[HN Gopher] Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
___________________________________________________________________
Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
Alt links: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boeing-reportedly-
working-737..., https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/boeing-
developing-new-si...
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 158 points
Date : 2025-09-30 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| advisedwang wrote:
| Non-paywall: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-
| defense/boeing-st...
| advisedwang wrote:
| > new single-aisle airplane
|
| Does that mean it's not trying to be "another 737" but actually a
| truely new type?
| selectodude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| The article said Boeing is talking to Rolls Royce for the
| new plane. American Airlines used to have a fleet of 757s
| powered by Rolls Royce engines assembled in Montreal
| Canada. I used to work on those engines many many years
| ago.
| selectodude wrote:
| You can use the most powerful LEAP engine on a lightened
| 757 "neo", it'll just be a complete dog like the A321 and
| not a rocket ship like the old one.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Just 'cause I'm totally ignorant about this stuff: why is
| that?
| quibono wrote:
| The A321 is an elongated/bigger version of the A320.
| Similarly to the B737 - which also went through this
| process a few times (e.g. compare the B737-400 vs
| B737-600 vs B737-MAX) - it means the engines are moving a
| heavier&bigger plane.
| rangerjoe wrote:
| Will it still be controlled by dual redundant 80286 chips like
| the MAX, with its software outsourced to the Indian 3rd party
| contractor?
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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?
| rkomorn wrote:
| The more you change, the more you need to recertify, the more
| it costs, the more time it takes, the less your shareholders
| profit.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Would probably add that it likely has reliable real-time
| constraints as part of this. While I can imagine simpler
| ARM and RISC-V chips having similar properties, depending
| on the application it would likely be hard to certify any
| modern CPU design for a lot of medical or aerospace
| applications.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Make you wonder how long management figured they can keep
| using ancient technology, just to avoid updating
| certifications.
| rkomorn wrote:
| At a dinner with a team of Airbus folks we were working
| with at a previous job, they talked about how difficult
| it was getting to source CPUs for the A320 after 30
| years.
|
| It's definitely a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing,
| but I ask myself a similar question: at some point
| whoever is producing these chips is going to stop finding
| it worthwhile and end production, no?
|
| But then I also assume the people who work on these
| things know arguably infinitely more than I do.
| karmelapple wrote:
| They do :)
|
| And if the companies who produce these chips continue to
| make a healthy profit, why would they stop?
| rkomorn wrote:
| The scenario that comes to my mind is: these chips had a
| lot of potential customers 30 years ago, and now may be
| down to just one or two customers left buying too few
| units to make it worthwhile.
|
| Presumably, they have "guaranteed" buyers but also, if
| so, why would Airbus have issues sourcing CPUs, for
| example?
| throw0101c wrote:
| > [...] _too few units to make it worthwhile._
|
| Not if the price of those units are _really_ high.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Forever if someone keeps making new chips.
| karmelapple wrote:
| This is the answer, and correct in many ways.
|
| If the chips are cheap and easily available, and you know
| their failure modes, and they've been field tested for
| decades, why change?
|
| It's very different from many software development
| attitudes, but remember that airframe manufacturers and
| avionics companies employ many people just to calculate
| risk and failure rates. The failure rates of these things
| are critical to the safety of your airframe.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That mindset is inevitably going to leave you in a ditch
| though. Either you run out of suppliers for the chip that
| are willing to produce on a shitty inefficient old node
| under certified conditions (mostly because it inevitably
| gets really expensive to keep the machines for production
| running!), or you run out of developers able and willing to
| write code for these old designs where the toolchain
| probably is also certified and has nowhere near close to
| the bells and whistles of modern IDEs or the automatic
| benefits from modern programming languages such as pointer
| safety.
|
| _Anything_ should have a replacement budget and timeline
| attached.
| rkomorn wrote:
| That's my gut feeling too but... I don't build certified
| airliners with lifespans of multiple decades for a living
| (or run companies that do).
|
| All I know from having worked in an Airbus subsidiary for
| a couple of years is that their world is nothing like
| mine.
| d_silin wrote:
| 737 with fly-by-wire avionics would be what 737MAX should have
| been.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Cancelled?
| Havoc wrote:
| Don't think it would have sold - behind the airbus neos on fuel
| efficiency. Hence the janky mcas solution to make the reengine
| work
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their
| best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
| sitharus wrote:
| He initially turned down the job because he felt that a
| lawyer wasn't the right person to run an engineering
| company, and from reports of people who worked with him he
| knew his knowledge limits and listened to the engineers. He
| took serious risks with the 707 and 747 projects because he
| trusted the people who understood the technology.
