> With the dawn of the 1980s, however, Boeing’s traditional way of doing things seemed increasingly out of touch. Deregulation under US presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had changed the economics of the industry, Greenberg said. “The idea was that if you had more competition, it would drop prices for consumers. Suddenly, airlines are looking at this and saying, ‘Oh my God, we can’t pass on the cost by continuously raising ticket prices.’ That put pressure back on Boeing, and on Airbus eventually, to become cost-conscious.”
I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers. Compare the union workers for the Big Three during the 1970's to that of the gig economy workers now. Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions is what is best in the long term? Or maybe, we need to alternate periods of disruption and highly competitive markets with periods of stability and oligopolies? I suspect we as a society will have to try to figure that out, and that it is not a simple answer.
Living in first world country it's easy to be biased against race to the bottom - it hurts previously very well paid jobs and breaks established status quo.
But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc).
And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.
Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.
This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision.
We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is always possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).
I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.
I'm not saying it necessarily applies for life-saving treatments AFAIK, but not everyone agrees on what medical care is. For example, in the U.S. it has been shown that state abortion restrictions hit the lower-income segment much harder precisely because they cannot afford to travel to states which have more liberal laws concerning abortion.
It doesn't have to be a rare disease—it can just mean that non-basic healthcare is hard to access.
Example: I live in the Philippines. Its healthcare system is affected by two things: centralization and the fact that the country is an archipelago.
Most quality health care is happening in Metro Manila. What you find outside is generally very basic, and even in 2nd-tier cities like Cebu or Davao they may refer you to Manila for something you'd think they ought be able to do.
With travel by boat being … rather slow, with vacation time not exactly ample, and the average salary being low I'm quite certain that affordable flights ($25 Cebu - Manila) are making ample difference in terms of what kind of healthcare situations are being addressed.
It is common enough that there is an entire organization (Angel Flight) dedicated to it. Using private planes and private pilots which are significantly less safe than commercial.
Another example is family members overseas. Many have to choose between providing for their family vs. being with their family. Affordability of flights can have a huge impact on their quality of life and ability to take part in the moments that many of use take for-granted.
This is partially self-inflicted. Cheap air travel incentivizes more people to move overseas because they know their families are just a flight away. I once knew a person that lived and worked in the UK, but studied in Poland - she flew back and forth twice a month(!). I guess it would be fine, if not for the environmental costs.
Anyway, I have this feeling that you could justify just about anything if you dig for nth-order effects, but it doesn't change the fundamental point: a race to the bottom sacrifices everything that can be sacrifices. Environment is usually the first victim, quality the second, but safety trade-offs are eventually made too. At some point in a product category's lifecycle, one starts to wonder whether it's so degraded that it would be better if it didn't exist anymore.
And n-th order effects and externalities are specifically excluded from corporate accounting.
Which means we don't know how much these things actually cost in real terms. We also don't know how to quantify potential benefits.
(And if someone says 'Well, that's subjective' - so is nominal market value.)
There's conventional profit-loss accounting, and there's everything else. It seems the everything else can accumulate to ecosystem-threatening levels, and conventional accounting will continue to pretend this is financially irrelevant.
If flying were very expensive for consumers, it would probably be a lot more expensive for the military too. Civilian aviation probably provides a lot of R&D that is used in military planes.
The discussion here is about more or less expensive air travel, within reasonable multiples. Al Qaeda would’ve probably been able to justify and afford 10x what it paid for its airfare so that’s mostly a matter of passenger air travel existing in the first place.
But memories are short and greed is long, and those who “forget” that every safety reg was written in the blood of others can sleep easy beneath golden parachutes and very good lawyers.
Honestly, best thing Boeing could do now is rename it the “737 MAX Fight Club Pinto”, fill it with all the incels who didn’t get the joke, and fly the whole crapload off into the great unknown.
In my opinion, Milton is right in that clip. Everyone agrees that we need to draw the line somewhere, define some level of safety as 'good enough'. IE flying is more dangerous in IFR conditions, so we could ban all commercial flights during those conditions. However that line is not the same for everyone. Most people are fine with accepting the slightly higher risk involved in flying during low visibility.
Risk tolerances are different, so why do we try to regulate to a given standard. It makes little sense to allow motorcycles yet have a regulation that requires the use of seatbelts in cars. Instead, I'd like to see regulations that enforce testing and information sharing. After that, let people decide which airline to take, which car to buy, and therefore where to draw that line.
If travel is necessary for medical treatment, it ought to be covered by insurance, so the price shouldn't matter. Medevac flights, aka air ambulances, are a thing.
"covered by insurance" doesn't mean much if you're still billed $10k or more after insurance.
My father has decent insurance as a retiree and still got billed for an ambulance ride after he had complications following a jaw surgery.
I've seen a bunch of anecdotal stories about how it's cheaper for someone on the west coast to fly to Korea, or down to Mexico, for non-critical surgeries, spend a week recovering, and then fly home.
I think it's a fair assumption that the US healthcare system would have been overhauled long before the complete elimination of the competitive market for commercial air travel, which is what this thread is about.
Isn’t this just another case of perfect being the enemy of good? If flying for a couple of hours is already safer than driving for 10, but we don’t want flying without a perfect safety record (making it much less accessible via much higher ticket prices)...then are we simply doomed? Instead of 99.95% reliability, do we really spend 10x more to get to 99.995%?
Drunk driving is low hanging fruit: it is really bad and easy to get rid of without great cost to society. It is incomparable to what is going on in the aviation industry.
I think the difference is psychological: you are in control of your car and you feel safer because of it. A plane gives you no control so you want more guarantees.
