Boeing Weighs Cutting or Halting 737 Max Production
wsj.com
wsj.com
There's been no further guidance so far on what we'll do when the 737 Max is back in service, but the message was clear: the safety and comfort of the employee is worth a $200 change fee, compared to being forced onto a plane that the employee feels is unsafe. I've never heard that mentioned for any other plane. As much as air travel has sucked this summer with cancelations and delays caused by the grounding of this plane, I don't foresee that model having much luck if/when it's put into full service.
but none quite like this one.
https://www.thejournal.ie/us-ireland-boeing-4538567-Mar2019/
It was appropriate, I think, for the FAA not to ground the fleet after the first crash. It was also arguably appropriate for the FAA not to ground the fleet immediately after the second crash, but then after some time when it became apparent that the failure mode was sufficiently similar (as they did).
However, what has emerged since then certainly damaged the reputation of the FAA. But it was not a matter of a few hours, it was a matter of careful investigation and evaluation over months.
If true, that would indicate these pilot reports were not given the full scrutiny that they deserved.
Sure, those things take time, but a more decisive action should have been taken sooner.
It might not justify a full ground but at least it should have justified a very strongly worded Advisory Notice to pilots (not sure of the specific nomenclature for this document) also the AOA disagree light should have been made default ASAP.
So no, FAA has a lot to blame here.
"Peter Defazio, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said an FAA analysis following the Lion Air accident but before the Ethiopian Airlines crash concluded there would be 15 fatal MAX accidents if there was no fix to MCAS. DeFazio asked Dickson why wasn’t airplane grounded then? He did not have an answer."
https://leehamnews.com/2019/12/11/faa-no-max-certification-u... (I think the first report was in the WSJ, but that's behind a paywall)
The last one also happened in SEA and had some initial duelling finger pointing so it worked well as a PR gambit to be the first to block it.
Especially in the middle of a trade war involving product quality issues and Boeing is the closest thing to a US state run aircraft manufacturer. It’s always been a beacon of American protectionism well before the recent administration.
So basically there was a ton of political will potentially involved here.
Is the Boeing mistake really that bad, or is it because this is the first such aviation design mistake to happen in our post-2010 everyone-is-online world? Remember that the tails on 737s used to just...fall off back in the '90s.
For the record, I don't think the 737 MAX should have ever been cleared to fly with the current version of MCAS. But I can't help but believe that there had to be some boneheaded designs in the past that cost hundreds of lives that we just don't think about today.
In any case, I hope Boeing has learned from this and revised its engineering processes to go back to its previous prestigious roots. I also hope against hope that we will finally see some executives go to prison for approving this.
There have been plenty of others in the past that do not detract from the magnitude of this one.
Then the 737NG went on to have the best safety record of any plane ever. So while the MAX problem is pretty bad, and social media vastly complicates the PR angle, there is precedent for recovering from this. Certainly with as many MAXs as have been built there is enormous incentive to get it fixed. It's not realistic to expect them to scrap the planes.
They wanted this airframe to be able to do something it was never designed for. Instead of redesigning it from the ground up, which costs money both for development and for recertification, they tried to correct the problem in software.
They didn't want to have to retrain pilots, so they pretended nothing really changed, again through software.
And of course FAA testing is expensive, so instead the FAA blindly trusts Boeing.
So a plane that should have been more thoroughly redesigned, recertified, with pilots retrained, got none of those things in order to save costs, and the FAA just blindly trusts Boeing that it's okay. Boeing clearly betrayed that trust.
It's not just a single honest mistake, it's a policy that drove everything towards this mistake. I think that's why a lot of people are so upset.
My cynical view is that little will change in this era.
The MBA piece of it is why I'm cynical. "Ho-ho-hold on one second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it." --- C.J. Burke "Aliens"
The context is airbus has an advanced and fuel-economic model that was eating Boeing market share. Boeing decided to produce one more version of the 737 model - it fit the category and as a fuel-efficinet "drop-in replacement", it was very competitive but was rather aerodynamically unstable. So Boeing added a software system to compensate but didn't tell anyone, didn't make it dependent on redundant sensors and basically produced a plane where, once the facts were all out, it became obvious it could never fly again - not because it could never be made safe but because making safe would involve admitting how flagrantly you initially skirted safety. No one flies on the "once this was utterly unsafe but now we've fixed it" plane if they really have fixed it.
