Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackflame7000 | Hacker News Reader

The original 737 had a terrible safety record at first because of a rudder hard-over flaw. It then went on to become the most used in history

View on HN

That doesn't sound right. The 737 went into service in the late 60s. There were two confirmed fatal accidents involving rudder hardover in the 90s.

By Original I meant the NG version

Both accidents attributed to rudder hardover took place before the 737 NG first flew in 1997.

There were a lot more than just 2 rudder incidents.

USAir Flight 427

United Airlines Flight 585

Eastwind Airlines Flight 517

Silkair Flight 185

Copa Airlines Flight 201

China Southern Airlines Flight 3943

MetroJet Flight 2710

I mean. I am going by wikipedia here but most of the things you've said in this subthread seem to be inaccurate. It wasn't the original 737. It wasn't the NG. And most of the accidents you've listed were not caused by that particular rudder design problem (as far as I can tell, 3 were, maybe?). You keep adding new inaccurate things without the slightest acknowledgement you might have misremembered or misstated something before.

Hence the reason I said time will tell.

But there are also many examples of aircraft with terrible early safety records that never recovered from their bad start.

> But there are also many examples of aircraft with terrible early safety records that never recovered from their bad start.

From Boeing? They have a history of sorting their shit out. Maybe this time is different, but I doubt it.

It's a shame so many people have to die for them to "sort their shit out". Maybe they shouldn't make idiotic design decisions and lie to regulators in the first place?

Flying is not exactly easy and imperfect beings can't build perfect machines and even if they could they wouldn't be able to test it because they are imperfect. In 1000 years there will still be aircraft accidents.

I would say times have changed at Boeing, because it seems for the MAX, rather than sorting their shit out they instead seem to prefer covering up their design faults.

They also seem to have a bad habit of blaming the dead pilots for not being able to fly they broken planes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com