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What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? Every airline using them has had several weeks to totally reorganize to deal with these huge missing parts of their

What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? Every airline using them has had several weeks to totally reorganize to deal with these huge missing parts of their fleets. Boeing keeps talking about fixing them and putting them back in the air, but I dunno. At this point, it should be agreed the fundamental design flaws are serious, and Boeing should have simply made a brand new plane, with much more modern controls and predictable maneuvering. Yes, pilots would have to be certified for these new plans, but that cost pails to the money lost from these grounded fleets. I'd honestly like to see the 737 MAX taken out of service and Boeing simply ending this line. The old planes should be stripped for parts and as much recycled as possible. It's going to cost them a lot of money, and it should. Their mistakes lead to the deaths of two whole planeloads of passengers. Airbus, Bombardier and others will probably make a lot out of this disaster, and that's probably a good thing and will help competition in this small/narrow market.

cm2187 8y ago
A brand new design would probably introduce more serious flaws than an interation of a mature design, so I am not sure it would be safer. In term of public perception, it is a PR disaster but not unprecedented. The DC-10 went through a similar rocky start where passengers just wouldn't want to board it. But after the flaws were fixed it turned out to be quite reliable.
- hirowan 8y ago
  > A brand new design would probably introduce more serious flaws than an interation of a mature design As evidenced by the ever-crashing 787s and A350s.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    The 787 was rushed through as well with the same modern Boeing safety culture and we were merely lucky that none of the flaws discovered in the 787 were bad enough to cause fatal accidents before they were rectified. Read up on its battery issues if you want an idea of what could have gone wrong.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    I rather had the exploding engines of the A380 in mind, the flaming batteries of the B787, but we can also talk earlier B737 (rudder, rivets on early models), DC-10 (cargo door), C-5 (door lock), A340 (freezing pitot tubes) etc.
    - hirowan 8y ago
      The 737 rudder hardover wasn't discovered until the mid-to-late 90s, a long, loooong time after the 737 entered into service. That does not quite speak to the benefit of a mature product (how mature is 'mature'?). Case in point: the 737 trim wheel and pitch trim assembly. The deficiencies of their design were put on full display in 2018, because of MCAS. Why do you think it is that (other) modern airliners do not have a stabilizer runaway non-normal checklist? There's a whole host of issues that are inherent to the 737 precisely because of how... mature it is. I think there's probably a crossover point, when a design ceases to be mature and becomes obsolete. (Engines on newer models can be - and usually are - iterations of older designs. The A380's RR engines are built on the same platform as the Tristar's, introduced in 1972!)
dboreham 8y ago
Might be usable as freighters like the DC-10s?
jeremyjh 8y ago
I don’t see another way Boeing can begin to regain public trust.
erentz 8y ago
> What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? The bugs will be addressed and they'll still fly. Airlines have no choice, there's a limited capacity in the world for airplane construction, several thousands of orders on the books for the 737 and 320 waiting to be filled. What can an airline do? They can cut back some orders but not all orders. > I'd honestly like to see the 737 MAX taken out of service and Boeing simply ending this line. I have an alternate history fantasy where instead of going with the MAX and then trying to kill the C-series as they did, they instead bought into the C-series. Swapping the cockpit for a Boeing cockpit design. Built the -500 stretch of the C-series, and then used the C-series to replace the 737 line in the <165 pax market. And moved ahead on the 797/NMA for which they'd have a shorter version covering the 200-270 pax market as a pure passenger mover as it's proposed.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  I'm not an engineer but what about: A) Adding two more angle-of-attack sensors so a pilot can be reasonably sure of auto-adjust will work. Retrofitting those would be expensive, of course. B) Put the two buttons back the way they were and add a "light" indicator an angle-of-attack sensor failure. C) More pilot simulator training so pilots know what to expect in the unusual situation that the system fails. I suspect the answer would be: "Even now we're not willing to bite the bullet and pay all the expenses we were dodging before". Searching, it seems Southwest already did something like this (after the first crash, in fact). The problem might be that if Boeing does this on their dime then Boeing would be essentially giving every one of their "bargain" customers the features of their "luxury" customers, which I would speculate might be a vastly expensive proposition especially if it sets precedent going forward. https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/southwest-airlines-is-adding-new-angle-of-attack-indicators-to-its-737-max-fleet/ https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/southwest-airlines...
