13 ms·

Here's what I don't understand: the 737 MAX was introduced in 2017. In 2018, two of them dropped out of the sky, the grounded for a while, it turned out Boeing

by mcv 3y ago

Here's what I don't understand: the 737 MAX was introduced in 2017. In 2018, two of them dropped out of the sky, the grounded for a while, it turned out Boeing had lost its engineering culture and its priority for safety, and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software. And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever. Why? Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation? Is it really that cheap?

jltsiren 3y ago
The world is very small, and it can't support that many companies making passenger aircraft. If you want aircraft of that size, you have to buy Boeing or Airbus. Both are sold out until the 2030s. And if you are already operating Boeing aircraft, it's more cost-effective to buy more of them instead of switching to Airbus. China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.
- stcredzero 3y ago
  The world is very small, and it can't support that many companies making passenger aircraft. If you want aircraft of that size, you have to buy Boeing or Airbus. Both are sold out until the 2030s. There's an apparent contradiction here. China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s. And here.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    While there is a growing demand for passenger aircraft, the fixed costs of getting into the business are so high that the market cannot support that many manufacturers. Not on a commercial basis, anyway. Airbus and Boeing are commercially viable, and they have customers all around the world. Comac is more of a political project, as China tries to reduce their dependence on Western technology. There are 1000+ orders for the C919, but effectively all of them are Chinese. Similarly, the USSR had domestic passenger aircraft industry, and Russia retains some capability to manufacture them. Their latest model is the Irkut MC-21, which has a few hundred orders. Again, effectively all of the orders are Russian. Then there is Embraer, which is the biggest manufacturer of regional jets. They have been decades in the business, but they have not made any attempt to build a competitor for the A320 and B737.
    - mcv 3y ago
      But why are they not also getting into the 737-size market, if that's such a huge market? If even the questionable 737 MAX is sold out for decades, that sounds like a pretty lucrative market to be in. It sounds to me like if you build something that works, you will sell as many as you can build.
      - jltsiren 3y ago
        For the same reason Boeing developed the 737 MAX instead of a completely new model. The fixed costs are too high, the risks are too high, and the profit margins are too low. If it takes 10-15 years to develop a new plane, several years to ramp up production, and several years beyond that to break even, it does not make sense as a business. If you think it purely as an investment, there are always better uses for your money.
        kelnos 3y ago
        Wasn't a significant part of Boeing's decision to "recycle" the 737 time-to-market? Sure, they saved a bunch of money not designing a new plane, but they were also under heavy threat from the A320neo and needed to get something out there relatively quickly.
      - SpecialistK 3y ago
        One chilling effect was what Boeing and the US gov't did when Bombardier in Canada developed their own 100-130 seat brand new ("clean sheet") aircraft. They levied so many tariffs that the project was economically unviable. So Bombardier sold it all to Airbus. Now Airbus has two series of single-aisle aircraft that are more competitive than Boeing's 737 (the A220 and A320.)
        Log_out_ 3y ago
        One can imagine how bad things must be behind the scenes if with that level of protectionism and political security deals backing the planes are grounded constantly. In working capitalism it's not the csuits that decide to make a great product, it's the competitive situation that forces everyones hand. Imagine Boeing as a ussr state owned conglomerate, who's directors try to game the metrics of the boss for a promotion. And we all know how that journey ended.
  - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    China, a country with the biggest industrial GDP (ie not services or agriculture), spent 15 years on R&D to deliver so far only 4 airframes of an airliner that is technically behind comparable Boeing and Airbus airliners. So not really a contradiction unless you are reading it too literally.
- deleted 3y ago
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- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s. ahahahahahahahahahahah no. Since 2022 Comac has delivered a grand total of four C919s. The only non-Chinese airline to order any is owned by a rich Chinese guy. The rest are Chinese airlines that have been browbeaten into ordering some. Nobody outside of China is in any rush to order a Comac anything because: 1.) Comac hasn't gotten any non-Chinese certification 2.) Comac's support infrastructure is even weaker than Sukhoi and Bombardier (both of whom struggled to sell and support their aircraft that were actually certified in the west).
  - missedthecue 3y ago
    True on all counts but it probably won't be long until it sells well. The Chinese government is throwing a lot of money behind it and even if the US doesn't certify it for political reasons, there is a huge global market starving for fresh air frames.
    - drtgh 3y ago
