7 ms·

The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep

The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee. If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them. My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft. Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design. Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

intrasight 1y ago
They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)
- reactordev 1y ago
  Can’t wait to fly in the 737-AI.
  - dsr_ 1y ago
    All the executives first, please.
- baby_souffle 1y ago
  Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin with!
jeffhwang 1y ago
> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
- clickety_clack 1y ago
  Maybe you want a small team of big people.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago
  With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket. They moan and complain about this or that, but they still do the same thing. So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.
  - sgjohnson 1y ago
    > So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly. By cutting the number of economy seats and increasing the number of business and first class ones? Airlines don’t care about the economy traveller. They are there just to fill the space for a marginal profit.
    - Night_Thastus 1y ago
      They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible. The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.
bunderbunder 1y ago
I think you might have the chain of causality mixed up. From what I've seen, the sheer scale of the company creates large committees because you've got lots of managers and they all know that getting involved in the project is essential to their career advancement. And then that creates scope creep. Partially due to design by committee effects, but also because the manager in charge of flobnix realizes their opportunity for career advancement by shoehorning problems that need to be solved with flobnix into the requirements. I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside. Concrete example: why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  >why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200 billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of Apollo before it even finished its original set of missions.
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    Gateway is also a trial run for conducting operations at a Mars/Phobos/Diemos station.
    - bunderbunder 1y ago
      But then you've got to ask why would we want an orbital Mars/Phobos/Deimos station?
baud147258 1y ago
> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane
- ghaff 1y ago
  Pretty much. You can outfit pretty much any airframe you want to be business class only seating but not enough people will buy when it pops up on Expedia at 2+ times the price of the alternative. I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.
  - Filligree 1y ago
    I would buy an upgrade if it was twice the price. In reality it's more like 10x.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades). So, yes, sticker price for upper class service is pretty expensive. In a world where upper class service was the norm on certain routes on certain planes it would probably be pretty expensive but probably cheaper than the upgrade on mixed class service.
      - Thorrez 1y ago
        Do you have a source showing $/sqft of economy vs business/first class? This video is basically saying the opposite of you: that business/first class subsidizes economy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc
ViewTrick1002 1y ago
> Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design. The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up. Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.
- wucke13 1y ago
  I think what parent was about is open vs. closed loop control, not fly-by-wire or not. Both their and your point stand of course.
- buildsjets 1y ago
  The 737, like all large commercial aircraft, also requires an artificial control feel force feedback system in order to meet design requirements. It has always had one going back to 1967. A question that has never been adequately answered: if MCAS was conceived of in order to meet the 14 CFR Part 25.143 requirements for a positive control force feedback gradient, why did Boeing not modify the existing Elevator Differential Feel Computer (a mechanical/hydraulic computer with no electronic components) instead of inventing a half-assed, undocumented, slow moving, open-loop fly-by-wire contraption using the trim tab actuator?
Night_Thastus 1y ago
>If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane. And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.
- extraduder_ire 1y ago
  The number of passengers you can fit in a commercial plane is based on how quickly you can evacuate them, with the doors being a major bottleneck. Many ULCCs in Europe have planes that are right up against that limit.
jandrese 1y ago
I think the days of Boeing being able to make the plane with a small focused team is probably in the past. Way too much engineering talent has been outsourced and the R&D just isn't there. It requires a level of vertical integration that was long since divested for cost saving reasons. That's why it is so beathtakingly expensive to develop a new plane. coordination between literally thousands of contractors is a nightmarishly complex task that requires an enormous team of middle managers and lawyers. It may even be the case that modern planes are just plain too complex to realistically do the majority of the work in-house.
dreamcompiler 1y ago
> The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft. I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans. The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.
PaulHoule 1y ago
1. Modern airliners with fly by wire have capability similar to MCAS the difference is it is not half baked but has numerous degraded states it can run in when sensors are out and pilots are trained on all that. Any new airplane will have that under the name “flight envelope protection” 2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it. 3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. (a) Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution. 4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs (a) when organizations in my town do a SWOT analysis they almost always put the bad state of the local airport as a disadvantage they have relative to competitors —- the county and state would spend money to improve what they can but it comes down to out-of-town airlines that have their own priorities, a pilot shortage, etc.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  +1 on the Embraer. It's much more comfortable than a 737 or A320 while being much smaller. The advantage of doing a greenfield design completely to modern capabilities
WalterBright 1y ago
> design it without sardines in mind Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is determined by the airline customer.
purple_turtle 1y ago
> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. In practice people in general vote with wallets for cheaper sardine-like flights. (though more spacious seats typically can be bought)
- nickjj 1y ago
  It might be because of how airlines price tickets. For a 10 hour flight that costs $500 (economy) it will cost +$80 1-way to pick a seat. Not a special seat, just a seat in general. An exit row seat costs +$160 1-way.
- izacus 1y ago
  So why are business class seats filled if there's plenty of economy space left? Surely all those business men spending 5000$+ for an overseas ticket are voting with their vallets for the 500$ one? Or maybe the reality isn't as simple as you make it seem?