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    You need three redundant sensors for safety-critical systems, so that if one fails you know which one is failing. Airbus has three AoA sensors (and three of others as well) on their planes for this reason. And it's worth pointing out that 737s already have two of these sensors, but don't use them both for MCAS (?!?!).
massysett 8y ago
These planes cost at least $100 million each. They will fix them and get them flying again.
- davewasthere 8y ago
  Yeah, but who is going to want to fly in one again? Even working in aviation in the past and knowing that they've probably nailed the issue, I'd still be less than keen.
  - cma 8y ago
    Many people just sort tickets by cheapest and choose that as their flight.
  - skellera 8y ago
    Most people don’t even think about the plane they’re flying in. It will not be that big of an issue to continue using them unless some group actively tries to warn passengers about flying in those specific planes.
    - bushido 8y ago
      It seems like this is becoming a concern now - per: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/07/barclays-downgrades-boeing-survey-shows-fliers-will-avoid-737-max.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/07/barclays-downgrades-boeing-s... The primary reason for the downgrade being: Barclays’ survey of airline passengers says many people will avoid the 737 Max “for an extended period” once the aircraft is flying again.
      - JudgeWapner 8y ago
        this is what marketing people are paid to solve. they'll rebrand it, have some feel-good TV commercials like BP did after they dumped millions of gallons into the gulf, and somehow get on with life.
      - Aeolun 8y ago
staunch 8y ago
Now imagine if Boeing had created a brand new design instead of the 737 MAX and it had some mysterious fatal flaw as well? Second System Syndrome is something every engineer should understand. There's just no good reason to suspect a brand new design would've been bug free or easier to debug than the 737 MAX. The 787s or A320neos could start dropping out of the sky at any minute. Maybe their carbon fiber panels start disintegrating midair after some number of pressurization cycles. The 787s almost did drop out of the sky due to battery problems. Because of the complexity involved, the only hard proof of an aircraft's safety is many years of successful flying. Other planes have had fatal flaws that took a lot more work to discover. The silver lining of the 737 MAX's MCAS problem seems to be that it is at least quite straightforward to fix, as far as aircraft bugs go. IMHO Boeing should payout millions for each death they caused, fix the mistakes that caused them, reorient their culture towards safety first, and return the 737 MAX to service. If they work very hard and learn from this mistake there's no reason to think they can't regain the public's trust within a few years.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > There's just no good reason to suspect a brand new design would've been bug free or easier to debug than the 737 MAX. A brand new design actually supporting the engines used would not have aerodynamic issues that place the airframe outside the limits set forth by regulations.
  - staunch 8y ago
    What regulations are you referring to? Yes, it's true that it would be have been free from this specific MCAS issue. But what other issues would a new design have had? It's impossible to know. It's also true that if Boeing had done a better job of implementing the MCAS design it would have been viewed as a triumph of software solving hardware problems. Air France 447 crashed in large part because the pilot flying was incapable of handling the aircraft at cruise speeds without software assisting him. He thought the plane would stop him from doing something stupid but it didn't because the software failed in a somewhat similar way to the MCAS failures (sensor failure). Airbus hasn't done anything to make their planes easier to fly at cruises speeds without software because software assisting pilots with complex flight characteristics is a fundamentally sound idea. The important thing is that the software actually works. Clearly the first version MCAS did not work reliably but there is no reason to believe that it couldn't work reliably.
skybrian 8y ago
It's rather weird to ask a huge number of mostly-good airplanes to be thrown away for PR reasons, rather than fixing them. (Not to mention that these planes have never crashed in most countries, even with an admittedly serious bug.)
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >It's rather weird to ask a huge number of mostly-good airplanes to be thrown away for PR reasons Welcome to the internet where other people's money doesn't matter.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    I don’t know about you, but in my real-life other people’s money doesn’t matter either.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  it’s not just pr reasons. they tried to hot patch this airplane design with software, and now they are hot patching that fix. it seems it is a fundamentally flawed design that they tried to hide and get away with rather than doing the right thing. i know i don’t want to fly on a 737 max ever, and this whole ordeal with boeing and the faa has made me less confident in the airline industry as a whole. your parenthetical still shows some finger pointing towards “poor” countries’ pilots and ignores the number of crashes and reports for as young as this plane is and the numbers in use.
