Enjoying watching the stock crater. Sorry. You can fool some of the people some of the time, etc.
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Bye, bye, Boeing.
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“Boeing has argued privately to regulators that the likelihood of such a failure is remote.”
That’s what Boeing engineers said about the original 737’s rudder system, which had no back up PCU servo valve to prevent uncommanded rudder deflections and rudder “hard overs”. Planes crashed (USAir 427 and United Airlines 585) or came close to crashing (Eastwind Airlines 517) and other incidents were suspected. It doesn’t matter how “remote” a catastrophic failure is perceived to be. If it is even remotely possible, then you take take steps to prevent it. Doing anything else smacks of greed and negligence.
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Just in time to meet the sudden surge in demand for air travel!
This is about air travel with the highest profit margin. Keep cutting redundancy, pilot training and intrinsic stability until something crashes
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The board should be sued . How in the world did a great company when they were in Seattle become this walking death trap. Killed passengers and then tried to blame the pilots . So Trump lie and pretend it didn’t happen
The board put in business leaders vs people who knew the business of aviation . They should be held to account, they voted in these greedy business leaders destroyed the company people lost their lives and the board never says a word. Ms Haley needs to talk to the people who list family members and account for this latest crisis if she even thinks she can have a political career
Thank you NYT for the story about the lives of the passengers and this latest issue.
After 1 year of tedious work to ensure the safety and air worthiness of this 737 edition, please one more change: Scuttle the “Max” suffix, give it a different suffix (maybe “1000”?)
And also, have Boeing senior management and their families be the first ones to fly on the plane to demonstrate their faith on this plane. Finally, no mega bonuses to any senior management over this plane: Give all this to charities around the world and the US.
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As a professional airline pilot with 20 plus years of flying the 737 I am sick of the stupidity of the public. The wiring bundles are the exact same on the next generation 737s, one of the most popular aircraft everyone has flown on for almost 2 decades.
Stop panicking. Boeing has made some mistakes and needs to get back to focusing on their core products. And throw the bean counters out and let the engineers do their work. But the FAA has made more. They need to get back to inspection and certification process. They need engineers to inspect during the design phase, not after the plane is built.
Air travel has never been more safe. The dangers of getting out of bed are enormous. But not much is safer than being on a western built and operated airplane.
If forced to make a decision, I would rather board a cruise ship than a 737 Max.
Retrofitting an older Boeing plane design because it was "cheaper" than paying engineers to design a decent, new plane, is core of the problem. Asking software to solve what was an engineering mistake at the beginning, is a fool's errand.
No one deserves to fly on those planes.
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Who is ever going to want to fly on this tainted and blood-stained plane? In order to maximize profits, company executives knowingly hid vital information that directly caused the murder - MURDER - of over 350 innocent people in Indonesia and Ethiopia. When they finally fired their CEO, how many millions of dollars did he walk away with? Regulators allowed Boeing to exist in a culture where profits came before safety and this plane will never regain the trust of the flying public. I, for one, would explicitly avoid flying on this plane and will never again believe the words of greedy Boeing executives who have the nerve to express remorse for failures that they could have easily avoided, thus saving so many innocent lives.
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@ManhattanWilliam Agreed. Unfortunately, in our current version of capitalism, profit supersedes human lives.
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Here is a prediction I write on the history of aviation this aircraft will end in the Arizona desert. It is poorly designed and manufactured. It is junk. Air Canada became the latest airline to cancel the purchase yesterday. I do love the new CEO attacking the former one lets see he sat on the board for over the years what was he doing sleeping. He even voted to give the former one a $60 million golden handshake for creating such a great aircraft. This airline besides being shoddy and a killing machine is the perfect example of what we see in the Stock Market crash in the past two weeks. Shareholders and the board were upset that their shares price was not high enough. So, head office was moved to Illinois great tax give away. Thousands of engineers, tech. people given the gate, stock price starts to climb. Always enjoy how you gut the company by letting employees go and the share price climbs. This is what Wall Street we talked about it like it is god is all about gut, slash share price goes up and then every 8-10 years crashes again. It will take years for airlines to get on their feet and people to fly again. Airlines have made lots of money by making us travelers pay for everything except the air we breath although I heard that was next along with pay toilets. Interesting how the FAA is finding all these problems when they did not before. This is what deregulation brought in by Saint Ronnie brings. Remember his other great project the Savings and Loans.