Everything about the plane was super advanced but cheap-as-could-be, including the software. But by that token, none of this seems the fault of "software culture", indeed, there's been no implication that the software was at fault in the crashes, just the total shitshow design package, which was indeed the fault of finance and management pushing this approach through.
It had two pitch sensors but each is paired with a single computer. There was an optional add on to use both sensors in some way but this is unreliable as well since you don’t know which is right. It was when the plane was flying with the failed sensor (every other time since only one sensor failed) that they ran into the problem.
At least from my readings of how you are supposed to build robust systems from unreliable parts, this is a terrible way to design a system.
See https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-c... for info on the sensors.
Search for Jim Gray and fault tolerance on how to build reliable systems from unreliable parts. You need redundant parts with voting (which implies more than 2 sensors and more than 2 computers), error detection, etc... Supposedly the Space Shuttle computer systems were designed right although much of the rest of the Shuttle wasn’t designed right.
The Boeing way relied on the pilots to compensate for mechanical or software failure. Unfortunately, they seemed to willingly choose to not inform pilots of MCAS and there seemed to be failure scenarios where recovery is difficult.
Lastly, I think it is part of the job of a software engineer to push back on requirements and designs that don't work even if it is a failure in the system. Falling back to built as spec'd isn't worth of being called engineering.
As far as we know the MCAS behaved exactly according to specifications. All of its flaws seem to be intentional (e.g. only using one AoA sensor, not being easy for the pilots to disable, not being explained to the pilots).
The DC-10 cargo door issue is probably the closest thing. Took two accidents, 346 fatalities and a House of Representatives investigation to get the flawed design fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_...
On the 737MAX crashes the single angle of attack indicator being used as input to the MCAS malfunctioned and in response the system set about repeatedly forcing the plane into a dive with no clear indication of why this was happening. Compounding this was the utter lack of training on the MCAS system, which wasn't even mentioned in the pilot manual or IPad-based training that was also used by US airlines.
There's a world of difference between these accidents.
Boeing bears a lot of responsibility but taking Boeing to task without taking a look at the system in which it operates seems short-sighted.
Common, successful marketing: If a brand is poisoned, distance yourself from the name & rebrand. At its extreme, it is used alongside phoenix company tactics.
It works, although a (likely minority) customer portion will keep their finger on the pulse.
I am not an industry insider but my understanding is the vast majority of the flying public simply does not matter. We are flying on the cheapest possible ticket. The people who do matter imo are those who are flying on a corporate account or better yet those who control a corporate account. If wealthy people refuse to fly on this death trap, I think airlines will listen.
This also means that once Boeing gets the 737-8200 (or whatever) approved for flight, it will be unnoticed for customers who won’t ever notice the difference between it and an 800 or an A320.
It may bring down the Boeing entirely, together with the operators who use Boeing aircraft. "If it's Boeing I am not going" can turn into a real thing, drastically reducing the occupancy of the flights. These businesses operate on thin margins, not being able to fill the aeroplanes may give rather short runways before their collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
However, Boeing did fix the problem, and the 737 went on to be one of the best selling airplanes in history.
This MCAS issue is eerily similar in that it has also resulted in two fatal crashes. But if history is any guide, the problems will be fixed, and the memory of MCAS and MAX issues will likely fade from the public as well.
I know a lot of people are now aware of this particular design flaw and I would put money on it being more generally known now then then.
The 80s and 90s were loaded with severe accidents where the NTSB was really giving the taxpayers their money’s worth since there would be a major accident almost every month and the agency had to create a new division to handle all the cases.
Most weren’t design issues like the MCAS and the 91’ rudder issue but faulty 3rd party parts, poor maintenance, unknown stresses on aging fleets, pilot issues, and on and on.
We are in an unprecedented age of aviation safety and the MCAS issue is a huge blow to that record, thus you’re hearing about it in this level because it is fresh in the news. Accidents were common place back then, so common that I’d wager the 91 crash wasn’t on peoples radars since they just accepted that aircraft crash frequently and to be honest the general public doesn’t know what a rudder is in the first place.
But today, a plane crashing due to an engineering failure is rare enough that it makes headlines that people don't forget easily
IDK, the Lockerbie and TWA crashes were all over the news for what seemed like years
Boeing better not loses one more plane due to design issues.
