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China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

reuters.com

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Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#71

Post by chvid »

akg_67 wrote: post #66
quanticle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn't put faith in the FAA to be beyond political influence and crack down on an American manufacturer quickly. I would. The FAA grounded the Boeing 787 after some widely publicized battery fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_... . I would assume that they would do the same thing here, if this also turned out to be a widespread issue not related to aircraft maintenance or pilot tr…

IIRC, FAA didn’t ground 787 until both Japanese airlines had grounded the 787. With the number of fatalities and accidents new 737 had, it should be grounded by all airlines.

I was checking out a thread about the subject on reddit aviation; half the people are saying this is a political move by China - the other half are checking their flights to make sure they are not flying a 737 MAX.

What happened to better safe than sorry? Obviously this type of plane needs to be grounded until issues are resolved or the two crashes can be definitely be dismissed as a freak coincedence.

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#72

Post by eecc »

cameldrv wrote: post #52

Maybe it's politically motivated, but IMO so is the FAA's certification and nonaction so far. Boeing promised a software fix by January, and the FAA's decision not to ground the fleet was probably informally based on that promise. Unfortunately the software fix is proving more difficult than anticipated. Regulated, safety-critical software, whose failure leads to a smoking crater full of bodies can be like that. Espe…

Well if the fix is difficult to implement, I don’t see how a feature switch can’t be done in a sprint./s

Jokes aside, if it’s that difficult I’d be weary of all the rest of the codebase...

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#73

Post by akg_67 »

chvid wrote: post #71
akg_67 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, FAA didn’t ground 787 until both Japanese airlines had grounded the 787. With the number of fatalities and accidents new 737 had, it should be grounded by all airlines.

I was checking out a thread about the subject on reddit aviation; half the people are saying this is a political move by China - the other half are checking their flights to make sure they are not flying a 737 MAX. What happened to better safe than sorry? Obviously this type of plane needs to be grounded until issues are resolved or the two crashes can be definitely be dismissed as a freak coincedence.

Will the reddit aviation answers be different if instead of China, it was Chinese (or another country’s) airlines were announcing one by one, they were grounding the planes?

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#74

Post by dis-sys »

Johnny555 wrote: post #54
dis-sys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would assume that they would do the same thing here, if this also turned out to be a widespread issue not related to aircraft maintenance or pilot training. Two brand new 737 Max from two different types of airlines crashed in 6 months, what else you need to establish the fact that 737 Max worth to be grounded for a full investigation? How "widespread" it need to be? Maybe a few more crashes are required for FAA…

The cause of this crash hasn't been determined, some witnesses described seeing flames before the plane hit the ground, so it's entirely possible that a cargo hold fire took the plane down. the black box should be relatively easy to find (assuming it survived), so investigators should have a better idea about the cause soon.

> The cause of this crash hasn't been determined

that is the exact reason why all 737 Max should be immediately grounded for a full investigation.

or are you suggesting to further risk lives just to protect the interests of a company which had two of its brand new jets crashed in 6 months? Will you defend a Russian/Chinese manufacturer posing similar obvious fatal risks to the public when FAA orders all of them to be grounded in the US?

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#75

Post by toephu2 »

speedplane wrote: post #20

Forget China, think about yourself. If you have an option to fly on a 737 Max or another aircraft right now, which would you choose? I suspect market forces will ground these planes anyway.

Why? Because 2 737s went down in the past few years? Do you know how many successful flights have been completed in the past few years? Would you rather drive? do you know how many people die in car accidents everyday? Over 3000. But it doesn't make the news because by definition it isn't new, it happens every day.

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#76

Post by toephu2 »

Because one plane went down now everyone is scared and going to cancel any 737 flights. Irrational humans that pay attention to the news. Your chances of dying in a car accident are much higher than dying from flying on a Boeing 737. Are you still going to drive to work tomorrow though?

Edit: Yes it is good that 737s are being suspended and investigated but still, statistically speaking, flying is safer than driving. The media just likes fear-mongering headlines (not this article, but others in general).

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#77

Post by yoda222 »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #37
drstewart wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the Airbus 330 should be grounded? It has 11 hull losses with 1447 built. That's a rate of 2.67 per 350 built by the way -- higher than the MAX

That's a rate of 2.67 per 350 built by the way -- higher than the MAX How many of those hull loses resulted in fatalities? How many of the hull loses were due to pilot error (e.g. AF 447)? How many flights have those A330s flown? So far Boeing's lost two MAX8s that were quite new with many signs pointing to a design flaw rather than pilot error. That's a worse record than the A330.

> How many of the hull loses were due to pilot error (e.g. AF 447)?

He is counting 11 hull losses, which is the correct number of hull loss ( http://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Airbus-A330/losses ), but he didn't bother to look for anything more than that. Out of these 11 losses, four were due to ground attack by armed groups (Two in Sri Lanka in 2001, two in Libya in 2014. These are the one marked "C1" in the page)

Pretty sure that these should not count when assessing the security of a airplane (at least a civilian airplane)

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#78

Post by chopin »

cjbprime wrote: post #55
TimTheTinker wrote: post #44

My family (wife and kids) and I have a scheduled flight on a Southwest 737 MAX this week. I'm worried about whether there's an unacceptable risk involved in flying on a 737 MAX because of this morning's crash (and last year's Lion Air crash). After a bit of googling, I found this article from November 2018: https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/southwest-airlines... Apparently, Southwest has been updating glass c…

I am generally the person who says things like "the plane will be many times safer than the car ride to get to the airport", and I would cancel that flight. (And I would further be shocked if the FAA doesn't issue a ground suspension of the MAX tomorrow.) And hey, Southwest gives full credit for cancellations, right? The Lion Air crash was world news. If any 737 pilot heard about it, presumably went through extra tra…

Visual flight conditions give you your angle relative to the horizon but not necessarily AoA especially in non-normal flight conditions (like steep ascent or descent).

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#79

Post by throwaway66666 »

hohohmm wrote: post #29

It befuddles me to see people relating this to external motivations, not a genuine concern for safety. Would you fly 737 max8 tomorrow? Anybody who knows anything about Chinese aviation industry knows that it is severely government-regulated industry and the top 1 priority is safety. It has better records than the American counterpart. While BOEING(being one of the pillars of American industry) might twist arms in co…

Before reading the article and before seeing your comment, I was chatting with my partner about the 737 Max, advising her to be wary. And lo and behold... You are definitely not alone in this.

However, and to play a bit devil's advocate, China has a reputation as being a place that does not care about the value of human life, and the current climate is charged with USA advising people to ban Huawei's hardware, so this could have ulterior motives. If it was France banning them, nobody would bat an eye.

Political or not, in my eyes it is definitely the right move.

Re: China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

#80

Post by shawabawa3 »

toephu2 wrote: post #76

Because one plane went down now everyone is scared and going to cancel any 737 flights. Irrational humans that pay attention to the news. Your chances of dying in a car accident are much higher than dying from flying on a Boeing 737. Are you still going to drive to work tomorrow though? Edit: Yes it is good that 737s are being suspended and investigated but still, statistically speaking, flying is safer than driving.…

2 planes have gone down in 6 months, basically unprecedented in commercial aviation
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