I quote the article: She noted the exemption Boeing had sought "involves an anti-ice system that can overheat and cause the engine nacelle to break apart and fall off. This could generate fuselage-penetrating debris, which could endanger passengers in window seats behind the wing."
Feel the thrill of life threatening bugs!
While that doesn't make Boeing any less responsible for engineering proper solutions instead of a compliance hack, there's a difference between the solution for a throwaway consumer device and one for a multi-million dollar airplane that has to operate in conditions with harsh vibration and wide operating temperature ranges, has to be serviceable for decades, and cannot fail in ways that render the plane inoperable.
What a bunch of hysterical hand-wringing.
They just needed to a program a timer on the heater circuit and/or add sensors; the engines are already incredibly instrumented so this wouldn't be hard to do.
"Cannot fail in ways that render the plane inoperable" is precisely why there should not be a system that if forgotten about by the pilots past ~10 minutes causes the destruction of the engine nacelle and thus both probable destruction of the engines and penetration of the body of the aircraft by parts of said engine when it ingests parts of the nacelle.
You don't understand how serious that is. The nacelle of a jet engine is designed to contain a blade-off event where one or more blades - each of which has a massive amount of kinetic energy - completely break off from the turbine rotor at takeoff power levels.
The level of corporate apologism in your comment is breathtaking.
A simple thermal fuse to prevent catastrophic failure of a toaster is an example of a solution that works for a toaster. It's cheap. If the toaster handle gets stuck, the fuse heats up, trips, and the toaster is inoperable but there is no fire. The customer can replace the toaster or the thermal fuse.
That solution doesn't work for a plane, because if the fuse trips mid flight and the anti icing system doesn't work until the plane lands and maintenance replaces the thermal fuse, the plane is screwed if it encounters icing conditions during the same flight.
A timer doesn't work in this case, since from what I recall keeping the anti-icing system on is okay as long as the plane is in icing conditions. It can only overheat if the anti-icing is kept on outside of icing conditions for a few minutes.
Realistically, the system should work the same way it works on other planes; if it's forgotten, then it could waste energy but shouldn't cause the engine to fail. It's only because the engine inlet is made of composite materials instead of metal that this is a problem, but this is a problem of Boeing's own making.
It's like when you go to the doctor and say "My knee hurts the day after I play basket ball" - you know what he's going to tell you - stop playing basketball. Sometimes you can be safe by just... not doing a particular thing.
Given that the 737 Max 8 and 9 are currrently flying with this defect and no damage has been reported, let alone failures, the actual likelihood of catastrophic failure is clearly low.
Boeing got an exemption for the existing MAX-8 and MAX-9 planes with the same issue, and are allowed to continue shipping new planes of those with the issue. This isn't really that big of a deal IMO, planes fly with stuff broken all the time, it's why they have minimum equipment lists. Planes are enormously complex with thousands of systems onboard, it would be kind of surprising if everything worked all of the time.
To not allow shipping MAX 7s with the same issue would be a bit odd, if it's serious enough the planes should either be grounded across the board, or at least not shipping new MAX 8s and MAX 9s.
Safety exemptions are there for a reason and this doesn't sound like a fitting example.
It's because planes with this same issue are currently flying and it's an easily managed issue (i.e. don't use it when certain conditions happen).
Boeing was hoping to add another model to the list of planes currently grandfathered in, but decided not to do that and instead fix it, and then back-port the fix to the currently flying planes.