  - skellera 8y ago
    Pilots are highly trained. They go through many hours of simulated flights. After an incident like this, any pilots still flying a MAX will be drilled on this specific failure. If you start to see pilots refuse to fly it, that’s when you should worry. Aviation adapts to problems and it always has. Southwest installed additional gear on their planes to help prevent this when the first plane crashed. It’s not far fetched that companies in countries with lesser regulations might skip out on training or plane enhancements that would lessen the chances of this problem.
manigandham 8y ago
There's no fundamental design flaw, the aircraft is sound. The problem came from using software systems to artificially make the plane behave like older designs to avoid entirely new training and certifications. Even that would've been acceptable and similar systems are already in use in other planes but it was the inadequate info, redundancy, warnings and controls to disable the system that created the problem. It's easily fixable but still a tragedy of greed and oversight that led to the situation in the first place.
- samstave 8y ago
  Exactly. Structurally it is sound. Tear out the MCAS and get the bodies in the air. Period. However, fuck boeing's engineering team on this one. They should pay a price. Fuck you for downvoting, be informed: https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/4/15/18306644/boeing-737-max-crash-video https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/4/15/18306644/boeing-737-max...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- contravariant 8y ago
  This is pretty far from my area of expertise but I if it was behaving as the older designs did then why did it crash? As far as I can tell there are definitely some flaws, which seemed to have crept in as a result of the attempt to make them behave like older designs, but it seems optimistic to assume you can simply remove the flaws by sacrificing on that point.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    It crashed because the system that was making it behave that way failed. The MCAS did not get correct data, did not react well, was not easily deduced to be the problem, and was not easily disabled. Training and technical improvements can resolve these problems and it's ready to fly. If that's still deemed too risky then Boeing can remove the behavior modifications with training and certification as a completely new design. It was this cost that they were trying to avoid through emulation but clearly not done in a safe enough manner.
jwr 8y ago
I think the 737 MAX should be properly re-certified as a new airplane once the "fixes" are implemented. The whole idea that you can significantly alter an existing airplane by mounting larger engines more forward, add new automatic systems, and still pretend that it's the same airplane, is flawed.
- SomeHacker44 8y ago
  Could not agree more. This is the real “fix” once the plane is rendered safe ... if the regulators or Boeing can ever be trusted about thus airframe again.
- the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  The 737 MAX cannot be certified as a new plane so that is not an option.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    Why not?
    - the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
      Because it has grandfathered rules that new planes don’t have it depends on. For instance no new plane design us allowed to have 737 style emergency exits.
      - jwr 8y ago
        Oh, that's bad. In that case, I expect we will see it forced through the regulatory pipeline, because Boeing is "too big to fail". This is not good, neither for us passengers nor for aviation safety in general.
      - anticensor 8y ago
        Just add more doors.
mandeepj 8y ago
> but that cost pails to the money lost from these grounded fleets They did not think - it'd ever happen. The shortcuts were taken for bringing 737 max quick to market.
Aeolun 8y ago
This would be nice, but both airlines and Boeing are too big to fail so it won’t happen. Airlines need their airplanes, and if boeing would recompense them for the lost planes they’d be instantly out of business. Conversely, the carriers cannot just write off a significant part of their fleet and buy new ones, which wouldn’t show up for years anyway.
btgeekboy 8y ago
> Boeing keeps talking about fixing them and putting them back in the air, but I dunno. More than that - they're continuing to manufacture them. There's quite a few of them stacked up at KPAE, just sitting there waiting for their software updates, all painted in customer livery. (They're not even manufactured at PAE; they're ferried there for storage.)
CaptainZapp 8y ago
Airbus, Bombardier and others will probably make a lot out of this disaster I don't think so. Traditionally manufacturers and airlines never argue about a security incident of the competition. I only know of one issue were this unwritten rule was not respected.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Shuttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Shuttle

