Just a reminder that during the pandemic these companies were given money to stay afloat and they immediately laid off the staff and have - apparently - neglected all meaningful maintenance.
And flew empty jets around the world. Polluting shit for absolutely no reason. Those companies can all go bankrupt and burn in a fire for all I care. People have become way too dependent on them anyway.
TBF the “flying empty trains around the world” were different companies that only bought the planes and had to adhere to stupid laws that would void their plane spots if they didn’t take off.
That’s like making Toyota responsible if a Toyota fanclub decides that you need to make 100k kilometers a year to stay in the club
Both are horrible but in this case it’s not useful to throw both in the same basket
Where you comment may reflect the airline industry as a whole it does not reflect Delta.
Delta was offered but didn’t accept any CARES Act funding, additionally they chose to do voluntary furloughs and a buy out instead of laying off employees. Yes this did cause them to lose some senior talent, but it was not forced.
Source: I know people who worked for Delta during the pandemic. Most took a month or two off and then returned to work on 4 day a week scheduled for 2020. A few took the buy out, which gave them good lifetime benefits.
Don’t forget the stock buybacks
Airlines were actually banned from stock buybacks during the pandemic as a condition of the federal aid.
No shit. Impressive that someone thought of that.
Really, who, specifically, do we have to that for that?
Potentially relevant piece of info, it was a Boeing. Might be bad maintenance, might be manufacturing defect, we’ll need to see what the investigation turns up. At the very least the fact it was a Boeing plane raises some eyebrows.
Edit: rereading it mentions it was a 33 year old plane with a history of problems. Leaning more towards bad maintenance, although if it was that prone to issues maybe it should have been taken out of service before now.
I was going to say do we even need to bother asking who manufactured the plane anymore.
Boeing and Airbus are the only large passenger aircraft manufacturers that I’m aware of.
Don’t get me wrong, Boeing’s doing awful lately. But even on a good day the odds are high it’s Boeing, and even higher when news outlets know people want to hear about every fail from Boeing suddenly.
Is Airbus seeing similar rates of failure on their older models? Not that you personally need to know, just that question should be asked/answered if we’re going to give Boeing the benefit of the doubt.
Great question, I’m curious too. I definitely don’t want to give Boeing to benefit of the doubt. Just wanted to give perspective that there aren’t a lot of aircraft manufacturer options.
All I know right now is I’ve seen a ton of stories lately about different Boeing failures and can’t think of a single such story about an Airbus failure. The only thing that pops into mind in general about Airbus is that one really big plane they were making kept getting delayed, which from my perspective actually sounds good because it’s a sign they might not be cutting corners like Boeing seems to be.
I fly Delta a fair bit just because they’ve fucked me around the least out of the major US carriers. They also use Embraer models for shorter regional flights. However, yes, you’re correct in saying the odds are high that any given commercial jet in the air is a Boeing or an Airbus.
You would think at this point every airline would be giving their fleet full inspections… I guess the bad press isn’t enough motivation?
For a thirty three year old plane, I wouldn’t call it too much of a “history of problems”. It was like 4 issues and one of them was hitting a bird.
“Leaning towards”??
Could still be a manufacturing defect on a replacement part, but obviously not on anything that is original. It’s more likely though that whatever it is failed from lack of maintenance or improperly done maintenance at this point.
BOEING KILLED JOHN BARNETT
They may be qualifed for a full refund under the new law.
That’s nice. But do they refund you for your hotel at your destination, PTO from your work, etc?
Airlines really don’t respect your money or time, and pay all sorts of stupid games that reduce the likelihood of you getting to your destination on time, or at all.
Over booking flights. Poor maintenance. Not having a replacement plane on standby in case one needs to be pulled for maintenance.
They maximize returns to an extreme, and don’t care if you lose an entire day of your travel plans if one small problem on their side completely derails your entire trip because they refuse to incur the cost of redundancy.
Agreed on all counts. But maybe having to refund the full ticket price in cash, which wasn’t the case for a long time, will force them to address things like redundancy.
Is there a surge of incidents like this or is it just being reported on a lot more?
It’s being reported on more.
Frequency might be up slightly too, but these things have been happening on the regular since as long as there has been passenger planes.
Sounds like all the more reason to do something about it
Does it?
Yo this wasn’t a boeing was it ?
If it’s Boeing, I’m YOLOing
Yes, but don’t really see how it’s their fault in this case.
Also it says Boeing right in the summary, didn’t even have to read the article
old planes, like old cars, develop unique problems as they age. This isn’t a failing of Boeing, but rather what happens when you cruise around in an antique airplane.
The upgrade to Airbusses can’t come soon enough… the 767s need to retire. They’re older than some people here.
Edit: Unlike old cars, airplanes are given a much more stringent and fine-toothed maintenance combing. The last thing any airline wants is to lose a plane.
