Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
wsj.comAlt links: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boeing-reportedly-working-737...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-st...
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/boeing-developing-new-si...
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
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.
A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
> A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession.
I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors?
It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-dime it does on everything it ends up paying lawyers, fines and damages. I wonder how they manage to see this as good business. Or maybe they hope that "the next" time they'll score big without any penalties?
One of the most exceptional CEOs I've worked with was a lawyer. I still think the proverb is largely correct, along with the other proverb about the exception proving the rule.
Well, the proverb doesn't necessarily attribute the death of the company to the lawyer.
If a company is dying (aka winding down), you most likely do in fact want a lawyer in charge, whatever their job title may be. For instance why would you put a scientist or engineer in charge of negotiating your acquisition?
It's a great proverb and in particular the "accountants in charge to extract maximum value after maturity, lawyers in charge at the end to wind it down or sell it off" part is accurate of many businesses in general. No company gets to live in the startup and growth stages forever. At a certain point shareholders decide to get everything they can out of their investment and move on.
That's not what "the exception proves the rule" means.
It means, when you see a sign that says an exception, "no parking Wednesdays between 8 and 12", it proves the rule that parking is allowed otherwise.
I have heard that phrase a million times and never understood it until your example. Thank you
GP's use is listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule... under "Proving the validity of a rule of thumb"
It's listed there as a way that people use it and then calls that usage objectionable and a misunderstanding.
I don't dispute that people use it that way but it's objectively a misuse. The phrase's misuse implies that evidence against a statement supports the statement.
> In many uses of the phrase, however, the existence of an exception is taken to more definitively 'prove' a rule to which the exception does not fit.
> In what Fowler describes as the "most objectionable" variation of the phrase,[1] this sort of use comes closest to meaning "there is an exception to every rule", or even that the presence of an exception makes a rule more true; these uses Fowler attributes to misunderstanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description
Try to understand that there is no individual ownership over turns of phrase, and that they tend to shift around over time. Bugs Bunny turned Nimrod from a byword for a competent hunter into an insult.
This is natural and all of your favorite words have or will be subject to it as long as there are humans to communicate with them.
Ooooh that's why nimrod is an insult! Now it makes sense! Thank you!
Btw, let me add my personal pet peeve: "egregiously" somehow went from meaning "very good" to mean "very bad" in American English.
In my native language "egregiamente" still has the original meaning so I was confused for a long time.
Dictionaries - at least the ones I checked - mark the "very good" meaning of "egregious" as archaic. I'm only aware of the "very bad" meaning (in UK English), and was quite surprised, when studying maths, to learn of Gauss's "Theorema Egregium", and that the word could have positive connations.
I'm still momentarily paused when kids today say 'shit' to mean 'good' etc. Yeah some words shift in meaning and other words swap in meaning.
Shit (meaning “how true”), shit is veritably the aladeen of words. It can basically mean anything depending on usage, context, attitude, or tone of voice.
> The phrase's misuse implies that evidence against a statement supports the statement.
The original meaning of 'prove' was more like 'test'. The original sense was therefore opposite to this.
A phrase does not mean anything by itself. People mean something when they use it. You could argue that expressions carry some meaning, by virtue of shared use. But your definition does not align with the meaning most people make of this specific expression as you can witness above.
A lot of people say a lot of stupid things, it does not make them less stupid and incorrect. Unless a million flies can't be wrong!
But the intended insight isn't stupid, and "the exception proves the rule" is a natural, easily-inferred contraction of "the rarity of finding an exception proves the general validity of the rule".
The way most people use it is wrong though and not in the normal "language evolves" way.
The exception of a lawyer being a good CEO does not, in any way, prove that lawyers are not good CEOs .
The phrase "most people mean the wrong thing by this phrase" makes no sense. A phrase means what most people mean by saying it, or understand by hearing it. So, "the exception that proves the rule" is, as its main modern meaning, a joking way of admitting that a rule (especially one that the speaker had argued for) is not actually a universal rule, while maintaining that it generally holds true.
The examples of legal signs and so on are a more specific, technical, meaning that is only used in certain contexts, such as actual legal proceedings or at least informal discussions about laws or contract terms.
When /u/flkiwi above said this phrase, they obviously meant it in the joking sense I gave, and which they had actually explained above. They agree that, in general, lawyers make bad CEOs, but they also personally know of exceptions. This is not "wrong usage", as proven by the fact that everyone who read the comment understood exactly what they meant.
This whole thing reminds me of the people who complain about the use of literally as an amplifier instead of for its primary meaning as "wrong", with seemingly no understanding of how flourishes and rhetoric work (nor even of the history of words like "very", which used to be quite similar to "literally" a long time ago).
Words are just noises. Think of them as pointers. They point to a concept in the brain. What concept that may be differs from person to person. But as long as the words point to something, they aren't used wrongly.
The idea that there was some point in history were the pointer target was officially designated to be x is just false. That point in time never existed.
My point isn't that the use of the phrase is wrong, the point is that the colloquial understanding of the phrase is a bad concept.
[All] lawyers are bad CEOs is a statement that was made. Evidence to the contrary was presented. "The exception proves the rule" was used to dismiss that evidence.
It's used in a similar way as "God works in mysterious ways".
People misuse expressions. A common one is the customer is always right. The actual wording is the customer is always right in matters of taste but people cut off the ending which changes it from a sensible and useful proverb to a bunch of nonsense. Of course the customer isn't always right. They're always right in terms of what they want to buy, not in all other terms.
Similarly an exception like a lawyer being a good ceo does not prove a rule like lawyers are bad CEOs. It's nonsense. People who don't understand the proverb took it and misused it and then others took after them and here we are, I've been wondering about that proverb my entire life and I never understood how it makes any sense. Now I finally do, and I'm glad the other commenter clarified it
On top of what j5r5myk mentioned, there is a fairly good record of the origin on “the customer is always right,” (described on Wikipedia) because it was something like a moderately well known person’s catchphrase, in an era when newspapers and marketing existed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right
There’s some quibbling to be had about the meaning, but it puts it closer to “assume good faith” or something like that, rather than reducing it to just preferences.
> The earliest known printed mention of the phrase is a September 1905 article in the Boston Globe about Field, which describes him as "broadly speaking" adhering to the theory that "the customer is always right".
