Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
wsj.com
wsj.com
There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company.
Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:
Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession.
I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors?
It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-dime it does on everything it ends up paying lawyers, fines and damages. I wonder how they manage to see this as good business. Or maybe they hope that "the next" time they'll score big without any penalties?
If a company is dying (aka winding down), you most likely do in fact want a lawyer in charge, whatever their job title may be. For instance why would you put a scientist or engineer in charge of negotiating your acquisition?
It's a great proverb and in particular the "accountants in charge to extract maximum value after maturity, lawyers in charge at the end to wind it down or sell it off" part is accurate of many businesses in general. No company gets to live in the startup and growth stages forever. At a certain point shareholders decide to get everything they can out of their investment and move on.
MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.
And yes professions have stereotypical personalities. Like the used car salesman.
It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.
It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
Even today it looks better than any of the major mobile OSs, is more responsive and just _feels_ better to hold and use.
The road not taken.
When you look at where most Nokia customers defected to, it is Samsung and Android.
An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded.
I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
The first crash was already too late for them. A team that behaved so callously earlier wasn't going to stop at that point without an external intervention. They were in fact attempting to scapegoat the pilots even after the second crash. Therefore, putting the blame on one CEO at the time of the first crash is illogical. The blame must fall on the team that established such an unbelievably flawed safety culture in the first place. Who was that? And why?
I'm not insisting that accountants and lawyers are unfit for top management. There are corporate portfolios that they're the best fit for - like accounting and law firms. Then there are the exceptions who do a sensible job even outside their portfolio. But I have seen both engineering heavy and accounting heavy managements. As expected, their priorities and operational philosophies are drastically different. But their influence doesn't end there. They also define the wider company culture - A culture that not even a CEO can change without significant personal effort against institutional inertia.
So, accountants or lawyers may be sufficient to lead IT companies. But if they choose to lead an industry where so many lives are at stake, they better hold back their profit-seeking instincts and understand the safety culture and the consequences of their decisions damn well.
You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions.
And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.
If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them.
My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside.
Concrete example: why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.
The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200 billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of Apollo before it even finished its original set of missions.
To add another data point: the Chinese lunar program also plans to land humans on the moon and later establish a manned research outpost on the surface. But there don't seem to be any plans for an orbital stations, despite China having very successful space stations in LEO
The reality was that Von Braun looked at dozens of mission architectures before discovering one that was much more feasible than any of the others and made it possible to realize Kennedy’s dream.
The moon is not far away in terms of miles but in terms of energy and momentum it is very far away if your goal is to fly there and fly back. Right now the best idea we have for a moon lander is to hope that SpaceX gets Starship to orbit and masters orbital refueling it’s not like they can fly 100 tons there and back, but rather they can land about what Apollo did with a much bigger spacecraft that’s really tall and tippy, needs an elevator, can get the ascent rockets smashed on rocks, etc. if they had a set of those chopsticks on the Moon or Mars they could land it easily but on generic inner solar system bodies covered with boulders, craters and stuff good luck. Plan B is basically the same from Blue Origin.
If you could refuel there the math changes, maybe you can, there might be usable ice at the poles but nobody has seen it, unless we have a Drexler machine we’re going to have to launch a huge number of missions with a marginally effective system until we have a system in place that can reliably deliver fuel.
So it’s tough, any honest analysis of space colonization makes you come to the conclusion that Drexler did, rocketry has very little to do with it, being able to pack a self-sufficient industrial civilization into the smallest package has everything to do with it.
Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane
For pitch, yes. For width, no —- you run into quantization pretty quickly. The difference between sardines and standard economy is less than the difference between 3+3 and 3+2 — it’s not really feasible for most traditional airlines to choose a different number of seats across than the design point. And for a 3+3 setup, adding 6” to fuselage diameter makes a noticeable difference to (wider) passengers, which the airlines can’t really take away.
I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.
I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans.
The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.
I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.
In practice people in general vote with wallets for cheaper sardine-like flights.
(though more spacious seats typically can be bought)
For a 10 hour flight that costs $500 (economy) it will cost +$80 1-way to pick a seat. Not a special seat, just a seat in general. An exit row seat costs +$160 1-way.
