Taking delivery of old orders is one thing, since they can't really back out of those, but placing new orders implies that some level of trust remains for this company, and I just don't see how that makes any sense at all?
Are they? Boeing had almost nine hundred 737 MAX orders in 2023; in 2024 they have 66:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
Three hundred 787 orders in 2023; 10 in 2024:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_787_orders_and_...
One hundred 777s in 2023, twenty-seven in 2024:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_777_orders_and_...
Their numbers are down bigly.
And who else are you going to order from? Airbus? How much capacity do they have to build more?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_family_...
1,689 orders in 2023, 154 in 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A220_orders_and...
141 orders in 2023, negative 12 in 2024.
As a result, I presume the explanation is less "no Boeing" and more something like "orders have a reporting lag" or "2023 was a big year for airlines post-COVID".
My mind immediately goes to whether airlines are quietly preparing for an expected downturn, or if airlines aren't selling to corporations because they're selling to governments and militaries. That could definitely be my own preconceptions sneaking in though.
the obvious choice is not to order rather than ordering faulty places because your greeds tells you that risking people's safety is worth the money you will get
2) Your fleet may mostly be formed by Boeing airplanes, having all of those move to Airbus airplanes is also a safety issue. Pilots have to re-learn and even forget things they accrued and evolved to react instantly for decades. At some point you need to weigh the odds of increasing human error vs relatively safer Airbus alternative
3) Maintenance and logistics conversion would be a huge pain
4) If you order an A320 today, you're gonna get it no sooner than in a decade. Not taking your ordered Max is really not a smart idea.
5) Boeing hasn't received a single new order for max airplanes in two months
Except fatalities.
737 Maxes have flown more than a couple of million of flights, at least, since they entered service, that puts their fatal incident rate at similar levels of the A320.
The only two incidents, also, as you know, were related and both happened 5+ years ago.
The A320neo entered service in 2016 and has over 3,000 of the type in service and has zero fatal accidents involving passengers or flight crew (there have been five fatalities from two incidents involving runway incursions by ground crew). There have been no serious in-flight incidents.
The 737max was introduced in 2017 and has over 1500 in service, about half of the airbus A320 neo. It has had two fatal accidents resulting in 346 fatalities and one serious in-flight incident. The record is not great.
If you want to compare all 737 models back to the first flight of the A320 I’m pretty sure it’ll be closer, but flying is much safer than it was even with the 737max.
However I do believe that Boeing will resolve the issues. It will take time to fix the culture that resulted caused them though.
That's easy, the 737 has a better record. The 737NG in particular has arguably the best safety record of any airliner ever produced.
It seems like this would be a pretty big hint that you're looking at statistics the wrong way. When a single fatal crash can make your airliner the 'most dangerous statistically' then perhaps that's not a good airliner to use in any kind of comparison because the number of total flights is way too low to be meaningful.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/11/boeing-sa...
New orders are significantly down.
Old orders will rarely be cancelled even if possible simply because there's no alternative. Airbus's backlog is longer than Boeing's. And while currently Airbus's manufacturing rate is much higher currently, it won't make a difference if everybody switches to Airbus.
For Airbus, too.
They just need to fix the bad part issues they seem to have.
Personally, I would fly on a Max 8 again.
But again, looking at bigger perspective, Southwest Airlines operates an all-Boeing fleet of 800+ airlines doing 4000+ flights per day. About a million and a half flights per year. And in their 50+ years of operation, there have been 4 deaths associated with Southwest flights, 1 of which was a suicide where a guy walked onto a runway and another was an unruly passenger who tried to storm a cockpit.
I don't want to let Boeing off the hook - their recent cock-ups absolutely seem to indicate cultural problems that need to be fixed so that quality can improve rather than continue to slide. But honestly, getting on a 737 Max to go on a trip still seems way safer than hopping on the highway.
And, while Boeing looks bad, when sales go down, corporations adapt.
The pesky customers want "Safety", and we aren't selling "Safety", got to get some of this "Safety". Guess we better do some re-orgs, some focus groups, some training to make sure everyone knows "Safety" is important. Maybe throw in some training on "Quality".
They'll adapt.
Gah hahahaha.
Oh God, don't make me laugh that hard. One does not merely add some more Quality to a product as if it were flour in a cooking recipe. Quality is literally the single most difficult to add back to something once you've decided to skimp on it; as quality itself is a compound output. It's a result of having your entire goddamn company devoted to the goal of creating a quantitatively superior product.
Boeing decided it was time to not sweat the package, and to turn itself into a financial product. As it turns out; it's pretty much impossible to do one while not doing the other...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
What I mean is, you are assuming now (you probably wouldn't have a year ago) that this Dutch Roll incident was caused by the plane being Boeing. So, why would anyone even buy a Boeing at this point?
But what indication is there of that this Dutch Roll incident was caused by the plane being Boeing? As far as I can tell, Dutch Roll is a phenomena whose causes aren't fully understood, that rarely, but occasionally, happens to planes, not just to Boeing planes.
