Why the 737 MAX has been such a headache for Boeing
45 comments
·May 13, 2025mjevans
dehrmann
I'm actually sympathetic to using fly-by-wire technology to keep the interface the same. When it works, it can be safer since pilots' experience transfers directly, they don't mix up subtle differences between the models, and it makes it an easy sell to airlines. I fault Boeing for not making it robust enough. It needed to be bullet-proof, and it wasn't.
saurik
I mean, it is easy to be sympathetic to something if you add the constraint that it must be perfect under the assumption that it could be perfect... the issue is that there is no way this wasn't going to be a leaky abstraction, and so I would thereby offer the decision no sympathy.
immibis
Because if it had redundancy, that would be a sign to the FAA that it was important. If it was important, the FAA would make them teach their customers and pilots about it.
Obviously the problem here is the fact that aeroplanes are regulated.
kelseydh
Little else symbolises technological stagnation better than Boeing reusing the design of its 737 series for its new airplane.
Tuna-Fish
It's the company providing their customers what they asked for. Because of the way pilot licensing works, the airliners really want to field as few separate types as they possibly can. If a Boeing executive goes to meet the people who buy his airplanes, upgrades that fit on existing type certificates is the first (and only) thing they ask for.
The job of a CEO is sometimes to tell the customers no. It's just really hard to do.
philosophty
A miser pays twice...and kills 346 people.
raverbashing
Yeah, because the legacy carriers apparently can't be bothered with spending any more money in moving out of the 70s
But pray tell me, did you save money in having part of your fleet grounded for 1.5yrs?
henry2023
This is not the carriers fault. Boeing promised one thing and was lying about it. Why would the customers take the heat?
jiggawatts
"That's a different budget." -- a comment I've heard several times, from several bean counters, justifying $billions wasted.
graceevans
[dead]
dingaling
EMBRAER of Brazil has been slowly expanding its market for 60 years but they've been reluctant to move into the A320/737 category. I don't understand why - there are over 12,000 orders backlogged with Airbus and Boeing, surely that's the strongest possible indicator of potential demand.
An airline placing an order for an A320 or 737 now will have a decade to wait for delivery.
Instead EMBRAER keep themselves locked in the regional jet market and are lucky to get 80 orders a year.
trhway
It is a very complicated product. Whole countries like Russia and China are trying to build even somewhat smaller modern jets and basically haven't been able so far.
And for "national jet" the task is easy as you can allow some inefficiencies. For a pure commercial jet product like EMBRAER would supposedly build, it must be a topline on all KPIs otherwise some ROI numbers over 10-20 years would project it to be several percent worse than Boeing/Airbus, and the airlines wouldn't buy it.
xiphias2
I don't really understand how a company can be criminally liable without any person working in it (especially the president)
bambax
Yes. It's good to inflict huge fine on the company itself, as it will eventually hurt stockholders; but management should be held accountable too, especially C-level personnel who quit with golden parachutes of various sizes. They should have to pay those back, at the very least.
ars
It's because of dilution of responsibility, each individual didn't do anything wrong, but take all together it adds up to wrongdoing.
It's not usually nefarious, it's usually a result of imperfect information - each individual works off of the information they have which leads them to wrong actions as a whole, but correct actions individually.
xiphias2
,,It's because of dilution of responsibility, each individual didn't do anything wrong''
In that case it would be true, but it would be hard for me to think that nobody told the leader of Boeing (who should have known it himself as the leader of the biggest airplane company) that putting an engine over the wing is both stupid and dangerous and unstable.
AtlasBarfed
Corporations are legally people who can't be jailed. Make sense?
mjevans
That never made sense to me. Isn't the whole reason the 'board' gets paid so much that they're the ones who go to jail if stuff is messed up (and they're culpable rather than clearly wronged by someone else)?
AngryData
Theoretically sure, that is the excuse given for their massive pay. But really that has only been true in practice for a few short periods of time, atleast in the US.
avalys
How much do you think the board gets paid?
somat
corporations are not people, they don't have personal privilege, corporations are governments, they have governmental privilege.
A corporation is the ruling apparatus for a group of people, which is a fancy way of saying government.
Animats
County of Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.
gonzo41
I remember suggesting during the VW emissions scandal that we needed something like a corporate guillotine to execute companies of scale that were involved in serious crime. Not just a change out of directors, but wholesale breakup.