Als: Planes add another dimension of things which can go wrong so maybe that is also involved.
> made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives
Except for the climate change part. Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives.
To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.
Keep in mind that as a fraction of emissions, air travel is actually quite small, about 2-3% [1] (and this is from a harsh article). There's some concern that as the industry grows (roughly 5% a year) and other sectors decarbonize, air travel will consume a larger fraction of remaining "carbon budget" (25-50% depending on where you look).
Clearly as the denominator shrinks, and the numerator grows even slowly, percentage increases. That said, it's probably not the main issue in in climate change or even close to it. Other sectors such as ground transport, industrial heat (cement, steel etc.), agriculture (primarily fertilizer) and other fixed sources (buildings/homes) are a bigger deal.
If we end up with airlines as the last carbon source, that's probably OK if we deal with the rest. 25% or even 50% of remaining budget is fine if the rest of the (easier) problems get solved. Air travel is uniquely hard, let's get the easier stuff first.
It's true that, overall, air travel isn't a large fraction of our carbon emissions. But that's entirely do to that fact that most people don't fly. Every trip you make across the Atlantic and back takes about 10% of a typical American's yearly carbon emissions. If you're a typical person who doesn't fly then indeed it's not worth worrying about the flying that other people are doing. But if you're someone who flies every year or especially multiple times a year then cutting down is probably one of the most significant things you can do for the environment.
How many of those trips are cuttable? Maybe one or two business trips. And businesses would already rather teleconference these days if the trip is really avoidable. Given how cumbersome and expensive flying is already, I'm not sure there's a huge amount of "waste" in the system to cut at the moment.
As for the occasional personal trip (I assume by # of people though maybe not # of miles flown, the far more common use case, only 12% of passengers are business travel[1]), should we be telling people, "no you're not going to see grandma for christmas"?
I'd imagine a lot of them are cuttable. I have a friend who regularly flies to the US (from the UK) to run conferences. Frankly it's ridiculous that they don't hire someone from the US to so it.
With modern video calling technology, how many business trips are really essential? Some sure, but a lot could be cut, or merged into fewer longer trips.
You're right I think some are overdone. One example is the consultants taking a plane 2x a week (leave early monday, come back thursday eve, often with unconstrained distances). Maybe a bunch of those could be cut, though in that case I think a lot of these business models offer a "premium" service. If you're paying $1M/quarter for a McKinsey contract or for an I-banker or a big 4 accountant you definitely want to see that person physically. Though keep in mind McKinsey is also probably less price sensitive than the average flyer.
Still even with that, I'd like to better understand the economics. If only 12% of trips are business vs pleasure, killing all business trips won't move the needle in the long run. There's some question of how long business trips are, you can be 12% of trips but if they're longer it's worse.
My overall point is that there are a lot of factors in how people chose to travel. It's far from clear that increasing the already quite high price is what's going to deter people unless you tax it massively. In which case we'll effectively return to a situation like the pre-deregulation days where only the rich flew, which may be fine, but should be directly considered.
In terms of impact there's a generally accepted ~2.7X multiplier applied to flight emissions:
"Among the reasons for this focus is that these emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level." [0]
So you can look at 2-3% of co2, or you can look at impact and if we use the co2 proportion as a proxy of overall emissions, ~8% in terms of impact - and growing fast.
I wonder what the emissions from a methane powered suborbital BFR is compared with a 16 hour flight, especially if that methane was generated from CO2 extraction from the air using renewable sources of electricity.
3% of global emissions being due to air travel, when 4/5 of the world population has never set foot in an airplane, is incredibly huge, not quite small. This is an activity almost entirely engaged in by the very wealthy, that has a huge adverse effect on the planet.
Taxing air travel to reduce frivolous trips would be a great policy. Add fast trains between major US cities.
What you say isn't wrong, but when you're asking what the most impactful changes to the current system would be, the absolute climate impact of flying vs. other sources of greenhouse gases needs to be considered.
Which is to say, the world-wide policy priorities need to be on transportation (other than flying), electricity production and industrial emissions [0]. Giving up coal and petrol cars has potentially much greater impact than giving up flying.
That said, when you consider the CO2 emissions that you cause yourself directly, a good rule of thumb is that as soon as you fly at all, CO2 from flying dwarfs all your other CO2 emissions. On the individual level, not flying, flying less, or offsetting carbon emissions from flying has the biggest impact.
I think reducing CO2 emissions from a personal level is the wrong way to go about it. It needs to be addressed from a more higher level, because the majority of CO2 emissions cannot be attributed to a single person.
Take for example shipping, which uses 4.5% of global co2 emissions, yet most people haven't stepped on a ship in their lifetime, and never will!
Shipping also very often uses the dirtiest of fuels and is therefore much more polluting than airliners which burn quite high quality refined fuels. That's why, to get around recent laws limiting sulfur emissions, large container boats now first "scrub" their exhaust gasses with sea water, so all sulfur will now nicely pollute and acidify our oceans. [0] No emissions though, because emissions bad.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that this is not a problem that should be solved individually. I don't hold my breath for what the higher ups are coming up with though, their measures seem misguided at best, deliberately loop-holed at worst.
Like every time this comes up, there are 7.5 billion humans on the planet and thus no need to only do X or only do Y. We can and must reduce every aspect of our global pollution problem, right now, or it will kill the majority of humanity. We aren't resource-constrained. This isn't a 5-person startup where you have 5 workers and that's it. You can put a million people (if needed) to work on fixing air travel at the same time as you put a million people (if needed) to work on any other aspect of climate change.
