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Having read many commments on HN and elsewhere since the crash, I know I’m in the minority here when I say this but to me it seems like the US airlines and FAA

by js2 8y ago

Having read many commments on HN and elsewhere since the crash, I know I’m in the minority here when I say this but to me it seems like the US airlines and FAA are following their procedures, the same procedures that make the US airlines the safest in the world, while the rest of the world is, I don’t quite want to use the word panicking, but at least giving into pressure from people who aren’t aviation safety experts. I don’t think it’s a simple as saying the US airlines and FAA are simply being greedy and placing profit over safety. The obvious easy thing to do from a PR perspective is to ground the planes. That they aren’t doing so in the face of immense pressure tells me that they base their decision on facts and procedure, not what-ifs and public scrutiny. Let the downvotes begin.

tapland 8y ago
> the same procedures that make the US airlines the safest in the world Citation needed? > Let the downvotes begin. Bracing for impact doesn't invalidate the cause of it.
- js2 8y ago
  > Citation needed You’re probably asking for a citation that the US airlines are safest due to their procedures and not for other reasons. I don’t have a ready citation for that. But as to US airline safety: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-last-7-years-you-were-more-likely-to-be-run-over-by-a-car-than-to-die-in-an-airline-crash/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-la... > Bracing for impact doesn't invalidate the cause of it. Fair, I should have left that out, but I won’t ninja edit it on you now. (And I have no idea why you’re downvoted. I’ve upvoted your comment.)
  - mijamo 8y ago
    Your link does not really help prove your point at all. Do you have a real source proving your point?
  - tapland 8y ago
    That link does not support your statement. There are countries with the same safety record and with a higher percentage of their airlines ranking higher in safety than US airlines. Lumping the US versus 'the rest of the world' together does not compare single countries against each other. The US is safe for air travel, but that does not show that it is the safest.
    - js2 8y ago
      My link may not be correct but it does say: the U.S. continues to have the lowest accident and fatality rates of any aviation market in the world The primary reason is likely due to training requirements: https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety Those requirements are due to US regulations.
      - tapland 8y ago
        Wouldn't something like this suggest that Europe and North Asia was safer in the period leading up to that forbes article? https://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-02-22-01.aspx https://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-02-22-01.aspx And that greenspun article from 2009 is just special.
retSava 8y ago
Aviation safety is written with blood, a high cost for every safety measure conceived. It is one of the areas where it's better to be wrong and safe. Aircrash investigations take a lot of time, and sometimes, well, sometimes you have to act on preliminary information or even guesses if it is on the safer side.
dokein 8y ago
The level of certainty required for an action changes depending on the downside risk of action vs inaction. For example, if I am 20% certain that you have a pulmonary embolism, the correct action is to start treatment immediately; the risks of treatment are low relative the harm of waiting for further testing. The FAA and NTSB are rightly very conservative and cautious with respect to approving new designs, since the risk of premature approval is high and the harm of waiting a bit longer for more information is low. But this is the opposite scenario - the risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience, versus the harm of another plane crash. The correct move here is to act even if they think the certainty is low.
- js2 8y ago
  > the risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience Is it possible there is a safety risk to grounding the 737 Max that outweighs the risk of allowing it to fly?
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Yes, if the alternative is even less safe. This is important when the alternative might be driving, as driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous. Safety measures that annoy people too much can end up with a net loss of life because of this. If there are other airliners that can be put into service to take up the slack, though, they’re very unlikely to be more dangerous.
    - Skunkleton 8y ago
      I doubt that enters into the FAA's calculus here. It is more likely that there is not enough information to show that the plane is unsafe (a sample size of 2 is not statistically significant). The FAA has already approved this design, and to say that there is a design flaw would cast a shadow on their own approval process, and by extension their authority. Of course, over the last 10 years or so the FAA has delegated much of the approval process to the corporations themselves. Perhaps the system really is rotten?
vb6lives 8y ago
They have more than 5000 orders for this model of aircraft. Each one costs approx 120million. Which means there are approx $640 billion dollars on the line. It is imperative that Boeing keeps it's reputation and grounding flights would destroy it.
- js2 8y ago
  Another 737 Max crashing in the face of the current scrutiny would destroy it even worse, wouldn’t it? Is that just a calculated gamble?
  - vb6lives 8y ago
    It is a calculated gamble. We've seen this so many time in so many industries.
  - Scarbutt 8y ago
    Is that just a calculated gamble? Yes, because by now, every pilot still flying that plane has been trained to deal with the issue.
    - a3n 8y ago
      As were, I'm guessing, the Ethiopian pilots.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      That was the Lionair aftermath. If this issue did occur again (and that's not proven), the question is why didn't the pilots deal? Were they operating past their limits for whatever reason, like with UPS1354? Or is it that the problem isn't something that can reasonably be dealt with.