Or maybe the reality isn't as simple as you make it seem?
2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it.
3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. (a) Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution.
4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs
(a) when organizations in my town do a SWOT analysis they almost always put the bad state of the local airport as a disadvantage they have relative to competitors —- the county and state would spend money to improve what they can but it comes down to out-of-town airlines that have their own priorities, a pilot shortage, etc.
The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up.
Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.
A question that has never been adequately answered: if MCAS was conceived of in order to meet the 14 CFR Part 25.143 requirements for a positive control force feedback gradient, why did Boeing not modify the existing Elevator Differential Feel Computer (a mechanical/hydraulic computer with no electronic components) instead of inventing a half-assed, undocumented, slow moving, open-loop fly-by-wire contraption using the trim tab actuator?
Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is determined by the airline customer.
The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane.
And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.
It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT.
Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
And right now as well, no laptop comes close to the overall experience that the Mac provides so he has been able to maintain market leadership.
Far better than Zuck for whom the only source of innovation has been acquisitions rather than releasing original products.
Fair point.
Beyond that, I’m not sure what you think is going to be the visionary product. AR/VR still feels like 3D tv to me - a solution looking for a problem. The best use case I’ve seen was HoloLens and the military, but even that has had limited scope.
Have you tried the Vision Pro? It was a life-changing experience for me. I actually forgot that I was looking at a screen and thought that I was looking through a transparent visor. It was that good.
If they could get the weight down I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem it solves (for me, or at least would solve if it didn't weigh so damned much) is having effectively a giant monitor that I can use on a plane.
In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance. Nothing gets maintained, it’s either new or collapsing, but no-one enjoys the middle part. Which is sad. It’s a form of inflation.
Boeing is perfectly right to design a new plane right now. Engineers who interned on the 787 have bought a house on the countryside a few years ago.
Businesses kill themselves all the time from the loss of institutional knowledge. We see stuff like "government spends X a year paying people Y to build almost no product Z". Instead, we're paying people Y to be ready to build Z when something goes terribly wrong like war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
Instead, the most important innovation are the ones that reduce maintenance needs.
Automating farms, moving mechanical computation into general purpose processors, simplifying science theories so that people can learn in a semester stuff that took decades to mature... All of those have a tremendous impact. All of those speed everything up, and make room for more innovation to appear.
How much are you or your enterprise willing to pay for that?
See, the economics just don't make sense. Give me some VC money, a small team of experts in the domain and some runway and I'll give you a self-hosted alternative to Jira.
But the cost for you would be too high and I will go out of business trying to sell software while everyone else is renting it out.
I kind of feel like people gloss over the seismic shift in computing power Apple silicon designs have ushered in. It seems like a lot of people on HN think of building these chips as almost an afterthought if they think of building them at all. Which is ludicrous.
It's the chips that make the new innovative products possible, not vice versa. You literally can't innovate, until you have the compute working at the power profile that you need. Only then can you build anything groundbreaking.
Because the Software Update page under System Settings is all that normies will ever read and so what's in the text there is focused on normies.
Meanwhile techies may be interest in the CVEs listed in the security update list:
* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/125111
* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/100100
* https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
And corporate IT types may be interest in enterprise features, like TLS behavioural changes:
AirPods and the Apple Watch are also major new product lines, by some accounts each alone bigger than many major technology firms, that were released in the Tim Cook era of Apple.
Also, I expect Vision to eventually be a massive success.
I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod.
The jury is out on whether Cook can pull it off.
The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well within their capabilities.
you forgot Apple Silicon -- a _huge_ leap forward
you also forgot the Apple Watch, which has become almost the standard watch these days in the US, worn by nearly everyone I see, from baristas to CEOs
AirPods have become almost ubiquitous (and every other brand now copies them)
I am seeing them everywhere, around here.
I suspect that quite a few are SEs and maybe last year's model, but I do see a lot of Ultras.
AR does seem to be a potential big deal. But the tech and implementation probably has a ways to go before it's interesting outside of a bubble audience.
Grab one when they go on sale, and keep it in the box for a couple of decades.
Have you seen what Lisas go for at auction these days?
"Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. ....abandoning today’s 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry." https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-bas...
