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I would guess it's usually secondary to the airline's reputation. Various airlines have gone bust following crashes, such as PanAm and Swissair, whereas other a

I would guess it's usually secondary to the airline's reputation. Various airlines have gone bust following crashes, such as PanAm and Swissair, whereas other airlines trade on their safety record, such as Quantas. Part of that is buying planes with a good safety record and grounding any planes they believe to be unsafe. The recent Boeing crisis does seem unusual in that it seems the media focus has bypassed the airlines entirely and gone straight for Boeing, but I've not heard anyone in the real world actually change their ticket directly based on the aircraft involved. Personally, as a passenger, I'm more concerned about maintenance and pilot training, as that's far more likely to lead to my untimely death than Boeing. Even with the 737 MAX crashes... don't get me wrong here, Boeing were absolutely at fault for how they handled the MCAS system, they deserve the backlash, and caused one of the holes in the Swiss cheese that led to the crashes. However. The crash investigation reports back up that poor training and safety culture at the airlines were also major factors. Runaway trim is something they should have been able to handle, and problems had been reported on previous flights on those planes, but they didn't want to take them out of service for financial reasons. Ethiopian Air and Lion Air already had terrible safety ratings before those incidents. All this is to say, I think the bigger risk for Boeing is that good airlines will worry how their reputation would be affected by an incident, and ground or stop buying their planes. Any airline is probably two major fatal accidents in a short space of time away from bankruptcy.

nunez 3y ago
PanAm was already on its way out before Lockerbie. Its entire business model was upended primarily by FAA route deregulation and upstarts like People Express, Laker and SouthWest charging substantially less for the same routes they flew, and, secondarily, by the hub and spoke model (PanAm primarily flew huge jumbos that were designed for point-to-point-to-transatlantic routes).
_heimdall 3y ago
> I've not heard anyone in the real world actually change their ticket directly based on the aircraft involved. Interesting that you went absolute here when my GP comment actually called out that I picked a flight specifically to avoid Boeing planes. I wasn't aware of the change after I booked so I didn't change my flight, but I did pay slightly more when to book on Airbus.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  I'm afraid that I don't consider this conversation to be in the real world just yet! Perhaps I'm showing my age? What I meant was that places like HN/Reddit don't tend to be very representative of the offline meatspace, and my experience in the latter is that few people would ever check which airliner they're flying on, let alone change a flight because of it.
salawat 3y ago
>Ethiopian Air and Lion Air already had terrible safety ratings before those incidents. Ethiopian Air actually has a great safety record, believe it or not, and Lion Air pushed Boeing for a MAX simulator, which Boeing pushed back on to wave attention away from the existence of MCAS by regulators. That's in spite of, yes, some serious quality related concerns with the airmanship culture that was loudly echoed by Langscheiss who should be ashamed of himself for such a display of Americanist chauvinism in the face of what was so clearly a fouled up attempt at rollout of a design by Boeing without the due care and communication involved with putting such machines under into the hands of unsuspecting pilots. >Runaway trim is something they should have been able to handle... Uh uh. No, bad MCAS does not present in the same manner as runaway trim. It is not a slow, steady, comtinuous, adjustment of trim, but a rapid, intermittent, escalating, and intensifying application thereof, with a 5 second reset every time you touch one of the electronic trim switches. Further, it was impossible to isolate the Flight Computer's trim circuit (which would solve the MCAS problem entirely) leaving the pilot's the electric switches they'd need to retrim fast enough because of a specific design choice to maintain type certification.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  I was too harsh on Ethiopian. I was being too eager to bash out a "hot take" on my phone. So, I withdraw my characterisation of them as terrible. While Ethiopian's safety record isn't terrible, Lion Air's was/is, despite attempts to change matters. Ethiopian do have a number of ongoing issues though, and Ethopian Airlines, the ECAA, and the EAIB have some troubling tendencies to avoid introspection - perhaps since Ethiopian Airlines is a government-owned flag carrier. Consider their response [0] to the LCAA/NTSB/BEA's investigation of the Flight 409 crash: "biased, lacking evidence, incomplete and did not present the full account of the accident [..] Any characterization of our pilots contrary to the foregoing is pure fabrication that cannot stand any scrutiny". That being said, I would personally fly on Ethiopian, but I definitely have reservations about them. With regard to both crashes, the NTSB/BEA/EAIB reports all identify crew performance as inadequate. The counter-argument is that since they hadn't seen this specific situation before, their inappropriate responses were due to a loss of situational awareness and task saturation, especially with the AOA causing an erroneous stick shaker and various confusing instrument readings. That said, in both cases, the weather was good and it was daytime, so the pilot responses are nevertheless surprising even given the erroneous instrumentation. While it's true that MCAS doesn't resemble the most common causes of runaway trim, runaway trim can happen for lots of reasons, and not all present the same way. For example, intermittent shorts can cause rapid intermittent uncommanded trimming. In any case, the response is the same, which (paraphrased) are the memory items: disengage and do not re-engage the autopilot, disengage and do not re-engage the autothrottle, hit the trim cutout switches, hold the trim wheel, and trim manually, then follow the more detailed written procedures. Indeed, in previous flights on the Lion Air aircraft, MCAS issues had occurred and the pilots in those flights recovered using the runaway stabilizer procedure. The reason they are memory items is because trim runaway can happen FAST and recovering a severely out-of-trim aircraft using the trim wheel is somewhere between difficult and impossible, even with light aircraft, so if the trim is ever doing something unexpected, the first instinct should be to disable AP and then stab trim cutout. The responses from the pilots in both crashes were not to do this, and indeed what they did do was strange and suggests poor CRM and insufficient training. Additionally, with Ethiopian, they hadn't properly disseminated Boeing's updated MCAS training to their pilots following the Lion Air crash. I'm not trying to defend Boeing, as they massively fucked up, but my point is really that airline training and safety practices are very important, and for me personally, far outweigh the aircraft I'd be flying in (unless BA were trying to get me on a Tupolev). I'm also not American and have long preferred Airbus to Boeing, so I'm not saying any of this because I'm biased in favour of the US. The FAA also clearly hold some of the bag here for not properly regulating Boeing. [0] https://corporate.ethiopianairlines.com/Press-release-open-page/ethiopian-airlines-refutes-et-409-crash-report---17-january-2012 https://corporate.ethiopianairlines.com/Press-release-open-p...