- nickjj 8y ago
  Would grounding it really destroy their reputation? Grounding it doesn't mean indefinitely. If anything, it's a huge positive if they grounded it until they knew for certain what's wrong because then it's a double win. Firstly, on the ground the plane has a 0% chance of killing anyone (unless someone decided to jump off the top of a parked plane and commit suicide, etc.), and secondly Boeing's reputation goes up because now people have a chance to think "ok finally, they actually care about safety instead of profits". Also, Southwest is the largest US flyer of this plane and it only makes up about 5% of their fleet, so it's not like the entire world's flight traffic gets disrupted. Lastly, I would think most people who are scheduled to fly on one of these planes will cancel or demand a plane switch, so the delays and flight traffic issues are still going to happen to some degree. Currently, all I'm reminded about from this situation is how insanely corrupt the US govt is (I'm from the US btw) and how little Southwest cares about people because they won't even let you cancel without paying out of pocket, which is totally insane. You only have 1 life.
throwaway427 8y ago
I agree and I don't think you deserve the downvotes. The FAA is an institution with a deep sense of safety first and independence from (and even dominion over) private industry. They are also a body of experts, with more collective knowledge than any other similar body of domain experts in world. If we believe in institutions of experts who study and make recommendations regarding complex systems, we owe it to the FAA to trust they are charting a prudent course based on the evidence they are gathering and analysis they are doing.
- peteradio 8y ago
  Regulatory capture happens. Top level leadership starts overruling career professionals and then that dominion gets reversed. Not saying that's what has happened hear but boy did Boeing pull one over on the Faa with this planes release. And Faa leadership has incentive to hold the line. Faa fucked this up long ago.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    An attitude of “damn the regulations, we need to help business” flows from the very top of this administration, too. That, and blatant corruption. How much has Boeing spent at Trump properties in the last few years? The FAA should be independent but it doesn’t always work that way, and this sort of thing can tip the balance.
- janj 8y ago
  It's interesting you put it this way. I just heard on NPR this morning that the FAA and NTSB is actually in partnership with private industry (like Boeing and the airlines) for cooperative self regulation because the FAA and NTSB just doesn't have the resources to provide adequate inspections without their help. I'll see if I can find that interview. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/13/702908761/why-did-a-boeing-737-max-8-crash-the-probe-is-in-its-early-stages https://www.npr.org/2019/03/13/702908761/why-did-a-boeing-73...
  - throwaway427 8y ago
    I listened to this interview and it's interesting the way you put it: Steve Inskeep rephrases a statement that Goelz makes to make it seem like the FAA is short staffed and that airline compliance is on the honor system. Goelz then says what he means is that there cannot be an independent FAA inspector in every single corner of a manufacturer or maintenance shop, but by then it's too late because the seed has been planted listeners mind. So here you are saying the "FAA and NTSB just doesn't have the resources to provide adequate inspections" and that the overall compliance model here is "cooperative self regulation" which... I guess barring the FAA having a 1:1 staff for every employee in the airline industry we are indeed going to have "cooperative self regulation".
Someone1234 8y ago
- We have a preliminary report from Lion Air, including a Emergency Airworthiness Directive and a Airworthiness Directive suggesting MCAS (w/faulty single AOA sensor) was closely tied to the accident. - The Lion Air flight had a certain aerial profile before the crash (a wave, as MCAS fought the pilots). - The Ethiopian Airlines aircraft has the same tell tale aerial profile It would be better to have the black box data from Ethiopian Airlines, but the local authorities have said they're going to take weeks. In the meantime given the facts we have, there are reasons to suspect that Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines had a similar cause. Additionally Boeing has also implicitly admitted there are issues, they're actively working on improvements to MCAS due out in April.
- js2 8y ago
  At least according to Southwest’s pilots union SWA has seen no MCAS issues in its fleet (edit: this may not be correct - see reply from antsar) and its pilots are prepared to handle any MCAS issue were it to occur.[1] I think a worse scenario is if the Ethiopian flight crashed due to some other not yet known issue specific to the Max. [1] https://swaparesources.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/pdf/Press_Releases/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302_Update_2.pdf https://swaparesources.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/pdf...
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Why is this down-voted? Your first statement is a statement of fact with a citation. Your second statement is a perfectly reasonable opinion (in what universe is a second distinct crash causing defect not worse?). It seems like anyone who dares say something that isn't proclaiming enthusiastic, blind and unquestioning support for the "ground them all this nanosecond, this problem is unambiguously MCAS related" line of reasoning is getting down-voted in every comment thread covering this topic. Personally I agree with that line of thinking but the Reddit-like "bury everyone who doesn't think what I think" behavior is off putting.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      The number of times I have seen "why is this being down voted" over the past week or so is absolutely insane. More so when most of the subjects of the downvoting complaints aren't actually below 0. People need to chill about about voting. The guidelines even say "don't complain about votes". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
