It’s maybe even worse: 737 Max designers should have maybe changed the design of the plane to make it more stable instead of “we’ll fix it in the software” (that will surely eventually unproportionally badly fail) approach. If I understood correctly the “management decision” was to keep the body effectively unchanged but fitting the engines with the different effects on the stability, then relying on software, instead of changing the plane geometry.
Currently, 335 people are dead in the Boeing 737 Max accidents, flying commercially only since May 22, 2017. Not even two full years.
If that's true, that sounds like a thorough nightmare. Nothing gets me more heated than when an 85% perfect design with decades of real world use is replaced with something that is demonstrably broken + more expensive, simply because of corporate groupthink gone wrong
Thank you for this insight, I will research more deeply
The bigger engines are more economically, that's the reason why airlines want it in the first place. But they had to move them forward to fit under the plane which brings the plane out of balance. The alternative would have been changing the height of the plane, which probably also results in other problems.
> The alternative would have been changing the height of the plane, which probably also results in other problems.
There were more alternatives but all negate the selling point “it’s the ‘same’ plane so you don’t have to pay to retrain pilots, just buy, fly and use less fuel.”
Marketing driven solution, with a bit of lie.
Remember that selling point whenever somebody claims that the “pilots didn’t follow the proper procedure” involving even initially undocumented new behavior and the new software dependency on the single point of failure sensor.
The goal to replace the engines was saving fuel. However it seems that the effects of that replacement should have not be fixed with the software trick, but with the airplane geometry redesign.
It maybe has some similarity to the VW emission scandal: “fixing” with the software what should not be fixed with it.
Agree, but what I meant by more expensive was the new plane costs more than if they just kept making the old design through 2019.
Fuel savings and etc is always nice to strive for, but now human lives and insurance companies and airline companies are paying the price for the geometrical/software fault created by Boeing's corporate structure
If this continues, it's going to be the Concorde all over again really-- a better performing but a tad more unsafe plane
> what I meant by more expensive was the new plane costs more than if they just kept making the old design through 2019
It's the opposite that happened here: the more consistent redesign was avoided and the software trick employed (and even kept hidden initially, according to some reports) to compensate for the change that was introduced. The new planes are anyway bought, it's Boeing who tried to pass their badly fixed old planes as "improved but the same." Had they not done that, it's Airbus who would have (rightly so, based on my impression of these two accidents) sold more of their new efficient planes instead.
Currently, 335 people are dead in the Boeing 737 Max accidents, flying commercially only since May 22, 2017. Not even two full years.