cm2187 8y ago

A brand new design would probably introduce more serious flaws than an interation of a mature design, so I am not sure it would be safer. In term of public perception, it is a PR disaster but not unprecedented. The DC-10 went through a similar rocky start where passengers just wouldn't want to board it. But after the flaws were fixed it turned out to be quite reliable.

hirowan 8y ago
> A brand new design would probably introduce more serious flaws than an interation of a mature design As evidenced by the ever-crashing 787s and A350s.
- ummonk 8y ago
  The 787 was rushed through as well with the same modern Boeing safety culture and we were merely lucky that none of the flaws discovered in the 787 were bad enough to cause fatal accidents before they were rectified. Read up on its battery issues if you want an idea of what could have gone wrong.
- cm2187 8y ago
  I rather had the exploding engines of the A380 in mind, the flaming batteries of the B787, but we can also talk earlier B737 (rudder, rivets on early models), DC-10 (cargo door), C-5 (door lock), A340 (freezing pitot tubes) etc.
  - hirowan 8y ago
    The 737 rudder hardover wasn't discovered until the mid-to-late 90s, a long, loooong time after the 737 entered into service. That does not quite speak to the benefit of a mature product (how mature is 'mature'?). Case in point: the 737 trim wheel and pitch trim assembly. The deficiencies of their design were put on full display in 2018, because of MCAS. Why do you think it is that (other) modern airliners do not have a stabilizer runaway non-normal checklist? There's a whole host of issues that are inherent to the 737 precisely because of how... mature it is. I think there's probably a crossover point, when a design ceases to be mature and becomes obsolete. (Engines on newer models can be - and usually are - iterations of older designs. The A380's RR engines are built on the same platform as the Tristar's, introduced in 1972!)

dboreham 8y ago

Might be usable as freighters like the DC-10s?

jeremyjh 8y ago

I don’t see another way Boeing can begin to regain public trust.

erentz 8y ago

> What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? The bugs will be addressed and they'll still fly. Airlines have no choice, there's a limited capacity in the world for airplane construction, several thousands of orders on the books for the 737 and 320 waiting to be filled. What can an airline do? They can cut back some orders but not all orders. > I'd honestly like to see the 737 MAX taken out of service and Boeing simply ending this line. I have an alternate history fantasy where instead of going with the MAX and then trying to kill the C-series as they did, they instead bought into the C-series. Swapping the cockpit for a Boeing cockpit design. Built the -500 stretch of the C-series, and then used the C-series to replace the 737 line in the <165 pax market. And moved ahead on the 797/NMA for which they'd have a shorter version covering the 200-270 pax market as a pure passenger mover as it's proposed.

joe_the_user 8y ago
I'm not an engineer but what about: A) Adding two more angle-of-attack sensors so a pilot can be reasonably sure of auto-adjust will work. Retrofitting those would be expensive, of course. B) Put the two buttons back the way they were and add a "light" indicator an angle-of-attack sensor failure. C) More pilot simulator training so pilots know what to expect in the unusual situation that the system fails. I suspect the answer would be: "Even now we're not willing to bite the bullet and pay all the expenses we were dodging before". Searching, it seems Southwest already did something like this (after the first crash, in fact). The problem might be that if Boeing does this on their dime then Boeing would be essentially giving every one of their "bargain" customers the features of their "luxury" customers, which I would speculate might be a vastly expensive proposition especially if it sets precedent going forward. https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/southwest-airlines-is-adding-new-angle-of-attack-indicators-to-its-737-max-fleet/ https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/southwest-airlines...
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  You need three redundant sensors for safety-critical systems, so that if one fails you know which one is failing. Airbus has three AoA sensors (and three of others as well) on their planes for this reason. And it's worth pointing out that 737s already have two of these sensors, but don't use them both for MCAS (?!?!).