peteretep 8y ago
> the US airlines the safest in the world Where do you people _get_ these ideas?!
- mikeash 8y ago
  Maybe from the fact that the last fatality in a US airline crash was over ten years ago?
  - NathanKP 8y ago
    Unfortunately I think Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 in 2018 counts as resetting that streak. It wasn't a crash but it did result in a death. I think your point still stands though. Very few of the incidents on this list are US airlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
  - SECProto 8y ago
    As far as I could find, there were no Canadian airline crashes in the same time frame. Unless you include small charter-airline type crashes, which would mean some american crashes would be counted too (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Rediske_Air_DHC-3_Otter_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Rediske_Air_DHC-3_Otter_c... )
    - mikeash 8y ago
      With less than 1/10th the number of passengers, that’s significantly less meaningful. It does indicate they’re about on an equal footing, though.
  - fbelzile 8y ago
    That means nothing. All airlines based out of France and Germany are ISOA certified, never had a fatality, and are rated 7/7 by AirlineRatings [0] (industry leader on airline safety ratings), for example. [0] https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/ https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/
notJim 8y ago
It's kind of ironic that this story is on front page at the same time as the one about internet mobs shutting down researchers. It really feels like internet mobs are succeeding in pressuring regulatory bodies to ground the airplane, even though those bodies have determined by their normal evaluation criteria that it's not necessary to do so.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  At this point that is a regulatory 'body', singular.
lightbyte 8y ago
>The obvious easy thing to do from a PR perspective is to ground the planes I don't think that is the case. The FAA and Boeing both said this plane is safe and approved it for use. They would look like complete idiots if they now turn around and say they were wrong and it would put a lot of focus on why and how they came to that initial conclusion that the plane was safe. They are doubling down on their safety claim and are refusing to admit they could have made a mistake at the expense of potentially hundreds of lives.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mzs 8y ago
WaPo's lead fact checker who covered FAA for four years as a journalist disagrees with you: https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/1105858140002754561 https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/110585814000275456...
- helaoban 8y ago
  Quote: "I covered airline safety and the FAA for four years, and I cannot remember a time when the FAA was so alone among world regulators on a serious safety issue. " Neither viewpoint is supported here. The anomaly is that there is a disagreement between the FAA and the other aviation authorities, but no evidence has yet surfaced that would vindicate either party.
  - mzs 8y ago
    at least quote it all please, "When a major accident like this happened, global aviation authorities conferred with the FAA -- which took the lead."
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      Maybe this is a reflection of the recent loss of respect the U.S. has been facing in the last couple years. Other countries are feeling less inclined to defer to our judgement.
    - helaoban 8y ago
      Because that part of the quote it not only pointless, it's nonsensical. The FAA DID take the lead by immediately issuing a notice in support of the airworthiness of the plane. Other aviation authorities then decided to contravene the FAA and ground the planes in their own airspace. There is an irrational assumption that has been injected into this argument, which is that all of a sudden the FAA's judgment should be subject to abnormal scrutiny (at a time when there hasn't been a single fatal accident on a commercial US airliner in 10 years), and the judgments of other civil aviation authorities should all of a sudden be held in higher regard.
matthewaveryusa 8y ago
Yup. Look at Airbus, look at the WTO ruling, look at how much illegal tax euros European countries sunk into the failed A380 and tell me how it's not political. Tell me how China grounding the planes had nothing to do with the trade war. This is about trade protectionism and a warning shot from the Europeans to the Trump administration that they are willing to play dirty, and this is about who will foot the bill for the grounded planes.
cal5k 8y ago
My father used to work for Transport Canada (Canada's version of the FAA), and I've found it rather dismaying how little faith people seem to have in the FAA/NTSB despite many years of evidence as to their competence. They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment. Ironically, if you were to dive into a thread about "Urban Air Transport", a hot topic in Silicon Valley, you'd likely see people decrying the FAA for being too conservative and stifling innovation.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  What would it take for you to change your opinion of them? How do we know they're not current asleep at the wheel? The FAA is not some singular, autonomous entity. It's real live humans with biases and potentially some level of political influence. No regulatory body is above suspicion. There's no way for them to know at this point what caused the second crash. It might actually be a critical defect, something that was overlooked or blame mis-applied on the first crash investigation. We simply don't know at this point, and neither do they.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment. Aren't most of the safety statistics they publish basically fake? If you look at the star ratings they give for crash tests, there is an asterisk with fine print saying that they only compare vehicles within 250lbs of each other. Which means that when you're trying to figure out which car is actually the safest, a car that gets a 3-star crash rating might actually be safer than one that gets a 5-star crash rating.
  - aquaticsunset 8y ago