All arguments that we shouldn't fix X climate problem because it's less important than Y are just arguments that we shouldn't fix climate problems because the arguer doesn't want them fixed.
No individual actions have any effect at all, and people who argue about them are, again, just distracting from the important work of creating collective solutions.
Yes, it's more efficient to concentrate on making one thing better. If you have a limited amount of people. But leaving the flying industry to play freely, the amount of saved environment will just move to the airplanes instead of taking the car. There is nothing that says we all can't do our part in lowering environment cost wherever we work.
I take your point, though I'm not sure taxes are the answer. Very rarely is air travel even close to the cheapest option (in the US here, Europe has low cost airlines that may shift the math). Although I'm pretty well off as compared to the average person, I don't know anyone personally who takes the plane purely on a whim, and I know nobody who prefers to fly when another comparable time option is available. If you were to tax air travel at say 10%, that would likely not change my travel, just make it more expensive. A $200 ticket now costing $220 isn't going to make me not take the flight. If you tax it more, sure I won't take the flight, but then you reduce quality of life given that in many places the alternatives don't exist.
In Europe I usually take the train places. If it's 2-3h away by train it's usually faster to take the train, and it's often (though not always) comparable or cheaper on price. In the US, I virtually never take the train, there simply aren't adequate options. The distances tend to be much larger, and we simply haven't built the infrastructure. We could build it, but that's proven quite hard (see CA high speed rail and efforts to modernize northeast corridor) for both political and practical reasons. NY<->DC I often take the bus, it's cheaper and only a slight time penalty vs. the train.
4/5 people sounds like a big number but those people are much more likely to start eating meat or buy a car at first than to fly. That's a way bigger problem environmentally.
In europe, jet fuel isn't taxed at all (but train/car fuel is) which often makes flying the cheaper option. From london, I can fly to several european cities cheaper than I can get a 2 hour train within the UK. Which is pretty ridiculous.
A train with 500 seats running London to Manchester costs about £4/mile in electricity, of which 20p will be VAT (which I think is reclaimed) - so tax would be about £35, or 7p per passenger.
A flight of a 150 seat plane from London to Manchester attracts £3900 in tax.
Not in most of the USA (well, it is electric generated from a diesel hybrid). Electrification over large distances is expensive, the only country to have done that so far are the Chinese (and even then they don’t bother with way out Tibet...yet).
The USA is big but not that big. It's about twice as wide as Sweden is tall. Sweden is all electric rail. From the south of Sweden to Rome, is the same distance as Sweden is tall.
All of Sweden's rail is electric and most of Europe's too.
Sweden’s population is confined to a narrow corridor, so it’s not like they need many lines of coverage. Likewise, density in Europe is good enough to make electrification worthwhile, while America is way too spread out. An extreme case would be Australia, imagine electrifying the entire route from Melbourne to Darwin.
> In europe, jet fuel isn't taxed at all (but train/car fuel is) which often makes flying the cheaper option. From london, I can fly to several european cities cheaper than I can get a 2 hour train within the UK. Which is pretty ridiculous.
Australia and America are irellevent. Almost all long distance trips in Europe is electricity
That's wild, agreed that is out of step. I usually book fairly last minute so I haven't seen those prices personally, but I know they exist. I surely don't believe we should favor air over train.
This is out of context. Same thing could be said with the advent of the internet and massive energy consumption that came with it. The debate here is about the effect the technology had on day to day human lives, not on the optimization of it afterwards.
> Global air travel is projected to significantly increase in the future without any obvious way to sufficiently reduce its carbon footprint.
I think we all understand that flying is not "green" or "sustainable".
> To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.
> If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good.
Reminds me of something really out of context: food. I was shocked when a gym trainer told me that if my goal is weight loss, I must focus on what I eat.
(I am not a vegetarian or a vegan btw) To keep our planet inhabitable, we must reduce the amount of meat we consume and alter our diet very significantly. I know this is a fact and yet I continue to stuff our faces like there's no tomorrow. I don't fly a lot but I eat a lot. I actually enjoy eating (to the point that it wasn't obvious to me that many people don't). It would be very hypocritical of me to suggest that there be a huge surcharge to discourage people from flying but no surcharge on meat products, leather, almonds, ...
> Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives.
It does not.
Climate change is real and will cause serious problems. It will emphatically NOT threaten billions of lives. The people who tell you that are either misinformed or lying.
On the other hand, the new pricing structure means some airlines shut down and other airlines cut out unprofitable/less-profitable flight routes entirely, making it more difficult for some people to travel. ️
Reportedly a lot of this is because deregulation eliminated many requirements that previously forced airlines to service less-profitable areas, in a similar fashion to how the USPS is required to provide service to Anyone instead of just people in profitable areas.
It's not the safest way to travel if you look at per trip or per hour spent death ratio [0]. To have even more correct numbers you'd have to add death ratio for transport to/from the airport as well.
Usually, when comparing modes of travel, a person has some destination in mind which is a fixed distance in mind. If you're just trying to get out of the house, say, then I'd agree that air travel is a more dangerous way to do it than driving around the block. But if you're trying to travel to a specific place for business, family, or vacation then it makes sense to compare based on danger per mile.
But then you should probably only compare trips with somehow similar distances/times involved right?
Since I'm unlikely to fly my 20 mile commute to work, logging those miles under the "drive car" category isn't comparable, but is likely how I'd be in a car accident since that's something like 75% of my driving life. It seems you should only compare flights of 3 hrs vs car trips of 3 hours, or similar.
