[HN Gopher] The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 M...
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The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max crisis
Author : prostoalex
Score : 285 points
Date : 2020-01-06 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (qz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (qz.com)
| Aloha wrote:
| I dispute that McDonnell Douglas was 'on the ropes' before the
| merger - the MD-80/90/95 family was selling well, and while the
| MD-11 was not, the market at that time for wide-body jets was
| fairly soft. In addition the C-17 was still being made as fast as
| it could be at that time. I'd also point to the success of the
| Delta II heavy lift vehicle too.
|
| Whats interesting to me, is the merger between McDonnell Aircraft
| and Douglas Aircraft was effectively a shotgun marriage. DAC was
| capital starved in the late 60's and merged for an infusion of
| capital.
| bronson wrote:
| Not many people would dispute that. From the article: "In 1996,
| Boeing took approximately 60% of the industry's new commercial
| aircraft orders. Airbus, the European consortium, lingered far
| behind it, at 35%. McDonnell Douglas took the remaining 5%."
|
| And falling fast. New military contracts had dried up too, with
| no meaningful wins coming in the foreseeable future.
|
| Agreed, the parallels with the Douglas merger are interesting.
| Even including the military branch, not just DC.
| Cyder wrote:
| Capitalism is working in this case. Boeing is being punished.
| Market forces are not always instantaneous. The China boom made
| investors demand unreasonable returns for domestic companies as
| well. A good business plan and making solid money over time is no
| longer acceptable. The China boom changed the expectations of
| investors to unreasonable rates. But the China boom wasn't
| capitalism. The Chinese economy is highly controlled and this
| influence on more capitalistic markets is what happens where the
| two separate markets converge.
| bgutierrez wrote:
| Yes. If enough customers die using a product, people will stop
| using that product.
| maxharris wrote:
| Both of you have a point! I believe that I have identified a
| crucial factor in my comment here
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656) that
| identifies the root of the problem. I hope that it helps in
| resolving this disagreement.
| thendrill wrote:
| Yeh also "capitalism is working" is a very biased expressions.
| I am pretty sure you would be singing a different tune, if
| "market forces" were directly effecting you ( example: if u had
| family on a crashed 737 Max). Or you lost your job coz it is
| cheaper elsewhere.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Capitalism is _not_ working in this case since making faulty
| aircrafts should not be possible, by regulation, in the first
| place. Waiting for market to react gives companies to sort of
| "binary search" the market to find a sweet spot where they
| don't overspend on engineering, or underspend on engineering by
| making faulty aircrafts. The point of having regulation is to
| force companies not be able to perform this "binary search" so
| that there is a baseline they have to spend on engineering to
| be able to produce a commercial airliner.
| soapboxrocket wrote:
| This is absolutely on target. I am hearing from friends in
| Wichita that the Textron Aviation merger with Beechcraft is
| creating the same situation as the Douglas-Boeing merger. I have
| friends that have been with Textron for a long time that are
| getting new bosses from Beechcraft and the term that is getting
| used is "well that was Beeched."
| cptskippy wrote:
| This piece kind of reads like the HP / Compaq merger.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| You mean Xerox/HP merger
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Why has antitrust died completely in America? Any hope of it
| coming back? I don't want one movie studio, one airplane
| manufacturer...
| Mr_Shiba wrote:
| For anyone interested in this topic I strongly recommend: The
| Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas
| Philippon
|
| Serious research with data, but also approachable for
| noneconomist.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Why has antitrust died completely in America?_
|
| 1. The Citizens United ruling allows unbounded money to flow
| into campaigns.
|
| 2. Campaign funding determines election results.
|
| 3. Elected officials determine what America does in terms of
| law and regulation.
|
| 4. Billionaires pour tons of money into campaigns.
|
| When you allow dollars to effectively determine elections
| instead of votes, the end result is oligarchy and the rule of
| the rich.
| jessant wrote:
| Do you know what Citizens United actually was about or
| allowed for? This video on campaign finance might surprise
| you:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhpy1uzOvrY
| bumby wrote:
| I used to ascribe to this notion, but 2016 proved me wrong
| about #2.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi.
| ..
| munificent wrote:
| I think the full story is more complex.
|
| A relatively smaller amount of money will influence state
| elections, and state-level politicians determine things
| like district boundaries (i.e. gerrymandering), vote roll
| purges, polling stations, etc. All of those have a very
| large impact on elections too.
