Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-has-started-working-on-a-737-max-replacement-40a110df

by bookofjoe • 10 months ago

303 481 10 months ago

wsj.com

Alt links: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boeing-reportedly-working-737...

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-st...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/boeing-developing-new-si...

advisedwang3• 10 months ago

Non-paywall: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-st...

advisedwang3• 10 months ago

new single-aisle airplane

Does that mean it's not trying to be "another 737" but actually a truely new type?

selectodude4• 10 months ago

They already did that, it’s called the 757 and nobody bought it. Maybe we’ll get a 757 MAX with MCAS to make it type compatible with the 737.

winstonp• 10 months ago

AFAIK the 757 frame is too heavy to be powered by the LEAP engines. Those planes were powered by a class of engine between the old 737 and 777 engines, and nobody makes them anymore because they're not in demand, so a 757 MAX is just not financially viable.

rangerjoe• 10 months ago

Will it still be controlled by dual redundant 80286 chips like the MAX, with its software outsourced to the Indian 3rd party contractor?

mrweasel3• 10 months ago

Is the MAX really using a 286 CPU? Why would they pick that for a plane launched in 2014. I get that it's based on the 737 Next Gen, but they just opted to not update the electronics?

rkomorn7• 10 months ago

The more you change, the more you need to recertify, the more it costs, the more time it takes, the less your shareholders profit.

ysangkok• 10 months ago

No. It is an FCP-2002. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763398

d_silin• 10 months ago

737 with fly-by-wire avionics would be what 737MAX should have been.

lostlogin• 10 months ago

Cancelled?

Havoc2• 10 months ago

Don't think it would have sold - behind the airbus neos on fuel efficiency. Hence the janky mcas solution to make the reengine work

AdrianB1• 10 months ago

No, they need a different landing gear to make room for bigger engines. Larger diameter engines are needed for better fuel efficiency. Fly by wire is nice, but fuel economy is more important.

nostrademons• 10 months ago

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s.

There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company.

Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA

scrlk• 10 months ago

To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.

SirHumphrey• 10 months ago

A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.

pavlov2• 10 months ago

Nokia’s CEO between 2006 and 2010 was their former chief lawyer.

It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.

wnc3141• 10 months ago

In most cases,the successor to a founder CEO is a finance person - because their mandate is to massage the stock on the behalf of the appointing board.

buildsjets3• 10 months ago

Dennis Muilenberg has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was Boeing’s CEO during and after the MAX disaster. He cannot be blamed for the first crash, but he absolutely bears a direct responsibility for every person who died in the second crash, as by that point he knew that he had delivered a product that had not been correctly and fully certified by the regulatory authority.

An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded.

I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.

gamblor956• 10 months ago

declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.

You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions.

And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.

lisper5• 10 months ago

with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets

It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT.

Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.

Gee101• 10 months ago

What about the Apple watch?

intrasight3• 10 months ago

What about Airpods?

Also, I expect Vision to eventually be a massive success.

garyrob• 10 months ago

There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.

I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod.

The jury is out on whether Cook can pull it off.

eastbound2• 10 months ago

There’s a beautiful conference (which I’ve lost) saying that science and technology can regress. We always talk about “the progress” but things do regress all the time; Tests I’ve cleared for employment can’t be passed by newcomers, the NASA wouldn’t be able to put a rocket on the moon today, and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore.

In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance. Nothing gets maintained, it’s either new or collapsing, but no-one enjoys the middle part. Which is sad. It’s a form of inflation.

Boeing is perfectly right to design a new plane right now. Engineers who interned on the 787 have bought a house on the countryside a few years ago.

mnahkies• 10 months ago

My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out

ashu1461• 10 months ago

Hasn't Tim Apple done his share by releasing apple watch and airpods, which have been good successors to other ancillary products which apple had earlier (ipad / ipod).

And right now as well, no laptop comes close to the overall experience that the Mac provides so he has been able to maintain market leadership.

Far better than Zuck for whom the only source of innovation has been acquisitions rather than releasing original products.

reaperducer2• 10 months ago

There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro

Grab one when they go on sale, and keep it in the box for a couple of decades.

Have you seen what Lisas go for at auction these days?

jen202• 10 months ago

The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro.

AirPods and the Apple Watch are also major new product lines, by some accounts each alone bigger than many major technology firms, that were released in the Tim Cook era of Apple.

djmips• 10 months ago

I feel like moving in the direction of their own silicon and getting M1 out and to massive success was under Tim Cook's watch. You might not consider this 'designing a new product' but I do.

tw042• 10 months ago

I dunno, Johnny Ive had the MacBook on a trajectory to disaster trying to make it thinner for the sake of being thin. Under Cook’s leadership they actually listened to users and redesigned it to be something people actually wanted.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what you think is going to be the visionary product. AR/VR still feels like 3D tv to me - a solution looking for a problem. The best use case I’ve seen was HoloLens and the military, but even that has had limited scope.

insane_dreamer2• 10 months ago

riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins.

you forgot Apple Silicon -- a _huge_ leap forward

you also forgot the Apple Watch, which has become almost the standard watch these days in the US, worn by nearly everyone I see, from baristas to CEOs

AirPods have become almost ubiquitous (and every other brand now copies them)

nonethewiser• 10 months ago

This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance. And in that comment the idea was that LLMs are accelerating this dynamic.

I dont want to stretch the analogy too thin but in this case instead of LLMs being a catalyst, perhaps its a monopoly.

hinkley12• 10 months ago

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Has a degree that’s basically informatics management.

My coworker took a class with case studies and the theory presented by that class was that all successful projects have at least one person who has fit the entire system into their head. They can tell you what happens if you pull on this thread. What the consequences are of trying to remove this feature. Lose them and you are fucked. Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same. If they can’t it’s the beginning of the end.

uh_uh• 10 months ago

This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance.

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424366

hinkley12• 10 months ago

I worked on the 787 but far from the engineering team.

Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that.

They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time, and doing an impression of Captain Ahab in trying to union bust in Seattle by fucking off to South Carolina. Boeing customers would figure out which plane numbers were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them.

The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines.