I’m not following. If I want to go visit my family 700 miles away for a holiday, I should most reasonably compare driving there with flying there as the risk choice is between those two manners of getting there.
Comparing flying for an hour vs driving for an hour isn’t a comparison between two substitute goods, unless the purpose of my trip was “to kill an hour”, making those valid substitutes.
Its normalized by distance, so the fact that 75% of your driving is short trips doesnt matter. You could argue that you need to look at only sustainable trips, but I think its unlikely to change the conclusion that per mile flying is safer than driving on a per mile basis.
You'd need to set some minimum trip distance for which flying is a viable alternative, like say 300 or 500 miles. Then throw out all the driving data for under that. Now, how would you expect this to shift the deaths/mile of driving?
In order to reduce it, driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true. Long trips often take place on highways at higher speeds and thus accidents have higher consequences. Drivers are more likely to be fatigued on longer trips. Drivers are less likely to be familiar with the roads on longer trips.
You've probably also got to throw out all flights for which driving is not a possibility. Like transcontinental trips. That may make flying appear safer since flights over oceans are more dangerous since there arent as many emergency landing opportunities.
> driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true.
I would be shocked to find that short trips were safer (per-mile) than long trips, as my intuition is that interstate highways are likely to be by far the safest type of roadway on a per-mile basis.
So I did some digging. It was surprisingly hard to find data that broke it down by roadway type, but I eventually found an article[1] that also linked to data[2].
Taking the most recent year available [2004], and converting to the typical airline standard (deaths per 10 billion miles travelled), urban interstates have a death rate of 57 deaths/10Bmi, urban collector roads 85 deaths/10Bmi, urban local roads 128 d/10Bmi, and rural local roads 315 d/10Bmi.
Airline figures for comparison are about 0.2 deaths per 10Bmi for scheduled commercial airline travel (Delta, United, Southwest, American, etc; not charter, not corporate, not general aviation), yet people are much more fearful of airplanes than automobiles on average.
Higher speeds does not necessarily equate to a more dangerous trip.
High speed delta to predominant flow is the more accurate metric.
Your fatigue comment is well received, but not a given either. A person may feel driving in a fatigued state is more acceptable for a short trip, but enforce more rigid limits on behavior for a long trip from home.
A foot or bicycle journey is not comparable to a commercial flight (except in the case of a few, statistically insignificant, cases). Furthermore, one flies commercially in order to get from A to B, not to spend a certain amount of time doing it, so the risk per hour is not a particularly useful figure.
> Furthermore, one flies commercially in order to get from A to B, not to spend a certain amount of time doing it
This isn't actually true for recreational travelers. People roughly spend the same amount of time traveling as before commercial flight, they just go further.
To put it differently, people generally have the same vacation time available to them. They're also generally willing to burn roughly the same fraction of their vacation on the travel portion.
Commercial air travel has just enabled people to travel further in the same amount of time, while also burning more fuel doing so vs. the alternatives (road, rail...)
What's implied in your statement is that the introduction of air travel reduced overall fuel consumption vs. where it was at when people traveled more by automobile.
This is obviously not the case.
Trying to compare the two "per pax mile" ignores the fact that the convenience of air travel createdmoretravel than it ever saved in fuel efficiency as a bulk mover. It covers longer distances in generally less time and more comfort, it created a new class of travel in an additive fashion, it didn't strictly replace the alternatives.
If we're actually debating fuel and emissions on a large scale, this is a major part of the larger picture.
Furthermore, since the primary dimension which matters to individuals is time and cost not distance, when you'd compare a vacation by automobile to flight, the automobile vacation would likely be to a nearer destination. So one shouldn't even be comparing equal distances if attempting such a comparison, it's just not comfortable and/or worthwhile for most people to drive across the country for a weekend trip - many will do that flight without batting an eye.
Fortunately modern vehicles, especially the likes of Teslas and supercharger networks completely destroy even your disingenuous comparison.
That's a fair point, though, in these cases, I suspect cost is even more of a determinant (and as train travel is often more expensive than flying, trains would probably also look safer by that measure, too!)
If someone invents a plane which has the same probability of death flying between point A and point B, but gets there in half the time, it's not really less safe.
> But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable
This is a point that needs to be made more often.
I'm not sure more access to air travel has made people's lives better (different, sure)... but it's not like the flying experience has been getting worse in a vacuum. AFAIK, way more people have access to it today than did half a century ago.
When reading old novels and travel logs up to a century ago, the main difference is that people took their time. Travelling often took days or weeks, but it was okay since there was no alternative, and since enjoying the journey was sometimes a part of the process. It's amusing to read about trains that stopped for 2 hours so that passagers could go out for lunch. Trains and boats were places were you lived and met people.
Since travelling was slow, people had to adapt. From Paris, a bourgeois family could spend a day or two in the neighboring countryside, but if they wanted to visit Italy or Russia, you'd stay there for a few months. Nowadays, it's the same: from Paris, a middle class family can spend the week-end at Tunis, but they will take two weeks of holidays for Thailand. Yet our time-constrained lives have made months-long stays less frequents.
What you're missing is the vast majority of people simply never traveled any real distance from their hometown at all. Spending a few months visiting Italy sounds lovely, but most people have always been too time-constrained for that kind of luxury.
> air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX
That wholly depends on how often you fly those damn death traps. I highly doubt accounting for just the MAX alone would still give you the same result (safest form of travel). My car sure feels safer than a MAX, but I didn't run the numbers.
USA innovated and created POTS, land line phones - and then again with wireless phones/radio phones that ultimately became cell phones.
