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That is pretty concerning. The way how Boeing can get its way simply by threatening to can the entire MAX program (which they'd never actually do) shows that there's a very deep level of integration between the US government and its biggest companies, especially one like Boeing that's often seen as kind of a minor point of national pride.

Not only that, but the article mentions that the 737 MAXs got an exemption on providing a modern crew alerting system. Of course, all of that is done so they could certify these aircraft as being basically the same as the first 737 from the 60s. Meanwhile, A320s have been flying with ECAMs (a centralized system for viewing the plane's status and alerts) since the 1980s.

The integration of government and these big businesses is one thing. The fact that it always seems to run in the direction of undermining citizen safety and protections, and weakening the country's capacity to actually hold these companies accountable to even national level interests is astonishing.

What purpose does this integration serve if not to allow the government leverage? These days you have the US government acting like its a 2nd-world power, just desperately trying to hang on to any businesses willing to grace the US with their presence, instead of a nation that holds the key to glibal economic power. Frankly it's pathetic.

Boeing doesn't have a real business plan until they have a plan to replace the 737. Boeing and Airbus have been going crazy over the past 30 years developing widebody airliners, some of which were solidly rejected by the market, but domestic flyers (most of them) are stuck with a 1967 design. It's a disaster when it comes to managing the social and environmental impacts of air travel.

A ride in this plane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_family

radically changed my view of what is possible in a small airliner, because it has a squared-off cross section it feels much larger on the inside than a 737... And this is a previous generation plane, now there is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220

There's a crisis brewing at America's small airports in that they've really stopped building the sub-50 seat regional jets that serve smaller airports. (In the small city near me, almost every organization lists the local airport as a weakness in a SWOT analysis) Manufacturers know that airliners around 70 seats would be dramatically lower cost to operate than the status quo, enough that prices would drop and service quality would increase and filling the extra seats would be easy. Trouble is the unions won't let the airlines upgrade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_clause

Yes! I rode in an E195 recently and I was kinda dreading it because it's a much smaller plane than a 737. I was so pleasantly surprised how roomy the cabin was. And how quiet and convenient. There was even a little holder for my tablet.

It is quieter for folks on the ground too. And it doesn’t get grounded when the temperature is too high nearly as much as the 737.

If people realized you could get widebody comfort in a regional jet they’d quit flying on legacy airlines.

Is it more expensive? Where do you search for these flights?

Delta has some A220s, I got put on an E-Jet on an American from Philadelphia to Montreal.

In my case it was not more expensive, no. But I was flying in Europe. Not sure about the US.

They just use them for the quieter flights where they have trouble filling up a 737.

I was dreading it because the last time I flew on an airliner this size it was a 717 and it was horrible. Very noisy in particular (I was seated right beside the engine I have to say). The Embraer was really delightful and it has under-wing engines.

Here in the US basically all the regional airlines use them. Horizon Airlines is one that I know of specifically, and Wikipedia lists Sky West, Envoy Air, Mesa Airlines, Republic Airways, JetBlue, etc, etc. Many of them contract for the more well–known airlines like Delta, US Airways, and so on, so you could end up on an Embraer even if you don’t seek it out.

A lot of those are the smaller and older regional jets like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_ERJ_family

which personally I like less than

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8

The newer and larger E-Jets are on a whole different level in terms of comfort.

The A220 / CSeries is another great example of the corruption that exists between Boeing and the US government. Locking out new competitors via dubious anti-dumping petitions.

Seems to me the solution to the union problem would be some kind of direct deal with the union on outsourcing rather than a workaround based on staff rules relating to seat numbers.

The best part is that Boeing had EICAS, the engine indicating and crew alerting system, in the early 80s with the introduction of the 757/767.

In the mid-90s, when they updated the 737 to the Next Generation, they opted to stay with the six-pack recall light system that every 737 pilot hates. Same in the Max. Too expensive to change and would likely require a new type rating.

The A320 was such a technological leap forward in commercial aviation. Boeing wasn’t able to match it until the introduction of the 777, almost a decade later.

I can't imagine EICAS is that expensive, the P-8 has it. Requiring a new type rating seems far more likely given that's how we got MCAS.

The type rating is the big factor, and that's largely driven by desire and/or pressure from customers.

IMO type ratings, and particularly the categorization of types, needs an overhaul. The current type rating system is, IMO, the primary indirect factor leading to the max accidents (customers demanded the impossible - more efficient engines with a 37 type rating) as well as countless other design decisions that seem silly from the outside.

