7 ms·
Japan ANA Boeing 737-800 flight turns back due to cockpit window crack
- eterm 3y agoThis is one of those stories that wouldn't be noticed if not for the attention on anything Boeing related right now. Instead it's near the top of the front-page. This hyper selective attention is very bad. It leads to all kinds of wrong inference about the background frequency of events, because suddenly when under the microscope we notice all kinds of things that would have previously gone unnoticed.
- adastra22 3y agoWell how often do cockpit windows of passenger aircraft crack?
- eropple 3y agoFrom a 2022 report, trivially searched-for on Google: > According to the Federal Aviation Administration, more than three dozen instances of cracked windshields have been reported by airlines over the past five years. https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article260551697.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article260551697.html
- jbverschoor 3y agohttps://avherald.com/h?search_term=cracked+windshield&opt=1&dosearch=1&search.x=0&search.y=0 https://avherald.com/h?search_term=cracked+windshield&opt=1&... Most of them are Boeing it seems: 14x Airbus 35x Boeing 5x Bombardier 3x Embraer
- JimBlackwood 3y agoDoes Boeing also have more plans in service and/or more flights?
- discordance 3y agoFor a fair comparison, this should be measured against flight hours per manufacturer
- krallja 3y agoTakeoff/landing cycles, actually. Cruising at high altitude is much less rough on the airframe (including windows) than the strains that happen when changing altitude.
- jbverschoor 3y agoA quick search gave me 12K vs 10K planes. I couldn't find the actual hours or number of flights
- kube-system 3y agoAnd until last year, most of the planes in the sky were also Boeing. And the Boeing planes in the sky, on average, are older.
- avereveard 3y agoBlatantly Overlooked Engineering Inadequacies, Now Grounded
- stjohnswarts 3y agothose don't mean much with out at least a "out of X planes from manufacturer Y"
- jjulius 3y agoA cursory Google suggests that it is not an uncommon occurrence.
- a12k 3y agoThis article from 2014, predating all of Boeing's recent failures, claims it is a regular occurrence and is also not always reported because it's a relatively minor thing to happen: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140507001219-90103575-cracked-aircraft-windshields-are-not-rare https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140507001219-90103575-crack...
- brunohaid 3y ago~ weekly, globally.
- scrlk 3y agoThe most infamous incident with a cockpit window is probably British Airways Flight 5390. An incorrectly installed window blew out, causing one of the pilots to be partially ejected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390
- sseagull 3y agoHere's a link to an Aviation Herald search for "windshield crack". Looks like a lot of bird and hail, but also a fair number of them just cracking. https://avherald.com/h?search_term=windshield+crack&opt=0&dosearch=1&search.x=0&search.y=0 https://avherald.com/h?search_term=windshield+crack&opt=0&do... There are lots of Boeing on there, but unsure what the ratio of Boeing to Airbus there are in service. Certainly some Airbus on there as well.
- hcs 3y agoSince this involves a window I can't help but think of the windshield pitting epidemic,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epidemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...
- genocidicbunny 3y agoOn the other hand, the hyper focus on Boeing might result in some actual change instead of more of the same as before. Perhaps a little of the stick to contrast with the carrot?
- williamcotton 3y agoI wholeheartedly agree. They need to get an aerospace engineer back at CEO and not some MBA optimizing for quarterly reports. People are absolutely dying because of an incoherent understanding of the value chain. The decision to outsource may please Wall Street for three months but it certainly hurts the brand in the long term. Boeing is in the business of R&D and production. That’s their value add. Fuck the investors, they’re literally killing people!
- gvedem 3y ago> Fuck the investors, they're literally killing people epitaph of the new century. from water that makes your teeth black to illegal drug trials in poor countries. corporations are amoral by design and we have to assume they will do literally anything to make a buck.
- gruez 3y ago>from water that makes your teeth black ???
- chmod775 3y agoTried to google it and found something about tap water with high iron content.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoFluoride is known to discolour teeth; also, inactive dental caries will turn dark, and most dentists will jump at the opportunity to drill that shit out.
- 3y ago
- Solvency 3y agoIt's a weird point to make. Does Boeing need your defense? In real life this is what happens. Bad students. Repeat offenders. Criminals. Neverdowellers. Their actions get spot lit and they're put under a microscope I don't see how making a stink over Boeing's constant little problems isn't a tiny cosmic balancing act against their decades of negligence.
- tekla 3y agoHysteria is hysteria.
