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Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

Consumer confidence in the DC-10 disappeared after its closely-spaced and related fatal crashes. This led to the plane being relegated to cargo duties and, eventually, to McDonnell Douglas's financial failure and sale to Boeing.

The TL;DR? If people don't want to fly the MAX, there's nothing Boeing can do to fix it. They're better off abandoning the design and doing the clean sheet plane they should have done from the beginning.

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That's not really accurate - the DC-10 was moved out of passenger operations because of operating costs - TriJets (DC-10/MD-11/L-1011) soldiered on in passenger roles until the mid-90's when better fuel performance from twin-jets and natural age based attrition moved them into freight roles.

ETOPS allowing dual engined aircraft to do routes that previously needed >2 engines sealed their fate.

Unfortunately, from what I understand, it’s more like MCD bought Boeing with Boeing’s money. Officially, Boeing bought MCD, but MCD executives, leadership, and design process replaced a lot of their Boeing redundancies.

I've read elsewhere that there aren't a whole lot of choices since competitors have limited capacity to ramp up? Also, some choices are also built by Boeing. (Such as other 737's.)

Other 737s aren't inheritantly unstable airframes that need software hacks to keep them flying.

Mind you, the entire MCAS issue would be mitigated, if the plane were re-certified.

The MAX8 is only really unstable in one specific set of circumstances where every other 737 would be stable. It doesn't need MCAS to be safe let alone fly. It needs MCAS so that pilots don't need to be trained (expensive) on the differences between the MAX8 and every other 737.

That one specific set of circumstances is that when the plane starts stalling during take-off, it wants to stall more.

Pilots need to be trained on that difference, because even with the software patches, MCAS will not correctly operate all the time.

Don't know why you're getting the downvotes.

Thanks for the TL;DR - as the site didn't work for me. Also, the analysis is spot on.

Here's Nader's original:

https://nader.org/2019/04/04/boeings-homicide-will-give-way-...

http://web.archive.org/web/20190426150157/http://havecoffeew...

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