      I think would not be exactly political. The part where the plutocracy benefits the interests of a few pockets would certainly be political, but by other part, the major aircraft manufacturers in the EU and the UE, build civil aircraft as well as military ones. As I understand it, to torpedo these companies by dumping prices would be to indirectly torpedo the EU's and the UE's defense aircraft production. A cost based production battle would be never won against China. And I guess many taxes would be earmarked to counteract this, again. By other side, the rampant lack of quality in Chinese products and the inability to produce enough planes if they were contracted, in my guess would translate into the quick construction of factories with the worst production quality yet to be seen, for to feed the dumping. The matter is, in such scenario we as consumers would be deeply affected, as civil aircraft manufacturing is already at the limit of what can be done without compromising safety (seriously, some managers should have been fired a few years ago, The aim should not be to imitate the lack-quality of the Chinese industry). I don't want to think about what would happen if a race to cut manufacturing costs were endemically launched in the civil aircraft sector. As European I don't want to see it. If it were, lets say, the Japanese industry, the high quality one, not the one that is offshoring production to China, I wouldn't be worried about it or comment on it. This is mere guessing, I'm not in the sector (It would be interesting to find objective researches on this matter in fact).
ajkjk 3y ago
Well a lot of them didn't fall out of the sky and were used like millions of times, and the reason a few of them did was ostensibly fixed so now the chances of them falling out of the sky is even less than when most of them already weren't.
- carbine 3y ago
  ostensibly the need for MCAS in the first place is a major design flaw and results in additional failure modes that other aircraft do not have. the "fix" was to prioritize human inputs over MCAS, making these planes more vulnerable to human error. still worth avoiding IMHO.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    MCAS is not strictly needed; the planes would fly fine without it, and pilots would be able to handle things just fine. MCAS only exists to make the MAX's flight characteristics more similar to 737NG.
bluGill 3y ago
What choice do they have? Airplanes wear out from metal fatigue over time, so airlines must replace their airplanes regularly. It isn't safe to keep operating the same airplanes for decades. (this very much depends on what the plane is made of - so some airplanes from the 1950s are still safe while others from 2000 are not). Sometimes airplanes are scraped by selling to some "third world" airline that keeps operating the airplane long past the safe date - engineers are very conservative about max life of an airplane but eventually the wings will fall off an old plane in the air. Because of this all good airlines won't operate old airplanes. The few bad airlines can't operate very well because any country with a functional government will not allow you to fly an expired airplane. And so Boeing and Airbus have long order books to replace planes as they hit end of life. Of course airlines are limited to airplanes still in the current catalog, so they often cannot order the model that was working great for them 20 years ago.
- boppo1 3y ago
  >eventually the wings will fall off an old plane in the air. Has this ever happened for an airliner?
  - dpe82 3y ago
    Not the wings and not recently, but there has been major failure due to metal fatigue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
  - AdrianB1 3y ago
    Nope, but all the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane wings had to be replaced recently due to cracks and Concorde planes were retired due to cracks (micro-cracks, to be more precise). Aluminium does that a lot.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    There's also stuff like this, where a bad repair 20+ years ago eventually leads to structural failure: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611 This one only took 7 years from a bad repair until catastrophic failure though: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123 So "repair stuff properly" seems to be the important thing there. ;)
dylan604 3y ago
I'm guessing a lot of the purchase orders were placed well before the MCAS incidents occurred. These purchases tend to be contract based, and not something you can just leave with the cashier when you suddenly decide not to purchase them. So you're contractually obligated to spend the money, so might as well get a plane out of it and hope for the best
- largepeepee 3y ago
  Exactly, the 737 was the highest-selling commercial aircraft before the incident, and the MAX was promised to be a simple but efficient upgrade to that popular series that many already had.
- ta8645 3y ago
  Lawyers for the airlines should have made their orders conditional on a continued high safety record.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    You're also looking over the fact that the purchasers really Really REALLY wanted this plane, and Boeing knew this. The fact that it was being sold as an in kind upgrade so no new training was required was a H. U. G. E. part of the decision to purchase. There was a helluva sales pitch with that fact on top of the fuel savings. I'm guessing there's a lot of bar lowering that the airlines would have been willing to accept to even contemplate a safety record clause
    - ta8645 3y ago
      Regardless, it would seem prudent to give yourself flexibility to react to such a compromised safety record. You can always still go through with the purchase if it makes sense. It just seems to me the airline lawyers failed to protect their interests, when agreeing to these purchase contracts.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
