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According to the article Boeing has halted production, but this leaves the door open to producing them again in the future after design updates. I predict they'
by BitwiseFool 7y ago
According to the article Boeing has halted production, but this leaves the door open to producing them again in the future after design updates. I predict they'll try to rename the model and fly it again after making changes and certifying.
That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
- heavymark 7y agoYes, I imagine the rebranding will be as ineffective as Comcast rebranding as Xfinity, where everyone knows they are the same.
- tyingq 7y agoTheir stock price certainly has a much better slope post rebrand. Though I don't know all the factors.
- codegeek 7y agoYea it is hilarious how Comcast thinks rebranding to xfinity etc is going to help. To be fair to them, the internet service mostly has been excellent where I live. The issue is the predatory pricing/cost and ever decreasing TV channels for existing customers.
- wayoutthere 7y agoHaving worked there during the rebranding, a big part of it was more to drive clarity around the business units (think Alphabet vs Google, only in reverse). "Comcast" refers to the overall holding company over the cable business, media business and stadium / real estate holdings. They referred to the cable business as "Comcast Cable" for a while before rebranding it to Xfinity. The public rebranding was definitely intentional, but it wasn't the only reason behind it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- linsomniac 7y agoI don't know what you're talking about, Comcast has had amazing support the last few months in my area. We even had a rep come to our house, and leave a handwritten note on the door when we didn't answer, asking if we had any questions or concerns and to give them a call if there was anything they could do for us. ... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our neighborhood... ;-)
- sieabahlpark 7y agoYou'll probably be happier on fiber when it rolls out
- briffle 7y agoMy Comcast connection is rock solid. Except when it rains. And I live in Oregon.
- linsomniac 7y agoFYI: I had that problem a decade ago, and the problem ended up being a nick in the coax sheathing on the run from the house to the neighborhood box. Water would get in and ruin the signal, but it was fine when it was dry.
- Treblemaker 7y agoI just got comcast installed in a new home, and the experience was completely different from what I've experienced in the past -- think "apple store", rather than "we're the phone company; we don't have to care". The customer service rep that helped me said they just finished six months of training, and even they were surprised that the system "just worked" when I went in to pick up the gear (my choice to pick it up two hours after calling them rather than waiting for delivery). I won't go into detail about all the other things that "went right" to avoid sounding like a marketing bird, but from what I heard it is a corporate initiative and not just for the fiber buildout.
- techsupporter 7y ago
- benhurmarcel 7y agoIt doesn't matter that everyone knows they're the same, rebranding often works.
- Retric 7y agoRebranding works when it’s paired with significant changes. Without that people tend to keep using the old name for a long time. People still call the Willis tower the sears tower and that change happened 11 years ago.
- thereare5lights 7y agoI've never understood the comcast hate. I've been using Xfinity for years and it's been very reliable and fast. My only gripe is the price.
- jaywalk 7y agoComcast used to do some pretty bad stuff, but they've definitely cleaned up their act. I've been a customer for 10+ years, and have had zero significant issues with my service.
- breischl 7y agoIt's not so much the service itself as the crappy customer support, shady billing processes (eg, accidentally overcharging on a regular basis...) and things like that.
- mabey 7y agothey enforce data caps on home internet
- jsight 7y agoAs much as I dislike Comcat/Xfinity, I don't think they are hurting at all.
- Brave-Steak 7y agoI'd assume this is only temporary. How many orders for the Max do they still have unfulfilled? That'd be a significant loss if they intended to not fill them sometime in the future. Edit: It says in the article > The assembly line in Renton, Washington, has stopped building Boeing's bestselling plane, the company confirmed late Monday. Boeing announced plans to temporarily halt production for an undetermined period in December, but it had not previously announced a precise day for the shutdown.
- asah 7y agothat's fine - but 99% of everybody else will fly a 737 Max for $x less and after 1-3 months of no reported incidents.
- xiphias2 7y agoAftee a few years I may fly them again, I just need to wait until the statistics are conviencing enough.
- freepor 7y agoI think you’re underestimating how much fear people have of flying. If there’s a plane that is considered “dangerous” then people are going to avoid it. It’s not like airlines losing your luggage which people just put up with.
- DougN7 7y agoI’m the opposite. I figure the safest time to fly is when all the problems are foremost in everyone’s mind. Not worried/haven’t checked if I’m flying one today.
