If Boeing is necessary for national defence and no longer knows how to build aircraft, drastic action is needed by the US government on a very short timeframe to get their shit together. War is a thing.
In the meantime it's hard to disagree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that flying with airbus seems a better idea.
Yeah especially given the public trust the FAA needs to rebuild after it came out how Boeing got the 737 certified in the first place. It’s an unmitigated shit show top to bottom.
You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.
> safest airliner ever built ... very low production numbers
If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?
The point in the outer comment was that the 737NG has both many flight hours and ... if I skimmed Wikipedia correctly, only 1 mechanically-attributed fatality.
For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo aircraft:
16K Douglas DC-3 (1935)
11K Boeing 737 family:
1K Original (1967)
2K Classic (1984)
7K NG (1998)
1K MAX (2016)
11K Airbus A320 family (1988)
Different sources give oddly different numbers (more than I would expect for ordered vs built vs delivered; I didn't investigate deeply), but nothing else is above 2K. Note that plenty of small or military planes beat these numbers.
I’ll take the one with 50 crashes any time. That’s 50 times something went catastrophically wrong and 50 times measures were taken to fix the underlying problems.
A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.
I think this is the wrong take, for the following reasons:
- There is no reason to assume that the learnings from the 50 crashes weren't also applied to the newer model. In fact you'd expect that they all were.
- Faults in a new design are likely to be front-loaded, meaning most of the crashes would have happened earlier than later. Therefore the new model seems to be a much safer design if it flew 10% of the miles without even 10% of the crashes (actually 0%).
The point is that commercial aviation is so extraordinarily safe, that mechanical failures that result in fatalities are too rare to determine if a model with 5 million flight hours is more or less safe than another model with 500 million flight hours.
Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.
I'm not sure if I agree or not, but my thinking were that it wouldn't reach great safety by upgrades until long after it became too expensive for Boeing and would instead be replaced with a new model.
