5 ms·

It kinda bothers me that airlines are still placing orders for new Boeing airplanes. Taking delivery of old orders is one thing, since they can't really back o

It kinda bothers me that airlines are still placing orders for new Boeing airplanes. Taking delivery of old orders is one thing, since they can't really back out of those, but placing new orders implies that some level of trust remains for this company, and I just don't see how that makes any sense at all?

masklinn 2y ago
Boeings are still flying, and Airbus has no availability. On the neos, they have more than a decade worth of orders, and the order book A350 is not much shorter.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  Boeing has many years of backlog, too, this is really normal with airplane manufacturers. The airlines commit ahead, they wouldn't actually want to take delivery today anyway, so the manufacturing system is designed to work this way.
  - masklinn 2y ago
    Boeing does not have a decade of backlog.
Sakos 2y ago
Seems like you haven't seen the latest news. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/11/boeing-sales-orders-drop-max/928418bc-2805-11ef-835a-2a6acac1f8a6_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/11/boeing-sa... New orders are significantly down. Old orders will rarely be cancelled even if possible simply because there's no alternative. Airbus's backlog is longer than Boeing's. And while currently Airbus's manufacturing rate is much higher currently, it won't make a difference if everybody switches to Airbus.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  > New orders are significantly down. For Airbus, too.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. I'm not aware of any significant drop in new orders for Airbus. Do you have a source?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
belter 2y ago
"Boeing sales tumble as company gets no orders for 737 MAX for 2nd straight month" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649943
yummypaint 2y ago
Institutional momentum at airlines is huge. Southwest flies only boeing to minimize training requirements and keep pilots interchangeable. Now they are appreciating the riskiness of that strategy in hindsight.
epolanski 2y ago
1) Even if the max had hiccups, plenty of them, it is an absolutely safe airplane by any measure. 2) Your fleet may mostly be formed by Boeing airplanes, having all of those move to Airbus airplanes is also a safety issue. Pilots have to re-learn and even forget things they accrued and evolved to react instantly for decades. At some point you need to weigh the odds of increasing human error vs relatively safer Airbus alternative 3) Maintenance and logistics conversion would be a huge pain 4) If you order an A320 today, you're gonna get it no sooner than in a decade. Not taking your ordered Max is really not a smart idea. 5) Boeing hasn't received a single new order for max airplanes in two months
- throwup238 2y ago
  > 1) Even if the max had hiccups, plenty of them, it is an absolutely safe airplane by any measure. Except fatalities.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    "Some of you might die but that's a sacrifice I am willing to take." - some Boeing suit
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Even by fatalities. 737 Maxes have flown more than a couple of million of flights, at least, since they entered service, that puts their fatal incident rate at similar levels of the A320. The only two incidents, also, as you know, were related and both happened 5+ years ago.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - sitharus 2y ago
      That’s comparing apples to two sacks of apples, one of which is 30 years older. The A320neo entered service in 2016 and has over 3,000 of the type in service and has zero fatal accidents involving passengers or flight crew (there have been five fatalities from two incidents involving runway incursions by ground crew). There have been no serious in-flight incidents. The 737max was introduced in 2017 and has over 1500 in service, about half of the airbus A320 neo. It has had two fatal accidents resulting in 346 fatalities and one serious in-flight incident. The record is not great. If you want to compare all 737 models back to the first flight of the A320 I’m pretty sure it’ll be closer, but flying is much safer than it was even with the 737max. However I do believe that Boeing will resolve the issues. It will take time to fix the culture that resulted caused them though.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
No fan of Boeing. But where are you going to go to buy something else? There is only Airbus. There isn't a huge competitive market, it is just 2 companies left standing. Perhaps a good argument for fighting monopolies? And, while Boeing looks bad, when sales go down, corporations adapt. The pesky customers want "Safety", and we aren't selling "Safety", got to get some of this "Safety". Guess we better do some re-orgs, some focus groups, some training to make sure everyone knows "Safety" is important. Maybe throw in some training on "Quality". They'll adapt.
- salawat 2y ago
  >The pesky customers want "Safety", and we aren't selling "Safety", got to get some of this "Safety". Guess we better do some re-orgs, some focus groups, some training to make sure everyone knows "Safety" is important. Maybe throw in some training on "Quality". Gah hahahaha. Oh God, don't make me laugh that hard. One does not merely add some more Quality to a product as if it were flour in a cooking recipe. Quality is literally the single most difficult to add back to something once you've decided to skimp on it; as quality itself is a compound output. It's a result of having your entire goddamn company devoted to the goal of creating a quantitatively superior product. Boeing decided it was time to not sweat the package, and to turn itself into a financial product. As it turns out; it's pretty much impossible to do one while not doing the other...
  - dboreham 2y ago
    It all starts when psychopaths on wall st install psychopaths in the C suite.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      Not even hiding it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
throw0101d 2y ago
> It kinda bothers me that airlines are still placing orders for new Boeing airplanes. Are they? Boeing had almost nine hundred 737 MAX orders in 2023; in 2024 they have 66: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_... Three hundred 787 orders in 2023; 10 in 2024: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_787_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_787_orders_and_... One hundred 777s in 2023, twenty-seven in 2024: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_777_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_777_orders_and_... Their numbers are down bigly. And who else are you going to order from? Airbus? How much capacity do they have to build more?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  I'd note Airbus is seeing the same pattern. The 737-MAX's A320neo competitor, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_family_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_family_... 1,689 orders in 2023, 154 in 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A220_orders_and_deliveries#By_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A220_orders_and... 141 orders in 2023, negative 12 in 2024. As a result, I presume the explanation is less "no Boeing" and more something like "orders have a reporting lag" or "2023 was a big year for airlines post-COVID".