| ngngngng wrote:
| This proves nothing. Both candidates raised outstanding
| amounts of money. Without that, neither of them would have
| had a chance.
|
| Also, it's a completely different ball game talking about
| which laws get passed vs which candidate gets elected.
| bumby wrote:
| If a 46% increase in funding is negligible, then I would
| think "2. Campaign funding determines election results."
| would have to be modified.
|
| Is your claim that above a certain dollar threshold money
| no longer has an impact?
| typon wrote:
| 1. More people voted for Clinton than Trump in 2016. If you
| look at the notion "More campaign funding = more votes",
| then this instance does not prove that wrong. It says a lot
| about Clinton's campaign strategy and America's election
| system, however, that she still lost the election despite
| more votes.
|
| 2. Trump still raised about a billion dollars. That is an
| insanely large amount of money.
|
| 3. Campaign financing for elections and financing for
| lobbying for policy are different things. For the latter,
| it is all but proven that financing is all that matters:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-
| poli...
| howard941 wrote:
| Thank Judge Bork.
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/20/antit...
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| I've heard someone claim that the US Government was responsible
| for this merger in the first place. I wasn't clear on whether
| they actively pushed it or it was a result of policy change
| around defense contracting. The implication was that it was the
| former.
| andrewla wrote:
| The book by Matt Stoller, Goliath, is a deep exploration of
| this.
|
| The blame is scattered all over the place, but the main idea is
| that government has become increasingly technocratic; trusting
| industry leaders to tell us that their industries are too
| complicated for politicians to interfere in. This is not just a
| question of "regulation" -- the problem is bigger than
| regulation since anti-trust is generally not a regulatory issue
| so much as a law enforcement issue. Regulation is actually part
| of the problem to a degree, as regulating fewer larger entities
| is "easier" than regulating a diverse healthy industry.
|
| In the 1970s, a combination of things -- Bork and the Chicago
| school's notion that "consumer protection" was the main
| objective of anti-trust action, Ralph Nader and the burgeoning
| consumer rights movement that joined forces with this (because
| of the regulatory pressure above), and the switch of the
| Democratic party from a populist party to principally a social
| justice party. All three of these had positive effects as well
| (prosecuting abusive monopolies, increasing customer safety and
| dropping consumer prices for goods, and advancing the civil
| rights movement), but between them they ended up dismantling
| the New Deal era protections against big businesses that led to
| the massive consolidations of the 80s and 90s across almost
| every sector.
|
| There are many things that Stoller points to as positive things
| that I was dubious about but he makes a compelling case --
| specifically pricing controls (where the manufacturer can set
| retail price ceilings and prevent discounting). Some of it has
| been things that I have had trouble specifically elucidating --
| why it's bad that Disney controls both content production and
| distribution, and how Congress can wield (and has wielded, in
| the past) power directly.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| When you read the press there is this constant celebration of
| companies hitting ever higher market values or billionaires
| weighing on on issues. It seems the bigger and richer the more
| respect companies and people get.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Regulatory capture. Corporations entice regulators with cushy
| jobs when they leave public service, with the implied
| understanding that they won't act against their interests while
| they work in government.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| That's another effect of income inequality. Some players can
| pay so much money that people are willing to compromise some
| values. I am pretty sure I could overlook some things if I
| suddenly got paid ten times as money as before.
| favorited wrote:
| That's only one theory. The other is that it is natural to
| expect people who exit high-level positions in public service
| to enter high-level positions in private industry,
| particularly in the same field.
| Symmetry wrote:
| In the progressive era we had pretty good anti-trust
| enforcement. But during the early 20th century the fashionable
| view was that dog-eat-dog competition was inefficient and it
| would be better if the economy was made up of a series of well
| regulated monopolies like Ma Bell or at least cartels like the
| airlines used to be. Back when the USSR was reporting huge
| economic growth this theory was something people pointed to to
| explain how communism could be so much more efficient than
| capitalism.
|
| Thankfully the pendulum has been swinging back in the other
| direction for various reasons like the fall of the USSR,
| realization of the dangers of regulatory capture, etc. But then
| we've been allowing all these horizontal mergers recently which
| just doesn't make any sense to me.
| jobu wrote:
| NPR's Planet Money Podcast did a fantastic 3-part series on
| Antitrust in America:
| https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...
