[jamghee]

>The FAA said the inspections will take between four and eight hours per plane.

Seems reasonable. I was wondering if a single event should really be enough to "ground" all similar planes, but seems like they just want to do a quick inspection.

[alwa]

A single explosive decompression event, comprising the spontaneous loss of an assembly the size of an entire exit door, two months off the factory floor?

I should certainly hope they’d take a gander at the others before I’d sit next to one.

Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years ago.

[nerdponx]

Let's also consider just how much worse this situation could have been. The door panel blew out next to the one seat that happened to be unoccupied, and it happened at 16,000 ft instead of 26,000 ft.

[ponector]

Not a big difference if everyone was with fastened seat belt.

There is a real story of another 737 of Aloha Airlines flight 243 where part of the fuselage blown away together with unlucky flight attendant at 24000 feet: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-to-pieces-the-ne...

[smcin]

Aloha Airlines Flight 243 (Apr 28, 1988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

[alwa]

And even so, sucked the shirt right off the boy in the middle seat! I shudder to imagine how things would have gone 20 minutes further in to the flight.

[siva7]

Almost certainly a fatal crash if they were a few minutes later into the flight

[akpa1]

No it's not. Crews are trained for decompression events and they've happened at higher altitudes than 26,000 feet before with no airframe loss at all (for example, the Southwest 737-700 where a fan blade ruptured the window happened at 33,000 feet). It may likely have been a fatal incident but definitely not likely a crash.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

It was a catastrophic failure of a two month old plane. I think grounding is warranted until the scope of the problem is understood.

[lostlogin]

> I think grounding is warranted until the scope of the problem is understood.

If the problem is the whole model or ‘Boeing’, both of which seem possible, what then?

[JonChesterfield]

If Boeing is necessary for national defence and no longer knows how to build aircraft, drastic action is needed by the US government on a very short timeframe to get their shit together. War is a thing.

In the meantime it's hard to disagree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that flying with airbus seems a better idea.

[vlovich123]

Yeah especially given the public trust the FAA needs to rebuild after it came out how Boeing got the 737 certified in the first place. It’s an unmitigated shit show top to bottom.

[rootusrootus]

> 737

You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.

[panarky]

> safest airliner ever built ... very low production numbers

If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?

[o11c]

The point in the outer comment was that the 737NG has both many flight hours and ... if I skimmed Wikipedia correctly, only 1 mechanically-attributed fatality.

For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo aircraft:

  16K Douglas DC-3 (1935)
  11K Boeing 737 family:
    1K Original (1967)
    2K Classic (1984)
    7K NG (1998)
    1K MAX (2016)
  11K Airbus A320 family (1988)

Different sources give oddly different numbers (more than I would expect for ordered vs built vs delivered; I didn't investigate deeply), but nothing else is above 2K. Note that plenty of small or military planes beat these numbers.

[kazen44]

its actually kind of crazy how much military planes where produces during world war 2.

Look at this list[0]: the soviet IL-2 plane has produced more planes the the entire list of planes mentioned above over a period of 4 years!

That is just one type of plane, for one country during a very short period..

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft

[dahdum]

I’ll take the one with 50 crashes any time. That’s 50 times something went catastrophically wrong and 50 times measures were taken to fix the underlying problems.

A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.

[Zetobal]

Until 1980-1990 I would completely agree but with the more recent history of basically everything I am not so sure anymore.

[lostlogin]

What has been done by Boeing that makes you feel that they have fixed everything up and that safety is their top priority?

They seem more keen on getting legislative change and regulation bypass or exemption.

[ric2b]

I think this is the wrong take, for the following reasons:

- There is no reason to assume that the learnings from the 50 crashes weren't also applied to the newer model. In fact you'd expect that they all were. - Faults in a new design are likely to be front-loaded, meaning most of the crashes would have happened earlier than later. Therefore the new model seems to be a much safer design if it flew 10% of the miles without even 10% of the crashes (actually 0%).

[panarky]

The point is that commercial aviation is so extraordinarily safe, that mechanical failures that result in fatalities are too rare to determine if a model with 5 million flight hours is more or less safe than another model with 500 million flight hours.

Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.

[Dah00n]

I'm not sure if I agree or not, but my thinking were that it wouldn't reach great safety by upgrades until long after it became too expensive for Boeing and would instead be replaced with a new model.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

It was only dumb luck that no one got killed because the adjacent seats were empty.

To give you some idea, a teenager seated across the aisle had his shirt completely torn off.

[stretchwithme]

His mother held on to him to keep him from getting suck out too.

[jahewson]

Of course it should. This is a manufacturing defect that could easily have sucked someone out the plane or dropped debris on someone’s head. Should it happen during cruise over water the consequences could be much worse.

[lokar]

It seems to have ripped the shirt off the person in the middle seat.

[Rapzid]

> We can do it in two!

Boeing probably.

[dpkirchner]

And if we can't, is there some way we can blame the pilots? Maintenance crew? Anyone but business leadership?