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    These stats alone seem like way more interesting news, suprised I haven't seen that before. I wonder why plane orders from the two biggest manufactures have dropped so dramatically and what it means economically. My mind immediately goes to whether airlines are quietly preparing for an expected downturn, or if airlines aren't selling to corporations because they're selling to governments and militaries. That could definitely be my own preconceptions sneaking in though.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      I wouldn't read too much into it yet; 2023's numbers look like they're abberantly high, which is probably the airlines catching up after the little economic hiccup we all had in 2020.
bradleyjg 2y ago
Do you think your car (or bike) is safer or more dangerous than the least safe Boeing plane in service?
- Zigurd 2y ago
  Per mile or per hour?
  - bradleyjg 2y ago
    Either.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  These numbers are always pretty BSy because the big dangers in flight are take-off and landing. Comparing distances just completely obfuscates everything for no real gain. You can illustrate this clearly with some sort of reductio ad absurdum. Imagine we have an interstellar ship traveling many trillions of miles, but that blows up 90% of the time. If you look at it in terms of this same deaths/mile metric it'd still be way safer than driving, but obviously it isn't - which emphasizes that the metric is misleading. The most reasonable way would be safety per average trip, with some sort of multiplier for particularly long or particularly short trips. After all that's exactly what people think these numbers mean, even though they most certainly don't.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    Okay. So let's compare accidents per flights to accidents per trip with bike/car. IATA reports 1.19 accidents per million flights in the 2019-2023 years. [1] Your turn to find a comparable number for road vehicles. 1: https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2024-releases/2024-02-28-01/ https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2024-releases/2024-02-28-0...
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      You pretty quickly shifted the goal posts there didn't you? That's for all flight vessels, not just Boeing's 737 class. You're also misreading your stats (that's per sector, not per million), but in either case I'm more interested in fatality rates. Your site gives a hull loss rate of 1 per 4.94 million flights for jets. For vehicles, the average person makes two trips a day over a total of 29.2 miles. [1] So we can say the average trip is 14.6 miles. And the average fatality rate is 1.33 per 100 million miles traveled [2]. So that's 1.33 fatalities per (100 / 14.6) = 6.8 million trips, or 1 fatality per 5.17 million trips. So on a first level analysis, vehicles are slightly safer than jets on a trip for trip basis. But the math I'm doing dramatically understates the actual difference, because the mortality numbers I'm using for vehicles are per person, not per fatal incident. In other words 1 PERSON dies per 5.17 million vehicle trips. And I'm comparing that against one entire JET 'dying' per 4.94 million flights, which is generally going to have tens to hundreds of people on it. If you do an apples to apples comparison, vehicles would be some orders of magnitude safer than jets, trip for trip. Of course ideal would be to ignore population and just look at car incidents with at least 1 fatality vs plane incidents with at least 1 fatality, but I can't find those stats unfortunately. [1] - https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-motorists-drive/ https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-moto... [2] - https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
PeterHolzwarth 2y ago
It's interesting to see the dynamic of the downward spiral (no pun intended) "pile on" media cascade mechanic in action, through your comment. What I mean is, you are assuming now (you probably wouldn't have a year ago) that this Dutch Roll incident was caused by the plane being Boeing. So, why would anyone even buy a Boeing at this point? But what indication is there of that this Dutch Roll incident was caused by the plane being Boeing? As far as I can tell, Dutch Roll is a phenomena whose causes aren't fully understood, that rarely, but occasionally, happens to planes, not just to Boeing planes. But now that we are collectively bought-in on a Boeing hate-fest (and they certainly seem to have brought it on themselves, no doubt!), we just knee-jerk apply the cause to any issue seen as being explained by the aircraft being Boeing.
afavour 2y ago
Such is the state of the airline business/capitalism. There are basically only two manufacturers: Boeing and Airbus. The airlines place orders years in advance and if you cancel a Boeing order now you’re a) out of a lot of money and b) joining the back of the line with Airbus. The simple reality is that the airlines (and their shareholders) consider a) and b) to be greater risks than the safety record of Boeing planes. Given the parameters they have they’re not wrong. Air travel is still incredibly safe, even if these Boeing incidents make it ever so slightly less safe. To be blunt, the market can absorb it and individual airlines have little motivation to change. If there is going to be a big change it’ll need to come from the FAA.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Yeah, Airbus is extremely backed up with orders
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    So is Boeing.
impulser_ 2y ago
The Max 8 are great planes. I rode one recently, in fact it was with Southwest, it was probably the best plane I flown in. Lots of space, comfortable and quiet. They just need to fix the bad part issues they seem to have. Personally, I would fly on a Max 8 again.
- lastofthemojito 2y ago
  Looking at Southwest is probably a good way to put the Boeing issues in perspective. It's easy to want to freak out over the negative headlines over the past few years, and the MCAS fiasco is a well-deserved black mark on Boeing's reputation. But again, looking at bigger perspective, Southwest Airlines operates an all-Boeing fleet of 800+ airlines doing 4000+ flights per day. About a million and a half flights per year. And in their 50+ years of operation, there have been 4 deaths associated with Southwest flights, 1 of which was a suicide where a guy walked onto a runway and another was an unruly passenger who tried to storm a cockpit. I don't want to let Boeing off the hook - their recent cock-ups absolutely seem to indicate cultural problems that need to be fixed so that quality can improve rather than continue to slide. But honestly, getting on a 737 Max to go on a trip still seems way safer than hopping on the highway.