|
| Here's an excerpt that starts to answer your question:
|
| > _The 1970s was a turning point in the other direction. In the
| decades leading up to the '70s, the government had grown
| increasingly aggressive--intervening in the free market to
| defend competition in more and more ways over time. Then a
| lawyer named Robert Bork completely transformed the way courts
| would interpret antitrust law. The approach to enforcement
| reversed direction away from protecting firms and toward a
| consumer focus, paving the way for today's tech giants._
| bumby wrote:
| I read recently in the book "A Generation of Sociopaths" an
| interesting perspective I hadn't before considered. The
| book's claim was that as the Baby Boomer generation aged into
| a capital owning class, they used their democratic voting
| influence to impact companies they increasingly owned via
| stocks.
|
| I don't know if I buy it, but it was an interesting take on
| the political and tax changes that began in the late 70s and
| early 80s.
| Vraxx wrote:
| I don't personally, it conflates boomers with capitalists,
| and there are plenty of boomers who aren't a part of the
| capitalist class by any stretch of the imagination. Just
| because some of them benefited from it, doesn't mean they
| had any part in its construction, execution, or intention.
|
| This story just obfuscates the fact that this tension
| between capital and labor existed long before this
| generation and pretends like the entire generation was in
| on it, when it was really just the boomer capitalist class,
| not all boomers.
| bumby wrote:
| It does group (majority white) boomers together but I
| don't think the auther conflates them with capitalists
| exactly. It was more so making the point that as a
| collective voting block, they tended to vote to their own
| selfish interests and had the numbers to sway policy. For
| example, reducing capital gains taxes which wasn't
| necessary until they, as a collective, had enough vested
| interest in the stock of companies later in their life.
| rb808 wrote:
| Looks like Boeing is the biggest producer of aircraft in the
| world. What is the problem again?
| simsla wrote:
| People dying, because cutting costs was considered more
| important than due diligence. Might doesn't make right.
| maxharris wrote:
| I agree with you, but what do you think of the point I have
| made here, which is that there's an even more fundamental
| problem _drove_ the awful, immoral cost-cutting?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656
| Stierlitz wrote:
| McDonnell Douglas to blame for 737 Max crisis? I don't think so.
| But full marks to the PR team that thought up that retrospective
| self serving disinformation.
| ausjke wrote:
| Recently the highly controversial bill
| S.386(https://antis386.org/) that mentioned Boeing used $9/hr
| India engineers to write some level of the software used on its
| airlines, is this true if there are any insiders who know
| something about it?
|
| Without a competitor Boeing has no intention to make the safest
| product anymore, however, Airline unlike others, must make sure
| safety/quality remains to be the No.1 priority. Any outsourcing
| should be carefully thought out before running towards the
| cheapest offer offshore.
| bynkman wrote:
| > Stonecipher seems to have agreed with this assessment. "When
| people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent,
| so it's run like a business rather than a great engineering
| firm," he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. "It is a great
| engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they
| want to make money."
|
| Wow. In retrospect, this is an amoral path. Basically it's money
| over lives. Furthermore, this "intent" has cost them more
| financially.
| jgeada wrote:
| And yet for Stonecipher it was a personally financially
| successful personal decision and none of the consequences will
| hurt him personally. When the rewards always go to the top (aka
| shareholders) and consequences always fall elsewhere, this is
| the predictable consequence.
|
| We need some system such that shareholders and executives
| become personally responsible for these tragic yet predictable
| consequences.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Exactly this. No skin in the game will lead to these
| outcomes.
| metabagel wrote:
| Qatar Airways refuses to take Dreamliners built in South
| Carolina, due to quality issues.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
| mzs wrote:
| Then Boeing tried to deliver them just days before the end of
| the year but Qatar Airlines had them fly back. My guess is it
| really was that Boeing had not met the schedule for fitting the
| Qsuite and QA was having none of it.
|
| https://simpleflying.com/qatar-airways-flies-brand-new-boein...
| vanusa wrote:
| Companies merge, split up, get acquired, go bankrupt.
|
| It's what they do, and there's nothing inherently dysfunctional
| about that. By themselves, these actions don't cause mines to
| collapse, plans to fall from the sky and highly polluting
| vehicles to be put on the road with full knowledge of the
| company's senior leadership. If there is a systemic cause for
| these things -- it's yawning gaps regulatory oversight (and
| enforcement).
|
| But these gaps aren't accidents, and don't arise in a vacuum,
| either. Nor are they mere byproducts of what should otherwise by
| a working system.
