Originally published at: Orders soar at Airbus, which makes jets where the side doesn't fall off - Boing Boing
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I’m not sure the execs at Boeing fully understand just how damaging all of this has been over the past decade or so. If they weren’t a defense contractor, they’d be facing an existential crisis.
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great, fossil fuel production is safe for now…-phew- ./s
this motherfucker is truly the worst motherfucker currently walking the earth, unfucking belivable!
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If they want to stay in this market, Boeing really needs to get their Future Small Airplane (FSA) 737 replacement underway - the MAX is just a rolling bad new story. Like the DC-10, it is fundamentally a good plane, but it has been hopelessly managed and obvious defects have been allowed to get through with horrible consequences. Even if, like the DC-10, it settles down to be a reliable aircraft, it will always be tarred with Boeing’s mistakes.
Though it will be interesting to see how much control the likes of SouthWest and RyanAir have over any new design - commonality of type clearance for pilots was a major factor in the MAX being built rather than Boeing’s planned Yellowstone Y1 design. Given the colossal amount of money a clean-sheet design will cost, taxpayers in Washington can expect Boeing to dip a hand deep into their pockets.
I suspect Comac is licking its lips at the prospect of C919 sales outside of China. Even with three assembly lines, Airbus can’t build A320neos fast enough; Embraer doesn’t have the capacity and there seems to be an endless need for relatively small twinjets.
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Clearly, DEI is also to blame for Tesla’s spontaneously combusting and murdering pedestrians.
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Reminds me of all the misogynists who claimed that the reason that cargo ship got stuck in the Suez Canal was because they let a woman be captain once. (For the record, she wasn’t even the person captaining the ship on the voyage when it got stuck but she probably put a hex on it when she was onboard or something.)
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Clarke and Dawe… remind me of John Bird and John Fortune.
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I’m not so sure. Retrofitting the larger turbofan engines onto the old 737 design to make the Max version resulted in a number of fundamental design compromises that they never would have made if it had been a clean-sheet design from scratch. The change in the thust vector messed up the flight characteristics which they papered over with the now-notorious MCAS software.
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Agreed:
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How does a new replacement solve this, if the problem is management and company culture?
Most likely, the existing management processes and overall employee culture would just carry over. Then you get a new replacement with similar problems.
Fixing a company culture is hard and takes a very concentrated effort from the top down setting new priorities and rewarding new behaviors. They have to change the unwritten rules that employees just know and use as their basis for actions to take and results that are desired.
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The MAX flies perfectly well without the MCAS software and is stable in flight. The problem lies with those engines giving it sufficiently different characteristics from the NG model that, unaltered, pilots would need recertification to be able to fly it. SouthWest in particular raised hell about this because of the problem they would have if an NG was substituted by a MAX at short notice but the crew had not been trained for the newer plane.
So MCAS was fitted, and then Boeing kept tinkering with the software - removing redundancies, compromising the angle of attack disagree warning systems, making the software much more aggressive - and then failing to tell airlines and crews what the software did or even that it was present.
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can we put engineers in charge at Boeing? PLEASE?
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Probably the opposite is true. A lack of DEI probably has increased their level of mismanagement.
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Engineers are why we HAVE MCAS. Because they thought they could engineer their way to a solution.
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Destiny closes a door, but Boeing open others.
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gonna disagree here. engineers wouldn’t be in that position if the folks at the top weren’t bean counters.
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Its management at the top directing it, sure. But I’m a software engineer. I’ve been in this field for 30 years. I know full well that it was engineer hubris that led those Boeing engineers to develop a “compatibility layer” between the old plane and new plane.
Sure, management probably told them to do it. But Management at Boeing are mostly the older engineers. And those old engineers think they can do everything.
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If you are an airline and if you have to retrain the pilots you could even think about buying a different plane. Like an Airbus perhaps? Which if you are Boeing you don’t want your customers even thinking about contemplating in any shape or form.
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It was American’s massive order for A320neos that convinced Boeing to dump the Y1 737 replacement in favour of building the MAX. There was genuine panic at Boeing that if American began to switch to Airbus, other US careers would go for the more efficient plane whilst Boeing was still planning a clean sheet design.
Boeing of course then played a dumb game by trying to block Bombardier’s small twin jet which ended up with Airbus getting hold of the company for $1 and having the awesome A220 to which Boeing has no answer.
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