Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes
cnn.com
cnn.com
That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
Yeah you will. Good luck selectively avoiding the most popular international route plane. Historically, people have been very quick to forget mishaps with particular airframes and revert to flying the most convenient/economical routes.
And by the time it's flying again, it will be hands down the safest plane that's being operated because every minute detail of it will have been checked with far more scrutiny than any other newly launched platform.
The force MCAS is correcting is a lightening of control forces near a stall. This is not allowed per FARs, so they added MCAS to force some extra force.
It will fly just fine with the computers turned off.
If the airframe is truly unsafe, then it'll never fly again. But everyone knows it will. Because it isn't.
The only thing that'll happen is the max 8 will probably require a new type rating which will hurt airline economy a bit. Other than that, you'll be flying in it a year from now and have forgotten all about this.
I think it's fairly unlikely that there's some other massively dangerous failure mode of the 737MAX, because the fleet has flown enough hours, and the only crashes have been the result of the MCAS. When that's fixed, it's quite possible that there are other gremlins that cause crashes, but they probably will be much less severe/likely than the MCAS problem.
Crucially, in order for this concept to work, the two sides are supposed to be totally independent -- the computers are different, the displays are different, and the sensors are different. However, at any one time, only one FCC is active, in that it is actually controlling the plane. Comparing the two sides AoA now violates this assumption and so many of the other engineering and certification assumptions may be violated since now the two FCCs are sharing AoA inputs.
Furthermore, my understanding is that now that everything is being looked at more closely, the FAA is having a change of heart about the idea of having one FCC active at a time being acceptable. If there is a hardware fault in the FCC, it has a lot of authority to cause problems, possibly faster than the crew can resolve them. My understanding is that now the FAA wants the FCCs to cross-check each other. Making this happen will require a lot of engineering and testing, and I think that this is the big reason for the delay. The MCAS fix itself was flight tested way back in April and May of last year.
All of that said, I don't believe an FCC fault has ever been implicated in an accident, so this IMO doesn't really present a safety issue big enough to be relevant to say, my decision of whether to fly on a 737MAX, but it looks like the FAA is deeming it not adequate for certification.
Airbus of course uses a different philosophy and uses multiple FCCs that continuously compare their output and vote.
No they're still rolling off the line for the military Poseidon and Wedgetail programs
They referred to the cable business as "Comcast Cable" for a while before rebranding it to Xfinity. The public rebranding was definitely intentional, but it wasn't the only reason behind it.
... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our neighborhood... ;-)
My view is that the indication is how a company treats you when you leave versus when you arrive and, at least this once, Comcast did well on both.
Aside from that my 300Mbps service frequently tops out at 30Mbps, seemingly whenever I want to download something large. The upstream bandwidth they offer is also abysmal.
Without that people tend to keep using the old name for a long time. People still call the Willis tower the sears tower and that change happened 11 years ago.
Edit: It says in the article
> The assembly line in Renton, Washington, has stopped building Boeing's bestselling plane, the company confirmed late Monday. Boeing announced plans to temporarily halt production for an undetermined period in December, but it had not previously announced a precise day for the shutdown.
Boeing made a lot of executives super rich with buybacks and equity compensation, this led directly to the shoddy engineering choices.
But this would require boards and executives who didn't want to just grant themselves huge amounts of equity while buying back stock. So far not many boards are standing up for this.
This news story is about Boeing, so yes I'm going to talk about Boeing here.
Do you work in defense or aerospace? You seem to be taking this personally for some reason.
First, if you think Airbus is any better, you should think again.
Second, what do you mean by "all modern Boeing planes"? If you just mean "planes designed after the merger with McDonnell Douglas", that's just the 787 and the 737 Max. The latter is grounded and the former only flies select long haul routes. For the average US business traveler they're a non-issue.
Even the best airframe will go down if poorly maintained or their pilots aren't experienced and properly rotated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_...
It seems to have continued on for several years, though ultimate its poor safety record seems to have been a factor in its discontinuation.
I guess people in general rely on the government agencies to do this decision for us..