nunez 3y ago

PanAm was already on its way out before Lockerbie. Its entire business model was upended primarily by FAA route deregulation and upstarts like People Express, Laker and SouthWest charging substantially less for the same routes they flew, and, secondarily, by the hub and spoke model (PanAm primarily flew huge jumbos that were designed for point-to-point-to-transatlantic routes).

_heimdall 3y ago

> I've not heard anyone in the real world actually change their ticket directly based on the aircraft involved. Interesting that you went absolute here when my GP comment actually called out that I picked a flight specifically to avoid Boeing planes. I wasn't aware of the change after I booked so I didn't change my flight, but I did pay slightly more when to book on Airbus.

cameronh90 3y ago
I'm afraid that I don't consider this conversation to be in the real world just yet! Perhaps I'm showing my age? What I meant was that places like HN/Reddit don't tend to be very representative of the offline meatspace, and my experience in the latter is that few people would ever check which airliner they're flying on, let alone change a flight because of it.

salawat 3y ago

>Ethiopian Air and Lion Air already had terrible safety ratings before those incidents. Ethiopian Air actually has a great safety record, believe it or not, and Lion Air pushed Boeing for a MAX simulator, which Boeing pushed back on to wave attention away from the existence of MCAS by regulators. That's in spite of, yes, some serious quality related concerns with the airmanship culture that was loudly echoed by Langscheiss who should be ashamed of himself for such a display of Americanist chauvinism in the face of what was so clearly a fouled up attempt at rollout of a design by Boeing without the due care and communication involved with putting such machines under into the hands of unsuspecting pilots. >Runaway trim is something they should have been able to handle... Uh uh. No, bad MCAS does not present in the same manner as runaway trim. It is not a slow, steady, comtinuous, adjustment of trim, but a rapid, intermittent, escalating, and intensifying application thereof, with a 5 second reset every time you touch one of the electronic trim switches. Further, it was impossible to isolate the Flight Computer's trim circuit (which would solve the MCAS problem entirely) leaving the pilot's the electric switches they'd need to retrim fast enough because of a specific design choice to maintain type certification.

cameronh90 3y ago
I was too harsh on Ethiopian. I was being too eager to bash out a "hot take" on my phone. So, I withdraw my characterisation of them as terrible. While Ethiopian's safety record isn't terrible, Lion Air's was/is, despite attempts to change matters. Ethiopian do have a number of ongoing issues though, and Ethopian Airlines, the ECAA, and the EAIB have some troubling tendencies to avoid introspection - perhaps since Ethiopian Airlines is a government-owned flag carrier. Consider their response [0] to the LCAA/NTSB/BEA's investigation of the Flight 409 crash: "biased, lacking evidence, incomplete and did not present the full account of the accident [..] Any characterization of our pilots contrary to the foregoing is pure fabrication that cannot stand any scrutiny". That being said, I would personally fly on Ethiopian, but I definitely have reservations about them. With regard to both crashes, the NTSB/BEA/EAIB reports all identify crew performance as inadequate. The counter-argument is that since they hadn't seen this specific situation before, their inappropriate responses were due to a loss of situational awareness and task saturation, especially with the AOA causing an erroneous stick shaker and various confusing instrument readings. That said, in both cases, the weather was good and it was daytime, so the pilot responses are nevertheless surprising even given the erroneous instrumentation. While it's true that MCAS doesn't resemble the most common causes of runaway trim, runaway trim can happen for lots of reasons, and not all present the same way. For example, intermittent shorts can cause rapid intermittent uncommanded trimming. In any case, the response is the same, which (paraphrased) are the memory items: disengage and do not re-engage the autopilot, disengage and do not re-engage the autothrottle, hit the trim cutout switches, hold the trim wheel, and trim manually, then follow the more detailed written procedures. Indeed, in previous flights on the Lion Air aircraft, MCAS issues had occurred and the pilots in those flights recovered using the runaway stabilizer procedure. The reason they are memory items is because trim runaway can happen FAST and recovering a severely out-of-trim aircraft using the trim wheel is somewhere between difficult and impossible, even with light aircraft, so if the trim is ever doing something unexpected, the first instinct should be to disable AP and then stab trim cutout. The responses from the pilots in both crashes were not to do this, and indeed what they did do was strange and suggests poor CRM and insufficient training. Additionally, with Ethiopian, they hadn't properly disseminated Boeing's updated MCAS training to their pilots following the Lion Air crash. I'm not trying to defend Boeing, as they massively fucked up, but my point is really that airline training and safety practices are very important, and for me personally, far outweigh the aircraft I'd be flying in (unless BA were trying to get me on a Tupolev). I'm also not American and have long preferred Airbus to Boeing, so I'm not saying any of this because I'm biased in favour of the US. The FAA also clearly hold some of the bag here for not properly regulating Boeing. [0] https://corporate.ethiopianairlines.com/Press-release-open-page/ethiopian-airlines-refutes-et-409-crash-report---17-january-2012 https://corporate.ethiopianairlines.com/Press-release-open-p...