I think a lot of people would actively refuse to fly on a 737 MAX in the future.
The design of the MAX was flawed to begin with. Essentially, the Boeing 737, designed in the 1960s,could not compete with the newer A320Neo on fuel efficiency due to Airbus redesigning the A320 around the much larger, state of the art CFM LEAP engines (Neo stands for “New Engine Option”), Boeing choose to jerryrig the CFM LEAP engines on their existing 737 airframe instead of redesigning another plane around the engine.
Now, since the engine is oversized with respect to the airframe, the newly christened 737 MAX has a tendency to tip upward due to too much lift when flying. Boeing opted to correct this in software by having the plane automatically correct its flight by tipping downward if it senses the plane was tipping up, which they called the MCAS. And of course, since one of the selling point of the 737 MAX Boeing promised was that no additional training was needed for the 737 MAX, the pilots did not know about MCAS, much less have a way to have a manual override for it.
So what if the sensors made a mistake and tipped downward when it’s not supposed to, you ask? We found out in 2018.
It is not something that is fixable barring a grounds up redesign. But that’s not going to happen.
At this point I’m not flying on any Boeing if I can help it. There’s no way to know how recently it was made or refurbished and anything that Boeing touched in the last few years is suspect.
I work in the world of planes, my rule for the 737 family. Is anything in the older NG family is fine. They were designed and built long enough ago for Boeing’s current issues to not be a problem. Plus they have seen enough maintenance with the airlines that they would have found any just in case. So that would be any 737-900/800/700/600
As for the Max family nope, I wouldn’t fly it. For a number of reasons, but mostly the engines are in the wrong spot and nothing they do can change that. That will be any 737-7/8/9/10 with the 10 still delayed. You may or may not see the word MAX in the name.
Not that I have heard of. It is either done in house or by contract companies who have facilities that specialize in doing the more extensive C and D level checks. As they can take between a week and six weeks. .
So if I were looking to fly with this in mind, you have any suggestions on finding flights on Airbus or older Boeing planes? I.E. is there a flight search site where you can specify? Or at least where it shows the plane on the search results page?
So the easiest is to just fly on an airline that doesn’t have Max planes. Like easyjet, frontier, wizz, Delta, British Air, and Air France are all airlines I know don’t have Max planes. I have heard some travel sites tell you the model of planes for a flight and may even let you sort by model. If nothing else you can look a plane up by its tail number. Often you will find that listed some were in the info about a flight.
Beyond personal safety concerns, I want to boycott Boeing whole sale. Make the whole brand toxic to airlines, period. Make airlines decide that they lose too much business to their use of Boeing to ever use their planes again. If Boeing doesn’t totally collapse, other airplane makers will eventually follow their example.
This whole LWT segment is a perfect illustration of the transition to late-stage capitalism at the microeconomic level, featuring examples of shareholder primacy, regulatory capture, communication breakdown, and recursive subcontracting. If I was teaching junior college microeconomics (Economics 1B), I’d consider showing this in class or recommending it to my students for viewing.
It really is a good schoolbook example of how a large reputable company goes to shit from the common ailments of real-world capitalism.
In case anyone wanted to buy one of those sweet shirts he inadvertently plugged in the clip, I checked the Boeing store and it appears they have pulled it already.
Was that the “if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going” shirt? I think it can be fairly easily fixed with a sharpie. If you’re feeling creative, you could also draw the wreck on the runway.
Oh damn how could I not find it??? Must not be available in the region I was searching because I scrolled through 13 pages of shirts and it didn’t show! I ironically want one
Edit: ok so it didn’t show in the men’s shirts section but I found it under general apparel. I don’t wanna give them any money but the temptation is great.
I think they just mean a lot of people on lemmy would prefer content that doesn’t require audio since they viewing it at work or on a phone in public etc.
Boeing used to be a company that put safety and quality first, they revolutionized plane travel with the 737. But recently Boeing has put share price ahead of safety and decided to move their corporate office from Seattle, where the planes are built and engineering is done, to Boston (edit: Chicago, not Boston). Why? Because executives heard that successful companies have corporate offices in a separate location. Then the merger with McDonnell Douglas, who has a horrible track record just made Boeing’s quality slide even further. Boeing now parcels out work to subcontractors who subcontract even further and there is no oversight or quality control on the components. This results in “door plugs” missing bolts or having bolts that were not tightened properly on the 737 max.
Why? Because executives heard that successful companies have corporate offices in a separate location.
You know, I feel like a corporation that fired management and executives for stupid decisions would end up with a massive advantage over competitors. Because apparently there’s a lot of inept executives out there who are moving offices because it’s the cool thing to do.
Which is good for Airbus, because they haven’t been doing themselves a lot of favors, either. The A380 is a pretty good plane that nobody seems to want.
High seas was my option after they moved their upload to Thursday. HBO claims that it would promote praying customers, I claim otherwise and they lost my YouTube subscription.
There’s a bit of meme that private companies make better decisions because they don’t have the silly pressures that the stock market puts on companies. Valve is usually the prime example.