|
| MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the
| reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a
| hit now for a payoff in ten years.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are always people who work out despite common sense
| saying they shouldn't that doesn't mean common sense is
| wrong, it just means we don't understand what the real
| factors are.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| davidkwast wrote:
| Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005
| Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the
| groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management
| did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a
| smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900
| but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen
| too.
| zdw wrote:
| The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in
| the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a
| somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at
| the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-
| height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult
| to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere.
|
| It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget
| if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare
| fingers.
| davidkwast wrote:
| True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple
| launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with
| Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to
| Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be.
| And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was
| interesting times back then.
| tim-- wrote:
| Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the
| Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first
| Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see
| the winds of change.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X
| foobarian wrote:
| I got to briefly try a N900 back in the day. When it
| powered on you would briefly see the raw X background
| stipple and the x-shaped cursor before the window manager
| loaded. I liked the nerd factor of it but I knew at that
| point the company was in the weeds.
| nicce wrote:
| They also threw away Meego, which was praised for UI and
| design.. and it was Linux.. not often heard in the same
| phrase. Build with Qt.
| noosphr wrote:
| I have an n9 that I turn on once in a blue moon.
|
| Even today it looks better than any of the major mobile
| OSs, is more responsive and just _feels_ better to hold
| and use.
|
| The road not taken.
| lisper wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| What about the Apple watch?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The Apple Watch seems to have suddenly found its pace.
|
| I am seeing them _everywhere_ , around here.
|
| I suspect that quite a few are SEs and maybe last year's
| model, but I do see a lot of Ultras.
| ghaff wrote:
| Battery does seem to be a limiting factor and I don't
| wear mine unless I'm doing activities where it's
| especially useful. But, for a lot of people, something
| else to charge doesn't seem a big impediment.
| ghaff wrote:
| When we heard young people don't wear watches any longer at
| the time. And certainly many people didn't think yet
| another bluetooth earphones were anything to get excited
| about.
|
| AR does seem to be a potential big deal. But the tech and
| implementation probably has a ways to go before it's
| interesting outside of a bubble audience.
| petre wrote:
| If people don't wear watches, they probably wouldn't wear
| scuba gear either. Unless AR comes in rose tinted
| glasses.
| petre wrote:
| What about it? I'm not going to recharge my watch every
| night. Yawn.
| spookie wrote:
| Yeah, we have basically infinite battery on "dumb"
| watches, as long as you use them. You know, so you can
| rely on them.
|
| The Apple Watch to me just seems like a worse earbud. If
| I want to be that interrupted in tge middle of something
| might as well hear the thing and not have to look at it.
| macintux wrote:
| I never had any interest in wearing a watch to bed. Still
| don't, although theoretically I could charge it for a few
| minutes in the evening to make that possible.
|
| The Watch has helped me lose 30 pounds, has significantly
| helped motivate me to exercise more, and has let me keep
| my phone on silent mode for at least 5 years now. For me,
| it's a great device.
| jen20 wrote:
| I don't personally sleep with my watch on, so I just
| charge it every night. But it actually only takes about
| 15 mins to charge a decent amount, so if I did I'd just
| charge it while I was in the shower...
| intrasight wrote:
| What about Airpods?
|
| Also, I expect Vision to eventually be a massive success.
| petre wrote:
| The basic Airpods are crap, noise cancellation is useless,
| they fall off the ear. You're better off with Sony or JBL
| at half the price. The Pro ones are good.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I don't have AirPods basic but I've got 2nd gen AirPods
| Pro and they're one of the best products I've bought in a
| long time. I'd put them up there with my 2011 kindle I
| still use every day.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You have to have the right ear form for ordinary AirPods.
| Comes with the design, sadly.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I don't own AirPods but it is a huge commercial success.
| autoexec wrote:
| They were designed so that they'd get easily lost and
| they prevent you from replacing the battery. With enough
| marketing even a low quality product like airpods can be
| a commercial success
|
| https://apple.slashdot.org/story/19/05/12/0256259/why-
| airpod...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I got the pros. I think they are great in every way
| except (1) they fall out of my ears, but that's cause
| I've got a genetic polymorphism that makes me make crazy
| amounts of earwax and my doctor warned me that one of
| these days I'm gonna wake up and not be able to hear
| cause my ears are clogged --- I don't wear them outside,
| I just wear them where having them fall out is not a
| problem, (2) the noise cancellation is supposed to turn
| itself off when I talk to somebody and it seems like they
| always turn it off whenever I mutter to myself, but when
| I actually talk to somebody, they don't, and (3) young
| people these days walk around with AirPods in and they
| just can't hear you. It's just like they're 95 years old.
