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Comment by PedroBatista | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately no.

He now adopted the "admit the problem and fix it" attitude because he was "caught", before that was business as usual for Boeing. It was/is more a "don't ask, don't tell", dump the risk on other separate entities/companies and cross your fingers because we need to get those planes out of the assembly line as fast and cheaply as possible no matter what.

Boeing is and has been under pressure, but it's their own fault. They have been fucking around for DECADES now and when there were "difficulties" they always called the US government to "facilitate" sales or their buddies inside the regulatory bodies to put the green check on their garbage.

Nothing about this is news, it has been known for years and years.

Unfortunately Boeing always has a sweet defense contract waiting to compensate any "rough year", so they keep fucking around..

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>Unfortunately Boeing always has a sweet defense contract waiting to compensate any "rough year", so they keep fucking around.

And because once airlines have their fleets locked into a specific airplane brand, swapping it for the competition is almost impossible without crazy expense, so they coasted on this vendor lock in for decades knowing their existing customers have no choice but to keep buying their planes.

And also probably because "nobody ever got fired for buying Boeing".

That doesn't sound likely. They can wait for existing planes to age out and then buy a competitor's planes. For many reasons including fuel efficiency, when an airline retires a plane they are not going to replace it with the exact same plane. So some levels of pilot retraining is expected.

The A320neo family has a backlog of over 7000 orders. As much as Airbus is ramping up production in the past few years, with their current ~600 goal for 2024 that’s still a 12 year wait if you order one today.

And that only gets you so far because Spirit Aerosystems supplies major components for Airbus as well (including A320neo): https://www.spiritaero.com/company/programs/

Type certification is a thing that exists, and the whole reason the 737 max is designed in this particular wonky way is so that it can grandfather into the type certification from the existing 737 family.

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

Having to mix and match pilots across the fleet is less efficient, what if you have a 737 pilot but the only aircraft available is an airbus? So, many airlines (eg southwest) will indeed only use one type, or only a handful of types. This also extends to things like parts availability etc.

The economics for switching away work exactly the same now as they did a decade ago when orders were placed: there is a very real cost to operating a mixed fleet and Boeing gets to extract a lot of that value themselves.

> So, many airlines (eg southwest) will indeed only use one type

And yet many airlines fly a very high amount of planes of many types, of multiple brands. Southwest is a consumer darling and punches above its weight but it is an outlier.

Well, Southwest was a successful well-run regional carrier that grew as large as the big mega-airlines, while trying to keep running the business the same way.

There are still 20 smaller regional airlines in the U.S. and hundreds around the world. The vast majority of those fly just one or two types of planes.

> And yet many airlines fly a very high amount of planes of many types, of multiple brands

That's simply untrue. Most airlines use 2, 3 types of planes at most. I'm not referring to the niche 5 percent of plane types but the overwhelming majority.

Type certificates for commercial airliners should expire after 30 years. After that date, allow any existing aircraft to continue operating but don't allow manufacturing of any new ones. The manufacturer should have to recertify and prove that the design fully complies with all current rules.

The original Boeing 737 design only took 4 years so that would give them plenty of time to work through any necessary design changes. And if pilots need to obtain a new type rating then so be it.

The type certificate was for pilots

> . So some levels of pilot retraining is expected.

I mean the whole reason for the 737 max was to avoid re training

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