I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).

tracker14• 10 months ago

Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers.

I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again.

In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.

masklinn6• 10 months ago

They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time

The 787 was a straight up MDD pants-on-head plan (pushed by Stonecipher and McDonnel themselves), the entire point was to shift the costs of design and development to suppliers, with the idea that they'd fund the aircraft you could sell.

sbierwagen• 10 months ago

Same thing down on the production floor. Each program (737, 767, etc) has its own part number series. I'm sure there has to be some parts commonality, somewhere, with the same part getting two different numbers printed on it at the factory, but I saw no hint of it happening.

Fun fact: the two big Puget Sound factories (Everett and Renton) number their hand tools differently. It's true. A socket wrench will be EVT12345 or whatever, and the same tool in Renton will be inventoried differently.

The two factories have very different cultures. Renton does two planes a week, Everett does one plane a month. There was much grumbling during the webinars and retrainings after the Door Plug Incident that all this was being inflicted on us because of the cowboys down in Renton and their maniacal obsession with production rate, something which is not quite so much a focus at Everett.

tracker14• 10 months ago

Boeing in particular has been about "maximizing shareholder value" to detrimental levels for decades now. Absolutely pushing out its most experienced (and expensive) employees in favor of less skilled and experienced staff often with an ageist bent. Beyond this has been a cultural shift and ever expanding increase to woke HR policies and practices to levels that are more harmful than good.

I should note that I'm entirely in favor of diversity of background and thought, not to mention various educational backgrounds. That said, actually having "unofficial" policies against promoting people of a certain race and gender combination (no white men hired or advancing in management, especially old white men) is as problematic as any other racial/gender/ageist bigotry.

I don't work for Boeing as I don't have a formal education that prevents me from ever being considered. I do know several people that do. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer or anyone else.

phkahler• 10 months ago

> There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets.

A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.

imoverclocked2• 10 months ago

A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral

(n of 1 observation)

Yeah, I just purchased an OrangePI ultra and that fact gushes through like a flood in a canyon. I wonder if I will ever have a u-boot for the board that isn't based on 10 repositories glued together with references to unchangeable branches which are patterned after dates like 2017. There are official images with binaries and dog-knows-what-else in them. It's like the computer wasn't meant to operate for more than a few years (at most.) AFAICT, a person working on so many parts of the OrangePI ultra just stopped as the money ran out and there is a mess of repositories left behind. Don't get me started on the security mindset of the whole situation. /rant

georgeburdell• 10 months ago

I work with a lot of Chinese. I can confirm that they like to work in 1st gear a lot, rebuilding the same stuff over and over in reaction to changing requirements. Because of their immense capacity for work, it more than compensates for what westerners might desire in long term planning. I have gained quite a bit of respect for this way of work due to the results they have gotten.

TheLegace• 10 months ago

Not to mention their customer service is amazing. I travelled several times, been to Shenzen, but mostly travelled to Shanghai for training and procurement of large manufacturing machines. To be honest I am a software person and was never really trained or taught fixing and maintaining moulds/machines.

But they have always been gracious and insanely dedicated to making sure my problems are solved and they show me how to rebuild everything. I have a dedicated WeChat group with their engineers and get back to me 7 days a week.

Compare that with a Candian machine, where I can rarely get a hold of a technican and they lack any deep expertise on anything even just to have a informal conversation on how to improve things at my plant.

imoverclocked2• 10 months ago

The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee.

If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them.

My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.

Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.

Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

intrasight3• 10 months ago

They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)

jeffhwang• 10 months ago

Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.

bunderbunder5• 10 months ago

I think you might have the chain of causality mixed up. From what I've seen, the sheer scale of the company creates large committees because you've got lots of managers and they all know that getting involved in the project is essential to their career advancement. And then that creates scope creep. Partially due to design by committee effects, but also because the manager in charge of flobnix realizes their opportunity for career advancement by shoehorning problems that need to be solved with flobnix into the requirements.

I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside.

Concrete example: why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.

baud147258• 10 months ago

If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane

ViewTrick10022• 10 months ago

Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.

The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up.

Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.

Night_Thastus3• 10 months ago

If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane.

And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.

jandrese• 10 months ago

I think the days of Boeing being able to make the plane with a small focused team is probably in the past. Way too much engineering talent has been outsourced and the R&D just isn't there. It requires a level of vertical integration that was long since divested for cost saving reasons. That's why it is so beathtakingly expensive to develop a new plane. coordination between literally thousands of contractors is a nightmarishly complex task that requires an enormous team of middle managers and lawyers. It may even be the case that modern planes are just plain too complex to realistically do the majority of the work in-house.

dreamcompiler• 10 months ago

The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.

I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans.

The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.

PaulHoule7• 10 months ago

1. Modern airliners with fly by wire have capability similar to MCAS the difference is it is not half baked but has numerous degraded states it can run in when sensors are out and pilots are trained on all that. Any new airplane will have that under the name “flight envelope protection”

2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it.

3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. (a) Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution.

4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs

(a) when organizations in my town do a SWOT analysis they almost always put the bad state of the local airport as a disadvantage they have relative to competitors —- the county and state would spend money to improve what they can but it comes down to out-of-town airlines that have their own priorities, a pilot shortage, etc.

WalterBright8• 10 months ago

design it without sardines in mind

Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is determined by the airline customer.

purple_turtle2• 10 months ago

If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

In practice people in general vote with wallets for cheaper sardine-like flights.

(though more spacious seats typically can be bought)

captainkrtek• 10 months ago

This feels apt to my years at $large_cloud_provider, where the current cohort of folks manage some of the largest web services, but would not be able to develop them from the ground up today. The brain drain from these orgs, the shift to maintenance / KTLO, and the focus on sales/AI "features" rather makes this feel spot on.

neilv• 10 months ago

A couple years ago, when I was interested in working at a huge cloud provider (and, in less-humble moments, imagine myself as one of the people who could've helped build that up from scratch)...

I was recruited directly by a manager(!), and to work on a relatively small new piece that I thought my systems programming skills would be up to... but then the big company required me to do a corporate grunt screening in Python, as well as memorize some behavioral corporate drone interview answers.

