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Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

Such a crappy aircraft - can we just get rid of these already?

Force it to develop actually new airplane, not rely on grandfathered type license from 60 years ago.

They keep trying to do that. This mess of a plane is care of Southwest and Ryanair who wanted a re-engined 737, period.

I don't know that they could. We're talking about Boeing, they're the sort of MBA hive that's embarrassed to have to employ engineers.

I wonder what automotive designs would look like if we allowed that kind of grandfathering. Or maybe we do but people keep wanting new car designs?

We don't really get many new car designs do we? Aren't most cars just built on top of old platforms that only see iterative updates?

I think a 2024 Boeing 737 Max is a lot closer to a 1968 737 original than a 2024 Honda Civic is to a 1972 Honda Civic.

Car platforms change a lot more, a lot more often, IMHO.

I think you would be mistaken. The car’s engines probably have more in common than the two planes’ engines (low-bypass turbofans in the original, vs. latest high-bypass on the newest ones; engines so different that they changed the plane’s handling enough to require the maligned MCAS). Avionics are entirely different and arguably much more vital to the planes function than a car’s instruments. The interiors are also basically not comparable (sure they have seats but that’s about it).

Deliberate or not, the NHTSA and automakers have found a symbiotic relationship where mandatory safety requirements become integral to a planned obsolescence sales cycle. Cars are more reliable and longer lasting than ever, but safety features mean many people feel compelled to buy a new car much sooner than they might have 30 or 40 years ago. Automakers negotiate with the NHTSA to set mandatory safety feature timelines so that features can work their way from luxury models down over the course of several years. By the time a features becomes mandatory, it's already been milked as a sales differentiator, and trickled down into most if not all car models.

I don't know if such a state of affairs is possible with the aircraft or airline industries. Those industries are too rational, whereas the expense of safety features in the consumer automobile market is in part quietly covered by arguably irrational consumer spending habits.

Bolts can be loosened, or fail to be tightened on any aircraft. I suspect this may be a problem with people and/or procedure.

The question is not about bolts, but more about what else is hidden there, what else is mechanically neglected that's waiting in there to take lives

Since the aircraft with the incident was extremely new, it is pretty certain that the bolts have not been properly assembled at Boeing, so the problem is with their assembly procedures.

The fuselage of this plane is not built by Boeing. It could be an issue with the contractor, Spirit AeroSystems, who builds it. It could be an issue with some other final configuration procedure. We'll need to wait for the investigation to conclude.

If it’s built so sloppily, will you manage to think of literally every mistake they might have made?

Agreed — while we’re at it, let’s break Boeing up into multiple firms. It has been “too big to fail” for too long.

Not sure that would help - the Boeing subcontractor that likely played a role in the defective parts, Spirit Aero, was previously part of Boeing and spun off in 2005.

If Boeing has insufficient competition, they don't have to care because their customers have limited alternatives. If they don't have to care then they don't have to care if their subcontractors care. They also have limited fear of regulators because the US government will be wary about damaging the country's sole supplier in an important industry.

Break them up and it's easier for both the market and the government to punish bad behavior.

And how would you break up Boeing to create more competition for civil airliners exactly?

Make five of them that each have full rights to the existing company's designs and split their existing physical plant between them. Does one of the new companies have the only plant that makes a certain type of component? That's fine, customers can buy from them like they buy from the existing Boeing, but now the other sister companies have the incentive to build another plant to compete for that business, and the first company has the incentive to keep prices competitive to deter them from doing that. For five years they have to sell to each other for cost, giving them enough time to either negotiate with each other or build new facilities.

They all have the rights to the existing designs, and can create derivatives, but they don't automatically get the rights to the others' derivatives, so they have the incentive to specialize or develop new designs to find a niche, for the same reason the Boeing 737 isn't an exact clone of the Airbus A320 or vice versa.

You realize how type ratings work yeah? An airline wants to fly a common model. They wanted a 737. They would buy a worse plane for twice as much (see: 737 max) over a brand new clean sheet model that’s incompatible with their pilots.

Type ratings work that way because there are so few types of planes, and because the incumbents like it that way. "Oh no, I guess it's impossible for anyone else to produce a new aircraft model because nobody's qualified to fly it, now we'll just have to rest on our laurels forever."

If there were more competitors, they'd lobby to change how the regulations work so they didn't effectively destroy the market for new aircraft types.

The FAA doesn't work like that and I can assure you, the airlines find it to be an enormous pain in the ass.

The FAA is susceptible to Boeing, the huge conglomerate and defense contractor, not any random airline that could go out of business without anybody really caring. But the status quo is good for Boeing because they don't have to pay to design new stuff, or at least they're ambivalent to it. Change that and see what happens.

I've said it here before, but working with Boeing, every project might as well be a different company.

All top 5 defense contractors preferably. And do the same in the EU too. Monopoly (effectively) clearly failed western defense efforts as the war shows now.

Always refactor

>Such a crappy aircraft - can we just get rid of these already?

It was a beautiful aircraft, destroyed by years of management comittees.

Boeing needs to be broken up and reorganized, full stop. Congress has to act. It is simply too important and vital of a company to US strategic interests to be left in this state.

Maybe Apple, or Elon Musk, or some other person or company with a spare hundred billion could spin up a decent aircraft company?

>Maybe Apple, or Elon Musk, or some other person or company with a spare hundred billion could spin up a decent aircraft company?

SV has tried and failed time and again to realize the enormity of undertaking that is commercial aviation. There are less than 10 countries in the world capable of producing and marketing a competitive modern civil airliner. And of those, a vast majority are state nationalized conglomerates, or in the case of Airbus multi-country efforts. It takes almost the entirety of a country's aviation workforce and industrial capacity to maintain just one of these companies. Boeing cannot be replaced. It has to be fixed.

Elon Musk doesn't have a spare hundred billion. Apple is one of the only entities that does, but it's not really their kind of market. Institutional customers that are going to expect gradual iteration and thorough specifications that allow independent third party repairs etc.

That's more like Microsoft's kind of market, but uh... don't give them any ideas.

I can't even fathom what it would cost to ride an Apple airplane, coach.

Probably not going to happen. If someone was interested, they could have had it easy if they bought up Bombardier's CSeries aviation unit before Airbus did.

> Boeing needs to be broken up and reorganized, full stop. Congress has to act. It is simply too important and vital of a company to US strategic interests to be left in this state.

The MD merger that led to the shift of Boeing management culture was due to the government intervening and forcing a marriage between the two companies because MD was too important for vital defense interests.

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