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How to Get People Flying on the 737 Max

Midwest Blade

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Ron Texas

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How to get people flying at all? Air travel is off 70% from 2019 and things are looking worse in the short term due to the damn plague.
 

Dmitri

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The 737 Max has got to be one of the most scrutinized airplanes ever produced. The last twenty months has put Boeing’s reputation on the line. Any attempt at this point to try and knowingly get by with any substandard or non redundant subsystem, and have that the cause of another tragedy, would be a fatal blow for the company. I feel we can be relatively assured it is a safe plane.
That said... I’ll give it a couple of years before I’ll fly in a 737 Max!
Most importantly, it’s time for the FAA to grab the reigns and minimize corporate oversight. To allow a company to be self monitoring, with all the varying agendas of cost concerns and potential production delays is completely and totally idiotic. The fact that it was allowed to happen in the first place is a crime in itself.
 
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Midwest Blade

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Surprisingly the FAA seems to have never been put on the spot for allowing all the self oversight by Boeing???

Boeing is also not the Boeing of old but it is all we have left in the US for commercial airline building.
 

SIY

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How to get people flying at all? Air travel is off 70% from 2019 and things are looking worse in the short term due to the damn plague.
FWIW, the last three trips I took, the planes were beyond filled, and volunteers were solicited to be put on a later flight.
 

Ron Texas

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FWIW, the last three trips I took, the planes were beyond filled, and volunteers were solicited to be put on a later flight.
That's because the airlines are scheduling far fewer flights. They lose too much money if the aircraft is not filled. I get my statistic for this from financial sources which look at TSA screening numbers. I used to fly over 50k air miles per year, but have been on the ground since mid February luckily getting my last trips to SF and Hawaii before everything went to pieces.
 

SIY

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That's because the airlines are scheduling far fewer flights. They lose too much money if the aircraft is not filled. I get my statistic for this from financial sources which look at TSA screening numbers. I used to fly over 50k air miles per year, but have been on the ground since mid February luckily getting my last trips to SF and Hawaii before everything went to pieces.
Yes, that’s certainly true, but it was still a bit surprising.
 

somebodyelse

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737 Max? No sir, we don't have any of those. We have the 737-8200 / -8 / -10 (delete as appropriate)
 

RayDunzl

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Some Air Stats for US Carriers for September 2020 and 2019

https://www.transtats.bts.gov/TRAFFIC/

1608795683936.png
 

RayDunzl

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Frankly, with all the scrutiny aimed at it, the 737 Max is probably the safest airliner flying today

Commercial Scheduled Air Travel:

The Safest Way to Die.

( I've watched too many Smithsonian Channel's Air Disasters episodes)

---

Click here for a daily dose of incidents that don't make the front page:

https://avherald.com/
 

terasankka

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I will not fly the 737 Max. I used to have commercial pilot license (not valid anymore) . There is too much "wrong" in that plane.
 

mhardy6647

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Some Air Stats for US Carriers for September 2020 and 2019

https://www.transtats.bts.gov/TRAFFIC/

View attachment 101302
This is a great set of comparative data; thanks for posting it.

I also just want to chime in with a word about relative risk. This is one of my hot buttons pet peeves nonlinearities (as I like to say) -- so many folks make choices about things they're willing to do, or not willing to do, with no understanding of the actual relative risk (or safety) of one activity vs. another. Drives me nuts, OK?! ;)

Dangerousness relative risks of activities by Mark Hardy, on Flickr

Ca. (edit) two orders of magnitude more risky (in terms of risk of death per unit time invested in the activity) to travel by car than by plane.

I apologize that I no longer have the original citation for this particular data set. I first saw a presentation along these lines when I was in grad school by Bruce Ames (the "Ames Test" guy), who was disheartened by the way that data from "his" test were misused/misrepresented. In his own way, he was trying to recast the context of Ames Test data, but he was largely "preaching to the choir". I've never found a copy of Ames' slide (mind you, I was in grad school a long time ago now). This graphic is taken from a Boston Globe article, but that's all I remember at this point. :(
 

TSB

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This is a great set of comparative data; thanks for posting it.

