Did Boeing pay for this article?
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Wall of rant incoming, sorry ;)
The website is a general aviation news source, and a decent one. Caveats: Given the size of Boeing in the global market, I have no doubt that they cover a lot of Boeing stories. Furthermore, given the size of Boeing in the global market, I would suspect they also advertise within, causing a bias to creep in there. However, none of the major bias reporting websites indicate anything about Simply Flying being bought and paid for. Furthermore, the numbers they are reporting are not their own.
Air incident doom and gloom stories make for excellent attention grabbing articles for news organizations -- clicks sell advertising, so of course they'll publish every doom and gloom article they can find, and Boeing makes an excellent target. Statistically speaking, due to the number of Boeing planes in the air, a good percentage of aviation related incidents will involve Boeing. But, even more so, there's now a narrative, and media organizations love articles that reinforce narratives. The narrative may be partially or wholly true, but it is often disproportionately reported.
Simple example: how many Tesla fires are reported my major media organizations, versus Ford fires, even though statistically there are far more Ford fires out there (both in terms of absolute numbers, and once normalized by the total number of vehicles). But that wouldn't fit the narrative and thus drive clicks.
The narrative in the media is that aviation is dangerous, and Boeing in particular. But the reality is that you're far more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than you are in an aviation related incident. That, however, is not sexy to report and doesn't drive clicks.
The reason I'm posting this is because it's not doom and gloom. People should feel comforted getting into modern aircraft that there are a ridiculous number of safety systems, regulations, inspections, and more going on and flying is literally the safest form of transportation.
(I'd add some exceptions for private bush planes, remote access to the Arctic and Antarctic, etc., where there is added risk due to lack of infrastructure or "cowboy" outfits operating ancient equipment, like the DC-3.)
Boeing's quality processes have shown to be very lacking and are not engineering driven, but rather cost cutting and profit driven. They could not even catch bolts MISSING from a door plug on a brand new air frame.
That is the antithesis of flight safety.
MBA's are making decisions regarding complex engineering problems that really should be left to their betters.
Boeing richly deserves every bit of backlash heading their way. They have killed hundreds of people by slapping band aids on a 55 year old air frame in an attempt to keep it current. When they should have been working on a clean sheet design 20 years ago.
In 2024 so far (to the best of my memory), we had one crash on a runway in Japan, but zero casualties (on the jet -- several casualties on the other plane -- not a jet). And a door fell off a plane in Alaska with zero casualties.
There are always a small number of bush plane or private small plane casualties every year, but they don't count against jets either.
The Alaska door plug incident didn't have casualties only because it just so happened nobody was sitting in the two seats directly adjacent to the door plug.
Edit: the point isn't to dispute whether somebody would have died or not, but to not let a stroke of luck downplay the severity of the actual issue
Seatbelts are also a thing, assuming you actually follow the safety recommendations.
We are not talking fatalities, we are talking casualties. You cannot convince me that an explosive decompression at 16k feet won't cause serious injury at the least.
Edit: seat belts are designed against the forces of severe turbulence, not explosive decompressions. Assuming the seat belt actually holds, all the forces are applied against the single point of contact the belt has with the midsection of the passenger. Reminder that the forces were enough to torque two seats, rip the padding off the closest seat, and ripped the shirt off a nearby passenger. I actually think there is a decent chance there would've been a fatality should anybody have sat in the closest seat.
in other words, it sounds like a totally meaningless metric.
No. Commercial passenger Jets are pretty much the safest form of travel that exists by almost every metric. Comparing them against three seater Cessnas that Billybob from Oregon uses for sight-seeing expeditions is not fair. You don't compare SUVs to bicycles when talking about safety because they both have tires.
Note that military aircraft are also not included. There were a lot of people who died in Jets this year in military contexts. But would you call that fair when putting together the safety metrics?
What about passengers that suffered heart attacks while flying in a commercial plane? Actually, that might be an interesting example, but not in the context of this article. (Tangent: there's probably a metric here. If you have a heart attack in a vehicle, what are the odds you're driving, and what are the odds your heart attack causes multiple fatalities as a result. But your travel time to hospital and survival rate might be higher as a passenger -- it takes more time for a plane to make an emergency landing. I'd bet those numbers come in close, but it'll depend on the metric used.)
You always need to pick a reasonable metric. In this case, commercial passenger jets is a good one, because it's the largest group.