Emerging countries skipped all that, landline, pots, regulation of monopolies and ultimately in the end just were able to put in some towers and voila, cell phones all w/ imported technology that majority of people in that emerging country do not understand to the equilivent of magic.
If there is no profit, it won't be built. Many countries didn't get cell phones until late 00's. Where now it's not really a cell phone, but "facebook."
Your points about cost reduction spreading wealth and access don't preclude the idea that a race to the bottom incentive might pass a stress tolerance threshold somewhere.
Yes, it's certainly a tricky one. But note that deregulated markets not only allow harmful race-to-the-bottom style behaviour, they all but require it, because "good apple" companies will be outcompeted by those cutting corners.
I think it's worth considering the effect that political and social narratives have on this. Reagan-style politics not only deregulates markets, it pushes a moral narrative that it is righteous to exploit the market as far as you possibly can, even when that means taking advantage of market flaws and externalities such that you are causing a net societal harm.
Their ideology is such that this is "capitalistic" and therefore good, and so we should not attempt to curb, regulate or otherwise discourage such behaviour. This has no basis in economic theory, and it's causing huge harms to our society (and economy).
Could this "lifting out of poverty" nonsense stop. In the West people have been put into poverty in the last decades, precisely because decent medium skilled jobs were exported by greedy managers who hide behind multiculturalism as a rationale.
To these people multiculturalism is just a means to increase the size of the industrial reserve army.
> I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure.
The market for air travel is highly competitive, the market for airplanes is not. In the market that the 737 serves, there's options from Boeing, Airbus, Tupolev and maybe Comac. Comac and Tupolev are deeply connected with the governments of China and Russia respectively; Airbus and Boeing are heavily subsidized by European and US government too, although more independent. There's a few more manufacturers if you include slightly smaller jets.
Building high capacity passenger jets has large inherent barriers to market, but then you also see things like Bombardier being forced into partnership with Airbus when it tried to develop a new jet around the market of the 737.
Long manufacturing queues and logistical difficulties of mixed fleets also make it hard for airlines to switch models or manufacturers, especially for smaller airlines.
The main reason Bombardier sold the CSeries to Airbus was that it was about to be hit with big tariffs that would have made it noncompetitive in the U.S. market. Airbus has a U.S. production plant in Alabama that can do final assembly and avoid the tariffs.
The 737MAX was still safer than air travel in the 1970s. Boeing definitely screwed up, but it's a mistake to overstate how dangerous it really is. It's still far safer than driving. Air safety has advanced to a point where we're capable of having almost zero fatal accidents, which IMO leads us to overemphasize each one that still happens.
Ultimately, the airlines wanted a common TC and type rating for very good reasons -- it saves money, i.e. human effort in pilot training, the number of pilots that need to be on reserve, maintenance training and staffing, spare parts inventory, etc. These are all laudable goals, and to simply say that Boeing should have designed a new plane is too simplistic. The real problem IMO was the contracts Boeing signed with very high penalties for delivering late or having any additional training whatsoever.
This didn't give the engineers enough flexibility or time to design a safe augmentation system, especially after the discovery during test flights that the pitch instability was worse than expected. That led to a quick patch-up job that totally compromised the redundancy of MCAS.
It's also clear in hindsight that the FAA handed too much authority to Boeing on the certification side, and that they should have been scrutinizing their safety analyses more. That is clearly happening now, to Boeing's consternation.
I'm not sure how those figures shake out, so if you could provide a source that would be terrific. Deaths per unit of distance flown for the 737MAX vs a comparable 70s plane.
And still, even if that is the case, the anger stems from the fact that corners seemed to have been cut and warnings ignored. In other words this was not some unforeseen event that was unavoidable. It was in fact avoidable
According to Wikipedia, the 737MAX flew 500,000 flights before it was grounded. According to this: https://randy.newairplane.com/2018/05/22/737-max-a-year-of-s... The average 737MAX flight was about 3 hours. Typically 3 flight hours is about 1250 miles, so the 737MAX flew about 625 million miles, for about 3 fatalities per billion passenger miles.
It looks like the U.S. in the 1970s had about 1 fatality per billion passenger miles. To get to 3 per billion, you have to go back to the early-mid 60s. I wasn't able to get worldwide data, but generally the rest of the world has lagged behind the U.S. by a factor of at least 3x.
The civil air transport airframe business environment was brutal long before Carter and Reagan. Look at the history of Lockheed, Convair, Dehavilland, etc. in the development of passenger jets during the 50's, 60's, and early 70's. There has always been a lot of technical and economic pressure in this business.
> I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
Can't you also plausibly in a similar spirit argue for the point that the regulations about retraining pilots were responsible for the 737 MAX disaster? Otherwise Boeing would not have made such crazy engineering decisions about its design.
Plus, studies by even Boeing themselves after the fact showed that retraining caught the problem, further cementing that retraining is a good thing. Had more pilots retrained specifically for the 737 MAX (rather than on older 737 simulators or test flight 737 vehicles that airlines had lying around from earlier models), a larger alarm would have been rang before problems were experienced in the wild at the worst possible time (when people's lives are endangered).
What do you mean regulations about retraining pilots? Any time you change airframe you generally have to retrain, and it really isn't that big of a deal, just an expense. My father-in-law retrained from the MD-11 to the 777 a few years back at over 60 years old and did completely fine. The regulation to retrain on a new plane is absoloutely reaonable and it was boeing trying to pretend the MAX was similar enough to the next gen that caused the issue. In terms of inherent flight characteristics it never was similar, and no amount of software could make up for that.
