Now I'm worried about boarding any 737
[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...
Given how much of its functionality is embedded in electronics and software, how can you know? Would a passenger be able to recognize if it suffered from the same flaws as the 737 MAX?
The 737 MAX and the 787 Dreamliner were both designed after the acquisition and are full of issues. The 777 predates that, so it's fine.
Doubt it.
For you perhaps, but the short memory of the general public, rebranding, and Boeing rebates (probably some generous amounts of heavy wine'n'dine), mean they will definitively show up at an airport near you.
What low-cost carriers in the US fly Airbus exclusively? There's Spirit, which is notoriously horrible, and I saw someone mention JetBlue elsewhere in this thread. Any others?
Spirit also gets an unnecessarily bad rap. Yes, their seats are tight, but they fly very few true long-haul flights, so it's not that big of a deal, and the Big Front Seat is probably the best value "premium economy" experience in the US. Prices for food and drinks in flight are more reasonable than they would be in the airport. In my experience, the only really unpleasant things about flying Spirit are:
1. Long lines to check bags (solution: don't check a bag, just pay the $5 extra to carry it on)
2. Other passengers that disregard plane etiquette (listening to music without headphones, etc.) or just complain a lot.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/allegiant-air-the-budget-airlin...
In 2010, Al Jazeera presented an investigative report about Boeing subcontractor Ducommun's substandard manufacturing practices for critical support structural ribs and door frames that Boeing installed on 737 NG (-600/-700/-800/-900) airframes and management subsequently covered up an internal safety investigation. As a direct consequence of these choices, several 737 NG's have broken up on hard landing and runway overruns, killing passengers, whereas in the past, fuselages survived intact under similar conditions.
Also, the 787 is a disaster waiting to happen.. anyone who steps foot on this clusterF deserves what they get.
Comparing the two is drawing a false equivalence. Yes, flying and driving are both modes of transportation, but they're radically different in terms of methodology.
Compare pilots to drivers or cars to planes.
I would guess that somewhere north of 90% of crashes are human error mainly or completely.
On the ground, it's the opposite. There's very little process around driving your car, but there's a lot of infrastructure. How roads and intersections are built, what signage is used and where, how and how much different modes are protected and isolated from each other, all have an enormous impact on road safety.
This is one of the key tenets of "Vision Zero", that blaming driver error is not an acceptable answer for why people die on the road. People make mistakes all the time, including while driving, and we have a moral responsibility to design systems and infrastructure that eliminate or minimize human death and suffering, even in the face of human error.
But if you die, it doesn't matter whether it's human error or not, so it might be better to compare overall risk from all causes?
/s
Ridiculous.
People have a short memory and a strong affect toward symbolism.
Marketing just pulls the desired psychological tricks to reach their objective.
It works. Just like lying in politics works. Just like making corporate PR statements work. Just like in your face ads work. Just like showing boobs work.
It will work as long as people are cruising in their life instead of trying to build it. It will keep working because it goes with the flow of our internal mechanisms, and it takes conscious efforts to not be influenced by it. And it will keep being used because the value of doing so it far superior than the cost.
( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Fouch%C3%A9 and https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Maurice_de_Talleyrand-... )
Just think about the "Sony Rootkit" or countless of other fiascos that have happened over time. Society forgets so easily.
The important part is how we react to those people. In that sense, I feel we are more responsible for the problem than them. Indeed, why blame a tornado ? Better learn to behave in case of one, and make houses the proper way.
So I don't think we should focus on the immorality as much as we should make sure we create generations of persons than know how to deal with it: remember bad deeds, detect manipulations, choose what they consume, etc.
Just a few examples: https://www.businessinsider.com/7-companies-that-changed-nam...
Boeing exhibits all the schizophrenic behaviour we come to expect from business as it stands in this age. And they will continue to do so as long as it maximises shareholder value, which is the only reason they exist.
Sure, corp-cucks will blab on about social license and the like, but look at how the market judged them: A $100 drop from $450 to $350, and that's it. Two planes drop from the sky, killing ~350 people, subsequent investigations reveals Boeing fired their skilled engineers and to this day have not fixed their software. The share price barely moves. Why the fuck should they change anything ?
The definition of fraud is as follows:
Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
What Boeing is doing meets that definition of fraud if you ask me.
1. Boeing-Ryanair: both parties know this plane has been rebadged and have agreed to it. There is no deception.
2. Ryanair-customer: one party has rebadged a known faulty product, claiming it to be something else. There is deception on the part of Ryanair, the entity financially benefiting from the transaction.