What arguments do you have that show that lots and lots of articles about about Boeings culture change are all wrong or insignificant (not a contributor to the Max's issues)?
I'm also not sure why you think a heuristic that uses amount of outrage as an inverse measure of the validity of an issue is a useful one. I would assume the connection is either non-existent or very weak, meaning you cannot infer anything useful about an issue from how much it is being discussed in the media and in public forums.
And yet, air travel today is far safer than it has ever been, the 737 non-withstanding. Considering air travel has increased by almost an order of magnitude since the heydays of engineering-run Boeing in the 60s, and fatalities have decreased by a similar factor, air travel today is about 70x safer than it was in the past.
Based on this data, any nostalgic theories of how safety today is being ruined by <x> are really hard to defend.
> And yet, air travel today is far safer than it has ever been, the 737 non-withstanding.
Boeing doesn’t get to take credit for all the advances in air safety in the past 40 years.
No, but they can certainly take credit for some of those advances.
The 787 is a suit-designed aircraft. Composite materials are not ready for prime time. They are a gamble that Boeing suits have made against passenger lives. If the bet pays out, the planes save a miniscule amount of fuel compared to planes made of traditional materials. If the bet does not pay out, people die.
Only a few months ago, we discovered more 737 problems. These were unrelated to MCAS. Instead, they affected the part that holds the wing to the fuselage:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/29/boeing...
Composites have been in use in crewed aerospace vehicles for ~55 years (or arguably >80 years).
Composite aircraft were developed in the early 1960s, although first use of composites goes back to the 1930s, and even the Space Shuttle developed in the 1970s made extensive use of composites... not just carbon fiber and kevlar, but also materials considered cutting edge today, like metal-matrix boron fiber and carbon-carbon.
The materials are perfectly ready, if you're willing to pay the cost of testing, analysis, and margin. It took just ~35 years to go from Wright Brothers and their wooden aircraft to all-aluminum pressurized airliners (and yeah, there were folks who were skeptical of aluminum at that time as well).
Given at least 50 years in extensive use, I can't see how waiting longer will help[0]. The alternative is permanent stasis.
[0]More analysis or more margin or more testing is an argument I could buy into, but not being "too early for prime time."
Wow, I didn't know the 787 was built with that in mind. Seriously, my dad has worked at Beechcraft since the 80s and he remembers when they tried that nonsense with the Starship. It's like no one remembers why the idea was scrapped beyond the initial costs (composites have to have aluminum weave to allow lightning strikes and static discharge dissipate through the wings otherwise it'll blow off said wing).
The fact that people smoke, drive while texting, drive drunk, don't exercise and so on, show that they don't really care about not dying. They just like to complain when dying is caused by somebody else.
Which is completely legitimate.
It's a fundamentally unstable airframe. The engines are too big and too far forward. They can't fix that without a major redesign of the fuselage to lengthen the landing gear. At which point it may better to simply design and build a whole new airplane.
The 737 MAX is not a 'fundamentally unstable airframe', though there are points in the flight envelope where it is close to becoming unstable. The definition of an unstable aircraft is when the center of pressure is forward of the center of gravity, a condition which never occurs in the 747 MAX flight envelope, though it comes perilously close to it in some edge cases.
As you correctly identify the engines being 'too big and too far forward' is a factor here, but the most important part of it is the extra lift created by the engine bodies, not the power of the engines themselves.
Full blown panic about Airbus' offerings had a lot to do with this faithful decision.
The first crash was a combination of greed, bad design decisions, rush to market and all that in combination with an FAA that was in Boeing's pocket.
The fact that they didn't immediately pulled the plane after the Lion Air crash and the second crash was nothing less than corporate mass murder for profit.
Now not to remove responsibility from them, ultimately they buckled under pressure and did the deed.
In the end the 737 MAX is largely a good design, just with one big fuckup.
There's also a certain irony that Boeing would have been able to push out a software update before the Ethiopian crash if the government was not shut down for a month over Dec 2018-Jan 2019.
If there had been no government shutdown, the Ethiopian Airlines crash might not have happened.
Boeing could itself grounded the airplanes without government intervention but corporate greed won.
Other governments are to blame ibdeed for relying on FAA certification instead of doing their own. I guess that won't happen again.