> However, John William Tebbel was of the opinion that Field never himself actually said such a thing, because he was "no master of idiom". Tebbel rather believed it probable that what Field would have actually said was "Assume the customer is right until it is plain beyond all question that he is not."
There is a common phenomenon where people claim proverbial quotes were originally longer. One I often hear is “Jack of all trades master of none” originally including the follow up “often better than a master of none.”
If you research this, as well as the customer as always right as you claim, you will find no evidence of their longer ‘original’ forms [1].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/articles/468815/customer-is-always-ri...
Your use of the phrase makes no sense. It's the "no parking" that proofs the rule and not the exception.
that's actually the correct use of the phrase "the exception proves the rule"
the rule is that the parking is allowed; the exception is that it's not allowed on Wednesdays; they didn't bother spelling out "parking is allowed at all other times except"
"No parking on Wednesday between 9-12pm"
Imagine you got a parking ticket on Tuesday. What would your defense in court be?
God Internet pendants are exhausting. I KNOW, but it's a harmless rhetorical device. This begs the question of why you care. There you go, that's a good one to get fired up about.
> I KNOW, but it's a harmless rhetorical device.
I don't really care but but when I found out the actual meaning of the phrase (the usage of which never really made sense to me), it made a lot more sense to me. I thought it was interesting.
I'd also argue that "it's harmless" is not always accurate. It's usage dismisses counter-evidence to a statement. Depending on the case, it may or may not be harmless.
There’s no need to be so literal. We’re discussing here, not formulating mathematical statements.
Read for what was intended by the author and you’ll learn more.
> Lawyers are bad CEOs
> That's weird because this one was good
> Ah an exception to the rule. That proves it, lawyers are bad CEOs!
Is that not what was intended by the author?
Attributed to Cicero, who was basically a lawyer.
That's a logical fallacy.
But parking signs are not proofs.
That doesn't absolve you from being at least logically correct.
I think denying the antecedent (that’s what this is, right?) is a well known fallacy precisely because it is often the intended implication in typical speech.
Yes, but in common usage it has come to also mean "the [rarity of finding an] exception proves the [general validity of] the rule", and it was clear from context which one the parent meant.
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.
Or we don't care because it's a rule of thumb not a law of physics.
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.
Fun fact the 707 had the first implementation of “MCAS” because the plane had a tendency to pitch up in a certain flaps configuration. They added a stick nudger which applied light pressure in said config. Not a stick pusher, as it did not alert the pilots, it simply applied an extra input independent of the pilots. However this was made aware to all pilots of the plane and likely contributed to its certification.
Also the 707 tail was extended by 40ft to give it better minimum ground speed control, this was retroactively applied to already built planes. Very interesting to see how this was applied in the past with a lawyer at the helm vs the current ceo during the launch of the 737Max
I think there might be some confusion here. The vertical stabiliser (not the tail) was extended by 40 inches [0] to combat concerns about poor yaw control.
Although the Wikipedia article cites the UK ARB as the influence, it was also in response to the 1959 crash [1] of a 707 being used for training, in which Dutch roll was induced and later became so violent it ripped 3 engines off the wings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_cra...
Assume 40 inches rather than 40ft
Adding 12 meters to an aircraft is quite a big change.
Mistake on my part they extended the tail to 40ft from 32ft
Hmm, you now highlighted an interesting thing - every company (I've seen) being run to the ground by MBAs and Lawyers was done so because they outright refused to trust their employees. The usual playbook is severance of any transparency and communication and implementation of more and more paperwork and oversight over their employees with no nuance. In other words - complete lack of trust into employed specialists being able to do their work.
yep, that's the most important thing about his operation of Boeing.
Both the 707 and 747 were "bet the company" projects, in particular the 747 pushed Boeing to the brink of bankruptcy. However both were major successes because they took a gamble on the future of the aviation industry.
In these days of "fiduciary responsibility" it's difficult to imagine any public company taking that kind of risk. Risk is what should make returns.
He was talking about stereotypes ...
And yes professions have stereotypical personalities. Like the used car salesman.
I’d wager he wasn’t just a lawyer.
Exactly, mostly likely he would have made a great engineer if that were his line of expertise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maemo was an actual GNU/Linux, not just kernel with custom userland. Logging into a cluster from my N900 and having plots just appear on screen thanks to X network transparency is still one of the most futuristic things I have ever seen a computer do.
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
Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them.
Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
Symbian did have some touch models in the end but they were very poor because they still used resistive touch and the UI was not well laid out for it.
X does not support touch natively. What it does support is mouse emulation from the touch input. This also greatly limits how good you can make it.
Symbian didn't use X in any way. That was Maemo, used on the 770. But there were also some Symbian-based touch devices like the 5800 XpressMusic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5800_XpressMusic
But Symbian didn't have any roots in Linux. It came from the Psion organiser line originally (and specifically the 5/7 series, not the earlier 3's).
If the 770 was anything like the N900 then the screen was resistive and the stylus was passive. So you could use your fingers but in my experience, for any finer task, you needed the stylus.
Damn, I really miss the N900. I was seriously using it as recently as about 4-5 years ago.
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.
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.
I loved my N9, truly one of the best experiences i've had with a mobile phone. I've watched Sailfish from a distance but their very limited choice of phones have always been off-putting.
It is just an urband legend that Apple caused Nokia to fail. Apple didn't even compete in the price range where Nokia sold most of their smartphones.
When you look at where most Nokia customers defected to, it is Samsung and Android.
I feel like Nokia would still be a notable smartphone company albeit not on the scale of apple (as the single alternative to the android ecosystem) if not for Microsoft and it's plant delivering the actual blow.
Dennis Muilenberg has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was Boeing’s CEO during and after the MAX disaster. He cannot be blamed for the first crash, but he absolutely bears a direct responsibility for every person who died in the second crash, as by that point he knew that he had delivered a product that had not been correctly and fully certified by the regulatory authority.
An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded.
I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
The mistake was committed willfully well before the first crash. Their emails during the development and testing of the Max 8 show some strongly worded exchanges clearly indicating their full awareness of the troubles with the MCAS system. There was one simulated flight by a test pilot where the MCAS had activated and was deemed a catastrophic failure. In another instance, the chief test pilot said, "I basically lied to the regulators, unknowingly" - a mistake that he chose not to rectify. It was abundantly clear at that point that business as usual was going to cost lives. The entire top management knew this and yet, not one of them decided to step in.
