And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever.
Why? Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation? Is it really that cheap?
And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever.
Why? Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation? Is it really that cheap?
The older models are also now out of production.
Most orders were before the accidents but the vast majority haven't been canceled. Boeing has only delivered a fraction of them; they have another 3,000 to deliver before they get to the orders placed after the accidents (~1400).
Basically: Switching cost are stratospheric.
You would think so, but it’s actually not. I used to work at an airline in IT, and asked that question of the Ops folks when the airline was evaluating switching fleets to Airbus. They said switching fleets or operating a mixed fleet is not cost prohibitive. This was midsize regional airline fwiw.
In particular, I've heard that maintenance and pilot training are big issues. If you've got half your pilots on the 737 and half on the A320, you're much less resilient to scheduling issues than having all of them on one or the other. Similarly, I believe maintenance facilities tend to be one or the other, so if you've got half your facilities for each, at the margins you're going to have more scheduling issues for maintenance.
There are economies of scale with anything to do with scheduling flexibility, and dividing like this essentially halves those economies of scale.
Edit: in regards to maintenance a lot of airlines are outsourcing maintenance to bigger providers so that’s less of a deal than you’d think as well. Fuel really is one of the largest factors in this and an extra 5 years of expensive gas while waiting for a new plane may be too much for budgets to bear.
Re: pilot training. I could imagine that going from a 737 to a 787 would be substantially easier than from 737 to A320, due to standardisation in interfaces, processes, documentation, etc, within one manufacturer. Is that the case? 5-6 weeks does still seem like a lot of downtime for a commercial pilot, and rolling everyone through that sounds like it would be prohibitively difficult for many airlines. Plus my understanding is that it's sort of a one way street, pilots don't typically (or can't feasibly?) stay rated for two aircraft types for long periods, so it would still reduce flexibility if an airline split its fleet right?
The threshold I've read on airliners.net is at about 30 frames. Below that costs of a sub-fleet are too high and you should aim for commonality. Above 30 frames you should pick the best plane for your routes, regardless of commonality.
So for example running two fleets of 30 A350-900/1000, and 30 787-9/10 would be perfectly rational. But having 50 A350-900/1000 and introducing a sub-fleet of 10 787-10 is unlikely to be a wise choice, even for routes where the 787-10 would beat the A350-900.
This isn’t true for the reasons you are implying. Most of these smaller carriers fly to regional airports with smaller runways and smaller demand which the 737 specifically is ideal for (since that’s what it was designed). It’s also one of the most common planes out there, so when smaller carriers are looking to buy, that’s what’s available. It’s not that they are looking to be a single vendor airline. It’s just that the one vendor made the plane they need.
But the specific example I had in mind is Air Tahiti Nui, and its grand total of four 787-9. It’s simply an airline specialized in bringing tourists to Tahiti from far, far away. Hence high density 787-9.
But even a very small airline like Air Senegal has a pretty diversified fleet, of 9 aircrafts…
This includes 80 A321 NEO, and with a further order for 50 A321XLRs I strongly doubt these are on the chopping block. The A321 NEO is very hard to beat on transcon: AA needs the subtype, so it's here to stay. And Airbus knows it: the A321 NEO is expensive...
As for the older A319s, AA is currently looking for their replacements: it should be either A220, 737 MAX7 or maybe Embraer E2 195. If they go for the 737 MAX7 that will make it to 4 types, eventually: Airbus A321 and Boeing 737, 777 and 787. Otherwise 5 types.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_fleet#Curren...
<As for the older A319s, AA is currently looking for their replacements:>
Which is basically what I wrote.
I can’t resist pointing out that an airline of all businesses should be comfortable with anything stratospheric!
A quick google suggests that in optimal conditions (all parts available), it would take minimum of 2 months to assemble a large airliner plane. 6 months is suggested as a common time frame. As far as needs go, a plant would need suppliers for all pieces (over 350k by one count for one type of airbus). And you'd need a place where you can assemble the plane, with a sufficiently large runway attached. Possibly in an area where testflights would be acceptable.