masklinn 2y ago

Boeings are still flying, and Airbus has no availability. On the neos, they have more than a decade worth of orders, and the order book A350 is not much shorter.

rootusrootus 2y ago
Boeing has many years of backlog, too, this is really normal with airplane manufacturers. The airlines commit ahead, they wouldn't actually want to take delivery today anyway, so the manufacturing system is designed to work this way.
- masklinn 2y ago
  Boeing does not have a decade of backlog.

Sakos 2y ago

Seems like you haven't seen the latest news. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/11/boeing-sales-orders-drop-max/928418bc-2805-11ef-835a-2a6acac1f8a6_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/11/boeing-sa... New orders are significantly down. Old orders will rarely be cancelled even if possible simply because there's no alternative. Airbus's backlog is longer than Boeing's. And while currently Airbus's manufacturing rate is much higher currently, it won't make a difference if everybody switches to Airbus.

rootusrootus 2y ago
> New orders are significantly down. For Airbus, too.
- Sakos 2y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. I'm not aware of any significant drop in new orders for Airbus. Do you have a source?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

belter 2y ago

"Boeing sales tumble as company gets no orders for 737 MAX for 2nd straight month" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649943

yummypaint 2y ago

Institutional momentum at airlines is huge. Southwest flies only boeing to minimize training requirements and keep pilots interchangeable. Now they are appreciating the riskiness of that strategy in hindsight.

epolanski 2y ago

1) Even if the max had hiccups, plenty of them, it is an absolutely safe airplane by any measure. 2) Your fleet may mostly be formed by Boeing airplanes, having all of those move to Airbus airplanes is also a safety issue. Pilots have to re-learn and even forget things they accrued and evolved to react instantly for decades. At some point you need to weigh the odds of increasing human error vs relatively safer Airbus alternative 3) Maintenance and logistics conversion would be a huge pain 4) If you order an A320 today, you're gonna get it no sooner than in a decade. Not taking your ordered Max is really not a smart idea. 5) Boeing hasn't received a single new order for max airplanes in two months

