Boeing 737 MAX family NEWS ONLY

Despite these difficulties, if you “look through the noise” the Max remains “a great aircraft”, argues O’Leary, noting that it provide the airline with 4% more seats than its Boeing 737NGs and a 16% fuel saving. Ryanair’s senior pilots have flown the Max in simulators, giving him full confidence in the equipment. “It handles brilliantly and customers are going to love it,” he asserts.

 
Ryanair are possibly to look at savings from cancelled orders, how much less can they get the max for versus the potential issue of the type being given no rating and not continuing. Business involves taking risks.
 
The 737 MAX problems are fixable and the plane will return to service. The only questions are how long will it take, how much will the FAA twist the knife, and how badly will Boeing come out of this.
 
From Flight's article on the 777X first flight:
"Just four days after the maiden flight, the airframer released a set of annual results that illustrate the full impact (or at least the latest estimate) of the 737 Max crisis.

The total cost of the grounding is now approaching a cool $20 billion, including nearly $9 billion in customer compensation. To put that into some sort of perspective, the latter figure is roughly the same as the annual gross domestic product of Chad."

Eye-watering!

 
TLDR: Boeing plans only "low rate" production for MAX in 2020, and will take several years to ramp up to the previous 57 a month. Not discussed in the article, but that has to mean major problems for the supply chain.

 
TLDR: Boeing plans only "low rate" production for MAX in 2020, and will take several years to ramp up to the previous 57 a month. Not discussed in the article, but that has to mean major problems for the supply chain.

“When the supply chain has stability, we will make the next rate increase,” so it looks like the problems have already hit and the question now is how long it will take to rebuild.
With A320 production outstripping it for the foreseeable future, one wonders if the market might begin to saturate by then and the old rate never be reached.
 
TLDR: Boeing plans only "low rate" production for MAX in 2020, and will take several years to ramp up to the previous 57 a month. Not discussed in the article, but that has to mean major problems for the supply chain.

“When the supply chain has stability, we will make the next rate increase,” so it looks like the problems have already hit

I was talking about a different problem, not the ability of the supply chain to meet Boeing's production needs, but the reduced level of those needs for a period of several years likely leading to financial problems, and the potential for redundancies and even bankruptcies.
 
Last thing Boeing needed at this point was a fatal 737 crash - a Pegasus Airlines 737-800 slid off the end of the runway at Istanbul and broke into three with 1 dead and 157 injured. Almost certainly it's going to be a weather/pilot issue, but the headlines won't help.

 
Well, it did go down a steep slope that was at the end of the runway. At Calgary International, the end of Runway 11 is just like it and I've always sort of wondered what could happen (I worked there for four years out on the airfield)
 
Well, it did go down a steep slope that was at the end of the runway. At Calgary International, the end of Runway 11 is just like it and I've always sort of wondered what could happen (I worked there for four years out on the airfield)

Casualties now 3 dead and 179 injured.

Apparently it's the second time a Pegasus 737-800 has had a runway excursion at Istanbul in a month, though the previous time was to the side and without injuries, and it was also a Pegasus 737-800 in the runway excursion at Trabzon in Turkey just over a couple of years ago where the aircraft left the runway to the side and slid down a cliff towards the sea, fortunately stopping short and without injuries, but wrecking the aircraft. Weather seems to have been a factor in all three incidents.
 

He's grossly early to be declaring it gross negligence. He asks why the crew didn't land on the opposite heading, but the operational direction of the runway is set by local air traffic control. There are reasons you might need to land even running fast and long, such as a fuel emergency that makes a go-around inadvisable. A quartering wind is coming in from the quarter, that's a 45 degree segment, and quite a variation in the tailwind component from one extreme to the other.

And his points about non-American carriers are basically xenophobic. There are nations out there with weak aviation enforcement, we know who they are and Turkey's not one of them. Incidentally, Pegasus was founded by Aer Lingus, so probably inherited its cockpit practises from them. And we know the 737 MAX crashes were nothing to do with training levels, with Ethiopian having a particularly good reputation, the investigations confirming that the issue was mechanical, and the required training for all MAX pilots worldwide coming out of the investigations, which he notes, actually contradicting the point he's trying to make.
 
May I ask that we do not discuss 737-8x stuff on this thread, which is strictly for news about the MAX. Thanks.
 

Probably a minor issue, IMO, but illustrates the issues in grafting a dual redundancy system into an existing aircraft.
 
