[DriverDaily]

737 Max is going to end up being one of the safest planes to fly in.

Every inch of every plane combed over, every engineering decision re-examined, every system and sensor double-checked for redundancy and reliability, the pilots alert for any sign of problems.

[PedroBatista]

We wish..

They should have been doing that since the beginning and it doesn't deserve a medal the same way we don't deserve a medal to do the job we agreed to do.

But I'm not even that optimistic:

- What's the point of combing over the plane when the microscope is broken and nobody seems to care?

- How about stop putting lipstick on a pig and retire the whole 737 entirely? A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?

[wannacboatmovie]

> and retire the whole 737 entirely

You're making the bold and naive assumption that a clean-sheet design would be bug free.

People here were saying the same thing a few weeks ago about the CVR with 2 hour storage. "It's the tech! Use cloud storage! Just buy more flash! Blah blah"

Well supposedly newer aircraft like the A350 and B787 have newer recorders with much more storage - that were later found to have software bugs in service writing garbage data. Imagine that.

So sometimes going with an old reliable design that is approved and rigorously tested for 25 years is the prudent decision when you have no requirement to upgrade.

With the current issues being manufacturing-related and not an engineering error, how would a new design help that? It's like saying let's scrap all the code because your ops team is incompetent and can't deploy VMs properly.

[bobsomers]

> How about stop putting lipstick on a pig and retire the whole 737 entirely?

What? The 737 NG family (along with the Airbus A320 series) have been the workhorse of short to medium haul air travel for decades now. Throwing out the 737 entirely is a nonsensical, knee-jerk reaction suffering from serious recency bias.

> A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?

And your solution to that is to throw out all the perfectly functional and flight-proven-over-decades aspects of the design and start completely fresh? If you're concerned about the process which produced the Max, what gives you any confidence that a fresh design wouldn't have 10x the issues that the Max does?

[DriverDaily]

> nobody seems to care?

Clearly people care. They are literally checking every bolt for proper torque. When they found a few undertorque bolts it becomes a national news, it gets shared so much it ended up on Hacker News, and you cared enough to comment.

[throwway120385]

I'll never consider this plane safe unless Boeing fixes the process the yielded these systemic quality problems.

[DriverDaily]

So your assesment of how safe the plane is doesn't depend on anything except Boeing's process? For example, you don't care about the number of accidents per operating hours?

[com]

But that is highly likely to be a trailing indicator. Some things like door plug blowouts apparently happen a few months after poor manufacturing processes occur, the question is how long do loose screws, cable frictions, or incorrectly bored holes in pressure bulkheads take to manifest?

It seems to me that we’re only at the start of statistical changes to the 737’s historic accident to operating hours ratio.

Do I want to be an unexpected data point or death and injury there? Not so much. A320-series or 737NGs for me for the foreseeable future I think, and those flights don’t generally cost a penny more.

[throwway120385]

Yeah it is. They have a huge manufacturing process problem and until they fix that they're just rolling the dice hoping the swiss cheese doesn't line up.

I'm probably going to switch airlines to one that has a majority-Airbus or 737NG fleet unless I hear about heads rolling at Spirit.

[diggan]

> 737 Max is going to end up being one of the safest planes to fly in

It already has two crashes under its belt, compared to other models that never had any crashes (like the A380).

But I guess if we put the disclaimer "From today on!" then it might be accurate.

[bobsomers]

> It already has two crashes under its belt, compared to other models that never had any crashes (like the A380).

You can't come to any conclusions from simple math like that because it isn't corrected for flight hours and exposure. There are literally 10x more 737 Max's delivered so far than there are total A380s left flying, and they're constantly booked doing short to medium haul flights all day long rather than a single long-haul flight per day. And given that takeoff and landing are the riskiest phases of flight, it should also probably be corrected by flight cycles, not pure flight hours.

It's nowhere close to as simple as you make it out to be.

[diggan]

As a thought experiment, I just gonna make up some numbers then.

A380 has X flight hours, with N landings, with no crashes

737 Max has X * 10000 flight hours, with N * 10000 landings, with two crashes

No matter how you calculate it, 737 Max been through more crashes than A380, unless you ignore the previous two crashes, obviously.

[bobsomers]

> No matter how you calculate it, 737 Max been through more crashes than A380, unless you ignore the previous two crashes, obviously.

Correct, but again this is too simplistic of a view and it's not a question that gives you any real information.

Consider a brand new airplane that has never flown. It's also been in zero crashes. Is it obviously safer than the 737 Max? Clearly not, so what is the real question you want to answer?

What you really want to know is, based on the existing data, how likely is it that I will crash if fly on an A380 vs a 737 Max? This is question that ultimately hinges on the predictive power of the existing data, and when you are dealing with rare events, the data volume makes a huge difference in your confidence intervals.

Without drowning the conversation in details, if you modeled crashes as a Poisson process (which may or may not be appropriate), there are absolutely situations in which a 737 Max with 2 crashes is the obvious statistical choice over an A380 with none, simply because you have so much more data for the Max that you have tight confidence intervals around the flight not ending in a crash.

With much less data on the A380s side, the confidence intervals are wider and it's possible that it's actually more likely that your A380 becomes the first crash than that you experience the third 737 Max crash!