    NTSB isn't the NHTSA, totally different agencies.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      NTSB also is not the FAA, just to be clear. The NTSB is one of the most respected safety and accident investigtation groups in the world.
js2 8y ago
Countering my own claim about the FAA I’ll link to this piece from 2010 that doesn’t make the FAA look so great in that decade: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/etc/cronfaa.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/etc/cro...
nraynaud 8y ago
I didn't see any comment that countered the narrative that the 2 planes that crashed had an erratic altitude before crashing. We have a natural and simple scenario to explain both, and a serious reason to suspect that any left side angle of attack indicator could have a mishap because those things happen and it's normally not a big deal. Even if the investigation deem that the root causes are different, it is the most natural explanation of those accidents absent more information, and it is even a nominal chain of event that was planned by Boeing.
danepowell 8y ago
I understand and agree that we don't want knee-jerk reactions on the part of regulators. I'm only an aviation enthusiast and by no means an expert, and fully admit that I could be wrong, and even with my natural inclination to reserve judgement, to me it seems obvious that grounding is warranted purely from a statistic viewpoint. Compare the release of the 737 MAX 8 with the release of other recent-ish models like the 777 and 787. It was 14 years before the 777 suffered even a single hull loss, and 20 years before a crash of the magnitude of the 737 MAX 8 (loss of all souls). The 787 is almost a decade old and has zero hull losses or fatalities. The 737 MAX 8 is less than a few years old and already has two catastrophic crashes? I know that it's hard to draw too much information from just two data points, but that's pretty compelling to me.
- kevin_nisbet 8y ago
  Also, don't forget that the 787's were also grounded when they were new for their battery problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_... It's a bit of a different situation, but they were grounded for a problem that I don't believe caused a single fatality, but had more incidents in a shorter time period.
- helaoban 8y ago
  By this argument, all Boeing 777s should have been grounded after the loss of Malaysia 370 and Malaysia 17. Same plane, both incidents within 5 months of each other.
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    Only if you consider the total amount of time during which the plane has been in business an irrelevant detail. Which it is not, of course.
  - Tomte 8y ago
    That's a deceptive argument. We know the reason why Malaysia 17 was lost. So we positively know that there is no reason to ground them.
mises 8y ago
The thing people aren't looking at is the condition of the planes. Both crashes happened with planes of third-world nations, and might not have been held to the same rigorous standards. I'm glad America is trying to get the black box, because I'm not sure I'd trust the Ethiopian govt not to tamper with it just to protect their image (and their tourism industry).
- Tomte 8y ago
  Last I heard they are looking for a European country to analyse it, because they don't trust America to fully and honestly investigate. That's pretty unheard of. But I can't blame them.
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  Lion, maybe, (I don't know anything about them to say), but Ethiopian Air is a top-rated airliner.
xutopia 8y ago
There is reason to believe that the FAA has bad actors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Elwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Elwell Trump has appointed people in various areas of the government based on their contentious views with the departments they would oversee. This makes many in the international community question Dan Elwell's position and influence at the FAA.
anigbrowl 8y ago
Let the downvotes begin. HN guidelines ask that you don't bait people this way, it's toxic to discussion. While you're trying to field a rational argument, doing so using pejorative language (panicking, giving in to pressure) preemptively delegitimizes other points of view and thus undercuts your own credibility. Certainly facts and procedure are great but it's also a fact that a large number of people just died in circumstances that are uncertain; you're essentially arguing that the uncertainty should not be considered absent a causal mechanism. Why is it so important not to adjust our course while investigations proceed? After all we have an elaborate financial services industry devoted to the mitigation of economic risk, so why shouldn't we allow that to operate? Voluntary risk-bearers (insurance and reinsurance firms, option issuers etc) can do their thing and shoulder the financial burden of the disruption rather than expecting passengers to shoulder vital risks which they're not qualified to assess.
devy 8y ago
> I don’t think it’s a simple as saying the US airlines and FAA are simply being greedy and placing profit over safety. No. It all comes down to as simple as "better safe than sorry" philosophy. FAA have generally very conservative about air safety tolerance as they should. The normal response should be "we know 737 is safe", because we have data showing that over 10k+ deliveries and less than 3% had hull loss. Can FAA say that to Boeing 737Max8 today?! So instead of being conservative they are being bold and saying "we don't know if 737 Max is not safe because investigation has not been concluded." You see the difference now? More and more evidence revealing that FAA/Boeing are placing profit over safety. Do you think FAA have a problem grounding AirBus planes with non hull loss accidents? Absolutely Not! In fact, they did exactly that in 2018 to AirBus 320neo [1] > Let the downvotes begin. This is the behavior to directly violate the HN rules. But having a minority opinion doesn't. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/pratt-said-to-assess-a320neo-engine-vibrations-in-latest-glitch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/pratt-sai...
adventist 8y ago
Trump gave into the pressure: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/business/canada-737-max.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/business/canada-737-max.h...