|
| In effect, they're there by _design_. They are exactly the
| desired outcomes of a system -- and the governing ideology behind
| it -- that enshrines the "right of capital" as a fundamental
| right. And which (not coincidentally) seeks to protect the
| exercises of this "right" from the inevitable consequences of
| their actions, as much as it can get away with doing so. With
| carnage and tragedy being the inevitable results.
|
| Because that's what it was designed to do.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
| maxharris wrote:
| I have a different view of the situation. I believe that the 737
| Max disaster was directly caused by the idea that management is a
| valuable skill on its own, that _management_ is somehow separable
| from the domain-specific knowledge required in order to make an
| honest buck.
|
| There are plenty of examples of engineers that make terrible
| managers, to be sure. But there are also plenty of examples of
| managers with business backgrounds that have absolutely _no_ idea
| about the consequences of their decisions. An optimal result
| requires skill in _both_ domains.
|
| By this point, you might be thinking, "Hey wait, isn't it true
| that cost-cutting also had a role in the crisis? Wasn't there at
| least one engineer that sounded the alarm in a memo?" And my
| answer to that is a resounding _yes_. But the question remains,
| where the hell did that idea come from? At no point did anyone
| think, "I'd love to spike my profits this quarter here and have
| huge disaster that will tank us in the next quarter." Therefore
| the problem isn't one of simple pursuit of the profit motive,
| because it is quite clear that Boeing _hasn 't_ profited from
| this situation long-term. And that's why I have focused
| explicitly on this foolish, self-defeating management fashion at
| the top of my mini essay here.
|
| This brings us to the topic of Boeing's future. I could be wrong
| about him, but the fact that they have selected a person who
| majored in _accounting_ to be their new CEO does not bode well
| for them. At the very least he has a major gap in his background
| to overcome, and at best I can only see them just managing to
| hang on instead of growing.
|
| How does this relate to the merger issue? This management fashion
| I am speaking would have likely infected _both_ McDonnell-Douglas
| and Boeing had they remained separate. That 's because companies
| hire people out of the same pool of people that learn this stuff
| in their universities! Maybe there is a case to be made that
| having separate companies would make it _slightly_ harder for
| them to both fail, but I believe that this isn 't a very strong
| argument.
| lonnyk wrote:
| I think them being separate companies would allow one to learn
| from the other without being tainted.
| mattrp wrote:
| I don't think deregulation, mergers or accountants killed the
| Max or its passengers. I think it was an engineering culture in
| love with the simplicity of an idea that on the face of it was
| genius. What made the Max work was the idea that you could use
| software - something Boeing in its military work already was
| very good at - to create essentially a new plane without all
| the rigors and costs of creating a new plane. This vision
| allowed Boeing to believe in its own BS that rather than have a
| collection of static designs incapable of evolution, it had a
| platform. The concept of the platform was the differentiator
| that Airbus had that Boeing did not have until it marketed the
| Max. Through software, the 737 became a way to create the
| illusion of a platform that could serve most if not all markets
| (wide body being the obvious exception). Once Boeing was in
| love with this idea, it never put it back through the rigors
| needed because to do so would have been to admit that the 737
| wasn't a platform and that they were in fact building a new
| plane. I won't find it surprising that in a forum (HN) visited
| by engineers this comment doesn't receive the mother of all
| downvotes. However, I think if you're looking at Boeing
| honestly and not clouding your views with a whole bunch of
| economist-mumbo-jumbo about deregulation, you'll see that
| Boeing is just a leading indicator for what's about to happen
| in a lot of industries if it isn't already. My view, stop
| loving the elegance of your engineering and start thinking
| about the lives you actually impact. <-- That -- is what was
| lost.
| bjornsing wrote:
| MCAS was "elegant"...? Where did you get your engineering
| degree?
| temac wrote:
| I've got a huge issue with all the stories about the
| "software" being supposedly at fault. The problem was never
| about the software per se; it was about the avionic specs on
| system level.
|
| You can do very complex things without even involving
| software - including non linear things - or by involving it
| but not necessarily in a primary characterizing way. What
| happened here was in _no way_ a software failure except if
| you generalize the meaning of "software" to include the
| whole lifecycle of the domain it's applied to, and the
| comprehensive corresponding engineering. And that's what tons
| of "purely" software people (by that I mean people working in
| a field where the non-software components are only ancillary
| to making the software run, in huge contrast with what
| happens in avionics) are doing too often in that case. Except
| what failed here was good old boring engineering, risk
| analysis, and properly conforming to regulations. The
| software "worked", in the sense that it did _precisely_ what
| it was designed to do. But what it was designed to do was
| stupid. And deciding what it should do was not a "software"
| thing. It was an avionics one. It is not possible to conflate
| the tech and the domain in this area, in contrast with what
| you can do for e.g. some websites or some smartphone apps.