I decided this would be a litmus test for whether the manager would be able to insulate me well enough from megacorp drone BS, and from some of the more aggressive org chart culture that the company was said to have. Nope, it turns out, the huge cloud provider really does insist that I do the corporate drone screening first.

I could've passed the screen with a day of memory refreshing prep on Python. (The last time I used it at that point, I had been switching back and forth each day between it and Swift, and had to look up details like how to get the length of a string. Yet I built something in Python with perfect uptime, over a year, in a critical production line, despite tricky complicating factors. And other comparable track record.)

Though I think I could've passed the nonsense screening, I decided that I already had enough negative signal, to bow out of the tempting cloud provider job. (I had a very positive impression of the manager. I was only scared of corporate culture outside of the team. If you're going to be a corporate drone, and jump through nonsense hoops, you should do it at a company widely regarded as treating its employees well.)

hitekker• 10 months ago

Andy Grove, Steve Job's friend (if not mentor), agreed:

"Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. ....abandoning today’s 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry." https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-bas...

No one listened to him, certainly not Intel.

ryandrake• 10 months ago

Here's a link to the same video but without the awful music inserted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

tpurves• 10 months ago

You forget, they also clean-sheet designed the starliner starting in 2014 and that project... also happens to exactly prove your point. (at least 2B over budget, and 8 years after it's original operational target of 2017, has yet to fly a fully successful mission)

gman83• 10 months ago

This dynamic is a core theme in Asimov's "Foundation." The Empire's technological stagnation is defined by its inability to create new atomic devices. They had the old ones, and they had technicians to maintain them, but the actual knowledge of how to design and construct one from the ground up had been lost to institutional rot. They could patch the old world together, but they couldn't build the new one.

alexey-salmin• 10 months ago

Asimov was such a visionary he managed to predict the year 2025 in France.

techas• 10 months ago

Very true! Unfortunately that is not present at all in the Apple series of Foundation…

FrustratedMonky• 10 months ago

Microsoft seems to do ok re-inventing itself, maybe through internal conflict and cage fights.

I wonder who the IBM/Xerox of today is? Amazon? Facebook?

jmyeet• 10 months ago

One of the reasons the 787 was fraught with problems is because it was peak decision-making by finance and accounting people. Specifically, Boeing outsourced everything for the 787s. There were layers of subcontractors upon subcontractors to produce the different parts because, you know, outsourcing was "cheaper" or "more efficient". So of course the logistics pipeline is hellishly complicated.

All because Boeing just didn't want to employ people directly who can build up expertise.

SoftTalker• 10 months ago

Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s

All of which are generally regarded as great aircraft by the people who fly them.

plun9• 10 months ago

Just ask ChatGPT how to design an airplane, easy.

reaperducer2• 10 months ago

The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009

That seems very quick to design a whole jumbo jet. I know they're not starting from scratch, but how long does something like that typically take?

JumpCrisscross7• 10 months ago

its design was fraught with problems

The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain and product-market fit. The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design, and has been an exceptional machine since then.

tacticus• 10 months ago

The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain

Which was a decision of boeing to outsource to their suppliers the design and development of those components. this combined with boeing doing some interesting pricing decisions lead to suppliers being rather screwed on the project.

The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design

Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues.

shuckles• 10 months ago

The Dreamliner had PMF issues? Hasn't it been a hugely successful point to point widebody?

Onavo• 10 months ago

What problems were there with the 787? IIRC it was the first major composite airliner and they had the advantage of hoovering up all the unemployed post Berlin Wall cream of the crop Soviet aerodynamicists to work on it for them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian...

KevinMS3• 10 months ago

I think its too big and expensive for the market right now, its like a cadillac escalade in a corolla market

whycome• 10 months ago

Does this also apply to Apollo?

throw7• 10 months ago

Well, if I was CEO of Boeing, first day I'd basically be Microsoft and move heaven and earth getting the Dave Cutler of aviation (I have no idea who that is). He's in charge and if you don't like it you come to me.

Second problem are the MBA's. I don't have a solution for that, other than keep them far away from Cutler's division.

Honestly, the technical part is "easy"; it's the day to day politics that gets in the way when what is needed is longterm thinking. Take for example when NYC hired Andy Byford and Cuomo The Child couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. Shame.

duxup• 10 months ago

It's interesting how that infects every aspect of a company.

I used to work tech support for a mid sized company selling some specialized networking eqipment, late 1990s and early 2000s. Our big deal was we answered the phone immediately, and we were good at what we did, we solved problems, resolved the issue right then and there on the phone.

Customers paid through the nose for our support contracts because it was worth it and they were happy. Happy customers were actually happy customers.

Company grew and was acquired and acquired other companies and so on.

By the end of my time there happy customers was a metric. It really didn't reflect actually happy customers, it was an amalgam of arbitrary stats. We could hit or surpass those numbers, nothing really mattered. Nobody was more happy if the numbers went up, or more sad if the numbers went down. Someone closed a ticket, did it solve anything?, who knows, but it was one more ticket closed!

Management who knew how to build a team, support people who cared, including myself, all just moved on.

Sad stuff really.

ulfw• 10 months ago

Also people retire out. A new product every 15-20 years leads to a lot of aging out

fsckboy• 10 months ago

you're trying hard to paint a picture of fail, but your evidence doesn't stack up

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009

2003 to 2009 is an incredibly short time line for a revolutionary new design (the heavy use of composites) The A350 developed in response was much less ambitious effort and took longer. The A380 also took a long time to plan and execute. Aircraft generations last at least a decade, and new designs every 15 years-ish is not a crazy ballpark

and its design was fraught with problems

A380 had plenty of problems, hence the delays

the problems with the 737MAX stemmed from Boeing trying to push the low-wing design of the older 737 through one more generation to avoid a complete redesign, to avoid the kind of cash flow pinch and never-paid-back development that Airbus suffered with the A380 (which was why they tried the "evolutionary" redesign on the cheap that led to the A350)

Before then was the 777 in the early 90s

777 was a revolutionary approach to developing a plane that led to its incredible success which continues through today (the clever idea they had? asking airlines what they wanted) Airbus has also chosen paths that have been quite successful, their "same cockpit" being one of them. 777 and Airbus's planes from that time all had very long commercial lives

everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets

I don't think anybody has ever designed a jetliner end to end, as piston planes crossed that hurdle earlier.

if ... a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company

where else are aerospace engineers going to work? I'm not saying there's a surplus but with defense, aviation is a very big industry, and most any engineer would like to work on greenfield designs for marquis products.

shoot from the hip copycat Jobs would find no jobs in aerospace. Different types of people have different personalities. Aircraft design is tight tolerance and exacting, and anybody who does it is going to be comfortable working in a that type of environment, lots of check, test, recheck, paperwork, etc.

raxxorraxor• 10 months ago

why should the company keep them around?