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My family uses air travel frequently. I would not book a ticket on this plane. Period. Write them off, salvage some of the parts.
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Oh my goodness, the only thing more loathed right now than Coronavirus is the Boeing 737 Max B. Throw in Trump and there should have been enough objects of scorn to unload all the hatred from the world onto and it now be gone. Fat chance, somethings are evidently infinite.
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Please, send these to the scrap yard before somebody else gets hurt.
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If it’s Boeing,
I ain’t going. !
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The tone-deafness of Boeing and the author of this piece are appalling. They take it for granted that if they "appease" the FAA all will be forgotten. This is what should happen in an ideal world.
- Airlines should refuse to fly the plane, and those who already own them should be refunded by Boeing and scrap the planes.
- Crews of airlines that do not do this should refuse to fly the planes.
- Passengers of airlines who fail both tests should boycott the airlines.
- If you booked a flight on a different aircraft and find a MAX at the gate, make a loud scene so all your fellow passengers are made aware of what is going on.
At this point it is immaterial whether or not the design is flawed ( I think it is, but no matter) and whether or not it can be made safe with additional training, software and sensor redundancy ( perhaps it can, but no matter). What this is all about is we the people teaching corporate greed a lesson that they are unlikely to forget: the once great and proud Boeing going out of business.
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Might as well say that the wires in the bundles are too close together. As long as multiple bundles aren't squashed together so tight that wires get broken or insulation stripped, "bundles too close together" is nonsense.
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Boeing is lobbying to salvage its disastrous product.
Appreciate NYT keeping the focus on this.
I want to know if any congress member is behind this ulterior development, who is getting paid and how much. for making this happen.
If abandoning 737 Max, means that Boeing has to go bankrupt and our economy takes a further hit, so be it.
No American life is worth the sacrifice to fly this coffin in the sky.
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Either the 737 is nixed, or Boeing must be nixed. It is that simple.
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Wire-bundle short circuit(s) produced the spark that triggered the fuel tank explosion that brought down TWA 800, a Boeing 747, in 1996. Slow learners there at Boeing. I think I'll stick with Airbus.
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The sooner Boing goes out of business, the better.
Despicable, lying and uncaring.
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@Doremus Jessup Boeing does have an interesting history read about the B-29 sometime and other aircraft that it has manufactured. One crash over ten years ago in Denmark I believe and the Feds covered up here the real reason for the crash and did not release the report of the Danish aircraft authority.
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Notice to any airline trying to use this model at any time in the future, no matter how many “improvements” are made: won’t buy, won’t fly.
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My uncle was killed in 1962 when a Boeing 707 plane crashed just after takeoff from Idlewild (Kennedy) airport. The cause was a short circuit in the autopilot servo wiring.
It appears Boeing has learned nothing in the intervening 58 years.
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@Evan , I flew that same flight, American Airlines Flight 1, about six months earlier, so your story strikes home very personally. So sorry for your loss.
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“There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over.” – Jack Bergman
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I will never ever fly on a MAX. Thank god for Boeing. Now given Boeing's propensity to lie and cheat and cajole authorities, as a matter of principle I will choose Airbus whenever I can. And better still, they are European, not American. MAGA has had an affect on many of us neutrals.
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I was a long-time investor in the stock, but could not ignore the long series of missteps made by a string of CEOs - and the "supremacy of the bean counters" corporate culture.
I was fortunate to get out of the stock in the last run up - it has lost almost two-thirds of its value since then. I can only hope that they get back to an accountability mentality, not only to shareholders but to the many people who have lost any confidence in the integrity of Boeing products.
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Just stop. Pull the planes apart and start over with a new design with the wings actually located where they were supposed to be without needing software to correct the imbalance.
No one will fly on these things. And with the disastrous space launch, the entire company needs to regain confidence in engineering, and testing.
I will never ever get on one of these things.
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@Thoughtful1 It’s the new engines that were moved, not the wings, FYI.
I’m not flying on that airplane. Period.
I’d have more confidence in a 1970s Cessna with duct tape on the stabilizer getting me to my destination alive than one of Boeing’s 737 Max.
Scrap the platform, and build an airplane that a pilot can land without the assistance of computer guided avionics.