No one listened to him, certainly not Intel.
I used to work tech support for a mid sized company selling some specialized networking eqipment, late 1990s and early 2000s. Our big deal was we answered the phone immediately, and we were good at what we did, we solved problems, resolved the issue right then and there on the phone.
Customers paid through the nose for our support contracts because it was worth it and they were happy. Happy customers were actually happy customers.
Company grew and was acquired and acquired other companies and so on.
By the end of my time there happy customers was a metric. It really didn't reflect actually happy customers, it was an amalgam of arbitrary stats. We could hit or surpass those numbers, nothing really mattered. Nobody was more happy if the numbers went up, or more sad if the numbers went down. Someone closed a ticket, did it solve anything?, who knows, but it was one more ticket closed!
Management who knew how to build a team, support people who cared, including myself, all just moved on.
Sad stuff really.
I was recruited directly by a manager(!), and to work on a relatively small new piece that I thought my systems programming skills would be up to... but then the big company required me to do a corporate grunt screening in Python, as well as memorize some behavioral corporate drone interview answers.
I decided this would be a litmus test for whether the manager would be able to insulate me well enough from megacorp drone BS, and from some of the more aggressive org chart culture that the company was said to have. Nope, it turns out, the huge cloud provider really does insist that I do the corporate drone screening first.
I could've passed the screen with a day of memory refreshing prep on Python. (The last time I used it at that point, I had been switching back and forth each day between it and Swift, and had to look up details like how to get the length of a string. Yet I built something in Python with perfect uptime, over a year, in a critical production line, despite tricky complicating factors. And other comparable track record.)
Though I think I could've passed the nonsense screening, I decided that I already had enough negative signal, to bow out of the tempting cloud provider job. (I had a very positive impression of the manager. I was only scared of corporate culture outside of the team. If you're going to be a corporate drone, and jump through nonsense hoops, you should do it at a company widely regarded as treating its employees well.)
The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain and product-market fit. The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design, and has been an exceptional machine since then.
Which was a decision of boeing to outsource to their suppliers the design and development of those components. this combined with boeing doing some interesting pricing decisions lead to suppliers being rather screwed on the project.
> The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design
Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues.
What are you referring to?
If you use the same engines from the same vendors, same aluminum, same carbon fiber, same landing gear. Almost everything just like the others, can you really differentiate anymore? Or if you are a component vendor, can you really innovate that much anymore?
Ie maybe it can be argued it is the correct move, from the board's and investors' point of view. The machine is already pretty close to optimal, and has been since the nineties. Don't change the machine, just milk it. Fire most engineers, move production to the lowest cost non-unionised place, outsource as much as possible to vendors that you compete viciously against each other etc.
There's still not a lot of ceramic fiber in use in the engines. That's a pure weight reduction and fuel efficiency increase, up to the point that NOx emissions can't be controlled.
Given the rapidly advancing VTOL autonomous drone tech, harbor tug concepts may yet make an appearance. The funding for this could be driven from rescue aircraft, short range powerful VTOLs optimized to go pluck a struggling aircraft out of the sky and put it on the ground. The obvious evolution of that is ditching a lot of the landing weight. Reinforced undercarriage, landing gears, high-lift devices almost all exist to be used in a very short segment of the flight. Unlike roads, automation in the air has quite a bit less variability to deal with. Would you rather pilots try to put a plane with a mechanical issue on the ground by skillfully manipulating throttles or let an overgrown DJI take a swing?
Probably innovative motivated people go to work in software, SpaceX, EVTOL startups or now AI and so on. Even Walter Bright moved already decades ago to software.
But it's interesting to look at Arianespace's VTOL rocket development. Can a "dinosaur" do rapid innovation, when there's massive enough incentive? The answer looks like, maybe!
I dont want to stretch the analogy too thin but in this case instead of LLMs being a catalyst, perhaps its a monopoly.
My coworker took a class with case studies and the theory presented by that class was that all successful projects have at least one person who has fit the entire system into their head. They can tell you what happens if you pull on this thread. What the consequences are of trying to remove this feature. Lose them and you are fucked. Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same. If they can’t it’s the beginning of the end.
Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all that often, and you can build pretty big things.
