What's the point of this plane? It's not that cheap, it's not that good for fuel efficiency, it misses most modern (decade old) systems like eicas. Seems another odd Boeing plane that woukd only sell because the competition cannot fill all orders.
It being a refresh of old design, means it's cheaper to retrain people (don't have to full training for the totally different aircraft), a lot of your supporting infrastructure can stay the same while being cheaper to operate.
And, in theory (ahm, MAX had some tiny, minor issues there) should be safe and reliable, as it's based on well known and tested platform.
That's not really the intention behind the initial concept. If you are able to update a plane to make it more efficient while keeping the same behaviour and the same interfaces for the pilot, then it is great and there are no safety concerns with that.
The only issue on the Max is that as part of the refresh, they were not able to keep the same behaviour. And then, instead of fixing it with additional engineering or requiring new training, they hid that under the carpet and made sure the FAA accept itq, leading to crashes and deaths. Plus the denial after the first crash was really disgusting.
Ding!
The whole issue was that they cheated to hide the differences to avoid additional training. Which proved fatal as the pilots were unaware of those differences.
This generally means the aircraft is the best choice to prop up customers whose business is slowly failing, and would be severely harmed by having to invest in improvements to the supporting infrastructure. This is not altogether surprising since air travel has been increasingly commoditized, so aircraft operators who don't price in long term capital improvements can outcompete (or for the worse ones, just stay afloat at all) for some period of time.
So it's no different than any other business with eye-wateringly expensive infrastructure, really.
If I understand the timeline properly, Boeing had a strategy, at least nominally: NMA, an all-new replacement for the 757. Boeing had to be brow-beat by their biggest customers to support the initiative, but at least from the outside they seemed to acquiesce.
Airbus responded with the A321XLR, betting it could reach market faster. Boeing countered by dropping NMA and trying to copy the Airbus approach of racing to market with a stretch variant of their workhorse (737 MAX vs A321neo). But Airbus was actually able to execute. A321XLR is on the verge of shipping while Boeing has been caught flat footed, again.
Also, A321XLR has significantly better specs than the 737 MAX 10 as the former was designed when Airbus thought it was going to compete with the NMA. 737 MAX 10 tries to be a cheaper alternative to A321XLR, but in trying to be a cheaper alternative to a cheaper alternative, Boeing lost the plot.
What I don’t understand is why Boeing didn’t work with the 757 instead. It’s a much newer design already comparable in size to the A321, and a new 757 variant would have had commonality with many airlines’ existing 757s and not run into the limitations Boeing has had literally “max”ing out the 737.
I wonder if this is an example of the downsides of not just doing something right from the beginning. If I understand correctly, this whole 737 Max kerfuffle was born out of Boeing trying to reduce costs for their "new" airplane by retrofitting an old one, intending to save on all sorts of costs. I don't know much about airplane development and manufacturing, but it almost seems like it would have been cheaper to just design a new airplane. Certainly would have saved lives, lawsuits, fixing hardware with software, and all this regulatory investigation.
My understanding is that building it correctly would require airport gates to be upgraded + pilot retraining. That would have killed the competitive advantage against the A320Neo.
As far as I know, pilots have been forced to retrain anyway due to the crashes and the revelations of the MCAS and other systems being much different than the existing 737. So I don't think that was saved.
I'm fairly certain I recall some pilots flying the day or sometime before one of the planes that crashed had the exact same issue with the same plane that crashed. Again, if I recall correctly, that pilot happened to be able to figure out the issue and was able to disable the system. So, it's really quite pathetic Boeing has been able to get away with this for so long. They knowingly lied and hundreds of people died because of that.
737 has had a digital cockpit since the NG launched prior to the turn of the century. That was a big deal at the time as they had to strong arm Southwest into taking it as-is and not creating a steam-gauge one-off. I guess DCAC/MRM was good for something after all.