I've actually only mentioned it in two or maybe three comments over the last year.
Your operating from the benefit of hindsight. All the information about the Lion Air crash is out now, you can look at it and decide it should have been grounded. At the time it was not very clear what had happened and why and if it was issues with the pilots or the aircraft or both. Boeing had more information than the public, but not as much as came to light after the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
Also, Boeing does not actually have the authority to ground aircraft they make, they have to push the FAA to do it. The FAA will want to have a good reason, because if the FAA does something that needlessly costs the airline industry lots of money, people at the FAA loose their jobs.
So, its pretty much fuckups all around.
It should haven't been flown in the first place, as it breaks the rule of having a full-authority control system dependent on a single non-redundant sensor.
Boeing got approval for a limited-authority control system, and then modified it to be full-authority without redoing the paperwork. They KNOWINGLY LIED on the type certification documentation. If they wouldn't have lied the aircraft wouldn't have gotten of the ground in the first place.
> Boeing does not actually have the authority to ground aircraft
They do, it's called an Airworthiness Directive and a manufacturer can ask for it and FAA will comply. Even if the FAA is un-operative due to a US government shutdown, they could've notified EASA, CAA, etc. to prevent a knowingly-faulty plane from flying. They CHOSE to cover it.
> the FAA does something that needlessly costs the airline industry lots of money
Try to balance corporate greed vs safety, and it won't end well because lives of people some place far away don't have monetary value to FAA. Safety MUST be paramount in all aspects, trumping profit, because otherwise people will die.
What I read that shocked me was that Boeing was relying on a single angle of attack sensor at a time, with software rules that should have never flown. Such as: not tossing out obviously impossible angle of attack readings, doubling down on nose-down stall corrections, and not limiting MCAS to an input that ensured pilot controllability if the electric trim had to be disabled. (this may not have been possible, actually, in certain flight regimes)
The system pushed the plane into a regime where, from everything I have read, the aerodynamic forces were strong enough that manual pilot trimming (via a physical wheel near the control column) was not possible for a normal human, especially while the pilots were experiencing negative G's from such a strong nose-down trim. The flight log information I could find showed a very difficult cockpit situation. Enabling electric trim (and MCAS) shoved the nose downward, but also allowed some level of trim correction by the pilots that they could not achieve with the trim wheel. Stick forces were also enormous on the elevator, having to pull back over 50lbs if my memory serves.
Imagine yanking back with all your might while fiddling with secondary controls that also required enormous force to move, while the plane is forcing you up and out of your seat, against the seatbelt. This is where any cockpit communication issues between the two pilots would be severely complicating.
That Boeing released this with such flaws, and the FAA accepted it, seems quite damning to Boeing and the FAA. This is something that I can imagine technical leadership and management at Boeing would know about and should have caught and stopped much earlier in the process.
The position of the engines causes the plane to pitch up more significantly when power is added. This is not necessarily bad, but it's different enough from the 737 NG that it would have required retraining pilots. MCAS was designed to remove the need for retraining, by using software to make the MAX act like the NG.
If everyone would have simply accepted that pilots needed to be retrained for the 737 MAX, MCAS wouldn't have been developed and those planes wouldn't have crashed.
Now, if you’re going to make a clean sheet design and allow a new type rating, you can change the landing gear and wing design to achieve enough room to set the engines farther back and change the airfoil around them to design a plane that meets 25.173. Boeing already has such a plane: the 757.
You don't spend billions of dollars developing a product that wont sell... unless your Airbus with the A380.
The 737 Max can't be fixed. The engine location unbalances the plane. Full stop. Huge changes to the entire plane must be made to fix that. Software fixes are bandaids and any time the software either fails to activate when it should, or activates when it should not, people die. Unless you think software is 100% infallible, this plane is going to be much less safe than it could have been, forever, unfixably.
Though I am absolutely certain that all the sleazy airlines (or perhaps Boeing) will soon begin a rebranding project, changing the name to something that people will not immediately recognize.
IIRC I read that they've already done that for the airplanes that are being delivered since the grounding.
The OP is referring to several Max that had their paint changed to remove "737 MAX" and replace it with "737 8200" (see link to RyanAir example in sibling).[2]
1 - https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20190709&t=2...
2 - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/15/boeing-737-...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/15/boeing-737-...