|
| There was software involved, but it is not more interesting
| in this case than noting that there was electronics involved.
| And it could also have been done through a mainly mechanical
| apparatus, but the only reason it did not is that software is
| more _convenient_. But that 's an implementation detail that
| played very little role in the tragedy (unless Boeing is
| _waaaay_ more fucked up than we are even all discussing
| about, but I actually don 't expect that).
| rossdavidh wrote:
| While I agree with some of your sentiment, I think it's worth
| pointing out that the recently-fired CEO on whose watch this
| debacle happened, was a lifetime aviation employee with an
| engineering background:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
| pcurve wrote:
| That's true. But people do change. Once you stop wearing your
| engineering hat, most of the benefit goes out the window.
| Yes, of all people, he should've known better to heed to his
| engineers' warning. He also should've ensured the properly
| management structure was in place such that the warning was
| given proper due diligence and risk management.
|
| I think you can still be an effective CEO of Boeing as long
| as you have right composition of senior leadership in place.
| Decades of major design-flow related crashes made everyone
| complacent.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I agree with this analysis, and find it overall reasonable, but
| it seems to need a little more evidence, e.g. do we have any
| data that shows companies who put "generic managers" on top on
| regular fail more than those who put engineers on top.
|
| I'm disappointed that you're being downvoted, I wish someone
| who downvoted you wrote a reply.
| GoToRO wrote:
| Apple.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > that management is a valuable skill on its own
|
| Arguably an issue back in the heyday of hereditary nobility
| too, come to think of it. I wonder how much of modern executive
| culture echoes some of those older patterns.
| bjornsing wrote:
| +1
|
| This was my comment too on the last MCAS story I read here on
| HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037572
| typon wrote:
| What I don't understand is why the Boeing executives are not on
| trial for the negligent killing of 189 + 157 people?
| d33 wrote:
| Shouldn't then car industry executives be also to blame for
| negligent killing of the ones whose death was a result of a car
| failure related to planned obsolescence?
| markdown wrote:
| Absolutely. If there is a direct link between wilful
| negligence and death, executives need to go to jail.
| ratsmack wrote:
| I spent 45 years in this industry and the following describes
| exactly what happened in the mid 90's throughout the entire
| industry. As subcontractors, we were told that we needed to get
| on board with the new way of thinking, or we would lose our
| contracts.
|
| >Inside the company, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction. A
| formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and
| executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-
| throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned
| employees they needed to "quit behaving like a family and become
| more like a team. If you don't perform, you don't stay on the
| team."
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| _Stonecipher_
|
| Always have an eye on the exit if your new exec sounds like he
| belongs in the next Bond movie.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Sounds like an AOL nickname.
| mc3 wrote:
| Sounds like an easy to crack encryption scheme, probably
| used on IoT devices and cryptocurrency exchanges.
| wallace_f wrote:
| Imagine if the FTC actually still did their job, not just how
| much more innovation and competition there'd be, but also lives
| saved.
| pg_is_a_butt wrote:
| A Scapegoat has entered the arena.
| oefrha wrote:
| Previous discussion on basically the same story:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304277
| legitster wrote:
| "We thought that we'd kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the
| ropes," he said. "I still believe that Harry outsmarted Phil and
| his gang bought Boeing with Boeing's money. We were all just
| disgusted." More than that, he added, the company had "paid way,
| way too much money [for McDonnell Douglas] and we're still paying
| for it. We wrote off so many tens of billions of dollars for that
| whole mess."
|
| A good lesson to not play games with hustlers. McDonnell Douglas
| was famous for being slimy, financial rent-seekers. They got
| hustled.
| dade_ wrote:
| One great company after another destroyed by financial
| shenanigans. Avaya & Silver Lake Partners is another that comes
| to mind, but there have been many.
| cletus wrote:
| I am not an aeronautical engineer. A year or two ago I read a
| comment here that certainly _seemed_ legitimate that talked about
| airplane design and it went something like this (paraphrased
| because I can 't find it now):
|
| > As soon as you move the engines, you probably need to move the
| wings. As soon as you move the wings, you need to redesign the
| airframe. As soon as you do that you're designing a whole new
| plane.