by js2 8y ago

tapland 8y ago

> the same procedures that make the US airlines the safest in the world Citation needed? > Let the downvotes begin. Bracing for impact doesn't invalidate the cause of it.

js2 8y ago
> Citation needed You’re probably asking for a citation that the US airlines are safest due to their procedures and not for other reasons. I don’t have a ready citation for that. But as to US airline safety: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-last-7-years-you-were-more-likely-to-be-run-over-by-a-car-than-to-die-in-an-airline-crash/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2016/12/28/in-the-la... > Bracing for impact doesn't invalidate the cause of it. Fair, I should have left that out, but I won’t ninja edit it on you now. (And I have no idea why you’re downvoted. I’ve upvoted your comment.)
- mijamo 8y ago
  Your link does not really help prove your point at all. Do you have a real source proving your point?
- tapland 8y ago
  That link does not support your statement. There are countries with the same safety record and with a higher percentage of their airlines ranking higher in safety than US airlines. Lumping the US versus 'the rest of the world' together does not compare single countries against each other. The US is safe for air travel, but that does not show that it is the safest.
  - js2 8y ago
    My link may not be correct but it does say: the U.S. continues to have the lowest accident and fatality rates of any aviation market in the world The primary reason is likely due to training requirements: https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety Those requirements are due to US regulations.
    - tapland 8y ago
      Wouldn't something like this suggest that Europe and North Asia was safer in the period leading up to that forbes article? https://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-02-22-01.aspx https://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-02-22-01.aspx And that greenspun article from 2009 is just special.

retSava 8y ago

Aviation safety is written with blood, a high cost for every safety measure conceived. It is one of the areas where it's better to be wrong and safe. Aircrash investigations take a lot of time, and sometimes, well, sometimes you have to act on preliminary information or even guesses if it is on the safer side.

dokein 8y ago

The level of certainty required for an action changes depending on the downside risk of action vs inaction. For example, if I am 20% certain that you have a pulmonary embolism, the correct action is to start treatment immediately; the risks of treatment are low relative the harm of waiting for further testing. The FAA and NTSB are rightly very conservative and cautious with respect to approving new designs, since the risk of premature approval is high and the harm of waiting a bit longer for more information is low. But this is the opposite scenario - the risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience, versus the harm of another plane crash. The correct move here is to act even if they think the certainty is low.

js2 8y ago
> the risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience Is it possible there is a safety risk to grounding the 737 Max that outweighs the risk of allowing it to fly?
- mikeash 8y ago
  Yes, if the alternative is even less safe. This is important when the alternative might be driving, as driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous. Safety measures that annoy people too much can end up with a net loss of life because of this. If there are other airliners that can be put into service to take up the slack, though, they’re very unlikely to be more dangerous.
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    I doubt that enters into the FAA's calculus here. It is more likely that there is not enough information to show that the plane is unsafe (a sample size of 2 is not statistically significant). The FAA has already approved this design, and to say that there is a design flaw would cast a shadow on their own approval process, and by extension their authority. Of course, over the last 10 years or so the FAA has delegated much of the approval process to the corporations themselves. Perhaps the system really is rotten?

vb6lives 8y ago

They have more than 5000 orders for this model of aircraft. Each one costs approx 120million. Which means there are approx $640 billion dollars on the line. It is imperative that Boeing keeps it's reputation and grounding flights would destroy it.

js2 8y ago
Another 737 Max crashing in the face of the current scrutiny would destroy it even worse, wouldn’t it? Is that just a calculated gamble?
- vb6lives 8y ago
  It is a calculated gamble. We've seen this so many time in so many industries.
- Scarbutt 8y ago
  Is that just a calculated gamble? Yes, because by now, every pilot still flying that plane has been trained to deal with the issue.
  - a3n 8y ago
    As were, I'm guessing, the Ethiopian pilots.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    That was the Lionair aftermath. If this issue did occur again (and that's not proven), the question is why didn't the pilots deal? Were they operating past their limits for whatever reason, like with UPS1354? Or is it that the problem isn't something that can reasonably be dealt with.
nickjj 8y ago
Would grounding it really destroy their reputation? Grounding it doesn't mean indefinitely. If anything, it's a huge positive if they grounded it until they knew for certain what's wrong because then it's a double win. Firstly, on the ground the plane has a 0% chance of killing anyone (unless someone decided to jump off the top of a parked plane and commit suicide, etc.), and secondly Boeing's reputation goes up because now people have a chance to think "ok finally, they actually care about safety instead of profits". Also, Southwest is the largest US flyer of this plane and it only makes up about 5% of their fleet, so it's not like the entire world's flight traffic gets disrupted. Lastly, I would think most people who are scheduled to fly on one of these planes will cancel or demand a plane switch, so the delays and flight traffic issues are still going to happen to some degree. Currently, all I'm reminded about from this situation is how insanely corrupt the US govt is (I'm from the US btw) and how little Southwest cares about people because they won't even let you cancel without paying out of pocket, which is totally insane. You only have 1 life.

