> Last year, I was flying from Seattle to New York, and I purposely scheduled myself on a non-MAX airplane. I went to the gate. I walked in, sat down and looked straight ahead, and lo and behold, there was a 737-8/737-9 safety card. So I got up and I walked off. The flight attendant didn’t want me to get off the plane. And I’m not trying to cause a scene. I just want to get off this plane, and I just don’t think it’s safe. I said I purposely scheduled myself not to fly [on a MAX].
For me, this is the biggest issue. Even if I put in the effort and choose to avoid a specific plane, they will possibly just schedule the exact plane I don't want, AND try to keep me on the plane when I find out.
If they're going to keep this plane in the air (they shouldn't at this point), they need to be required to flash a big warning to ticket holders.
fwiw I've been Boeing-negative since the first crash, and I believe I understand the details of how the aircraft was mis-designed, but I fly on the planes. I believe overall they're now about as safe as any other plane I have the option to use.
Yeah, that's where I am too. Even granting that this is probably the most dangerous airliner design in decades (and, yeah, it probably is), it still remains extremely safe in an absolute sense. If like me you're middle-aged, your chance of dying from any cause on any given day is getting up to around one in a hundred thousand or thereabouts, which is much higher the fraction of fatal crashes in the total list of MAX flights.
That's based on deaths per mile, right? I'm not sure that is the best way to compare different kinds of transport.
For an extreme example imagine a company that offers trips to the Andromeda galaxy on a fleet of starships. Each ship carries 100 passengers.
There's a 99% chance that the ship explodes when they turn on the warp drive which kills everyone on board. If the ship doesn't explode it will make it safely to the destination.
The passenger fatality rate for that service is only 0.0000000000000069 fatalities per mile. That's nearly 5 orders of magnitude lower than the rate for commercial airlines. It's over 8 orders of magnitude lower than for cars.
But I doubt many people here would consider that to actually be safer than the drive to the spaceport.
> Not to mention multiple orders of magnitude safer than driving to the airport.
I guess that's counting accidents per distance. Which is a weird metric if you compare a vehicle that is going some 560 miles per hour with one that is going not even 55 mph on average.
By that metric, using a space shuttle is safer than commuting by bicycle in Europe (which is not only extremely safe if you wear a helmet, cycling will statistically make your life longer instead of shorter, in spite of the accident risk, so large are the health advantages..)
If I need to go to a place 1600 km away and can choose between a car or a plane then fatal accident per km is a metric I would use to see what would be a probability of a fatal accident in either case.
Is it, are there any stats to support this? Driving to the airport is different from driving in general where most accidents happen when you are sleepy or close to home. Most deaths occur on two lane highways
> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has stated that more than 50 percent of all car crashes happen within 25 miles of drivers' homes.
But.. do you not do more than 50% of your driving near your home? This doesn't sound like a meaningful statistic at all.
Define close to home. The other responder noted 25 miles. Having lived in cities most my life, I don't think I have ever lived farther than 25 miles to a major airport. But a quick google search: you have somewhere between about a 1 in a 101 to a 1 in 15,000 lifetime chance of dying in a car wreck in the USA and about a 1 in 11,000,000 to 1 in 821,000,000 for lifetime chance of dying in an airplane crash. Even if you take the best odds for cars and the worst odds for airplanes, it's still multiple orders of magnitude...
flying is not safer than driving- unless you drive 500 miles with 150 other people every time you get in the car- statistics are massaged, and I think risk of accident per journey is better (and is higher in flying)
Thank the "regulatory state". The problem angle of attack widget is required to be redundant in the US - but not on all export cheaper models. This is why the crashes happened abroad.
In general, US pilots have better training and experience as well.
I doubt they ironed out the bugs/features in the process that lower the quality for a price. To undo that reorganization would reflect as a massive permanent share value reduction.
> 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:
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.
The worst part is that Senior Theatre Engineer, sees that the Theatre is on FIRE - but he calmly just exits the building... "well, at least **I** am not going to die in this dumpster fire..."
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????
He's spoken up publicly about this. He was called to testify before Congress. He started a non-profit -- The Foundation for Aviation Safety -- to raise awareness about the issue. So it's not like this guy is keeping this to himself. He's actively trying to raise awareness.
A better analogy would be him noticing that the fire extinguishers are past their expiry date, and calmly exiting the building on the basis of a slightly higher percentage chance that in case of a fire, the risks are greater.