Neither had I, until I took a Tupolev jet between Moscow and India. I then decided I would never fly another aircraft that wasn't certified to fly in American and European airspaces. The reason for this was that I had trust in the FAA's and European aviation authory's standards and integrity. That trust has been greatly eroded (particularly with the FAA) for me.
Having money/status to travel doesn't == intelligence, unfortunately.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/boeing-doesnt-expect-regulat...
Self admittedly, I don't fly as frequently as I used to, but do they still put the model of plane you're flying on anywhere on the ticket?
How can someone go about making sure you're not flying on this specific model?
The major users from North American airlines are Southwest (34 planes), Air Canada (24), American (24), United (14), and Aeromexico (6), so it's not super common here at least.
If I can see the plane type in the list of available flights, and the difference is $15 on a $250 ticket I would choose the non Max flight, all else being equal.
Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi
737 Max -> ?
Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.
> Most of the flaws in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors were corrected after the Chernobyl accident and a dozen reactors have since been operating without any serious incidents for over twenty years. [99]
Including 3 remaining reactors of Chernobyl Power Plant itself.
The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe and added a bunch of software to try to make it fly exactly like second generation 737s so that pilots didn't need to retrain. But the abstraction was leaky and it turns out that when you have a different airframe, you have to retrain your pilots.
That said, Boeing did some janky stuff to get this nonsense certified by the FAA and the whole design probably needs to be recertified, which will take years.
You've got it backwards. The problem was that they used the same airframe with larger engines that had to be mounted differently due to ground clearance issues.
Anyhow, the point is that scrutinizing a bad architecture doesn't make it any better. Scrutinizing a chicken won't make it an eagle.
With that in mind, yeah, Windows ME sounds like a pretty great analogy.
The MCAS has an issue with redundant AOA sensors; that specifically needs to be fixed. The MCAS caused problems on other flights, but the pilots knew to disable it by flipping the circuit breaker. The pilots on the crashed planes did not know to disable it. That is a training issue.
Fix the redundant AOA and provide training to disable the MCAS, and it will be fine.
[1] An IMHO stupidly obfuscated way of saying that the cooling water around the reactor was an unpressurized pool that would boil if it got hot. Low-density bubbles of steam absorb fewer neutrons than liquid water, so when it boils the core gets hotter, not cooler.
There are many exactly same reactors as was in Chernobyl fixed and running still:
> Most of the flaws in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors were corrected after the Chernobyl accident and a dozen reactors have since been operating without any serious incidents for over twenty years.
Even Chernobyl itself had 3 remaining reactors working for many years after the disaster, last decommissioned in 2000.
Interesting maybe could have been fixed with software. I am thinking of Reactor Characteristics Augmentation System, or RCAS.
Also, Chernobyl exploded because they pressed the halt button at a very bad time. This also sounds like something that can be fixed in software.
Ten plants of same design are still operational today.
All the rest—dodgy sensors, crappy software kludge, no pilot retraining—is hacks laid on top of that initial flaw just to pretend it isn’t there. A lot of us here build complex systems for a living; if that isn’t a “smell”, what is?
(Aerodynamically unstable design is a thing, btw, e.g. Typhoon. But that’s Military, which can afford fly-by-wire software that works.)
A stable design might’ve lifted the airframe further from the ground to give those huge engines the clearance they need under the wing, keeping them to the COG and thus ensuring the plane continues to fly naturally level as per its original design. (Any air geeks want to check me on that?)
But obviously that would’ve cost more, and now Boeing’s run by short-term profit chasers, not adult engineers, the attitude is “What can we get away with?”, not “What do we need to build?” That alone’s reason not to trust their bloody product any more. Not least cos what else might they be tempted to cut corners on?
I mean, a shitty iPhone will screw up your day; a shitty Boeing will screw up the rest of your life.
This is why Corporate Manslaughter laws should include hanging the Board by its heels.
Not that any plane flies perfectly level at all speeds, which is why they need trim in the first place. But presumably there’s a “sweet spot” which the original 737 was designed to nail in normal flight, which subsequent revisions have moved further and further away from.
