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Comment by justapassenger | Hacker News Reader

It being a refresh of old design, means it's cheaper to retrain people (don't have to full training for the totally different aircraft), a lot of your supporting infrastructure can stay the same while being cheaper to operate.

And, in theory (ahm, MAX had some tiny, minor issues there) should be safe and reliable, as it's based on well known and tested platform.

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That's a very nice way of saying that it finds a way to extract profit from regulatory systems which 10yr olds could poke holes in. /hj

That's not really the intention behind the initial concept. If you are able to update a plane to make it more efficient while keeping the same behaviour and the same interfaces for the pilot, then it is great and there are no safety concerns with that.

The only issue on the Max is that as part of the refresh, they were not able to keep the same behaviour. And then, instead of fixing it with additional engineering or requiring new training, they hid that under the carpet and made sure the FAA accept itq, leading to crashes and deaths. Plus the denial after the first crash was really disgusting.

One of the charges in the MAX crashes were that _it did_ need a whole new training class

Ding! The whole issue was that they cheated to hide the differences to avoid additional training. Which proved fatal as the pilots were unaware of those differences.

This generally means the aircraft is the best choice to prop up customers whose business is slowly failing, and would be severely harmed by having to invest in improvements to the supporting infrastructure. This is not altogether surprising since air travel has been increasingly commoditized, so aircraft operators who don't price in long term capital improvements can outcompete (or for the worse ones, just stay afloat at all) for some period of time.

So it's no different than any other business with eye-wateringly expensive infrastructure, really.

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