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Comment by ozmaverick72 | Hacker News Reader

The software fixes as described sound sensible and it's hard to believe they were not in the original design. Unfortunately I don't see how these changes will allow them to keep a common type rating with the 737 NG. After the updated MCAS has made its one shot trim adjustment you will now be flying an aircraft with different handling characteristics if you keep increasing the angle of attack into the stall. Surely the FAA can't sign off on the common type rating and half hour of video training ??

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Having a new type rating is a fair punishment, I think, for Boeing and the airlines who have been stringing along this obsolete airliner for way too long.

Note the 737 MAX was rushed out not just to fight the A320neo but also to counter this kind of jet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220

which is cheaper to run than the 737 MAX but also has much better passenger comfort than the 737. I was in the similar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_family#E175

and even though it is a smaller plane, it feels more like riding in a widebody than in a 737.

Canada developed a fully modern small jet on it's own dime and taking risk, then Boeing nearly killed it by offering airlines a 70% discount on the 737 MAX. Airbus bought a controlling interest in it for free because that was the only way it could survive.

Common type rating is a big reason why airlines are sticking with the 1967 era 737 rather than upgrading to modern planes that will make flying much more pleasant, make less noise, use less fuel, less climate change impact, etc.

>then Boeing nearly killed it by offering airlines a 70% discount on the 737 MAX.

Actually, Boeing lobbied/sued to get punitive tariffs levied on the Bombardier CSeries. While they ultimately lost the case, while it was pending, Bombardier entered an agreement with Airbus to finish assembly of the planes for American customers as a US-based Airbus factory as a way to get around the tariffs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...

You're right -- but Boeing provoked Bombardier into "dumping" its aircraft by offering that 70% discount!

Do you have any links? Because if true that was a clever tactic, dump your own products to force the competitor to price dump too and then sue them for price dumping.

See The Economist cartoon for this week: https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2019/04/13/kal...

A slightly different event, but when Embraer accused Bombardier of being illegally subsidized by the Canadian government, Bombardier said "no u" and made the same accusations against Embraer. IIRC both companies ended up getting fined

Wasn't Embraer bought by Boeing?

Boeing has a marketing partnership w/ Embraer, but may have a hard time getting the Brazillian government to let go of it.

Not yet.

> then sue them for price dumping

you don't think Boeing has a few attorneys on staff providing legal review for its business decisions?

A new type rating wouldn't be punishment, but the bare minimum of common sense. It only seems like it would be unreasonably onerous for Boeing (et al) because Boeing set themselves in this position to call the FAA's bluff TBTF-style.

What should really happen, in the free market creative destruction paradigm, is that the entire design should be scrapped - designated as non-airworthy by the FAA. Since the design goals seem to have revolved around hacking FAA regulations, as opposed to good faith engineering, how can any of the results be trusted?

A reasonable pick-up-the-pieces approach would see the MAX grounded for a minimum of three years for an overall design review with no getting out of a new type cert, with production halted in case hardware changes are needed.

But what's reasonable can never happen politically, because Airbus, headquartered in that entirely non-allied and utterly foreign country France, would benefit. Mon Dieu!

Which is the general setup for Too Big Too Fail - ignore regulations/prudence, skim profit short term profits, and then make sure it is everyone's problem when the sham inevitably blows up. The Boeing executives that forewent actually designing a modern plane are the ones responsible for not having kept up with Airbus, and should frankly end up in prison for mismanaging a TBTF (ie quasi-government) entity.

The E175 is even better than a 787 in 9 seat configuration. It’s a superior experience in economy, and I hope every 737 and CRJ is replaced by it.

I was blown away when I experienced it. If you had an airline that could always put you on something better than a 737 and have a better cost structure... You'd put the other airlines out of business.

I'm surprised because I incorrectly assumed passenger comfort was mainly correlated with the mass of the aircraft. I.e. small planes get blown around more.

I've been in the Bombardiers, and they are as you said a surprisingly comfortable plane, much more so than the 737s.