All in all: perhaps current suppliers are at or close to their limits, and a new facility would need a completely new supply chain. If not, I'd imagine that if the bottleneck is exclusively with the builder, a solution could be found.
What a load of bull. Just last week the Seattle times was mentioning that the MAX had had 1200 orders cancelled.
And here is a Reuters article citing 480+ MAX orders cancelled, just for the first 9 months of 2020.
Unless you are a sociopath and only care about your balance sheet I suppose.
well, there you go
Because of this all good airlines won't operate old airplanes. The few bad airlines can't operate very well because any country with a functional government will not allow you to fly an expired airplane. And so Boeing and Airbus have long order books to replace planes as they hit end of life. Of course airlines are limited to airplanes still in the current catalog, so they often cannot order the model that was working great for them 20 years ago.
Has this ever happened for an airliner?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611
This one only took 7 years from a bad repair until catastrophic failure though:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123
So "repair stuff properly" seems to be the important thing there. ;)
Me, crying while flying a 50 year old Cessna 172.
Oh, luckily you are wrong this time: most planes at top airlines are replaced with more competitive ones, not because they depleted the airframe. The rest is replaceable - airplanes replace engines more often than some people change their socks and everything else is either regularly checked or replaced based on a strict schedule.
Replacing the airframe with a more competitive one is part of it, but part of the competitiveness is that you reach a point where you're having to do much more inspections and maintenance than a new plane.
For comparison, a car's life expectancy is maybe 3,000 hours or so. Airframe quality is way, way higher than car quality.
Also note that the GP pointed out that it depends on what the plane is made out of, so older construction from 50 years ago can have more longevity in a way that more recently-built planes will not.
- The pilots are already trained (this is a big one and is part of the reason behind the MCAS debacle - new features mean retraining which costs money and limits which crews can fly which aircraft) [0]
- The 737 generally fits easily at a lot of airports since it's been around for a while - no need to reconfigure your gates/jet ways/etc to accommodate another aircraft at your gates)
- Airlines more recently prefer twin engine jets for better fuel economy and some changes in regulations [1]
- The MAX upgrade to the 737 platform was mostly to jam larger, more fuel-efficient engines into an existing airframe to save on manufacturing, certification, and training costs (see first point)
- In the US many airlines have shifted to single-aisle "mid-sized" planes for domestic routes due to deregulation around direct service - instead airlines can use a hub-and-spoke model with several connecting flights as opposed to only providing direct routes with enough demand to fill a plane [2]
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-cr...
[1] https://simpleflying.com/two-engines-vs-four-engines/
[2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/ai...
The reason given at the time was the desire to simplify maintenance and parts logistics.
Now Alaska's fleet is all 737, a mix of MAX and NG models. The MAX is about a quarter of their fleet, so the current grounding has hurt them.
How would this help them? A large % of the fleet is still grounded.
As Alaska is based in Seattle, they've been pushing this ridiculous all-Boeing nonsense for a while. Horizon still exists as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska. Their fleet is all Embraer. In fact I'd be hard pressed to think of a time when Alaska was ever all Boeing.
I do kind of wonder about the relationship with Boeing, with Boeing Field and the plant just up the road from Alaska's HQ at Sea-Tac. Cynically speaking I'd guess that Alaska and Boeing CEOs are golf buddies or something. Boeing's HQ is is now in Chicago (which may be part of the problem, as the article notes) so maybe not.
I think this is no longer strictly true. In the early days of deregulation, yes, absolutely, airlines went to a hub-and-spoke model and eliminated a bunch of their direct routes.
But it turns out that customers don't actually like this, and they'll leave for a different airline that has the direct (or at least more-direct) routes they want.
So I believe it's sorta in the middle now: sure, airlines have hubs, and they don't do quite as many direct routes as they used to. But it's also common for there to be direct flights between airports that aren't what you might call hubs.
(Note that the article you linked to in support of this point is from 2001; a lot has changed over the past 23 years.)
The A380 had long range, but not to the extent of the 787 or A350, and it didn’t have their fuel efficiency, and there are structural choices that make freighter conversion difficult (like a middle floor too weak for cargo without reinforcement) and less economical in the first place (more volume available than weight it can support).
