Boeing Warns of Possible Electrical Issue on 737 Max Planes | Hacker News Reader

Boeing Warns of Possible Electrical Issue on 737 Max Planes

npr.org

86 pointsnolok22 comments

This is a routine occurrence in aviation. What happens is that one particular operator (airline) discovers an issue (in this case an electrical grounding fault) and decides to conduct a local survey of their own fleet. If they discover more than one aircraft is affected by the same fault then they will usually choose to notify the engineering authorities who will then send out an airworthiness directive, or a service bulletin, or similar instrument to all affected parties.

Because only certain aircraft were affected with this issue it's probable that it has to do with a specific variant configuration of avionics in use by only a subset of operators.

On the bright side. At least they are now forthcoming ahead of any issues or tragedies.

It's a good step for Boeing to rebuild trust with the airlines

>The company said the issue is not related to the flight control software system that has been blamed in two crashes that killed 346 people.

Well that's a relief.

737 MAX is cursed. I can't wait until it's finally cancelled.

I'd happily fly 737 MAX if the ticket price would be lower. The chance of dying on the way to the airport is astronomically higher anyway.

Interesting statistic. Is that using distance as the parameter? That is, is that saying that for a 1000 miles traveled driving is more dangerous than flying in a 737 Max?

The per-mile death rate is something like 750 times greater driving than flying.

So a 1500 mile flight is as dangerous as a 2 mile drive to the airport.

Oh man I was expecting a much higher difference.

Makes sense since there is only about 2 miles of runway traveled at either end.

Per mile isn't really that good a measure for either flying or driving, because the risk of both flying and driving depends on where the miles are.

For driving, the risk is much higher in cities on surface streets than it is on freeways between cities, for example. So a 10 mile round trip to the grocery store and back would probably be orders of magnitude more dangerous per mile than an 800 mile round trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back.

But your chances of dying on the grocery store trip and your chances of dying at one of the ends of your LA/SF trip would be roughly the same.

Same with flying. Takeoff, climbing to cruising altitude, cruising, descending for landing, and landing all have different risk profiles. A long trip is much safer per mile than a short trip because most of it is spent cruising at high altitude which is the safest part of the trip, but the overall risk is usually going to be higher on the long trip.

Driving is further complicated because you have a lot more control over your safety when driving than you do when flying. When I've flown from LA to SF, it was probably about the same risk no matter what time of day I went.

When I've driven from LA to SF, I've generally been able to pick times of day when there was little traffic at the ends, and there were generally no other cars within a couple miles of me on the freeway. That should have put my risk way below the average driving risk. (Note: I am not claiming that I am a more skilled or safer driver than average!).

It was still probably more risky than flying, but not orders of magnitude more risky.

So, you're the other car I see on 101 at 3am :)

The commenters argument is illogical. The commenter is engaging in 2 activities. Driving a car and then taking a plane. The fact that driving a car is riskier than taking a plane does not mean that that taking a plane that is 30x riskier than other planes doesn’t affect their risk.

These are 2 independent risk events. If the taking plane part of your travel schedule becomes more risky, your overall risk also rises.

The fact that driving a car is extremely risky has nothing to do with what price they should be willing to pay for the increased risk they would be taking flying a riskier plane.

Both for miles and time spent doing the activity

Something to consider:

737 MAX crash rate is 3.08 per million.

Vs 0.1 for the other 737 models, so it's about 30X less safe.

http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

With an incredibly small sample size

Right, because it was withdrawn from service for being so unsafe.

I mean I'm all for "glass half full" but blaming the sample size when the sample size is a direct result of its unsafety seems a little misleading. If the 737 Max could have kept flying the sample size would have increased, and it would likely have become even more unsafe statistically as the casualties continued to mount.

You don’t always need a large sample size to show correlation. When an incredibly rare event happens twice in a short span of time, the chances of it being a random fluke are vanishingly small. And anyways I thought it was pretty clear that MCAS caused the crashes?

Do you think Concorde is still safe then, because the sample size was so small?

It's not like it's a tiny bit higher than all the other planes in the list. It's more than an order of magnitude higher (except Concorde, which was immediately withdrawn from service and decommissioned).

Concorde would still be flying if Airbus hadn't refused to continue with maintenance on the aeroplanes. Without that support the decision was made to remove them from service.

So it was a coincidence that it happened right after a lot of people died.

When the first plane crashed into the North Tower that was a small sample size. Probably an accident.

Sixteen minutes later when the second plane crashed into the South Tower, that was still an incredibly low sample size, but you could say with very high confidence that it wasn't an accident.

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