throwup238 2y ago
> 1) Even if the max had hiccups, plenty of them, it is an absolutely safe airplane by any measure. Except fatalities.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  "Some of you might die but that's a sacrifice I am willing to take." - some Boeing suit
- epolanski 2y ago
  Even by fatalities. 737 Maxes have flown more than a couple of million of flights, at least, since they entered service, that puts their fatal incident rate at similar levels of the A320. The only two incidents, also, as you know, were related and both happened 5+ years ago.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - sitharus 2y ago
    That’s comparing apples to two sacks of apples, one of which is 30 years older. The A320neo entered service in 2016 and has over 3,000 of the type in service and has zero fatal accidents involving passengers or flight crew (there have been five fatalities from two incidents involving runway incursions by ground crew). There have been no serious in-flight incidents. The 737max was introduced in 2017 and has over 1500 in service, about half of the airbus A320 neo. It has had two fatal accidents resulting in 346 fatalities and one serious in-flight incident. The record is not great. If you want to compare all 737 models back to the first flight of the A320 I’m pretty sure it’ll be closer, but flying is much safer than it was even with the 737max. However I do believe that Boeing will resolve the issues. It will take time to fix the culture that resulted caused them though.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

No fan of Boeing. But where are you going to go to buy something else? There is only Airbus. There isn't a huge competitive market, it is just 2 companies left standing. Perhaps a good argument for fighting monopolies? And, while Boeing looks bad, when sales go down, corporations adapt. The pesky customers want "Safety", and we aren't selling "Safety", got to get some of this "Safety". Guess we better do some re-orgs, some focus groups, some training to make sure everyone knows "Safety" is important. Maybe throw in some training on "Quality". They'll adapt.

salawat 2y ago
>The pesky customers want "Safety", and we aren't selling "Safety", got to get some of this "Safety". Guess we better do some re-orgs, some focus groups, some training to make sure everyone knows "Safety" is important. Maybe throw in some training on "Quality". Gah hahahaha. Oh God, don't make me laugh that hard. One does not merely add some more Quality to a product as if it were flour in a cooking recipe. Quality is literally the single most difficult to add back to something once you've decided to skimp on it; as quality itself is a compound output. It's a result of having your entire goddamn company devoted to the goal of creating a quantitatively superior product. Boeing decided it was time to not sweat the package, and to turn itself into a financial product. As it turns out; it's pretty much impossible to do one while not doing the other...
- dboreham 2y ago
  It all starts when psychopaths on wall st install psychopaths in the C suite.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    Not even hiding it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...

throw0101d 2y ago

> It kinda bothers me that airlines are still placing orders for new Boeing airplanes. Are they? Boeing had almost nine hundred 737 MAX orders in 2023; in 2024 they have 66: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_... Three hundred 787 orders in 2023; 10 in 2024: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_787_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_787_orders_and_... One hundred 777s in 2023, twenty-seven in 2024: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_777_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_777_orders_and_... Their numbers are down bigly. And who else are you going to order from? Airbus? How much capacity do they have to build more?

ceejayoz 2y ago
I'd note Airbus is seeing the same pattern. The 737-MAX's A320neo competitor, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_family_orders_and_deliveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320neo_family_... 1,689 orders in 2023, 154 in 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A220_orders_and_deliveries#By_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A220_orders_and... 141 orders in 2023, negative 12 in 2024. As a result, I presume the explanation is less "no Boeing" and more something like "orders have a reporting lag" or "2023 was a big year for airlines post-COVID".
- _heimdall 2y ago
  These stats alone seem like way more interesting news, suprised I haven't seen that before. I wonder why plane orders from the two biggest manufactures have dropped so dramatically and what it means economically. My mind immediately goes to whether airlines are quietly preparing for an expected downturn, or if airlines aren't selling to corporations because they're selling to governments and militaries. That could definitely be my own preconceptions sneaking in though.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    I wouldn't read too much into it yet; 2023's numbers look like they're abberantly high, which is probably the airlines catching up after the little economic hiccup we all had in 2020.

bradleyjg 2y ago

Do you think your car (or bike) is safer or more dangerous than the least safe Boeing plane in service?