737 MAX uses 20% less fuel.
Incidentally, this fuel-efficient design is what lead to the design defect. The fuel efficiency is thanks to larger engine (larger engines burn hotter and use less fuel). To make the larger engine fit under the wing without raising the fuselage, they had to reposition the engine forward. This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when accelerating quickly (and this can cause stall) and they fixed this defect using software to push the nose down.
This grand-fathering of 737 is the reason it still does not have fly-by-wire in 2024: it simulates the antique original 737.
Or was misleading people on the invasive nature of the changes always the point? And MCAS is easier to hide than new wings?
> This grand-fathering of 737 is the reason it still does not have fly-by-wire in 2024
The 737 does not have fly-by-wire? Then how does MCAS work?
I thought it was mostly due to the much higher bypass-ratio than burning temp?
"The new two-stage High Pressure Turbine section adds advanced coatings for cooling metal parts that will enable the same metal temperatures as today’s engines despite hotter gas path temperatures."
https://web.archive.org/web/20150418191419/http://airinsight...
The same improvements are being made to electric utility turbines.
MCAS was not intended to be an anti-stall system.
The only purpose of MCAS was to have the 737 MAX exactly mimick the 737 NG's (previous gen) pitch dynamics so that airlines wouldn't have to retrain their pilots on the 737 MAX.
Commercial pilots are generally pretty good at not stalling planes and understanding flight dynamics, they don't need MCAS to avoid stalling even when the plane pitches up during thrust.
The EA crew did not follow the runaway trim procedure sent to them in an Emergency Airworthiness Directive. The procedure is:
1. restore normal trim with the electric trim switches
2. turn off the trim system
This video is about bledend-wing designs, but it touches on the 737 MAX problem with illustrations,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59A8-rKRs-0&t=705s
at minute 11:45 , but it's also worth watching the part at 4:31 , where another illustration explains the forces at work in an aircraft, using a classic 737 as an example.
It is on a different subject but the whole video is very interesting.
That said, it's true the MCAS was intended to address some comments from test pilots during development.
https://www.aircraft-commerce.com/wp-content/uploads/aircraf...
It could be argued it was an appropriate design.
The critical error was in that 737 MAX has two angle of attack sensors that feed data into the cockpit; however, the MCAS software only used input from one of them. In the Lion air case the one considered sensor had been improperly calibrated after being flagged for maintenance by the crew.
The fix is fairly comprehensive. If an angle of attack disagree occurs between the two sensors the system is inhibited from activation.
> Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation?
They don't see it as compromised. The purchase price was set based on the fact that airlines would _not_ need to retrain existing 737 pilots for the new model, that it was type equivalent.
With the software changes and with additional training there are cost implications but not necessarily safety considerations with the model.
China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.
There's an apparent contradiction here.
China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.
And here.
Airbus and Boeing are commercially viable, and they have customers all around the world. Comac is more of a political project, as China tries to reduce their dependence on Western technology. There are 1000+ orders for the C919, but effectively all of them are Chinese.
Similarly, the USSR had domestic passenger aircraft industry, and Russia retains some capability to manufacture them. Their latest model is the Irkut MC-21, which has a few hundred orders. Again, effectively all of the orders are Russian.
Then there is Embraer, which is the biggest manufacturer of regional jets. They have been decades in the business, but they have not made any attempt to build a competitor for the A320 and B737.
So Bombardier sold it all to Airbus. Now Airbus has two series of single-aisle aircraft that are more competitive than Boeing's 737 (the A220 and A320.)
I thought Airbus was heavily subsidized
It's fine that governments have decided to prop up these industries in their own ways, of course. Just hard to expect "free market" participants to show up and take on such a capital intensive industry
Wait these are big corporations instead of struggling single mothers? Nevermind...
Back to topic, Comac is not starting with a bang like Airbus did - but they don't have to. Same quality, slightly different, slightly cheaper could work after reaching governement-aided critical mass. Such government aid got Airbus started and notably did not cripple it.