However, it's been evident from the beginning this is a fundamental design flaw that Boeing was trying to, inappropriately, use software to make work. Something no software would be capable of doing because software could not make up for the lack of necessary information in the case of certain sensors failing.
Instead they checked just one and come what may sent the plane to hell based on that one sensor read-out.
Two sensors are sufficient to prevent false positives, but three or more are necessary to mitigate false negatives.
If the MAX is really so easy to stall that it needs a computer system to prevent stalls, then that system should be robust enough to survive a sensor out.
There was never any risk of stalling.
MCAS was added solely so that the 737 MAX 8 could share a type rating with the previous members of the 737 family. This is what allowed Airlines to put pilots on this plane without any significant new training.
Please stop perpetuating urban myths.
Here, listen to a guy who actually know what he's talking about describing the overall situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btZXVPfh-pE
The desire for a common type rating is an explanation for why the FAA rule was violated without MCAS.
The origin of this noise is sensationalist news coverage and misinterpretation of FAA rules. I expect a higher standard on HN than perpetuating myths. You guys are like the flat earthers of aviation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
As Juan points out in either that or another video, the 767 has a stronger pitch-up characteristic and yet doesn't have MCAS and doesn't fall out of the sky from stalls.
Another myth and piece of sensationalist news bullshit is that Boeing made a safety feature that would have prevented the accidents optional. The safety feature in question was AOE Disagree Indicator. The reason it was optional is because AOA doesn't mean anything to civilian pilots and the option only made sense for airlines who hire ex-militaray pilots who can actually read the AOA indicator and make sense of it.
People died because Boeing was playing with emulators in real life?
Boeing got very greedy and multiple failures have occurred along the way. MCAS on passenger planes is not unheard of, and has been implemented for various reasons before including shared type ratings. It was just never botched across the board this badly before.
The biggest failure as parent comment correctly notes, is MCAS was given significantly more control authority than originally planned after flight testing showed it was ineffective as per the original design. But this change in control authority didn't trigger a review process which would have reclassified it from non-critical to critical system.
Note that last piece: "intended to [...] meet a certain certification requirement". So yes, part of the intention of MCAS is to meet the certification requirements. It's a bit downplayed in the text, but is very important nevertheless: the certification requirements MUST be met (MUST in the sense of the Internet RFCs). Modelling the behavior of previous models is a sufficient condition for that, and is what Boeing was trying to do anyways, but is not critical. Complying to the certification requirements is critical.
Do you have a source for that because as far is I can see it is rubbish.
Military pilots are probably more familiar with AoA as early swept wing aircraft needed to be flown with careful attention to it. However several civilian accident investigations have suggested an AoA indicator as a potential mitigation. It's not exactly like reading tea leaves, if you keep the value below 15 or so degrees the wing is flying. Much above that it won't be.
They are also used to good effect by backcountry private pilots who need to extract maximum performance from their aircraft.
It felt weird, usually these companies wait for a good initial investigation, take some pressure and then start spreading their message through more discreet channels.
The former is understandable. The latter is far more worrying.
Disclosure: I was a Boeing employee in the early 90s, and wrote software to control test systems that exercised electronic subsystems. The subsystems were supplied by vendors, and in some cases some of the test hardware too.
Disclaimer: I know nothing.
This is just another effort to pressure politicians and regulators to get the Max back in service.
It also shows yet again the sad state of media. This almost reads as a Boeing press release, lacking any reflection or substantial commentary.
Regardless of how they're trying to address the issue, the whole idea of not installing redundant AoA sensors as the default base option was a manufacturing, engineering, and management problem in my book.
But that would ‘never fly’. So we will get a software-upgraded, mandatory “training” aircraft where pilots will have to be on full-alert every second of the flight, it will somewhere crash again and pilots faulted for being “trained but not paying enough attention” and there’s that.
The quoted statement is highly speculative, but it's a good indication of why supposedly reputable news outlets and others in positions of societal authority seem to be hand-waving away the seriousness of the entire issue.
Planes have fallen out of the sky, and civilians were killed. These planes should never fly again, regardless of whatever random macro-economy professor says.
Of course, they would have to replace this with something, either previous specced 737s, a new spec 737, or a new plane. While they are developing that market share will fly to Europe and possibly China.
