Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Personally I am amazed just what the focus on safety has achieved.

The 737 Max was objectively surprisingly safe to fly at the time of the groundings. As in for the average flying passenger their odds were significantly higher to die of something else on the day of their flight than from a crash. But still we know how to do better and things improved.

Imagine if we treated each individual car accident as a failure and millions of like could have been saved. It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.

View on HN

x2 737 Max nose dive crashes killing all onboard within 6 months of each other is not "surprisingly safe". It's surprisingly unsafe!

Perhaps be generous with your reading of the post and consider the 737 MAX's flight record and fatality rate on a per-mile or per-passenger rate to, say, cars in the United States. Because, by the standards of other transportation methods, even the 737 MAX was very, very safe.

It is a testament to the not-yet-entirely-captured regulatory regime of international flight that the 737 MAX was not considered safe enough.

2 nose dives in 6 months apart within 2 years of first operational flights. This is not safe. This was anything but a testament to the aviation regulatory regime at the time. There was glaringly obvious engineering and procedural issues the FAA and Boeing management waived through.

Is the MAX safe now? After killing over 300 people needlessly, being grounded for 1.5y, and an extensive investigation? Yeah sure, probably.

To be saying what your saying, I think you mustn't of followed Max 8 MCAS debacle very closely, or at all.

First being X months apart isn’t how you calculate risk. What matters is total failure over total flights and there’s a gap between the last crash and the fleet being grounded where that risk kept on going.

~2 years * 2 flights per day * 365 days per year * ~350 aircraft would be 511,000 flights but it’s / 2 because aircraft where being delivered over time that’s 2 crashes per ~255,000 flights or 1 per ~127,000. (Edit: Actual numbers were less than half that at 3 crashes per 1 million flights.)

By comparison someone living to 80 is 80 * 365 days = 29,200 days. Meaning the average day would be more than 3x as risky as taking a flight on a 737 Max. It’s not actually that simple as hospitalized patients are unlikely to fly, but you get plenty of elderly people dying from hart attacks etc on aircraft.

I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft, (edit: it beat the DC-8 and 707 which was still in use at the time) but general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours not flights. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...

Right, exactly. The 737 MAX mess is bad. But the numbers remain on the side of any cleared-to-fly jetliner, even including that situation, compared to almost any other form of transportation except maybe walking.

I don't think that's an apples to apples comparison at all. An elderly person dying of natural causes is a relatively unavoidable, normal death that just happens.

People dying because a plane crashes because of the negligence and penny-pinching of the airline manufacturer is no comparable at all.

What we want to compare is the crash/fatality rate of the 737 MAX during that period with rates for other aircraft types. And I suspect we'll find the 737 MAX falling far short of the standard if we do that.

> I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft

Right, but that's the only kind of comparison that really matters.

> general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours

We're talking about commercial airline safety. It's pretty well-known that general aviation is less safe, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.

I agree that I'm safer getting into a 737 MAX than I am into a buddy's Cessna or a car or train(?) or boat or whatever, but I don't care about that. If I've chosen to fly somewhere, I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.

> I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.

So, I’ll ask you which commercial aircraft have still in use have worse safety histories. If you’re being rational clearly you should be concerned with actual risks not just media reporting.

Not that I actually mean this as personal attack on you, it’s just the kind of irrationality I am referring to here.

A car is dangerous because of traffic not because the front falls off (generally)

Current research shows ~850 people die in the US each year from mechanical failures in cars, but underperforming tires breaks etc contribute to far more.

The difference is we don’t do NTSB style investigations after a traffic accident.

The reasons we don’t do NTSB investigations is generally bc of what I said

"Traffic" is a controllable phenomenon, though. We know how to manage it and direct it to achieve our goals.

NTSB investigations of road fatalities, given teeth, would radically change how cars interact with one another.

Compared to other models the 737 MAX had horrific deaths per passenger mile after the accidents.

Much worse than other modern aircraft, but there’s many with worse track records globally. The DC-8 and 707 where still in use at the time (https://simpleflying.com/douglas-dc-8-active-2022/) and had worse track records, as did the 720 which just retired. Going back to Concord which retired in the early 2000’s and was far worse. Go back further and the prop aircraft were crazy dangerous.

Again it should be compared to modern aircraft, but this just shows how far we’ve come that the bar has moved this far.

> Again it should be compared to modern aircraft

Right, exactly, and this is why this sub-thread is so maddeningly weird. I'm going to compare the 737 MAX's safety record to that of the 737 NG, 777, 787, 757, as well as to Airbus' current-gen 3xx planes. I don't care how it compares to the DC-8 or 707 or 720 because it's exceedingly unlikely I'll ever fly on one of those.

And I'm certainly not comparing to the kinds of small planes general aviation pilots fly, and I'm not comparing against other modes of transportation. I already know that I'm safer in a plane (even in a 737 MAX) than in a car, but if I'm choosing to drive, I'm choosing to drive. If I'm choosing to fly, then then the 737 MAX's record, coupled with how poorly Boeing has handled the situation, is a big concern to me.

> is a big concern to me

And I get that, it’s obvious given the choice you pick the safer aircraft. But in a broader context the numbers are so low it’s hard to contemplate.

Currently it’s 2 per 6 million flights. Spend the cost of a flight on Powerball tickets and you’re more likely to with the jackpot than have been on one of those fatal crashes. But people still think of those risks and chances as worth thinking about, which is also why lotteries stick around.

All while the expected value as given by the competition through the A320 Neo series is zero deaths per passenger mile with more than double the fleet size.