The first crash was already too late for them. A team that behaved so callously earlier wasn't going to stop at that point without an external intervention. They were in fact attempting to scapegoat the pilots even after the second crash. Therefore, putting the blame on one CEO at the time of the first crash is illogical. The blame must fall on the team that established such an unbelievably flawed safety culture in the first place. Who was that? And why?
I'm not insisting that accountants and lawyers are unfit for top management. There are corporate portfolios that they're the best fit for - like accounting and law firms. Then there are the exceptions who do a sensible job even outside their portfolio. But I have seen both engineering heavy and accounting heavy managements. As expected, their priorities and operational philosophies are drastically different. But their influence doesn't end there. They also define the wider company culture - A culture that not even a CEO can change without significant personal effort against institutional inertia.
So, accountants or lawyers may be sufficient to lead IT companies. But if they choose to lead an industry where so many lives are at stake, they better hold back their profit-seeking instincts and understand the safety culture and the consequences of their decisions damn well.
In most cases,the successor to a founder CEO is a finance person - because their mandate is to massage the stock on the behalf of the appointing board.
declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions.
And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.
[dead]
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
Can you see a future for humanity where the moon isn’t colonised?
Yes? Why do we need to colonize the moon with squishy meatbags with billions of years of evolutionary optimization for life on Earth?
All these dreams of star-trek like interstellar travel (or even interplanetary travel beyond taking a selfie and going home) require major advances in the physics tech tree. Might come, might not.
A lot of manufacturing processes are easier without an atmosphere. Also low gravity makes it easy to launch completed product out to space for future space missions
Maybe, but the shipping costs are killer and physics puts a hard minimum on the price.
We have plenty of earthbound motivation to solve the "energy too cheap to meter" problem. We're nowhere near that. Adding one more big energy consumer (moving cargo to/from orbit) does not make a material difference.
What's your hard minimum on price?
Starship is supposed (Musk hype warning!) to be 1/10th to 1/100th the cost.
We haven't done skyhooks or launch loops or launch cannons, which are large upfront projects but once built are semi-permanent economic gamechangers.
> A lot of manufacturing processes are easier without an atmosphere. Also low gravity makes it easy to launch completed product out to space for future space missions
I always felt like that was a backwards justification for going to space (we want to go to space, how do we sell it), rather than a real need to that would push people to go to space.
Which manufacturing processes are easier w/o an atmosphere? We've placed objects in planetary orbits for 75 years now. If there was an obvious economic benefit to a manufacturing process outside of 1G, then we'd have had a business actively exploiting that opportunity for profit.
ZBLAN, a high quality optic fibre, can be made in space with fewer defects. A process that is in the process of being exploited.
Though the rather limited space on the ISS and its imminent decommissioning complicate that a bit. I think the current plan is to launch satellites for commercial production
Would you not like to see major advances in the physics tech tree? The way you get those advancements, is to have a goal. And funding.
A moon colonization program provides both.
To use video games as an analogy: You can't invest all your resources racing up one tech tree; you have to build the whole economic engine to achieve those later levels.
"Moon base that produces positive economic benefit" is about 10 steps up a very expensive tech tree and we don't even know what the rungs are.
I also don't think this is very imaginative. If you want to colonize the moon, why send a man in a can? How about genetically engineering a human-ish that's better adapted to that kind of environment? That's the kind of technology advancement that makes manned interplanetary missions reachable.
> You can't invest all your resources racing up one tech tree; you have to build the whole economic engine to achieve those later levels.
The exact opposite of that has been the meta in most 4X games I've played.
You always rush specific techs because you understand the ROI for the specific empire you're going for. That involves specialization.
Apollo allowed America to demonstrate its ability to land a rocket with pinpoint accuracy on the Moon, implying it would be easier to land an ICBM on the Soviets.
The USSR got a large PR boost through launching Sputnik and then a person. It convinced many people communism was a superior ideology for advancing science and technology. Turning it into a "Space Race" allowed the USA to reframe the discussion for the world in a way that let America catch up.
> Why do we need to colonize the moon with squishy meatbags with billions of years of evolutionary optimization for life on Earth?
Given current American politics, I'm honestly divided on whether we should colonise the Moon. That someone will do it seems pretty obvious.
What's the future for humanity if the moon is colonized? What does the moon provide us that the Earth does not?
One interesting (admittedly small in scope, but huge in impact) thought experiment is the following- let's say that the doomsayers are correct. The Earth has been destroyed and inhabitable, leaving just our extra-planetary outposts. How do we supply the necessary high-tech manufacturing capability to survive?
Have we spun up all of the supply chain to reproduce the state-of-the-art technology required just required to sustain life on that celestial body? As an example, even with all our experience on Earth, we have exactly one physical location on our entire planet that can crank out the most advanced chips used in our modern technology we take for granted. That build-out took massive investment of deca-billions of dollars plus a massive, deep supply chain to build, even with all the advantages we have here on Earth (things like, oh, breathable air, access to vast carbon energy storage, access to millions of humans and existing factories... just as a start...)
Are we expected to replicate all of that on our next celestial body? If not, how do we expect to replace failing parts and continue progress?
What about even more basic concerns about things like... literal population growth? We understand ... a little... about how very healthy adult human bodies react to prolonged periods in zero-g (hint: not well, where "prolonged" == 437 contiguous days [0]). What about pregnant women? Babies? Spaceflight crews are required to exercise two hours every day to counteract muscle and bone atrophy [1]. How is that expected of say... an infant?
Don't get me wrong, I find spacefaring fascinating. I idolize the Apollo era. But we haven't even scratched the surface of how we can sustain any sort of population off this planet. We need to find ways to get along here, because ... this is all we've got, folks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_longest_spacefligh... [1] https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/07/16/muscle-an...
Well, we'll never achieve anything if we don't try. But I think as terra starts to become inhospitable the required urgency will arrive. Hopefully after I'm gone, though.
Even a relatively inhospitable earth is much, much more livable than the celestial bodies we can reach in reasonable time. Even living 100% underground would be easier than trying to establish bases on the moon or Mars, with a hope that we could find a way to clean up the mess that we created.
If we find some faster-than-light travel mechanism and a star group that includes a planet like our own, then perhaps there's a way out of here.