Not defending Boeing's behavior, just noting that the grounding of the MAX indeed materially affected GDP.
It's a much harder sell when the product in question is an aircraft. If Chipotle is wrong, I get food poisoning. If Boeing is wrong, I get to learn what it feels like to be in a plane falling out of the sky.
Killing off the 737 Max seems awfully expensive.
For a more traditional business, I would guess that the failed product would be fixed, renamed, and then released as something brand new. I'm not sure if that's possible in the aerospace industry, but I'm curious to see what Boeing does here.
Many more people eat meals each day, than fly in a plane.
What kind of plane crashes are there where you have a good chance of surviving? I'd have guessed the only ones where everyone survives are where they run off the runway at half speed and bump around a bit on an empty field of grass.
Surely if something happens in mid air and you're not able to make it back to a runway and actually land the plane your odds would be complete shite (<5%?)
"From 1983 through 2000, NTSB investigated 26 accidents involving fire, serious injury and either substantial aircraft damage or aircraft destruction. There were 2,739 occupants involved in these serious accidents; 1,524 (55.6 percent) of the occupants survived the accident, 716 (26.1 percent) of the occupants died from impact, 340 (12.4 percent) died from unknown causes, 12 131 (4.8 percent) died from fire/smoke, and 28 (1.0 percent) died from other causes."
Of course, that is extrapolating from the small number of flights and deaths that occurred. I don't think the sample is statistically significant enough to compare with cars... but the eggs are on a quite safe territory.
The original 737 is a fine 60's design. It is long past time for the industry to break out the capital crowbar and pry some funds from the industry tuches to support some evolution. As the cost of that appears in ticket prices people will have to think harder before obligating themselves to bounce around the world. I care not.
Also in Airbus the computer tells you what is wrong and in the 737-max you get an error code that you need to look up in a book. All to make sure pilots need as little additional training.
Of interest the P-8 Poseidon has EICAS but none of the other 737s do.
Edit: not to lessen any of the other points you made - this absolutely should have gone through approval as a new model.
You just put designing an entirely new airplane in a parenthetical. New landing gear means modifications to the wing. Modifying the wing isn't much less work than just designing a new one. By the time you've designed a brand new wing, you've 75% of the way to a new clean sheet design anyway.
For some value of 'completely new.' The design isn't new. A new design would accommodate modern, large diameter high by-pass turbo fans without compromising pitch behavior. The 737 was designed to be powered by much smaller diameter low-bypass engines that prevailed in the 60's.
Also, the cockpit is deliberately designed not to require changes in training; the now ancient controls and instruments are significant contributors to the 737 MAX problems.
I used the term 'design' several times because I do indeed understand there is much new in the 737 MAX, but the fundamental design is obsolescent.
The fact that it doesn't look like a new aircraft and that Boeing did what they could to make it look like a 737 has as much to do with the customer demands and the regulatory hoops they were trying to jump through without re-certifying it as a new aircraft.
Now, if they had done a complete redesign from the ground up without these restrictions then it would have no doubt been a better plane in many ways, but it would not have sold so fast in these numbers, which for Boeing was very important. So think of it as a 'new plane trying to masquerade as an old one' and you're pretty close to where it's at.
More important than maintaining its reputation for safe designs, apparently.
This is covered ground. They whys and wherefores of how Boeing ended up ruining its track record are well understood. My point -- my only point -- is that I hope the halt of 737 MAX they are now being made to contemplate ultimately carries over to the rest of the 737 family, and I've seen nothing that dissuades me from that hope.
I'll add that if the Boeing business model (and the airlines etc.) is not viable without forever reworking an obsolescent 50+ year old product then perhaps the thing that really needs rework is the business itself. Keeping dysfunctional bubbles inflated is the source of some of the greatest evils.
The 'obsolescent 50+ year old product' ended up serving the market better than some much more recent designs. The whole reason the industry moves slowly is because they want to play it safe, if they end up not doing that than they might as well 'go ahead and break stuff' but I really hope that they will be able to regroup and do it right the next time around because Airbus needs the competition as much as Boeing does.
I'm pretty curious what would satisfy you in terms of a modern day business model for aircraft manufacturers and airlines, so if you would care to write out your thoughts I would definitely be grateful.
