I really used to like Boeing a lot. I want to keep liking them. There's just so much silliness and weirdness and so many compounding poor decisions adding up over there that it's frustrating to watch things like this happen and start to interconnect.
I understand the reasoning (from an airline and from a manufacturer perspective) for not including a modern EICAS in the 737, but it seems like everyone was so resistant to spending any money that they boxed themselves into a corner where there's now no obvious way to issue a stopgap software fix for the 737 MAX. Without at least automating alerting around the conditions that could lead to failure, we're now depending on pilots' memory and not being engaged in other ongoing things. It's become a problem which could now unintentionally compound other problems. I've heard the argument from Southwest, at least, that the true reasoning behind this is concern about the mental tax of having to switch between two different cockpit configurations and the potential for pilot error in those cases. It rings a little hollow in the context of Southwest trying to avoid "expensive simulator training" at the same time, however.
I am not going to profess to be enough of an expert in the economics of airliner design to say that there was a better option than continuing to re-engine the 737, but it really, really feels like Boeing is overdue for a clean sheet replacement for the 737 and have pushed things way too far.
> I am not going to profess to be enough of an expert in the economics of airliner design to say that there was a better option than continuing to re-engine the 737
I think it's as simple as Boeing caved to pressure from the buyers of these aircraft to minimize retraining for their crews. And other costs they might incur in a more abrupt aircraft change.
Saying caved makes it sound like Boeing just had no choice. Boeing made this decision deliberately to give themselves a leg up on the new Airbus model that had caught them off guard. So they hastily announced a new 737 and made the decision to keep it as similar to older models as possible so airlines don't have to retrain pilots. To that end, they hid features that might require retraining like MCAS[0]. They are not at all victims here and leadership should be in jail.
MCAS was designed entirely to prevent needing retraining. The engine position change changed the handling characteristics because it moved the forces around. So instead of admitting they've been using a design far too long and needed to change it which would require a new type certification and thus retraining so pilots understood the way the plan actually handled they put a software Band-Aid over it but didn't properly relabel it as a safety critical system to hide the massive change from the FAA which meant it didn't get the proper sensor support to ensure it always had proper data.
They've been rotted from the inside by McDouglas's exec team and the usual profit driven decision making. On top of all of that the agency responsible for keeping that at least marginally in check has been gutted and lobotomized by decades of "the only good government is one small enough to drown in a tub" mentality.
"caved" doesn't imply no choice. It does imply they made a decision with some pressure from their buyers. I'm not trying to be some sort of apologist for anything Boeing has done.
It seems that, on paper, in this case specifically, re-engining rather than clean sheet made a lot of sense. Of course, we all know how things ended up in practice...
But at this point, if Boeing were to spend a lot of money on a clean-sheet design – even if they shipped it on time, would they have customers? It's hard to see how that would play out.
Letting the management of McDonald Douglas the company they bought because it was failing due to safety failures take over the company that was nominally acquiring them was a ridiculous mistake but the management class protects their own over making good decisions all the time. The rot has been pervasive for years at Boeing it's just finally becoming too fully realized to be papered over.
I understand the reasoning (from an airline and from a manufacturer perspective) for not including a modern EICAS in the 737, but it seems like everyone was so resistant to spending any money that they boxed themselves into a corner where there's now no obvious way to issue a stopgap software fix for the 737 MAX. Without at least automating alerting around the conditions that could lead to failure, we're now depending on pilots' memory and not being engaged in other ongoing things. It's become a problem which could now unintentionally compound other problems. I've heard the argument from Southwest, at least, that the true reasoning behind this is concern about the mental tax of having to switch between two different cockpit configurations and the potential for pilot error in those cases. It rings a little hollow in the context of Southwest trying to avoid "expensive simulator training" at the same time, however.
I am not going to profess to be enough of an expert in the economics of airliner design to say that there was a better option than continuing to re-engine the 737, but it really, really feels like Boeing is overdue for a clean sheet replacement for the 737 and have pushed things way too far.