throwaway427 8y ago

I agree and I don't think you deserve the downvotes. The FAA is an institution with a deep sense of safety first and independence from (and even dominion over) private industry. They are also a body of experts, with more collective knowledge than any other similar body of domain experts in world. If we believe in institutions of experts who study and make recommendations regarding complex systems, we owe it to the FAA to trust they are charting a prudent course based on the evidence they are gathering and analysis they are doing.

peteradio 8y ago
Regulatory capture happens. Top level leadership starts overruling career professionals and then that dominion gets reversed. Not saying that's what has happened hear but boy did Boeing pull one over on the Faa with this planes release. And Faa leadership has incentive to hold the line. Faa fucked this up long ago.
- mikeash 8y ago
  An attitude of “damn the regulations, we need to help business” flows from the very top of this administration, too. That, and blatant corruption. How much has Boeing spent at Trump properties in the last few years? The FAA should be independent but it doesn’t always work that way, and this sort of thing can tip the balance.
janj 8y ago
It's interesting you put it this way. I just heard on NPR this morning that the FAA and NTSB is actually in partnership with private industry (like Boeing and the airlines) for cooperative self regulation because the FAA and NTSB just doesn't have the resources to provide adequate inspections without their help. I'll see if I can find that interview. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/13/702908761/why-did-a-boeing-737-max-8-crash-the-probe-is-in-its-early-stages https://www.npr.org/2019/03/13/702908761/why-did-a-boeing-73...
- throwaway427 8y ago
  I listened to this interview and it's interesting the way you put it: Steve Inskeep rephrases a statement that Goelz makes to make it seem like the FAA is short staffed and that airline compliance is on the honor system. Goelz then says what he means is that there cannot be an independent FAA inspector in every single corner of a manufacturer or maintenance shop, but by then it's too late because the seed has been planted listeners mind. So here you are saying the "FAA and NTSB just doesn't have the resources to provide adequate inspections" and that the overall compliance model here is "cooperative self regulation" which... I guess barring the FAA having a 1:1 staff for every employee in the airline industry we are indeed going to have "cooperative self regulation".

Someone1234 8y ago

- We have a preliminary report from Lion Air, including a Emergency Airworthiness Directive and a Airworthiness Directive suggesting MCAS (w/faulty single AOA sensor) was closely tied to the accident. - The Lion Air flight had a certain aerial profile before the crash (a wave, as MCAS fought the pilots). - The Ethiopian Airlines aircraft has the same tell tale aerial profile It would be better to have the black box data from Ethiopian Airlines, but the local authorities have said they're going to take weeks. In the meantime given the facts we have, there are reasons to suspect that Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines had a similar cause. Additionally Boeing has also implicitly admitted there are issues, they're actively working on improvements to MCAS due out in April.

js2 8y ago
At least according to Southwest’s pilots union SWA has seen no MCAS issues in its fleet (edit: this may not be correct - see reply from antsar) and its pilots are prepared to handle any MCAS issue were it to occur.[1] I think a worse scenario is if the Ethiopian flight crashed due to some other not yet known issue specific to the Max. [1] https://swaparesources.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/pdf/Press_Releases/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302_Update_2.pdf https://swaparesources.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/pdf...
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Why is this down-voted? Your first statement is a statement of fact with a citation. Your second statement is a perfectly reasonable opinion (in what universe is a second distinct crash causing defect not worse?). It seems like anyone who dares say something that isn't proclaiming enthusiastic, blind and unquestioning support for the "ground them all this nanosecond, this problem is unambiguously MCAS related" line of reasoning is getting down-voted in every comment thread covering this topic. Personally I agree with that line of thinking but the Reddit-like "bury everyone who doesn't think what I think" behavior is off putting.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    The number of times I have seen "why is this being down voted" over the past week or so is absolutely insane. More so when most of the subjects of the downvoting complaints aren't actually below 0. People need to chill about about voting. The guidelines even say "don't complain about votes". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

peteretep 8y ago

> the US airlines the safest in the world Where do you people _get_ these ideas?!

