But more deaths leads to fewer emissions! A bright side!

That's not great... I can only hope more people opt for trains instead this time.

As someone who lives on an island, lol. But still a good point assuming a North American car centric viewpoint. I’ll be resorting to wind power, jetski, breath stroke, or airbus. Perhaps other options including rail ( yes we have it on Islands too ) may look competitive again.

I hope that prompts more funding into Amtrak if people do opt for that!

What is that like really fancy long blimps

Airbus will still be (mostly) safe. And I'm more concerned with the number of flights - particularly short flights that can be substituted by trains - than with flying per se. For long-distance travel, we don't have a comparable alternative (yet).

No, planes are good for that. But there's a ton of domestic travel that could easily be replaced with a decent rail network.

Yes, it's always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.

But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren't trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.

If they weren’t 10 times as slow I would never fly.

We have the tech for high speed rail, we just refused to build it because of lobbying (bribery), regulatory capture, and forced dependence on cars and planes.

To me at least the speed isn’t a problem. I’d much rather take a 2 day Amtrak (in sleeper) than an 8 hour plane.

The problem is the pricing, and also how much it fluctuates due to the extremely low capacity (one train a day…)

That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they're relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.

I've never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a "they're all the same!" when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.

This happens every time a company focus shifts from building a good product to appeasing the shareholder gods. Capitalism kills.

It makes the most sense for a company to spread their risk amongst as many suppliers as possible if their entire business relies on the performance of those suppliers.

Thinking about it, IT hardware and networking doesn't ever seem to do this. Maybe that's because it's lots of items working together to create a system instead of multiple discrete systems.