But now that we are collectively bought-in on a Boeing hate-fest (and they certainly seem to have brought it on themselves, no doubt!), we just knee-jerk apply the cause to any issue seen as being explained by the aircraft being Boeing.
You can illustrate this clearly with some sort of reductio ad absurdum. Imagine we have an interstellar ship traveling many trillions of miles, but that blows up 90% of the time. If you look at it in terms of this same deaths/mile metric it'd still be way safer than driving, but obviously it isn't - which emphasizes that the metric is misleading.
The most reasonable way would be safety per average trip, with some sort of multiplier for particularly long or particularly short trips. After all that's exactly what people think these numbers mean, even though they most certainly don't.
IATA reports 1.19 accidents per million flights in the 2019-2023 years. [1] Your turn to find a comparable number for road vehicles.
1: https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2024-releases/2024-02-28-0...
So on a first level analysis, vehicles are slightly safer than jets on a trip for trip basis. But the math I'm doing dramatically understates the actual difference, because the mortality numbers I'm using for vehicles are per person, not per fatal incident. In other words 1 PERSON dies per 5.17 million vehicle trips. And I'm comparing that against one entire JET 'dying' per 4.94 million flights, which is generally going to have tens to hundreds of people on it. If you do an apples to apples comparison, vehicles would be some orders of magnitude safer than jets, trip for trip.
Of course ideal would be to ignore population and just look at car incidents with at least 1 fatality vs plane incidents with at least 1 fatality, but I can't find those stats unfortunately.
[1] - https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-moto...
[2] - https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
No my dude. You said "These numbers are always pretty BSy because the big dangers in flight are take-off and landing." That is a statement about these kind of statistics in general, not in specific to Boeings. But sure. How many accidents had Boeing during take-off or landing?
> You're also misreading your stats (that's per sector, not per million)
Negative. To quote "All accident rate (accidents per one million flights)" What is even per sector?
> Your site
Not my site? Are you arguing from good faith here?
> If you do an apples to apples comparison, vehicles would be some orders of magnitude safer than jets, trip for trip.
I will let everyone know who is considering commuting by jet twice a day for 14.6 miles.
Imagine we're comparing a long flight thousands of miles around the world to a short little domestic flight between a couple of relatively nearby cities. Which flight do you expect to get the latest, most stable, and secure plane? Most of everybody would expect it to be the international flight. In reality, it's the short little domestic flight. The reason is that with planes a trip that goes on for thousands of miles is, in general, almost exactly as dangerous as the briefest of trips imaginable. Take off, landing, and pressurization are where basically all the risk (and wear and tear) come into play. So your little plane going on a hundred mile voyage is going to be exposed to far greater risks than the one traveling thousands of miles. It's why the stats, as typically offered - deaths/mile, are extremely disingenuous. And they serve very little purpose other than to mislead those who don't know better, which is the overwhelming majority of people.
As for the exact numbers, reread your own source, and include the entire quote. You're having a failure where you keep misreading something the same way. Keep in mind you quoted 1.19 for 2019-2023.
And you are having a failure where you are not quoting what you think I'm misreading. Look at the table. First column labeled "ACCIDENT TYPE". Second row first column "All accident rate (accidents per one million flights)". Last column labeled "5-YEAR AVERAGE (2019-2023)" The data in second row last column "1.19 (1 accident every 0.88 million flights)".
Go ahead and tell me where do you see "per sector" in any of that?
---
The all accident rate was 0.80 per million sectors in 2023 (one accident for every 1.26 million flights), an improvement from 1.30 in 2022 and the lowest rate in over a decade. This rate outperformed the five-year (2019-2023) rolling average of 1.19 (an average one accident for every 880,293 flights).
---
So in the table their "All accident rate (accidents per one million flights)" row is giving you two different pieces of the data. The first is accident rate (which is per million sectors) and then in the parenthesis is the accidents per million flights. And actually even that's wrong, since they actually give you flights per accident -- whoever put that table together clearly was not big on the whole accuracy thing.
So when you see "1.19 (1 accident every 0.88 million flights)" that means the rate per million sectors is 1.19, and the rate per million flights is 1/0.88 = 1.14.
That works in your favor, though. The 737NG has a terrific record, probably the best in the industry. Including all airplanes drives the crash rate higher, which will help your comparison with other modes of travel.
Let's reductio ad absurdum this. I take my 1000CC motorcycle around the block every 10 minutes for a year. Safest transportation mode on the planet! Way safer than walking (which I did once down the middle of a highway, blindfolded)
The simple reality is that the airlines (and their shareholders) consider a) and b) to be greater risks than the safety record of Boeing planes. Given the parameters they have they’re not wrong. Air travel is still incredibly safe, even if these Boeing incidents make it ever so slightly less safe. To be blunt, the market can absorb it and individual airlines have little motivation to change. If there is going to be a big change it’ll need to come from the FAA.