mikeash 8y ago
Maybe from the fact that the last fatality in a US airline crash was over ten years ago?
- NathanKP 8y ago
  Unfortunately I think Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 in 2018 counts as resetting that streak. It wasn't a crash but it did result in a death. I think your point still stands though. Very few of the incidents on this list are US airlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
- SECProto 8y ago
  As far as I could find, there were no Canadian airline crashes in the same time frame. Unless you include small charter-airline type crashes, which would mean some american crashes would be counted too (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Rediske_Air_DHC-3_Otter_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Rediske_Air_DHC-3_Otter_c... )
  - mikeash 8y ago
    With less than 1/10th the number of passengers, that’s significantly less meaningful. It does indicate they’re about on an equal footing, though.
- fbelzile 8y ago
  That means nothing. All airlines based out of France and Germany are ISOA certified, never had a fatality, and are rated 7/7 by AirlineRatings [0] (industry leader on airline safety ratings), for example. [0] https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/ https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/

notJim 8y ago

It's kind of ironic that this story is on front page at the same time as the one about internet mobs shutting down researchers. It really feels like internet mobs are succeeding in pressuring regulatory bodies to ground the airplane, even though those bodies have determined by their normal evaluation criteria that it's not necessary to do so.

jacquesm 8y ago
At this point that is a regulatory 'body', singular.

lightbyte 8y ago

>The obvious easy thing to do from a PR perspective is to ground the planes I don't think that is the case. The FAA and Boeing both said this plane is safe and approved it for use. They would look like complete idiots if they now turn around and say they were wrong and it would put a lot of focus on why and how they came to that initial conclusion that the plane was safe. They are doubling down on their safety claim and are refusing to admit they could have made a mistake at the expense of potentially hundreds of lives.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mzs 8y ago

WaPo's lead fact checker who covered FAA for four years as a journalist disagrees with you: https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/1105858140002754561 https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/110585814000275456...

helaoban 8y ago
Quote: "I covered airline safety and the FAA for four years, and I cannot remember a time when the FAA was so alone among world regulators on a serious safety issue. " Neither viewpoint is supported here. The anomaly is that there is a disagreement between the FAA and the other aviation authorities, but no evidence has yet surfaced that would vindicate either party.
- mzs 8y ago
  at least quote it all please, "When a major accident like this happened, global aviation authorities conferred with the FAA -- which took the lead."
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Maybe this is a reflection of the recent loss of respect the U.S. has been facing in the last couple years. Other countries are feeling less inclined to defer to our judgement.
  - helaoban 8y ago
    Because that part of the quote it not only pointless, it's nonsensical. The FAA DID take the lead by immediately issuing a notice in support of the airworthiness of the plane. Other aviation authorities then decided to contravene the FAA and ground the planes in their own airspace. There is an irrational assumption that has been injected into this argument, which is that all of a sudden the FAA's judgment should be subject to abnormal scrutiny (at a time when there hasn't been a single fatal accident on a commercial US airliner in 10 years), and the judgments of other civil aviation authorities should all of a sudden be held in higher regard.

matthewaveryusa 8y ago

Yup. Look at Airbus, look at the WTO ruling, look at how much illegal tax euros European countries sunk into the failed A380 and tell me how it's not political. Tell me how China grounding the planes had nothing to do with the trade war. This is about trade protectionism and a warning shot from the Europeans to the Trump administration that they are willing to play dirty, and this is about who will foot the bill for the grounded planes.

cal5k 8y ago

My father used to work for Transport Canada (Canada's version of the FAA), and I've found it rather dismaying how little faith people seem to have in the FAA/NTSB despite many years of evidence as to their competence. They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment. Ironically, if you were to dive into a thread about "Urban Air Transport", a hot topic in Silicon Valley, you'd likely see people decrying the FAA for being too conservative and stifling innovation.

linuxftw 8y ago
What would it take for you to change your opinion of them? How do we know they're not current asleep at the wheel? The FAA is not some singular, autonomous entity. It's real live humans with biases and potentially some level of political influence. No regulatory body is above suspicion. There's no way for them to know at this point what caused the second crash. It might actually be a critical defect, something that was overlooked or blame mis-applied on the first crash investigation. We simply don't know at this point, and neither do they.
Alex3917 8y ago
> They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment. Aren't most of the safety statistics they publish basically fake? If you look at the star ratings they give for crash tests, there is an asterisk with fine print saying that they only compare vehicles within 250lbs of each other. Which means that when you're trying to figure out which car is actually the safest, a car that gets a 3-star crash rating might actually be safer than one that gets a 5-star crash rating.
- aquaticsunset 8y ago
  NTSB isn't the NHTSA, totally different agencies.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    NTSB also is not the FAA, just to be clear. The NTSB is one of the most respected safety and accident investigtation groups in the world.