intrasight 1y ago

They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)

reactordev 1y ago
Can’t wait to fly in the 737-AI.
- dsr_ 1y ago
  All the executives first, please.
baby_souffle 1y ago
Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin with!

jeffhwang 1y ago

> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.

clickety_clack 1y ago
Maybe you want a small team of big people.
Night_Thastus 1y ago
With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket. They moan and complain about this or that, but they still do the same thing. So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.
- sgjohnson 1y ago
  > So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly. By cutting the number of economy seats and increasing the number of business and first class ones? Airlines don’t care about the economy traveller. They are there just to fill the space for a marginal profit.
  - Night_Thastus 1y ago
    They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible. The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.

bunderbunder 1y ago

I think you might have the chain of causality mixed up. From what I've seen, the sheer scale of the company creates large committees because you've got lots of managers and they all know that getting involved in the project is essential to their career advancement. And then that creates scope creep. Partially due to design by committee effects, but also because the manager in charge of flobnix realizes their opportunity for career advancement by shoehorning problems that need to be solved with flobnix into the requirements. I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside. Concrete example: why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.

mrguyorama 1y ago
>why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200 billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of Apollo before it even finished its original set of missions.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  Gateway is also a trial run for conducting operations at a Mars/Phobos/Diemos station.
  - bunderbunder 1y ago
    But then you've got to ask why would we want an orbital Mars/Phobos/Deimos station?

baud147258 1y ago

> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane

ghaff 1y ago
Pretty much. You can outfit pretty much any airframe you want to be business class only seating but not enough people will buy when it pops up on Expedia at 2+ times the price of the alternative. I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.
- Filligree 1y ago
  I would buy an upgrade if it was twice the price. In reality it's more like 10x.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades). So, yes, sticker price for upper class service is pretty expensive. In a world where upper class service was the norm on certain routes on certain planes it would probably be pretty expensive but probably cheaper than the upgrade on mixed class service.
    - Thorrez 1y ago
      Do you have a source showing $/sqft of economy vs business/first class? This video is basically saying the opposite of you: that business/first class subsidizes economy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc

ViewTrick1002 1y ago

> Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design. The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up. Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.

wucke13 1y ago
I think what parent was about is open vs. closed loop control, not fly-by-wire or not. Both their and your point stand of course.
buildsjets 1y ago
The 737, like all large commercial aircraft, also requires an artificial control feel force feedback system in order to meet design requirements. It has always had one going back to 1967. A question that has never been adequately answered: if MCAS was conceived of in order to meet the 14 CFR Part 25.143 requirements for a positive control force feedback gradient, why did Boeing not modify the existing Elevator Differential Feel Computer (a mechanical/hydraulic computer with no electronic components) instead of inventing a half-assed, undocumented, slow moving, open-loop fly-by-wire contraption using the trim tab actuator?

Night_Thastus 1y ago

>If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane. And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.

extraduder_ire 1y ago
The number of passengers you can fit in a commercial plane is based on how quickly you can evacuate them, with the doors being a major bottleneck. Many ULCCs in Europe have planes that are right up against that limit.

jandrese 1y ago

I think the days of Boeing being able to make the plane with a small focused team is probably in the past. Way too much engineering talent has been outsourced and the R&D just isn't there. It requires a level of vertical integration that was long since divested for cost saving reasons. That's why it is so beathtakingly expensive to develop a new plane. coordination between literally thousands of contractors is a nightmarishly complex task that requires an enormous team of middle managers and lawyers. It may even be the case that modern planes are just plain too complex to realistically do the majority of the work in-house.

dreamcompiler 1y ago

> The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft. I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans. The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.

PaulHoule 1y ago

1. Modern airliners with fly by wire have capability similar to MCAS the difference is it is not half baked but has numerous degraded states it can run in when sensors are out and pilots are trained on all that. Any new airplane will have that under the name “flight envelope protection” 2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it. 3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. (a) Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution. 4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs (a) when organizations in my town do a SWOT analysis they almost always put the bad state of the local airport as a disadvantage they have relative to competitors —- the county and state would spend money to improve what they can but it comes down to out-of-town airlines that have their own priorities, a pilot shortage, etc.

wkat4242 1y ago
+1 on the Embraer. It's much more comfortable than a 737 or A320 while being much smaller. The advantage of doing a greenfield design completely to modern capabilities

WalterBright 1y ago

> design it without sardines in mind Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is determined by the airline customer.

purple_turtle 1y ago

> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines. In practice people in general vote with wallets for cheaper sardine-like flights. (though more spacious seats typically can be bought)

nickjj 1y ago
It might be because of how airlines price tickets. For a 10 hour flight that costs $500 (economy) it will cost +$80 1-way to pick a seat. Not a special seat, just a seat in general. An exit row seat costs +$160 1-way.
izacus 1y ago
So why are business class seats filled if there's plenty of economy space left? Surely all those business men spending 5000$+ for an overseas ticket are voting with their vallets for the 500$ one? Or maybe the reality isn't as simple as you make it seem?