It's also possible that Ryanair believes that a crash wouldn't damage their business significantly. Ryanair competes almost entirely on price, to the point of removing literally everything they can in order to stay the cheapest option. A decade ago they considered removing the seats from their planes (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/jul/01/stand-up-for-r...) as well as plans for things like making passengers pay to use the bathrooms. More recently Ryanair refused to remove middle seats in order to help stop the spread of Corona virus.
I would be very reluctant to believe Ryanair believe in the 737 Max for any reason besides cost. Safety is not a priority for them beyond meeting the absolute minimum requirements necessary to fly.
> Safety is not a priority for them beyond meeting the absolute minimum requirements necessary to fly.
This is absolute nonsense. Safety is paramount at Ryanair - their reputation in industry is that they have the strictest standards of any airline operating in Europe, low-cost or not.
This is simply your own bias showing through.
It's also ridiculous to state that a crash wouldn't impact their business.
Yes. And your post is your bias showing through. That's OK though. That's how opinions work. A post on HN that isn't a strict statement of fact is always going to be affected by the posters biases. Discussion forums simply couldn't work otherwise.
Saying someone is biased is not a damning indictment of how terrible they are. It just means they've been affected by, and formed opinions based on, what has happened to them.
It's also ridiculous to state that a crash wouldn't impact their business.
If you just ignore the "significantly" bit, sure.
> If you just ignore the "significantly" bit, sure.
Okay, it's also ridiculous to state that a crash wouldn't significantly impact their business.
Your comments on this are so outlandish that I wonder if they're made in good faith?
I could suggest you're being paid to defend Ryanair online, but I can't imagine Ryanair paying someone to do that. They don't care about their reputation enough. Kind of like how they aren't too bothered about how it looks in the media when their planes catch fire or have to be intercepted by fighter jets.
Source?
This shows otherwise.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-safest-airlines-in-2020-...
Compare this to any other airline on the "safest" list. All EU airlines are extremely safe - it's a highly regulated market. None have the record or reputation of Ryanair, especially not at the scale they operate.
>> None have the record or reputation of Ryanair, especially not at the scale they operate.
Again, source?
Airbus has NEO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320neo_family
"After a year in service, Lufthansa confirmed the 20% efficiency gain per passenger with up to 180 seats, along with reduced noise and CO₂ emissions.[26] Operators confirm the 15% per seat fuel-burn savings even counterbalanced by the added weight on short sectors, which can rise to 16–17% on longer routes and to 20% or more for Lufthansa with 180 passengers up from 168 with two more seat rows"
vs
"On 8 September 2014, Ryanair made a commitment to order 100 new Boeing 737 MAX 8s (plus options for an additional 100) for delivery from 2019.[75]"
The only non-737 Type Rated aircraft in the corporate fleet are the A320-200s that came with the aquisition of Lauda Air, which are set to be replaced by 737-8200s.
The A320neo was never a viable option for Ryanair.
Working there is a pretty big bias
Pilots seem uniquely qualified to judge whether a company is prioritizing safety or short-term profit.
For example, a pilot will know whether the company incentivizes pilots to overlook issues to make a flight happen or whether it encourages a safety culture of speaking up and staying on the ground when something comes up, or whether they fly with the absolute minimum of fuel permitted or a little bit more (and whether that is a safety issue or not).
Not even on the list:
https://www.airlineratings.com/news/worlds-safest-airlines-n...
It's own safety rating system puts Ryanair at the same "7 stars", but their history speaks for itself.
Qantas has not had a fatality since 1951 (Ryanair was founded in 1984); so that cannot possibly be true.
The only competitor in terms of safety record is Hawaiian, which also has a stellar history, but is an order of magnitude smaller.
But the Qantas Flight 32 is the point, this is exactly what this story is about. Confidence in an aircraft. Qantas Flight 32 was an Airbus A-380, which is exactly what you would expect to hear anytime you heard about serious accidents or plane crash; the name "Airbus". Boeing used to be the safe over engineered plane, while Airbus was a French/German/Spanish hybrid where the jokes about French cars, carried over to the planes, which led to joke slogans like this:
"Take a chance with Air France"
Boeing was synonymous with safety; but now they seem insistent on destroying their own legacy with that MAX/8 plane.
This [1] seems to disagree with you, searching for Boeing and airbus, there seem to be many more Boeing incidents than Airbus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
Crucially, this also doesn't normalize to the quantities of planes flying. If Boeing makes up 70% of the global fleet, but only 65% of incidents, then that would mean they were safer rather than not.
Airbus has delivered more planes than Boeing in the last two years but I'm having trouble finding statistics on overall fleet makeups going back further than that.
I'm guessing that Boeing's good safety reputation had some root in reality, just like Toyota probably is a more reliable car than many other brands. Renault could be a very reliable brand now for all I know, but their reputation has already been shot, and that can be hard to recover from. Some brands really never recover, and just change their name; like LG did, GoldStar (their former name) was not associated with quality. The reason Boeing is changing the name of the MAX to 8 is similar, but a name change alone will not resurrect their image.
I'm sure at one point Boeing was a very safe plane, since I associate that brand with safety, but today perhaps Airbus is as safe (or even safer), but it's hard to shake off a reputation.
Either way, both explanations are speculation and we'll have to see how that turns out.
That said, they take safety extraordinarily seriously and would not risk their reputation if they had doubts about the Max.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/06/what-are-the-safest-airlines...
It seems Ryanair does not make it to the top 20 in terms of being the safest airline. Ryanair comes in at the 7th place for the low-cost-airline safety.
It could mean that Boeing are handing out huge discounts, or that Ryanair bets on these planes never making it to market, forcing Boeing to give them a killer deal on a replacement plane etc.
The thing is that most passengers that have read any of the articles about this plane, will never set foot on one of them.
It may be somewhat subjective, and it is probably hard to compare the many airlines that have had no fatalities or serious accidents (reported at least) in the last 30-40 years; like Ryanair has.
But you said Ryanair were the safest of any airline (by far), which seems strange as there are many airlines with similar safety records as Ryanair. Why should they rank above everyone else?
In the end the customers will decide, but hopefully we can avoid another load of customers hitting the ground in MAX (or 8) crash.
I'm not sure about serious accidents, but there seems to be many airlines with no fatalities in the past 40 years. But perhaps Qantas just stays #1 since it has had no jet-plane crash (and no crash at all since 1951). Or perhaps it's the "Rain man" quote where Dustin Hoffman says Qantas never crashes; that cemented their position as the safest airline in history.
Ryanair certainly seems very safe, but with all those new MAX planes, who knows how long that will last.
My confidence in Ryanair is decreasing. The only problem that they got routes that no other European airline has and I am forced to fly with them time to time even though I try to avoid them like plague. If there are multiple flights from A to B and there is Ryanair in the mix, the price difference is usually negligible (5 - 10 EUR) and I am always willing to pay that little extra to an other airline which has a decent CEO (not like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Leary_(businessman...).