71–78 of 78 posts
...and once the pandemic is over and I start flying again, I'm going to fly exclusively with Spirit from now on.
I'd rather punch myself in the face than fly Spirit again. (They're as safe as any other US airline; they just operate like a worse-Ryanair.)
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You can look up the plane by its tail number. But you're still at the mercy of the airline. If they do an equipment swap, you're not entitled to change or cancel. You'd only have the option not to fly, forfeiting the cost of your ticket. As someone else in this thread said, just fly Delta (domestically).
Your second line is simply not true. Both American [1] and United [2] have committed to waiving change fees if you don't want to fly on a 737 MAX. Southwest is farther away from bringing the MAX back into service, so they have less detail on their site [3], but it sounds like they'll do something similar. [1] https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/737-MAX-return-to-servic... [2] https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/trav…
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When another plane crashes.
It's just another expense. If US authorities have shown anything so far it's that they're very forgiving especially with companies with government contracts.
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I still don't understand why the pilots of ETH302 weren't primed about this issue. I seem to recall it being common knowledge within the aviation community that there was a likely trim system fault that downed LNI610. With that backdrop, I'd expect anyone sitting in the front seats of a 737-Max to be aware of the recent crash of the type and reasonably fresh on the systems procedures/memory items to remedy. It's cert…
The pilots were inexperienced. The right seat guy had less than 250 hours total time in any airplane. At that level of experience, he’s lucky to remember where the landing gear controls are. (He didn’t have 250 hours in the 737, but less than 250 hours in any airplane!) Even the captain had fewer hours than an average United first officer. At those low levels of experience, it’s just unrealistic to expect them to be…
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I don't think that's right. Didn't several generations of 737 before MAX have that flattened engine bottom? I think I've been seeing it for considerably longer than MAX has been around.
Ah, yes, searching a bit, you appear to be right about the flat bottom. I believe the sawtooth edge is still correct though.
Well, I mean, we have a critical shortage of airline flight capacity right now, so of course they had to. Oh, wait...
The 737 Max does not provide additional capacity, it provides cheaper capacity. It has modern engines that use less fuel and wouldn't fit on the existing lineup. Right now the ability to cut costs at the cost of a few hundred passengers a year is probably the kind of news the airlines need to keep investors happy.
That's the problem in a nutshell.
If I had an actual choice, I'd choose to fly in a plane whose airframe was designed around the engines its using.
How many total 737 MAX MCAS events occurred? If two ended in crashes, I’d expect there to be twenty or so similar events that the pilots were able resolve. Or was it a case that there were only two flights with faulty pitot tubes that ended in crashes. I not a pilot, so I may have glosses over details, apologies in advance.
In fairness, every pilot who's even mediocre should be well aware of MCAS, its issues and how to turn it off. The real question is what else have Boeing half arsed?
The investigation turned up a few non-MCAS-related things, and required that they be fixed. I don't recall specifics - something about a wire that could become damaged?
I wonder if that is done or if pilots have been warned that "in rare occasions button X can activate system Y and if that happens you must do Z". Or maybe they'll wait to see if there is another crash before highlighting it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/business/boeing-737-max-w...