|
| I can't even remember if this was talking about the Max at all.
|
| So it seems to me the core problem here is Boeing had reached the
| limit of what they could do with a 50 year old airframe while
| maintaining the common type rating and aircraft and engine design
| have simply changed. Airbus may eventually have that problem with
| the A320 family. I really don't know. But they don't have it yet.
|
| Part of controlling costs at a budget airline is maintaining a
| single fleet (in type rating terms). The two choices here seem to
| be the 737 or the A320.
|
| The Max came about because there was a huge captured demand for
| it from the likes of Southwest. Would this have happened without
| the MD merger? I can't say but I'd be surprised if it couldn't
| given the demand from budget airlines.
|
| Of course people like to take an issue like this and tie it to
| whatever axe they want to grind too.
| [deleted]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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.
| kapuasuite wrote:
| Regulation and price controls aren't the same thing, which
| you seem to be implying.
| jessant wrote:
| Most people seem to prefer lower prices to higher quality. That
| is why airlines have responded that way.
| pnathan wrote:
| > 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.
| hackernewsboy wrote:
| The solution can be an arrangement with multiple tier
| products with different quality control and assurance.
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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)
| hannasanarion wrote:
| 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.
| spease wrote:
| "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?
| Symmetry wrote:
| 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.
|
| So I think it's really a different situation.
| vibrolax wrote:
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| An excellent point.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| Vervious wrote:
| 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.
| cameldrv wrote:
| 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.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Free markets work. What doesn't work is absolving individual
| liability via corporations.
| justapassenger wrote:
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| 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).
| mirekrusin wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_c
| omp...
| Symmetry wrote:
| 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.
| cujo wrote:
| 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.
| QuotedForTruth wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > 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 this was true, as my
| intuition is that interstate highways are likely to be
| 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 schedule commercial airline travel (not
| charter, not corporate, not general aviation).
|
| [1] - http://freakonomics.com/2010/01/29/the-irony-of-
| road-fear/
|
| [2] - https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/national_t
| ransporta...
| salawat wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| newnewpdro wrote:
| > 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...)
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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!)
| sokoloff wrote:
| Per pax mile, airlines are surprisingly competitive with
| private automobiles.
|
| Short haul flights are right around 100 miles per gallon
| per passenger seat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_ec
| onomy_in_aircraft#Short...
|
| For a couple considering an airline flight vs a car,
| they'd need to be driving a 50mpg car to achieve the same
| fuel efficiency as the airline.
| newnewpdro wrote:
| 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 _created_ _more_
| _travel_ 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.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Per hour seems like a bad metric to me.
|
| 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.
| Y-Bopinator wrote:
| The human race is a race to the bottom. We'll see what
| happens when we get there.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > 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.
| idoubtit wrote:
| 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.
| t12212w2w wrote:
| 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.
| ATsch wrote:
| This kind of reminds me of the dril quote:
|
| > drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a
| lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say
| if its bad or not,
|
| https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| aeternum wrote:
| > no matter what the benefits 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.).
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > 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.
| flatline wrote:
| Or the cost of flying and getting surgery abroad is far
| cheaper than doing it at home, with minimal additional
| risk.
| aeternum wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| SahAssar wrote:
| 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.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Who is flying commercial to get treated for life-
| threatening emergencies?
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Not to underestimate that cheap far distance travel
| probably decreases the probability of big wars by a
| reasonable amount.
| nostromo wrote:
| Except, air travel has gotten cheaper, _and_ safer.
| taurath wrote:
| Its not a binary choice though - perhaps instead of a sprint
| to the bottom, it could be a marathon to the bottom with a
| lot more safety checks?
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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. [?]
|
| https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-
| News/Southw...
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Routes-Southwest-
| Alask...
|
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/03/jetblue-is-
| canceli...
|
| 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.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _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.
| entee wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-
| emissi...
| jellicle wrote:
| 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.
| entee wrote:
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| 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.
| entee wrote:
| 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.
| svara wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-
| gas-emis...
| bouncycastle wrote:
| 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!
|
| Quote: "annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet
| have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO2, or nearly 4.5%
| of all global emissions" https://www.theguardian.com/envi
| ronment/2008/feb/13/climatec...
|
| Also, note that aircraft are not limited to carrying
| passengers... They also carry cargo.
| newnewpdro wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel)
| Symmetry wrote:
| 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.
| entee wrote:
| 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"?
