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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Even Boeing itself started calling for the grounding of the Max 8:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/boeing-requests-faa-ground...

Something is terribly wrong when the regulator that's supposed to keep people safe is less willing to do that then the company that stands to lose the most from the bad image of a product.

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Boeing did it far too late to help themselves.

Compare and contrast with Johnson & Johnson's handling of the 1982 Tylenol poison incidents. Tylenol immediately pulled the product off the shelves everywhere out of an abundance of caution and earned a lot of credit with the public. Boeing... yeah.

Just in case anyone is under the presumption that J&J is a good company, that business school corporate responsibility case apparently didn't have a lasting impact on their culture. In recent years, there have been numerous cases of them covering up serious defects in their products while keeping them on sale:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/27/vaginal-mesh...

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/business/27hip.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-11/j-j-said-...

Honestly that's more of a sign of the times. People have gotten more greedy and immoral when running companies. Or just in general, have become complete cowards to admit they fucked up.

No Southwest and American airlines stand to lose the most. Nothing is worse for an airliner than a grounded jet.

As an aside, do you know who actually owns most of the jets for an airliner? Banks like wells fargo and chase. They still expect leasing payments regardless if the plane is flying or not.

10% of Those airlines fleets (Apr Canada too)

Flydubai is the biggest loser - over 20% of their fleet grounded.

Those calculations are always crude.

Airlines typically fly many sizes and shapes of planes. And usually more of the smaller planes.

But You can’t just drop in a Dash8 q400 twin turboprop for your grounded MAX.

And the MAX could fly further than the 737; so it opened new routes that the 737 could not do.

Of course they're crude, however the fact remains that with very few hours in the air, 2 737-maxs have crashed in similar circumstances, both under 6 months old. If this doesn't raise concerns, what does.

> Nothing is worse for an airliner than a grounded jet.

Those airlines clearly think the probability of this is pretty low or they would have make the call to ground those planes on their own, but a jet that smashes itself into the earth and disintegrates because of a faulty sensor is probably even worse than a grounded jet.

Not quite because the Airline can turn around and sue Boeing so there is some recourse. Furthermore, people aren't blaming Ethiopian airlines they're blaming Boeing, so the reputation damage to the airline would likely be minimal. The reason why they can't easily sue Boeing over the grounded airplanes is that they don't own them, the banks do.

So you're saying the airline stocks should be shorted?

If you look at the 5-day chart for southwest, you will see 2 big drops that correspond to Monday opening bell and the faa announcement. https://www.google.com/search?q=southwest+stock

But the reason why I'm not a day trader is that I have no idea why they rebounded so quickly haha

Traders operate on all kinds of time scales, and most trading is done based on algorithms that account for the fundamentals more than of-the-day news. It's likely that holding SW is good for the long term as people make more money and continue to fly more.

No. Nothing is worse for an airline than to lose a plane, to lose lives. You don't ever want that to happen.

My company sent me on gig to a petroleum pipeline once. Gig was a result of an accident where a couple of people were burned alive in their homes when the pipeline exploded. Maintenance guy I met said one the engineers went down to the accident site to supervise. That night came back to the office, sat down and threw up on his desk.

Personally I never want to be that guy.

> Nothing is worse for an airliner than a grounded jet.

I'd say a spotty record is probably worse...

That was after Trump unexpectedly announced he was going to push an emergency declaration to ground the planes earlier in the day.

Gotta get ahead of that PR curve!

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