None of the airlines are run by engineers who have a culture of safety either. That's why.
- ulfw 3y ago
  An engineer isn't the golden ticket to run every kind of job best. In fact I wouldn't think an airline is the kind of company that needs nor should have an engineer at the helm. They're a transportation/marketing company, not a manufacturing company. An airline markets a flight to a public which they perform on leased or purchased third party equipment based on negotiated route pairs/airport slots in a competitive market environment. Even their 'digital' offerings are mostly outsourced (GDS, website/app, in-flight-entertainment) as they have low core competency in that, nor do they need to.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    >An engineer isn't the golden ticket to run every kind of job best. Even for an engineering-heavy company, an engineer running it doesn't necessarily work out. The last time Intel had an engineer as CEO, it was a disaster.
linkjuice4all 3y ago
Haven't seen it mentioned yet - but there are several reasons why airlines continue to buy from Boeing - specifically the 737 variants. - The pilots are already trained (this is a big one and is part of the reason behind the MCAS debacle - new features mean retraining which costs money and limits which crews can fly which aircraft) [0] - The 737 generally fits easily at a lot of airports since it's been around for a while - no need to reconfigure your gates/jet ways/etc to accommodate another aircraft at your gates) - Airlines more recently prefer twin engine jets for better fuel economy and some changes in regulations [1] - The MAX upgrade to the 737 platform was mostly to jam larger, more fuel-efficient engines into an existing airframe to save on manufacturing, certification, and training costs (see first point) - In the US many airlines have shifted to single-aisle "mid-sized" planes for domestic routes due to deregulation around direct service - instead airlines can use a hub-and-spoke model with several connecting flights as opposed to only providing direct routes with enough demand to fill a plane [2] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-crash-problems-human-error-mcas-faa https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-cr... [1] https://simpleflying.com/two-engines-vs-four-engines/ https://simpleflying.com/two-engines-vs-four-engines/ [2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/airline3.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/ai...
- themadturk 3y ago
  In addition, some airlines, such as Southwest, fly only 737s, taking consistency in training and maintenance to the max.
  - inamberclad 3y ago
    Wonder how that will work out for Southwest after this.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      Sometime in 2023 Alaska Airlines completed their efforts to sell off all their Airbus and Bombardier Q400 aircraft. Alaska acquired Virgin America and its all-Airbus fleet in 2016, and the Q400s were from their Horizon Air operations. The company sold the Airbus aircraft to American and retired the Bombardiers. The reason given at the time was the desire to simplify maintenance and parts logistics. Now Alaska's fleet is all 737, a mix of MAX and NG models. The MAX is about a quarter of their fleet, so the current grounding has hurt them.
breadwinner 3y ago
> Is it really that cheap? 737 MAX uses 20% less fuel. Incidentally, this fuel-efficient design is what lead to the design defect. The fuel efficiency is thanks to larger engine (larger engines burn hotter and use less fuel). To make the larger engine fit under the wing without raising the fuselage, they had to reposition the engine forward. This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when accelerating quickly (and this can cause stall) and they fixed this defect using software to push the nose down.
- soperj 3y ago
  The reason they didn't want to raise the fuselage was to pretend it was actually a 737 and not a completely different plane, so that they could avoid all the testing required. If they'd just built it properly in the first place...
  - AdrianB1 3y ago
    There was no way to raise the fuselage. That would require longer landing gear with no space in the wings to retract it, so it required new wings, leading to re-certifications of both the planes and the pilots and the associated costs. This grand-fathering of 737 is the reason it still does not have fly-by-wire in 2024: it simulates the antique original 737.
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      In retrospect maybe they should have based the MAX on the 757. It's more or less a stretched 737 with longer landing gear. Sounds perfect for installing those enormous engines.
      - bronson 3y ago
        The primarily 737 airlies wouldn't have switched.
      - Cacti 3y ago
        There’s a thousand reasons why this not true and not a good idea.
joe_the_user 3y ago
Basically, the MAX has sold well for the reason that Microsoft Office has sold well. It had a set of features that airlines needed even if it was kind of junk overall; it was "backward compatible" with earlier 737 models and it saved a lot of gas compared to them. The backward compatibility was key since it save a lot of further money that would otherwise be needed for retraining and retesting (Airbus had a gas saving plane that would require retrain and this was the "killer app" versus that).
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  a320neo does not need retraining if you already fly the a320, it just needs retraining if your pilots only know how to fly the older 737s