- eterm 3y agoI'm not defending Boeing. I've said elsewhere I wouldn't fly on a max. I'm attacking the way in which the media (and audience, the media is mostly just chasing ratings) gets obsessed about a topic to the exclusion of other stories, only to dramatically flip-flop around and completely dump a topic once it's bored of it.
- whynotmaybe 3y agoAre you new here? (Jokingly...) I don't know what percentage of HN is about AI & LLM in the past few months but it's like nothing else important is happening in the ICT world.
- EGG_CREAM 3y agoIt’s not just HN, you all seem to be upset with basic human nature here. Something happens, and then you notice related events more often because they feel more salient. You might as well be upset that people recognize patterns, it’s just part of how people are wired.
- tiahura 3y agoSome of us choose HN to receive our preciously minuscule free time on because we expect it to be of a higher signal to noise ratio than average.
- jsiepkes 3y ago> This hyper selective attention is very bad. > because suddenly when under the microscope we notice all kinds of things that would have previously gone unnoticed. They knew that was a risk when they started cutting corners. Now they are paying the price. Can't say I feel for them. It's a nice deterrent.
- oneplane 3y agoIn the context of just Boeing, that makes sense. In the broader 'news' context, it's bad, because there are a crapton of things that really aren't as significant as they are made out to be to the layman. It's not a firehose we should be drinking from, instead, the most significant things are supposed to be selected by specialists so we have enough space in our heads to focus on things we choose to instead of just whatever happens to be getting firehosed at us. (you can probably elaborate the 'selected by specialists' with complete departments or even organisations that specialise in various things - the world is much too big and made of too many pieces for just some person or small team to do all the 'is this thing important' work for everything, and definitely not in a single outlet)
- kjkjadksj 3y agoWe don’t in fact drink from the firehose. There are actually specialists who select what stories we are exposed to. The simple fact is that their incentives of politics and profits don’t align with yours of general knowledge and a peaceful learned population, and what we see today is the end result of these incentives.
- sdenton4 3y agoSpecialists who carefully wield their HN up votes to make sure you see stories like this one...
- tiahura 3y agoYep. Another example is the stranger kidnapping scare of the ‘80s. There’s an unhealthy paradox at work: The rarer a highly emotional event occurs, the more media attention attention it gets. The more media attention something gets, the more people think it’s actually common. Another example is police killing unarmed black men. Trying explaining to someone that something is in the news because it’s rare is futile.
- cbhl 3y agoAS1218 is probably not the cause of extra attention to airplanes _in Japan_. They had arguably much worse events on Jan 2 (landing JAL516 A350 crashed into a earthquake relief Coast Guard DC-8 on landing; killed 5, and both aircraft caught fire).
- sph 3y agoThis is how journalism and social media have been working in the Internet Age: keep bombarding people with the topic du jour because it sells (or it is easy HN karma), and then move onto the new thing. For many, like OP, Hacker News is the place to post random news that have nothing to do with computers or hacking. (I blame HN's vague and simplistic guidelines that allow "anything that our users might find interesting")
- JKCalhoun 3y ago> Hacker News is the place to post random news that have nothing to do with computers or hacking. Thankfully. If HN was just posts about Docker or Web stacks I would have left a long time ago.
- mmaunder 3y agoAgreed this is a nothingburger but the side effect of having a spotlight on Boeing is helpful. There are fundamental changes needed at Boeing to move the finance guys off the helm and move engineering back into leadership roles.
- nswest23 3y agoCovid?
- lessbergstein 3y ago[dead]
- EGG_CREAM 3y agoYou’re fighting human nature if you think people aren’t going to be hyper attentive to things like this after the (latest) Max 9 incident. Also, it is not in any way “very bad.” In fact, it’s very good. Plane makers should believe one faulty decision could completely ruin them, that’s how they should be attacking any engineering problems related to putting people in the air. Clearly Boeing’s leadership is ok with putting profits before safety, they need to be shown there is no profit without extremely tight safety margins.
- ReptileMan 3y ago>Plane makers should believe one faulty decision could completely ruin them In that case nothing will ever be done, improved or innovated. The optimal is close, but greater than zero on faulty decisions.
- lxgr 3y agoInaction/no decision is a decision too, although that idea is often a surprisingly hard sell in the media.
- PedroBatista 3y agoFunny, because the broad non-attention is what lead us to the situation we are in now.
