There is risk most any human activity. Your prudent thing would result in suspending any beneficial activity with any possible risk. The a prudent thing would be to err on the side of still receiving the benefits of 737 air travel.

Nonsense. This plane right now has two out of about four hundred that crashed, which for a new plane is more than enough reason to hit the 'pause' button for a bit until we know or least think we know what went wrong.

Thinking like that does not result in 'suspending any beneficial activity with any possible risk', it just suspends this activity with a roughly 0.5% risk of incidence until the causes are clear.

There are plenty of other aircraft in the world, also many non-Max 737's.

Nobody is talking about ground the 737 - a very safe plane used thousands of times a day

This is the 737-max, a new plane with very little history, barely used, and had been involved in two crashes with similar circumstances in the last 6 months.

Millions of dollars could save a lot of human life right now, even in America.

Who in their right mind downvotes this? I realize HN is not representative of America, but I think if you take a moment to notice all the homeless people you step over on your way to work in SV you'd reconsider.

Sure, then let's fly other unsafe planes types as well to save money, and hand the benefits to the poor!

Except, in which universe do airlines hands out their revenue to the poor ?

That's not the point. The point is that the comparison between people's lives and money is invalid.

Because scarce resources are a real thing, there necessarily should be a value to life, otherwise you are just ignoring reality.

I like how people downvote this, yet when stepping over homeless people in SV think "I only make $100,000+, and I need every bit of it, even if $20 could drastically improve this human's welfare.

Then when they board a flight on their own: "millions is not too much to spare! No cost is too great for my life!"

It is a double standard.

Did the E.U. ground the A320 when the Germanwings suicide pilot crashed the plane in the Alps, killing 150? Investigators didn’t know what brought that plane down for several days. Wouldn’t the prudent thing to do be to ground all Airbus A320s until the cause was confirmed? Did they ground the A320 after the Egyptair crash? They still aren’t sure what brought that plane down. But they didn’t ground the fleet. How about the Metrojet flight that crashed just a year earlier? At least 3 A320 crashes in as many years, but they don’t ground Airbus.

If it were a Boeing airplane, you can bet the EU would have grounded them. Given the E.U. has provided about $22 billion in subsidies to Airbus, it makes perfect business sense for the E.U. to ground Boeing 737s, but not ground Airbus when there are Airbus crashes.

In 2012, Australian safety engineers called for the grounding of the A380 due to significant structural cracks, in Qantas and Singapore airplanes, yet Airbus refused. Is it fair to say that the E.U. and Airbus cared more about profits than safety back in 2012? Has the E.U. ever grounded an Airbus plane ever?

Let’s not make the mistake of assuming benevolence that which is better explained by profit or politics.

> Did the E.U. ground the A320 when the Germanwings suicide pilot crashed the plane in the Alps, killing 150?

Was there a similar-seeming crash of the same model a few months before?

Your comment is a very nice example of whataboutism. Let's remain on topic about two crashes, with very similar characteristic, with two brand new aircraft of the same model. This is unheard of in this day and age of stellar aircraft safety. If that's not reason for concern, I don't know what is. Another commenter has said to err on the side of caution, that's something the US / FAA should do in this case, but somehow is not. You can give all the reasons you want, but the facts take precedent: ~350 people killed in the same model aircraft and in a similar way, the FAA should act.

Interesting that you mentioned Australia, who also grounded the plane. Clearly they're in the EU's pocked, right? Despite that Qantas' Boeing fleet is more than twice as numerous as their Airbus fleet.