| garyrob wrote:
| > 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.
| petre wrote:
| That's why they bought up Luxotica shares. Because scuba
| gear is for scuba diving. Even if it's white, it's still
| scuba gear. Remember the PDAs with resitive screens and
| styluses? They were a lot more convenient than scuba gear.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It's more likely than not that they will, in my opinion. As
| an owner of both an AVP and Quest 2, the former is a lot
| nicer to use than the latter with the exception of VR
| games, and my hunch is that Valve is going to eat Meta's
| lunch for gaming with Deckard (which will be at least as
| good as the Quest 3, but much more open, paired with a
| vastly more populated and popular marketplace, probably
| won't treat PCVR as an afterthought, and won't be saddled
| with the Quest's somewhat painful sideloading experience).
|
| The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and
| improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well
| within their capabilities.
| spookie wrote:
| Having experienced the Quest Pro I can say that Apple has
| absolutely no clue what the focus should be on.
|
| Hint: being able to grab a well balanced headset that is
| so easy to put on as a cap. This makes you not think if
| you are going to watch or play in VR, you just do it.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I think Apple knows exactly what they're doing, but was
| forced to choose between making the product more about
| demonstrating their tech and end goals or being mass
| market mediocre and chose the former. Nobody would've
| cared about what amounted to a Quest wrapped in a
| Cupertino design with similar performance, specs, etc.
| It's very much in line with the original iPod and iPhone,
| both of which took a few iterations before becoming
| category-defining hits. It'll probably be the second or
| third-gen Vision device that'll fix the AVP's nits while
| also keeping or improving upon its strong points.
| eastbound wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This here should trigger a red flag when you hear anyone
| say "The government should be run like a business".
|
| Businesses kill themselves all the time from the loss of
| institutional knowledge. We see stuff like "government
| spends X a year paying people Y to build almost no product
| Z". Instead, we're paying people Y to be ready to build Z
| when something goes terribly wrong like war.
| charcircuit wrote:
| When they say run like a business that doesn't mean that
| it should be done like a reckless business. Plenty of
| businesses invest into things like disaster recovery or
| insurance which they may never need.
| selectodude wrote:
| Running like a business means providing services to
| profitable customers. This is, surprisingly, the exact
| opposite of what government is supposed to be doing. The
| USPS would be plenty profitable if it didn't have to
| maintain the infrastructure to deliver a letter from
| Honolulu to Barrow for 50 cents. Medicare? Not the best
| business model. Roads? Forget it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >means providing services to profitable customers
|
| So Uber wasn't a business for its first 14 years? There
| are more objectives a business can have than maximize
| immediate profit. There are other metrics it can try and
| move.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Uber was a Business trying to gain a market share in
| hopes to cement itself as competitor or even become
| monopoly. It's also clear Uber was building massive ride
| hailing network so when self-driving cars became a thing,
| out with human drivers, in with computer drivers.
| Obviously, that didn't happen.
|
| Government does not really have that. All their
| businesses have 100% market share so to run it
| profitable, they would have to stop doing unprofitable
| thing. Like providing healthcare to poor people or
| delivering from Hawaii to some rural area.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Nope. When people say governments should run like a
| business, they always mean the most reckless version of
| business you can think of.
|
| It's even the only interpretation of that phrase that
| makes sense, because if you take the optimizing into
| large risks interpretation away, there's no other way
| those two can act in similar ways.
| thoughtFrame wrote:
| Is it this one?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko Preventing the
| Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to
| the speed of maintenance.
|
| Instead, the most important innovation are the ones that
| reduce maintenance needs.
|
| Automating farms, moving mechanical computation into
| general purpose processors, simplifying science theories so
| that people can learn in a semester stuff that took decades
| to mature... All of those have a tremendous impact. All of
| those speed everything up, and make room for more
| innovation to appear.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore.
|
| How much are you or your enterprise willing to pay for
| that?
|
| See, the economics just don't make sense. Give me some VC
| money, a small team of experts in the domain and some
| runway and I'll give you a self-hosted alternative to Jira.
