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Comment by 627467 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe what most people are truly concerned is the Boeing Narrative?

Increasingly more than just a narrative

Do you know that or do you just feel it? If you know it, how do you know? Is that knowledge reflected in the reporting?

If you camped avherald watching for incidents, and you had an inciting incident like the door plug (indisputably a major story!) to start from, could you create the same narrative for Bombardier? I think you could.

Does it matter? At this stage it's just ridiculous that there's no more uproar towards Boeing or even direct intervention into it. Maybe because it's one of the 2 disfuntional members of the duopoly at the foundation of global air transit with massive geopolitical consequences if major changes are suggested.

It depends on whether you want to respond to stories like this with advocacy or understanding.

Definitely both. You never really want to stop understanding, but understanding in public interest cases serves to inform advocacy, and any story can cross the evidence threshold where advocacy becomes the primary concern. I think we're there with Boeing.

Did Bombardier have a scandal where cost cutting measures led to the crash of two aeroplanes and the loss of hundreds of lives?

Does it sell more ads? Does it get more eyeballs? Do people click on the story? Does the writer get promoted? A bonus? Is this a conspiracy against Boeing? Is the owner of the newspaper short Boeing and long Airbus? (those last four questions are /s the first two maybe less so.)

I used to laugh at those pushing "mainstream media" wild stories (e.g. from a certain portion of Americans) but Journalism isn't what it used to be, and maybe it was never what it used to be.

I do think that focus on Boeing is somewhat warranted but it's a good question how do we get a real unbiased picture. Especially given that accidents are a low probability event and it's hard to determine what happens by chance, within reason, or is really reflecting something concerning that has to be addressed and how it should be addressed. Your average Journalist is lacking the training and tools to think about these things and they wouldn't even know who is the right expert and what is the right data to look at.

Whether time proves that out - and whether 'more than a narrative' (meaning..safety culture) is actually related to this incident matter and are independent of it emerging as a narrative.

A very similar thing happened post Air France 447's crash into the Atlantic ocean. The reporting on it began to include any incident involving any airbus plane for quite a while until it was determined the crew was primarily at fault. There was a narrative building simply because of our tendency in media to have extreme recency bias.

Airbus has other types of disfuntions.

It's ridiculous to consider the problems with Boeing started now:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Boeing_787_Dreamliner_g...

IIRC there were other Airbus incidents and concerns. It's been so long I don't recall the details but I remember being worried about flying Airbus.

Airbus has had any number of incidents (here's one: https://safetyfirst.airbus.com/landing-with-nosewheels-at-90... ) - and for awhile their approach to autopilots was widely argued back and forth (Airbus wouldn't let you put the plane outside of the envelope, basically), and there's some disagreement on how competing sticks should be handled.

I love when I can read something and identify the guy who's been interested in the topic for decades.

Right…there are always going to be concerns, no manufacturer is perfect…some are bad, some good, soon change with time, some don’t.

What the conversation was pointing out that coverage of such issues tends to shift with the closeness in time to something really bad. If your one of your planes crashes, anytime your planes has an issue for a whole the coverage is going to be amplified. The manufacturer is irrelevant…it’s the nature of media coverage and human biases

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