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Comment by h4kunamata | Hacker News Reader

Poised??

Only if a company is completely blind to buy Boeing planes in 2025! It does not matter if the places are millions of dollars cheaper, all the money spent with lawsuits and lawyers when things go sideways, plus the airline name dragged to shit, I don't think it is worth.

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The airline with the best safety record in the world, Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet (with the exception of the Lauda Airbus A320-200s) that has never had a fatal accident, despite over a 120 Boeing 737 MAX-8s currently operating.

It’s probably easy to find a subset of airlines that would work for either airline.

But that RyanAir didn’t happen to have a version of the design that was extremely unsafe doesn’t mean that the family of planes is safer than the competition. It just means that it got lucky that it didn’t have the flawed planes.

it's by design, Ryanair never buys from the factory AFAIK. They buy secondhand, they are basically scalpers of the second hand market, always on the lookout for a good deal.

That mitigates the risk of buying untested tech with first-iteration demons

That's the complete opposite of reality. Ryanair only buy new from Boeing (often being the largest customer - the MAX 8 200 being designed specifically for their needs) and have the youngest fleet of any major.

Yeah, this used to be Ryanair's thing, and they had a motley collection of weird old 737s, but they're very much all new these days.

Even that's not true. Following a meeting with Herb Kelleher, when then-CFO O'Leary became CEO in January 1994, the airline ordered its first Boeing 737s direct from Boeing and has never flown a second-hand aircraft since (unless you include the Airbus A320s from the Lauda acquisition).

> Ryanair, is an all-Boeing 737 fleet

That's probably the biggest reason for their safety record: the same plane means common maintenance, training and operations, giving much less risk.

I fly on 737 MAXes pretty often. They're still modern aircraft, and they still have a good safety record overall (consider that almost 2000 have been produced, and there have only been two crashes). Boeing will keep pumping them out and they will go on to be just as reliable as any other modern jetliner.

The flying public generally does not know or care what the model of plane they're on is. I almost never see anyone actually pull out the safety card from the seatback pocket to check. I'm not sure if it can be a reputational risk.

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