At some point you really need an adult in the room to stand up and declare “no more”. But by accounts McDonnell-Douglas already showed all the grown-ups the door. That’s the nice thing about responsibility: just disseminate it enough, and no-one’s to blame.
The MCAS might have been okay if the behavior matched initial expectations.
On the other hand I'm just a bystander in all this.
Mind you, my physics ed stopped after high school (though even that much is enough to do a double-take at MAX). This looks like a much better explanation:
https://www.quora.com/Where-should-the-center-of-mass-lift-a...
I know Bloomberg et al don’t appreciate my attempting to bypass their technical controls and cause undesired effects on their systems, and would likely file a criminal complaint.
Why is it legal for advertisers to write code which is meant to bypass a system control and exceed their authorization?
I think we need a browser that automates CFAA complaints to the FBI when a company engages in behavior that would be illegal for an individual — such as hacking your audio.
I believe at the point where a company writes code with the explicit purpose of bypassing your control of the computer, eg autoplaying a video despite technical measures being taken to prohibit that behavior, it constitutes a breach of the CFAA.
This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure.
The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this.
As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you).
Systems are usually to blame more than people are.
IDK, honestly. Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design.
I don't know about US companies, but I think most big enterprises have an internal whistleblower system, that can and should be used if unethical decisions are pushed down.
You can think all you want, but the system is larger and more complicated than you are. You might as well ask a gear to think about the engine.
The system has, in it, people who are smarter than you. You can’t hope to understand all the implications of incentives you create in a system.
> But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design.
I feel that a statement leading with “in the end” is too reductionist. These are complicated problems, and pointing fingers is too simple a tool to solve them.
The system is set up so that you can blame the people who hired child laborers, fire them, replace them, and still end up with the same child laborers making the same clothes in the same factory. Same with Boeing—no matter who you point fingers at with the 737 MAX, you can fire those people and rehire new ones but the disaster will happen again as long as the system encourages it.
Asset seizure and jail time work wonders, too bad they're not being used.
It's very easy to see that the wrong decision was made in this case, but this is just one of thousands (or more) that were made in this program; much less the company as a whole.
So while this was definitely bad, it's much simpler to say "this decision was bad and you shouldn't done this" than it is to say "you shouldn't make bad decisions"
…
>Banks that have already committed to contribute to the loan include Citigroup, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan…
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/20/737-max-crisis-boeing-seeks-...
It isn't just the monetary cost to re-calibrate machining and tooling, also the staff time and monetary cost to fill in gaps that appeared during the shutdown, both material and vendor relationships. And an abundantly clear lesson (as if the domain experts in sourcing shouldn't know this already) from the debacle is that outsourcing is not plug-and-play: there will be both product and relationship re-alignment and re-certification going on anywhere vendors are swapped out in the supply chain.
If Boeing was forward-looking, then they would bite the bullet and keep production going, but use the downtime to crawl through every aspect of production to look for and fix any quality and safety-related concerns on the line (including absolute bottom-up authority for production line escalating concerns through to engineering and design) and in the supply chain. It massively slows down the production, which is perfectly fine right now. It wouldn't matter if they slowed to 10% of normal output, if the deliverable was absolute confidence in what is built on that line; they should have started this a long time ago when the shutdown passed 90 days.
Even after the design is amended, planes modified, re-certification awarded by all the aviation agencies around the world, there will be a titanic push to run the line as fast as possible. And if they don't completely debug every piece of that line to an inch of its life, there will be guaranteed production quality problems when it restarts, and if those problems lead to more crashes, Boeing is getting bailed out by taxpayers and unalterably changed. Better to keep the line on "warm standby" while debugging it before the pressure is on.
Where would they put them? These things ain't small.
Airliners are expensive. The manufacturers do not build a large number speculatively and then find customers. They find customers, then build what has been ordered. They have enough storage space to serve as a buffer between output and delivery so that minor glitches on either don't affect the other.
Also because airliners are expensive, and they get paid on delivery not on order, once past the initial production current production is paid for from recent deliveries. If deliveries have to stop for an extended time, there is no money to fund more production.
