> Photos have emerged of a repainted 737 Max in Ryanair colours outside Boeing’s manufacturing hub, with the name 737 Max replaced by 737-8200 on the nose.
I'm worried about boarding any Boeing aircraft at this point. The revelations paint a picture of an engineering culture deep into the normalization of deviance [1].
The planes they built before the current era of management should be ok. I've heard the 777 has the best safety record of any plane flying, but it was engineered before the current management.
Yes and that's the point. As a lay person it's not my business to determine which Boeing aircraft are safe and which aren't. Boeing's conduct has dealt tremendous damage to their reputation for safety and this casts a shadow over the entire fleet. They have to do a lot of work to rebuild that reputation and restore the public trust.
As a lowly passenger I don't get to choose which plane I am assigned to, also the airline seems to change it on a whim.
At this stage I'd be unhappy to be on a modern Boeing but I don't know what I could do about it, except cross my fingers and hope I won't be the next victim. I don't know what rights I'd have to claim a refund or demand a different model plane.
What fascinating language. "I'm using all my leverage to refuse" doesn't me "I refuse". I wonder how many Boeing engineers used all their leverage to refuse to compromise safety.
Some (large) companies have automated processes where you’re forced to book travel arrangements through intranet portals with a limited choice of suppliers.
I've worked for and know many people that work for very large (F500ish) companies, as well as the large consulting companies (Deloitte, Pwc, Accenture, etc), and booking your own flights/hotel is standard practice at all of the consulting companies and most of the others.
Interesting. I’ve never heard of a corporate department that books your travel. Sounds like a hassle. Any company I’ve been at, big or small, just has their policy parameters enforced by third party booking tools.
The very first passenger flight of the A320 was said to have been brought down by a software issue* and was effectively grounded by its launch being delayed. It isn't exactly the same situation, but its close enough to draw some parallels.
* - official reports blamed the pilot, but the pilot blamed the new software in the plane. Airbus was also accused of tampering with evidence to blame the pilot. These are also some parallels to Boeing's involvement in the initial MAX crash...
It should be noted that for the Air Show, the Airbus had most of it’s software safety features disabled and on top of that, the pilots flying the plane actually didn’t know the airport they were performing at. The latter is a major red flag.
In the end, software didn’t bring down that flight (as in, the software didn’t pitch the plane down into the ground). Disabled safety features stopped the plane from correcting a situation it would normally be protecting pilots from. And the pilots where unaware of any obstructions past the runway. Coupled with long spool up times for jet engine (any jet engine, I might add), and that flight was basically doomed once it was over the runway.
Mind you, I’m not trying to put the blame on anyone here, but to compare that crash with the recent MAX crashes is just not right. More comparable would be something like Qantas Flight 72, where the autopilot did in fact result in an uncommanded pitch down. Although the pilots recovered from that situation and the plane landed safely.
Really? I was in a 777 yesterday and felt like I was flying in a well-tested, mostly modern plane built with well-understood technologies. That, and I realized 737s (not Max, obviously) have loud interiors.
> felt like I was flying in a well-tested, mostly modern plane built with well-understood technologies
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?
I generally hate being pedantic, but to really be accurate they started flying themselves into the ground rather than falling out of the sky.
I have thought a lot about this for personal reasons, and I increasingly think the biggest failing is not grounding the fleet after the Lion Air crash. The Ethiopia Air should never have happened in any company that prioritized safety and risk appropriately.
From what I understand, Boeing became toxic when they bought McDonnell-Douglas and absorbed their company culture of "Safety? Quality control? What are those?".
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.
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.
The argument is that the issue with Boeing isn’t that they had a flaw with the 737 Max, but that their entire culture has moved away from a safety focused engineering one.
If that is indeed the case, it’s unlikely the 737 Max’s flaw is the last one (in fact, we know it isn’t, and that the FAA discovered something else, which is why it was sent back to Boeing).
Ditto. And I'm really sad because after nearly two decades of not flying, I flew again last year (two round trips!) on Southwest, and I loved it and was looking forward to flying Southwest again. And now because of the 737 MAX, I'm going to have to avoid them.
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?
There is Allegiant, which has an all-Airbus fleet, but you're unlikely to fly them unless you're taking a vacation to Vegas or Florida.
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.
Allegiant has one of the notoriously worst safety records of any US airline. I definitely wouldn't recommend them if your goal is to pick a safer flying experience.
Allegiant started out with old DC-9's/MD-80's, and a few 757's. They were all replaced with Airbus A320's by November 2018. Most of Allegiant's previous safety problems stemmed from using old jets.
I think the company's startup plan was to use cheap/old fuel-guzzling aircraft to get the business off the ground: it's cheaper to pay for fuel than interest payments on new jets. Now that they've built a stable-enough business they've transitioned to newer planes. Wikipedia says the company's first brand-new jet was purchased in 2017, which was 20 years after the company was founded.
Delta is also known for using old jets (including MD-80s, a lot of 757s, and until 2014 the DC-9. 25% of Delta's current fleet is these old planes) and is famous in the aviation world for having a stellar maintenance program and few safety issues with them. Up until ~2014, American also had several hundred MD-80s (and still has many 757s) in its fleet, and yet it still didn't have nearly the rate of safety issues that Allegiant has.
Many of the issues Allegiant was cited for were also not only due to the plane being old, but also because Allegiant's maintenance crews (which apparently are very understaffed and underequipped) totally missed the issue and erroneously cleared the plane to fly.
Allegiant's issues may have been partly due to old planes, but as evidenced by Delta/American, if Allegiant had a decent maintenance operation the old planes would not have been a problem. The fact that they still had issues does not speak well of their overall safety program, which is more than just the types of planes they fly, and also affects their current fleet.
Any Boeing designed, built or remanufactured in the past 20 years is fundamentally risky to the flying public because of the corrupting influence of regulatory capture, i.e., lax oversight of phases of system engineering and manufacturing, self-certification.
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.
You're comparing the mortality rate of automobile travel to that of aircraft travel. Would you also compare the rates at which the two forms of travel are subject to, say, bird collisions?
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.
The objection is obvious and very easy to understand; it tries to compare apples with oranges, and here you are trying to argue that they are both fruit.
"Apples and oranges" is a metaphor for things that shouldn't be compared. But that's just asserting that you can't compare two things without giving a reason. And I'm asking why not?
There are lots of statistics comparing deaths from different causes. Why not use them to make informed choices about risk?
> "Apples and oranges" is a metaphor for things that shouldn't be compared.
No it's a reference to comparisons that don't make sense.
You can compare as many apples you'd like with oranges, just as you can compare air travel with roadway traffic, but you'd be making absurd and meaningless comparisons.
Respectfully, my objection is the implication that people should be okay with an "acceptable rate of mortality" for air travel because there's a relatively high rate of mortality for automobile travel (which is unrelated.)
There is an acceptable rate of mortality for everything. In some cases it's very low, but not zero. You can't leave the house without taking a risk, and there are risks at home, too.
Once again, my issue is that you appear to have falsely compared flight safety to car safety despite the fact that the two operate in very different ways.
There are pieces beyond just equipment failure and operator error: things like infrastructure and process. Infrastructure has less of an impact in the sky, where the plane is pretty self-reliant, but process is huge, with maintenance schedules, co-pilots, ATC, etc all making the flying experience safer.
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.
I understood it to be a rhetorical question, apologies if I misunderstood.
Driving encompasses both mechanical and human risks. Here we are talking about just the mechanical, so I don't think the comparison is particularly fair.
[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...