On the other hand, why not try to achieve something like ... getting along better here? We could find ways to create more clean energy here on Earth, clean up existing messes, better harness the 3/4 of the globe covered by water, etc.
Plus we have a lot of societal issues to try to address. How would living on another planet solve distinctly human problems like war, conflict, need to pollute the natural environment of a new planet, etc? Why not look at how we can improve our own self-governance? After all, if we do escape this rock, it's not like we're magically going to become more altruistic, compassionate, etc. We'll still suffer from the same problems we do here, just with even more stressors like "my body boils over if I dare step outside unprotected". Sounds super depressing to me.
The Azores wasn't exactly instrumental in the colonization of north america.
A moon base gets us a platform to test what long term low gravity does to a human body, and an environment to test ISRU for various materials like water, oxygen, iron, titanium, etc...
Being able to prove that people can live in an environment like the moon long term and develop materials that can make their stay there sustainable by reducing consumables and developing replacement parts from lunar material is a great stepping stone.
Being able to demonstrate the doubling of usable pressurized space by building and burying modules that can be stocked with equipment brought from Earth would be a remarkable accomplishment.
Stepping stone to… what exactly?
We couldn’t even handle a closed source experiment on earth (see biosphere 2), why would one on another celestial body fare any better?
> We couldn’t even handle a closed source experiment on earth (see biosphere 2), why would one on another celestial body fare any better?
Because (1) the project would be designed seriously and (2) you don't need a completely closed loop. Just one that's mostly closed.
I'd argue that you need a loop that's capable of operating without Earth support for a significant length of time - vastly beyond what they managed with Biosphere 2 - for margin of safety reasons. Possibly also with a very different, scaled down design - maybe not growing all their own food, for example - because 13,000 square meters is maybe a bit much for a first off-planet base. And the best place to start working out how to do that is right here on Earth. Because it's an immediate cost reduction of at least one and probably several orders of magnitude, and because you can much more easily iterate on the design while you're still working out the kinks.
And then, once you've got it working well here on Earth, then you have a go at doing it on the moon.
This idea that the best place to get started on working out how to do these sorts of things is on the moon makes about as much sense as suggesting that the Space Shuttle program should have had astronauts rushing to work out the kinks of EVA missions in space instead of doing everything they could to test and practice procedures in swimming pools in an effort to learn as much as possible before you blow half a billion dollars on trying it out in orbit.
> need a loop that's capable of operating without Earth support for a significant length of time
Agree. A moon base lets us test this out with real-world constraints as opposed to simulants.
We don’t know how to build ecological closed loops. But every failure mode of Biosphere 2’s was almost trivially solvable with expendable components. (The CO2 cascade being the simplest among them.)
> idea that the best place to get started on working out how to do these sorts of things is on the moon
It’s not. It’s the best next step. We’re doing a lot of pre-colonisation lab work already. And we will need to do more before establishing a moon base. The moon base is the interim goal—you don’t put astronauts in swimming pools without a plan for a Shuttle. And Biosphere 2 is a terrible swimming pool for anything we’d do on the Moon or Mars.
Who will design and execute this “seriously”? Given the current state of our government (shutting down as I type), I don’t foresee any “serious” projects from the feds any time soon. Even when there are serious people - everything will get politicized. So nasa is out.
Ok so maybe a multibillionaire. Perhaps Elon musk? Yikes. Or Bezos? Maybe.
The EU is kinda busy increasing their defense spend, preparing to engage in Ukraine so I don’t see them super excited to do this.
China or India perhaps?
Also, why shouldn’t it be completely closed loop? If you’re designing to address the myriad of scenarios that can unfold in space, I’d say you’d want that experience under your belt. Its already easy mode doing this exercise on earth you might as well give yourself a little challenge to capture lessons learned.
> Who will design and execute this “seriously”?
NASA.
> why shouldn’t it be completely closed loop?
Because it doesn’t need to be. Engineering an ecological carbon cycle is hard. Putting in long-lived CO2 scrubbers is not.
Less Money went into biosphere 2. You could probably have automated everything and lowered the workload and bioload significantly.
OK great, how much do you think is necessary to spend? In the 1990s the billionaire Ed Bass spent $150 million to operate Biosphere 2 with an expected mission time of two years. Even after spending $150 million in 1993 dollars, the experiment shut down after only 6 months. [0]
So let's say we spend a little more money ($150 million would be approx $335 million today, so maybe $0.5 - 1 billion). That's a lot of money but still a LOT less than establishing a moon base. And by doing it on Earth we can solve for more closed-loop system problems here without also coping at the exact same time with an environment actively trying to kill the participants and a multi-month lead time for any resupplies/"oops"es.
Then we can take those lessons learned and apply them to the much harsher environment of the moon. In other words, it's a lot cheaper and faster to learn some lessons here on Earth first before having to tackle all that plus things like keeping yourself alive.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5442529/biosphere-2-ear...
It's a stepping stone to building very large spacecraft/space stations that have rotating habitat rings that would be used to colonize the solar system.
These kinds of things can be put into cycler orbits around the Moon or Mars[0] which would allow relatively comfortable and cost effective journeys to these locations. As the scale of these kinds of craft expand they could eventually become destinations themselves akin to massive cruise ships in the sky where some people live out their entire lives.
Biosphere 2 was obviously a flawed experiment but it seems that Mir, the ISS, and Tiangong have shown that long term habitation in micro-G is possible, it seems like the extension of that is to try long term habitation of a body with gravity and material to experiment with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler
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).
Gateway is also a trial run for conducting operations at a Mars/Phobos/Diemos station.
But then you've got to ask why would we want an orbital Mars/Phobos/Deimos station?
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.
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.
The Lunar Gateway exists so that SLS and Orion have a way to get to the Moon, because with it SLS can’t get into LLO and return to Earth, so they need another craft to finish the trip and a place to meet up with that craft. A reasonable question might be why not make Starship HLS act as its own gateway but then you start getting into why is SLS and Orion even needed.
Even if WW3 were to happen, I'm not sure it could let Earth be in a worse state than Mars for supporting human life.
It won't be. Even an extinction level asteroid or comet impact will be easier to handle on a planet with breathable atmosphere, water, and other resources. Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that. Still, Mars would require much more self-sufficiency than we've ever attempted. It's worth the effort to expand human exploration.
> Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that
I hear this somewhat often, and I find it a bit disingenuous since it's not like we're trying that hard to colonize Antarctica, we're mostly preserving it as well as we can, no? And the existing Antarctic bases aren't total hellholes or anything, AFAIK the larger ones are relatively normal spaces with power and normal food and heated water.
I do agree with the overall point though for sure.
The same considerations apply to Mars.
Hence the "Reds" vs. "Greens" in the KSR Mars trilogy.
I always found it amusing that KSR's Greens were the side that would have in effect have destroyed the natural environment of Mars (by terraforming it), unlike our Greens who in general want to preserve the environment.
It's kinda poetic that, on Earth, Greens are sometimes accused of being Reds in disguise ;)
I think that's the point? :-)
The Reds want to preserve the environment and the Greens want to completely change it...
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.
That is a terrible book that starts with the premise that it isn’t possible or desirable. d then arranges its arguments to come to that conclusion. But it turns out that making solar cells on the mean is feasible.
Yes, the book has a clear point of view. That said, it's not subtle at all, and they're very clear about their bias. I'd rather a clearly defined bias than one that is hidden from view or some half-hearted attempt at "bothsiding" the argument.
I felt they had some very good points, though, and I don't see any progress on the major blockers to any sort of large scale extra-planetary colonization. I hadn't considered the issues with procreation discussed in the book, for example--that's kind of a huge issue if we want to have any sort of self-sustaining population outside of this earth!
If any faction is on Mars during WW3, there’s a nuke landing there 6 months after the show is over here.
Only if WW3 happens during a transfer window.
True, the flight duration will vary depending on conditions. :)
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.
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.
That starts from the false premise that you have to go from zero to self-sufficient colony all in one go. The reason cheap launch is foundational is because your initial bases will need lots of resupply and will gradually migrate to needing less over time.
> 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
> 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.
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.
Sort of timely because I was on an Alaska Max 9 yesterday I couldn't believe how narrow the aisle was. I actually looked up whether a Max 9 fuselage was narrower than a traditional 737, it was that bad. Now, it's possible this plane had the wider seat option (possible ex-Hawaiian, if they used a different config?), but even so, I've been on a lot of planes, and this is the first where I felt like I had to walk down the aisle sideways.
I've only flown on Airbus planes and one of them had a middle isle that I must have been less than 18 inches wide. I felt claustrophobic.
... with wider seats and skinny aisles bringing more weight (-> more fuel consumption), and slower boarding/deboarding times (-> more time on the ground), both of which are cost drivers.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The 747 was at its most efficient when flying long haul routes, like overseas. The 747 was immensely profitable for Boeing for several decades. Every sale was a giant chunk of cash dumped on the company. But none of that would have happened if the 747 wasn't also immensely profitable for the airlines.
True but small planes are profitable too even for long flights. They have to compete against the more profitable large ones but they do that by emptying the large ones. I want to get to a destination and if a small plane isn't much more money it is cheaper to not transfer at a hub and pay for the 2nd plane to where I want to be. More smaller planes can also fit my schedule which can save money.
there is a reason nobody flies the 747 anymore. It isn't profitable enough agaisnt the 777 and small planes which are cheaper to run.
> there is a reason nobody flies the 747 anymore
The reason is the aerodynamics of it are 60 years old making it no longer competitive with modern aerodynamics.
Compare your car with a 1965 Chevy Impala, for example.
Mostly it's about engine tech. A 777/787 or whatever can fit almost as many passengers as a 747, but has only two engines, burning less fuel and requiring less maintenance.
Back when 747 was designed engine tech wasn't there yet to build really big two engine airplanes. There was also the issue of ETOPS limits. The regulations on how far away from nearest airport you can fly with two-engine aircraft were stricter than today, so for many routes flying over oceans you needed more than two engines.
There's also the issue of cargo space. The 777-300 actually has a larger hold, about 11% more. Cargo is pretty lucrative so even passenger airlines like being able to devote some of their hold space to it.
Modern wings made a huge difference. Take a close look at a modern wing vs a 747 wing.
Modern wings could be retrofitted to the 747. Maybe not completely, but the more important features. However there are a lot of other parts of the 747 that don't make sense, and so not enough buyers (if any!) would exist if they did.
That only works if you make the airplane enough bigger so that you can fit more seats and thus paying passengers. The parent comment was arguing to make the plane only a little bigger so that each passenger has more space, but not enough so that extra seats can be fitted.
It was an old airplane too and not as optimized as newer airplanes in terms of engines, aerodynamic design, weight and so forth.
The A380 was a step up in size and had additional problems such as there not being that many airports which had upgraded their gates and other facilities to support an airplane that big.
As aviation technology improved, the 747 could not improve its aerodynamics and so became relatively costlier to fly. It's longevity, however, was due to it's cost effectiveness for several decades.
> Passengers rarely know what type they'll be flying on when they book, and prioritize it over price even less.
Virtually every booking page gives you that information during booking, and I (and several of my friends) actively avoid any flight that has a MAX operating it, to the point that we'd rather fly longer and/or more expensive alternative routes operated with other models.
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.
I would buy an upgrade if it was twice the price. In reality it's more like 10x.
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.
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
It might be better to say that they form a system which is economically optimized as a whole. It is genius, for instance, that frequent fliers get upgrades from coach to first class when they're available because it means if a first class flier changes their plans or wants to fly on short notice an economy flier just says in coach and won't feel mad about it -- the first class seats are 100% occupied in terms of providing somebody a somewhat premium experience but are 50% occupied with full revenue customers and that 50% occupation is part of the completely premium experience because it means it is always available.
Yes, I was imprecise in what I wrote. There's a lot of cross-subsidization in various forms going on that makes all-business class at business-class prices tough for airlines even on routes like NYC to London--which have existed but not sure they do at the moment.
I heard only place where business + premium economy works is ultra long routes. Where people are willing to pay the premium of single leg over multi leg. So it seems people might be willing to pay for time, but not for comfort.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
In airline parlance, this is called "buyer furnished equipment". Boeing sells the airframe (without the engines, even if there's only one choice) and the seats, lavatories, etc. are all provided by the customer. The certifying authority (e.g. FAA/JAA) will have a maximum passenger count for the type. I'm reasonably certain that the BFE has to be certified as well, as you couldn't evacuate the type limit if the aisle wasn't in the center or you mixed 3-2 and 2-3.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
How would you explain discount airlines that don't have business class at all?
