Senior Boeing employee on why he won't fly a MAX: Just Get me Off This Plane

> Four airlines in the U.S. fly MAX planes: Alaska, American, United and Southwest.

So: Don't fly those airlines. It is your responsibility to punish them.

(It is also the FAA's responsibility to regulate them, but it's increasingly clear that every regulator is captured. So I'll focus on what I can control.)

And since there was an Ethiopian airlines crash, clearly there are also non-US airlines using the MAX, so let's dig more... This website appears to have done the research:

https://www.alternativeairlines.com/airlines-not-flying-boei...

This should help us boycott the correct airlines.

...

Unfortunately, the route I use most frequently is serviced almost exclusively by one of these bad airlines. I do have some alternatives if I'm willing to take more time though. I guess, if I want to put my money where my mouth is, I will need to start using those alternatives.

EDIT:

WHAT THE FUCK:???

>>>It's up to the public whether to act on this knowledge.

Its up to the public that the engineer knows what hes talking about????

THE PUBLIC should be responsible for your calculations????

JERASUS EFFSINGS CKNSDHIST@!

The military tried to order tankers from a different manufacturer, but Boeing owned enough senators to put the kibosh on that and make them re-run the competition.

So you have two options, no planes, or the 737 MAX. Those are their options.

They've done this in the past after the prior -MAX issues. It's a pretty meaningless gesture and it can be tasteless at times ("my flight went fine unlike those victims!"). It is very rare for these defect(s) to cause malfunctions during any given flight. The likelihood becomes significant when many of these planes are making many flights every day.

Test pilots aren't employees (or at last not exactly) that would have an agenda, nor are they evil (at least on average I suppose), so any program manager with a vested interest in the plane would happily fly on any that leave the flightline. Any manager that would purposefully conceal or downplay a defect obviously believes the plane is "safe enough" to fly.

The issue lies in "safe enough". Any production aircraft is safe enough to fly according to someone. Program managers know the BIG money involved has already been spent ten times over, so they might draw their "safe enough" line with a tiny bit of leeway because hey, what are the odds?

Anyone traveling directly from Seattle to the east coast probably makes that trip often, which is an excruciating 4-5 hours aboard a plane taking you 3 hours into the future. Maybe he did notice the plane roll up to the gate, and that it was different from the plane he used as criteria for his purchase, and that it was instead the exact plane he outspokenly refuses to fly on. He could go quietly complain to the desk for a voucher or something else that would get brushed away. Or he could board with intent to vocally complain that he and passengers are on a 737 MAX, the one that keeps showing up in the news, not a 737 like folks thought they were purchasing and is not obvious to laymen.

It's also highly unusual for that flight to not be a 737 (or AirBus equivalent). Airlines with Boeing fleet that offer direct flights between Seattle and the east coast are almost exclusively using 737s on those routes. The plane was designed for that unique range and capacity, so those margins are just about the only thing that keeps those direct flights running.

Why? Ignoring the safety concerns I don't really see an advantage to take a MAX over another plane from a passenger POV. At least with an A350 or 787 you get a more comfortable flight due to the higher pressure and humidity within the plane, but the 737 MAX is just a stretched 737 to fit in more people.

Second, the 717 is actually just a renamed DC-9, and DC-9’s (and the MD-80 series, which are also renamed DC-9’s) certainly have had hull losses and fatalities. They all share the same type certificate, so it’s a bit meaningless to slice out the accidental statistics of 717’s from the rest of the production.

A major reason the 717 had so few accidents is that relatively few of them were sold as “717”s and the design was fairly mature and thoroughly debugged by the time they were marketed as 717’s.

So, everyone's forgotten about that uncommanded rudder hard-over issue from a couple of decades ago? I can only wonder what kind of noise that would have made were it happening now, as that root cause was far harder to track down.