fsckboy 3y ago
>the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever... WHY? in most industries, the fat part of the market is the lower end, so your smallest cheapest product is your biggest seller. McDonalds sells more regular hamburgers than they do Big Macs. BMW sells more 3 series than they do 7 series. There are many other factors that go into selecting the brand of the next plane you buy than simply "zomg they made a mistake". Boeing still has a leading technology and engineering position in the aerospace field, and their product line overall is a very good fit for what many carriers need to buy. This problem of some loose bolts is easily remedied, and is just not a dealbreaker. despite an exaggerated title, TFA is very light on making any case that there's a set of deep problems inside Boeing that rise to any level of statistical significance. A software problem and some loose bolts.
- Swenrekcah 3y ago
  The door plug falling out is a mistake. The MCAS crashes were caused by criminal negligence and outright fraud driven by money concerns. The plane may be OK after the fixes and now when the pilots are no longer (?) being actively misled by Boeing, so perhaps no need to scrap the whole fleet. But MCAS was not a “software problem”.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > But MCAS was not a “software problem”. Yeah, it was. And so was the fix. There was also a pilot training issue, in that of the 3 crews that experience MCAS failure, only one of them thought to turn off the trim system (and landed safely).
esotericimpl 3y ago
Check the orderbook for the A320 Neo If you need single aisle planes, your only option would be to book the Max, the A320 is decades out on order.
deleted 3y ago
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cratermoon 3y ago
> Is it really that cheap? The fuel economy is driving the switch. The 737MAX was created to compete with the a320neo. For airlines, especially with rising fuel prices, even a small % improvement in fuel efficiency gives huge returns.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  40% of the cost of your ticket is for fuel.
ulfw 3y ago
Because there are only two manufacturers. It's impossible to get significant A321 delivered within the next decade as Airbus is (rightfully) sold out for most of their production. Also it's extremely simpler for a 737 airline (the biggest being Southwest in the US and Ryan Air in the EU) to put another 737 in their arsenal rather than switch to a different manufacturer's plane. Anything from in-house maintenance to training to rostering to having the right type-rated pilots etc is easier for those cheaply run airlines to do when they're running just one type of aircraft. Why airlines still order 737s at this point is beyond me. I guess some value having every type of aircraft in their arsenal for just-in-case one gets grounded while other airline groups are just caring about getting the cheapest thing (Lufthansa)
akira2501 3y ago
> and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software. It could be argued it was an appropriate design. The critical error was in that 737 MAX has two angle of attack sensors that feed data into the cockpit; however, the MCAS software only used input from one of them. In the Lion air case the one considered sensor had been improperly calibrated after being flagged for maintenance by the crew. The fix is fairly comprehensive. If an angle of attack disagree occurs between the two sensors the system is inhibited from activation. > Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation? They don't see it as compromised. The purchase price was set based on the fact that airlines would _not_ need to retrain existing 737 pilots for the new model, that it was type equivalent. With the software changes and with additional training there are cost implications but not necessarily safety considerations with the model.
missedthecue 3y ago
Because for the airlines, their ONLY other option is to put themselves on the end of a very long waiting list with Airbus. Yes, Embraer, Sukhoi, Bombardier, and Mitsubishi have/had limited offerings but only in very select configurations. None sell an A321/737 equivalent. So, the airlines bet that Boeing is not going to keep selling deadly airplanes, and will fix the Max, and they can keep their place in line. It's a problem that the airline manufacturing industry is a duopoly but interestingly, it doesn't seem like the market can support more than a small number of players. Despite the fact that the airline industry has exploded and demand for new airplanes has grown with it, certain econonomies of manufacturing have meant that a lot of mergers and bankruptcies and consolidation happened.
WalterBright 3y ago
> had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software The problem was not the aerodynamic design. It was the software that granted too much authority to the MCAS system and the MCAS system relying on a single sensor. Both those problems have been fixed. A further problem was two crews not remembering how to deal with runaway stabilizer trim (it's supposed to be a "memory item"). Generally what is in the popular press about the MAX is wrong.
ploxiln 3y ago
It's like enterprise software - the product and sales managers are just giving the high-paying customers what they demand. And it works for sales. It does not result in a good design though. (Of course, I'm an engineer ... I don't know how to sell a good design to big pockets, I just know why the technical design sucks ...)
hilux 3y ago
Because eventually most people remember that getting on a plane, even a 737 MAX, is about the safest part of our day.

