>(Not to mention that these planes have never crashed in most countries, even with an admittedly serious bug.)

In... Most countries? That's such a weird standard to hold an aircraft to. Even very serious aircraft issues before typically only resulted in crashes in a handful of countries!

Did I read that wrong or do you want 100+ of the 200ish countries in the world to have experienced a 737 MAX crash before scrapping the MAX?

Just putting the safety record into context.

Actually, I think if the planes can be fixed (and I'd be shocked if they couldn't), the two crashes before the fix will no longer be relevant for assessing safety.

You're putting the safety record into chauvinist context, to be exact. An AoA failure is sufficiently rare for it to have only occured in a couple of occasions in - shockingly - only a couple of countries.

Okay, I probably should have calculated the number of successful flights to avoid this. But, nowhere did I say any country is better than any other. That's your inference.

I can help with that -- the MAX is suffering hull losses per flight completed at a rate about 100x that of comparable planes like the A320. Totally off the charts.

It’s such a weird statistic to use though. One crash takes a really long time to recover from in that score. So even if the 737 Max was magically fixed tomorrow, the score wouldn’t change.

> One crash takes a really long time to recover from in that score.

As it should be. That's how important safety is. Boeing brought this on themselves by letting a second airplane crash before responding properly.

It's not remotely a strange choice when it represents the current most reasonable prediction of risk.

If it were fixed tomorrow at that point we could discuss how it effects risk in the future.

Hundreds of people died. It should leave a long-term impact on Boeing's safety record. It should take them a long time to recover and regain trust.

What was your original motivation to bring up the country aspect?

This isn't a valid way to put it into context. It doesn't matter which countries the planes crashed in; the causes were the same and lives lost are lives lost. And air travel is so globalized these days that one crash anywhere can kill citizens of dozens of countries.

Yes, it doesn't matter which two countries it was, but it's fine to point out that many airlines in many countries didn't see these problems. The planes flew in many places every day with no trouble.

You are calling me out over nothing. This is uncharitable, to say the least. Why make trouble?

There were "only" two instances (which killed >300 people) before the plane was yanked from the air entirely. That means that, roughly speaking, it was only going to happen in two countries at all, or one really unlucky country. So there's no use in pointing out that it didn't happen in many more countries, because that would have required dozens more accidents with tens of thousands of deaths, which was simply never in the cards because the planes would've been yanked long before then. So there's no use in pointing out that it didn't happen in many countries, because that never would've happened.

You're explaining my own reasoning and then telling me how I'm wrong.

Talking about countries is just another way of saying that the plane was flying in many places all over the world and the risk of accident, despite these horrible accidents, was never very high. As you say, would never happen.

The risk of accident was very high relative to other airliners, by more than an entire order of magnitude. I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make here.

it’s not just pr reasons. they tried to hot patch this airplane design with software, and now they are hot patching that fix. it seems it is a fundamentally flawed design that they tried to hide and get away with rather than doing the right thing. i know i don’t want to fly on a 737 max ever, and this whole ordeal with boeing and the faa has made me less confident in the airline industry as a whole.

your parenthetical still shows some finger pointing towards “poor” countries’ pilots and ignores the number of crashes and reports for as young as this plane is and the numbers in use.

The fix taking a while to get right is not evidence for "fundamentally flawed".

You have a strange idea about how to assess risk. It's like faults are somehow contagious.

> It’s like faults are somehow contagious.

They are. If 737 MAX was rushed to market and this is the first issue we become aware of, how many more are hidden?

If Boeing makes a habit of rushing planes to market without certification, how many more ticking time-bombs are flying around?

The notion that you can fix an aerodynamic stability problem in software by making a software program mimic the flight characteristics of an older plane is fundamentally flawed. And the notion that we can just patch the system later if it turns out you did it wrong is dangerous. You're betting with human lives that this time you've got it right.

Why is it fundamentally flawed?

There’s no question that Boeing’s implementation had major issues, but there is IMO a higher burden of argument(?) to declare that a fundamental inevitability.

This could simply be a case of Boeing incompetent/reckless/...

Pilots are highly trained. They go through many hours of simulated flights. After an incident like this, any pilots still flying a MAX will be drilled on this specific failure. If you start to see pilots refuse to fly it, that’s when you should worry.

Aviation adapts to problems and it always has. Southwest installed additional gear on their planes to help prevent this when the first plane crashed. It’s not far fetched that companies in countries with lesser regulations might skip out on training or plane enhancements that would lessen the chances of this problem.

> After an incident like this ...

Clearly, that didn't happen, or a second MAX wouldn't have crashed under very similar circumstances.

> Southwest installed additional gear on their planes to help prevent this when the first plane crashed.

Southwest ordered the MAX with an AoA indicator; it wasn't retrofitted.

> ... to help prevent this ...

It's questionable whether the AoA indicator would've made a difference. However, an AoA disagree alert that is standard in the previous 737 gen was "accidentally" made part of the AoA indicator extra feature set on the MAX, and the AoA disagree just _might_ have made a difference. [1]

> It’s not far fetched that companies in countries with lesser regulations might skip out on training or plane enhancements that would lessen the chances of this problem.

An AoA indicator is not mandatory anywhere in the world.

[1] https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/05/06/boeing-angle-of-att...

I doubt that. Pilots get used to flying on an autopilot and often make mistakes when they have to control everything manually. Recent example is a crash of SSJ100 in Moscow where the pilots failed to land the plane manually when the computer turned off.

If you make controls more complicated, pilots will make more mistakes in critical situation.

>It's rather weird to ask a huge number of mostly-good airplanes to be thrown away for PR reasons

Welcome to the internet where other people's money doesn't matter.

I don’t know about you, but in my real-life other people’s money doesn’t matter either.