|
| But the cost for you would be too high and I will go out of
| business trying to sell software while everyone else is
| renting it out.
| mnahkies wrote:
| 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
| waiwai933 wrote:
| I believe I read somewhere that announcing new emoji drives
| noticeably more OS upgrades compared to more boring
| security and stability update release notes.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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_
|
| Because the Software Update page under System Settings is
| all that normies will ever read and so what's in the text
| there is focused on normies.
|
| Meanwhile techies may be interest in the CVEs listed in the
| security update list:
|
| * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/125111
|
| * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/100100
|
| * https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-
| note...
|
| And corporate IT types may be interest in enterprise
| features, like TLS behavioural changes:
|
| * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/121011
| ashu1461 wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| > apple watch and airpods
|
| Fair point.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Have you seen what they went for when they were new?
| jen20 wrote:
| > 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.
| lisper wrote:
| Fair point.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| procaryote wrote:
| For software, the easiest way to design for this is to keep
| systems small enough that fitting it in your head is
| relatively feasible in a reasonable time for a competent
| engineer.
|
| Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all
| that often, and you can build pretty big things.
|
| I imagine this is doable with hardware too
| unreal6 wrote:
| > Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change
| all that often, and you can build pretty big things.
|
| Emphasis on _clear_. It 's a challenging endeavor to
| properly draw and enforce these service boundaries.
| hinkley wrote:
| Occasionally I make an analogy to stage acting or opera.
| In order for the people in the medium priced seats to see
| the action on the stage, all the actors have to over-
| emote to make everything that is happening dreadfully
| obvious.
|
| In a system that is the composition of 30-300 different
| functional units, nobody will be close to any one part
| unless they're the bus number for it. So each piece needs
| to be dead obvious so you can worry about the
| consequences of composing them. At the end of the day
| it's Kernighan's Law but rephrased so as not to ignore
| Conway or Brooks.
| hinkley wrote:
| My yard stick is discoverability. If you don't touch
| things for a while they get fuzzy, and someone might have
| refactored it. So you need to be able to familiarize
| yourself with bits of the code you haven't looked at
| recently. Helps with code reviews, onboarding, and
| production outages.
|
| In particular it's difficult to train new people to take
| up on-call duties if they cannot sit in the corner of the
| room and try either the same things you're trying or
| their own pet theories without taking your attention or
| interfering with your tests. They need to be able to hear
| the repro steps and spool up their own snapshot in a
| similar state. That scales. Gatekeepers do not.
| Discoverability is necessary but insufficient to achieve
| this. There's more to it but the foundation is
| discoverability and reproduceability.
| cptroot wrote:
| That sounds like a very interesting theory, with an
| actionable result. Do you have any links for more reading?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I've been on large projects where we didn't have one such
| person but was nevertheless very successful.
|
| The key there was that one qualified representative for
| each part of the affected organization and other relevant
| parties in the core team, and there were frequent alignment
| meetings where they were all present. The representatives
| were close to the action, not some three-levels-removed
| manager.
|
| In the meetings processes and such would get discussed step
| by step in detail, and any representative could chime in at
| any point to say "this won't work" or similar.
|
| Hard to do though, and quite costly in terms of
| organizational resources required.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same.
|
| Or the company ponies up and rewrites the thing.
|
| Sometimes legacy really _is_ bad, and sometimes you really
| _do_ need to throw the old product into the bin.
|
| See Trello for an example.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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).
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| If I'm remembering the timeline correctly, we already knew
| how shitty we were being in Afghanistan by the point the
| question was asked.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| The modular structure of the aircraft was also meant to
| reduce or remove the need for gantry cranes. It required 2-
| or maybe it was 3-axis forklifts but no gantries. Gantries
| need tracks and structural support and those make the
| building the planes are built in quite expensive. I joked
| at the time that they could buy an old Walmart Superstore
| and use it to assemble the 787. Though I'm relatively sure
| they'd crack the concrete.
|
| I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that
| plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.
| dingaling wrote:
| Nothing really exceptional about that, risk-sharing
| projects were common in aerospace in the 80s onwards. 21%
| of the 777 ( yes the beloved Triple Seven ) was farmed out
| to a Japanese consortium which took risk for the design and
| production of the fuselage.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >> 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.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| 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.
| intrasight wrote:
| They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design
| the plane ;)
| reactordev wrote:
| Can't wait to fly in the 737-AI.
