should also probably be corrected by flight cycles, not pure flight hours.
It's nowhere close to as simple as you make it out to be.
A380 has X flight hours, with N landings, with no crashes
737 Max has X * 10000 flight hours, with N * 10000 landings, with two crashes
No matter how you calculate it, 737 Max been through more crashes than A380, unless you ignore the previous two crashes, obviously.
Correct, but again this is too simplistic of a view and it's not a question that gives you any real information.
Consider a brand new airplane that has never flown. It's also been in zero crashes. Is it obviously safer than the 737 Max? Clearly not, so what is the real question you want to answer?
What you really want to know is, based on the existing data, how likely is it that I will crash if fly on an A380 vs a 737 Max? This is question that ultimately hinges on the predictive power of the existing data, and when you are dealing with rare events, the data volume makes a huge difference in your confidence intervals.
Without drowning the conversation in details, if you modeled crashes as a Poisson process (which may or may not be appropriate), there are absolutely situations in which a 737 Max with 2 crashes is the obvious statistical choice over an A380 with none, simply because you have so much more data for the Max that you have tight confidence intervals around the flight not ending in a crash.
With much less data on the A380s side, the confidence intervals are wider and it's possible that it's actually more likely that your A380 becomes the first crash than that you experience the third 737 Max crash!
I'm not saying this is definitively the case, it would require lots of specific data I don't have access to and a subject matter expert to sign off on the modeling, but X is not safer than Y simply because X has a fewer total number of events.
20 years later: 2005
Current consumer Windows in 2005 was late-lifecycle WinXP, so this actually checks out.
It just got a lot worse again some time after that.
It exists specifically to bypass those new requirements.
All else being equal, it will never be as safe as something designed to meet modern standards.
Relying on the constant vigilance of pilots is a non-starter due to the limits of simply being human. Which is why risk is modeled using the Swiss cheese model. Pilots have off days and cannot be relied to catch everything, especially if the issue is previously unknown.
This isn’t the first 737 Max issue so why didn’t Boeing take the opportunity then to fix everything else wrong with the plane after the MCAS issues? Especially when they had the time during the pandemic to do so. How many new final issues should we expect? 3.. 4?
I’m not saying flying is going to be drastically more dangerous, just that it’s more dangerous than it could have been.
At this point design should be scrapped. No amount of review can fix a broken concept executed by an incompetent manufacturer.
Historical note: ActiveX and Flash were never successfully made safe. They just stopped being a threat… by dying, a bit like the USSR never resolved communism, it just stopped doing it by dying.