This is what happens when you remove all accountability from the market.
Boeing used to be accountable to its competitors; now it's the last remaining American manufacturer of airliners. The c-suite often has little accountability to the board. The government treats them with kid gloves because of item #1; who else would the USAF order tankers, AWACS and other logistical aircraft from?
> The government treats them with kid gloves because of item #1; who else would the USAF order tankers, AWACS and other logistical aircraft from?
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.
Not just senators, they also had a mole in the tender process passing secrets and making decisions that Boeing then "hired" on an inflated salary. They were later convicted for fraud for their part and Boeing was fined but they still got to keep the contract.
I feel like any tender that doesn't feature an aircraft designed and made by an American company (preferably in the US) is going to fail on that quality alone.
Generally speaking, if you can, you should source items vital to your national defense/foreign policy from domestic sources. The problem emerges when there's only one domestic source and it exists for the sole purpose of delivering value to shareholders by any means necessary, with no real accountability.
I assume that airbus and Northrop Grumman teamed for those reasons. Airbus also has a major presence in Alabama if I'm not mistaken. BAE is based in London but has a lot of US defense contracts as well.
The ship of shareholder value has sailed a long time ago and won't be coming back any time soon.
The actual problem is production. Airlines don't want to buy the MAX. The issue is is, if you want to order 100 A320s or 100 A220, you are gone wait a long, long time.
So you have two options, no planes, or the 737 MAX. Those are their options.
Boeing 737 Max backlog [1] is almost as big as Airbus’s [2]. If you are going to order a hundred planes you’re going to be waiting a long time regardless. Orders have been outpacing deliveries for years.
Better engines and lighter materials were about fuel, a serious operating costs that goes into calculating the profit of a route when presuming maximally cheap consumers, AFA I understood.
I wonder how many different federal and state bureaucracies govern the manufacture & operation of commercial aircraft.
All it would take is for one of them to require senior leadership to take a certain number of flights (per year, let's say) on each new model of aircraft they ship. This would be solved immediately.
> All it would take is for one of them to require senior leadership to take a certain number of flights (per year, let's say) on each new model of aircraft they ship. This would be solved immediately.
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?
We can fix it conclusively in one fell swoop; remove the limitations on liability for executives and active shareholders.
If the executives in charge at boeing had to show up to court every time one of their planes crashed, this wouldn't be an issue. If they were facing criminal liability for negligence, you'd never even see them in court. The problems would straight-up just disappear.
Same goes for Pharma and oil execs. If your actions can be punished, you will do a better job of controlling yourself when you see dollar signs, rather than just do literally whatever and face the "worst-case" scenario of being fired with a golden parachute.
Umm if you're a Boeing expert and you don't notice you're on a Max until you've boarded and see the safety card, you're really not that much of an expert.
I'm sure he could pick it out of a lineup, but the visual differences are subtle and liveries can really change the profile of a plane (often intentionally as a sort of branding). It also might have been departing during the AM in the dark.
Or maybe he didn't pay attention because he trusted the airline to provide what they offered (naive I know), and hopefully not mistake models in their own fleet for one another.
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.
>Southwest flies them and it's nice when I'm lucky enough to get one.
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.
* Manufacturing inconsistency since the late '90's led to variance in bear strap and structural component quality (e.g., handmade parts out of tolerance yet marked "airworthy") and installation technique (e.g., beating parts to fit).
** 7[0124]7 are no longer widely flown (passenger) commercially but some are seen in small airlines in remote areas. 717 has 0 hull losses.
First, I’m not sure why you rank the original and classic 737 so high, given the fatal rudder issues, which Boeing tried to hide in a similar way as the -max saga.
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.
I'm just annoyed the price of BA flights has dramatically increased since people started paying attention to the planes being flown by each airline. Please go back to your death traps!
> Regulators ultimately approved the plane to return to the air nearly two years after the 2019 crash, but Pierson still doesn’t trust the MAX line — the modernized, *more fuel-efficient version* of Boeing’s predecessor planes.
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil age - and its end will take more than a few companies down with it, which are way too attached to the massive use of fossil fuels.
For me, this is the biggest issue. Even if I put in the effort and choose to avoid a specific plane, they will possibly just schedule the exact plane I don't want, AND try to keep me on the plane when I find out.
If they're going to keep this plane in the air (they shouldn't at this point), they need to be required to flash a big warning to ticket holders.