Maybe consider that everything the 737 MAX 8 touches dies. Airlines, flyers, shareholders.
Boeing made this dumpster fire and now they should sleep in it. I'm with other posters here who will now avoid any 737. Lots of fish in the sea, lots of planes in the sky.
Well this sure solves that problem in an anti-customer way.
Your partner doesn't want want duck for dinner? Order it anyways and tell them it isn't duck. If you make up a new word for duck, it's not lying and you're a good partner. /s
People thought they were great and prefered them over beef, untill they found out it was horse.
Its all in the mind!
(Steak doesn’t kill you though, airplanes do)
Edit: resto is called Piet de Leeuw
Remember, when the first plane crashed, they tried to blame the pilots. Then the second plane crashed, and they continued to insist it was safe. All the other nations' air safety agencies had to ground the plane before the FAA would. Then after that they continued to refuse to admit fault, they wanted to make a small, lame patch to the MCAS software instead of making it triply redundant, they didn't want to retrain pilots, I could go on and on. In short, they didn't really want to fix the issue completely, they just wanted to gloss over it and get the planes back in the air as quickly and cheaply as they could, which proves my original point: safety is not a priority with Boeing today. And they certainly haven't fixed their internal management or engineering to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again.
So why would you trust this company at all at this point?
Doesn't mean I trust Boeing, I trust market force, I trust that other people will keep the uproar to keep airline in check.
I agree with you, and expect that engineers/regulators to do their jobs. But I think this is a form of the bystander effect. [1] I'm not sure what we can do proactively except be cognizant of what we choose to ride in.
https://www.themilitant.com/1997/617/617_34.html http://old.seattletimes.com/news/local/737/part04/
Their best selling plane in history is also that which carries the most blatant stain of corruption and negligence. If Boeing gets away with this type of behavior, we really do essentially break the system by acknowledging that as long as you get big enough, it's totally fine to cheat; even in a life/safety critical industrial vertical. Sure, the PR will suck, but the network effects will ensure you keep rolling unharmed because you're too big to be allowed to fail.
This is way more than any one person's convenience at stake. This is any hint of actual systemic integrity that is at jeopardy.
This is the danger of excessive centralization and consolidation. Yes, synergy happens, and money gets unlocked, but the consequences of failure also get amplified, becoming of such a scale the entire infrastructure starts getting jeopardized. More seperate, redundant pieces at least ensures there is buffer to keep some semblance of stability in case of catastrophic failure of one particular agent in the system. When the system is essentially one agent, you're flying on a prayer nothing goes wrong. When you only have two realistic options, it isn't much better.
Of course, in the US, we do the exact opposite by going for the candidates that harp on about waste and cutting down government in favor of free market solutions even when they aren't tenable. Unless of course, it's a terrorist attack, then we can unleash the floodgates of taxpayer funds to agencies tasked with violating our civil liberties.
Would that bring down the trust for low-cost airlines too?
Maybe cheap tickets can get associated with low security?
"Yeah, don't buy that ticket they are probably using the crashy plane"
The name is not new but still the motive is unclear...
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/new-name-for-ryan...
The new name is about as humdrum and forgettable as you can get, which is exactly what Boeing hopes will become of the memory of all that has transpired with the MAX.
Fortunately the plane has some distinctive and memorable exterior features: A sawtoothed trailing edge on the engine nacelles and bidirectional winglets.
However, it sounds to me like if you know about how the new 737 behaves, and you are aware of/trained on the procedure to fix an incident similar to what happened in the 2 crashes then you are likely to recover without any issue. On the flipside, I used to love to fly SWA because they had only 737s and all their planes were more or less the same and maintenance would be standard across all planes and therefore something that is repeatable and more likely to be mastered by the technicians. Parts would be easily available for their fleet. The pilots know the flight envelope. Sounds to me like one of southwest's biggest selling points is about to go out the window for me, even if this is a laymans perception that is completely wrong. It still seems like they have fragmented their fleet.
I'm surprised by the number of HN readers going bananas about never flying in this plane again. Every pilot on the planet knows about this issue now, and commercial pilots are already used to broad differences in airplane handling characteristics and how to avoid a stall in different configurations, as long as they're not forced to fight against 120 lbs of pitch trim.
If the only thing Boeing does is add an "MCAS off" button, pilots will be able to get the thing back on the ground in an emergency, even without new type rating, and even if pitch is a little bit squirley for ten minutes.