massysett 8y ago

These planes cost at least $100 million each. They will fix them and get them flying again.

davewasthere 8y ago
Yeah, but who is going to want to fly in one again? Even working in aviation in the past and knowing that they've probably nailed the issue, I'd still be less than keen.
- cma 8y ago
  Many people just sort tickets by cheapest and choose that as their flight.
- skellera 8y ago
  Most people don’t even think about the plane they’re flying in. It will not be that big of an issue to continue using them unless some group actively tries to warn passengers about flying in those specific planes.
  - bushido 8y ago
    It seems like this is becoming a concern now - per: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/07/barclays-downgrades-boeing-survey-shows-fliers-will-avoid-737-max.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/07/barclays-downgrades-boeing-s... The primary reason for the downgrade being: Barclays’ survey of airline passengers says many people will avoid the 737 Max “for an extended period” once the aircraft is flying again.
    - JudgeWapner 8y ago
      this is what marketing people are paid to solve. they'll rebrand it, have some feel-good TV commercials like BP did after they dumped millions of gallons into the gulf, and somehow get on with life.
    - Aeolun 8y ago

staunch 8y ago

Now imagine if Boeing had created a brand new design instead of the 737 MAX and it had some mysterious fatal flaw as well? Second System Syndrome is something every engineer should understand. There's just no good reason to suspect a brand new design would've been bug free or easier to debug than the 737 MAX. The 787s or A320neos could start dropping out of the sky at any minute. Maybe their carbon fiber panels start disintegrating midair after some number of pressurization cycles. The 787s almost did drop out of the sky due to battery problems. Because of the complexity involved, the only hard proof of an aircraft's safety is many years of successful flying. Other planes have had fatal flaws that took a lot more work to discover. The silver lining of the 737 MAX's MCAS problem seems to be that it is at least quite straightforward to fix, as far as aircraft bugs go. IMHO Boeing should payout millions for each death they caused, fix the mistakes that caused them, reorient their culture towards safety first, and return the 737 MAX to service. If they work very hard and learn from this mistake there's no reason to think they can't regain the public's trust within a few years.

blattimwind 8y ago
> There's just no good reason to suspect a brand new design would've been bug free or easier to debug than the 737 MAX. A brand new design actually supporting the engines used would not have aerodynamic issues that place the airframe outside the limits set forth by regulations.
- staunch 8y ago
  What regulations are you referring to? Yes, it's true that it would be have been free from this specific MCAS issue. But what other issues would a new design have had? It's impossible to know. It's also true that if Boeing had done a better job of implementing the MCAS design it would have been viewed as a triumph of software solving hardware problems. Air France 447 crashed in large part because the pilot flying was incapable of handling the aircraft at cruise speeds without software assisting him. He thought the plane would stop him from doing something stupid but it didn't because the software failed in a somewhat similar way to the MCAS failures (sensor failure). Airbus hasn't done anything to make their planes easier to fly at cruises speeds without software because software assisting pilots with complex flight characteristics is a fundamentally sound idea. The important thing is that the software actually works. Clearly the first version MCAS did not work reliably but there is no reason to believe that it couldn't work reliably.

skybrian 8y ago

It's rather weird to ask a huge number of mostly-good airplanes to be thrown away for PR reasons, rather than fixing them. (Not to mention that these planes have never crashed in most countries, even with an admittedly serious bug.)