I imagine this is doable with hardware too
In particular it’s difficult to train new people to take up on-call duties if they cannot sit in the corner of the room and try either the same things you’re trying or their own pet theories without taking your attention or interfering with your tests. They need to be able to hear the repro steps and spool up their own snapshot in a similar state. That scales. Gatekeepers do not. Discoverability is necessary but insufficient to achieve this. There’s more to it but the foundation is discoverability and reproduceability.
(It also usually involves some quite proactive learning of the form of finding the specialist in some part of the system and sitting next to them and going "explain to me how this part works", and then repeating more or less indefinitely)
Emphasis on clear. It's a challenging endeavor to properly draw and enforce these service boundaries.
The key there was that one qualified representative for each part of the affected organization and other relevant parties in the core team, and there were frequent alignment meetings where they were all present. The representatives were close to the action, not some three-levels-removed manager.
In the meetings processes and such would get discussed step by step in detail, and any representative could chime in at any point to say "this won't work" or similar.
Hard to do though, and quite costly in terms of organizational resources required.
Or the company ponies up and rewrites the thing.
Sometimes legacy really is bad, and sometimes you really do need to throw the old product into the bin.
See Trello for an example.
Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that.
They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time, and doing an impression of Captain Ahab in trying to union bust in Seattle by fucking off to South Carolina. Boeing customers would figure out which plane numbers were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them.
The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines.
I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).
I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again.
In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.
Fun fact: the two big Puget Sound factories (Everett and Renton) number their hand tools differently. It's true. A socket wrench will be EVT12345 or whatever, and the same tool in Renton will be inventoried differently.
The two factories have very different cultures. Renton does two planes a week, Everett does one plane a month. There was much grumbling during the webinars and retrainings after the Door Plug Incident that all this was being inflicted on us because of the cowboys down in Renton and their maniacal obsession with production rate, something which is not quite so much a focus at Everett.
The 787 was a straight up MDD pants-on-head plan (pushed by Stonecipher and McDonnel themselves), the entire point was to shift the costs of design and development to suppliers, with the idea that they'd fund the aircraft you could sell.
I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.
>It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009
2003 to 2009 is an incredibly short time line for a revolutionary new design (the heavy use of composites) The A350 developed in response was much less ambitious effort and took longer. The A380 also took a long time to plan and execute. Aircraft generations last at least a decade, and new designs every 15 years-ish is not a crazy ballpark
>and its design was fraught with problems
A380 had plenty of problems, hence the delays
the problems with the 737MAX stemmed from Boeing trying to push the low-wing design of the older 737 through one more generation to avoid a complete redesign, to avoid the kind of cash flow pinch and never-paid-back development that Airbus suffered with the A380 (which was why they tried the "evolutionary" redesign on the cheap that led to the A350)
>Before then was the 777 in the early 90s
777 was a revolutionary approach to developing a plane that led to its incredible success which continues through today (the clever idea they had? asking airlines what they wanted) Airbus has also chosen paths that have been quite successful, their "same cockpit" being one of them. 777 and Airbus's planes from that time all had very long commercial lives
>everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets
I don't think anybody has ever designed a jetliner end to end, as piston planes crossed that hurdle earlier.
>if ... a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company
where else are aerospace engineers going to work? I'm not saying there's a surplus but with defense, aviation is a very big industry, and most any engineer would like to work on greenfield designs for marquis products.
shoot from the hip copycat Jobs would find no jobs in aerospace. Different types of people have different personalities. Aircraft design is tight tolerance and exacting, and anybody who does it is going to be comfortable working in a that type of environment, lots of check, test, recheck, paperwork, etc.
Second problem are the MBA's. I don't have a solution for that, other than keep them far away from Cutler's division.
Honestly, the technical part is "easy"; it's the day to day politics that gets in the way when what is needed is longterm thinking. Take for example when NYC hired Andy Byford and Cuomo The Child couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. Shame.
I've listened to a fair number of podcasts about this, and consensus seemed to be they need to start designing a new airplane now, because if they wait as long as they'd previously been indicating, they'd have lost too much of their "new airplane design" experience.
All of which are generally regarded as great aircraft by the people who fly them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian...
