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Comment by sgjohnson | Hacker News Reader

Boeing fucking up with the 737 Max so much is merely a symptom.

They so desperately needed it to remain a 737 so it wouldn’t be a new type and therefore wouldn’t need a new type rating was mostly because the airlines demanded a better 737.

Yes, Boeing is at fault for the MCAS disaster (no redundancies, holy fucking hell), but in reality it was the entire industry.

My point is, had nothing changed, it would have happened anyway, and perhaps with Airbus and not Boeing.

The one big oopsie is “we want a better plane and we also don’t want to retrain our pilots”, which is an oopsie that absolutely was not Boeing’s fault.

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> The one big oopsie is “we want a better plane and we also don’t want to retrain our pilots”, which is an oopsie that absolutely was not Boeing’s fault.

Of course it is. Customers always ask for the impossible. Responsible firms say no to unreasonable requests.

There should definitely be some introspection around what constitutes an aircraft type and what doesn't. Perhaps it would be better if manufacturers could have more leeway in terms of redesigning newer models of aircraft without requiring retraining. Say e.g. if Boeing would make a completely different undercarriage to a new 737 so it was as tall on its legs as a 320.

That would have meant the MAX engines could have sat more like on the legacy 737. Which perhaps would have been a lesser change to the system overall than the changes made on the MAX? (larger engines, different engine placement, systems to counter the behavior coming from the new engine placement and so on and so forth). I'm not sure what the solution would be here, but it seems like any time a set of regulations is rigid-yet-full-of-holes it's almost better if it isn't so rigid.

> in reality it was the entire industry

Do you have further reading on this? First time I’ve seen someone suggest that Airbus has similar structural issues to Boeing when it comes to safety

I didn’t suggest that Airbus has similar issues. What I meant by the “entire industry” also includes the airlines.

I suggested that had nothing changed, it might have been Airbus that was low-key blackmailed into making a new plane that’s of the same type, with similar issues that would become evident only after a couple of crashes.

The very root cause of the issue was that Boeing was simply allowed to say “trust me bro, this is just a 737, it’s like any other 737, no retraining of any kind needed”, when, in fact, it wasn’t just the same old 737. Now this can’t happen anymore.

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