You also contradict yourself saying they only profit from business class but at the same time they can't profit from business class because there is no enough demand for it.
Your statement doesn't make sense and what the poster above you said is right - they need both and that's the reason there are both.
> > 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
Maybe you want a small team of big people.
> 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)
It might be because of how airlines price tickets.
For a 10 hour flight that costs $500 (economy) it will cost +$80 1-way to pick a seat. Not a special seat, just a seat in general. An exit row seat costs +$160 1-way.
So why are business class seats filled if there's plenty of economy space left? Surely all those business men spending 5000$+ for an overseas ticket are voting with their vallets for the 500$ one?
Or maybe the reality isn't as simple as you make it seem?
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.
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.
+1 on the Embraer. It's much more comfortable than a 737 or A320 while being much smaller. The advantage of doing a greenfield design completely to modern capabilities
> design it without sardines in mind
Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is determined by the airline customer.
They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)
Can’t wait to fly in the 737-AI.
All the executives first, please.
Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin with!
>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.
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.
> 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.
The 737, like all large commercial aircraft, also requires an artificial control feel force feedback system in order to meet design requirements. It has always had one going back to 1967.
A question that has never been adequately answered: if MCAS was conceived of in order to meet the 14 CFR Part 25.143 requirements for a positive control force feedback gradient, why did Boeing not modify the existing Elevator Differential Feel Computer (a mechanical/hydraulic computer with no electronic components) instead of inventing a half-assed, undocumented, slow moving, open-loop fly-by-wire contraption using the trim tab actuator?
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.
> 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.
I dunno, Johnny Ive had the MacBook on a trajectory to disaster trying to make it thinner for the sake of being thin. Under Cook’s leadership they actually listened to users and redesigned it to be something people actually wanted.
Beyond that, I’m not sure what you think is going to be the visionary product. AR/VR still feels like 3D tv to me - a solution looking for a problem. The best use case I’ve seen was HoloLens and the military, but even that has had limited scope.
> AR/VR still feels like 3D tv to me - a solution looking for a problem.
Have you tried the Vision Pro? It was a life-changing experience for me. I actually forgot that I was looking at a screen and thought that I was looking through a transparent visor. It was that good.
If they could get the weight down I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem it solves (for me, or at least would solve if it didn't weigh so damned much) is having effectively a giant monitor that I can use on a plane.
>If they could get the weight down I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem it solves (for me, or at least would solve if it didn't weigh so damned much) is having effectively a giant monitor that I can use on a plane.
If they could get the weight down, the size down, the cost down, it might have a market. But with the R&D of a trillion dollar company they've been unable to do any of those things.
Mass adoption would require the thing to be the price of a gaming console which is almost a 90% price reduction from where it sits today, while making it smaller and lighter.
Good luck to Apple.
What people fail to realize is that 2D works. It's the optimal configuration of information for the human brain. Adding a third dimension, although possible and supported natively by human brain hardware, adds little to no value to almost everything people do with computers.
Where does it add value? Entertainment, but not nearly as much as 2D entertainment. It also takes a lot more processing power to decode the 3D experience. It's why people get fatigued after spending any reasonable amount of time in VR. Some of that is due to the synthetic nature of the experience, but even a theoretical perfect device would require more energy consumption for the brain to decode than an equivalent 2D interface. The experience in 3D might be more intuitive because it borrows from already learned spatial relationships and behaviors from the real world, but long term it's going to take more energy to accomplish the same task in a 3D environment than a 2D one.
For the vast majority of people, what we have now is optimal. It's like trying to train a model when its already converged.
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.
> apple watch and airpods
Fair point.
I feel like moving in the direction of their own silicon and getting M1 out and to massive success was under Tim Cook's watch. You might not consider this 'designing a new product' but I do.
No, that's a fair point. It's not really a product, but given what a huge win it was in terms of power/performance I'd say it qualifies.
PASemi was acquired in 2008.
Yeah.
I kind of feel like people gloss over the seismic shift in computing power Apple silicon designs have ushered in. It seems like a lot of people on HN think of building these chips as almost an afterthought if they think of building them at all. Which is ludicrous.
It's the chips that make the new innovative products possible, not vice versa. You literally can't innovate, until you have the compute working at the power profile that you need. Only then can you build anything groundbreaking.
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
> 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
I believe I read somewhere that announcing new emoji drives noticeably more OS upgrades compared to more boring security and stability update release notes.
Apple is rumored to have a strategic emoji reserve. The more they want people to install an update, the more emojis from the reserve they release as part of it. Because this is basically the only thing that drives OS updates among average people.
New emojis are actually created by the Unicode consortium so they they are interoperable across ecosystems.
They assign the code points, yes, but Apple makes the art assets in their fonts so that they can actually be rendered.
Text handling and Unicode support is part of any modern user-facing OS. New emoji is a highly visible user-facing upgrade.
What about Airpods?
Also, I expect Vision to eventually be a massive success.
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.
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.
Yup, that version is the good one. My wife had the Pro 2s and was super happy with them until they died after two years. I got her a pair of AirPods 4 with ANC and we had to return them because they were subpar compared to the AirPods Pro 2. The price difference between 4 ANC and the Pro 3s is like $60 and you get an actual useful product if you're willing to spend that amount.
I’m considering Pro 3 for the hearing aid + live translation features, but not in a big rush… I wish they would bring these to Pro 2, because it really seems like an artificial restriction…
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.
I don't own AirPods but it is a huge commercial success.
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...
i’ve owned airpods for 8 years and lost them once. by “lost” i mean i forgot them when frantically checking out of a hotel to catch a flight.
Not everyone is careless with their things. On the aspect of battery replacement, i agree it’s a shame.
You have to have the right ear form for ordinary AirPods. Comes with the design, sadly.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course the AVP is much nicer than the Quest 2. For more than 10 times the price it had better be.
It doesn't really describe the companies' different abilities but the design goals. The quest 2 was clearly 'make it as cheap as possible so lots of people can buy it' and the AVP's was 'make it as good as it can be, price is not a factor'
Still though, both products eventually get stuck at the same point: a killer usecase. Neither has a compelling reason to actually want to put it on. There's very few things that are better in VR and the ones that are are really niche. I personally love VR gaming and stimulations. I love VR for it and I use it a ton. But those are pretty niche.