It doesn't exactly help that nobody wants to work with Russia for reasons.
>They [Embraer, Brazil] have been decades in the business, but they have not made any attempt to build a competitor for the A320 and B737.
They are actively attempting precisely this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family
To contextualize, both Irkut, now called Yakovlev, and Embraer received massive support from their respective governments to get started.
They are much smaller, with 2-2 seating, compared to 3-3 in the bigger jets. There are some routes and airlines where these are competitive; but they are not similar planes.
Both the E2 195 and the CSeries are well above the threshold of 100 passengers that Wikipedia uses as the maximum for a "regional jet", with the former holding up to 146 passengers and the latter up to 160. However, this is well behind the 737 MAX at 220 passengers. This classification apparently varies by source; 49 USC 41714 considers the maximum to be 71 passengers, while some sources take a threshold as high as 150 seats.
In any case, Embraer has gradually ramped up the maximum seating capacity on its planes, though you correctly point out that it has yet to take the middle-seat plunge.
So not really a contradiction unless you are reading it too literally.
China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering
mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.
ahahahahahahahahahahahno.
Since 2022 Comac has delivered a grand total of four C919s. The only non-Chinese airline to order any is owned by a rich Chinese guy. The rest are Chinese airlines that have been browbeaten into ordering some. Nobody outside of China is in any rush to order a Comac anything because:
1.) Comac hasn't gotten any non-Chinese certification
2.) Comac's support infrastructure is even weaker than Sukhoi and Bombardier (both of whom struggled to sell and support their aircraft that were actually certified in the west).
As I understand it, to torpedo these companies by dumping prices would be to indirectly torpedo the EU's and the UE's defense aircraft production. A cost based production battle would be never won against China. And I guess many taxes would be earmarked to counteract this, again.
By other side, the rampant lack of quality in Chinese products and the inability to produce enough planes if they were contracted, in my guess would translate into the quick construction of factories with the worst production quality yet to be seen, for to feed the dumping.
The matter is, in such scenario we as consumers would be deeply affected, as civil aircraft manufacturing is already at the limit of what can be done without compromising safety (seriously, some managers should have been fired a few years ago, The aim should not be to imitate the lack-quality of the Chinese industry).
I don't want to think about what would happen if a race to cut manufacturing costs were endemically launched in the civil aircraft sector. As European I don't want to see it. If it were, lets say, the Japanese industry, the high quality one, not the one that is offshoring production to China, I wouldn't be worried about it or comment on it.
This is mere guessing, I'm not in the sector (It would be interesting to find objective researches on this matter in fact).
You can look at other models. Their Xian Y-20 freighter has also never had an accident and flies tens of thousands of hours per year.
This isn't 1992 anymore where the only things coming out of China are plastic molded injection crap.
https://theaircurrent.com/china/china-eastern-comac-c919-ret...
> Launch airline China Eastern’s tentative February 28 entry-into-service date never materialized [..]
> After regularly operating as part of its route proving, the aircraft appeared to change tempo on February 2. The aircraft flew a half dozen more short flights before February 27 then sat for nearly a month before being ferried from Hongqiao to nearby Pudong on March 23 when it was last seen. There’s been no definitive explanation for the jet’s return to the manufacturer.
Apparently they didn't copied well the stolen designs from American and European manufacturers[1] or there was a quality issue with the delivered aircraft. I think the Chinese government wants EU approval to use European citizens as alpha-testers.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/china-eas...
> China Eastern Airlines (600115.SS) said on Thursday it will buy another 100 C919 airplanes in a deal worth $10 billion at list prices, in what would be the largest ever order for the jet made by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC).
> The state-owned carrier said it had received a "substantial discount" for the deal and that the planes will be delivered in batches from 2024 to 2031. The list price for the C919 is $99 million but aircraft can be sold at discounts of up to 50%, especially for new models.
50% of the EU and the UE aircraft prices. It should be expected prices dumping, the same that happened when Hawuei and ZTE was subsidizing antennas and selling equipment at lower prices than manufacturing costs in the European Union.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919#US_espionage_allega...