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-
| much-rev...
| nicoburns wrote:
| 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.
| entee wrote:
| 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.
| NortySpock wrote:
| "Environmental conservation by telling people to use less
| resources is like telling people not to sin.
|
| The problem is that Christians have been telling people
| not to sin for 2000 years, and people have not stopped
| sinning..."
| MartianSquirrel wrote:
| > Except for the climate change part.
|
| 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.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Global air travel is projected to significantly increase
| in the future without any obvious way to sufficiently
| reduce its carbon footprint.
|
| The internet can be plausibly powered by low-carbon
| energy sources using present technology.
|
| If you uncritically define negative consequences as "out
| of context" then every technology can be declared to be
| an unalloyed good.
| mcny wrote:
| > 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, ...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-
| red...
|
| https://outline.com/BYjw66
| ip26 wrote:
| 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.
| wolfgke wrote:
| > 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.
| borkt wrote:
| 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.
| wolfgke wrote:
| > 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.
| scott_s wrote:
| 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.
| bwat49 wrote:
| > 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.
| james-mcelwain wrote:
| 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.
| azernik wrote:
| The regulations here are generally sane - the retraining
| requirement for a new plane is an unavoidable necessity.
|
| Boeing tried to game the regulations, and because of cuts the
| regulator didn't have the manpower to catch them.
|
| Classic "starve the beast" - cut funding to government so it
| fucks up, then claim government is incompetent and so should
| be smaller.
| gdubs wrote:
| Deregulated or not, the airframe business is essentially a
| duopoly of Boeing and Airbus.
| SftwrSvior81 wrote:
| 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.
| somurzakov wrote:
| if US allowed foreign airlines to serve domestic routes, that
| would be the case
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| > that happens because the customer accepts the lower
| quality.
|
| What choice do we have? Even if there is a choice, the
| majority of consumers don't have the luxury of choosing.
| SftwrSvior81 wrote:
| 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?
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.
| SftwrSvior81 wrote:
| 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.
| yourMadness wrote:
| Of course the customer accepts the lower quality.
|
| Dying once every 10 million flight hours instead of every
| 1000 million flight hours is a fair price to pay for 10 USD
| of savings.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| hackernewsboy wrote:
| Think about computers. Apple Machintosh costed $2000, now
| ... Why airplane industry cannot behave like computer
| industry?
| jen20 wrote:
| 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?
| peteradio wrote:
| > A ticket that cost $600 in 1980 dollars goes for $300
| today.
|
| I'm not sure that is a universal positive.
| makomk wrote:
| 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.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| If you're talking about airline passengers, they have no
| choice in which plane they fly in.
| tedunangst wrote:
| It's not hard to see which planes fly which routes.
| tirpen wrote:
| A lot of routes have only one airline though.
| jen20 wrote:
| 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.
| mopsi wrote:
| Depends on airline. Southwest, for example, has Boeing-
| only fleet. JetBlue has only Airbuses and Embraers.
|
| The odds of buying a JetBlue ticket and ending up on a
| Boeing are fairly low compared to flying Southwest.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Plus, flights get cancelled, and passengers get re-routed
| last minute.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I can't recall any plane crashes that also involved a
| plane switch. So getting bumped to a different plane type
| and crashing is incalculably rare.
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> because the customer accepts the lower quality._
|
| 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.
| SftwrSvior81 wrote:
| 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.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| This also assumes perfect knowledge, which isn't true.
| ssalazar wrote:
| 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.
| SftwrSvior81 wrote:
| 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.
| narrator wrote:
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I dunno. At first this article almost felt like damage control:
| it wasn't Boeing, it was those McDonnell Douglas peeps. But then
| it seemed to focus more on the engineers themselves and try to
| make them seem like a cozy family shop .. even before the big
| merger; Boeing was hardly that. It was (and is) a massive
| employer that has tactically distributed manufacturing to as many
| different states as possible (to help with lobbying efforts under
| the banner of job creation; distributed with a very wide net of
| employees).
|
| Even without the Douglas acquisition, would we still be here with
| the 737-Max8 failure as bad as it is? I think all industry over
| the past two decades have gone down the route of maximizing
| profits and cutting costs. Hell, there are startups build around
| the idea of just ignoring or lobbying against legislation (Uber,
| AirBnB) and marking that arrogance as being "disruptive," as if
| they were some kind of civil rights pioneers.