- Cacti 3y agoEvery single Boeing story here is filled with comments from Seattle tech people thinking they know something special about Seattle aerospace, but they don’t, and they’re completely unaware of this. Mostly it’s people repeating their parents stories and they’ve never bothered to fact check them, or it’s people who have never like Boeing doing military aircraft and simply shit on them for that. It has zero impact though outside of extending the ignorance of HN readers and promoting fear, uncertainty, and doubt. No one doing aerospace cares what HN thinks or even knows about HN for that matter.
- mihaaly 3y agoThey wanted to trade on the hyper selective attention and binding new and old very tightly together, but this thing has double edge, everyone knows it, they must eat what they cooked! They wanted the good ignoring the bad in their deliberate half blindness.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoEven if it normally wouldn't be news, given the shitshow that the MAX is and how they're now trying to get MAX-10 certified, this might be a case of the media being a functionally broken clock. The FAA should have hell to pay if they certify it and this will put pressure on them, as at the end of the day they answer to the American public, even if boeing only answers to shareholders.
- bdcravens 3y agoTrue, but we see the same cycle frequently. Apple keyboards, Teslas and FSD, Apple antennas, Samsung phones catching fire, etc, all created an environment where tangential stories received elevated attention.
- hindsightbias 3y agoI measure societies by what they’re hysterical about. It’s the best measurement of character there is imo.
- callalex 3y agoKinda like how every train derailment was evidence of a failed society a few months ago and now nobody cares again.
- feverzsj 3y agoRecent 737 accidents remind me of the famous Aloha Airlines Flight 243.
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoAs long as it doesn't remind us all of the ill fated JL123 flight...
- ginko 3y agoReading the wikipedia page on that one is horrific.
- booleandilemma 3y agoFor the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoIndeed, i used to work for ANA, and my colleagues used to bring this up fromt time to time, with assorted creepy anecdotes. This disaster somehow struck a nerve in the Japanese psyche. There were even novels written on this topic with a boarding pass for flight 123 included as a bookmark.
- supernova87a 3y ago"...Flight 1182 was en route to Toyama airport but headed back to the Sapporo-New Chitose airport after the crack was found on the outermost of four layers of windows surrounding the cockpit, the spokesperson said..." Hopefully people can tell routine maintenance issues from newsworthy improper design and implementation / manufacturing problems.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> Hopefully people can tell routine maintenance issues from newsworthy improper design and implementation / manufacturing problems. 100 upvotes and counting. There's your answer.
- tekla 3y agoOn HN? Never. This entire thread is proof of it.
- alpaca128 3y agoNo reason to pretend like HN is some special noteworthy kind of echo chamber. You won't find any large online community where the majority reads more than the headline.
- drumhead 3y agoRight now any bad news related to a 737 is fatal to the brand, regardless of how common or uncommon the incident may be.
- rootusrootus 3y agoOr the opposite. Now people will become desensitized and assume it's just more clickbait.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoI think you underestimate how many people hold a dim view of (nu)boeing
- irrelative 3y agoOr perhaps you overestimate how many people hold any view of Boeing at all.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoThey're fairly well known in europe after the MAX debacle, I don't know how it is stateside though.
- EasyMark 3y agoor even saw the story. Tech nerds tend to pay a lot more attention to the news than most by a large margin in my experience (other than people that are actually in the journalism business)
- lolinder 3y agoThe plane in question was JA56AN [0], which according to PlaneSpotters.net was delivered in June 2009 [1]. Forbes [2] indicates that the service life of a fight deck window is ten years (it's not clear if that applies to the windshield as well as passenger windows)—if that's accurate, it's likely that this is completely unrelated to Boeing's significant manufacturing problems lately. Unfortunately for Boeing it doesn't matter, anything involving a 737 will get news coverage right now. [0] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/nh1182 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/nh1182 [1] https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-737-800-ja56an-all-nippon-airways/egxko1?refresh=1 https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-737-800-ja56an... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2018/05/19/airplane-windows-can-cope-with-more-stress-than-you-think-expert-explains/?sh=12a68bac149f https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2018/05/19/airplan...
- ta1243 3y agoBoeing made a business decision to brand a new model as a "737". They wanted to trade of the reputation of the 737. Instead they tarnished it.
- djha-skin 3y agoFurther, they allowed the old planes to tarnish the reputation of the new ones. If they had made of completely different brand name, then a 10-year-old 737 wouldn't get mixed up with a new plane.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoBut its more like the opposite: the new MAX planes are tarnishing the reputation of the older ones. This one incident being a more standard problem that hasn't gotten much attention in the past.
