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US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

bbc.com

21–30 of 344 posts

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#21
post #14
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They know Boeing makes up 10.5% of the Dow... [1] or it did before these crashes, currently under 10% due the the stock price dropping [1] http://indexarb.com/indexComponentWtsDJ.html

The FAA was intentionally made independent of airline advocacy to avoid conflicts of interest that previous government agencies overseeing air travel in the past had. So it’s odd if it’s not based on the data.

If it's based on data why not publishing it?

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#22
post #11

Will this basically be negated by enough other countries grounding it though? It seems to me that if the EU, China, the UK, and other major countries are all grounding it then many others are likely to follow suit basically making it irrelevant if there are one or two holdouts (even if one of them is the U.S.)

There are a ton of these aircraft flying in the US domestically and on US-Canada routes.

Got it, can states/airports decide unilaterally not to serve them? I imagine if the highest volume airports banned these flights it would ground the vast majority of them

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#23
post #20

From a customer perspective I would have appreciated a joint approach of the major aviation agencies. The way it is handled right now, I can’t judge whether the EU is reacting shortsighted or if the US is too careless. One seems to be true?

None, US politicians are looking after their self-interest. Lobbying strikes again!

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#24
post #15

It’s scary to think how complicit the FAA was in granting Boeing’s wish that this 30 year newer plane with substantially larger engines only required 2-3 hours of new training and said training was able to miss covering entire systems like MCAS. Now 350 people are dead, all the FAA can be thankful of is the dead are foreigners so it’s unlikely they’ll be held properly accountable.

While you may end up being entirely correct, it is too early to start finger-pointing before the investigations are finished.

Neither Lion nor Ethiopian had stellar safety records, e.g.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/asia/lion-air-crash...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_accidents_a...

The training hours should also be looked in the context of the total hours flown on that specific model - a pilot who just sat through the short training session would have a different perspective than a pilot who sat through the same training session but has also flown the plane for hundreds of hours.

It's also not a brand new airplane - it's a modification of 737, so the training is transitional. It's not like Boeing took a freshly minted Cessna 152 pilot, gave them a 2-hour seminar, and type-rated them for the 737 Max.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#26
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a ton of these aircraft flying in the US domestically and on US-Canada routes.

Got it, can states/airports decide unilaterally not to serve them? I imagine if the highest volume airports banned these flights it would ground the vast majority of them

No? FAA makes these decisions.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#29
post #2

What does the US know that the EU or China doesn't which gives them such confidence? Any clues?

In short, the Max-8 ships with a shitty default configuration. After the first crash, the FAA and the major american airlines with these planes aggressively updated the instrument panel settings, warnings and processes to ensure pilots were aware if there was a sensor disagreement that could cause the MCAS system to accidentally stall. (I know this is true for Southwest, I assume the rest followed suit.) While the default configuration and the behavior of the MCAS system are both hideously awful, the FAA trusts their process to have fixed it, and I think their results back up the call.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#30
post #13
post #2

What does the US know that the EU or China doesn't which gives them such confidence? Any clues?

Safety is always a priority, but it's never the only one: There's also an economical factor in the equation. Other nations have less to lose by grounding these planes, leading to a different result between 'risking human lives' vs 'causing financial impact'. Finally, airplanes may have different configurations. I only skimmed some discussions and I'm not well versed in the subject so take what I say with a grain of s…

> Other nations have less to lose by grounding these planes

By what measure?

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