- mrtweetyhack 7y agoThat's what the people who died thought as well
- l33tman 7y agoI have many friends who fly a lot more than me, and I've never heard any of them mention the type of airplane as an issue. Most of them don't know the exact model or even brand of "that plane that was grounded".. I guess people in general rely on the government agencies to do this decision for us..
- ghaff 7y agoI don’t think I’ve ever made a flight decision based on the safety of a particular airline type. I prefer certain types for long hauls as well as caring about seat configuration and schedule/price. But I figure getting back and forth to the airport is more dangerous.
- stopads 7y agoI'm almost there, after reading about how much Boeing has spent on stock buybacks (5x all of R&D over the past six years) I think I'm going to start looking into which model typically services a route and avoid all modern Boeing planes. Boeing made a lot of executives super rich with buybacks and equity compensation, this led directly to the shoddy engineering choices.
- rapsey 7y agoJust like every other major public company. If that is your criteria you will be left with little to buy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stopads 7y agoNo, the current buyback madness (at least at these levels) is a very recent invention of the past decade and quite abnormal. We can go back to reinvesting in companies and employees and research tomorrow if we want to. But this would require boards and executives who didn't want to just grant themselves huge amounts of equity while buying back stock. So far not many boards are standing up for this.
- rapsey 7y agoYeah recent like you said for boening last six years. They are doing what everyone else is doing so it is pretty strange to single them out on this issue.
- stopads 7y agoI've complained about many companies that are devoting even more resources to buybacks on this very forum, including Chevron, Texas Instruments, Google and Oracle. Google in particular has been the trendsetter, everyone else is trying to keep up with their buybacks. This news story is about Boeing, so yes I'm going to talk about Boeing here. Do you work in defense or aerospace? You seem to be taking this personally for some reason.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago> That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as. Self admittedly, I don't fly as frequently as I used to, but do they still put the model of plane you're flying on anywhere on the ticket? How can someone go about making sure you're not flying on this specific model?
- eropple 7y agoJust look on FlightAware or similar. They've all got the historical record for a given route (though of course it's possible an airline might substitute after you've bought the ticket, it's unlikely; most flights fit a specific profile and most airlines have only a couple of models to fit that profile). The major users from North American airlines are Southwest (34 planes), Air Canada (24), American (24), United (14), and Aeromexico (6), so it's not super common here at least.
- paulmd 7y agoI strongly doubt the overwhelming majority of consumers are going to cross reference booking details against an external site to avoid a specific plane unless there are planes falling out of the air on a daily basis. People may say they will, but in practice they'll look up the cheapest flight and book that, as usual.
- nickserv 7y agoDepends on how prominently the information is displayed, and the price difference. If I can see the plane type in the list of available flights, and the difference is $15 on a $250 ticket I would choose the non Max flight, all else being equal.
- paulmd 7y agoFair, and someone mentioned that Kayak does display that, but I think you will probably have to move to a different airline to get a different aircraft type (airlines use one common type for most flights on a given route) and the price differences are often steep and/or there are other sacrifices to be made (frequent flyer miles, more expensive bag checkins, etc).
- stanferder 7y agoI've completely stopped buying tickets on airlines that own or ordered 737 MAX's, so I don't even have to check if they've been un-grounded.
- linsomniac 7y agoI've heard that the "Max" name doesn't appear on FAA filings and the like, they use the name "737-8". I'm guessing that they'll be switching to using that name once the issues are ironed out.
- yeezul 7y agoI hope not. That's going to be confusing with the 737-800 model.
- madengr 7y agoThis will probably be the safest plane to fly on, considering the amount of scrutiny the FAA is now applying.
- mrtksn 7y agoWould restarting Chernobyl make it the safest NPP considering the amount of scrutiny that it would be put through? Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.
- TJSomething 7y agoBut Windows 7 was just Windows Vista with some relatively minor changes and it was fine. The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe and added a bunch of software to try to make it fly exactly like second generation 737s so that pilots didn't need to retrain. But the abstraction was leaky and it turns out that when you have a different airframe, you have to retrain your pilots. That said, Boeing did some janky stuff to get this nonsense certified by the FAA and the whole design probably needs to be recertified, which will take years.
- mrtksn 7y agoWindows Me was probably a better example but not everyone will remember it. Anyhow, the point is that scrutinizing a bad architecture doesn't make it any better. Scrutinizing a chicken won't make it an eagle.
- mumblemumble 7y agoI worked at a help desk when Windows ME came out. As I recall, the most salient difference I found between it and XP was that they removed a bunch of tools that I had come to rely on for diagnosis, troubleshooting, and just generally understanding what was going on under the hood. I guess it was ostensibly better, but I never did feel as comfortable working with an ME box. With that in mind, yeah, Windows ME sounds like a pretty great analogy.
