FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

Re:FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s by SoftTalker on Saturday January 06, 2024 @04:34PM (#38895723)

Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft.

Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.

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Re:FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s by pc86 on Saturday January 06, 2024 @06:23PM (#38896639)

There's a joke about asking skydivers why they'd jump out of a perfectly good airplane and the punch line is that there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.

Every single plane has things that are broken, things that are inoperative, things that behave slightly out of tolerance. This is true for commercial aircraft the whole way down to single engine trainers. 172s are notorious for having fuel gauges that are basically only good for telling you how many fuel tanks you have and not anything related to quantity of fuel on the plane.

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