| dsr_ wrote:
| All the executives first, please.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin
| with!
| jeffhwang wrote:
| > 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.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Maybe you want a small team of big people.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket.
| They moan and complain about this or that, but they still
| do the same thing.
|
| So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.
|
| By cutting the number of economy seats and increasing the
| number of business and first class ones?
|
| Airlines don't care about the economy traveller. They are
| there just to fill the space for a marginal profit.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| They need _both_. They want the high-margin business and
| first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume
| would be too low and overall prices too high to make
| operating feasible.
|
| The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats
| filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most
| commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly
| every seat is filled.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > They need both.
|
| No. If they could fill the entire plane with
| business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even
| less) of it, you bet they would.
|
| The only reason why economy class exists is because they
| can't. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily
| increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.
|
| So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn't
| say that they need the economy passengers.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > > They need both.
|
| > No (...) The only reason why economy class exists is
| because they can't.
|
| in other words, in nearly all cases they need both
| autoexec wrote:
| > With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest
| ticket
|
| With rare exception people just buy what they can afford.
| If people had so much money that they could afford to fly
| first class and it wouldn't impact their budget very few
| would get the lowest price they can find knowing that
| their experience in the air will be miserable.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >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?
|
| The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200
| billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of
| Apollo before it even finished its original set of
| missions.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Gateway is also a trial run for conducting operations at
| a Mars/Phobos/Diemos station.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| But then you've got to ask why would we want an orbital
| Mars/Phobos/Deimos station?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Because Elon.
|
| Snark aside: the goal is Mars because it might be
| possible to colonize the planet and to have a place that
| acts as a reserve for humanity should shit really hit the
| fan (i.e. WW3).
|
| The moon isn't suitable as much for that purpose due to a
| complete lack of any atmosphere and because it's too
| close to Earth.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's not Elon's plan. He's too smart for that shit and
| wants to aerobrake down to the surface where there is
| abundant CO2 and probably H2O somewhere to make fuel for
| the return trip.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| That's surface habitation, not an orbital station around
| the planet or one of its moons.
|
| The problem with using a space station as a waypoint on
| the way to and from the surface of a remote body is that
| it make the mission more expensive. For example, the
| Lunar Gateway increases the delta-v requirement by 15-20%
| (can't remember exact number) compared to a more direct
| mission. Which then, all else being equal, increases the
| total mission cost by much more than 15-20% because the
| rocket equation always wins. And that's just the actual
| visit, we're not even considering the cost of putting the
| station there in the first place.
|
| So I keep going back to, _why a space station_? If we 're
| going to spend all that extra money on turning hydrogen
| and oxygen into hot water, why put it toward a space
| station out in the middle of nowhere instead of, say,
| more time or more equipment on the surface of the body?
|
| Also, IIRC, none of Elon's proposed mission architectures
| for going to Mars involve an orbital station. And, while
| SpaceX did get the Artemis lander contract, they weren't
| involved in the decision to have a Lunar Gateway.
| ipython wrote:
| Mars isn't exactly habitable either. Not to mention the
| myriad of issues we face even getting there, let alone
| thriving.
|
| Read the book A City On Mars recently which had a lot of
| interesting concerns not widely discussed in the pro
| space colonization community :
| https://www.acityonmars.com/. Highly recommended.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If any faction is on Mars during WW3, there's a nuke
| landing there 6 months after the show is over here.
| wongarsu wrote:
| We'd pay $xxx billion to have a permanent moon base,
| something Apollo never had. If that can't efforts excite
| people enough to keep funding flowing I doubt a space
| station in lunar orbit will move the needle
|
| To add another data point: the Chinese lunar program also
| plans to land humans on the moon and later establish a
| manned research outpost on the surface. But there don't
| seem to be any plans for an orbital stations, despite
| China having very successful space stations in LEO
| ipython wrote:
| What does a moon base get us, though?
|
| It was cool to get bragging rights by being the first to
| land and come back - in the ultimate show of "soft power"
| against the Soviet Union. But a permanent moon base? We
| can't even fund the ISS.
| bluGill wrote:
| Frankly, a moon base might be cool, but nobody has sold
| me on it is worth having for any other reason. Some smart
| people have given good arguments that it isn't worth
| having.