This is the same mistake we accuse the public of making when they freak out over terrorism and demand more TSA theater. We have steel cockpit doors and a new cultural understanding of what a hijacker can do. This is what prevents a 9/11 style hijacking from happening again, not the TSA.
Also, it's hard for even an expert to estimate the current chance of a 737 MAX flight crashing: historically it's around 1 in 5,000, but if they were cleared to fly tomorrow it's hard to say if the rate would be 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 1 million.
Despite the rubber-stamping of the 737-MAX, I view these as separate.
Though I think what you may be actually intending to ask is is the airline bound to provide with a flight to your ticketed destination on another plane if they have to sub-in a MAX because of reasons.
That is a question with a far less straightforward answer; the last time I read terms they reserved the right to swap in hardware as circumstances warrant. You'll want to take it up with the carrier. Which I recommend everyone does; as they only pay attention when sizable customer groups start making a fuss.
in ryan's case, its fleet is 100% 737, so you need to switch airlines to be sure you're not on a MAX unless they tell you somewhere.
I'm more irritated with IAG who is ordering a bunch of Maxes while they are still grounded and who knows when will fly again, and what the hell is wrong with them. Even giving up a part of their Airbus fleet maintenance to Boeing. Truth be told, the Max will probably fly again and it will be a very scrutinized aircraft so this is a wise business decision. Just don't mind me considering it joining the dark side.
I'll post the usual counterpoint: this isn't a new. The F-16 for instance is also famously unstable, and cannot be flown without computer assistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...
The whole problem was that they were trying to pass off an airplane that now has very different handling characteristics as a 737, in order to avoid retraining and proper safety testing.
I did not read anything about investigating everything from scratch, there is a possibility that the bigger engines could affect the wings, or other subsystem and because they were rushing they did not test all the systems or downplayed the possible issues.
Adding to my doubts is the fact that all the incentives is to get back in business as fast as possible and safety is just a bump that Boeign needs to get around or over it as soon as possible.
Last big issue is the credibility of FAA, you had the first airplane crash and nothing was done, second airplane crashes and FAA again does nothing until it is basically forced to ground the plane. Without the pressure from the other countries the MAX would still fly today with all the issues and the pilots and airline would have got all the blame
I won't fly in a max. Likely ever, but at least for a number of years after they start flying again.
The Mitsubishi MU2 is a good example, it had some interesting control quirks due to having a tiny wing for its weight. After a number of reviews a training package was designed which almost completely solved its safety problems.
The Cirrus SR22 was also in a similar category, despite having a whole-frame parachute. Their problems were solved by insurance companies demanding more training and their owners group pushing the mantra "if in doubt, pull the chute".
I'm sure there are better examples from the commercial air transport end of the scale but I knew those from the top of my head.
Until executives are fired and senior engineers that have been laid-off are rehired you should expect no substantive changes.
It is not just commercial, the US Air Force has been turning back tankers for sloppy work as well. https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-ramp-up-inspections-a...
The Fokker-100 was rebranded as MK-28 in Brazil after an accident (trust reverse deployed after take-off). The news reported every incident with the plane afterward. I remember my parents avoiding flights with Fokker-100. The MK-28, on the other hand, had a very good safety record.
The planes with the faulty software are grounded and won't be flying until they new software is proven to be safe. The re-certification process will likely be stricter than usually is. Thus, any fear about flying in those planes are unjustified.
"hey we released a new version of the software" is clearly not enough to gain back my trust. The only way this plane can be consider safe is for the whole plane to go through an external and independent audit to address all the other potential design flaws. The FTA certification processes should go through an external audit as well, any of the flaws should be addressed and retrospectively applied to this plane (and any other plane concerned).
No they aren't. Not until the new software is indeed proven to be safe, and a review of the Max program completed to ensure corners weren't cut elsewhere as well.
It will be fearmongering if all the above is done, and media are still trying to push fear. This is not the case today, so it's not fearmongering.
You know what they say, lightning often strikes the same place three times, but never a fourth time. :)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/airline-mechanics-feel-pressure...
Given that the remaining 737 non MAX aircraft should be good in theory, there are very concerning trends still rife in the aviation industry that are cause for concern.
For once, the bean counters need to take a back seat to those actually trying to do their jobs keeping people safe.
This is just disgusting, corporate greed. People don't trust Boeing and this isn't going to help.
I won't fly on Ryanair myself, but it has nothing to do with their safety record (which is fair to good), it has to do with the way they treat customers and employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Accidents_and_incident...
