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Comment by wolfgke | Hacker News Reader

> I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.

Can't you also plausibly in a similar spirit argue for the point that the regulations about retraining pilots were responsible for the 737 MAX disaster? Otherwise Boeing would not have made such crazy engineering decisions about its design.

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The regulations here are generally sane - the retraining requirement for a new plane is an unavoidable necessity.

Boeing tried to game the regulations, and because of cuts the regulator didn't have the manpower to catch them.

Classic "starve the beast" - cut funding to government so it fucks up, then claim government is incompetent and so should be smaller.

Plus, studies by even Boeing themselves after the fact showed that retraining caught the problem, further cementing that retraining is a good thing. Had more pilots retrained specifically for the 737 MAX (rather than on older 737 simulators or test flight 737 vehicles that airlines had lying around from earlier models), a larger alarm would have been rang before problems were experienced in the wild at the worst possible time (when people's lives are endangered).

What do you mean regulations about retraining pilots? Any time you change airframe you generally have to retrain, and it really isn't that big of a deal, just an expense. My father-in-law retrained from the MD-11 to the 777 a few years back at over 60 years old and did completely fine. The regulation to retrain on a new plane is absoloutely reaonable and it was boeing trying to pretend the MAX was similar enough to the next gen that caused the issue. In terms of inherent flight characteristics it never was similar, and no amount of software could make up for that.

You can do it, but it's not cheap for the airlines to retrain pilots. Adding another type of aircraft to an existing fleet is also expensive, because it's difficult to maintain currency on multiple aircraft types. This means that you can't swap crews between flights and you need to maintain more reserve crews. This is one of the reasons Southwest only flies 737s -- they never need to retrain for another aircraft type, they can swap any crew for any other crew, and they only need reserves for one aircraft type.

The inherent flight characteristics of the 737MAX are very similar to the 737NG. The difference is only in abnormal, high AoA maneuvers, when the aircraft is being mishandled. MCAS was supposed to correct for this situation. Unfortunately the final MCAS design was highly failure prone and instead of protecting from an abnormal situation, it caused the plane to become uncontrollable.

> it was boeing trying to pretend the MAX was similar enough to the next gen that caused the issue.

The regulations lead to the situation that Boeing had an incentive to do that. Nearly every economist will confirm you that economy is all about incentives.

I think that is true, and I still think we should have those regulations. Companies in regulated markets area always incentivized to do bad things to skirt around those regulations. That doesn't make the regulations bad.

> Can't you also plausibly in a similar spirit argue for the point that the regulations about retraining pilots were responsible for the 737 MAX disaster?

I don't think that's a great argument, pilots needing to be trained/certified for a significantly different plane is a pretty sane regulation. Would you feel comfortable flying in a plane that the pilot was never trained on?

Also, I would argue that the ultimate cause of this disaster is that the Pilots were not adequately trained on how the MCAS system works. This only further supports this kind of regulation being important.

As an outsider, it seems like regulation led them (or the airlines really) down a path of avoiding retraining at all costs, while it seems plausible that some sort of cost effective retraining for a plane that still was substantially similar to predecessors should have been possible.

This only works if the assumption is that it would be equally safe for pilots to operate a new plane without training. I'm not willing to fly under that assumption.

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