Without diving into your bizarre claim about 737 MAX being safe...

> It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature [for cars] etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.

My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities. In most crashes, the driver(s) involved are completely sober. Making breathalyzers mandatory in cars would be awful.

> My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities

Your understanding is wrong, “About 32% of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States involve drunk drivers (with BACs of .08 g/dL or higher).”

> 737 MAX being safe

At the time it was under 1 accident per 300,000+ flights which is objectively lower than 2 other jets flying at the time. Today with 346 died in 2 crashes but another 200+ people died of medical emergencies on 737 Max flights. That’s the kind of risk people are taking, flying it’s slightly more dangerous than spending that much time sitting at home watching TV.

Surprisingly safe? Right now the 737 Max is at 1 death per 3 million trips.

The 787 Dreamliner which came out 15 years ago, has no deaths at all.

It's not good. It's about 5x as deadly as the 747-400... And it just got started.

I agree it’s bad for modern aircraft, but the Concord would be over 33 crashes per 3 million trips not 1. These numbers are just really low by any objective measurement except modern airline safety standards.

Driving 25 miles in the US is in 2022 was as dangerous on average vs a random 737 Max flight over its history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... In 2022 the average car was driven 14,500 miles or ~600 flights worth of risk, but people still really worry about it.

I don't really get why you insist on continuing to compare the 737 MAX deaths to unrelated, irrelevant other statistics.

The Concorde was a niche aircraft that hasn't flown for over 20 years. Even if it were flying today, I would still consider its safety record as in a completely separate bucket than subsonic commercial airliners.

And I don't care how the 737 MAX compares to driving. I care how it compares to other, similar, commercial aircraft in use today. If I'm going to drive, I drive. If I'm going to fly, I'm going to care about how the plane on my itinerary compares to other planes I could be sitting on with a similar itinerary.

> unrelated, irrelevant other statistics.

Risk I regularly take are hardly irrelevant to me. I consider this kind of comparison to be foundational to rational behavior.

> completely separate bucket than other subsonic commercial airliners

It didn’t have the worst history compared to other subsonic commercial airliners flying at the time when they grounded it. What it had was the potential for improvement.

If you actually care about safety knowing what the actual most dangerous aircraft are would be the rational decision. And today the 737 Max has had 20x the flights and still the same number of accidents. So if you’re concerned about safety how does it stack up?

> The 737 Max was objectively surprisingly safe to fly at the time of the groundings [...]

e.g., "Things ran great, until ... they didn't."

This gets my vote for most vacuous statement on HN this year.

The groundings happened after the 2 crashes. When the groundings happened it had the 3rd worst record of then flying large commercial jet aircraft and far from the most dangerous of commercial aircraft of all time.

Tossing that many caveats and still not being the worst aircraft is shocking to many people.

Decades of focusing on safety are being unwound because of ~decade plus (so far) focus on efficiency and environmental regulation.

You can't maximize both.

That's right. It's definitely those darn environmental regulations. Nothing at all to do with short-term profits and MBA-syndrome.

Yet you probably loved cash for clunkers.

Getting old cars off the road meaningfully improved safety even if it didn’t do much for the environment.

It actively harmed the environment. Once the thing has been manufactured doing anything less than driving it into the ground is wasting the upfront environmental cost.

Not always. The average car in Wyoming gets driven 24,000 miles a year something getting 12 MPG is burning 2,000 gallons a year directly and another 30% indirectly from manufacture transportation and extraction of oil. That’s a lot for a 5 year old car you could easily be saving 30,000+ gallons of oil.

Obviously, that’s average many cars are significantly worse. Run the numbers and swapping a high mileage but poor fuel economy car for a hybrid/EV and the payback can be a net positive.

Er, no? A program designed mostly to enrich automakers that had little or even negative environmental effect? Why would I love that?

Yeah, 50+% of new cars being SUVs (gas guzzlers, kill pedestrians, easily roll over) is because of those damn environmentalists.

And those killer Class 2b and 3+ pickups.

Manufacturers push those because of less environmental regs on those vs the perfectly viable Class 1.

Or don't try to regulate 'class 1' into something people don't want to buy.

And FYI those trucks are bigger because you need more volume and moment-arm when building them out of lighter aluminum instead of heavier steel- a direct consequence of CAFE standards.

Yea, I know why. And I'm mad about it. And I love my Class 1 and am mad they are hard to find.

I imagine we'd agree that CAFE was poorly done.

This is actually true though; it’s a case of unintended consequences.

If you regulate 'normal' cars into things people don't want to buy, don't be surprised if they want suvs or trucks instead.

If you price gasoline higher, people don't want those SUVs or trucks. Gasoline is too damn cheap in the US. Gov't regulations work on multiple levels.

Don't discount the effects of marketing here. Companies found a loophole and started marketing to exploit it.

Focus on “efficiency” and environmental regulation?

I think you mean to say cutting back on costs due to corporate greed?

What efficiency and environmental aspects of car design do you see as causes car accidents?

Dozens.

#1 most obvious atm is autostop.

Starter gives you enough juice to enter the intersection, but engine sputters and you get tboned. Same for not providing enough acceleration/ hp.

Also 1 pedal driving.

Electric cars that outweigh the 'old' 'inefficient' light trucks because batteries are heavy. Harder to stop, more wear on roads. Tires that are designed to extract breaking energy over stopping.

Lithium fires (not cause but much more dangerous result).

Aluminum crush zones in cars not big enough to have crush zones.

Every design decision is a compromise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com