Smart companies should know that a large chunk of their value chain is knowledge work. For airplanes the danger of suddenly seeing a Boink 212 appearing on the market is probably quite low, but there certainly is engineering work to be done on planes, even if some of it won't see implementation for a long time.
But long time strategy is probably not even a term in some companies.
A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.
(n of 1 observation)
Yeah, I just purchased an OrangePI ultra and that fact gushes through like a flood in a canyon. I wonder if I will ever have a u-boot for the board that isn't based on 10 repositories glued together with references to unchangeable branches which are patterned after dates like 2017. There are official images with binaries and dog-knows-what-else in them. It's like the computer wasn't meant to operate for more than a few years (at most.) AFAICT, a person working on so many parts of the OrangePI ultra just stopped as the money ran out and there is a mess of repositories left behind. Don't get me started on the security mindset of the whole situation. /rant
But they have always been gracious and insanely dedicated to making sure my problems are solved and they show me how to rebuild everything. I have a dedicated WeChat group with their engineers and get back to me 7 days a week.
Compare that with a Candian machine, where I can rarely get a hold of a technican and they lack any deep expertise on anything even just to have a informal conversation on how to improve things at my plant.
I wonder who the IBM/Xerox of today is? Amazon? Facebook?
That seems very quick to design a whole jumbo jet. I know they're not starting from scratch, but how long does something like that typically take?
I should note that I'm entirely in favor of diversity of background and thought, not to mention various educational backgrounds. That said, actually having "unofficial" policies against promoting people of a certain race and gender combination (no white men hired or advancing in management, especially old white men) is as problematic as any other racial/gender/ageist bigotry.
I don't work for Boeing as I don't have a formal education that prevents me from ever being considered. I do know several people that do. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer or anyone else.
All because Boeing just didn't want to employ people directly who can build up expertise.
The 747 was an amazing engineering marvel. They started designing it in '65, the first one rolled off the production line in '68, and they were still making and selling them right up to 2023.
I have a book here somewhere that talks about how so many of the design decisions were based on cold hard physics facts combined with engineering pragmatism. They needed to run the engine at peak efficiency, and the tradeoff between air density and air temperature set the cruising altitude to ~35,000 feet. They knew they didn't know enough to be able to build a supersonic plane, so that set the top speed at just under mach 1 at 35,000 feet. They wanted to carry 2-3 times as many passengers as the 707 which set the payload and the all up weight. It needed to go slow enough to land safely at typical airport altitudes, which set the wing loading and given the weight the wing area. It needed to be as efficient as possible which meant a high aspect ratio, but given the required wing area and the available engineering capability for wing spars and aluminum construction that set the wing span.
It was hard engineering tradeoffs like that which then set a whole bunch of aviation standards. Runway lengths, terminal and jetway heights, landing approach speeds - all those types of "standards" which still exist today in airports around the globe, are heavily influenced by the 747 and it's design parameters. Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.
That is not today's Boeing.
This isn't even close to true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_approach_category.
Cessnas approach at less than half the speed of 747s. The safe maximum cruising speed is 20-30 kts short of a 747 approach speed. You would have to be willing to risk your airplane and your life to get a Cessna up to the approach speed of a 747.
My experience landing Cessnas and other light aircraft at airfields where they land the big boys (including busy international ones) is that you approach and land at the speeds that the aircraft you are flying is designed for (which, btw, ATC and the FAA don’t give two shits if you are an international airport, the rules are the same everywhere in the US. I am licensed and have flown in other countries, and it varies ever so slightly, but not in the direction you are implying). I have had controllers ask me to keep speed up for spacing, but they aren't expecting miracles, they know that you simply can't get a Cessna to go above a certain speed.
The rest of your comment also has some dubious claims. I suspect that the top speed was set just below mach 1, not because Boeing had no engineering knowledge about supersonic flight, but because fuel efficiency, and a host of other factors that make supersonic flight difficult. As a counter to that assertion I would point out that Boeing had a supersonic engineering team that started in 1952. They even designed a supersonic airliner that was never built in the 1960s. Hard to believe that they chose not to make the 747 supersonic because they lacked the experience to design an SST while they simultaneously had an SST design and supersonic research team before the 747 was conceived.