Smart companies should know that a large chunk of their value chain is knowledge work. For airplanes the danger of suddenly seeing a Boink 212 appearing on the market is probably quite low, but there certainly is engineering work to be done on planes, even if some of it won't see implementation for a long time.

But long time strategy is probably not even a term in some companies.

Gravityloss2• 10 months ago

But is there room for innovation in the airliner industry anymore? Let's have a thought experiment

If you use the same engines from the same vendors, same aluminum, same carbon fiber, same landing gear. Almost everything just like the others, can you really differentiate anymore? Or if you are a component vendor, can you really innovate that much anymore?

Ie maybe it can be argued it is the correct move, from the board's and investors' point of view. The machine is already pretty close to optimal, and has been since the nineties. Don't change the machine, just milk it. Fire most engineers, move production to the lowest cost non-unionised place, outsource as much as possible to vendors that you compete viciously against each other etc.

positron26• 10 months ago

has been since the nineties

There's still not a lot of ceramic fiber in use in the engines. That's a pure weight reduction and fuel efficiency increase, up to the point that NOx emissions can't be controlled.

Given the rapidly advancing VTOL autonomous drone tech, harbor tug concepts may yet make an appearance. The funding for this could be driven from rescue aircraft, short range powerful VTOLs optimized to go pluck a struggling aircraft out of the sky and put it on the ground. The obvious evolution of that is ditching a lot of the landing weight. Reinforced undercarriage, landing gears, high-lift devices almost all exist to be used in a very short segment of the flight. Unlike roads, automation in the air has quite a bit less variability to deal with. Would you rather pilots try to put a plane with a mechanical issue on the ground by skillfully manipulating throttles or let an overgrown DJI take a swing?

palmotea2• 10 months ago

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems.

I've listened to a fair number of podcasts about this, and consensus seemed to be they need to start designing a new airplane now, because if they wait as long as they'd previously been indicating, they'd have lost too much of their "new airplane design" experience.

UltraSane2• 10 months ago

A big advantage for this kind of project today is the fact that the entire plane can be modeled in CAD with every single part verified to fit and work. The US Air Force claims this was heavily used for the B-21 and greatly accelerated development.

jacquesm3• 10 months ago

This will be Boeings answer to the Bombardier C Series, aka the Airbus A220 series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220 , which is one of the nicest planes for short haul in service at the moment.

Edit: indeed, not the 'Neo', I got the name wrong but the link right.

sauercrowd2• 10 months ago

The A220 is an absolute treat. Can't put exactly my finger on why, but it just feels right in size, noise, the little screens at the top.

Flown it once or twice with AirBaltic, and would love to take it again.

jacquesm3• 10 months ago

AirBaltic was my introduction to the series as well and it felt for the first time in 30 years or so that I was in a modern aircraft. The last time before that was in a then brand new 747, which I absolutely loved to fly.

actionfromafar3• 10 months ago

Here's some anecdotes about it being heavy to maintain:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmaintenance/comments/1colti...

huslage• 10 months ago

The "Neo series" are re-engined A320 series (neo = New Engine Option) and has nothing to do with the A220.

jacquesm3• 10 months ago

Ah yes, you are right, I meant the A220 though. I've edited the comment, thank you for pointing out my error.

rkomorn7• 10 months ago

Replacing the 737 MAX with a competitor to the A220? Something does not make sense.

The A220 series' maximum capacity is basically the 737 MAX series' minimum capacity.

speed_spread• 10 months ago

Boeing's only answer to the A220 was to get the US administration to impose a 220% import tarif on it. It didn't even compete with Boeing models. Fuck Boeing.

jeffbee2• 10 months ago

How does such a tariff even work? Can't an airline finance all of its aircraft through an entity in the Maldives or whatever?

masklinn6• 10 months ago

The A220 is unrelated to the Neo. The Neos are re-engining of the 320 and 330 series (neo stands for "new engine option"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320neo_family

And while a plane with good bones, the A220 has not been all positives for Airbus: AFAIK they still loses money on the thing, ramping up has been hell as it's not part of any of Airbus's existing lines of procurement, and it's contributed to the already awkward 319neo being DOA.

spuwho2• 10 months ago

The timing may be right. The A220 is suffering from lousy engines from their supplier. Lots of engine turnover, lots of maintenance needed. Delta just made a huge commit to the A220 made in Mobile to replace their 717 fleet.

Lets hope Boeing can do it right this time.

Esophagus4• 10 months ago

I hope they design and build the airframe properly this time. A plane that needs [cheaply outsourced] software (that relies on one sensor) to correct bad behavior at the flight envelope is just not acceptable.

I still refuse to fly on the 737 MAX. I know it’s probably fine given what pilots now know about the how to control the thing, but I just refuse to support Boeing’s malicious negligence or any carrier that enables it.

There are few companies on earth I’m as mad at as Boeing. As I see it, they are not done repenting for their crimes.

quibono2• 10 months ago

It'd be a new airframe and not an elongation of an elongation of an existing one... So we might be lucky this time.

silverquiet• 10 months ago

I read "Airframe" by Michael Crichton probably twenty years ago, and it was around ten years old at that time. I remember that that book talked about how the planes were unstable by design and required software to maintain proper flight characteristics, and that this was so because it was more efficient. The book is fiction, but I doubt it was far off the mark at the time. I suspect that there is no going back from this state of things, and so if there must be software, it should be good software.

masklinn6• 10 months ago

War planes dropped natural stability a while ago, IIRC the F16 was the first relaxed stability production aircraft (it's naturally stable at supersonic speeds but not subsonic).