Zigurd 2y ago
Per mile or per hour?
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  Either.
somenameforme 2y ago
These numbers are always pretty BSy because the big dangers in flight are take-off and landing. Comparing distances just completely obfuscates everything for no real gain. You can illustrate this clearly with some sort of reductio ad absurdum. Imagine we have an interstellar ship traveling many trillions of miles, but that blows up 90% of the time. If you look at it in terms of this same deaths/mile metric it'd still be way safer than driving, but obviously it isn't - which emphasizes that the metric is misleading. The most reasonable way would be safety per average trip, with some sort of multiplier for particularly long or particularly short trips. After all that's exactly what people think these numbers mean, even though they most certainly don't.
- krisoft 2y ago
  Okay. So let's compare accidents per flights to accidents per trip with bike/car. IATA reports 1.19 accidents per million flights in the 2019-2023 years. [1] Your turn to find a comparable number for road vehicles. 1: https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2024-releases/2024-02-28-01/ https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2024-releases/2024-02-28-0...
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    You pretty quickly shifted the goal posts there didn't you? That's for all flight vessels, not just Boeing's 737 class. You're also misreading your stats (that's per sector, not per million), but in either case I'm more interested in fatality rates. Your site gives a hull loss rate of 1 per 4.94 million flights for jets. For vehicles, the average person makes two trips a day over a total of 29.2 miles. [1] So we can say the average trip is 14.6 miles. And the average fatality rate is 1.33 per 100 million miles traveled [2]. So that's 1.33 fatalities per (100 / 14.6) = 6.8 million trips, or 1 fatality per 5.17 million trips. So on a first level analysis, vehicles are slightly safer than jets on a trip for trip basis. But the math I'm doing dramatically understates the actual difference, because the mortality numbers I'm using for vehicles are per person, not per fatal incident. In other words 1 PERSON dies per 5.17 million vehicle trips. And I'm comparing that against one entire JET 'dying' per 4.94 million flights, which is generally going to have tens to hundreds of people on it. If you do an apples to apples comparison, vehicles would be some orders of magnitude safer than jets, trip for trip. Of course ideal would be to ignore population and just look at car incidents with at least 1 fatality vs plane incidents with at least 1 fatality, but I can't find those stats unfortunately. [1] - https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-motorists-drive/ https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-moto... [2] - https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

PeterHolzwarth 2y ago

It's interesting to see the dynamic of the downward spiral (no pun intended) "pile on" media cascade mechanic in action, through your comment. What I mean is, you are assuming now (you probably wouldn't have a year ago) that this Dutch Roll incident was caused by the plane being Boeing. So, why would anyone even buy a Boeing at this point? But what indication is there of that this Dutch Roll incident was caused by the plane being Boeing? As far as I can tell, Dutch Roll is a phenomena whose causes aren't fully understood, that rarely, but occasionally, happens to planes, not just to Boeing planes. But now that we are collectively bought-in on a Boeing hate-fest (and they certainly seem to have brought it on themselves, no doubt!), we just knee-jerk apply the cause to any issue seen as being explained by the aircraft being Boeing.

afavour 2y ago

Such is the state of the airline business/capitalism. There are basically only two manufacturers: Boeing and Airbus. The airlines place orders years in advance and if you cancel a Boeing order now you’re a) out of a lot of money and b) joining the back of the line with Airbus. The simple reality is that the airlines (and their shareholders) consider a) and b) to be greater risks than the safety record of Boeing planes. Given the parameters they have they’re not wrong. Air travel is still incredibly safe, even if these Boeing incidents make it ever so slightly less safe. To be blunt, the market can absorb it and individual airlines have little motivation to change. If there is going to be a big change it’ll need to come from the FAA.

bowsamic 2y ago
Yeah, Airbus is extremely backed up with orders
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  So is Boeing.

impulser_ 2y ago

The Max 8 are great planes. I rode one recently, in fact it was with Southwest, it was probably the best plane I flown in. Lots of space, comfortable and quiet. They just need to fix the bad part issues they seem to have. Personally, I would fly on a Max 8 again.

lastofthemojito 2y ago
Looking at Southwest is probably a good way to put the Boeing issues in perspective. It's easy to want to freak out over the negative headlines over the past few years, and the MCAS fiasco is a well-deserved black mark on Boeing's reputation. But again, looking at bigger perspective, Southwest Airlines operates an all-Boeing fleet of 800+ airlines doing 4000+ flights per day. About a million and a half flights per year. And in their 50+ years of operation, there have been 4 deaths associated with Southwest flights, 1 of which was a suicide where a guy walked onto a runway and another was an unruly passenger who tried to storm a cockpit. I don't want to let Boeing off the hook - their recent cock-ups absolutely seem to indicate cultural problems that need to be fixed so that quality can improve rather than continue to slide. But honestly, getting on a 737 Max to go on a trip still seems way safer than hopping on the highway.