by mcv 3y ago

jltsiren 3y ago

The world is very small, and it can't support that many companies making passenger aircraft. If you want aircraft of that size, you have to buy Boeing or Airbus. Both are sold out until the 2030s. And if you are already operating Boeing aircraft, it's more cost-effective to buy more of them instead of switching to Airbus. China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s.

stcredzero 3y ago
The world is very small, and it can't support that many companies making passenger aircraft. If you want aircraft of that size, you have to buy Boeing or Airbus. Both are sold out until the 2030s. There's an apparent contradiction here. China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s. And here.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  While there is a growing demand for passenger aircraft, the fixed costs of getting into the business are so high that the market cannot support that many manufacturers. Not on a commercial basis, anyway. Airbus and Boeing are commercially viable, and they have customers all around the world. Comac is more of a political project, as China tries to reduce their dependence on Western technology. There are 1000+ orders for the C919, but effectively all of them are Chinese. Similarly, the USSR had domestic passenger aircraft industry, and Russia retains some capability to manufacture them. Their latest model is the Irkut MC-21, which has a few hundred orders. Again, effectively all of the orders are Russian. Then there is Embraer, which is the biggest manufacturer of regional jets. They have been decades in the business, but they have not made any attempt to build a competitor for the A320 and B737.
  - mcv 3y ago
    But why are they not also getting into the 737-size market, if that's such a huge market? If even the questionable 737 MAX is sold out for decades, that sounds like a pretty lucrative market to be in. It sounds to me like if you build something that works, you will sell as many as you can build.
    - jltsiren 3y ago
      For the same reason Boeing developed the 737 MAX instead of a completely new model. The fixed costs are too high, the risks are too high, and the profit margins are too low. If it takes 10-15 years to develop a new plane, several years to ramp up production, and several years beyond that to break even, it does not make sense as a business. If you think it purely as an investment, there are always better uses for your money.
      - kelnos 3y ago
        Wasn't a significant part of Boeing's decision to "recycle" the 737 time-to-market? Sure, they saved a bunch of money not designing a new plane, but they were also under heavy threat from the A320neo and needed to get something out there relatively quickly.
    - SpecialistK 3y ago
      One chilling effect was what Boeing and the US gov't did when Bombardier in Canada developed their own 100-130 seat brand new ("clean sheet") aircraft. They levied so many tariffs that the project was economically unviable. So Bombardier sold it all to Airbus. Now Airbus has two series of single-aisle aircraft that are more competitive than Boeing's 737 (the A220 and A320.)
      - Log_out_ 3y ago
        One can imagine how bad things must be behind the scenes if with that level of protectionism and political security deals backing the planes are grounded constantly. In working capitalism it's not the csuits that decide to make a great product, it's the competitive situation that forces everyones hand. Imagine Boeing as a ussr state owned conglomerate, who's directors try to game the metrics of the boss for a promotion. And we all know how that journey ended.
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  China, a country with the biggest industrial GDP (ie not services or agriculture), spent 15 years on R&D to deliver so far only 4 airframes of an airliner that is technically behind comparable Boeing and Airbus airliners. So not really a contradiction unless you are reading it too literally.
deleted 3y ago
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inferiorhuman 3y ago
China spent ~15 years developing the C919, and it's finally entering mass production. But it also appears to be sold out until the 2030s. ahahahahahahahahahahah no. Since 2022 Comac has delivered a grand total of four C919s. The only non-Chinese airline to order any is owned by a rich Chinese guy. The rest are Chinese airlines that have been browbeaten into ordering some. Nobody outside of China is in any rush to order a Comac anything because: 1.) Comac hasn't gotten any non-Chinese certification 2.) Comac's support infrastructure is even weaker than Sukhoi and Bombardier (both of whom struggled to sell and support their aircraft that were actually certified in the west).
- missedthecue 3y ago
  True on all counts but it probably won't be long until it sells well. The Chinese government is throwing a lot of money behind it and even if the US doesn't certify it for political reasons, there is a huge global market starving for fresh air frames.
  - drtgh 3y ago
    I think would not be exactly political. The part where the plutocracy benefits the interests of a few pockets would certainly be political, but by other part, the major aircraft manufacturers in the EU and the UE, build civil aircraft as well as military ones. As I understand it, to torpedo these companies by dumping prices would be to indirectly torpedo the EU's and the UE's defense aircraft production. A cost based production battle would be never won against China. And I guess many taxes would be earmarked to counteract this, again. By other side, the rampant lack of quality in Chinese products and the inability to produce enough planes if they were contracted, in my guess would translate into the quick construction of factories with the worst production quality yet to be seen, for to feed the dumping. The matter is, in such scenario we as consumers would be deeply affected, as civil aircraft manufacturing is already at the limit of what can be done without compromising safety (seriously, some managers should have been fired a few years ago, The aim should not be to imitate the lack-quality of the Chinese industry). I don't want to think about what would happen if a race to cut manufacturing costs were endemically launched in the civil aircraft sector. As European I don't want to see it. If it were, lets say, the Japanese industry, the high quality one, not the one that is offshoring production to China, I wouldn't be worried about it or comment on it. This is mere guessing, I'm not in the sector (It would be interesting to find objective researches on this matter in fact).