|
| It's really impossible to tell what would have happened without
| Boeing buying MCD, but I there is a good chance we would have
| ended up here eventually anyway. Focusing on MCD in this article
| feels more of a narrative tool than an objective critique and
| analysis.
| hbosch wrote:
| Maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's the retro mindset of work as a
| way of life, maybe it's just "how things used to be"... but
| I've spoken with a few old, retired Boeing engineers that are
| acquaintances or family friends (I live in Seattle) and a lot
| of them really make out the 70's/80's Boeing to be a "family".
| There is a warmth and camaraderie and a fondness that is hard
| to describe.
|
| Lot of these old engineers stay in touch, godfathers to each
| others kids, go on fishing trips, go to church together. Still
| have Thanksgivings together. At one late family member's
| remembrance I think more than half the attendees were retired
| Boeing engineers, or their families. I really do think that,
| rose-colored-glasses aside, it sounds like a few decades ago it
| really was the kind of place where aerogeeks ran the show and
| obsessed together over making great products like the article
| suggests.
|
| I know two people who work for Boeing today, as well, and I
| don't think either of them really like it very much.
| legitster wrote:
| > It was (and is) a massive employer that has tactically
| distributed manufacturing to as many different states as
| possible (to help with lobbying efforts under the banner of job
| creation; distributed with a very wide net of employees).
|
| This was specifically out of the MCD playbook. Boeing was
| pretty consolidated geographically before that.
| Frost1x wrote:
| In a lot of respects, I find modern business tactics skewing
| ever further towards being more and more harmful to society at
| large for the sake of business capital owners. Let's not forget
| the social contract and that we, as a society, allow businesses
| to operate while they remain beneficial to society.
|
| I'm not saying remove capitalism but some modifications of our
| current state of capitalism are certainly in order. Perhaps
| this is tighter or different regulatory constraints, changes to
| some core principles (e.g. Citizen's United, business rights as
| "people", etc.). I'm not saying I have the answers or the quick
| examples mentionrd are the core issues, just that the future
| doesn't look great if current trends continue. We need to start
| a productive conversation and elect representatives willing to
| be a voice in that conversation to explore and try improvement
| options.
| jessant wrote:
| Thank you personally for allowing corporations to exist.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Is this a genie that can be bottled back up? Lets say you
| enact these magical regulations. Will the corporations stick
| around or will they focus on other countries where they have
| more clout? Similarly, will they use international levers of
| pressure to "fix" the issues any one country poses?
| salawat wrote:
| Mmm. Good question.
|
| Personally, I don't see the rest of the world as willing to
| indulge in that type of regulation havening. Besides which,
| where else are you going to find the combination of
| hypermodern physical infrastructure, relatively stable
| political/judicial systems, and the fiscal infrastructure
| to support these types of businesses all bundled together?
|
| It seems to end up being a puck-two sort of thing
| otherwise, and if they did move out, they'd likely have to
| instantly write off the American market, as such a drastic
| measure would not go unnoticed. It starts to reek of
| nationalistic pride as the insurance policy, but history
| didn't build itself up without such a thing in the first
| place; so I see it as foolish to discount the mechanism
| moving forward.
|
| One can only hope the cost in blood to maintain such
| security won't have to be repeated however.
| papito wrote:
| That's exactly it. "Corporations are people, my friend", when
| they need to pump an insane amount of money into our election
| process, but when the time comes to pay for blunders and
| crimes - nah uh, don't touch the innocent corporation, you
| can't put it on trial, like a ... person.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right. And I could imagine a few other scenarios that get us
| here as well:
|
| Boeing's MCD buyout doesn't happen, industry keeps going where
| it was going, Boeing didn't adapt, their market share and
| market cap drop, MCD's on the other hand, rises, and MCD buys
| Boeing, variation of the MAX8 still happens.
|
| Boeng's MCD buyout doesn't happen, industry keeps going where
| it was going, Boeing adapts, tightens margins, still builds
| MAX8, same deal, except we still have MCD floating around as
| another minor player in the market (or MCD just goes out of
| business).
|
| It's weird to blame it all on MCD's executives taking over
| Boeing and turning it into a margin-driven company, when that's
| just where the market was going in the first place, and it's
| likely that any airplane manufacturer would have to make the
| same choices in order to stay relevant. Perhaps the root cause
| was deregulation, or something else.
| [deleted]
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