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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

> How do I as a passenger identified all the rebranding permutations of the Max so that I make sure my family is not flying in them?

The 737 MAX series has a better safety track record than whatever car your family drives.

Note that since the MCAS issue has been fixed, there have been zero incidents that have caused passenger injury or death.

Note further that pilots—a cohort of self-interested humans like any other—continue deciding to crew the plane. You don’t hear about pilots backing out of flights or refusing to fly in them. Pilots and air crews aren’t threatening to walk out en masse.

This plug design has been in use without incident at least since the -900ER in 2007 and prior to the MAX models. The NTSB report will be worth reading, but I will be good money it won’t have anything in it that warrants the kind of wild frothing at the mouth response here.

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Pilots will go to irrational lengths to continue to fly, up to and including doing everything possible to hide any hint of medical problem to continue to do so.

Maybe you trust pilots as some sort of supra-human. I do not. They are humans just as much as the rest of us, and they need to get paid, and I wager they'd fly a bucket of bolts if that was the only thing that people were willing to pay them to fly long after sane passengers opted out of riding along.

100% this - they fly to earn a living wage, it's not optional.

> The 737 MAX series has a better safety track record than whatever car your family drives.

None of the car models I've ever driven have any recorded in-flight incidents. I highly doubt any of them were ever involved in an FAA investigation.

You can't beat the flight safety record of most automobile makers.

Ground safety, sure, some cars are worse than others. But even the MD-80 has a pretty good record on the road. All that use and only a few traffic collisions.

I have never had my car door fall off mid road trip though

Plenty of people have quite literally had the wheels fall off their car.

> But not at 30,000 ft doing 500mph.

Other than Tesla, how many brand new cars have their wheels fall off?

Several, including recently Toyota and Subaru who have been making cars for more than half a century.

You just don't hear about them because negative news about Tesla is heavily amplified on HN, Reddit and in the media, and bad news about other carmakers is buried.

In fairness, it wasn’t the wheels falling off that attracted coverage so much as the systemic attempt to dodge responsibility for the problem.

> systemic attempt to dodge responsibility for the problem.

If it was widespread, the NHTSA would have forced Tesla to recall the cars. Tesla sold 1.8 million cars just in 2023. It's hard to impossible to hide accidents, injuries and fatalities resulting from wheels falling off.

No, not "negative news about Tesla", but all news about Tesla. They put themselves on the pedestal by choice, it's not exactly a conspiracy.

I generally don't see any news about other car makers at all unless there's a major issue.

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