ajkjk 3y ago

Well a lot of them didn't fall out of the sky and were used like millions of times, and the reason a few of them did was ostensibly fixed so now the chances of them falling out of the sky is even less than when most of them already weren't.

carbine 3y ago
ostensibly the need for MCAS in the first place is a major design flaw and results in additional failure modes that other aircraft do not have. the "fix" was to prioritize human inputs over MCAS, making these planes more vulnerable to human error. still worth avoiding IMHO.
- kelnos 3y ago
  MCAS is not strictly needed; the planes would fly fine without it, and pilots would be able to handle things just fine. MCAS only exists to make the MAX's flight characteristics more similar to 737NG.

bluGill 3y ago

What choice do they have? Airplanes wear out from metal fatigue over time, so airlines must replace their airplanes regularly. It isn't safe to keep operating the same airplanes for decades. (this very much depends on what the plane is made of - so some airplanes from the 1950s are still safe while others from 2000 are not). Sometimes airplanes are scraped by selling to some "third world" airline that keeps operating the airplane long past the safe date - engineers are very conservative about max life of an airplane but eventually the wings will fall off an old plane in the air. Because of this all good airlines won't operate old airplanes. The few bad airlines can't operate very well because any country with a functional government will not allow you to fly an expired airplane. And so Boeing and Airbus have long order books to replace planes as they hit end of life. Of course airlines are limited to airplanes still in the current catalog, so they often cannot order the model that was working great for them 20 years ago.

boppo1 3y ago
>eventually the wings will fall off an old plane in the air. Has this ever happened for an airliner?
- dpe82 3y ago
  Not the wings and not recently, but there has been major failure due to metal fatigue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
- AdrianB1 3y ago
  Nope, but all the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane wings had to be replaced recently due to cracks and Concorde planes were retired due to cracks (micro-cracks, to be more precise). Aluminium does that a lot.
- justinclift 3y ago
  There's also stuff like this, where a bad repair 20+ years ago eventually leads to structural failure: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611 This one only took 7 years from a bad repair until catastrophic failure though: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123 So "repair stuff properly" seems to be the important thing there. ;)

dylan604 3y ago

I'm guessing a lot of the purchase orders were placed well before the MCAS incidents occurred. These purchases tend to be contract based, and not something you can just leave with the cashier when you suddenly decide not to purchase them. So you're contractually obligated to spend the money, so might as well get a plane out of it and hope for the best

largepeepee 3y ago
Exactly, the 737 was the highest-selling commercial aircraft before the incident, and the MAX was promised to be a simple but efficient upgrade to that popular series that many already had.
ta8645 3y ago
Lawyers for the airlines should have made their orders conditional on a continued high safety record.
- dylan604 3y ago
  You're also looking over the fact that the purchasers really Really REALLY wanted this plane, and Boeing knew this. The fact that it was being sold as an in kind upgrade so no new training was required was a H. U. G. E. part of the decision to purchase. There was a helluva sales pitch with that fact on top of the fuel savings. I'm guessing there's a lot of bar lowering that the airlines would have been willing to accept to even contemplate a safety record clause
  - ta8645 3y ago
    Regardless, it would seem prudent to give yourself flexibility to react to such a compromised safety record. You can always still go through with the purchase if it makes sense. It just seems to me the airline lawyers failed to protect their interests, when agreeing to these purchase contracts.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

None of the airlines are run by engineers who have a culture of safety either. That's why.