I'm not sure it's fair to put Embraer in the same category, it is a much less comfortable plane, both in size and handling in my opinion.

How is the 737 obsolete?

The 737 predates the 747 and the Concorde, and both of those are out of passenger service.

The circular cross-section, for one thing, makes it like the old American cars that were huge on the outside and small on the inside. The only way you'll really understand this is ride on an modern plane such as the E175 or A220 -- you'll get that you hate to fly not because you hate to fly but you hate to fly on a 737 and never get to fly on anything else.

The overall design of the aircraft is not compatible with high-bypass engines. Thus they bolted MCAS onto it. Even there the 737 Max does not support the geared turbofans that are available for modern airliners and the A320. These are so quiet that it isn't that you hate living near an airport, it is that you hate living at an airport where 737s land.

Modern airplanes use fly-by-wire which reduces weight (sometimes dramatically because the size of the control surfaces can be reduced) and enables flight envelope protection (like MCAS) in a way that is a lot more rational and thought-through than MCAS.

An all-electric plane like the 787 might also improve air quality on the flight. I don't think small airplane competitors have this yet.

Boeing has used it's market power to suppress alternatives to the 737 so you will pay more for tickets, suffer in transit, have noisier airports, and have more global warming. The MCAS system was just one part of this scheme.

The 737 Max is a case of the "undercompetition and underinvestment" connected with secular stagnation; it is like how your internet service sucks...

Why is this downvoted? It is 100% true.

The 737 has the _fundamental_ problem of having wings very low to the ground during ground operations. Taller landing gear is not an option, in fact the 737-max has slightly-extending landing gear to resolve this issue. It is part of the reason the plane is called "max" - they maxed out things like ground clearance, fuselage length, wing chord, and other parameters.

Back to the low wings: there is no room for a large (quieter, more efficient) engine. In the earlier 737s, the engine was just as high as it could go, you could even see the cowling squished at the bottom. In the max, the larger engine is placed in front of the wing, which means that it sits much further forward than the airframe was designed for. Thus, MCAS was needed to have the plane "behave in flight like the old 737".

These are _fundamental_ issues that cannot be fixed on the current airframe. Just as the 2019 Ford Mustang chassis is better (stiffer, lighter, safer) than the 1964 Ford Mustang chassis, newer airframes resolve many of the issues that were not designed into their 1960's counterparts.

> Taller landing gear is not an option

Why?

Because the plane wasn't designed that way in the 1960s, that's why. They can't change it without designing a different chassis, which means it's a different plane and a whole new type rating that pilots have to be trained for and certified on.

Nowhere to stow it.

747 is out of domestic passenger service in the U.S. but it's definitely still used a ton for international passenger service including to/from the U.S.

It's really old, and the main problem is that it's avionics are old, and don't have the same level of electromechanical flexibility that new planes.

Think of the difference between slapping IoT / real-time monitoring capabilities onto an old factory process versus building from the ground up with those capabilities kept in mind.

Obsoletion happens when there is a better alternative available, and there are plenty of better options to the aging 737 airframe.

> It's really old

The design has been iterated and improved many times. The field of aviation is very conservative. What's old is generally what works. New designs are prohibitively expensive. The 787 won't be profitable for some time, even a decade after it was launched.

> it's avionics are old

They're brand new. Where do you think they get them for brand new planes ?

>versus building from the ground up with those capabilities kept in mind.

They have done that, just the other way around: the avionics are built from the ground up with the capabilities of the well-understood (at least before -Max) aircraft in mind.

> > it's avionics are old

> They're brand new. Where do you think they get them for brand new planes ?

I have some industry experience- there are still new planes that get large, ugly beige Honeywell units in them that're slow and clunky while there are much better avionics packages available. The Honeywell packages are generally pretty newly built, but are still really old. The Raspberry Pi Foundation still sells the original Raspberry Pi, even though they've gone through 3 different generations and like 6 iterations since. The original Raspberry Pi is old, no matter when it was manufactured. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ is new, and has more features and power. Sure, they have similar names and functionality, but there is a world of difference between the two.

