Comment by _s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _s | Hacker News Reader

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Going through the process to type certify the Max as anything other than a 737 would’ve been far more expensive, slow and painful for Boeing and all its customers because of how slow and difficult the FAA is.

They added the MCAS because they didn’t want the Max to be a different type, which meant starting the certification process from scratch. They were able to self certify precisely because it was a 737 type.

Yes - there were many issues that lead to the accidents and you can’t really point to just the one thing; but ultimately it did boil down to a culture at the company created by the environment it operates under.

I’m not defending Boeing here - if anything, I’m more upset at them as they had the engineering will and talent, the political and financial backing to make meaningful changes to the regulatory environment and make aviation safer as a manufacturer - but they chose greed.

Lastly, that’s nowhere near what I said but I can see how you can get to that conclusion. I’m an aviation enthusiast and a Pilot (feel free to go through my post history) - and it’s not a question of weakening regulation; it’s a matter of streamlining ways to get new technology certified faster - it only took 3 decades for the FAA to give the STC for unleaded gasoline etc etc.

I'm pretty sure the reason that Boeing didn't want to certify the Max as anything other than a 737 is that this would have required expensive pilot-retraining for all airlines purchasing that aircraft, and this would have put Boeing in a bad position relative to Airbus, with the main factor being 'fuel burn per seat' where the Airbus A320neo had an initial advantage. The plane designs are nicely compared here (2014), esp. Fig 2:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/2765285-the-battle-on-the-n...

The shoddy software primarily responsible for the Boeing 737MAX disasters was introduced so that Boeing could market the planes to airlines as a standard 737 that required no expensive pilot training programs, as far as I can tell. The nature of the FAA's regulatory process seems mostly irrelevant here, unless rushing poorly designed products with huge risk profiles to market to help Boeing improve sales is something the FAA should promote... note also that Boeing lost around $30 billion in market value over the MAX debacle, which could have been avoided by FAA being more strict, even if that mean fewer plane orders.

you are 100% correct about retraining. Flying Blind is a great book about the MAX failures at both Boeing and the FAA that I just finished a few weeks ago, highly recommend.

Just to add a bit to this, as far as I understand, they didn't want the Max to be certified as something other than a normal 737, not because of certifying the aircraft, but because it would also mean all pilots would need additional training or even new type ratings to fly it.

Though, adding the MCAS, which in certain circumstances overrides the pilots instructions, should most certainly have triggered new training for the pilots for those situations, at the very least.

> Going through the process to type certify the Max as anything other than a 737 would’ve been far more expensive

Nonsense. Boeing regularly does that.

> They added the MCAS because they didn’t want the Max to be a different type, which meant starting the certification process from scratch.

Also nonsense.

They added the MCAS because they didn’t want the Max to certify as anything but a different type because the entire point of the Max program was for customers who exclusively fly 737s (like Southwest) to be able to fly a more efficient plane without needing to recertify pilots.

Unlike Airbus, Boeing does not have unified profiles and accelerated cross-type training[0], so changing type is close to a full certification for crews, which translates to the crews being grounded for several weeks / a few months.

[0] IIRC they have something along those lines for some planes released close to one another, but Airbus has it across most of the range, with the exception of the older types and the A220 which is not an Airbus plane per-se (it's a rebadging of the Bombardier CSeries)

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