ulfw 3y ago
An engineer isn't the golden ticket to run every kind of job best. In fact I wouldn't think an airline is the kind of company that needs nor should have an engineer at the helm. They're a transportation/marketing company, not a manufacturing company. An airline markets a flight to a public which they perform on leased or purchased third party equipment based on negotiated route pairs/airport slots in a competitive market environment. Even their 'digital' offerings are mostly outsourced (GDS, website/app, in-flight-entertainment) as they have low core competency in that, nor do they need to.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >An engineer isn't the golden ticket to run every kind of job best. Even for an engineering-heavy company, an engineer running it doesn't necessarily work out. The last time Intel had an engineer as CEO, it was a disaster.

linkjuice4all 3y ago

Haven't seen it mentioned yet - but there are several reasons why airlines continue to buy from Boeing - specifically the 737 variants. - The pilots are already trained (this is a big one and is part of the reason behind the MCAS debacle - new features mean retraining which costs money and limits which crews can fly which aircraft) [0] - The 737 generally fits easily at a lot of airports since it's been around for a while - no need to reconfigure your gates/jet ways/etc to accommodate another aircraft at your gates) - Airlines more recently prefer twin engine jets for better fuel economy and some changes in regulations [1] - The MAX upgrade to the 737 platform was mostly to jam larger, more fuel-efficient engines into an existing airframe to save on manufacturing, certification, and training costs (see first point) - In the US many airlines have shifted to single-aisle "mid-sized" planes for domestic routes due to deregulation around direct service - instead airlines can use a hub-and-spoke model with several connecting flights as opposed to only providing direct routes with enough demand to fill a plane [2] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-crash-problems-human-error-mcas-faa https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-cr... [1] https://simpleflying.com/two-engines-vs-four-engines/ https://simpleflying.com/two-engines-vs-four-engines/ [2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/airline3.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/ai...

themadturk 3y ago
In addition, some airlines, such as Southwest, fly only 737s, taking consistency in training and maintenance to the max.
- inamberclad 3y ago
  Wonder how that will work out for Southwest after this.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    Sometime in 2023 Alaska Airlines completed their efforts to sell off all their Airbus and Bombardier Q400 aircraft. Alaska acquired Virgin America and its all-Airbus fleet in 2016, and the Q400s were from their Horizon Air operations. The company sold the Airbus aircraft to American and retired the Bombardiers. The reason given at the time was the desire to simplify maintenance and parts logistics. Now Alaska's fleet is all 737, a mix of MAX and NG models. The MAX is about a quarter of their fleet, so the current grounding has hurt them.

breadwinner 3y ago

> Is it really that cheap? 737 MAX uses 20% less fuel. Incidentally, this fuel-efficient design is what lead to the design defect. The fuel efficiency is thanks to larger engine (larger engines burn hotter and use less fuel). To make the larger engine fit under the wing without raising the fuselage, they had to reposition the engine forward. This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when accelerating quickly (and this can cause stall) and they fixed this defect using software to push the nose down.

soperj 3y ago
The reason they didn't want to raise the fuselage was to pretend it was actually a 737 and not a completely different plane, so that they could avoid all the testing required. If they'd just built it properly in the first place...
- AdrianB1 3y ago
  There was no way to raise the fuselage. That would require longer landing gear with no space in the wings to retract it, so it required new wings, leading to re-certifications of both the planes and the pilots and the associated costs. This grand-fathering of 737 is the reason it still does not have fly-by-wire in 2024: it simulates the antique original 737.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    In retrospect maybe they should have based the MAX on the 757. It's more or less a stretched 737 with longer landing gear. Sounds perfect for installing those enormous engines.
    - bronson 3y ago
      The primarily 737 airlies wouldn't have switched.
    - Cacti 3y ago
      There’s a thousand reasons why this not true and not a good idea.

joe_the_user 3y ago

Basically, the MAX has sold well for the reason that Microsoft Office has sold well. It had a set of features that airlines needed even if it was kind of junk overall; it was "backward compatible" with earlier 737 models and it saved a lot of gas compared to them. The backward compatibility was key since it save a lot of further money that would otherwise be needed for retraining and retesting (Airbus had a gas saving plane that would require retrain and this was the "killer app" versus that).

bobthepanda 3y ago
a320neo does not need retraining if you already fly the a320, it just needs retraining if your pilots only know how to fly the older 737s

fsckboy 3y ago

>the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever... WHY? in most industries, the fat part of the market is the lower end, so your smallest cheapest product is your biggest seller. McDonalds sells more regular hamburgers than they do Big Macs. BMW sells more 3 series than they do 7 series. There are many other factors that go into selecting the brand of the next plane you buy than simply "zomg they made a mistake". Boeing still has a leading technology and engineering position in the aerospace field, and their product line overall is a very good fit for what many carriers need to buy. This problem of some loose bolts is easily remedied, and is just not a dealbreaker. despite an exaggerated title, TFA is very light on making any case that there's a set of deep problems inside Boeing that rise to any level of statistical significance. A software problem and some loose bolts.

