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This 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
by eterm 3y ago
This 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.