js2 8y ago

Countering my own claim about the FAA I’ll link to this piece from 2010 that doesn’t make the FAA look so great in that decade: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/etc/cronfaa.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/etc/cro...

nraynaud 8y ago

I didn't see any comment that countered the narrative that the 2 planes that crashed had an erratic altitude before crashing. We have a natural and simple scenario to explain both, and a serious reason to suspect that any left side angle of attack indicator could have a mishap because those things happen and it's normally not a big deal. Even if the investigation deem that the root causes are different, it is the most natural explanation of those accidents absent more information, and it is even a nominal chain of event that was planned by Boeing.

danepowell 8y ago

I understand and agree that we don't want knee-jerk reactions on the part of regulators. I'm only an aviation enthusiast and by no means an expert, and fully admit that I could be wrong, and even with my natural inclination to reserve judgement, to me it seems obvious that grounding is warranted purely from a statistic viewpoint. Compare the release of the 737 MAX 8 with the release of other recent-ish models like the 777 and 787. It was 14 years before the 777 suffered even a single hull loss, and 20 years before a crash of the magnitude of the 737 MAX 8 (loss of all souls). The 787 is almost a decade old and has zero hull losses or fatalities. The 737 MAX 8 is less than a few years old and already has two catastrophic crashes? I know that it's hard to draw too much information from just two data points, but that's pretty compelling to me.

kevin_nisbet 8y ago
Also, don't forget that the 787's were also grounded when they were new for their battery problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_... It's a bit of a different situation, but they were grounded for a problem that I don't believe caused a single fatality, but had more incidents in a shorter time period.
helaoban 8y ago
By this argument, all Boeing 777s should have been grounded after the loss of Malaysia 370 and Malaysia 17. Same plane, both incidents within 5 months of each other.
- TomVDB 8y ago
  Only if you consider the total amount of time during which the plane has been in business an irrelevant detail. Which it is not, of course.
- Tomte 8y ago
  That's a deceptive argument. We know the reason why Malaysia 17 was lost. So we positively know that there is no reason to ground them.

mises 8y ago

The thing people aren't looking at is the condition of the planes. Both crashes happened with planes of third-world nations, and might not have been held to the same rigorous standards. I'm glad America is trying to get the black box, because I'm not sure I'd trust the Ethiopian govt not to tamper with it just to protect their image (and their tourism industry).

Tomte 8y ago
Last I heard they are looking for a European country to analyse it, because they don't trust America to fully and honestly investigate. That's pretty unheard of. But I can't blame them.
Baeocystin 8y ago
Lion, maybe, (I don't know anything about them to say), but Ethiopian Air is a top-rated airliner.

xutopia 8y ago

There is reason to believe that the FAA has bad actors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Elwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Elwell Trump has appointed people in various areas of the government based on their contentious views with the departments they would oversee. This makes many in the international community question Dan Elwell's position and influence at the FAA.

anigbrowl 8y ago

Let the downvotes begin. HN guidelines ask that you don't bait people this way, it's toxic to discussion. While you're trying to field a rational argument, doing so using pejorative language (panicking, giving in to pressure) preemptively delegitimizes other points of view and thus undercuts your own credibility. Certainly facts and procedure are great but it's also a fact that a large number of people just died in circumstances that are uncertain; you're essentially arguing that the uncertainty should not be considered absent a causal mechanism. Why is it so important not to adjust our course while investigations proceed? After all we have an elaborate financial services industry devoted to the mitigation of economic risk, so why shouldn't we allow that to operate? Voluntary risk-bearers (insurance and reinsurance firms, option issuers etc) can do their thing and shoulder the financial burden of the disruption rather than expecting passengers to shoulder vital risks which they're not qualified to assess.

devy 8y ago

> I don’t think it’s a simple as saying the US airlines and FAA are simply being greedy and placing profit over safety. No. It all comes down to as simple as "better safe than sorry" philosophy. FAA have generally very conservative about air safety tolerance as they should. The normal response should be "we know 737 is safe", because we have data showing that over 10k+ deliveries and less than 3% had hull loss. Can FAA say that to Boeing 737Max8 today?! So instead of being conservative they are being bold and saying "we don't know if 737 Max is not safe because investigation has not been concluded." You see the difference now? More and more evidence revealing that FAA/Boeing are placing profit over safety. Do you think FAA have a problem grounding AirBus planes with non hull loss accidents? Absolutely Not! In fact, they did exactly that in 2018 to AirBus 320neo [1] > Let the downvotes begin. This is the behavior to directly violate the HN rules. But having a minority opinion doesn't. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/pratt-said-to-assess-a320neo-engine-vibrations-in-latest-glitch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/pratt-sai...

adventist 8y ago

Trump gave into the pressure: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/business/canada-737-max.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/business/canada-737-max.h...