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Comment by plett | Hacker News Reader

The whole reason the 737 Max series exists is to avoid having to start over. By maintaining "backwards compatibility" type approval with the regular 737 then the existing massive pool of 737 pilots can jump straight in it and start flying.

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I always thought that was the most idiotic part that the FAA accepted. Like, I get that there has to be leeway for similar configurations of the same plane so they don't have to go through the process for each. But it's been so clearly abused that it's ridiculous now.

This: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/EM_N323A...

Is so obviously not this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Alaska_7...

I'm not sure a simple picture is enough.

The Airbus A330 and A350 share the same type rating. (At least some variants; I'm not an expert.)

A big advantage Airbus has is their more modern designs are full fly-by-wire, so they're able to more practically compensate for the handling characteristics in software.

As far as I know (not a pilot or aeronautics engineer) MCAS was more or less an attempt to do the same to a non-fly-by-wire plane, and we see how that turned out...

  The Airbus A330 and A350 share the same type rating.

In fact, they do not in the United States.

https://registry.faa.gov/TypeRatings/

In Europe, they do:

https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/downloads/11737/en

However even within the same type rating you may have additional training or restrictions. For instance the FAA prohibited Southwest from using the same pilots across three generations of 737 (Classic, NG, MAX), so Southwest ditched the Classics when they bought the MAX.

The picture is just to show how far the plane has deviated from its original design on a colinear (e.g. same price/size target among the new generation) scale. If you want more depth into the pains Boeing goes to not trigger a "new design" recertification, there are plenty of articles on it released during the initial Boeing MAX MCAS forced crashed saga, such as ArsTechnica's series of articles.

How bad can retraining possibly be?

Is there something in that process we can address instead?

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