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

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

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does change odds. So when considering defensive driving the rule "flying is safer" may not hold.

There is no amount of defensive driving you can do that would make driving safer than flying commercial.

That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km.

Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite.

On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.

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

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do some math, shall we? > In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regular…

IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown. Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more w…

Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc.

Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good.

But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.

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

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The Supremacy clause reserves no rights for the people. Only for states. Only a state can challenge a law based on the Supremacy clause.

The Supremacy Clause establishes that federal law takes precedent over state laws.

The Tenth Amendment says that powers not specifically given to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people at large.

The Ninth Amendment says that the enumeration of some rights does not mean people don't have other, unenumerated rights.

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

#704

Interesting timeline. Following the two fatal crashes involving the MCAS system and the 737 Max … The FAA gave Boeing until Dec of 2022 to implement a fix. The fix was to reconfigure the 737 Max with 2 sensors (instead of one) and include an manual shutoff Guess what happened? Boeing didn’t fix anything.. instead they cried to congress that the fix is too expensive and they cannot get it done. So what happens is cong…

You'd probably want to cite such a big claim ("Boeing didn't fix anything"), which is not supported by your link. Other online sources say Boeing did fix MCAS, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

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

#705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Executives are personally liable for loss of life, regardless of the law it is morally contemptible to hide behind a corporation. Until people go to jail for manslaughter this will not change.

worth noting for no particular reason China had a baby formula scandal in 2008 that led to the death of four infants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal The Intermediate People's Court in Shijiazhuang sentenced a farmer, Zhang Yujun, and a senior manager, Geng Jinping, to death in 2009. five more people received life sentences and the main company behind it went bankrupt. this was for four infant…

China executes billionaires with some regularity. Li Jianping got the death penalty last year. There were like a dozen that got it in the aughts from mining corruption. Not to say they are free of corruption but America will never do this.

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

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I rode in an E195 recently and I was kinda dreading it because it's a much smaller plane than a 737. I was so pleasantly surprised how roomy the cabin was. And how quiet and convenient. There was even a little holder for my tablet.

It is quieter for folks on the ground too. And it doesn’t get grounded when the temperature is too high nearly as much as the 737. If people realized you could get widebody comfort in a regional jet they’d quit flying on legacy airlines.

Is it more expensive? Where do you search for these flights?

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

#707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is widely known that the Supreme Court has been since at least FDR (if not longer) been derelict in their duty to limit the power of congress by ensuring laws fall into only the powers listed in Article 1 section 8 are accepted as constitutional. Under the current "living document" doctrine adopted by the court the power of the federal government is limitless, and there really is not need for Section 8 of Article…

> It is widely known that the Supreme Court has been since at least FDR (if not longer) been derelict in their duty to limit the power of congress by ensuring laws fall into only the powers listed in Article 1 section 8 are accepted as constitutional. It's a partisan assertion of a narrow political group, not generally accepted. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make the assertion, but to say it's somehow a truth gener…

That's a partisan phrasing, but I think there's an uncontroversial, generally accepted assertion there. Namely, starting with Wickard v. Filburn in 1942, the courts were willing to uphold nearly any federal program under the banner of "interstate commerce" until US. v. Lopez.

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

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying is safer by several orders of magnitude. Especially in the US.

Let's do some math, shall we? > In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regular…

This is roughly accurate for general aviation (people taking a Cessna out for a ride on a weekend, etc.) - it is about 10x deadlier than driving and the rates have been pretty stable for decades.

If you look at just airlines, they’re in turn 10x _safer_ than driving if I remember correctly. There’s this anecdote that after 9/11 people were afraid to fly and died on the highways in much higher numbers. There’s also the fact that there there was a very small number of passenger deaths involving airliners in the US in over a decade (meaning no major crashes). Compared to thousands and thousands of traffic deaths a year that should drive the point home, even when you have to adjust for base rates.

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

#709
post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's the new Max 7: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... It's not clear if older models suffer from the same defect.

Any of the newly engined Max models are involved, even the Max 8 and 9. The problem with the de-icing mechanism was only found _after_ the 8 and 9 were certified so they've been allowed to continue flying with the "pilot fix" in place (this is ludicrous btw). The Max 7 is being blocked currently because it hasn't been certified yet.

That's what I thought, thanks. As you note, the "solution" is absurd, and insulting and offensive. The older models should be pulled too. WTF.

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

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do some math, shall we? > In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regular…

The report you seem to be citing is this one, which summarizes the data on General Aviation flights. Those are small private planes. Commercial air transport is not part of General Aviation. https://www.aopa.org/-/media/files/aopa/home/training-and-sa... The last passenger death in a US Commercial Air Carrier was in 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_in... Even assuming your 24-million fl…

Yep, I'm not actually claiming that driving is safer per se, but it's apples vs oranges. I'm also not sure about 24M hours, total commercial airlines hours (i.e. aircraft hours, not passengers') is around 14M/year in 2018 (link in my other comment), so we need to multiply by the average number of passengers. Which gives >1B hours/year for commercial airlines only.

If that door had hit horizontal stabilizer though we would have had a completely different statistics even with 1B hours. Fortunately it didn't happen, but with the current trend the idea that flying is always safer may become not so obvious, and "orders of magnitude" thing may disappear pretty fast.

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