Y-20 is now powered by Chinese WS-20.
from whom have designs been stolen this time?
Why do you assume out of hand they would be low quality?
The short answer? Peers and past performance as a predictor of the future. Transport aircraft are way more complex and held to higher standards than military aircraft. Or look at where the SSJ100, SpaceJet, ARJ-21 and C919 are today. COMAC's delivered four C919s in three years and has yet to get EASA or FAA certification. Most of the C919 orders are from big Chinese banks or leasing companies with no clear interest from airlines (domestic or foreign).the need for MCAS in the first place is a major design flaw and results in additional failure modes that other aircraft do not have. the "fix" was to prioritize human inputs over MCAS, making these planes more vulnerable to human error. still worth avoiding IMHO.
in most industries, the fat part of the market is the lower end, so your smallest cheapest product is your biggest seller. McDonalds sells more regular hamburgers than they do Big Macs. BMW sells more 3 series than they do 7 series.
There are many other factors that go into selecting the brand of the next plane you buy than simply "zomg they made a mistake".
Boeing still has a leading technology and engineering position in the aerospace field, and their product line overall is a very good fit for what many carriers need to buy. This problem of some loose bolts is easily remedied, and is just not a dealbreaker. despite an exaggerated title, TFA is very light on making any case that there's a set of deep problems inside Boeing that rise to any level of statistical significance. A software problem and some loose bolts.
The plane may be OK after the fixes and now when the pilots are no longer (?) being actively misled by Boeing, so perhaps no need to scrap the whole fleet.
But MCAS was not a “software problem”.
Yeah, it was. And so was the fix.
There was also a pilot training issue, in that of the 3 crews that experience MCAS failure, only one of them thought to turn off the trim system (and landed safely).
The problem was not the aerodynamic design. It was the software that granted too much authority to the MCAS system and the MCAS system relying on a single sensor.
Both those problems have been fixed.
A further problem was two crews not remembering how to deal with runaway stabilizer trim (it's supposed to be a "memory item").
Generally what is in the popular press about the MAX is wrong.
Yes, Embraer, Sukhoi, Bombardier, and Mitsubishi have/had limited offerings but only in very select configurations. None sell an A321/737 equivalent.
So, the airlines bet that Boeing is not going to keep selling deadly airplanes, and will fix the Max, and they can keep their place in line.
It's a problem that the airline manufacturing industry is a duopoly but interestingly, it doesn't seem like the market can support more than a small number of players. Despite the fact that the airline industry has exploded and demand for new airplanes has grown with it, certain econonomies of manufacturing have meant that a lot of mergers and bankruptcies and consolidation happened.
Also it's extremely simpler for a 737 airline (the biggest being Southwest in the US and Ryan Air in the EU) to put another 737 in their arsenal rather than switch to a different manufacturer's plane. Anything from in-house maintenance to training to rostering to having the right type-rated pilots etc is easier for those cheaply run airlines to do when they're running just one type of aircraft.
Why airlines still order 737s at this point is beyond me. I guess some value having every type of aircraft in their arsenal for just-in-case one gets grounded while other airline groups are just caring about getting the cheapest thing (Lufthansa)
(Of course, I'm an engineer ... I don't know how to sell a good design to big pockets, I just know why the technical design sucks ...)
The fuel economy is driving the switch. The 737MAX was created to compete with the a320neo. For airlines, especially with rising fuel prices, even a small % improvement in fuel efficiency gives huge returns.
In fact I wouldn't think an airline is the kind of company that needs nor should have an engineer at the helm. They're a transportation/marketing company, not a manufacturing company.
An airline markets a flight to a public which they perform on leased or purchased third party equipment based on negotiated route pairs/airport slots in a competitive market environment.
Even their 'digital' offerings are mostly outsourced (GDS, website/app, in-flight-entertainment) as they have low core competency in that, nor do they need to.
Even for an engineering-heavy company, an engineer running it doesn't necessarily work out. The last time Intel had an engineer as CEO, it was a disaster.
If you need single aisle planes, your only option would be to book the Max, the A320 is decades out on order.