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Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

Travel has certainly been a great deal affected, but the 737 Max was a pretty massive disaster in an of itself.

With the coronavirus this is a huge 1-2 blow to Boeing.

I wonder how much of their go forward business will be military contracts, as the their civilian aviation business seems to be dead for the next 3-5 years.

They can get the 737 Max recertified to fly, but I think the damage to the reputation is done, so they probably will need to release a brand new plane to be competitive. Not sure on the design to production timeline for an airplane, but that's where I assumed 3-5 years.

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> They can get the 737 Max recertified to fly,

That is getting more and more dubious every day. Do you have a source which says this is doable? To recap, the 737 Max was not only fitted with the MCAS to save money but because it was relying on being grandfathered in to be able to be certified at all. So if they are forced to make so much change to the MCAS to require recertification they will fail doing so.

I thought the MCAS was to grandfather in pilots to be able to fly. Without it, the plain itself would still be certifiable; but pilots would need training before being allowed to fly it.

Basically all the issues of the Max come down to the pilot certification issue: the shared "type rating" with the prior 737s. That's why they needed to make the necessary changes to fit bigger engines on the old design, why they added MCAS to basically "simulate" more similar handling in some situations, and why they made so many decisions to downplay the existence of the system or offer new indicators or controls.

The whole business case for the Max was to fend off the A320neo, and if airlines were going to have to retrain pilots, that's one less reason for legacy customers to stay.

Sure, but they have already delivered about 400 of them and have another 400 built and waiting to be delivered. At 100 million a piece, that's 40 billion they will probably have to refund in some fashion if they scrap the ones delivered, and another 40 billion in sales waiting to be realized. Granted, they probably could get some money back by scrapping all of those planes, but I cannot imagine them losing more money training some pilots than refunding and scrapping all of those planes (at least for the currently built ones).

Actually in a cynical sense this may actually be good for Boeing (not in absolute terms, but in terms of market share). A downturn in the industry gives them more time to get a replacement ready before orders start picking up. The size of the market void into which Airbus could have jumped with extra A320 orders has shunk, basically.

Airbus cannot (or is unwilling to) ramp up production much either. In fact, I would expect job losses here too.

Airplanes are notoriously slow. I would expect turnaround on a new airframe to be over a decade, and on a new design at least 5 years.

That said, I don't think a "new design" ontop of the 737 airframe exists. The whole point of the 737 Max and its failures is that the airframe was old so they tried to make a radical design change and handle the shortcomings in fly-by-wire software, but who on earth is going to trust Boeing with that now?

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