The 747 was a groundbreaking airplane, but it wasn't all of the things being claimed here.
For decades after deregulation the total net profit of all airlines was negative. (Might still be, I’m not sure.) The industry got really cost competitive, and so the planes they purchased had to as well.
You can't just say that, mention a bunch of interesting things, and not tell me the name of the book...
Sutter was one of the people who led the design of 747.
How do you know they don't take all this into account when designing their planes?
The COMAC C919 is finally shipping, although it's not a great aircraft and China still imports the engines. COMAC will probably do better in the next round.
Will Embraeier build something in that size range? They could. They already build small midsize aircraft.[3]
This looks like Boeing missing the market.
And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_New_Midsize_Airplane
Interesting how in the eyes of Joe Public, Southwest had nothing to do with it. Wonder if the Southwest board figures their cynical calculation worked out well enough to try again?
i assume there is a limited talent pool of the required people
I still refuse to fly on the 737 MAX. I know it’s probably fine given what pilots now know about the how to control the thing, but I just refuse to support Boeing’s malicious negligence or any carrier that enables it.
There are few companies on earth I’m as mad at as Boeing. As I see it, they are not done repenting for their crimes.
The remaining exception is that, at a certain AoA, speed, thrust, etc, there is a case where adding thrust pushes the nose up more than it does for the normal 737
The nose push is not abnormal, it is not unsafe, it is not unexpected. All planes with engines below the inertial "center" of the plane have this, including every 737 and every A320.
The problem was, this meant that it's flight characteristics were "different" from the older 737s. The entire point of any plane that is even a little bit 737 is to sell to airlines as "This is still a 737 and you don't need to train anyone in anything extra".
MCAS was built to change how the plane acts in this very specific regime, to act more like older 737s and counteract this nose push.
MCAS was entirely unnecessary except for business and policy goals. MCAS killed people because properly training aircrews for it would have gone against the entire point of the 737 MAX.
All aircraft with underslung engines have similar pitch up tendencies to varying degrees and different handling characteristics between models are fine.
As seen with 757/67, 777/787 and A330/40/50 sharing type ratings despite being massively different aircraft.
> As the nacelle is ahead of the C of G, this lift causes a slight pitch-up effect (ie a reducing stick force) which could lead the pilot to inadvertently pull the yoke further aft than intended bringing the aircraft closer towards the stall. This abnormal nose-up pitching is not allowable under 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall characteristics". Several aerodynamic solutions were introduced such as revising the leading edge stall strip and modifying the leading edge vortilons but they were insufficient to pass regulation. MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during elevated AoA when flaps are up.
http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm
The feeling of the aircraft is not the problem. The stall characteristics not complying with the regulation is.
That reg says:
>No abnormal nose-up pitching may occur. The longitudinal control force must be positive up to and throughout the stall.
(how do airbus planes pass that I wonder....)
I guess most planes are "not abnormal" but the behavior of the MAX crossed into "abnormal"
Where did you get this?
In fact there was a flying airliner with relaxed stability (though only neutral not negative) when Airframe was published: the MD-11. Though I don't know that there have been others since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability#Intentional_...
It’s easier to make a turbofan more efficient by making it bigger. But power density also tends to go up with new models, so there’s at least a chance that there’s a smaller, lighter engine with the same thrust and fuel economy out there, allowing them to improve (restore) the physics of the aircraft.
But that would have required a heavier certification process, and some pilot re-training. And they couldn't have that.
Of course that wouldn't have freed Boeing from the rest of its dismal record (MCAS didn't cause door blowouts), but...
I just looked and from what I can find on Wikipedia this may warrant a new model from P&W or CFM because I’m not seeing a documented turbofan family with similar thrust and smaller diameter except ones with much lower bypass ratios and thus garbage fuel efficiency.
RR seems to be concentrating on bigger engines. They have a demonstrator that’s 2x the diameter of the Max’s engines. JFC.
Every other plane is higher than the 737. The only reason the engines needed to be pushed forward on the 737, is that the 737 was built back in the day to be lower to the ground for easier operations at poorer airports, with things like stairs and baggage.
The 737 doesn't need to be as short as it is anymore because the vast majority of them now fly to airports with jetbridges and modern bag handling equipment.