- nodesocket 7y agoAgree the title should be changed as it’s misleading. CNBC reporting June or July[1]. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/boeing-doesnt-expect-regulators-to-sign-off-on-737-max-until-june-or-july.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/boeing-doesnt-expect-regulat...
- fred_is_fred 7y agoThey could rebrand it as the 737 Cargo since I think a lot of potential passengers feel just like you.
- Gibbon1 7y ago50/50 prediction. Existing 737 Max aircraft will never fly passenger service again.
- missosoup 7y ago> That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as. Yeah you will. Good luck selectively avoiding the most popular international route plane. Historically, people have been very quick to forget mishaps with particular airframes and revert to flying the most convenient/economical routes. And by the time it's flying again, it will be hands down the safest plane that's being operated because every minute detail of it will have been checked with far more scrutiny than any other newly launched platform.
- JaRail 7y agoYou can check it all you want. That won't change the physics of its dynamically unstable design.
- missosoup 7y agoThe max 8 doesn't have an inherently unstable design. This meme now only lives in the minds of the most ignorant out-of-the-loop individuals who wilfully consume FUD and ignore expert evidence. If the airframe is truly unsafe, then it'll never fly again. But everyone knows it will. Because it isn't. The only thing that'll happen is the max 8 will probably require a new type rating which will hurt airline economy a bit. Other than that, you'll be flying in it a year from now and have forgotten all about this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kayfox 7y agoIts a stable design. The force MCAS is correcting is a lightening of control forces near a stall. This is not allowed per FARs, so they added MCAS to force some extra force. It will fly just fine with the computers turned off.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's a stable design. Barely so in some edge cases, but it is stable across the whole flight envelope.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoThey don't "leave the door open" to restarting production. It's the official plan to do so.
- cameldrv 7y agoThe 737NG is out of production, and Airbus currently has something like a 5 year backlog of A320 orders. The only other direct competitor is the Comac C919. Boeing has already made about 1000 737MAXes. The 737MAX is going to be a significant part of the global airline fleet whether you like it or not. There will be many routes where the 737MAX is the only aircraft flying that route. I think it's fairly unlikely that there's some other massively dangerous failure mode of the 737MAX, because the fleet has flown enough hours, and the only crashes have been the result of the MCAS. When that's fixed, it's quite possible that there are other gremlins that cause crashes, but they probably will be much less severe/likely than the MCAS problem.
- phkahler 7y agoMCAS is not the fundamental problem. The new CEO has said they may require training for this 737 variant after all. Given a failure to simply drop MCAS, do extra pilot training and move on, we can conclude the plane isn't safe without additional computer control - of the quality MCAS was not. I hope I'm wrong about that, but the longer it drags on the more it looks like that may be the case.
- cameldrv 7y agoI'm not directly involved, but my understanding is that to some degree the entire computer system is now involved. The problem is that the design philosophy of the instruments and computers on the 737 is the idea of having two "sides" to many sensors and instruments, a left and right. If the captain's airspeed readout differs from the FO's readout, the pilots are supposed to decide which one to trust. Crucially, in order for this concept to work, the two sides are supposed to be totally independent -- the computers are different, the displays are different, and the sensors are different. However, at any one time, only one FCC is active, in that it is actually controlling the plane. Comparing the two sides AoA now violates this assumption and so many of the other engineering and certification assumptions may be violated since now the two FCCs are sharing AoA inputs. Furthermore, my understanding is that now that everything is being looked at more closely, the FAA is having a change of heart about the idea of having one FCC active at a time being acceptable. If there is a hardware fault in the FCC, it has a lot of authority to cause problems, possibly faster than the crew can resolve them. My understanding is that now the FAA wants the FCCs to cross-check each other. Making this happen will require a lot of engineering and testing, and I think that this is the big reason for the delay. The MCAS fix itself was flight tested way back in April and May of last year. All of that said, I don't believe an FCC fault has ever been implicated in an accident, so this IMO doesn't really present a safety issue big enough to be relevant to say, my decision of whether to fly on a 737MAX, but it looks like the FAA is deeming it not adequate for certification. Airbus of course uses a different philosophy and uses multiple FCCs that continuously compare their output and vote.
- m463 7y agoDiebold -> Premier Election Solutions Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi 737 Max -> ?
- ohnope 7y ago737 Max -> 737 TruFlight® OneSky™