You can do it, but it's not cheap for the airlines to retrain pilots. Adding another type of aircraft to an existing fleet is also expensive, because it's difficult to maintain currency on multiple aircraft types. This means that you can't swap crews between flights and you need to maintain more reserve crews. This is one of the reasons Southwest only flies 737s -- they never need to retrain for another aircraft type, they can swap any crew for any other crew, and they only need reserves for one aircraft type.
The inherent flight characteristics of the 737MAX are very similar to the 737NG. The difference is only in abnormal, high AoA maneuvers, when the aircraft is being mishandled. MCAS was supposed to correct for this situation. Unfortunately the final MCAS design was highly failure prone and instead of protecting from an abnormal situation, it caused the plane to become uncontrollable.
> it was boeing trying to pretend the MAX was similar enough to the next gen that caused the issue.
The regulations lead to the situation that Boeing had an incentive to do that. Nearly every economist will confirm you that economy is all about incentives.
I think that is true, and I still think we should have those regulations. Companies in regulated markets area always incentivized to do bad things to skirt around those regulations. That doesn't make the regulations bad.
> Can't you also plausibly in a similar spirit argue for the point that the regulations about retraining pilots were responsible for the 737 MAX disaster?
I don't think that's a great argument, pilots needing to be trained/certified for a significantly different plane is a pretty sane regulation. Would you feel comfortable flying in a plane that the pilot was never trained on?
Also, I would argue that the ultimate cause of this disaster is that the Pilots were not adequately trained on how the MCAS system works. This only further supports this kind of regulation being important.
As an outsider, it seems like regulation led them (or the airlines really) down a path of avoiding retraining at all costs, while it seems plausible that some sort of cost effective retraining for a plane that still was substantially similar to predecessors should have been possible.
This only works if the assumption is that it would be equally safe for pilots to operate a new plane without training. I'm not willing to fly under that assumption.
> I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best
They probably are.. but it's probably not wise to consider a market dominated by three players as "competitive."
> Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions
I also don't think "more monopoly" is the sensible conclusion.
> and that it is not a simple answer.
Why is "more government regulation" not even a part of your consideration? The article itself even hints at this, before deregulation a company like Boeing could exist and be profitable, but after deregulation it becomes beholdant to Wall Street. It seems pretty clear what the solution is.
Most regulations aren't price controls, but the historical regulations being discussed here are. In the US, routes and prices used to be decided by the Civil Aeronautics Board, removing price competition between airlines. After the price controls were dropped, air travel became a lot more affordable and profit margins got smaller. "Airline deregulation," in a US context, refers to this.
(The terminology is a bit unfortunate, but we're stuck with it for now.)
> I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers.
I have also mostly changed my mind here. Largely because I've worked in a quality focused shop and seen the difference. But, I also appreciate that cheaper means more people can access goods and services, even if at a lower quality.
“Quality of what” is an important question as well. Oftentimes business incentivizes maximizing easily measured (and therefore also short-term) metrics. As well as metrics that are easy to gain wider buy-in, and therefore don’t rely on expert knowledge.
In this case, it’s easy to understand “pilots don’t need new training” and “we don’t have to recertify as much”, but it required more expertise to understand the increase in risk of dangerous situations occurring due to those changes, and the long-term impact of a loss of trust.
It also sounds like the changes in the company culture reduced the status of the people with that expertise who were responsible for measuring, understanding, and informing the physical risks of the product.
It’s pretty logical in retrospect, then, that Boeing suffered a airline accident scandal rather than an overspending scandal. Because of the nature of the product, there wasn’t a gradual warning sign that the risks were getting untenable. Things crossed a threshold, air disasters happened, and permanent damage was done to the company’s reputation.
Even if Boeing did replace the 737 with a new plane, I’d now be wary of flying on it due to the de-escalation of engineering concerns I’ve read about. If the importance it places on engineering has dropped to the point where it can’t upgrade its own existing planes without causing them to crash, how can I trust them to design a completely new one?
In some markets, yes. But in most markets there needs to be some minimum acceptable standard of QC & assurance. In the market for aluminum tubes hurling through the skies at 500 mph it's to everyone's benefit to make sure they don't come crashing to the ground.
Even markets for more innocuous products/services require some minimum acceptable standard or else the race to the bottom will give us more affordable but more dangerous products: Thomas the Tank Engine ($3) vs Deluxe Thomas the Tank Engine with Lead-Free Paint ($5)
Which is what we already have at the consumer end of airline pricing. The economy seats on an airplane put together aren't enough to pay for the cost of fuel. Business and first class passengers are the only ones that make the airlines any money.
>The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
If you ask me this is a problem in every highly regulated industry. You often find that the regulations have exceptions for smaller changes. What then happens is that you have many tiny changes that are made to fly under the radar, because it's unduly expensive to recertify after a big change. This makes it impossible to do big changes that are necessary to get rid of technical debt. Since it's impossible to get management approval for these. And technical debt keeps on building up.
If the incentives were more continuous (not sure how this is possible), instead of abruptly changing (no training <-> full training dichotomy), then we would see fewer of these cases.
So cases like this become a question of certain cost vs. risky reward (cheating or other hacky solutions). And if you've already invested in a few hacky solutions and not been caught, then the incremental risk seems to go lower, while the abrupt cost change stays the same.
> If you ask me this is a problem in every highly regulated industry. You often find that the regulations have exceptions for smaller changes.
Another example of this is getting planning permission to build a house. Renovations are generally easier to get approved than new construction and keep any variances that have already been granted, so you’ll occasionally see someone “renovate” a house by tearing down everyrhing except for a single wall and building completely new otherwise.