It’s not completely wrong, but needs to be more carefully considered. Being private makes it possible to make better decisions due to lack of stock market pressures. Whether companies actually do or not needs to be considered on a case by case basis. There are plenty of private companies that are still run by shitbags.
I know and disgree, imagine Elon Musk being CEO of Valve instead of gaven, the counter example being Twitter, Which Musk is running as a private company. IMO this idea that private companies are better is a giant falsehood and akin to an urban legend.
Arguably one of the most well run companies in the world is Apple which is public, from more personal knowledge, I’d say one of the most well run companies here, is Novo Nordisk which is also public.
Nah, since they’re in the “too big to fail” category, nationalize them. Achieves the same outcome of removing the shareholders and board, without pouring money into a rich douchebag’s pocket
I don’t know that the second part would succeed. I feel like it’d end up with the same contractor structure, but now the contractors are whoever’s company bought the right senators.
It’s a very natural way to identify which industries and companies should be nationalized. If it’s too big to fail, it’s too important to be privately (or publicly by investors) owned.
So I lived in the Everett area and worked near the Boeing plant. My ex gf’s brother worked directly on the line. One family dinner someone mentioned the two MAX crashes mentioned in the video. He totally brushed them off and said
They were from “”“n-word”“” countries. They crashed it themselves.
He was the most blatant, but the other Boeing folk I knew spoke simmiliarly.
Yeh that was one of the most shocking aspects of Boeing behaviour post the first Max crash. But it was the attitude from the top. Blaming the victims, on effectively racial or cultural grounds. An incredibly cynical and disgusting tactic, to deflect from their own abject failure of a business model resulting in death. The whole corporation showed how it values its passengers in those moments for me, ( and as a non American). They have no interest in our safety and due to this I haven’t stepped on a Boeing plane since the Lion air incident. Not that they care. It also made me wonder to what extent Boeing are responsible for the poor air transport safety history of Indonesia and elsewhere. I would bet they haven’t put a cent into atleast helping to improve it, considering how much money they have probably made there - it being an archipelago and the 4th most populated country globally. Several hundred people were sacrificed in order to expose these criminals for what they are. Profit making is too often a conflict of interest when lives are at stake.
My uncle repaired airplanes for a living. I have never flown as an adult and I hopefully never will. Somethings I just can’t unlearn. When he first started things were great, but by the time he retired it was a shitshow of cutting corners on replacement parts and who knows what else.
I think it’s the (seeming) paradox of the information age. Visibility on issues increasing has made things seem more dangerous, even when in reality they’ve gotten safer.
To put it mathematically, if we see only half the failures with a 10% failure rate, we perceive a 5% fail rate. But if we see every failure for a 7% failure rate, we perceive a 7% fail rate, and it looks worse even though it’s actually better.
Totally true. I read some interesting research some years ago, which I can’t find now of course, that people who speak smaller languages (ie with less global speaking population) feel safer because they simply aren’t exposed to as many bad things happening in their own language. So when a plane crashes in the US, UK people feel more impacted from it because they can see victims and relatives speaking about it in a language that feels like their home language. Though to people in Denmark that crash was “abroad”, so “nothing I need to worry about; it was far from home”.
“Near” is people who speak your language. “Far away” is people who don’t.
Commercial flying remains the safest way to travel, and it continues to get safer. That’s not to minimise your reluctance to fly. I get it: if something goes wrong it’s 99.9% sure you’re going to die, and know about it long enough for your last moments to be horrifying. But the facts is the facts and the facts is that you’re way more likely to die on a bicycle journey.
I don’t buy that simply because of the metrics used to get to that “safest way to travel”. Isn’t it per distance traveled? That’s extremely pro aeroplane.
It’s not extremely pro aeroplane, because if a plane crashes there are 100x more fatalities than in a car crash. Even so, there are more than 100x more fatalities in cars.
It makes sense that flying is safer because it’s so strictly regulated. People are able to drive tired/sick/hungover but pilots aren’t. Your car can have a fault that you haven’t noticed where planes can’t.* There’s a crew operating the plane as opposed to a single driver.
One of the defining characteristics of Southwest is that they ONLY fly 737s (Boeing). That and their focus on domestic flights helps them offer good rates and low/non-existent fees. I guess their maintenance only has to focus on one plane. However, it seems like they got caught up in Boeing’s “737 MAX is the same plane” scam because they fly some of those too and I believe it affected their stock.
TL;Dr Boeing got ate up internally from the failed company they had acquired, becoming a little bitch to a bunch of cocaine addled wall street ninkompoops, who had to be acquired because they made flying death traps, who eventually made Boeing make and sell flying death traps.
The irony is the whole “if it’s not Boeing I’m not going” phrase came from the era of airplanes like McDonald Douglas being so utterly shit - the company that bought Boeing. Basically a bunch of engineers got buttfucked by business school dropouts.
