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The problem isn't in retraining a pilot to fly the new plane. The problem is that this pilot is now no longer interchangeable with legacy 737 pilots, and cannot fly a legacy 737.

This means that if you have a hardware issue, you can't swap the plane without also swapping the flight crew.

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There is a thing called equipment change. We use it all the time. At airline scale a captain (and crew) is worth an airplane. (And, come to think about it, it's a 1:1 relationship, so that follows Noether's Lemma, I think).

Don't overvalue the airship in the equation. (And I've done this job. I know what levers we can pull and how often it comes up.) Show me your data.

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