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>It's rather weird to ask a huge number of mostly-good airplanes to be thrown away for PR reasons Welcome to the internet where other people's money doesn't matter.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I don’t know about you, but in my real-life other people’s money doesn’t matter either.
nikofeyn 8y ago
it’s not just pr reasons. they tried to hot patch this airplane design with software, and now they are hot patching that fix. it seems it is a fundamentally flawed design that they tried to hide and get away with rather than doing the right thing. i know i don’t want to fly on a 737 max ever, and this whole ordeal with boeing and the faa has made me less confident in the airline industry as a whole. your parenthetical still shows some finger pointing towards “poor” countries’ pilots and ignores the number of crashes and reports for as young as this plane is and the numbers in use.
- skellera 8y ago
  Pilots are highly trained. They go through many hours of simulated flights. After an incident like this, any pilots still flying a MAX will be drilled on this specific failure. If you start to see pilots refuse to fly it, that’s when you should worry. Aviation adapts to problems and it always has. Southwest installed additional gear on their planes to help prevent this when the first plane crashed. It’s not far fetched that companies in countries with lesser regulations might skip out on training or plane enhancements that would lessen the chances of this problem.

manigandham 8y ago

There's no fundamental design flaw, the aircraft is sound. The problem came from using software systems to artificially make the plane behave like older designs to avoid entirely new training and certifications. Even that would've been acceptable and similar systems are already in use in other planes but it was the inadequate info, redundancy, warnings and controls to disable the system that created the problem. It's easily fixable but still a tragedy of greed and oversight that led to the situation in the first place.

samstave 8y ago
Exactly. Structurally it is sound. Tear out the MCAS and get the bodies in the air. Period. However, fuck boeing's engineering team on this one. They should pay a price. Fuck you for downvoting, be informed: https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/4/15/18306644/boeing-737-max-crash-video https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/4/15/18306644/boeing-737-max...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
contravariant 8y ago
This is pretty far from my area of expertise but I if it was behaving as the older designs did then why did it crash? As far as I can tell there are definitely some flaws, which seemed to have crept in as a result of the attempt to make them behave like older designs, but it seems optimistic to assume you can simply remove the flaws by sacrificing on that point.
- manigandham 8y ago
  It crashed because the system that was making it behave that way failed. The MCAS did not get correct data, did not react well, was not easily deduced to be the problem, and was not easily disabled. Training and technical improvements can resolve these problems and it's ready to fly. If that's still deemed too risky then Boeing can remove the behavior modifications with training and certification as a completely new design. It was this cost that they were trying to avoid through emulation but clearly not done in a safe enough manner.

jwr 8y ago

I think the 737 MAX should be properly re-certified as a new airplane once the "fixes" are implemented. The whole idea that you can significantly alter an existing airplane by mounting larger engines more forward, add new automatic systems, and still pretend that it's the same airplane, is flawed.

SomeHacker44 8y ago
Could not agree more. This is the real “fix” once the plane is rendered safe ... if the regulators or Boeing can ever be trusted about thus airframe again.
the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
The 737 MAX cannot be certified as a new plane so that is not an option.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  Why not?
  - the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
    Because it has grandfathered rules that new planes don’t have it depends on. For instance no new plane design us allowed to have 737 style emergency exits.
    - jwr 8y ago
      Oh, that's bad. In that case, I expect we will see it forced through the regulatory pipeline, because Boeing is "too big to fail". This is not good, neither for us passengers nor for aviation safety in general.
    - anticensor 8y ago
      Just add more doors.

mandeepj 8y ago

> but that cost pails to the money lost from these grounded fleets They did not think - it'd ever happen. The shortcuts were taken for bringing 737 max quick to market.

Aeolun 8y ago

This would be nice, but both airlines and Boeing are too big to fail so it won’t happen. Airlines need their airplanes, and if boeing would recompense them for the lost planes they’d be instantly out of business. Conversely, the carriers cannot just write off a significant part of their fleet and buy new ones, which wouldn’t show up for years anyway.

btgeekboy 8y ago

> Boeing keeps talking about fixing them and putting them back in the air, but I dunno. More than that - they're continuing to manufacture them. There's quite a few of them stacked up at KPAE, just sitting there waiting for their software updates, all painted in customer livery. (They're not even manufactured at PAE; they're ferried there for storage.)

CaptainZapp 8y ago

Airbus, Bombardier and others will probably make a lot out of this disaster I don't think so. Traditionally manufacturers and airlines never argue about a security incident of the competition. I only know of one issue were this unwritten rule was not respected.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Shuttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Shuttle