In fact there was a flying airliner with relaxed stability (though only neutral not negative) when Airframe was published: the MD-11. Though I don't know that there have been others since.

Centigonal• 10 months ago

Starting with the F-16, many fighter jets are designed to be intentionally unstable to improve maneuverability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability#Intentional_...

kjs3• 10 months ago

Fighter planes are unstable by design, and require computer control to stay in the air, because they're expected to do some pretty insane things in the air. A passenger plane has a somewhat different performance envelope, and while they are by-and-large fly-by-wire these days, they aren't designed to be aerodynamically very unstable.

mrguyorama4• 10 months ago

The 737-MAX is not "unstable by design". It has the exact same positive stability as other planes in 99% of it's flight envelope.

The remaining exception is that, at a certain AoA, speed, thrust, etc, there is a case where adding thrust pushes the nose up more than it does for the normal 737

The nose push is not abnormal, it is not unsafe, it is not unexpected. All planes with engines below the inertial "center" of the plane have this, including every 737 and every A320.

The problem was, this meant that it's flight characteristics were "different" from the older 737s. The entire point of any plane that is even a little bit 737 is to sell to airlines as "This is still a 737 and you don't need to train anyone in anything extra".

MCAS was built to change how the plane acts in this very specific regime, to act more like older 737s and counteract this nose push.

MCAS was entirely unnecessary except for business and policy goals. MCAS killed people because properly training aircrews for it would have gone against the entire point of the 737 MAX.

6SixTy• 10 months ago

When that book was published, the F-117 Nighthawk was already retired after 10 years in service. The thing doesn't even look like it could fly on account of the rudimentary stealth features.

whatevaa• 10 months ago

Passenger aircraft are stable by design. Fighter jets are unstable as this reduces drag and increases maneuverability.

hinkley12• 10 months ago

The 737 is a clusterfuck because the giant engines throw off the physics of the plane both inertially and aerodynamically.

It’s easier to make a turbofan more efficient by making it bigger. But power density also tends to go up with new models, so there’s at least a chance that there’s a smaller, lighter engine with the same thrust and fuel economy out there, allowing them to improve (restore) the physics of the aircraft.

masklinn6• 10 months ago

While not great, the MAX would have been fine if Boeing (and their airlines) had not clung so hard to the type rating. Without that, MCAS could have been left out entirely alongside its utterly botched implementation.

But that would have required a heavier certification process, and some pilot re-training. And they couldn't have that.

Of course that wouldn't have freed Boeing from the rest of its dismal record (MCAS didn't cause door blowouts), but...

raverbashing2• 10 months ago

The only instability most comercial planes have is the so called Dutch roll caused by swept wings and is compensated by the yaw damper (no sw needed)

bapak• 10 months ago

I just refuse to support Boeing’s malicious negligence

I get, but if everyone does that, Boeing does and we're left with a monopoly. Is that better? Will you feel safer flying on a COMAC?

someperson• 10 months ago

Did you mean Airbus?

KeplerBoy• 10 months ago

Boeing would get a bailout and hopefully do better next time. No way, they are ever going under unless there is a superior domestic alternative.

dang• 10 months ago

[stub for offtopicness]

bookofjoe2• 10 months ago

https://archive.ph/Cqgtc

advisedwang3• 10 months ago

That link doesn't work. "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"

ranger_danger2• 10 months ago

Endless captcha loops for me.

ranger_danger2• 10 months ago

737 MAX Ultra Plus Alpha?

JohnMakin• 10 months ago

737 HBO

pavlov2• 10 months ago

Boeing √543169, technically not a new model.

recursivedoubts• 10 months ago

Looking forward to what AI-generated flight control software can do!

ionwake• 10 months ago

I mean it couldnt be worse than what they released last time could it?

EDIT> what is scarier? the quality of the software they released or that someone on HN is defending it?

Mistletoe• 10 months ago

You’re absolutely right! The engines do not appear to be working. What I actually meant to do is, of course, turn the engines on. As you can see, they should now be working correctly. Sorry about that, thanks for correcting me!

blackbear_• 10 months ago

Fly-by-vibe?

downrightmike• 10 months ago

Hey hey hey, the $9/hr software engineer will be doing all the work, unless they can find a $1/hr guy. The first guy should just become a vendor and subcontract down to the $1/hr guy, that's what the rest of Boeing's supply chain is doing already.

https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...

jordanb• 10 months ago

During the MCAS scandal I saw a report that the software developers who wrote it were offshored and being paid something like $13/hr.

While there weren't actually coding flaws in MCAS in that it did what the spec said, I've met people who work in avionics and they would have pushed back against the specification because they tend to think about how their component integrates into the system.

Obviously it's impossible to prove that, had the software been developed by people specializing in avionics they would have caught the problem but it's just another hole in the swiss cheese model: when you outsource your avionics software development to an offshore contractor who was making a webstore yesterday and will be making an iphone app tomorrow, you eliminate the possibility that the implementers could do an informed critique of the spec.

flykespice• 10 months ago

Prompt: "Do a barrel roll!"

vntok• 10 months ago

The article just mentions "Boeing plane" with no details. Will it fly?

IAmBroom• 10 months ago

It said "Boeing", duh.

Like the sound it will make.

stray• 10 months ago

You're absolutely right! Unfortunately, the MAX replacement will have strict weekly limits on how many hours it can be flown fully loaded - and most airlines will hit the weekly limit after just a couple flights.

tracker14• 10 months ago

    Boeing 737 MAX+
    Boeing 737 MAX+ Xtreme
    ...
    Profit!

bombcar• 10 months ago

Boing 737 Pro Max.

Still prefer the 737 Air

UtopiaPunk2• 10 months ago

China recently started building and delivering airplanes. It will be interesting to see if Boeing can actually compete with what is coming out of China over the next few years: https://www.voanews.com/a/7528331.html

In the short-term, I imagine USA-based airlines will not be allowed to buy any airplanes from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-comac-military-... And perhaps they would not even be allowed to fly in our airspace. But if China decides that it wants to build planes at lower prices than Boeing (or Airbus), then I imagine they will. Their marketshare would grow elsewhere in the globe, reducing Boeing's sales. Can Boeing deal with that? Would the USA borrow China's playbook, and nationalize (or something similar) Boeing to keep it solvent?

