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Comment by PedroBatista | Hacker News Reader

We wish..

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!" ?

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> and retire the whole 737 entirely

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.

> How about stop putting lipstick on a pig and retire the whole 737 entirely?

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?

> nobody seems to care?

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.

I'll never consider this plane safe unless Boeing fixes the process the yielded these systemic quality problems.

So your assesment of how safe the plane is doesn't depend on anything except Boeing's process? For example, you don't care about the number of accidents per operating hours?

But that is highly likely to be a trailing indicator. Some things like door plug blowouts apparently happen a few months after poor manufacturing processes occur, the question is how long do loose screws, cable frictions, or incorrectly bored holes in pressure bulkheads take to manifest?

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.

Yeah it is. They have a huge manufacturing process problem and until they fix that they're just rolling the dice hoping the swiss cheese doesn't line up.

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.

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