I don’t know that I agree with the thrust of this writer’s argument, because I don’t think that whether or not it’s a more dangerous year on average is the issue. The fact that Boeing’s planes are so shoddily built that it has the potential for things to get much worse is much higher than it used to be. The implication seems to be that we shouldn’t be concerned about the issues with the 737 MAX because this is an average year for accidents.
aside from recently, when was the last time an airplane’s door plug was ripped from the fuselage?
Like the premise is that on average things aren’t any worse. But there’s mechanical issues… and then there’s “Supposedly-permanently-installed-panels” getting ripped off the side of the plane. or like the MCAS system and the headaches that caused.
This is definitely a case of selective statistics.
It’s also the nature of the problems. It’s one thing for something to fail due to difficult to detect material defects or weird freak mechanical stresses. It’s entirely a different matter for things to fail because of just blatantly shoddy work or because the entire design is fundamentally broken. The kinds of failures Boeing has been experiencing are very much the latter not the former. They’re the sort of things that shouldn’t ever happen and yet they seem to have become the new normal for Boeing.
Not panels, panel. One. One panel ripped off.
You’re demonstrating exactly here the point that the author was making. You seem to think bad things are happening more than they really are.
No.
You completely missed my point.
How frequently does permanently-bolted door plugs fall off? Show me another example of a structural component of the airframe itself just failing without some external event causing it. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
It’s not that common. And every other example of similar depressurizations were caused by something hitting the window, or similar. (For example 5+ years ago a bit of engine struck the window on an airbus. Iirc, the engine was hit from a bird strike or something.)
A door plug is a panel/frame that goes into the the structural airframe to seal it up. Imagine bricking over a doorway because it’s no longer a doorway.
What vox just did was insist that “incidents” are the same. This would be like a state DMV saying “accidents are the same!” But forgetting to mention that there’s a much greater percentage of fatal accidents than previous years
Whatever your opinion on the subject is, I thought this was pretty incredible for aviation in general:
That’s a safety record of about one or two passenger fatalities per light-year traveled.
The metric to measure the distance is a bit weird. Revenue passenger miles. Does that mean a 1000 miles flight with 200 people is 200,000 miles in this unit? Because that is already like a light second
It really is an astounding safety record compared to ground transport of all kinds. Literally every American can name several personal acquaintances who died or were severely injured in car crashes, but nobody thinks twice about automotive travel.
tl;dr, no:
Are more planes having incidents than ever before? Or are we just hearing about more incidents? It’s mostly the latter.
It’s the hot news thing, so any minor incident gets published to capitalize on those sweet, sweet ad impressions.
Or it’s the effort of a PR firm trying to redirect attention away from Boeing’s abysmal quality control and management blundering.
It’s not really minor when Boeing has to just admit they don’t have records on important manufacturing processes.