They're tapping more debt and still plan on issuing dividends. Those dividends are likely going to be accompanied by equity buybacks. Those buybacks are measured in billions [1]. Carve out from the buyback funds what it costs to ensure quality where they can control it while waiting for clearance to reassure regulators, politicians and the general public, and tell the investors that it is either hold on with the team until quality is re-established within the culture, sell and come back later, or eventually zero out the investment because no one wants to buy from a plane manufacturer with suspect quality.
[1] https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/06/boeing-enhances-...
Is that training of no use because disabling MCAS would also need re-certification? Is the process of getting certification for a MCAS-free version roughly the same as getting the fixed version certified? Speculating way out my depth now: maybe it would still be worth it to pursue parallel certification to have the option of retraining when MCAS should be deemed uncertifiable.
I shorted BA for a few months based on many HN posts after the crashes, but covered my position after it seemed to stabilize at ~320. I think it will probably head lower, but as a general rule I try to find companies I believe in rather than companies I don’t.
It was a very interesting choice to maintain the dividend for now. I think they will have to revisit that and it will kick-off the next big swing downward.
Last week the WSJ reported [1] that they are in the process of raising a new $5 billion round. Now [2] the word on the street is they’re looking for $10 billion over 2 years - a “mid term” debt round, structured as a line they can draw on over several years - somehow this is supposed to limit the effect it will have on their debt rating. A significant Moody’s downgrade seems like it’s past due, and Moody’s recently announced they put BA “on review”. [3]
Their debt at the start of Q4 was $15 billion and then rose to $20 billion by the end of Q4. Back in 2018 it was closer to $12 billion. I wouldn’t be surprise to see it near $25 billion at the end of Q1.
Supposedly Boeing keeps about $10 billion in liquidity “available” but they’ve burned through that by now.
The “charges” they take against the MAX disaster which started at $5.6 billion could balloon as high as $20 billion as the ramifications continue to unfold. [4]
Lastly I would point out that over the last decade plus timeframe the FAA hollowed out as a regulatory agency into a box checker. Today they have as I understand it just ~750 total pilots and engineers on staff to review technical data from the plane manufacturers. The FAA said last year to do it themselves they would need 10,000 more. [5]
> “It would require roughly 10,000 more employees and another $1.8 billion for our certification office,” Elwell told the Senate subcommittee on aviation and space.
> The FAA Aircraft Certification Service had a budget of $239 million for fiscal 2019 and about 1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production.
I recall news articles claiming Congress recently approved significant new funding for the FAA, but looking at their budget [6] PDF page 37 it seems like “Regulation & Certification” remains level-funded at $1.3 billion the last three years.
A more recent report on the MAX specifically [7] said;
> The report said the FAA had just 45 people in an office overseeing Boeing's Organization Designation Authority (ODA) and its 1,500 employees.
...
> The FAA's office oveseeing Boeing has just 24 engineers and they face a wide range of tasks to ensure compliance in overseeing Boeing's 737, 747, 767, 777, and 787 programs.
> The review added there are only two technical FAA staff assigned per Boeing program and some are "new engineers with limited airworthiness experience."
The full report which this article is excerpting I believe is this one. [8] See specifically PDF Page 47 but put down any objects you might be prone to throwing before beginning to read.
I would imagine engineers qualified to actual critically review detailed 737 specifications aren’t unemployed and take a long time to hire. How long will it take the FAA to even staff up to the point where they can start doing their job if they are only just now getting the money to hire? Pundits saying they expected the 737 return-to-service to happen before New Years and now say it’s happening any day now I think don’t comprehend the massive gap between what the FAA used to do and what they are now tasked with doing, and that they literally don’t have the qualified people in-house to even start doing much of this work. All that assumes necessary funding has even been appropriated and there are the people and the culture in place to even do the work. Big IFs.
To me that points to a extremely delayed return to service as new engineers are hired and brought on to critically review documentation which used to be rubber stamped — let alone dealing with the actual software failures and faulty design specifications which straight up didn’t/don’t conform to modern safety standards.