I think part of the problem is the focus on the financial figures for the next shareholder call. With a significantly longer time horizon it would be easy to justify investment in a total redesign, because it would lead to a number of cost savings down the line as technical debt was eliminated. And all for the low, low price of one comprehensive new government approval.
Instead it seems the goal was to get a moderately viable product to market as fast as possible, and the fastest and cheapest way was force some changes and fly under the regulators' radar.
That's at least one alternative perspective worth considering.
I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
No! That's shifting the blame away from those that engineered and built that death trap. Which is the Boeing Corporation.
If airlines demand features, which are just not feasible to provide at the price range they're willing to pay then it's the plane makers responsibility not to provide such planes. Period!
The core issue (apart from what happened much earlier, after McDonnel's reverse take over) was not the fact that airlines were trying to drive the price down, but that Boeing didn't have a competing product in the most critical market and wouldn't have one for a decade if they engineered a modern plane.
So they hacked an ancient 60th design to modern standards and shunned, demoted or simply fired engineers, which dared to raise concerns. Having the FAA in their pockets and spending tons of cash on lobbying instead of investing it into the construction of good reliable planes also didn't help.
This one's on Boeing. Not on airlines and certainly not on pilots. It's on The Boeing Comnpany; period!
And what galls me most is that the only entity, which was in a position to know what was wrong after the first crash did everything in it's power to blame, befuddle, obstruct and deflect from the real cause. MCAS, which wasn't even documented in the manuals at that time.
In that sense the second crash is corporate mass murder for profit and I really hope that C level people go to jail for that one (alas, I doubt it).
I know this is Hacker News and we like to blame politicians or rich non-engineers, but isn't the 737-Max case a case of very bad engineering that they could have done better? Maybe management had a hand in that, but the final outcome is the engineering was terrible and it's not simply the fault of deregulation in the 80s.
Muilenburg is to blame. He got the stock price up by getting rid of all of the more experienced (older) higher paid engineers who knew to not make the sort of mistakes that were made on the 737-Max. I was a happy 35+ year Boeing employee who would have stayed where I was for maybe another ten years, but Muilenburg made my choice to retire very easy by changing the terms of the (retirement) plan to give me a compelling reason to leave. If I had stayed, I would have effectively taken a pay cut of about 20% because of the reductions to my defined benefit payout. Instead, I found a better job elsewhere for a 20% raise and took the early retirement.
I think part of that is, had there been different engineers there, it is not so clear that the outcome would have been different, but with different management decisions (e.g. whether to make a new plane or try to pretend it was still the 737) things could have been different.
Was the MCAS a lone example of rushed, poorly tested work done by people without enough knowledge of the industry they were working for? Or is it just the first one to come to light, because the MCAS caused the plane to be grounded before any others did?
We don't know, but my guess is, based on the other news coming out about the 737MAX since it was grounded, that there are other issues like this lurking. This tends to suggest that the problem is cultural, and the corporate culture is one of the primary responsibilities of the people in command.
To do good engineering, you need good engineers and you need a culture of good engineering. You need an organisation and incentives that encourage doing things well.
Looking at it through a software lens - even if you do have the best people, if your project structure squeezes development time, rather than producing solid code and catching all the bugs early, you'll produce flaky code that will produce surprises down the line.
Then on top of that, such will lose some of its best engineers (because they get frustrated) and probably won't attract new good ones because they don't value them sufficiently to pay them enough.
A competitive market should improve the quality of planes: no one should buy a Boeing if there is a viable alternative. Allowing the merger reduced competition.
We really shouldn't blame deregulation (in the sense of reducing the barrier of entry to airline markets). Lower airline ticket prices (Europe is a case in point) is better for everyone. And if quality were indeed lower, then another company should be able to swoop in and capture a higher tier quality market if there are people willing to pay for it (like first class, or business class)
Lack of anti-trust enforcement in the aerospace manufacturing industry is entirely orthogonal and hurts plane safety.
The market is just an optimizing function. Perhaps the problem is not competitive markets but rather the structure of the market, e.g. the optimization parameters & feedback loops.. For example, a common criticism of the medical market is that without accurate quotes, you cannot price compare- thus it's not a properly functioning free market with the appropriate feedback cycles, and the free market approach to fixing it would be to improve price information.
I don't think this has anything to do with airline deregulation. The FAA has really done an excellent job of managing the various airlines and it's an example I'd point to of how regulation can work correctly in that context. Mostly that's because airlines are even more interested in preventing their competitors form cutting corners that put airline crashes in the news than they are in cutting corners themselves leading to a good sort of regulatory capture.
But Boeing itself isn't one of the many airlines and is the singular US plane exporter champion. Wheras Delta, Southwest, et al want to see that the FAA isn't giving Jet Blue a pass there's mostly only Boeing to check whether Boeing is given too much of a pass and political pressure from up high is targeted at making Boeing better positioned to compete with Airbus which the FAA doesn't have jurisdiction or input from.
Free, deregulated markets work well when the market participants have high information about what's in the market. If you're interested in buying, say, books, there's not much need to regulate what's in the books - customers have a pretty good idea, they can page through the book at the bookstore, and they can read what reviewers say.
Customers don't have any idea about which airline is safer. Airlines rarely have an idea of which airline is safer - shortcuts taken in manufacturing might lead to problems 20 years down the line when no human who was involved in the engineering or purchasing work is still at either company.
Free markets push everything to the level of just bearable. Bad, but not quite bad enough not to use a service you rely on. Seats are tight, just not tight enough to make people in general seriously consider to not fly because of that. Food is bad, just not bad enough for people not to eat it.