|
| And here I'm sitting in my basement not working on space
| projects and realizing money spent on space is money I
| don't have for something else I want (even it is is only
| $.10 that is still money that adds up).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In the 1980s I read articles in the "science fact"
| columns in _Analog Science Fiction Magazine_ that told me
| that NASA sold out a much more ambitious lunar program
| for something that was little more than a stunt.
|
| The reality was that Von Braun looked at dozens of
| mission architectures before discovering one that was
| much more feasible than any of the others and made it
| possible to realize Kennedy's dream.
|
| The moon is not far away in terms of miles but in terms
| of energy and momentum it is very far away if your goal
| is to fly there and fly back. Right now the best idea we
| have for a moon lander is to hope that SpaceX gets
| Starship to orbit _and_ masters orbital refueling it's
| not like they can fly 100 tons there and back, but rather
| they can land about what Apollo did with a much bigger
| spacecraft that's really tall and tippy, needs an
| elevator, can get the ascent rockets smashed on rocks,
| etc. if they had a set of those chopsticks on the Moon or
| Mars they could land it easily but on generic inner solar
| system bodies covered with boulders, craters and stuff
| good luck. Plan B is basically the same from Blue Origin.
|
| If you could refuel there the math changes, maybe you
| can, there might be usable ice at the poles but nobody
| has seen it, unless we have a Drexler machine we're going
| to have to launch a huge number of missions with a
| marginally effective system until we have a system in
| place that can reliably deliver fuel.
|
| So it's tough, any honest analysis of space colonization
| makes you come to the conclusion that Drexler did,
| rocketry has very little to do with it, being able to
| pack a self-sufficient industrial civilization into the
| smallest package has everything to do with it.
| baud147258 wrote:
| > 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
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much. You can outfit pretty much any airframe you
| want to be business class only seating but not enough
| people will buy when it pops up on Expedia at 2+ times the
| price of the alternative.
|
| I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly
| not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a
| more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.
| Filligree wrote:
| I would buy an upgrade if it was twice the price. In
| reality it's more like 10x.
| ghaff wrote:
| That is, in no small part, because business/first class
| is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the
| passengers in those classes are status upgrades).
|
| So, yes, sticker price for upper class service is pretty
| expensive. In a world where upper class service was the
| norm on certain routes on certain planes it would
| probably be pretty expensive but probably cheaper than
| the upgrade on mixed class service.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Do you have a source showing $/sqft of economy vs
| business/first class? This video is basically saying the
| opposite of you: that business/first class subsidizes
| economy.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc
| cyberax wrote:
| > That is, in no small part, because business/first class
| is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the
| passengers in those classes are status upgrades).
|
| That's the complete 100% opposite of truth. For most
| airlines, the economy class is just a nice addition to
| the business class.
| jjmarr wrote:
| There is a business-class only airline (La Compagnie)
| that flies from Newark to Europe and they're profitable.
| A little more expensive than 2x the price though, but
| less than 10x.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Compagnie
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Never heard of this airline so I just checked: Over the
| next few months the cheapest flight from EWR to their
| base in Orly is ~$2,500 vs ~$365 for Economy (French Bee
| to be exact). That seems like its still a separate class
| and would exclude most Economy flyers.
| glitchc wrote:
| Yup, as another poster noted, the seating density and
| comfort are decided by airlines. Aircraft manufacturers
| install standardized rails for seating and console
| selection, and allow for many different configurations.
| addaon wrote:
| > 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?
|
| For pitch, yes. For width, no --- you run into quantization
| pretty quickly. The difference between sardines and
| standard economy is less than the difference between 3+3
| and 3+2 -- it's not really feasible for most traditional
| airlines to choose a different number of seats across than
| the design point. And for a 3+3 setup, adding 6" to
| fuselage diameter makes a noticeable difference to (wider)
| passengers, which the airlines can't really take away.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| There's no incentive. Passengers rarely know what type
| they'll be flying on when they book, and prioritize it
| over price even less. For airlines, a bigger airplane is
| a distinct disadvantage though, as it's operationally
| more expensive (increased cross section equals increased
| drag equals increased fuel burn).
| WalterBright wrote:
| A fully loaded 747 is extremely profitable, the large
| size has economies of scale. That's why the 747 was very
| very popular with the airlines.
|
| So, yes, a 747 burns more fuel. But the fuel burn per
| paying passenger is _less_.