A little competition would go a long way. This market is wholley owned by two company oligopoly that employs the sons and daughters and sons-in-laws and daughters-in-laws of the senators and chairmen and vice-chairmen and acting-deputy-vice-chairpersons directly or indirectly through their boards and law firms and non-profit chairmanships and god knows what else, so the regulatory capture you mention is a metaphysical certitude. I know of two remaining solutions; a GULAG system or competition. The former is worse than the problem so I dream of the latter. War use to serve as a means to break these ice jams, but that's pretty much obviated today given nukes.
BTW, this view applies to far more than aircraft manufacturers and operators. Pretty much every damn 'problem' you can name in the modern world is a consequence of the same structural dysfunction.
That's the best I can afford to do with my time.
If a company would book a ticket for me at one of these I would rather get fired or quit my job rather than board a MAX plane.
Never ever, am I going to travel with this model and I will be highly suspicious for future models they produce.
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2019-02-26-Boeing-Nominates-Nik...
Boeing doesn't have $50B cash, or anything close to it.
There are 393 delivered to customers at this time and another 300 produced. The unit cost ranges from 100M to 130M. The cost of all units is aprox 80 billion dollars whereas their annual earnings are about 8 billion. They have aprox 9 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Scrapping all maxes would therefore require them to borrow 9-10 years worth of earnings. I predict they find a way to kill more people before cratering and being bailed out on all our dimes. We should just order them scrapped now and buy the pieces after the company becomes insolvent and skip the dead people but if this happened now we would probably end up with Jared Kushner running Boeing.
Maybe they made their own bed then... A major shake up would lead to restructuring within the aerospace industry and new competitors would spring up. The company would likely be majorly downsized but wouldn't go out of existence. Taxpayers shouldn't be liable just because they made a catastrophic miscalculation and built a fatally flawed aircraft.
You either come clean and bankrupt the company, or move forward and try to make the defective thing work asap, which is sort of what they did.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but clearly having the only incentive being the morality of those involved willing to risk their livelihood is not the solution.
I would not know of a quicker way to ensure that Boeing really would end as a company.
Also, creating a replacement would take at least 10 years. Any attempt to rush this has the risk of creating a much larger disaster than fixing MCAS. With MCAS, there is a defective software (which can and is being fixed) on a well-known and reliable airframe. With a new plane, you start from scratch in every aspect.
Yes, Boeing should start a successor of the 737 on full steam, but stopping the 737 doesn't sound like a good idea.
Firing them all is a no-brainier, but they need to be replaced with competent ones willing to take the reigns of a slowly but surely nose diving plane on fire.
Unfortunately the cancer spread to lower levels of the company too, so it's no easy to turn this around and tragically politics and geopolitics it's what will "saved" them for now but I'm almost sure it's a pack with the devil and they'll pay dearly for it.
Maybe they could help their PR if they made it actually comfortable to fly in. I was avoiding it before the grounding because it sounds like a sardine can they want to use for 5 hour flights like LAX-DCA.
https://thepointsguy.com/news/cruel-and-unusual-aa-puts-pann...
But none of the executives are going to prison right? That's what should actually happen. They deliberately and systematically short-changed the engineering in order to make more money, to the point where hundreds of people died.
For the rest of us, no big deal. Airbus will happily take up the slack.
Clearly Boeing has a company culture issue, not a 737 issue. Well both I suppose.
There should 100% be a prison sentence for the decision makers that OK'd that move. That's negligence to the highest degree.
Will that happen? No, thus a new(ish) and now chronic distrust of the company and the decision that it makes.
Once you have a bad culture established in an organization it's very hard to turn that around absent a rather drastic purging of employees at multiple levels combined with a very pro-active new management that not only talks about the necessary new culture but also actively implements the incentives required to enforce such a culture.
Personally I've had to deal with cultural turn around efforts at companies in the past (albeit nowhere near the scale of Boeing) and over time I learned that the only reliable way to address such a situation is to purge with fire and bring in new people.
You're thinking of the de Havilland Comet (or possibly the aircraft manufacturer Convair).
And, can you document it rather than just claim it?
GM's choice to recommend lower inflation pressures for the tires vs installing an anti-sway bar for the first gen cars with swing axle rear suspension (2nd gen was IRS) was rather stupid but it's nothing compared to the 737 MAX.
It's not rocket science.
(sorry)