Air travel is so much safer than traveling by car that anything you can do to bring down its price is probably a big safety win -- including corner-cutting on airplane safety.
High competitive / low prices marketeering at best gives you Walmart: where none of the products are very good, false values products are vaunted (the one gallon pickle jar for $4.99) and nobody is especially enthused about what's on offer.
The free market can work - if certain safeguards are in place to ensure the race to the bottom doesn't negatively impact either the safety and suitability of the products and services produced, or the wages and benefits paid to workers. Remove those and you end up with misery.
I think you're right that highly competitive markets can push down quality but that happens because the customer accepts the lower quality. If air lines or the customers actually flying on these planes decided that they were not going to buy/fly on Boeing planes, the quality issue within the market would be resolved fairly quickly. Either Boeing would produce higher quality planes or they would go out of business and their market share would be taken over by a competitor with higher quality. Of course, I'm assuming that such a competitor exists. In case they don't, my argument becomes invalid.
Nobody knew the 737 MAX was lower quality until it started falling out of the sky.
I think we can agree that an ideal system wouldn't require people to die horrifically in the process of price discovery.
Absolutely, I 100% agree with this. I wasn't arguing that the current system is anything even close to ideal. I was trying to point out that now that we, the public, have paid this horrendous price, we are still not using the information gained. A company that shows that they will put profit above their customers' lives should be abandoned very quickly by its customers. That isn't happening and the fault for that lies with the customers, IMO.
In my opinion, we all have the choice of not flying on Boeing planes any longer. If a company shows that they are willing to put profits above their customers' lives, then customers should not do business with that company any longer. The customer has to provide an incentive to the company to not do this. Going out of business is a very powerful incentive, I believe. If a company can kill a couple of hundred of its customers and still continue to make money, then why should it do anything differently, especially if the decision that caused the deaths also caused higher profits?
Also, air travel has actually got safer over time, not less safe - despite the massive increase in air travel, total deaths have actually gone down over time. The whole reason that the 737 MAX problems were such big news is that passenger airplanes are so safe these days that even one air crash is remarkable, let alone two which appear to have the same cause.
It's more like a $800 difference in ticket price. People forget just how expensive it was to fly back before deregulation. A ticket that cost $600 in 1980 dollars goes for $300 today.
According to Wikipedia, the original Mac 128k had a launch price of $2495 in 1984, equating to approximately $6100 in 2019 USD). I'd say they're behaving very similarly?
No information - They rarely have any information (you have to go through several menus to find out your plane on most sites). They don't know when / where the plane was last serviced [0].
No framework - Your average consumer of air travel is not equipped to accurately evaluate that information should they even have it. (c.f., 'if it's not Boeing I a'int going [1]). They cannot make rational and informed decisions without information and a rational decision making framework
No control - They have no control over whether that plane is changed for operational reasons even if they have the information and a framework to evaluate it. You may not even know until you are onboard with the door shut unless you are really well informed about airplanes that the plane model has changed (e.g., I avoid A321s because
No recourse - Even if they consciously choose a plane based on information and an informed framework and then it gets changed what can you do? Are you even going to know until you get on the plane at which point what do you do? Do you think you get a refund?
It's also not guaranteed which plane will fly which route. Every airline has "substitution" rules in their conditions of carriage, and frequently use them.
Unless you are an aerospace engineer or pilot I don't think you can judge the quality of a plane under the surface. I note the leg space and if the plane is noisy or shakes much.
One doesn't need to be an aerospace engineer to know that Boeing planes crashed because the company leadership decided to forgo quality for the sake of profits. Before the crashes, I agree, there was no reason for customers to expect Boeing planes to be unsafe. However, now that this information has become public, any customer can decide to not fly on their planes.
Is it rational for a customer to not fly on a plane that is as safe as any other just because the same company later made another plane that was less safe? It seems like a lot to ask.
In any case, even if 10% of people totally stopped flying on Boeing, which would be a wildly optimistic outcome for any organized consumer action, the airlines would just discount those flights ever so slightly and the other 90% of price-conscious consumers would immediately take up the slack. Nobody's going out of business in that scenario. This is, of course, why we rely on regulation rather than consumer choice to ensure safety, and why this is a failure of regulation, not of the market.
This presumes a perfect market where customers are rational actors with access to a variety of sellers whose product differs only on quality, which consumers have access to accurate information about and the time and expertise to precisely evaluate.
Of course the reality is we're just trying to book a flight to get home before Mom's chemo starts and all we know about each airline is the ticket price and how good the peanuts were the last time we flew on them.
Airlines are about the last industry on Earth where we should expect laissez-faire capitalism to produce optimal outcomes.
I wasn't suggesting that the customers could have known beforehand that the Boeing planes had issues that would cause crashes. However, we do know NOW that Boeing planes have quality issues. If customers still willingly get on those planes, then where is the incentive for Boeing to do anything differently? That's really the point I was trying to make. We don't need perfect information to now decide to not fly on Boeing planes. That would send a very strong message to the entire industry that putting profits above customers' lives will be met with very negative consequences such as reduced or loss of profits and possibly the company going out of business.
A further complicating factor is that quality can be masked from the customer, and indeed will be if that's less expensive than actually improving the quality.
And thus no one will actually know that Boeing's planes are of lower quality, until a couple hundred people die.
I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers. Compare the union workers for the Big Three during the 1970's to that of the gig economy workers now. Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions is what is best in the long term? Or maybe, we need to alternate periods of disruption and highly competitive markets with periods of stability and oligopolies? I suspect we as a society will have to try to figure that out, and that it is not a simple answer.