Am I Flying Boeing? | Hacker News Reader

Am I Flying Boeing?

amiflyingonaboeing.com

47 pointslord_sudo21 comments

Haha thanks to whomever shared this! I'm Shrey and I'm actually the guy who developed this site. I travel a ton (and run a travel company too!) and I kept having friends ask me how to avoid Boeing planes, so I figured i'd make this to help out. Hope y'all find it useful :)

Can this somehow be made a filter option when booking a flight? Like in a browser extension?

If there's enough interest in this I'm happy to oblige!

Heads up that tickets generally don't guarantee the plane you'll be on, they can change at any time for a bunch of different reasons.

Yep thanks for adding this clarification! Planes swap out last minute for operational reasons all the time, so nothing is guaranteed until you're physically on the plane.

Kayak.com added this because it is a meta-search, but they left it off their other direct booking sites (booking.com and priceline.com) I suspect due to liability reasons. This is why almost all car rental listings say "Honda Civic (or similar)" because the person taking your money does not control the car you end up with.

https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/what-is-the-bait...

Wanna add Spirit?

Yea I think this should be possible! I'll add it in.

> I travel a ton (and run a travel company too!)

I would expect someone who works in the industry to know that this website is extremely misleading. The process of airlines assigning airframes to routes is not deterministic and accurate data only exists within the airlines internal systems, which even then is subject to change right up to departure. The data you get in your feed that indicates airframe is just the most common model that has flown that route over the last 90 days.

Really wish people would stop building these websites.

Yep, I do mention as much in the disclaimers for the site when you put in a flight. It's true that airlines fully have the right to change the aircraft, but they also reserve the right to change basically any part of your itinerary (e.g. move you from one flight to another under unexpected circumstances/IRROPS). I figure presenting info that has a high probability of being correct is better than not presenting any info at all just because of a chance of it being incorrect under IRROPS circumstances.

On the note of high probability: we do use data sources that plug into the GDS booking systems for the flights, so it's not just a historical thing for this site specifically. While that once again doesn't give us a guarantee, it's likely better than relying on previous route aircraft stats.

> we do use data sources that plug into the booking systems for the flights, so it's not just a historical thing

Yes, I know exactly where you are getting the data. Your OTA API is a booking system that is intended to provide basic information to travel agents. You'll be presented with an IATA equipment code, or more likely the intermediary providing you the API is expanding it to an airframe or using ADSB data to supplement the field (as I mentioned up thread). The data field exists mostly for wake classification and general seating guidance.

You'll notice despite huge consumer demand none of the major booking sites rolled out an airframe filter. Booking Holdings put it on their metasearch site Kayak.com, but didn't deploy it on their direct sites like Booking.com and Priceline.com.

> I figure presenting info that has a high probability of being correct

The accuracy is inversely related to peoples desire for the information. When the MAX aircraft are grounded for example, you'll have massive fleet shuffles and the booking system does not get updated.

It is like advertising that you have a 100% accurate earthquake predictor (except when an earthquake happens).

This seems pretty useful for me. Out of habit, I have always checked whether I am flying an A320 or a 737 MAX when purchasing plane tickets. The information is usually buried in details, in small text.

And it can also change. It's easier to pick an airline that has only one type of fleet

For people on this who are more knowledgeable about both recent incidents and perhaps any details about Boeing as an organization ... do the recent incidents make you skeptical of _all_ Boeing aircraft? Is it only later generations of the 737?

The details are still hazy but it does seem there was some actual supply chain and manufacturing issues with some of these planes. There's a few people that have done pretty nice deep dives on this, like https://heated.world/p/boeings-big-green-disaster.

That wasn't a deep dive. That was a terrible and biased article that takes a "Boeing should have only focused on the environment" BS. A piece of rag.

I think emotive/political language aside, it explains that the 737 MAX was pushed out the door to catch up with Airbus's newer, more fuel-efficient engines. Boeing basically used an existing plane design and jammed the engine in there, and tried to offset it with a new MCAS technology to help with the nose pitch issues. While it's worked most of the time, seems there's some edge cases in that tech that might not have been there had there been a ground up redesign.

I think this twitter thread might provide a more objective take on the same types of content in the article: https://twitter.com/emorwee/status/1770833808222277890

You should be wary of any aircraft that has been worked on by Spirit AeroSystems (not to be confused with Spirit Airlines), which also does work for Airbus and others. The issue with Boeing is entirely poor management that continues to funnel work to Spirit.

Pretty sure you're still way more likely to die in a car accident and several other ways than on a Boeing flight. The fear around this is silly.

Yea personally I do believe air travel remains remarkably safe, but for some people it does help with peace of mind. Travel is stressful enough I figure!

For me it's the basic moral position of avoiding companies who suicide their whistleblowers.

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