But you know, just a person on the internet yelling into the void...
alexey-salmin
They jailed the engineer, all working as expected
graceevans
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Gathering6678
For anyone who is interested, Petter @MentourPilot on Youtube has a few videos about this topic that are worth watching.
ChicagoDave
Boeing: we should cut costs by getting away from being an engineering company. Then we’ll make very bad decisions because we’re behind AirBus.
Execs: sounds perfect
ninetyninenine
As an American I sort of live in a bubble. I didn't realize the rest of the world views the US as a country that's falling apart until recently. This article solidifies what I've heard even further. With Airbus dominating the commercial aviation market, what is the US currently best at?
Space, Defense, cinema and software?
mrtksn
IMHO USA is still the best in many of those things, it's just that its no longer uncontested. USA is going through the stage all the former European empires went through. You are even trying to do the nationalism thing which by itself means if you adopt it you will become a nation instead of an empire and instead of doing global stuff you will do what a nation of 340M people do. All those isolationist stuff, identity crisis etc. looks like post-imperial Europe to me. Sometimes I wonder if USA is trying to do soft-transition from being global superpower empire into a largish country like on of the others. I just can't see the mechanism where all that can be orchestrated, so maybe it's not orchestrated but because US have only 2 neighbors and they are well behaved the US empire isn't going down with a huge war but its just pulling back as it is contested.
cjblomqvist
The UK (empire) didn't go down in a big war (although they fought in several, that also threatened them). It seems wars are definitely not needed for the transition to a nation rather then empire.
immibis
Is self-destruction a soft transition?
jiggawatts
Software, cloud, AI, financial services, movies, computer games, space (i.e.: Starlink), military technology, etc...
There are entire categories of things where it is just the US doing the thing, OR without the US the thing would implode.
For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple).
Let me put it this way: If every undersea fibre link out of the Americas was suddenly severed, people in the USA might not even notice for a while. The rest of the planet would make a winding down noise as every second piece of hardware or software stopped dead because of some missing dependency.
wiseowise
> For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple).
Not for long.
https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_unveils_its_own_pc_os__harmo...
MrDrMcCoy
There's also Sailfish OS and Tizen, which could become suitable replacements if investment and necessity arose.
awesome_dude
American Exceptionalism.
From my neck of the woods, we've largely viewed the Americans as part of a security arrangement (Pacific) but, as a trading partner, they are far behind the Chinese (so much so that its a constant political discussion on how to balance the two competing alliances).
This is largely what Trump was trying, and failing (miserably) to address with his tariffs, nobody buys from the US anymore.
If the fibre was cut through the USA, then yes there would be a period of difficulty, but it would be very quickly replaced with other countries technology (keeping in mind that most Western governments were looking to move to Chinese Huawei telecommunications kit until the US made aspersions as to how secure peoples data/secrets would be if that happened, completely ignoring Snowden's revelations that the US had been engaged in using the hardware in overseas telecommunications systems for that exact purpose)
yesbabyyes
I thought Huawei's only competitors in telecommunications are European, though?
jiggawatts
Sure, that'll be easy!
Just clone the repos from GitHub, wait... oh no.
We'll just deploy it to AWS... wait... IAM is in US East 1 only. Dammit.
Okay, fine, we can live without all of those JS CDN URLs, right?
Where's NPM managed from again?
Crates.io?
NuGet?
Uh-oh.
iancmceachern
Medical devices
fakedang
Pretty much all of the above. And drugs, although America's healthcare model is so well known it cancels that out.
Tbf, the rest of the world also views Europe in the same boat (if not having taken an early-bird ticket on it).
graceevans
[dead]
Offhand, what I remember reading during the initial 737 MAX crashes:
Part of the appeal of the 737 series of airplanes was pilot certification across a wide fleet allowed for carrier flexibility and cost savings. Same airframe, same 'response', 'same certification'. So they tried to lie to everyone. Mount the engines on the same airframe a bit differently. Use software to make the behavior (in most circumstances) the same as the older models. etc.
The rational was that they 'couldn't' spend the time, money, or above pilot training needs to field a new competitive model. They'd just come off of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner . Which skimming the Wikipedia article, probably also dovetails in with the seemingly eternal struggle between the Machinists union and Boeing the company who used to be headquartered in Seattle. Penny pinching decisions there probably had negative effects on safety too.