In short, my prediction is that BA will inevitably have to suspend its dividend, it will take a charge upwards of $20 billion for the MAX, return to service will be extremely delayed beyond analysts wildest expectations, they will be downgraded by Moody’s and their debt load will increase to nearly $30 billion over the course of 2020 into 2021, and there is a remote chance of a debt squeeze, and the company declaring bankruptcy and having to restructure.
I don’t currently own any position in Boeing (other than through holdings in the S&P500) and do not plan on initiating any BA position in the next 72 hours. This is not investment advice.
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-considers-raising-debt-a...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/20/737-max-crisis-boeing-seeks-...
[3] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/boeings-debt-on-review-for...
[4] - https://apple.news/AcnxFGCurRfW3l1BNvzr6aw
[5] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/03/27/want-...
[6] - https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/miss...
[7] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-faa-certificat...
[8] - https://www.faa.gov/news/media/attachments/Final_JATR_Submit...
Not 10000 more pilots and engineers. 10000 more employees. Now they have "1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production."
This is the number he gave to answer what it would take to do the whole thing internally with no delegation whatsoever. Hard to say how of this number is just political grandstanding.
10,000 perhaps is too many, but 45 is too few.
Delegation seems to have steadily increased in scope since the 1930s. A brief and interesting history of Delegation from the FAA is here. [1] It has evolved over decades to become what it is today.
The specific concept of the ODA - Organization Designation Authorization — which is the program which delegates certification work to Boeing, didn’t exist until 2009. Last year Boeing had 1,500 people working internally in their ODA Compliance program, and there were just 45 people at the FAA BASOO (Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office).
Cost was one factor, but perhaps not the primary driver. Wanting to leverage private industry expertise is usually the reason cited. I don’t think it was downsizing necessarily as a cost control measure. It was downsized as a policy decision that delegating increasing amounts of the compliance work to industry was the right way to get the job done because that’s where the experts were.
In concept it’s almost reasonable. In practice they underestimated the degree to which Boeing could fuck up on the designs, overestimated the level of independent authority would vest in the ODAs to correct deficiencies, and I think eventually you lose “critical mass” back at home base (the FAA) and the ability to actually oversee the people doing the work.
I mean, the FAA Director went on record saying they would need to hire 10,000 people to fully staff this function. This to me indicates they have lost the critical mass required to perform the role even primarily as an outsourced effort.
Excerpting from PDF Page 13 of the JATR report;
> The BASOO is required to perform a certification function, including making findings of compliance of retained (non-delegated) requirements, while also performing the oversight function of the Boeing ODA. The BASOO must have the resources to carry out these two primary functions without compromise. The JATR team concluded that FAA resource shortfalls in the BASOO (and other allocated resources) may have contributed to an inadequate number of FAA specialists being involved in the B737 MAX certification program. In some cases, BASOO engineers had limited experience and knowledge of key technical aspects of the B737 MAX program.
> The BASOO delegated a high percentage of approvals and findings of compliance to the Boeing ODA for the B737 MAX program. With adequate FAA engagement and oversight, the extent of delegation does not in itself compromise safety. However, in the B737 MAX program, the FAA had inadequate awareness of the MCAS function which, coupled with limited involvement, resulted in an inability of the FAA to provide an independent assessment of the adequacy of the Boeing proposed certification activities associated with MCAS. In addition, signs were reported of undue pressures on Boeing ODA engineering unit members (E-UMs) performing certification activities on the B737 MAX program, which further erodes the level of assurance in this system of delegation.
Further, from PDF Page 46;
> The FAA initially delegated acceptance of approximately 40% of the B737 MAX project’s certification plans to the Boeing ODA. Additional certification plans that were originally retained for acceptance by the FAA were later delegated to the Boeing ODA as the certification project progressed. While the JATR team did not conduct an exhaustive review of other ODAs, the team observed that delegating the acceptance of certification plans does not appear to be a widespread practice for the FAA.
“Does not appear to be widespread” seems to me to be a political way of saying “outside of acceptable practice and this should never have been done.”