| bluGill wrote:
| The real issue with the 747 is people will take a point
| to point route if at all possible. Worse, flying a small
| plane point to point is cheaper for the passenger than
| flying 2 747s. If you live in Lincoln NE - sorry your
| city is too small to get direct flights to anything but
| close major hubs (even then odds are you drive to nearby
| Omaha thus further reducing demand options). However if
| you live in a Larger non-hub city airlines can undercut
| each other by just doing direct flights to other large
| non-hub cities.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Seat and aisle widths are customer selectable options.
| Hence, a customer may order a 787 with 3-3-3 seating or
| 2-4-2 seating. The vast majority of airlines chose
| sardines instead of comfort. In a 737, customers only can
| get 3-3 seating, but they can choose wide (17.8") seats
| and skinny aisles, like Southwest does, or they can
| choose skinny (17.1") seats and wider aisles, like Alaska
| does.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Boeing is in constant communication with the airlines on
| new airplane designs, as they want to build the most
| profitable airplane for their customers that they can.
| This means the airline has a lot of input on fuselage
| diameter.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| > 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.
| wucke13 wrote:
| I think what parent was about is open vs. closed loop
| control, not fly-by-wire or not. Both their and your point
| stand of course.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| >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.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| The number of passengers you can fit in a commercial plane
| is based on how quickly you can evacuate them, with the
| doors being a major bottleneck. Many ULCCs in Europe have
| planes that are right up against that limit.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > design it without sardines in mind
|
| Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is
| determined by the airline customer.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Here's a link to the same video but without the awful music
| inserted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
| tpurves wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Asimov was such a visionary he managed to predict the year
| 2025 in France.
| techas wrote:
| Very true! Unfortunately that is not present at all in the
| Apple series of Foundation...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Just ask ChatGPT how to design an airplane, easy.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| sauercrowd wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| bgnn wrote:
| I had the exactly same experience with AirBaltic. It felt
| so modern!
| huslage wrote:
| The "Neo series" are re-engined A320 series (neo = New Engine
| Option) and has nothing to do with the A220.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ah yes, you are right, I meant the A220 though. I've edited
| the comment, thank you for pointing out my error.
| rkomorn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| How does such a tariff even work? Can't an airline finance
| all of its aircraft through an entity in the Maldives or
| whatever?
| peterhhchan wrote:
| Airbus had to move production from Quebec to Georgia (US)
| apendleton wrote:
| It wasn't Airbus yet, so more like: Bombardier had to
| sale a controlling stake to Airbus to gain access to its
| Georgia production facilities.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why, though? I am just wondering how it takes effect. The
| carriers often lease the planes from special-purpose
| entities. If such an entity is based in Liberia, where
| does the tariff apply?
| masklinn wrote:
| 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.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| 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.
| quibono wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| chris393434 wrote:
| This is no different than modern traction control, and in
| no way is "wrong" from a design perspective. If I recall,
| the more fundamental flaw here is the degraded behavior of
| MCAS with dual-sensor AoA system was not they adequately
| trained pilots for, which was clearly part of the business
| case for Boeing, negligent or not.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| This is not correct and a gross simplification of the true
| issue.
|
| All aircraft with underslung engines have similar
| characteristics to varying degrees and different handling
| characteristics between models are fine.
|
| As seen with 757/67, 777/787 and A330/40/50 sharing type
| ratings despite being massively different aircraft.
|
| > As the nacelle is ahead of the C of G, this lift causes a
| slight pitch-up effect (ie a reducing stick force) which
| could lead the pilot to inadvertently pull the yoke further
| aft than intended bringing the aircraft closer towards the
| stall. This abnormal nose-up pitching is not allowable
| under 14CFR SS25.203(a) "Stall characteristics". Several
| aerodynamic solutions were introduced such as revising the
| leading edge stall strip and modifying the leading edge
| vortilons but they were insufficient to pass regulation.
| MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose
| down stabilizer input during elevated AoA when flaps are
| up.
|
| http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm
|
| The feeling of the aircraft is not the problem. The stall
| characteristics not complying with the regulation is.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| 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...
| hinkley wrote:
| Indeed. A fully new airframe likely won't try to avoid
| training and certification overhead. Ripping that bandaid
| off will cut a lot of bullshit. But, there's only so much
| engine you can shove under a narrow body aircraft. Landing
| gear is limited by physics and just making it taller won't
| fix everything.
|
| I just looked and from what I can find on Wikipedia this
| may warrant a new model from P&W or CFM because I'm not
| seeing a documented turbofan family with similar thrust and
| smaller diameter except ones with much lower bypass ratios
| and thus garbage fuel efficiency.