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Who amongst the flying public is ever going to step foot on a Boeing 737?
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@PeteThe regular 737 is a fine plane with an outstanding safety record. The 737 Max is an engineering nightmare of adding much larger engines that have more thrust than the 737 design could safely stand which made it unstable on takeoffs and landings. So, Boeing kludged together a computer "fix" that did not work correctly and then they failed to honestly inform the pilots of the serious issues and how to counteract them. Boeing is no longer an aircraft manufacturing company. It is a stock investment company that happens to make airplanes. This is what you get when you hire an non-engineer to run an aircraft design and manufacturing plant. It won't get better because they replaced the President involved, who by the way had absolutely no engineering training, with another investment banker instead of an aerospace engineer. The frightening thing is that he new head of Boeing was the head of the board of directors is the former Chairman of the Boeing board of directors who failed to properly supervise the old president who was fired.
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After last nights address to the country it's hard to believe there will be any demand for new airplanes anytime soon.
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Appeasing regulators? How about just "not getting innocent passengers and crew killed"? That the company's focus is on profits and not on human lives is what got us into this mess.
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How many people will not step foot on that plane out of principle?
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@S Out of principle & for my own life.
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Who wrote the headline? "Appease" regulators? As if the FAA were demanding something outlandish and aggressive. Boeing designed a disaster of an aircraft and the regulatory agencies are finally during their job after falling asleep at the yoke.
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@Cassandra So Boeing takes out the manual controls, replaces them with electronics and doesn't consider the risk of having too many electrical cables in one place? Seems like a tiny oversight.
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Boeing needs a whole new culture. Calhoun was a poor choice to lead it out of the quicksand.
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Does anyone think that people are going to fly in this plane? I mean, come on. While searching the plane for redesign after the crashes, they find another design flaw that could cause the plane to crash.
Even I know (without any mechanical background) that if you put two wiring harnesses too close together, a random spark could cause a short in the wiring. As anyone with an old car knows, this type of event has caused serious car trouble.
Who designed that feature? Who OK'd that design? Who supervised the building of the plane? Who were the airplane mechanics that put the plane together?
This is what happen when a company goes from being proud of their work to a manager who is proud of the money he saves the company so that the stockholders will be pleased.
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Calhoun is missing a huge opportunity. The design of the MAX is not going to be fixed by moving cables, adding sensors, or correcting software. The airframe of the MAX is dangerously flawed. The aircraft cannot be flown safely under manual control. MCAS is not an autopilot. It is software meant to correct a design flaw. Selling such an aircraft is criminal.
The downturn in air travel provides an opportunity to Boeing. They could use the time to put normal sized engines on the MAX, turning it into a normal 737. Then they could go back to the drawing board and design a new aircraft optimized around the new, larger engines.
Is Calhoun smart enough and responsible enough to take advantage of this opportunity? I doubt it. It will be business as usual at Boeing.
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@ShenBowen I agree with you that the underlying problem with the aircraft is the decision to add larger engines in a way that requires computer assistance to fly properly. I also agree that Boeing needs to design a new aircraft around the engines it wants to use. Boeing's decision to compromise safety to save money will end up costing it so much more in the long run, than if they had made the correct decision initially.
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Oh, and by the way BA is drawing down its $13.8bn credit line. Financially healthy companies do NOT do this. I suppose if BA had kept some money in the bank rather than repurchasing billions of dollars of its stock, it would not be running into liquidity problems now. Terrible Board of Directors.
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As long as the GOP and Grover Nordquist have a hand in things the public interest will never take precedence, ever. Ronald Reagan started the ball rolling when he said regulations and big government are the problem and that we should leave oversight and safety to the experts, the industry itself. Fast forward 40 years and we see the wholesale gutting of the FAA, FDA and EPA. The FAA can't send inspectors out into the field to checkup on safety, maintenance by the major airlines takes place in third world countries where the cost is far less and away from the prying eyes of inspectors. The FDA is also far away from the point of origin for numerous drug components and generics making them ideal targets for counterfeits and toxic contaminants. And tell me the lack of government inspectors in slaughterhouses has not resulted in far to many to count incidents of contamination.
The mindset that government oversight and regulation is bad was always a lie but Americans prefer cheap over safe, they make that choice every day.
