The only reason nobody was injured this time was nobody was sitting in the seats next to the door plug that blew off. The seat was destroyed.
From all photo evidence I’ve seen, some cushions were sucked off the seat. These cushions are designed to be removed. If a passenger was seated and wearing their seat belt, I have every faith that they would have been fine. Uncomfortable as hell but ultimately fine. I’ll bet money the NTSB report will say as much.
And the point stands that the only reason this story is noteworthy is because of airlines’ spotless safety record over the past two decades. Incidents like this are exceedingly rare.
That said this incident occurred during the initial climb-out where seat belt use is mandatory.
So yes, if a passenger was seated there and if their belt was unbuckled, I can see how somebody would have died. Nobody is saying that this isn’t a serious fuckup that doesn’t need to be investigated and remedied.
What I am saying is that major airlines in the U.S. have a more or less unblemished safety record for twenty two years, the likes of which has not only been unparalleled in aviation, but by any other form of transport. Literally walking is more dangerous than flying a major commercial airline in the U.S.
The MAX line of planes in particular has had their share of problems, but with the MCAS situation resolved there is no reason to believe that it in particular is any less safe than any other airframe operated by the majors. The issue with the door plug is unlikely to be related to the MAX (the same part and design have been in service without issue since well before the MAX). It will be investigated, fixed, and we will in all likelihood go back to flying gajillions of passenger miles without serious incident.
I’ll put this another way: if all of this gnashing of teeth and doom and gloom causes enough anxiety over flying that a few hundred people choose to drive instead, it will inevitably cause more injury and death than if every airline went all-in on a fleet of 737 MAXes.
TIL half the people commenting here are nobody :)
Commercial aviation in the U.S. is still incomprehensibly safe. It is not getting measurably less safe. The 737 MAX line are not death traps.
Not an overreaction. Not bolting on a door on a brand new plane is past bordering into full-on insanity.
Nobody floods into the comment sections on HN when this happens because people dying in cars is depressingly normal but planes are so unimaginably safe that a person hypothetically getting sucked out of a plane is strange and terrifying.
There's a reason they tell you to always wear your seatbelt though, ranging from sudden turbulence/downdraft to sudden depressurization.
You're kind of making my point for me when clothing being removed from a person is the most harrowing part of an aviation incident.
This was a serious fuck-up. But it remains that there was at risk no more than one, maybe two, fatalities. That isn’t enough to justify the claim that “safety is getting worse.”
Straw man. Nobody says even a single death isn't tragic. What I'm saying is it doesn't overwhelm trillions of miles of safe flight. Not flying a 737 Max 8, only to go onto a Spirit Aerosystems-assembled Airbus, doensn't make sense. (Note: not implicating Spirit. Just saying that the window of culpabilitiy extends more in their direction than it does across every 737 Max.)
OP said air safety is going down broadly [1]. So yes, considering all air transport miles is valid given the context.
You’re proposing crashes are autocorrelated. They’re not. They would be in a vacuum filled with spherical cows. But grounding and investigating takes care of that.
This is related to the fallacy of thinking if a coin has come up heads thrice in a row, it’s more likely to come up tails the fourth time. It’s not. We have a lot of innocuous flight miles as data from which to make robust statements, particularly when it comes to characterising the safety of the entire airline industry.
Put another way, on which day are you safer, the day before the accident or the day after?
There has been one passenger fatality aboard a major U.S. airline since November 2001.
Statistically, there is no difference between a new plane and one that's been flying for 18 years [1].
Given dying because an installer fucked up feels mighty similar to dying because a maintenance tech fucked up, I don't see a rational reason to over-penalise fabrication errors to the extent that it overrules millions of successful flight miles. (Design mistakes are categorially different.)
[1] http://awg.aero/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/analysisofimpact....
Just because it's happening to other people doesn't make it okay to hand-wave away safety.
And by the way, so far NTSB believes it's not a fabrication error but an assembly error. NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in.
As a layman, no. Were I looking for more than a Twitter level of analysis, it would be an indication for investigation. Not grounds for conclusion.
More directly, even as a layman, if I were to use that anecdote as grounds to condemn the state of car manufacturing in summa, that would be irrational.
> NTSB suspects 4 bolts were never screwed in
Source? Last I saw, they couldn't find the bolts. It takes lab work to ascertain whether they ever existed.
You seem to not know the meaning of suspect, so here is the definition:
Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more sus·pect verb 3rd person present: suspects /səˈspek(t)/ 1. have an idea or impression of the existence, presence, or truth of (something) without certain proof. "if you suspect a gas leak, do not turn on an electric light"
Have a great day sir.
Suspicion doesn't mean baseless hypothesis, e.g. "Mars is an orange." The NTSB would never say (and has not said, as you've conceded) it "suspects" the "bolts were never screwed in."
Were there a lack of marks where the bolts should have exerted clamping force, there would be basis for suspicion. That isn't proof. But it's more than a hypothesis.
Where are you getting this? Crookshanks said the NTSB had "not yet recovered the four bolts" and "have not determined if they existed there" [1].
Your source, for which I'm genuinely curious, is categorically false in suggesting the NTSB "suspects" the bolts were never there, or that Crookshanks said "there is so far no evidence 'the bolts were ever there'". (The latter being particularly reprehensible, given it involves materially misquoting an aircraft investigator.)
> Good luck with your investments
Wat.
[1] https://airwaysmag.com/ntsb-as1282-exams-all-12-door-plug-st...