TylerE2• 10 months ago

The C919 isn’t even competitive with where Boeing was 20 or 30 years ago.

UtopiaPunk2• 10 months ago

I'm admittedly very much not an expert in this area. But my post is less about the C919 specifically, and more about China's track record of developing manufacturing processes very rapidly such that they compete on the world market. Specifically I'm thinking of how China is suddenly exporting tons of EVs throughout the world at prices that USA/EU auto-makers can't really compete with. Over 50% of EVs sold in the world are Chinese (and none of those cars are allowed in the USA).

If China decides they want to continue developing and building commercial airplanes, where will they be in 5-10 years? Where will Boeing be?

maxglute2• 10 months ago

COMAC can only compete (geopolical drama aside) if engine efficiency improves or fuel prices decreases. TLDR every bit of COMAC can be modern / tier1 (and most of it is), but at current aviation fuel prices, 10-15% efficiency gap in engines will save more money on fuel over airframe lifetime. C919 is basically a 2025 narrow with a 2015 engine, but that old engine alone makes it not economically viable in most markets AT current aviation fuel prices. COMAC makes a lot of sense for PRC economically, not giving a cent to boeing, can build out COMAC specific support across country easily, but it's still commercially not well priced.

The caveate being COMAC is only expensive / has limited room to discount because it uses a lot of western components (for easy regulation/certification only). If PRC moves to a full soveign civil aviation stack, it would probably be very possible to price COMAC competitively, but that's more a medium/long term project. That's probably how it goes the way things are gonig, US probably not going to even certify/liimt where PRC planes can land to kneecap COMAC. PRC + RU can probably do some shenanigans like prevent US planes from flying over their airspace in retaliation and then it's a matter of how much divertion (extra fuel+travel costs) impact bottom line. At the end of the day geopolitics will determine how viable civil aviation projects are.

protocolture• 10 months ago

China is very good at subsidising development like this. Other commenters are rightly pointing out that they cannot currently compete with Boeing. But if you look at the way the chinese approached car manufacturing, 20 years ago, I wouldnt have even ridden in one, these days they are honestly fantastic. Its because they got the chance to make those really bad cars, that they were able to improve to where they are today. 20 years from now, its possible that the gap closes to the point that Boeing is displaced from everywhere but the US.

Biggest issue I can see is that the US will try and weaponise national security against them. Much like how Cisco and Juniper fought to have Huawei and friends blacklisted in most western countries. Just as they become competitive, Boeing and Airbus might start screaming that the chinese planes have communist killswitches and that planes will fall out of the sky if theres a war with China.

Havoc2• 10 months ago

Has there been any sign of change in their corporate culture?

Last I heard they're pushing hard to ramp up production and FAA is back to letting them self-certify stuff. And they're under worse financial pressure now than when they made the last round of questionable decisions.

...I'm all for competition & avoiding a monopoly but colour me unconvinced that the root cause has been fixed.

bfrog• 10 months ago

I wonder if they will try for a blended wing

wyldberry• 10 months ago

This has been a long time coming. The big buyer for 737 consistently has been Southwest. Before a recent ownership shakeup, Southwest wanted to only operate the 737 airframe, and avoid as many new features as possible to keep training costs low, and maintenance costs low.

New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames. Boeing doesn't want to make 737s, but they are locked in because of this demand.

Source: Family member trains pilots at Southwest after retiring from a major airline carrier after a career as pilot/check-airman.

selectodude4• 10 months ago

People blame Boeing for the 737 MAX. They were elbows deep in a clean sheet design. Yeah, they shouldn’t have built the plane but the demand was made by Southwest and American who both said straight up if you don’t make a new 737, we’re switching to Airbus.

KevinMS3• 10 months ago

My understand is that the 737 Max was fine if they treated it as a new airplane. The problem was the put gizmos on it to make it behave like a regular 737 so pilots didn't need to get retrained on it. Those gizmos are what crashed it when you didn't know how they behaved when they failed.

stingraycharles• 10 months ago

Boeing is absolutely to blame though, in the end they’re responsible for the safety of the aircraft and there was plenty wrong internally at Airbus. The customer isn’t always king.

raverbashing2• 10 months ago

New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames.

Looks like a case of "broken clock is right twice per day"

t1234s• 10 months ago

Might be easier for them to try and license and produce the A320 under their own name.

etiennebausson• 10 months ago

Airbus's suppliers already have a hard time keeping up with airbus right now. Why would they add a concurrent that depends on the exact same supply chain, when they have taken delivery engagements for the next decade.

Unless the price is truly astronomical ,but then it's not worth it for Boeing anyway.

And that's before touching reputational damage that come from building your concurrent's plane because you couldn't design your own.

jeremyjh• 10 months ago

I hope someone is working on a Boeing replacement.

guardiangod• 10 months ago

Well since the 787 program will very likely never break even, let alone turn in profit, for Boeing, the 737's replacement will be a do or die project for Boeing. They cannot afford another money-losing product.

DiogenesKynikos• 10 months ago

The US will bail out Boeing, if necessary.

There are only two¹ major manufacturers of commercial airliners: one in the US and one in the EU. Both are essentially state backed. Both blocs want to have their own manufacturer, for strategic reasons, and they won't let it go under.

1. There will probably be three in a few years, since China is building up Comac.

notatoad• 10 months ago

boeing will never die as long as the government wants to have a domestic passenger airline manufacturer. and they pretty clearly do want that.

it'll take more than financial losses to kill boeing.

ffitch• 10 months ago

seeing how much power shifted from legislative branch to executive, and how often executive branch changes its mind, I wouldn’t count on the unwavering government support

mihaaly• 10 months ago

as long as the government wants to have a domestic passenger airline manufacturer. and they pretty clearly do want that.

Now.

Opportunistic politics mixed with the religion of infinite profit maximization produces a turbulent swampt to build the future of anything on top of.