The only thing not covered by LWT (no shade for them at all) was the reaction time required to “correct” MCAS’ error. Imagine being strapped into a seat in the cockpit, and the plane suddenly nosedived and you have under twenty seconds to correct it after not being informed it had that much control in the first place. People who fly model airplanes and helicopters wouldn’t accept that. Pilots with planes full of travelers absolutely shouldn’t. Enshittification issues aside, (takes mental gymnastic skills that I don’t have) that is an unforgivable mistake that should have never made it to planes.
Sir this is America. We only do hardcore capitalism in this country, preferably to the detriment of the average citizen and benefit of CEOs and stockholders the way God intended. /s
You can take the quotes off too big to fail, they literally are. Their only competitor in the world is Airbus. Boeing going bust would be catastrophic to the global aviation industry and doubly so for the USA.
That said, I wanna see Lockheed step up and do a commercial plane. Gimme a jumbo jet that breaks the sound barrier and has a radar signature the size of a credit card pls.
If I was in Embraer leadership I’d be scrambling to design a jet in the 737 class right now. It’s just one step up from what they already make. Embraer is already popular with US regional airlines and would be more acceptable in the US market than Comac.
The A220 is tough to compete against though. If Airbus goes up to a A220-500 they’ve got a small, hyper-efficient 737 already. And it’s not like the A320 neo isn’t already in place.
Definitely agree that no US airline would be willing to stand the political fallout from buying a C919, whatever deal they could secure or however confident they felt in the reliability and safety of it.
…I mean until planes run on hydrogen. The climate really wouldn’t mind covid levels of global aviation for another decade or so.
OTOH the US is of course in a tough spot, they’re reliant on aviation for domestic transport because they never bothered to invest in rail. And don’t come and say “the US is too large”: You can have a high-speed sleeper train from NYC to LA, 14 hours total travel time shouldn’t be hard to achieve, eight of which you can spend sleeping in perfect comfort, ten if you’re indulgent. Proper food. You can even take a shower. Leave in the evening, arrive in the morning, especially as a travelling businessman consider it a hotel on wheels. You can fit a bloody McDonalds in a train if you want.
This is a video from a US-based urbanist channel, and I particularly want to call attention to the modes graph at around the 6 minute mark. This compares driving, high speed rail, and air travel with the distance traveled and figures out the time factor for each compared to the distance. A destination within an hour’s drive tends to be better to drive, and then trains become better, and at some point, air travel is better.
As the video points out, the exact numbers depend a lot on individual people, but in general, high speed rail tends to beat air when the destination is within 750 miles.
One problem the US has isn’t just that it’s big, but that there are huge swaths of absolutely goddamn nothing for the span of several states. This is especially true north of Texas. Go from Minneapolis and trace west, and see how long it takes before you come near a city anyone outside the region cares about. Significantly south of that line is Denver, and you had to cross the Dakotas to get there. Then you’re hitting Salt Lake City after another large state’s worth of travel (about 500 miles, so we are still within the range where high speed rail would be better). If you were to stay to the north, you wouldn’t find much of anything until you get to the west coast.
What that means is that we can have rail that links up the east coast, the Great Lakes states, and the south east and Texas, and then another set of high speed rail that hugs the west coast. Linking those two up, though, is a huge task, and air travel will be faster.
We’re likely to have two different networks that, at best, are only connected to the south. Flights across the Plains and Rockies are here to stay. That said, even getting that done would be a huge improvement.
CityNerd is a great channel, but his mode graph leaves out sleepers: Of those 14 hours travelled, how many do you actually count as travel time? I’d say subtracting the time you spend leisurely sleeping and eating at the minimum, make that 10 hours, you might also save on hotel check-in and check-out, the additional travel to that hotel, and other small stuff. Four hours travel time are very competitive.
The schedule is more restricted but I doubt many people visit more than one far-away city in a day. HSR sleepers aren’t also really a thing, at least I’m not aware of any it’s all conventional rail but that doesn’t mean that it’s some utopian far-out concept. Over here in Europe sleepers aren’t high-speed simply because they don’t need to be. And/or because our train infrastructure actually sucks and you can’t take a sleeper from Helsinki to Lissabon, quite comparable a route to NYC-LA.
One important thing is to make sure that those trains are actually nice: When the Austrians doubled down on sleeper trains they quickly found out that the more expensive tickets actually sold very well and with newer trains they basically got rid of the whole mid-range, it’s either a decent compartment with shower and everything or a capsule. Business-class or hostel-class. People are willing to, and almost demand, to spend money on the ticket that they would otherwise spend on a hotel room for a night. Lean into that, make sure the bread rolls are crunchy and the coffee has a decent standard and people are going to flock to it. About all the staff having a Viennese accent of course doesn’t hurt the ÖBB.
They kind of have to, otherwise it would be an Airbus monopoly, and there are plenty of planes they still need to deliver to customers. Management needs a total reshuffle for sure though.
Their management doesn’t just need reshuffling, but we also need to start throwing a bunch of them in jail. They made decisions that specifically led to people dying and endangered countless others.
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