Kayak customers can exclude Max 9 aircraft after cabin panel blowout on Alaska Airlines flight
Online travel agent allows customers to filter out Boeing 737 Max planes::Kayak customers can exclude Max 9 aircraft after cabin panel blowout on Alaska Airlines flight
The last few incidents with the MAX series has me on edge with them. I fly planes myself (GA) and am an aviation geek. It's only 3 incidents but it seems like they rushed the MAX out too quickly to compete with Airbus. I could be really wrong.
The MAX 8 series was the one where they had additional software to correct the climb and this caused two accidents of total loss in passenger planes Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopians Flight 302.
Between March 2017 and March 2019, the global fleet of 387 aircraft operated 500,000 flights and experienced two fatal crashes, having a fatal accident rate of four accidents per million flights, whereas the previous Boeing 737 generations averaged 0.2 fatal accidents per million flights.
Then we have the MAX 9 that had a door blow off because of a missing door plug. Thankfully, no deaths and only minor injuries.
If Boeing were extremely smart, they would replace the 737 with a net new design serving the same market segment. The 737 just sits too low to the ground. The giant LEAP engines were shoehorned on where they shouldn't have been and two planes full of people are dead because of it. With the open rotor engines likely to be the next evolution, I'm not even sure they couldn't put those on the 737.
Add in that the 737-900ER has the same door plug design, it makes me wonder if it is rational to fear the Max 9 specifically. I would actually prefer to fly a max 9 that was forced to have a recent inspection instead of the older 737-900ER that recently had scrutiny for the same door if my fear was the door plug itself.