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Comment by wyldberry | Hacker News Reader

This has been a long time coming. The big buyer for 737 consistently has been Southwest. Before a recent ownership shakeup, Southwest wanted to only operate the 737 airframe, and avoid as many new features as possible to keep training costs low, and maintenance costs low.

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.

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People blame Boeing for the 737 MAX. They were elbows deep in a clean sheet design. Yeah, they shouldn’t have built the plane but the demand was made by Southwest and American who both said straight up if you don’t make a new 737, we’re switching to Airbus.

My understand is that the 737 Max was fine if they treated it as a new airplane. The problem was the put gizmos on it to make it behave like a regular 737 so pilots didn't need to get retrained on it. Those gizmos are what crashed it when you didn't know how they behaved when they failed.

The problem is that the whole point of the 737 Max was that airlines didn't have to treat it as a new airplane. If they did, it would have lost a lot of the value proposition and there would have been more support for an entirely new replacement instead. It would be a fascinating case study in perverse incentives and unintended consequences if it wasn't for the loss of life that resulted.

Doesn't that make it an even more important case study? I remember learning about the Therac-25 in CS undergrad specifically because it killed people.

According to my research (watching youtube videos), putting those big turbofan engines (which had to be pushed forward and up to fit) gave the plane different flying characteristics which, under the rules of whatever, required new pilots to be retrained to some degree (at least flight simulator training), which made it a real pain for some airlines to ship their pilots off to wherever those simulators are.

Boeing is absolutely to blame though, in the end they’re responsible for the safety of the aircraft and there was plenty wrong internally at Airbus. The customer isn’t always king.

> New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames.

Looks like a case of "broken clock is right twice per day"

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