|
| RR seems to be concentrating on bigger engines. They have a
| demonstrator that's 2x the diameter of the Max's engines.
| JFC.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Landing gear is limited by physics and just making it
| taller won't fix everything.
|
| Every other plane is higher than the 737. The only reason
| the engines needed to be pushed forward on the 737, is
| that the 737 was built back in the day to be lower to the
| ground for easier operations at poorer airports, with
| things like stairs and baggage.
|
| The 737 doesn't need to be as short as it is anymore
| because the vast majority of them now fly to airports
| with jetbridges and modern bag handling equipment.
|
| The A320 is not as short as the 737 despite serving the
| same market, and can handle bigger engines.
|
| But the entire problem stems from wanting to abuse the
| 737 type rating even further. If they were fine with a
| new type rating, they could put the engines pretty much
| wherever they want, put nice tall landing gear, etc.
| TylerE wrote:
| That isn't really true. Air stairs are still very common
| in much of Europe and Asia. It's only places like the US
| and the Middle East that jet bridges are ubiquitous.
| spogbiper wrote:
| also common in south america in my experience
| linuxftw wrote:
| This is at best a Boeing talking-point. We don't have any
| data that states it is safe to operate the MAX without
| MCAS. It's quite possible that probable scenarios would
| result in stall faster than a human can react.
| masklinn wrote:
| Afaik all analysis of the max's design have come to the
| conclusion that its natural behaviour was nothing special
| or dangerous. It's just that in some edge cases the nose
| would lift faster than on an NG, and that was not
| acceptable if it was sold as a 737 with no retraining.
| linuxftw wrote:
| One would think this question would have been answered
| directly in the FAA report, but it got zero mentions. We
| got zero data on how often MCAS made adjustments and how
| often in the report.
|
| Basically, we only have Boeing's word for it, which is
| worthless. They self-certified everything, and we see how
| that went.
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Did you mean Airbus?
| rkomorn wrote:
| Or dies instead of does ?
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Cqgtc
| advisedwang wrote:
| That link doesn't work. "Please enable JS and disable any ad
| blocker"
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Endless captcha loops for me.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| 737 MAX Ultra Plus Alpha?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 737 HBO
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Hulu in the on-deck circle
| pavlov wrote:
| Boeing [?]543169, technically not a new model.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Looking forward to what AI-generated flight control software
| can do!
| ionwake wrote:
| 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?
| jimbo808 wrote:
| I mean, they botched one piece of software in order to
| retrofit an old plane with catastrophic results. God knows
| what the Wall Street zombie version of Boeing will do with
| a whole new plane, especially in the age of AI
| enshittification.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Also the maga tariff and bizarre interventions age.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| No situation is so bad that it cannot possibly be made
| worse
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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!
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| We are about to crash, did you really turn them on? I still
| have no control of the plane
| thfuran wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| Fly-by-vibe?
| DontBreakAlex wrote:
| VFR = Vibe Flight Rules
| downrightmike wrote:
| 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...
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Ah the hitman business model
| jordanb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Prompt: "Do a barrel roll!"
| rjsw wrote:
| The 367-80 did it fine [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_367-80#Barrel_roll
| vntok wrote:
| The article just mentions "Boeing plane" with no details. Will
| it fly?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| It said "Boeing", duh.
|
| Like the sound it will make.
| stray wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Boeing 737 MAX+ Boeing 737 MAX+ Xtreme ...
| Profit!
| bombcar wrote:
| Boing 737 Pro Max.
|
| Still prefer the 737 Air
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| 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?
| TylerE wrote:
| The C919 isn't even competitive with where Boeing was 20 or 30
| years ago.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| 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?
| maxglute wrote:
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wonder if they will try for a blended wing
| wyldberry wrote:
| 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.
| selectodude wrote:
| 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.
| t1234s wrote:
| Might be easier for them to try and license and produce the A320
| under their own name.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I hope someone is working on a Boeing replacement.
| guardiangod wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Aldipower wrote:
| How about to just "virtually" fly? So Boeing could save on
| building an actual plane, but still getting the money!
| Animats wrote:
| 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/
| mjg59 wrote:
| 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.
| eduction wrote:
| 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
| chris393434 wrote:
| 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).
| z3ratul163071 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can't wait to beta-test it as a pax.
| blueelephanttea wrote:
| 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.
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