- hef19898 3y agoBranding didn't really matter. The MAX had to be a 737 for certification and crew training. Boeing cut corners during development, MCAS. And it seems that they are cutting corners as well in manufacturing, supplier management and quality insurance. There is nothing to funny about any of that.
- pcurve 3y agoThis happened a few times to 737. With picture https://twitter.com/HawaiiNewsNow/status/1658175996925734912 https://twitter.com/HawaiiNewsNow/status/1658175996925734912 Another one. https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Avelo-flight-from-Tweed-to-Nashville-diverted-17688708.php https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Avelo-flight-from-Tw... It's not specific to 737. 787 also had a bunch of cracked pilot window issues not related to external impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eemw9RNkU_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eemw9RNkU_k
- rootusrootus 3y agoIt's also not specific to Boeing. All airplanes get cracked windows sometimes.
- vonthecreat0r 3y agoDoesnt a plane at high altitude with a cracked window at those speeds (900+ kmh/hr) pose a risk of exploding from too much cabin pressure especially if it's the front window; regardless of brand/company?? which may mean perhaps weather is to be factored before we blame a brand regardless; because no matter how you put it: every company in any industry does things differently. Sometimes their practices are far from optimal, but at the very least they meet baseline before blaming or considering shareholders or quality control as the only culprit....
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoHere we go. The inevitable mainstream media freak-outs over the usual background noise of airplane issues. This is how I know my YouTube recommendations are going to be extra awful for a while.
- bmitc 3y agoBig deal. It's Boeing's fault. Maybe they and the airlines shouldn't have defrauded the public and regulators. If they hadn't, this would indeed be in the background noise.
- rootusrootus 3y agoWe've now reached the stage where every non-story is interesting because it has "Boeing" in the headline. While you think this hurts Boeing's reputation, I'm not at all sure that's how it plays out. It desensitizes people and reminds them that the news is just about clicks and outrage. Then they'll not be paying much attention if there is real newsworthy revelations. The fact that it's getting so many upvotes on HN is kind of sad, but not unexpected.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoAre you a Boeing stock owner? The buzz is deserved because 20 documented, serious deficiencies in the 737 MAX have escaped widespread press. Furthermore, few people are aware of the 737 NG Ducommun scandal. The rot at Boeing stretches back to the 90's.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> Are you a Boeing stock owner? Nope, just someone rational who has a passing interest in aviation, and knows that broken cockpit windows are pretty routine. They do get tracked, of course, and if you look at that you'll find that every manufacturer is well represented. I have no appreciation for emotional clickbait outrage news and I hate to see it on Hacker News. I'd like our community to hold itself to higher standards.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoFYI: 737 NGs were also manufactured shoddily says whistleblowers from 20 years ago. Bear straps and other falsely approved, deficient structural components were beaten into place with hammers on the assembly line ("preloaded"). There have been 3 737 NG accidents where people died because the fuselage broke up when 737 Classic fuselages would've survived similar scenarios.
- inejge 3y agoThis made the news only because of Boeing's current troubles with the MAX9. They richly deserve the scrutiny for that blunder, but cracked windshields on aircraft are not all that uncommon. A step above anecdotal, but if you go to the Aviation Herald and search for "cracked windshield"[1], the first page of results covers about a year and has sixty-something entries. About half are Boeing aircraft, but again, this is not rigorous, because Avherald doesn't cover everything (but please, support them if you can; they are a great resource.) [1] https://avherald.com/h?search_term=cracked+windshield&opt=0&dosearch=1&search.x=0&search.y=0 https://avherald.com/h?search_term=cracked+windshield&opt=0&...
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- roamerz 3y agoWhen I see that the plane has been in service for 30 years and has a cracked windshield I think less about the age of the glass and more about the rigidity of the airframe. Seems that as a plane ages out it would tend to stress those types of parts more.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoHow many buildings collapse in the world daily? How many catch fire and burn to the ground? How many trucks and cars self combust or lose a wheel? How many trains derail out of the tracks? Aviation people and regulators are so paranoid, they hold a chokehold on global economic growth, maybe only nuclear regulators causes more GDP and quality of life losses. Instead of grounding them or demolishing them send these plane to Africa, they will take them
- kazinator 3y agoIf you have to go through any hassle like turning back, it's best to be on a Japanese plane.