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.)
That's not true, and we'd get to a much, much worse place if we relied on that. The industry put the current system in place because it could see that airlines would make gruesome compromises if consumer choice was the only thing driving safety.
Many airlines allow same day changes. If everyone scheduled on a Max reschedules for alternative flights consistently, they'll get the message soon enough. Refusing to board a Boeing plane at all is perfectly reasonable at this stage.
The country that is still launching the same platform for manned space that they did in the 50s can't figure out how to do that but with warheads -- doubt! Makes a good story though!
It's the warhead, especially the small ones, that are difficult. I imagine a thousand launchers distributed across the country are an issue as well. The problem is that it's too tempting for locals to simply scavenge or resell any maintenance supplies. Very similar to the fuel and food that got sold prior to the start of the Ukraine invasion, only nobody is going to find out unless there's a nuclear war.
Yeah, sorry, I don't believe for a second that Russia has failed to maintain their only playing card. What a joke. US military industrial complex folks will make up any story to excuse their audit-free slovenly spending.
Well, that's the genius in the Military Industrial Complex propaganda.
Russia is either pathetically weak and so we can push their buttons at our heart content or it is a all powerful evil entity and we need to spend like a trillion to close the missile gap.
Because until that point i didn't know much about HDLs like Verilog/VHDL and how they were at a completely different level than "standard" programming languages like C/Python/etc. My then assumption was that since C was a low-level language and chip designers were working at a low-level they would be able to program in Assembly/C in their sleep and that they would be able to initiate me into the mysteries of how my C code was actually translated into electrical signals in the processor circuits. It was a big disappointment for me when i realized we were living in completely different worlds.
I actually made a deal with some of them to teach them C/C++ in return for them teaching me Verilog/SystemC but unfortunately that never came to pass. I even got me a couple of Verilog/VHDL books and FPGAs to teach myself what i call "Actual and True Hardware Programming" but haven't really sat down with it. Hopefully sometime in the future so i can finally know everything from the bottom-most layer to the top-most.
Ok, I guess that's fair. Having worked at one of the large chip makers, I can tell you there are plenty of people who know C and Verilog, you just weren't talking to any of them. Those who need to do, and those who don't, don't. It's certainly an industry with high degree of specialization.
So riddle me this; do those who know C & Verilog have a better idea of how the whole C->Assembly->MachineCode->Physical Processor circuitry works? I don't mean the logical model; but how exactly the program bitstream gets transformed into electrical signals by their HDL code.
No, not usually. In my experience anyway, most random engineers in the semiconductor industry that you would run into who know both C and Verilog would be just using those tools to do their job. There is a lot of ECE stuff to unpack in your question, but the subfield of ECE in question is called VLSI. You'd want to talk to someone who works in VLSI, or did VLSI as their focus in ECE undergrad or grad school.
Those were egregiously huge. Part of my rose tinted glasses about past UI systems was the information density. Now everything fetishes “clean” interfaces with minimal controls.
That "map by tiled" example feels like 10 fps on my Firefox mobile. It's significantly better than the official Flutter demo game, but significantly worse than a pure JS framework.
Actually no, it's not "as simple as that" when everyone except you doesn't take lunch hour and schedules meetings at noon. We have a right to the lunch hour.
Then decline those meetings. Doesn't mean that other people should have to waste an hour of their day that they could better spend at home in the evening.
In particular, how is Boeing apparently exempt from antitrust? Shouldn't there be more than one large airliner manufacturer in North America? I guess regulators consider Airbus to be sufficient, but when each has its own government comfortably in its pocket, I'm skeptical.
Not only is this a strange opinion, that you want some kind of entity to decide whether or not each of our health conditions are at-fault, your analogy to car insurance isn't even true in no-fault states, of which there are many.
