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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

There are 5 Southwest MAX8s parked at Chicago Midway (MDW). I took this photo of them just the other day:

Southwest is in the process of moving all of its MAX8s to the Victorville, the airplane graveyard in the desert. I doubt they'll scrap them but it smacks of long-term parking.

> I doubt they'll scrap them but it smacks of long-term parking.

Oh please, they're not being scrapped. But a working airport is not a proper place to store large jets.

Probably costs them a pretty penny every day they are there.

The 5 at Midway are parked at a Southwest maintenance hangar, so it’s probably a bit cheaper than public airport space.

Oh please, they're not being scrapped.

Which is what I said.

But a working airport is not a proper place to store large jets.

Short-term it's fine. If the expectation is that the MAX will be allowed to fly in a few weeks it makes sense to keep the airplanes at strategically chosen airports. This'll make it easier to bring them back into service. If the assumption is that the MAX will be grounded for a long period of time it makes more sense to stash them at a graveyard like Victorville.

The weird thing is that the GP quoted your comment that the planes won’t be scraped, and then he tried to one-up you... by agreeing that the planes won’t be scrapped.

Utterly bizarre.

Are the MAX8s grounded from flying altogether, or just from carrying passengers?

The article answers this.

In the United States ferry flights are allowed (and you can watch as Southwest moves their planes to the desert). In other countries it'll vary. There are definitely some MAX8s stranded in out of the way places in Europe.

They have something like 34 total, just under 5% of their fleet. So, notable, but not a huge problem.

Given the thresholds and margins at which airlines operate, I'm quite sure that it's a huge problem.

A counterexample is Air Canada abandoning their financial guidance for the year as a result of the 737 Max issues: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-15/air-canad...

That's a different problem. They are a bigger percentage of Air Canada's fleet. Also Air Canada's fleet is widely varied. With other aircraft that are notably larger or smaller. And crews can only work aircraft they are qualified on. This wiped out basically a whole subset of their operation.

Southwest can more easily substitute any of their other aircraft, lease more non-max models, defer non-essential maintenance activities, and use any other crew to fill the holes. They fly all 737s.

Sure, but having to do all those things on very short notice is probably a huge problem for a couple of folks at Southwest.

It's a much bigger deal for Westjet: They don't have much transoceanic capacity that the 737MAX was used for.

I don't think their 737 non-MAX fleet can even make the trip from Halifax to Paris like the MAX fleet can.

And transoceanic birds need other safety features not required for standard continental fleets, like life jackets.

I met a maintenance supervisors/leader type for United Airlines last weekend. He said that the grounding of the 737 Max was annoying, but manageable. Their are all sorts of tricks companies can use to keep up with hiccups in aircraft availability. For example, not all of an airlines planes are flying at once. An plane sidelined for maintenance can be serviced more quickly, and returned to operating status faster than it was initially scheduled to be back in the air.

I'm worried that quicker maintenance will in the end lead to less secure air travel.

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