Imagine that you've designed a product around the original Raspberry Pi. The projects needs include GPIO, internet connectivity, and video output. The expectations have been trimmed appropriately to fit within the hardware available. Custom PCB's have been made for the Pi to socket into, and there's a standardized system in place for testing the Pi.

Later on, you decide that you want to replace the old Pi with a new one. Compared to the current Pi, the old one has less GPIO, less processing power, a weaker GPU, lamer internet, and less IO- and, although you can just drop in the new Pi with an adapter cable, you're still missing out on all the pins, and your code isn't exploiting all the available resources.

This "not everything gets updated" cycle has serious compounding effects the longer you go. After a few decades of Raspberry Pi releases, your product is a little bit antique, and needs some serious updating to be able to compete in the now-mature product category that you were in. Not starting over and working from the ground up has serious knock-on effects in the future, (for instance, the 737's wings were way too low, which is not future-proof for bigger engines).

This isn't just about avionics, either. It's about every single part of the airplane.

I don't see how anything is wrong with "large, ugly beige" electronics. 737's fly everyday just fine. What benefits are they going to get from sleek, thin Jony Ive-inspired UX? Are they going to get to destinations faster? Are they going to have a smoother ride? What product requirements could possibly change that would necessitate upgrading the avionics?

All these high-tech upgrades have downsides. Fiber optic is very slow to be adopted in aviation because movement generally destroys it. those fancy HUD obscure the runway and lighting. AIRDRU's malfunction, sometimes spectacularly [1]. Sometimes they kill people when working exactly as designed [2]. I'm not surprised to see a fetish for the fastest, sleekest electronics on Hacker News, but I'm shocked to suddenly see such sharp criticism for the '37 on here (aside from the Max issue). It's one of the most reliable and safe aircraft ever, yet somehow it needs the latest glass cockpit technology.

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/airlines/a26854898/p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296

Your original claim wasn't "how anything is wrong with" the electronics, but whether they were old or not. You're moving the goalposts.

If you look at it, Boeing has put improved technology in all of the other planes it makes, just not the 737. For instance they have retrofitted the 747 with fly-by-wire.

Fly-by-wire offers huge avionics benefits, reduces weight, fuel consumption, etc.

Planes with fly-by-wire also have inertial measurement units that contribute to envelope protection so they would have another input to work from rather than just the AoA vanes.

the A220 is really meant to be an DC-9 Series 80/90/95 (MD-80, MD-90, MD-95/717) replacement, and doesnt match the 737max in either range or capacity.

Yes it is smaller, so airlines can run more frequent flights. The range is not so good, but there an awful lot of flights the 737 flies that don't go to the full range.

>The software fixes as described sound sensible and it's hard to believe they were not in the original design

Without the benefit of hind sight it's not obvious that it's a better decision. MCAS being turned off changes the flight characteristics of the plane. If you do that silently you might run into a situation where an aircraft stalls because a pilot is used to having MCAS correcting their input.

If both aggressive MCAS is unsafe because pilots can't control the plane and nonaggressive MCAS is unsafe because of stall risk that would seem to imply that 737 MAX should not be certified to fly.

An always-on system designed to always override the pilot should be at least as reliable as the control system used by the pilot. Because the 737MAX is supposedly flies like a 737, and because authorities signed off on this without mandating pilot training, this means this system needs to be as reliable as it can - to maintain the illusion.

And basically everyone knows that there are some subfields of software engineering where safety is critical. From nuclear reactor/warhead control to healthcare devices, and somewhere right in the middle there should be aviation, and other transportation industry related software (train signaling, braking systems, self-driving whatevers, and so on).

And we have Boeing, acting worse than Uber (when they put someone into a Tesla to watch it self-drive without hooking that someone up on intravenous Modafinil).

Do the proposed fixes do it silently?

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