The P-8 having EICAS is more of an indictment of Boeing than anything (the P-8 is a Navy 737). It’s completely technologically possible, just that entrenched interests (namely, Southwest) kept Boeing from advancing the technology of their aircraft.

Which in itself is ironic as the US government spends a large portion of it's current time accusing China of the same thing. As usual you should always expect projection when shade is being thrown.

At least in China when greed kills people there are consequences for executives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...

Chinese system has a huge number of flaws but one thing it gets right is the government stands above corporations.

Corporate control over government is the path to dystopia, it's how the climate situation got out of control, why the drug epidemics keep coming back, why obesity is killing the country, etc. etc.

Occasionally people wake up and fight back for a moment but it's always fleeting because the deck is stacked against the people. The corporates have the money for the research and "lobbying" aka bribes to keep regulation at bay for decades usually.

Corporate greed is all consuming and thus regulation is meant to exist as it's counter-balance. When the corpos are the ones regulating themselves well... you can't be surprised when this is the result.

This is completely wrong. Boeing did make the changes to include input from two AoA sensors, they did change the system to prevent recurrent horizontal stabilizer movements, they did include a manual shut-off.

What you are talking about has very little to do with MCAS. Congress required any new aircraft type certified after 2022 to include an Engine-Indicating and Crew Alerting System.

It was never even intended to apply to the 737-10, but because the certification took longer than expected, it became likely the -10 would fall under the regulation, which would cause pilots to have to be re-trained for the -10.

All of this is only peripherally related to MCAS.

You are confusing two different issues. The article you reference is from December 2022. The MAX 8 had already returned to service two years prior, with the required fixes to the MCAS system, in 2020.

This law had to do with a deadline for certifying the MAX 7 without completely redesigning some of the systems.

I'm not a Boeing defender here -- these issues are incredibly concerning.

What are all the differences between these MAX <n> planes? Is this an intentional strategy by Boeing to confuse so that they can make all these loose arguments and skirt regulations?

Bigger number = longer plane. They start counting from 7 because the MAX 7 was the successor to the 737-700.

Thank you for answering, especially when so many doenvoted. Now I know!

It does appear that Boeing tries to get away with "you've approved it for MAX <x>, so just approve it already for MAX <y>".

Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless it is to add more limitations based on past (bad) performance and then only to document the reason the law exists, never to provide exemptions.

Somewhere, the NFL is quickly checking its shoes...

Congress will be happy to replace “Boeing” with “American companies which manufacture all of commercial and military aircraft, satellites, and space vehicles and launchers”.

> Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless

No "unless". No law should target a specific company or individual by name, ever, whether to give them special exceptions or special permissions or special restrictions or anything else.

(They also shouldn't target specific companies by sufficiently-specific-description-it-only-applies-to-one-or-two-companies, either.)

If course they can: laws frequently cite specific cases and specific abuses in their supporting documentation in order to point out the exact intent of the law.

Laws are not research papers, they don't need to cite sources.

The fact that they do not need to is true, but the typical law rests on a body of data and some of that data will be supplied with the bill depending on what the material is about.

This is because most laws are created with specific goals and purposes in mind, they're not born finished and ready to be voted on derived from first principles, they usually exist to address something quite specific.

I never said they "can't", I said they shouldn't.

Also, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with citing something as an example in the argumentation around a bill enacting a law (unless it's by way of targeting them with polemic), but there is something fundamentally wrong with putting that in the legal code itself.

US Congress has been passing acts concerning specific people or institutions, directly referenced by their name since its inception. It's called private laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Congress#Public_law,_pr...

You raise a good point, and there definitely exists a pile of related jurisprudence on the subject of "attainder"[0]. Afaik that only applies to negative consequences though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

Washington State has been making Boeing-specific laws for decades, without having to mention them by name - the legislature just writes up a bill which sets such-and-such a lower tax rate for every aircraft manufacturer which employs at least so many workers, et voila! There happens to be only one.

It's almost comically evil at this point. Boeing actually argued that the victims didn't experience any suffering, because they died on impact.

So in your final screaming moments as you hurtle toward the ground, be comforted to know that the ultimate perpetrators of your death will say your terror never even happened.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-families-argue-over-pay-...

You'd probably want to cite such a big claim ("Boeing didn't fix anything"), which is not supported by your link. Other online sources say Boeing did fix MCAS, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

> makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy

The US has not been a functioning democracy for a very long time, if it ever even was.

Don’t despair! Plenty of people have fulfilling and happy lives in non-democracies. But it’s important to be realistic about the chances of anything about the political system fundamentally changing.

> Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)

By international standards, US ‘democracy’ doesn’t get rated that highly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde....