Aldipower• 10 months ago

How about to just "virtually" fly? So Boeing could save on building an actual plane, but still getting the money!

Animats• 10 months ago

Is this the New Midsize Airplane, the "797", again? [1] That's been on and off for over a decade. Should have been shipping by now.

The COMAC C919 is finally shipping, although it's not a great aircraft and China still imports the engines. COMAC will probably do better in the next round.

Will Embraeier build something in that size range? They could. They already build small midsize aircraft.[3]

This looks like Boeing missing the market.

And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_New_Midsize_Airplane

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919

[3] https://www.embraer.com/e-jets-e2/e195e2/en/

everybodyknows• 10 months ago

And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.

Interesting how in the eyes of Joe Public, Southwest had nothing to do with it. Wonder if the Southwest board figures their cynical calculation worked out well enough to try again?

contrarian1234• 10 months ago

i dont know anything about how these companies are run, but couldnt it simply be their engineers were busy working on other projects?

i assume there is a limited talent pool of the required people

mjg59• 10 months ago

Boeing currently has an awkward gap between the 737 and the widebodies that was previously filled by the 757 - the 737 Max 10 (which still isn't certified!) only has about two thirds of the range of the A321XLR, and a slightly lower passenger capacity. Airlines that currently have 757 fleets and who need that range are going for Airbus instead, and Boeing just doesn't have an answer for it. So while, yes, any new Boeing design is likely to be fly by wire and composite and everything, it also seems likely that it's going to try to fit that market.

The 737 Max 7, the smallest of the Max series, is longer than the 737-200, the stretched version of the original design. A brand new design is going to be able to ignore that market (which basically doesn't exist any more, the Max 7 only has a handful of orders) and scale upwards to also be a 757 replacement. But it's also going to have basically no commonality with the 737, so it's going to have to genuinely be better than the Airbus product because existing Boeing customers aren't going to benefit from being able to move existing pilots to it without retraining or benefit from common maintenance plans and so on. It obviously should be better - the A320 program started over 40 years ago, it's not that much newer than the 737 - but given Boeing's myriad series of failures in recent years and how painful the 787 program was, it's not impossible that they'll fuck this up entirely.

alkonaut• 10 months ago

So given that both the basic recipe for the 737 and A320 are pretty old by now, how much "better" could a new clean sheet narrowbody realistically be, given recent in aircraft design?

And how much better would it _need_ to be, in order for large 737 operators to be convinced to place their next order for the new 7007? (yes, like nVidia, I trust they'll just add a number and start over when they run out of numbers).

jt2190• 10 months ago

This comment talks about next-gen engines as the driver for new airframe designs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45431849

Those engines will be a major driver of whether “better” is achieved, in particular maintenance costs and fuel economy will need to move the needle.

eduction• 10 months ago

The obvious move is to take cues from the 787 program in terms of composites, to cut fuel burn. Adds some creature comforts like larger windows as a side bonus.

https://youtu.be/lapFQl6RezA?si=Nef60vinA7hXbnta

chris3934342• 10 months ago

Anyone with 737MAX cockpit time?

Overly nerdy question: I'm curious regarding AoA sensor failure, is there an ability to manually source select the AoA, if not, how about the FMC? This might be called master source select, or which side is controlling (captain or first officer).

kashunstva• 10 months ago

The AoA failure logic does not allow for manual reversion of the master/monitoring FCC. It still requires cross-checking sides in the event of an AOA DISAGREE annunciation. But since the update, MCAS is disabled in this scenario. As far as the FMC, the relationship between AoA vanes, flight control computers and CMD A/B is not configurable. But the non-failed autopilot channel can be selected.

z3ratul163071• 10 months ago

well, for the safety critical sw, in addition to outsourcing to the cheapest indian shop they can find, they can also now use the cheapest ai models.

koziserek• 10 months ago

Can't wait to beta-test it as a pax.

blueelephanttea• 10 months ago

This is not a surprise. The timeline for this plane aligns exactly with the timeline for Airbus's a320/321 replacement which aligns exactly with when it is believed the next generation of engines will be ready.

Both Boeing and Airbus are spending a lot of time evaluating the next engine options. Last year there was an article that Airbus is more optimistic about CFM's open rotor designs while Boeing thinks the next generation geared turbofan models will win out. That is entirely based on leaks and no-one actually knows how true those assessments are.

The 737 Max was designed with the expectation that the 8 variant would be the sweet spot. Since that time it is clear that there is massive demand for up-gauging and the A321neo is dominating and there is significant demand for the Max10 variant despite it not being certified yet.

I would expect that both Boeing and Airbus are looking at that size (maybe slightly larger) for their next narrowbody with some flexibility for shrinks and/or stretches.

This is not a response to any existing planes. The A320/321 family is very old (50 years mid 2030) and it is expected that both Boeing and Airbus are going to be introducing new airframes to fit the new engine technology.

bigiain• 10 months ago

Boeing today is so obviously a different organisation to the one that built their rapidly dwindling reputation.

The 747 was an amazing engineering marvel. They started designing it in '65, the first one rolled off the production line in '68, and they were still making and selling them right up to 2023.

I have a book here somewhere that talks about how so many of the design decisions were based on cold hard physics facts combined with engineering pragmatism. They needed to run the engine at peak efficiency, and the tradeoff between air density and air temperature set the cruising altitude to ~35,000 feet. They knew they didn't know enough to be able to build a supersonic plane, so that set the top speed at just under mach 1 at 35,000 feet. They wanted to carry 2-3 times as many passengers as the 707 which set the payload and the all up weight. It needed to go slow enough to land safely at typical airport altitudes, which set the wing loading and given the weight the wing area. It needed to be as efficient as possible which meant a high aspect ratio, but given the required wing area and the available engineering capability for wing spars and aluminum construction that set the wing span.

It was hard engineering tradeoffs like that which then set a whole bunch of aviation standards. Runway lengths, terminal and jetway heights, landing approach speeds - all those types of "standards" which still exist today in airports around the globe, are heavily influenced by the 747 and it's design parameters. Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.

That is not today's Boeing.

dghlsakjg• 10 months ago

Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.

