The airline plans to purchase 41 more Boeing 737-8 Max planes
“Once bitten, twice shy,” doesn’t really apply to Africa’s biggest carrier, Ethiopian Airlines. Amid this year’s Dubai Air Show, the company has announced that it has ordered 20 planes of the Boeing 737-8 Max—the same model that killed 157 people six minutes after taking off from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa in March 2019.
Five months earlier, a similar plane—the Lion Air 737 Max—crashed in Indonesia’s Java Sea, causing 189 instant fatalities. In both cases, investigators determined sensor malfunctions to be the cause.
Boeing admitted full responsibility for the malfunctions. The accidents led to the grounding of 737 Max models for two years; flights were resumed in June 2021.
Why is Ethiopian Airlines buying 737-8 Max planes?
Most airlines have since avoided purchasing the aircraft, with only 30 out of the world’s 5,000 airlines flying it. But Ethiopian Airlines thinks adding the model to its fleet makes business sense—despite travelers citing fears of flying in the 737 Max since the 2019 accident. “We have renewed our confidence in that aircraft,” CEO Mesfin Tasew told the press in Dubai. “We believe we have checked and confirmed that the design defect of that aircraft has been fully corrected by Boeing.”
Tasew also said Ethiopian Airlines would purchase 21 more 737 Max planes in the near future. It demonstrates, he added in a press release, the company’s commitment “to serve passengers with the latest technologically advanced airplanes.” The airline said in the release it is purchasing the model because it “reduces fuel use and emissions by 20%” while minimizing noise by 50% compared to the planes it will replace.” But returning to the plane hasn’t been without controversy for Ethiopian Airlines in the past, particularly among families of crash victims.
read more: https://qz.com/ethiopian-airlines-boeing-737-max-faa-fatal-accident-1851028514
The 737 Max is the only plane that Boeing has ever made that the guys at the Boeing factory refuse to fly on. These are guys with “if it ain’t Boeing I ain’t going” bumper stickers. Unless it’s the one.
That is an ambiguous and purely anecdotal statement. Obviously a news outlet looking to paint the Max as a death trap will be able to find a guy or two to say that for the camera. Meanwhile when I lived in the Seattle area and had neighbors that worked for Boeing they all had virtually the exact same opinion as me on this, which isn’t surprising since talking to actual Boeing employees and engineers is how I developed this opinion. The main bickering and strife for employees is about the Everett plant vs Charleston plant drama. While I am sure there are people that worked for Boeing that are still scared of the Max, I actually lived near the factory and interacted with employees in both social and professional settings and never came across any. But hey, if one person is literally a trained aviation mishap investigator and another one read something on the internet purely designed to cause outrage the latter is definitely the one to focus on when talking about aviation safety.
Super weird that you are claiming all this familiarity with the factory and the motivation of the complaints without realizing that they don’t build the Max in South Carolina so that has nothing to do with this.
They also don’t build it in Everett so it’s super weird that you met so many people who worked on it there. I guess that in all your many social and professional associations with Boeing people in Everett that it just never came up at all that they build the plane fifty miles away in Renton. Even though non fictional people at Boeing are pretty goddamned specific about which airframe they work on because it literally determines where they live.
This is a fun study in how anecdotal evidence isn’t all created equal. Made up nonsense is worth quite a bit less than stuff that actually happened.
I never said they built it in Charleston or Everett, I just said that the majority of drama amongst Boeing employees that I came across was about the Everett vs Charleston split and not the Max. Renton is actually the location that I worked directly with and spent time at since that is where the MDC is. But yes, your 3 seconds of googling loaded terms and reading shock value “journalism” makes you the expert here. It’s not like I’ve literally put a black box in the back of my Ford Focus to drive it to the post office and mail it to Boeing for an investigation or anything.
The MDC is in Tukwila, not Renton. ;-)
It’s an easy mistake to make when you are just making shit up to double down on getting caught making shit up already.
Here is where you post some more bullshit:
OK, I flubbed that one I will admit. I mixed up which of the multiple Boeing locations all within a stones throw various things were at. Other than mixing that up I have not made up a single thing. Not sure what you want me to post to prove anything. I legitimately am a pilot, I am safety trained and coded as a flight safety officer, I have been to mishap investigator training and I have personally done investigations on Boeing aircraft to include the black box story. What “proof” would you suggest for any of this? I can show my redacted pilots license, my mishap investigator course certificate or anything else like that. Specific investigations are privileged so I can’t share anything like that. I don’t think I still have my access pass from when I was at the MDC since I have since moved from WA to OK and didn’t keep it. All of that doesn’t change the fact that my actual description of the issue with MCAS and how the mishaps occurred is 100% accurate and you have absolutely nothing tangible to counter it with, hence your anecdotal “BoInG EMpLoYeeS WoN’T FlY oN THeM” response.
I get it, CNN man told you to hate Boeing and you’re independent and smart enough to do whatever the internet media tells you. But for actual pilots that actually fly things like this, the issue was way overblown by the media.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
say that for the camera.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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