 

"In both the Max accidents and the 2009 crash, which involved a 737 NG, Boeing’s design decisions allowed a single malfunctioning sensor to trigger a powerful computer command, even though the plane was equipped with two sensors. For both models, the company had determined that if a sensor failed, pilots would recognize the problem and recover the plane. But Boeing did not provide pilots with key information that could have helped them counteract the automation error.
"After the 2009 crash, regulators required airlines to install a software update for the NG that allowed comparison of data from the two available sensors — much the same fix that Boeing has now proposed for the Max."
 

"Joe Sedor, the N.T.S.B. official who led the American team that participated in the Dutch investigation a decade ago, as well as representatives of Boeing and the F.A.A., cautioned last month against comparing the crashes, noting that they involved different systems on different planes. "

The comparison is pretty obvious at the systems level. They're both systems that gave misleading results based on a single point of failure, even though there were two sensors, because the sensors were wired so as to be individually selectable rather than dual redundant. And the justification for not needing to fix that is identical in both cases, the pilots themselves are mitigation/a form of redundancy, which is an a safety mitigation the MAX investigation has now ruled is unacceptable.

That's not so much something the NTSB should be refusing to acknowledge, as a potential spread of a now ruled unacceptable safety case to other systems on the same aircraft, and potentially other aircraft, and normally the kind of thing they'd run with.

It would be very interesting to know just how many aircraft, and how many systems aboard them, are flying based on the same safety case.
 

I hadn't caught the story about the 787 production rate cuts mentioned here so went and hunted up the details. TLDR: in November Boeing announced a cut from 14/month to 12 by late 2020 for two years, last week they changed it to be down to 10 from 2021), but that's going to put the supply chain companies under even more pressure than just the loss of MAX work (even if it starts up again relatively quickly). Boeing has been hammering margins in the supply chain for several years, which probably means a lot of companies don't have much in reserve. I'll be amazed if someone important doesn't go under.

 
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Quickly addressed and not thought to add to any delays, but still:

Given the FOD problems with the KC-46, this is possibly more damaging than it looks on the surface. It suggests there might be systemic issues in Boeing's production practises, and that could encourage FAA to be more assertive on individual aircraft acceptance issues, where they've already taken the MAX paperwork back in house.
 
Reading between the lines here which obviously has its drawbacks, could this be a case of supervisors pushing for jobs to be done too quickly leading to disjointed workplace practice?
 
Reading between the lines here which obviously has its drawbacks, could this be a case of supervisors pushing for jobs to be done too quickly leading to disjointed workplace practice?

I wouldn't be surprised at all if that was behind some of the incidents.
 
Reading between the lines here which obviously has its drawbacks, could this be a case of supervisors pushing for jobs to be done too quickly leading to disjointed workplace practice?

I wouldn't be surprised at all if that was behind some of the incidents.
New staff also. That's the problem of overstretching production capacities that you can't hold (retain due to cost).
 
Interesting claims posted at StackExchange:
According to one answer;

In 2017, Boeing Engineering team head resigned and he bought these complaints to FAA. As per him, Spanners, Rags, and the shavings of drill bits (Aluminium bits) Scraps and other tools were left as is in the wings and tanks.
As per him, he took the issue to his superiors, who ignored his complaints. Then he resigned and then filed the issue with the FAA.
Why Now? There had been some recent criticism from him in a podcast and on TV (I guess) by BBC, which was broadcasted throughout the world. As per the podcast, there were others who filed similar complaints on the brand too.

Among the many media reports of the MAX contamination, according to The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/busines...debris-found-in-fuel-tanks-of-grounded-planes

The company has had recent issues with debris – including tools and rags – found in its 787 Dreamliners and KC-46A military refueling tankers. Those issues have led to two suspensions of deliveries of KC-46As to the US air force.

One trusts that the FAA are staying awake.
 
"Boeing is also working to reduce instances where workers leave tools, rags and other debris inside jetliners as they build them, a problem at multiple Boeing factories."

I wonder how that compares with other manufacturers?
 

TLDR: Boeing has made $7m of new CEO Dave Calhoun's $36m pay over the next 3 years contingent on him reaching a series of milestones by 2023, including the return to flight of the MAX and all of the c800 delivered and undelivered aircraft, and strengthening Boeing's engineering culture (plus a bunch of non-MAX related goals). Be interesting to know how they plan to judge the second of those.
 
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