This isn't even close to true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_approach_category.

Cessnas approach at less than half the speed of 747s. The safe maximum cruising speed is 20-30 kts short of a 747 approach speed. You would have to be willing to risk your airplane and your life to get a Cessna up to the approach speed of a 747.

My experience landing Cessnas and other light aircraft at airfields where they land the big boys (including busy international ones) is that you approach and land at the speeds that the aircraft you are flying is designed for (which, btw, ATC and the FAA don’t give two shits if you are an international airport, the rules are the same everywhere in the US. I am licensed and have flown in other countries, and it varies ever so slightly, but not in the direction you are implying). I have had controllers ask me to keep speed up for spacing, but they aren't expecting miracles, they know that you simply can't get a Cessna to go above a certain speed.

The rest of your comment also has some dubious claims. I suspect that the top speed was set just below mach 1, not because Boeing had no engineering knowledge about supersonic flight, but because fuel efficiency, and a host of other factors that make supersonic flight difficult. As a counter to that assertion I would point out that Boeing had a supersonic engineering team that started in 1952. They even designed a supersonic airliner that was never built in the 1960s. Hard to believe that they chose not to make the 747 supersonic because they lacked the experience to design an SST while they simultaneously had an SST design and supersonic research team before the 747 was conceived.

The 747 was a groundbreaking airplane, but it wasn't all of the things being claimed here.

NegativeK• 10 months ago

To your point, the large airport I worked at was annoyed at small, slow aircraft landing because it jacked up the spacing and slowed down the customers who paid the vast majority of the bills. But the feds required the airport to allow it for a low (relatively) fee, so the airport could only be annoyed.

okdood64• 10 months ago

That is not today's Boeing.

How do you know they don't take all this into account when designing their planes?

carabiner• 10 months ago

Everything he described, mission requirements, sizing, trade studies, is taught in undergrad aerospace engineering curricula today. It's part of every new clean sheet design, civil, military, fixed wing or helo. It'd be the computer science equivalent of extolling how Windows was built with OOP and compiled programming languages on 8 mb ram. Pretty amazing if you're not familiar with the concepts but SOP if you're in the industry.

kqr2• 10 months ago

I have a book here somewhere

You can't just say that, mention a bunch of interesting things, and not tell me the name of the book...

hannofcart• 10 months ago

Am not OP, but wondering if the book being referred to is '747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet' by Joe Sutter.

Sutter was one of the people who led the design of 747.

mattmaroon• 10 months ago

To be fair, they did not operate in today’s world. The airlines they sold to back then before deregulation had government-guaranteed profits and so were much less focused on cost cutting than in today’s deregulated environment.

For decades after deregulation the total net profit of all airlines was negative. (Might still be, I’m not sure.) The industry got really cost competitive, and so the planes they purchased had to as well.

insane_dreamer2• 10 months ago

That's because Boeing is primarily a defense contractor these days.

atourgates• 10 months ago

Semi-unrelated, but that photo is taken from the Hyatt Regency Lake Washington, which looks over Boeing's Renton facility from many of the rooms.

Nice hotel on its own (though a bit out of the way from most Seattle tourist stuff), but extra-nice if you're an aviation geek.

ftchd• 10 months ago

couldn't predict that I'd ever say this but I hope they test this one and don't discount on costs

sour-taste• 10 months ago

I'm pretty ignorant here, but as I understand it

* The design time on a new plane is going to be tens of years

* Boeing is already losing customers to Airbus as a result of the max disaster, doors blowing off, etc.

* The major thing keeping Boeing in business is long delivery time orders of their older planes, and those are drying up

Given these things can this help them in time?

Drblessing• 10 months ago

Just in time for AI to design it.

buyucu• 10 months ago

Maybe Boeing should have done this before they murdered 346 people?

brainzap• 10 months ago

remember when they built an unsafe plane and the FAA approved it

nottorp• 10 months ago

Self certified, according to other news...

spuwho2• 10 months ago

While McDonnell Douglas seems to be the whipping boy for Boeing Commercial Aircraft (BCA) problems, many of the business decisions actually predate the merger. As a college student in 1988, a BCA executive was invited to speak in our capstone class about Boeing plans for the future. The executive spoke about their extensive outsourcing strategy. Where Boeing would still design the platform, but suppliers would be required to design/build to spec. This distribution of work was supposed to drive out the vertical costs of design/build inside Boeing. The 777 was at the time in testing out at Moses Lake and nearing release. The reaction in the class was somewhat of a shock. Boeing was essentially "giving away" their book on how to make an airplane (a quality one) and turning it over to all of these suppliers with a mandate to do it more cheaply. The Boeing exec was quite pleased with how much money this was going to save the company as they became only the prime assembly point, with essential components coming in JIT mode from around the world. Students were quick to challenge him during the Q&A asking how they were going to maintain quality by so much outsourcing, he stated that there would be contractual requirements and inspections to make sure the components met the spec. McDonnell Douglas business methods are not above it either as they too were looking to outsource MD-9x parts production overseas before they were bought out by Boeing. Their effort to partner with Airbus to build a super-jumbo by fusing certain MD-11 design elements (MD-12) is no secret.

So in summary, let me state for the record that Boeing's redirection into outsourced suppliers and engineering was moving forward by 1988. Well before the merger with MCD.

stuaxo• 10 months ago

737 Maximum ?

Its hard to imagine this will not have glaring issues too.

0xTJ• 10 months ago

It'll be interesting to see if they can turn around their reputation. For my own travel decisions, a flight scheduled on a Boeing plane has a genuine impact on considering other options, especially if I have flexibility. Not because I'm worried about an incident (I know that flying is incredibly safe, and feel very comfortable with it), but out of pure spite.

hydrogen7800• 10 months ago

You're not alone, but I find it interesting that not too long ago[0] there was a common sentiment of "if it's not Boeing, I'm not going". I heard that often after the Air France 447 crash [1]

[0]OK, I guess 2009 is not as recent as I remember...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

gethly• 10 months ago

I could care less. I am never flying with Boeing - ever.

vonneumannstan• 10 months ago

Who could even trust them to build something safe?

Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

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