searching for mcas and its long form might do as well.

So 20 MAX-related issues out of ~850. How is that significant?

> So 20 MAX-related issues out of ~850. How is that significant?

To build on what @ggm and @siwatanejo noted. The 737 debuted in 1967, so it is 52 years old now. The 737 MAX is 2 years old. In terms of number of issues per year since the aircraft was introduced the 737 is at ~15 incidents per year and the 737 MAX is at ~10/year. But as @ggm notes, it's important to look at when in the life cycle many of the non-MAX 737 incidents occurred.

Another way to look at this is by number of aircraft produced. The Boeing website[0] gives production numbers for various classes of the 737. In terms of incidence per number of aircraft delivered the non-max 737s have 0.082 incidents per delivered aircraft while the 737 MAX has 0.05 incidents per delivered aircraft.

Both of those suggest that the 737 MAX may not be any worse than the non-max 737s, but a more careful statistical analysis is probably necessary to draw strong conclusions.

[0] http://active.boeing.com/commercial/orders/displaystandardre...

I’d look at incidents per flight hour. Some of those 737s have been in the air for decades. I suspect the numbers for the 737 MAX will stand out more on this analysis.

It’s also worth noting that the MAX should benefit from 5 decades of accumulated experience and regulation. So you’d expect far lower incidents.

The problem might not be with the plane per se but rather with Boeing rushing a bit and relying on the fact that “it basically the same plane but better so why would there be issues”.

Note that 15 vs 10 incidents per year is also not accurate since there are far fewer 737 MAXs out there.

It's likely that a given plane gets more incidents at the start of its life. It might not be statistically significant

So then why did I get downvoted so hard?

I didn't downvote you, so I can't speak for those who did. But I replied because simply saying "20/850 is small" isn't sufficient to argue there isn't a difference between the two planes. Partly because the timescales for the two incident counts are different and so are the number of planes constructed. So normalizing the incident counts against those quantities is a first step at getting towards their significance. Though as @ggm and @ansy point out, the incident rates also vary as a function of time through the lifetime of that airplane model. So really that behavior needs to be examined as well.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

We'd need some meta analysis of the rate of issues for other plane types by release date to track the declining exponential curve of bugs to legacy.

"all new systems have bugs. this may not be unusual"

I don't think anything else has been pushed as far as the 737. The closest are probably the De Havilland DHC-8 and the Douglas DC-9/MD-80/MD-90/717, and maybe the DC-10/MD-11. The The Q400 had some pretty serious landing gear issues, the MD-11 was notoriously tricky to land, the MD-80 had that undocumented auto throttle issue, and the MD-90 had those extra flaps next to the engines.

we're talking about a plane model that is only 2 years old?

Yes and no. The basic 737 design dates to the 1950s. The first ones flew in the 1960s.

The 737 Max is an augmented version of the original.

Right, I'm (we're) obviously talking about 737MAX

> Right, I'm (we're) obviously talking about 737MAX

I think @ams6110 is saying that it may not be fair to identify the 737MAX as a completely new plane, since the 737MAX can be identified as more of an evolution of the 737 rather than a new, from-scratch plane design.

And that is bullshit. As long as you're not just changing the resolution of the seat's screens, it's a completely different model, for all intents and purposes.