> safety is getting worse, not better or even staying the same
The only death in US major commercial aviation in ages was when a woman was partially sucked out of a window in 2018 when an engine failed and blew apart, breaking the window open.
Before that, we have the Asiana flight which crashed after landing short at SFO, striking the undercarriage on the edge of the floating platform and cartwheeling. Everyone survived the crash, but a woman was killed when a fire truck ran over her amidst the firefighting foam.
Prior to that we have to go to 2005 when a plane overran a runway and hit a car, killing one occupant… of the car.
We have to go all the way back to November 2001 to have a serious accident where an American plane crashed on takeoff, killing all on board. Technically this was due to pilot error due to over-responding to wake turbulence, breaking off the vertical stabilizer. But it’s arguably an engineering issue that the pilot was able to induce catastrophic structural failure through control inputs.
There has definitely been a worrying trend lately in operational error with pilots and ATC nearly causing accidents due to runway incursions, nearly landing on taxiways, etc. But it’s really hard to say with a straight face that major airlines have anything other than an exemplary safety record the likes of which has been completely unparalleled before now. We have had one single death aboard a major commercial aviator in the U.S. in more than twenty two years.
From all photo evidence I’ve seen, some cushions were sucked off the seat. These cushions are designed to be removed. If a passenger was seated and wearing their seat belt, I have every faith that they would have been fine. Uncomfortable as hell but ultimately fine. I’ll bet money the NTSB report will say as much.
And the point stands that the only reason this story is noteworthy is because of airlines’ spotless safety record over the past two decades. Incidents like this are exceedingly rare.
It is trivial to see how someone sitting there not seat belted could have perished. You do understand that long stretches of flight allow you to be unseatbelted right?
They allow you to, but on every single flight I’ve been on in ages, the pilot makes a note that they recommend keeping your seatbelt fastened whenever you’re seated. People have been injured due to sudden and unforeseen turbulence, and it’s just a good idea in general.
That said this incident occurred during the initial climb-out where seat belt use is mandatory.
So yes, if a passenger was seated there and if their belt was unbuckled, I can see how somebody would have died. Nobody is saying that this isn’t a serious fuckup that doesn’t need to be investigated and remedied.
What I am saying is that major airlines in the U.S. have a more or less unblemished safety record for twenty two years, the likes of which has not only been unparalleled in aviation, but by any other form of transport. Literally walking is more dangerous than flying a major commercial airline in the U.S.
The MAX line of planes in particular has had their share of problems, but with the MCAS situation resolved there is no reason to believe that it in particular is any less safe than any other airframe operated by the majors. The issue with the door plug is unlikely to be related to the MAX (the same part and design have been in service without issue since well before the MAX). It will be investigated, fixed, and we will in all likelihood go back to flying gajillions of passenger miles without serious incident.
I’ll put this another way: if all of this gnashing of teeth and doom and gloom causes enough anxiety over flying that a few hundred people choose to drive instead, it will inevitably cause more injury and death than if every airline went all-in on a fleet of 737 MAXes.
I think you’re misunderstanding the comments. This was a problem, it needs to be investigated and fixed, but the overreaction to this is bordering on insanity.
Commercial aviation in the U.S. is still incomprehensibly safe. It is not getting measurably less safe. The 737 MAX line are not death traps.
Mechanics routinely forget to bolt the wheels onto cars, which has caused and continues to cause actual traffic deaths.
Nobody floods into the comment sections on HN when this happens because people dying in cars is depressingly normal but planes are so unimaginably safe that a person hypothetically getting sucked out of a plane is strange and terrifying.
I was watching a video, I believe this one (https://youtu.be/WhfK9jlZK1o?si=goQBueaF-5So3U0X) that seemed to make the case that due to the door design it is much less likely, if not impossible, for the presumed failure here to occur at cruising altitude because of the higher pressure differential.
There's a reason they tell you to always wear your seatbelt though, ranging from sudden turbulence/downdraft to sudden depressurization.
1. The seat was not destroyed.
2. The door blowing off would not be the only reason; a second reason would be that the person failed to wear the seatbelt.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I don't believe in blaming the user for manufacturing and maintenance errors. I think that makes a bad programmer too, actually.
A child in the middle row had his shirt sucked off his body.
They were only at 16,000ft, maybe half the cruising altitude? I forget if it's 35,000 or 50,000 usually.
> only reason nobody was injured this time was nobody was sitting in the seats next to the door plug
This was a serious fuck-up. But it remains that there was at risk no more than one, maybe two, fatalities. That isn’t enough to justify the claim that “safety is getting worse.”
"Only two people would have died, so it's really not that bad," is wild. What if it were you sitting at that seat and you died? Still not that bad an outcome?
> "Only two people would have died, so it's really not that bad," is wild.
Straw man. Nobody says even a single death isn't tragic. What I'm saying is it doesn't overwhelm trillions of miles of safe flight. Not flying a 737 Max 8, only to go onto a Spirit Aerosystems-assembled Airbus, doensn't make sense. (Note: not implicating Spirit. Just saying that the window of culpabilitiy extends more in their direction than it does across every 737 Max.)
more accidents is less safe, anyway you cut it. I really can't understand how you can view flying as not being less safe in this moment.
If you want to do integration over huge time spans to make your point, lets start at zero and go to infinity... human lifespan is 0 years long average over history, seeing as we didn't exist for some period of time. So any changes to human life in shorter time spans is completely meaningless to an average. Is this 0 year lifespan a useful statistic?
