The following was posted in r/Boycott_Boeing with the title “How to Boycott Boeing”, which was censored, ironically. The moderator, who has his own post showing ways to avoid Boeing, is strangely intent on suppressing methods of boycotting other than his own.
Suppose you want to boycott Boeing. A Boeing aircraft is probably not on your shopping list, so you can’t simply scratch Boeing off your shopping list as easily as you can with a company like Dell, for example. But there are some things you can do to reduce money that ultimately feeds Boeing.
Boeing has a duopoly with Airbus (detailed on wikipedia).
Most airlines own both Boeing and Airbus products, so it would be impractical to extend the boycott to all airlines that have Boeings in their inventory. But there is a bias. Some airlines have a strong majority of Boeings in their fleet compared to Airbus. Here is a sampling of some of the large carriers:
| Airline | Active Boeing assets (%) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Aer Lingus | 7.8% (4/51) | source |
| Air Berlin | 0.0% (0/84) | source |
| Air Canada | 36.9% (62/168) | source |
| Air China | 51.7% (200/387) | source |
| Air France | 31.6% (71/225) | source |
| Alitalia | 9.8% (10/102) | source |
| American Airlines | 48.7% (452/928) | source |
| British Airways | 47.0% (126/268) | source |
| China Eastern Airlines | 3.7% (16/428) | source |
| Delta | 57.0% (479/840) | source |
| Finnair | 0.0% (0/47) | source |
| Iberia | 0.0% (0/78) | source |
| Japan Airlines | 100.0% (163/163) | source |
| KLM | 88.8% (103/116) | source |
| Korean Air | 75.3% (119/158) | source |
| Lufthansa | 13.7% (37/271) | source |
| Swiss Global Air Lines | 33.3% (6/18) | source |
| United Airlines | 78.6% (578/735) | source |
| Virgin Atlantic | 56.8% (21/37) | source |
I recommend boycotting airlines with a Boeing inventory over ~40%. In addition to avoiding Boeing-dominant airlines, it’s also a good idea to exclude flights on Boeing aircraft from your air travel search. Here’s how:
- Go to itasoftware.com
- Fill out the search form as you normally would
- Click on “Advanced routing codes”, and noticed that a new box appears to enter outbound and return routing codes.
- In all the advanced routing codes boxes, paste this:
/-aircraft t:703 t:707 t:70F t:70M t:717 t:721 t:722 t:727 t:72B t:72C t:72F t:72M t:72S t:72X t:72Y t:731 t:732 t:733 t:734 t:735 t:736 t:737 t:738 t:739 t:73C t:73F t:73G t:73H t:73J t:73M t:73W t:73X t:73Y t:741 t:742 t:743 t:744 t:747 t:74C t:74D t:74E t:74F t:74H t:74J t:74L t:74M t:74N t:74R t:74T t:74U t:74V t:74X t:74Y t:752 t:753 t:757 t:75F t:75M t:75T t:75W t:762 t:763 t:764 t:767 t:76F t:76W t:76X t:76Y t:772 t:773 t:777 t:77F t:77L t:77W t:788 t:789 t:B72
That will exclude all flights that make use of a Boeing aircraft from the search results. Why is that a good idea? A pilot is either a Boeing pilot or an Airbus pilot. Rarely is a pilot trained in both. Riding on a Boeing aircraft feeds Boeing pilots, who exclusively cator for Boeing products.
Commandline nerds who want to know how to derive that syntax may want to run this:
$ lynx -dump -nolist https://www.flugzeuginfo.net/table_accodes_iata_en.php | awk 'BEGIN{ORS=" ";} tolower($0) ~ /boeing/{print "t:"$1}'
Don’t forget to prefix the /-aircraft .
Why boycott Boeing and General Electric?
See the rationale chart.
Boeing has made a deal with General Electric to ensure that some Boeing aircraft can only be fitted with GE engines. It turns out that General Electric (a former ALEC member) is itself very boycott-worthy anyway because it’s involved with the same evils as Boeing. Also note that Airbus does not contribute to any of the problems in the rationale chart. It will not be immediately obvious to everyone why drug testing is such a bad idea. I suggest this article for more detail.