Swenrekcah 3y ago
The door plug falling out is a mistake. The MCAS crashes were caused by criminal negligence and outright fraud driven by money concerns. The plane may be OK after the fixes and now when the pilots are no longer (?) being actively misled by Boeing, so perhaps no need to scrap the whole fleet. But MCAS was not a “software problem”.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > But MCAS was not a “software problem”. Yeah, it was. And so was the fix. There was also a pilot training issue, in that of the 3 crews that experience MCAS failure, only one of them thought to turn off the trim system (and landed safely).

esotericimpl 3y ago

Check the orderbook for the A320 Neo If you need single aisle planes, your only option would be to book the Max, the A320 is decades out on order.

deleted 3y ago

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cratermoon 3y ago

> Is it really that cheap? The fuel economy is driving the switch. The 737MAX was created to compete with the a320neo. For airlines, especially with rising fuel prices, even a small % improvement in fuel efficiency gives huge returns.

WalterBright 3y ago
40% of the cost of your ticket is for fuel.

ulfw 3y ago

Because there are only two manufacturers. It's impossible to get significant A321 delivered within the next decade as Airbus is (rightfully) sold out for most of their production. Also it's extremely simpler for a 737 airline (the biggest being Southwest in the US and Ryan Air in the EU) to put another 737 in their arsenal rather than switch to a different manufacturer's plane. Anything from in-house maintenance to training to rostering to having the right type-rated pilots etc is easier for those cheaply run airlines to do when they're running just one type of aircraft. Why airlines still order 737s at this point is beyond me. I guess some value having every type of aircraft in their arsenal for just-in-case one gets grounded while other airline groups are just caring about getting the cheapest thing (Lufthansa)

akira2501 3y ago

> and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software. It could be argued it was an appropriate design. The critical error was in that 737 MAX has two angle of attack sensors that feed data into the cockpit; however, the MCAS software only used input from one of them. In the Lion air case the one considered sensor had been improperly calibrated after being flagged for maintenance by the crew. The fix is fairly comprehensive. If an angle of attack disagree occurs between the two sensors the system is inhibited from activation. > Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation? They don't see it as compromised. The purchase price was set based on the fact that airlines would _not_ need to retrain existing 737 pilots for the new model, that it was type equivalent. With the software changes and with additional training there are cost implications but not necessarily safety considerations with the model.

missedthecue 3y ago

Because for the airlines, their ONLY other option is to put themselves on the end of a very long waiting list with Airbus. Yes, Embraer, Sukhoi, Bombardier, and Mitsubishi have/had limited offerings but only in very select configurations. None sell an A321/737 equivalent. So, the airlines bet that Boeing is not going to keep selling deadly airplanes, and will fix the Max, and they can keep their place in line. It's a problem that the airline manufacturing industry is a duopoly but interestingly, it doesn't seem like the market can support more than a small number of players. Despite the fact that the airline industry has exploded and demand for new airplanes has grown with it, certain econonomies of manufacturing have meant that a lot of mergers and bankruptcies and consolidation happened.

WalterBright 3y ago

> had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software The problem was not the aerodynamic design. It was the software that granted too much authority to the MCAS system and the MCAS system relying on a single sensor. Both those problems have been fixed. A further problem was two crews not remembering how to deal with runaway stabilizer trim (it's supposed to be a "memory item"). Generally what is in the popular press about the MAX is wrong.

ploxiln 3y ago

It's like enterprise software - the product and sales managers are just giving the high-paying customers what they demand. And it works for sales. It does not result in a good design though. (Of course, I'm an engineer ... I don't know how to sell a good design to big pockets, I just know why the technical design sucks ...)

hilux 3y ago

Because eventually most people remember that getting on a plane, even a 737 MAX, is about the safest part of our day.