I'm not saying this is definitively the case, it would require lots of specific data I don't have access to and a subject matter expert to sign off on the modeling, but X is not safer than Y simply because X has a fewer total number of events.

[DriverDaily]

"end up being" is not enough of a disclaimer for you?

[vlovich123]

No, they’re correct. “End up being” does not imply that you ignore the existing track record. That’s why OP clarified “only if you ignore their existing safety record” - given that other planes have had 0 crashes and 0 fatalities, I’m not sure how the 737MAX could even ”end up” being “safer” even if you ignore existing issues - you can’t get better than 0 issues, so at best it would be as safe as most other aircraft.

[ldoughty]

A plane that has a perfect track record now may not be perfect from now on.

Meanwhile, a plane with a bad track record right now may never have another incident from now on.

So, the 737 MAX may have 2 crashes now... but every other major plane might have that many crashes (or more) over the next 30-40 years. This would make the 737 Max "One of the safest planes" generally speaking.

[vlovich123]

Maybe but the A380 had already been flying for 17 years. It seems unlikely that it’s going to have foundational issues with the program at this point vs normal things that would apply to any airplane like airlines not maintaining the air craft properly or pilot error / suicide by pilot.

[DriverDaily]

If you want to be pedantic, you're conflating 'having a safe record' with 'being safe.' It's just an indicator.

[vlovich123]

Not really. All safe planes have a safe record and a safe record implies some amount of inherent safety. Since safety is really hard to quantify and compare and in some ways is qualitative, the safety record is a justifiable and defendable proxy for comparing safety.

[DriverDaily]

We’re on the same page.

You’re acknowledging that the safety record is just a proxy for safety. That’s what I’m saying too.

I would argue that using the number of incidents as a proxy for safety ignores the trend.

[nottorp]

The thing is, it doesn't look like Boeing has learned anything.

[stefan_]

No, because it can absolutely not end up being that? 2 crashes is already a massive number, who is going to go back and make them disappear?

[User23]

It certainly isn’t for the folks involved in crash three.

[bootlooped]

If that's true why wasn't it already made the safest after the two Max 8 crashes that killed everybody on board.

[ducttapecrown]

Because they kept letting Boeing do (or not do) the inspections?

[insonable]

Maybe, but instead of redesigning and building a new jet suitable for the larger and more efficient engines allowing their competitor's A320 to be more efficient, they appear to have kludged them onto the old (and low-sitting) 737. To do this, they had to change their location on the wing, which made the aircraft more unstable, which lead to the MCAS system to mitigate this, and problems with MCAS and sensor redundancy led to the two fatal crashes. I have a hunch many of us have seen this sort of thing and consequences before.

[axus]

Not the worst analogy. Microsoft Windows did turn out pretty well after 20 years.

[FerretFred]

The Stasi would love the telemetry features that M$ Windows provides as standard!

[vundercind]

First release: 1985

20 years later: 2005

Current consumer Windows in 2005 was late-lifecycle WinXP, so this actually checks out.

It just got a lot worse again some time after that.

[whalesalad]

can't tell if this is satire or not

[elsonrodriguez]

It is still an airframe that does not have the same redundancies required of new air frames.

It exists specifically to bypass those new requirements.

All else being equal, it will never be as safe as something designed to meet modern standards.

[cjbgkagh]

This is nonsense, this is a repeat of correctness by construction vs correctness by test that we see in software. Since these planes are poorly constructed, due to failure in process controls, they must now rely on a correctness by test which is more expensive and less effective. I would argue that in such complex systems no amount of testing can ever make up for failures in controls.

Relying on the constant vigilance of pilots is a non-starter due to the limits of simply being human. Which is why risk is modeled using the Swiss cheese model. Pilots have off days and cannot be relied to catch everything, especially if the issue is previously unknown.

This isn’t the first 737 Max issue so why didn’t Boeing take the opportunity then to fix everything else wrong with the plane after the MCAS issues? Especially when they had the time during the pandemic to do so. How many new final issues should we expect? 3.. 4?

I’m not saying flying is going to be drastically more dangerous, just that it’s more dangerous than it could have been.

[uh_uh]

Aren't there some fundamental issues with the Max regarding its engine placement which necessitated the MCAS system that was responsible for the two fatal crashes? If that's true, I don't think the Max can be as safe as a plane that doesn't have these issues in the first place due to its design.

[FredPret]

People said exactly this after the first two crashes.

At this point design should be scrapped. No amount of review can fix a broken concept executed by an incompetent manufacturer.

[likeabbas]

Engineering can’t always combat a poor integral structure.

[eastbound]

Our software is the safest software, because we’ve discovered a lot of bugs in it.

Historical note: ActiveX and Flash were never successfully made safe. They just stopped being a threat… by dying, a bit like the USSR never resolved communism, it just stopped doing it by dying.

[philip1209]

Yeah, it's similar to how SVB went from least safe to most safe bank (for a short period).

[throwanem]

How'd that work out for the DC-10?

[josemanuel]

Do you really believe that?

[minedwiz]

TBF, the 737 had a bad rudder flaw in the 1990s that led to fatal crashes. After an overhaul it never came back, and the 737 went on to have a great record.

[throwanem]

The 737 also had a responsible parent in those days.