The A320 is not as short as the 737 despite serving the same market, and can handle bigger engines.
But the entire problem stems from wanting to abuse the 737 type rating even further. If they were fine with a new type rating, they could put the engines pretty much wherever they want, put nice tall landing gear, etc.
I get, but if everyone does that, Boeing does and we're left with a monopoly. Is that better? Will you feel safer flying on a COMAC?
New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames. Boeing doesn't want to make 737s, but they are locked in because of this demand.
Source: Family member trains pilots at Southwest after retiring from a major airline carrier after a career as pilot/check-airman.
Looks like a case of "broken clock is right twice per day"
So in summary, let me state for the record that Boeing's redirection into outsourced suppliers and engineering was moving forward by 1988. Well before the merger with MCD.
Edit: indeed, not the 'Neo', I got the name wrong but the link right.
Flown it once or twice with AirBaltic, and would love to take it again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmaintenance/comments/1colti...
And while a plane with good bones, the A220 has not been all positives for Airbus: AFAIK they still loses money on the thing, ramping up has been hell as it's not part of any of Airbus's existing lines of procurement, and it's contributed to the already awkward 319neo being DOA.
The A220 series' maximum capacity is basically the 737 MAX series' minimum capacity.
Lets hope Boeing can do it right this time.
Both Boeing and Airbus are spending a lot of time evaluating the next engine options. Last year there was an article that Airbus is more optimistic about CFM's open rotor designs while Boeing thinks the next generation geared turbofan models will win out. That is entirely based on leaks and no-one actually knows how true those assessments are.
The 737 Max was designed with the expectation that the 8 variant would be the sweet spot. Since that time it is clear that there is massive demand for up-gauging and the A321neo is dominating and there is significant demand for the Max10 variant despite it not being certified yet.
I would expect that both Boeing and Airbus are looking at that size (maybe slightly larger) for their next narrowbody with some flexibility for shrinks and/or stretches.
This is not a response to any existing planes. The A320/321 family is very old (50 years mid 2030) and it is expected that both Boeing and Airbus are going to be introducing new airframes to fit the new engine technology.
There are only two¹ major manufacturers of commercial airliners: one in the US and one in the EU. Both are essentially state backed. Both blocs want to have their own manufacturer, for strategic reasons, and they won't let it go under.
1. There will probably be three in a few years, since China is building up Comac.
it'll take more than financial losses to kill boeing.
Now.
Opportunistic politics mixed with the religion of infinite profit maximization produces a turbulent swampt to build the future of anything on top of.
Overly nerdy question: I'm curious regarding AoA sensor failure, is there an ability to manually source select the AoA, if not, how about the FMC? This might be called master source select, or which side is controlling (captain or first officer).
If the chips are cheap and easily available, and you know their failure modes, and they've been field tested for decades, why change?
It's very different from many software development attitudes, but remember that airframe manufacturers and avionics companies employ many people just to calculate risk and failure rates. The failure rates of these things are critical to the safety of your airframe.
Anything should have a replacement budget and timeline attached.
All I know from having worked in an Airbus subsidiary for a couple of years is that their world is nothing like mine.
It's definitely a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing, but I ask myself a similar question: at some point whoever is producing these chips is going to stop finding it worthwhile and end production, no?
But then I also assume the people who work on these things know arguably infinitely more than I do.
The 737 Max 7, the smallest of the Max series, is longer than the 737-200, the stretched version of the original design. A brand new design is going to be able to ignore that market (which basically doesn't exist any more, the Max 7 only has a handful of orders) and scale upwards to also be a 757 replacement. But it's also going to have basically no commonality with the 737, so it's going to have to genuinely be better than the Airbus product because existing Boeing customers aren't going to benefit from being able to move existing pilots to it without retraining or benefit from common maintenance plans and so on. It obviously should be better - the A320 program started over 40 years ago, it's not that much newer than the 737 - but given Boeing's myriad series of failures in recent years and how painful the 787 program was, it's not impossible that they'll fuck this up entirely.
And how much better would it _need_ to be, in order for large 737 operators to be convinced to place their next order for the new 7007? (yes, like nVidia, I trust they'll just add a number and start over when they run out of numbers).