> more accidents is less safe, anyway you cut it. I really can't understand how you can view flying as not being less safe in this moment
You’re proposing crashes are autocorrelated. They’re not. They would be in a vacuum filled with spherical cows. But grounding and investigating takes care of that.
This is related to the fallacy of thinking if a coin has come up heads thrice in a row, it’s more likely to come up tails the fourth time. It’s not. We have a lot of innocuous flight miles as data from which to make robust statements, particularly when it comes to characterising the safety of the entire airline industry.
Put another way, on which day are you safer, the day before the accident or the day after?
Statistically, there is no difference between a new plane and one that's been flying for 18 years [1].
Given dying because an installer fucked up feels mighty similar to dying because a maintenance tech fucked up, I don't see a rational reason to over-penalise fabrication errors to the extent that it overrules millions of successful flight miles. (Design mistakes are categorially different.)
I'm pretty sure if you personally drove a new car off the lot and the door fell off you would not believe that quality were unchanged from your prior impression of that car company.
Just because it's happening to other people doesn't make it okay to hand-wave away safety.
And by the way, so far NTSB believes it's not a fabrication error but an assembly error. NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in.
> if you personally drove a new car off the lot and the door fell off you would not believe that quality were unchanged from your prior impression of that car company
As a layman, no. Were I looking for more than a Twitter level of analysis, it would be an indication for investigation. Not grounds for conclusion.
More directly, even as a layman, if I were to use that anecdote as grounds to condemn the state of car manufacturing in summa, that would be irrational.
> NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in
Source? Last I saw, they couldn't find the bolts. It takes lab work to ascertain whether they ever existed.
NTSB are doing that lab work right now in Washington D.C.
You seem to not know the meaning of suspect, so here is the definition:
Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
sus·pect
verb
3rd person present: suspects
/səˈspek(t)/
1.
have an idea or impression of the existence, presence, or truth of (something) without certain proof.
"if you suspect a gas leak, do not turn on an electric light"
Suspicion doesn't mean baseless hypothesis, e.g. "Mars is an orange." The NTSB would never say (and has not said, as you've conceded) it "suspects" the "bolts were never screwed in."
Were there a lack of marks where the bolts should have exerted clamping force, there would be basis for suspicion. That isn't proof. But it's more than a hypothesis.
I mean you can believe what you want but NTSB literally had a guy at a podium say into the mic last night that there is so far no evidence "the bolts were ever there", around the 17-18 minute mark if you have nothing better to do. Good luck with your investments.
> NTSB literally had a guy at a podium say into the mic last night that there is so far no evidence "the bolts were ever there"
Where are you getting this? Crookshanks said the NTSB had "not yet recovered the four bolts" and "have not determined if they existed there" [1].
Your source, for which I'm genuinely curious, is categorically false in suggesting the NTSB "suspects" the bolts were never there, or that Crookshanks said "there is so far no evidence 'the bolts were ever there'". (The latter being particularly reprehensible, given it involves materially misquoting an aircraft investigator.)
Because other countries have—in general—a demonstrably poorer track record than major airlines in the U.S. for a wide variety of factors, including poorer training programs, maintenance regimes, operational expectations, and sometimes cultural norms that interfere with good CRM (crew resource management).
I'll address the elephant in the room and say that I don't think it's coincidence that the two airframe losses in the MAX 9 were with Indonesian and Ethiopian carriers and not American or European ones, despite American and European carriers having received—as far as I can tell—the bulk of the deliveries of this airframe and at least a plurality (if not majority) of hours in use (if someone else can find good data on this I'd be grateful). I suspect that more resources put toward pilot training played a meaningful difference here. For example, the first officer of the Ethiopian flight had less than 200 hours of flight experience. This would be completely unacceptable for a U.S. major.
I want to be clear that I am not saying that it's the pilots' fault, but that the swiss-cheese model relies on multiple overlapping failures. The additional resources spent on training, maintenance, operations, and CRM at American and European airlines in general ensures fewer overlaps and thus fewer incidents.
After watching Downfall, Lion air asked multiple times for additional training but was refused as this would cost boeing money. To me, that looks like Lion Air was more aware of issues than US operators. Boeing never even bothered to inform pilots of the MCAS system's existence before the first grounding.
The only death in US major commercial aviation in ages was when a woman was partially sucked out of a window in 2018 when an engine failed and blew apart, breaking the window open.
Before that, we have the Asiana flight which crashed after landing short at SFO, striking the undercarriage on the edge of the floating platform and cartwheeling. Everyone survived the crash, but a woman was killed when a fire truck ran over her amidst the firefighting foam.
Prior to that we have to go to 2005 when a plane overran a runway and hit a car, killing one occupant… of the car.
We have to go all the way back to November 2001 to have a serious accident where an American plane crashed on takeoff, killing all on board. Technically this was due to pilot error due to over-responding to wake turbulence, breaking off the vertical stabilizer. But it’s arguably an engineering issue that the pilot was able to induce catastrophic structural failure through control inputs.
There has definitely been a worrying trend lately in operational error with pilots and ATC nearly causing accidents due to runway incursions, nearly landing on taxiways, etc. But it’s really hard to say with a straight face that major airlines have anything other than an exemplary safety record the likes of which has been completely unparalleled before now. We have had one single death aboard a major commercial aviator in the U.S. in more than twenty two years.