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@AusTex
Everyone knows that Reagan started this downfall with his saying that the government was not going to solve the problem that the government was the problem.
And here we are forty years later with wars that shouldn't have been fought; sick people who can't get medical care because of cost; a president who bullied and lied his way out of impeachment...
What do these things have in common-- Republicans. Can't we have a three party system yet. Two party system has developed into something akin what goes on in a kid's playground. We've got a party that is a bully and a party that gets bullied.
And who suffers? EVERYONE.
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Does Mr. Chokshi work for Boeing? His brief report, "...to Appease Regulators", is constructed almost entirely of language that suggests that poor Boeing is being forced to perform unnecessary upgrades only to appease irrational government bureaucrats.
"...plans to separate wire bundles in the jet to assure regulators about the plane's safety...." How about actually to assure the jet's safety?
"...they could, in rare circumstances, cause a short circuit and lead to a catastrophic failure." How about simply they could cause a short circuit and lead to a catastrophic failure? (We already know that the circumstances of all catastrophic airliner failures are rare.)
"Boeing has argued privately to regulators that the likelihood of such a failure is remote." Of course they have. And so what? Remote still means possible.
"...concluded that global regulators' insistence on it might further delay the Max's return...." Again, victim Boeing bending to the demands of an unreasonable overseer rather than acting on real concerns about safety and danger.
"The wire bundles were not implicated in those accidents...." This one is a useful piece of information, but still seems exculpatory to Boeing.
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@Hugh Huntley
The only thing the public can do is refuse to fly on the 737. I'd like to be there when Boeing delivers all the planes and they're sitting vacant on the tarmac because no one will fly on them.
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@sheila: You mean the 737 Max with is a different plane than the Original 737 that has one of the best ts safety record in the industry. The original 737 is a great plane that I love to fly in. OTOH, no matter what Boeing does I will never set foot in a 737 Max.
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@sheila
I would advise patronizing only airlines that decline to include the 737 Max in their fleet. Because they can swap in a 737 even if your flight was originally scheduled on another model.
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Old news and irresponsibly pitched. The wire bundles were safe and will now be safer. It will be a good day when the Max is flying.
@NYT Reader: The MAX is an aircraft whose airframe is not designed to carry the oversize engines with which it has been fitted. The design flaw requires a software correction system. The aircraft cannot be flown safely under manual control. It is criminal for Boeing to sell such a plane and for the FAA to approve it.
The MCAS system is NOT an autopilot. There's no problem with an autopilot system, because the aircraft can be flown safely under manual control when the autopilot is switched off. MCAS is software meant to correct a design flaw. That's the worst kind of engineering.
There is NO basis for thinking that this aircraft is safe (except wishful thinking).
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@NYT Reader The Max is not aerodynamically stable without a whole lot of computer aid. An airplane should be aerodynamically stable based on its mechanical design, without have it have a computer compensation for its faults.
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Once back in services, I wonder how many people will board. I never liked this aircraft before it became "Max" and I doubt the two crashes and all the problems and delays in repairing it, will encourage anyone to buy a ticket unless they give them away.
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@jerome stoll: I love the original 747. I will not fly on a 737 Max under any condition.
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By the time Boeing finally gets around to pasting even more fixes onto this lemon, the flying public will not be impressed and will shun it. Besides if the coronavirus pandemic continues, there won't be anyplace to fly!
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@Jason Shapiro
No one.
The public demonstrated no aversions to the DC-10.
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It is ironic that Boeing was an early adapter/developer of "Fault Tree Analysis", a system for evaluating failure modes in complex systems. "Boeing began using FTA for civil aircraft design around 1966." (Wikipedia)
From what I've read, it seems decisions were made for other than safety reasons. I once worked for a large engineering and construction company, and saw the chief engineer pushed aside for a less qualified individual whom I believe would not stand up to client company demands in areas like safety. I was glad I retired before that move came home to roost, as it apparently did for Boeing.
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"to satisfy the regulators that the plane is safe" ???? You mean they're doing window dressing? Maybe they should do it "to make the plane safe".
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I will never fly ANY of their planes again. As for the FAA, the NYT excellent reporting has shown how entirely bankrupt that agency is, allowing companies like Boeing and airlines like Southwest to basically certify their own planes.
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Scuttle the Max 737!
I will never fly on one.