Those engines will be a major driver of whether “better” is achieved, in particular maintenance costs and fuel economy will need to move the needle.
Unless the price is truly astronomical ,but then it's not worth it for Boeing anyway.
And that's before touching reputational damage that come from building your concurrent's plane because you couldn't design your own.
Does that mean it's not trying to be "another 737" but actually a truely new type?
In the short-term, I imagine USA-based airlines will not be allowed to buy any airplanes from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-comac-military-... And perhaps they would not even be allowed to fly in our airspace. But if China decides that it wants to build planes at lower prices than Boeing (or Airbus), then I imagine they will. Their marketshare would grow elsewhere in the globe, reducing Boeing's sales. Can Boeing deal with that? Would the USA borrow China's playbook, and nationalize (or something similar) Boeing to keep it solvent?
Biggest issue I can see is that the US will try and weaponise national security against them. Much like how Cisco and Juniper fought to have Huawei and friends blacklisted in most western countries. Just as they become competitive, Boeing and Airbus might start screaming that the chinese planes have communist killswitches and that planes will fall out of the sky if theres a war with China.
The caveate being COMAC is only expensive / has limited room to discount because it uses a lot of western components (for easy regulation/certification only). If PRC moves to a full soveign civil aviation stack, it would probably be very possible to price COMAC competitively, but that's more a medium/long term project. That's probably how it goes the way things are gonig, US probably not going to even certify/liimt where PRC planes can land to kneecap COMAC. PRC + RU can probably do some shenanigans like prevent US planes from flying over their airspace in retaliation and then it's a matter of how much divertion (extra fuel+travel costs) impact bottom line. At the end of the day geopolitics will determine how viable civil aviation projects are.
If China decides they want to continue developing and building commercial airplanes, where will they be in 5-10 years? Where will Boeing be?
I doubt that the same will happen in commertial aircraft engines. If China catches up it will be through industrial spionage or very slow grinding, that will take many years.
Commerical turbofan harder, but ultimately it boils down to TCO, where fuel efficiency "major" factor, major factor in that 10-15% less efficiency kills margins / ability to discout for current COMAC builds which uses many overpriced western components for certification. PRC switches to all domestic aviation stack (which they already have for military aviation, i.e. most of pieces there already), they can feasibly undercut/discount where PRC commercial aviation is competitive, it doesn't matter if CJ1000A is 15% less efficient than leading if upfront cost (+ favourable PRC financing) makes up for lifetime of less efficient fuel costs (cheaper TCO). But TBH civil aviation is not actually a "commercial" sector, it'a a strategic (geopolitical) sector, US will do everything it can to kill COMAC, or prevent global exports, i.e. no certification, sanction countries that buy COMAC etc.
[0]OK, I guess 2009 is not as recent as I remember...
Nice hotel on its own (though a bit out of the way from most Seattle tourist stuff), but extra-nice if you're an aviation geek.
Last I heard they're pushing hard to ramp up production and FAA is back to letting them self-certify stuff. And they're under worse financial pressure now than when they made the last round of questionable decisions.
...I'm all for competition & avoiding a monopoly but colour me unconvinced that the root cause has been fixed.
Its hard to imagine this will not have glaring issues too.
* The design time on a new plane is going to be tens of years
* Boeing is already losing customers to Airbus as a result of the max disaster, doors blowing off, etc.
* The major thing keeping Boeing in business is long delivery time orders of their older planes, and those are drying up
Given these things can this help them in time?
While there weren't actually coding flaws in MCAS in that it did what the spec said, I've met people who work in avionics and they would have pushed back against the specification because they tend to think about how their component integrates into the system.
Obviously it's impossible to prove that, had the software been developed by people specializing in avionics they would have caught the problem but it's just another hole in the swiss cheese model: when you outsource your avionics software development to an offshore contractor who was making a webstore yesterday and will be making an iphone app tomorrow, you eliminate the possibility that the implementers could do an informed critique of the spec.
https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...
EDIT> what is scarier? the quality of the software they released or that someone on HN is defending it?
Boeing 737 MAX+
Boeing 737 MAX+ Xtreme
...
Profit!Still prefer the 737 Air
Like the sound it will make.