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FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

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101–110 of 884 posts

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#101

At what point does Boeing just scrap the 9s? Completely, for good? It’s all starting to feel like the galaxy note, where you pass a tipping point of no return with public perception.

Is the 9 really that different from the 8, other than being a few meters longer?

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#102

Two days ago before we got on one of these planes I said to my partner “don’t worry, it’s the most scrutinized plane in history”.

When all of that scrutiny stops finding issues, I'll not worry about it. Sadly, every time they look, they find new issues.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#103
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: the running joke is/was that McD bought Boeing with Boeing's money. * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing... * https://archive.is/q5pQV * https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... * https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/ B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing…

I’ve heard variations on this story a few times, successful company swallows failing company and gets infected by failing-culture. Isn’t that what happened to Netscape?

Who poisoned Netscape?

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#104

Good book describing the cultural change from engineering-focus to business-focus of Boeing: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...

Has there been any push to break up Boeing?

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#105
post #67
post #3

>The FAA said the inspections will take between four and eight hours per plane. Seems reasonable. I was wondering if a single event should really be enough to "ground" all similar planes, but seems like they just want to do a quick inspection.

A single explosive decompression event, comprising the spontaneous loss of an assembly the size of an entire exit door, two months off the factory floor? I should certainly hope they’d take a gander at the others before I’d sit next to one. Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years a…

Let's also consider just how much worse this situation could have been. The door panel blew out next to the one seat that happened to be unoccupied, and it happened at 16,000 ft instead of 26,000 ft.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#106

One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane from flying ETOPS routes. They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount…

Do you have a source for that? I'm not denying it, just curious to read more.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#107
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public wants it to be an aerospace engineer.

The public don't get a vote, companies aren't a democracy.

No one said they got a vote, snark unnecessary.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#108
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft. Prior to new models released in the last ~10yrs-ish, Boeing made the safest planes in the sky (as measured by passenger miles). Many of those planes are still flying and still doing great. For me the interesting question is what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes which is apparently resulting in worse safety performance…

After the unfortunate incident in Japan this week, the Boeing 787, a plane designed in the 2000s and flying since 2013, is now the only passenger airliner without a hull loss. So they are clearly capable of producing modern safe airliners post merger.

Producing, what about “designing safe aircraft post-merger”?

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#109
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 737 You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.

> safest airliner ever built ... very low production numbers If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?

I’ll take the one with 50 crashes any time. That’s 50 times something went catastrophically wrong and 50 times measures were taken to fix the underlying problems.

A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#110

[flagged]

At the very least we should have a corporate death penalty. Force the company into bankruptcy, de-list it from the stock market, and turn it into a worker-owned co-op that can never be publicly traded or be sold to private equity.

If a corporation can be "punished" to become a co-op, what incentive does that give the employees?
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