I also just want to chime in with a word about relative risk. This is one of my hot buttons pet peeves nonlinearities (as I like to say) -- so many folks make choices about things they're willing to do, or not willing to do, with no understanding of the actual relative risk (or safety) of one activity vs. another. Drives me nuts, OK?! ;)

Dangerousness relative risks of activities by Mark Hardy, on Flickr

Ca. (edit) two orders of magnitude more risky (in terms of risk of death per unit time invested in the activity) to travel by car than by plane.

I apologize that I no longer have the original citation for this particular data set. I first saw a presentation along these lines when I was in grad school by Bruce Ames (the "Ames Test" guy), who was disheartened by the way that data from "his" test were misused/misrepresented. In his own way, he was trying to recast the context of Ames Test data, but he was largely "preaching to the choir". I've never found a copy of Ames' slide (mind you, I was in grad school a long time ago now). This graphic is taken from a Boston Globe article, but that's all I remember at this point. :(
A lot of those statistics do not represent 'risk' as they are not the outcome of a stochastic process. For example, the chance of dying during rock climbing is very dependent on the skill of the climbers and the willingness to take correct safety measures. Similarly, lumberjack deaths include a lot people doing stupid things that can be avoided. This is not the case for air/train travel. Hence a lot of these statistics are rather meaningless as a basis for decisions.
 

RayDunzl

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I also just want to chime in with a word about relative risk.

So.

Using a Cell Phone while driving is 10x safer than simply travelling in a light car or truck.

Totally.
 

jomark911

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I will not fly the 737 Max. I used to have commercial pilot license (not valid anymore) . There is too much "wrong" in that plane.

What do you mean , you will not fly max. As a pax or as a crew member?
Indeed they have made mistakes , but they've remedied the whole thing.
Their biggest mistake, trying to copy AIRBUS.
 

mhardy6647

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A lot of those statistics do not represent 'risk' as they are not the outcome of a stochastic process. For example, the chance of dying during rock climbing is very dependent on the skill of the climbers and the willingness to take correct safety measures. Similarly, lumberjack deaths include a lot people doing stupid things that can be avoided. This is not the case for air/train travel. Hence a lot of these statistics are rather meaningless as a basis for decisions.
Did I tell all y'all about my run-in with Simpson's Paradox just a week ago while I was calculating final grades for my students in the course I teach?

So.

Using a Cell Phone while driving is 10x safer than simply travelling in a light car or truck.

Totally.
That's pretty interesting, isn't it?
Maybe smoking & cell phone use in the car is the way to go to maximize safety. ;)

I stand by the point, though, which is that, on the average* flying is pretty darned safe relative to many other things that folks willingly, and mindlessly, choose to do all of the freaking time. Now, chattin' on a cell phone while sittin' on a 737-MAX? Certain death. :cool:

_______________
* And, as I like to tell my students: we used to have a cat who was grey on the average.

DSC_1506 by Mark Hardy, on Flickr
 

orangejello

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What do you mean , you will not fly max. As a pax or as a crew member?
Indeed they have made mistakes , but they've remedied the whole thing.
Their biggest mistake, trying to copy AIRBUS.
Their biggest mistake was corporate rot. I do not believe that the problem can ever be fully remedied since the design sucks. I read the backstory on the MAXX development. It was driven entirely by the threat of the superiority of the Airbus competition particularly with regards to fuel efficiency. In order to save money (and not require complete retraining of pilots on a new airplane so as to make the cost to the buyer lower) they did not do a complete redesign. They just retrofitted the previous 737 with huge engines that created a lot of aerodynamic problems (and ground clearance problems) which they knew about but figured that they could correct in the software. See https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-12-23/boeing-737-max-dennis-muilenburg and https://www.theguardian.com/busines...andal-the-internal-boeing-messages-and-emails Clearly cost savings (read ”greed”) trumped safety. These guys are killers like the Sacklers at Purdue Pharma and like the Sacklers they will not do jail time. Read the two links and if you are not disgusted, I don’t know what will disgust you.
 
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