The next paragraph continues;
> Finding F5.1-A: The FAA extensively delegated compliance findings on the B737-8 MAX project to the Boeing ODA. Safety critical areas, including system safety documents related to MCAS, were initially retained by the FAA and then delegated to the Boeing ODA. (See also Findings F4.1-A, F4.1-B, and F4.1-C.)
Delegation was used to an improper extent in the project, and what little staff they had dedicated to the BASOO appear to have insufficient experience, technical expertise, or knowledge of the 737-8 systems themselves.
Now the FAA is on record as saying those same people will have all the time they need to get it right without any compromises. In my experience, a team that failed under undue pressure the first time will take a deliberately exorbitant amount of time, given a second bite at the apple and the instructions to “do whatever it takes to get it done right.”
Is the design so flawed that it can’t be safely flown by a human without this system that causes random catastrophic failures?
The car company could have either A) told and trained their drivers at the dealership to brake harder than normal, B) used a two-camera backup system, or C) redesigned the brakes to accommodate for the increased vehicle weight.
MCAS is basically that. It makes the MAX8 maneuver and behave just like the previous 737 models, even though the larger engine and more forward placement causes it to fly somewhat differently in certain situations. The failures came from the lack of training and understanding of the system as well as a flawed implementation using input from only a single sensor instead of two. Without MCAS, they would have required a significant amount of training and possibly re certification, which costs at least a few billion dollars more than a few hundred lines of code (but unfortunately a lot less than 346 people's lives and many many billions of dollars of follow-on debt).
Maybe think about it like anti-lock brakes. Cars without ABS can be driven safely in many/most circumstances, but most drivers are accustomed to ABS. (This is necessarily a limited analogy)
Also, there are government requirements per aircraft type, and removing this system would change the aircraft type, triggering a significant amount of required re-training.
---
Not directly related to your question, but I think [pure speculation/psychological theory] one thing that went badly wrong here was engineers thinking about this as a convenience system. Because it was thought of as a convenience system, they didn't fully consider the safety aspect of it.
The departure from reality in this case is pretty severe:
1. There were severe issues with pilot's performance on both flights.
2. Airline maintenance is culpable in the Lion Air flight.
3. MCAS is required irregardless of what type certificate is used.
4. Boeing's "new problems with the 737" are not as much a result of faults previously ignored, but new issues created by reassessing the risk factors related to those systems.
5. The 737 MAX is not aerodynamically unstable.
6. The 737 MAX issue has brought to light severe issues in the aviation industry that may require retraining many pilots in the industry or being way more aggressive with refresh training (also see the Atlas Air crash recently).
It's entirely possible, even likely I would say, that the majority of pilots would intervene before a stall is ever reached in a scenario where MCAS would kick in. I think you could fly this plane for hundreds of thousands of hours without incident without MCAS. Unfortunately, there have been cases (AF447) where the pilots were so confused/tired/inexperienced that they ignored the stall horn and let the plane stall and crash. MCAS was meant to address situations like those but tragically it only made things worse.
The other thing is that Boeing didn't want to have to re-certify this aircraft with the FAA, as that would also require airlines to train their pilots for this new aircraft type. Note that the whole purpose of the MAX was to compete with the A320neo, and re-certification would have taken a long time and cost a whole lot of money. This would negate the purpose of the MAX in the first place. MCAS allowed Boeing to "pretend" the 737 MAX was the same exact airplane as the 737NG (which the MAX was based off, I believe), and thus pilots didn't need additional training outside of a 30 minute iPad session.
Failing this, what is the likelihood a competitor with old-school Boeing values might emerge to compete, in such a capital-heavy industry?
Airplane travel today is also about 70x safer than it was in, say, the 1960s, on a per-passenger-per-mile basis. Despite Boeing's trouble, plane construction, pilot instruction, and flight management have all done a rather good job. There are no "good old times", at least none better than the present.
There are a few instances of a true turnaround from a company that has lost the plot, but even in those instances it looks like jettisoning large portions of an organization and re-growing it along a new axis.
It takes years to set up the infrastructure, though. They'd need to build up to it on smaller scale things first
0 to narrow or wide body production line is a huge undertaking.
It must have made it safer to fly.