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Comment by borkt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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