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The airlines certainly don't need any new planes so the assembly line in Renton will be down for a long time regardless. They'll be lucky if they can keep any lines open.
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Is this insanity or very clever?
In the midst of a pandemic, Boeing tries to slip in some “fixes” to the Max. Is the new regime at Boeing kidding themselves? Who in their right mind will step foot on one of these airplanes?
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Isn’t the real issue the fundamental design of the aircraft? It seems that the 737 Max 8 is overpowered for the wing design, with engine weight and engine position the underlying problem, as previously warned by aerodynamics experts and explained by Brian Pascus of CBS news on March 13, 2019 as follows:
“The Max 8 is outfitted with bigger, more fuel-efficient engines than earlier 737s, and the weight and positioning of those engines shifted the plane's center of gravity forward, increased the potential for the nose to pitch up after takeoff. To counteract this risk, Boeing developed software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.”
Boeing is focusing on new software and different priority of input from speed/angle of attack sensors, but shouldn’t they scrap the whole design and start over? As I understand it, management chose cost savings over design integrity when they chose not to redesign the fuselage and wings (my lay person’s understanding). Who’s ever going to trust them again if they never admit there was a basic design problem?
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@William Ankenbrandt My understanding is that they were trying to avoid having to classify this plane as a new "type," which would require airlines to train their pilots as if it was a new plane. They were responding to customer demands (looking at you, Southwest) to avoid paying for that training. They convinced the FAA that the Max was just an iteration of the original 737 and therefore more or less the same plane with the same handling characteristics, etc. As you note by referencing the CBS reporting, that definitely is not the case. It really is a brand new aircraft and should be treated as such.
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@Jon They were trying to get market share from Airbus that had designed an entirely new aircraft. Boeing has been using the same body and design on many of its various aircraft types since the 1960's.
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No way I’m ever getting one of these.
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Laughing at the idea of ever setting foot on one of these planes again.
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The lesson of the Max, as with the 2008 Great Recession, the opioid crisis and other events: we need proper government over-site and firewalls to make and keep America great. Without it we are one hot mess.
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@Mike Voelk
And the goal of this administration is to dismantle every one of those firewalls. They've already done it to our National Monuments, the State Department, the CDC...
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“In rare circumstances...”. In the design/certification of, especially, things electrical, it is assumed that rare circumstances happen, and the object is to design so that ‘in the rare event of a failure, no hazards are possible’. Sometimes, it means devices like fuses, fault detection, redundancy. Wire bundles “too close together” so that current from one wire might transmit to another, is not an unknown failure mode. The FAA chose to not ignore this, or ask for anything except separating the bundles, and Boeing fought even that.
Sometimes, we make hazards trying to fix things: soy-based wire insulation in recent cars is a prime example. Environmental progress failing to recognize that rodents eat tasty things. So cars experience failures that once were extremely rare, in some cases making them un-repairable. Airplanes are thought to operate much more conservatively - or at least we used to think so.
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To appease regulators?? How about to manufacture a safe product in which consumers can have confidence? It’s situations like this that result in more regulation and red tape by government to protect the public. Then industry blames federal regulations for increased costs. Do it right the first time.
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@ECass Right. This must be why the country needs more deregulation, and not only in energy and financial markets.
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Boeing argued that it shouldn't have to separate wire bundles that were too far apart? When we flew to Europe last year, we went to great lengths, literally, to only fly with airlines that do NOT have Boeings in their fleets. This latest bit of news reinforces our decision to never fly Boeing. It may cost more and be less convenient, but it's absolutely worth it for a bit of peace of mind while strapped to a seat in a metal tube somewhere up in the stratosphere.
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I will never travel on one of these airplanes, no matter what Boeing does or what the FAA approves.
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Ha. You will when you pick your flight based on cost and only realize once you're in your seat and pickup the safety card that it's on the newly rebranded Boeing 737-2020 or whatever the non-max name will be.
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@Andrew Lee.... Nope...you ask what the equipment is before you pay. We did that multiple times when this problem first arose and before the planes were grounded. Went on other flights when we were told it was a Max.
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@Smotri At that point the 737 Max will have been the most tested and scrutinized commercial aircraft in history, and if regulatory agencies - not only in the US, but worldwide - sign off on it after subjecting it that sort of rigor, than I will be seeking it out when I fly.
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