> By international standards, US ‘democracy’ doesn’t get rated that highly.

For starters, it's a two party system.

Sharp tongues would point out that this is double the amount of political parties you'd "find" in Russia or China ...

>(inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)

The word you are looking for is oligarchy.

Yeah, I heard Boeing even has it's own Presidential candidate...

A brief search of who Boeing donates to is a bit depressing.

I know that they have parted ways now, but Haley has managed to sit on both sides of negotiations between government and Boeing.

> Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)

We're not. There was a coup attempt scant years ago, and there will absolutely be another in November.

There should be people on life sentences for manslaughter of 346 people that happened as a result of corporate greed and a company culture which made company profits the only important metric of success.

That is not at all accurate. The MAX has two AoA sensors from day one.

We're talking about what the MCAS used for input. The aircraft has two AoA sensors and three computers. MCAS used 1 and 1 because it was believed to be non-safety-critical system. Here is a direct quote from Wikipedia's MCAS article:

> Though there are two sensors on the MAX only one of them is used at a time to trigger MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. Any fault in this sensor, perhaps due to physical damage, creates a single point failure: the flight control system lacks any basis for rejecting its input as faulty information.

There is a whole subsection just about MCAS and AoA sensors.

So what you're saying is that I'm right, it in fact had 2 AoA sensors from day one.

>makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy

Obviously, obviously not.

Single item spending bills ftw

Such an americentric take... as if Boeing only had to deal with FAA only. You completely forgot about other regulatory bodies. How was Boeing supposed to sway EU bodies, for example? Once you realize there's more of those, your conspiracy theory ends up in shambles.

I hate to turn this into a political comment, but your comment about it being depressing struck a nerve with me.

Many conservatives and people worried about the border have been feeling this depression pretty hard the last few years, if not 20+ years. Add in the crime problem with no cash bail, and honestly a few friends and I have felt something is really wrong for several years on a pretty deep sad level.

Interesting that something slighlt convoluted like a plane retrofit was what brought about it in you.

Feeling sad and depressed can be a medical condition rather than a reality issue. There are many numerically things (can't check everything) that are not much worse than 20 years ago (and some even better), but people seem more and more upset. It's like they just spend time online/on TV and WANT to find reasons to feel bad. Or that they expect that because things CAN be good they will be good tomorrow without any effort.

I'm in California since 1989. Things are definitely different and IMO worse than before.

If I had to guess, previously the crime was in obvious rough areas. Now it seems it's expanding to everywhere.

But even if crime/illegal border crossings were down... Just because we were unaware of it 20 years ago and are now aware doesn't really make people feel better about it.

"Hey, you know how you were wondering why wages are stagnant, yet housing prices are still rising? Turns out there were millions of people entering illegally every year and you just weren't aware of it previously! Better turn off the news or you'll feel worse about that $3k 2bdroom."

One has got nothing to do with the other. Illegal immigrants aren’t driving up housing costs. Standard of living is stagnant, because wealth doesn’t “trickle down” like Reagan promised us. It trickles up. You’re repeating right wing talking points.

How are immigrants not driving up housing costs? Aren't they using housing? Isn't housing driven by supply and demand?

The "demand" in supply and demand means "how much money are people able&willing to invest into x" For illegal immigrants, the answer to that is "not a lot"

I assure you, they have enough money to rent a home or apartment. Most are not homeless. To say even 1% of illegal immigrants are homeless a year after arriving would be a stretch.

Fortunately, Boeings work on the 737 MAX was independently checked by non-US aviation authorities who aren't subject to US Congress provisions.

<Non-US aviation authority reads FAA papers>

"All good boss. Let's certify this!"

https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/newsroom-and-events/press-rele...

"Following extensive analysis by EASA, we have determined that the 737 MAX can safely return to service. This assessment was carried out in full independence of Boeing or the Federal Aviation Administration and without any economic or political pressure – we asked difficult questions until we got answers and pushed for solutions which satisfied our exacting safety requirements. We carried out our own flight tests and simulator sessions and did not rely on others to do this for us."

EASA insisted on additional requirements then the FAA did - so I think "no".

I guess that depends on what you believe a "functioning democracy" because yes we are are "functioning democracy", the fact that the outcome is not what you desire do not mean it is non-functional.

Keeping in mind that a democracy was never the goal, and being a democracy is actually the root of the problem. Looking to the federal government for solutions to all of these problems is the the problem itself.

People expecting the government to fix everything is the problem....

Maybe instead of acting "are we a functioning democracy", the better question is "how can we solve these problems with out government..."