But socialising in VR is not really a great user experience despite most of meta's focus going there. And Apple? They don't really have any usecase that shines. Maybe watching movies but even that works better on an actual TV as you can share the experience with others.
My take on VR/AR socialization is that it can work, but only if it's as low-friction as picking up a phone and doing a video call is today, which isn't achievable so long as we're still stuck on headsets as the primary form factor.
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.
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.
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.
There are fixes for this: When I was at the Boeing ASL (pre MDD merger), there were plans to have a group that regularly created a "paper airplane" every two years based on market conditions and product line gaps. If the economy could support a launch, great, you've got a head start. If the economy is down, well, at least you've got the institutional capability to design airplanes.
It wasn't a particularly huge cost, and before Harry Stonechisler took over there was money for that type of work within a profitable BCAG.
I don't disagree with your larger point, but specifically in the scenario you outlined, the highly skilled, highly capable people that actually can produce product Z will not be satisfied with that kind of arrangement. All you will have is a daycare for bureaucracy barnacles.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Is it this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
YES. Yes it is. I need to learn his arguments by heart to demonstrate it myself.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Fair point.
What about the Apple watch?
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.
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.
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.
If people don't wear watches, they probably wouldn't wear scuba gear either. Unless AR comes in rose tinted glasses.
What about it? I'm not going to recharge my watch every night. Yawn.
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.
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.
I have a Garmin with roughly the same functionality and I only need to charge it every other week. If you use the GPS the battery gets drained in about a 6 hour activity, but I've recharged it at a refuge while eating.
I understand, and I don't care. I charge my watch overnight, and if I don't have a charger, I can power it off overnight and still have juice for the next day. It's simply not a big deal for me.
I think that roughly is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Part of the point is that Apple doesn’t do “roughly”.
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...
> riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins.
you forgot Apple Silicon -- a _huge_ leap forward
you also forgot the Apple Watch, which has become almost the standard watch these days in the US, worn by nearly everyone I see, from baristas to CEOs
AirPods have become almost ubiquitous (and every other brand now copies them)
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?
Have you seen what they went for when they were new?
It's interesting how that infects every aspect of a company.
I used to work tech support for a mid sized company selling some specialized networking eqipment, late 1990s and early 2000s. Our big deal was we answered the phone immediately, and we were good at what we did, we solved problems, resolved the issue right then and there on the phone.
Customers paid through the nose for our support contracts because it was worth it and they were happy. Happy customers were actually happy customers.
Company grew and was acquired and acquired other companies and so on.
By the end of my time there happy customers was a metric. It really didn't reflect actually happy customers, it was an amalgam of arbitrary stats. We could hit or surpass those numbers, nothing really mattered. Nobody was more happy if the numbers went up, or more sad if the numbers went down. Someone closed a ticket, did it solve anything?, who knows, but it was one more ticket closed!
Management who knew how to build a team, support people who cared, including myself, all just moved on.
Sad stuff really.
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.
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.
Very true! Unfortunately that is not present at all in the Apple series of Foundation…
Asimov was such a visionary he managed to predict the year 2025 in France.
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.
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.)
But is there room for innovation in the airliner industry anymore? Let's have a thought experiment
If you use the same engines from the same vendors, same aluminum, same carbon fiber, same landing gear. Almost everything just like the others, can you really differentiate anymore? Or if you are a component vendor, can you really innovate that much anymore?
Ie maybe it can be argued it is the correct move, from the board's and investors' point of view. The machine is already pretty close to optimal, and has been since the nineties. Don't change the machine, just milk it. Fire most engineers, move production to the lowest cost non-unionised place, outsource as much as possible to vendors that you compete viciously against each other etc.
> has been since the nineties
There's still not a lot of ceramic fiber in use in the engines. That's a pure weight reduction and fuel efficiency increase, up to the point that NOx emissions can't be controlled.
Given the rapidly advancing VTOL autonomous drone tech, harbor tug concepts may yet make an appearance. The funding for this could be driven from rescue aircraft, short range powerful VTOLs optimized to go pluck a struggling aircraft out of the sky and put it on the ground. The obvious evolution of that is ditching a lot of the landing weight. Reinforced undercarriage, landing gears, high-lift devices almost all exist to be used in a very short segment of the flight. Unlike roads, automation in the air has quite a bit less variability to deal with. Would you rather pilots try to put a plane with a mechanical issue on the ground by skillfully manipulating throttles or let an overgrown DJI take a swing?
Good ideas. Boeing will probably not be involved much in those things? (Though I could be wrong...)
Probably innovative motivated people go to work in software, SpaceX, EVTOL startups or now AI and so on. Even Walter Bright moved already decades ago to software.
But it's interesting to look at Arianespace's VTOL rocket development. Can a "dinosaur" do rapid innovation, when there's massive enough incentive? The answer looks like, maybe!
> 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.
> The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain
Which was a decision of boeing to outsource to their suppliers the design and development of those components. this combined with boeing doing some interesting pricing decisions lead to suppliers being rather screwed on the project.
> The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design
Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues.
> Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues
What are you referring to?
The Dreamliner had PMF issues? Hasn't it been a hugely successful point to point widebody?
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.
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.
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
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.
In my experience (and I generally have found myself in the position of 'person that has the system in their head'), it's not necessarily about size but about being able to sit down and work with the system. It's not just about having the theory but also having the time actually working with the system and learning how things act in practice, which is a kinda weird mix between being a senior role with a high-level view of the system and a theoretically quite junior role of more or less technician.
(It also usually involves some quite proactive learning of the form of finding the specialist in some part of the system and sitting next to them and going "explain to me how this part works", and then repeating more or less indefinitely)
> 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.
Definitely! My metric is "how often do I need to change two systems at once".
This is one of the things monorepos help in some ways (by making it easier to change two systems) and break in some ways (as you now get less annoyed by the split between systems being in the wrong place)
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.
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.
> 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.
Rewriting is moving the goalposts and hoping that person emerges in the rewrite. They often don’t. Or they get fed up with reasonable criticism and leave. Which is a variant of the Lavaflow Antipattern.
That sounds like a very interesting theory, with an actionable result. Do you have any links for more reading?
I haven’t talked to that guy in a while. The way the class was described I expect there’s a bibliography somewhere though.
> This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance.
Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424366
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).
Same thing down on the production floor. Each program (737, 767, etc) has its own part number series. I'm sure there has to be some parts commonality, somewhere, with the same part getting two different numbers printed on it at the factory, but I saw no hint of it happening.
Fun fact: the two big Puget Sound factories (Everett and Renton) number their hand tools differently. It's true. A socket wrench will be EVT12345 or whatever, and the same tool in Renton will be inventoried differently.
The two factories have very different cultures. Renton does two planes a week, Everett does one plane a month. There was much grumbling during the webinars and retrainings after the Door Plug Incident that all this was being inflicted on us because of the cowboys down in Renton and their maniacal obsession with production rate, something which is not quite so much a focus at Everett.
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.
If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, we already knew how shitty we were being in Afghanistan by the point the question was asked.
> 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.
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.
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.
But never the wings. That was always Boeing’s. Until MD fucked everything.
Here's a link to the same video but without the awful music inserted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
> It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems.
I've listened to a fair number of podcasts about this, and consensus seemed to be they need to start designing a new airplane now, because if they wait as long as they'd previously been indicating, they'd have lost too much of their "new airplane design" experience.
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)
Well, if I was CEO of Boeing, first day I'd basically be Microsoft and move heaven and earth getting the Dave Cutler of aviation (I have no idea who that is). He's in charge and if you don't like it you come to me.
Second problem are the MBA's. I don't have a solution for that, other than keep them far away from Cutler's division.
Honestly, the technical part is "easy"; it's the day to day politics that gets in the way when what is needed is longterm thinking. Take for example when NYC hired Andy Byford and Cuomo The Child couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. Shame.
> why should the company keep them around?
Smart companies should know that a large chunk of their value chain is knowledge work. For airplanes the danger of suddenly seeing a Boink 212 appearing on the market is probably quite low, but there certainly is engineering work to be done on planes, even if some of it won't see implementation for a long time.
But long time strategy is probably not even a term in some companies.
>> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
Just ask ChatGPT how to design an airplane, easy.
you're trying hard to paint a picture of fail, but your evidence doesn't stack up
>It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009
2003 to 2009 is an incredibly short time line for a revolutionary new design (the heavy use of composites) The A350 developed in response was much less ambitious effort and took longer. The A380 also took a long time to plan and execute. Aircraft generations last at least a decade, and new designs every 15 years-ish is not a crazy ballpark
>and its design was fraught with problems
A380 had plenty of problems, hence the delays
the problems with the 737MAX stemmed from Boeing trying to push the low-wing design of the older 737 through one more generation to avoid a complete redesign, to avoid the kind of cash flow pinch and never-paid-back development that Airbus suffered with the A380 (which was why they tried the "evolutionary" redesign on the cheap that led to the A350)
>Before then was the 777 in the early 90s
777 was a revolutionary approach to developing a plane that led to its incredible success which continues through today (the clever idea they had? asking airlines what they wanted) Airbus has also chosen paths that have been quite successful, their "same cockpit" being one of them. 777 and Airbus's planes from that time all had very long commercial lives
>everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets
I don't think anybody has ever designed a jetliner end to end, as piston planes crossed that hurdle earlier.
>if ... a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company
where else are aerospace engineers going to work? I'm not saying there's a surplus but with defense, aviation is a very big industry, and most any engineer would like to work on greenfield designs for marquis products.
shoot from the hip copycat Jobs would find no jobs in aerospace. Different types of people have different personalities. Aircraft design is tight tolerance and exacting, and anybody who does it is going to be comfortable working in a that type of environment, lots of check, test, recheck, paperwork, etc.
> 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.
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.
A big advantage for this kind of project today is the fact that the entire plane can be modeled in CAD with every single part verified to fit and work. The US Air Force claims this was heavily used for the B-21 and greatly accelerated development.
Does this also apply to Apollo?
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?
Also people retire out. A new product every 15-20 years leads to a lot of aging out
What problems were there with the 787? IIRC it was the first major composite airliner and they had the advantage of hoovering up all the unemployed post Berlin Wall cream of the crop Soviet aerodynamicists to work on it for them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian...
I think its too big and expensive for the market right now, its like a cadillac escalade in a corolla market
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?
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.
Boeing today is so obviously a different organisation to the one that built their rapidly dwindling reputation.
The 747 was an amazing engineering marvel. They started designing it in '65, the first one rolled off the production line in '68, and they were still making and selling them right up to 2023.
I have a book here somewhere that talks about how so many of the design decisions were based on cold hard physics facts combined with engineering pragmatism. They needed to run the engine at peak efficiency, and the tradeoff between air density and air temperature set the cruising altitude to ~35,000 feet. They knew they didn't know enough to be able to build a supersonic plane, so that set the top speed at just under mach 1 at 35,000 feet. They wanted to carry 2-3 times as many passengers as the 707 which set the payload and the all up weight. It needed to go slow enough to land safely at typical airport altitudes, which set the wing loading and given the weight the wing area. It needed to be as efficient as possible which meant a high aspect ratio, but given the required wing area and the available engineering capability for wing spars and aluminum construction that set the wing span.
It was hard engineering tradeoffs like that which then set a whole bunch of aviation standards. Runway lengths, terminal and jetway heights, landing approach speeds - all those types of "standards" which still exist today in airports around the globe, are heavily influenced by the 747 and it's design parameters. Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.
That is not today's Boeing.
> Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.
This isn't even close to true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_approach_category.
Cessnas approach at less than half the speed of 747s. The safe maximum cruising speed is 20-30 kts short of a 747 approach speed. You would have to be willing to risk your airplane and your life to get a Cessna up to the approach speed of a 747.
My experience landing Cessnas and other light aircraft at airfields where they land the big boys (including busy international ones) is that you approach and land at the speeds that the aircraft you are flying is designed for (which, btw, ATC and the FAA don’t give two shits if you are an international airport, the rules are the same everywhere in the US. I am licensed and have flown in other countries, and it varies ever so slightly, but not in the direction you are implying). I have had controllers ask me to keep speed up for spacing, but they aren't expecting miracles, they know that you simply can't get a Cessna to go above a certain speed.
The rest of your comment also has some dubious claims. I suspect that the top speed was set just below mach 1, not because Boeing had no engineering knowledge about supersonic flight, but because fuel efficiency, and a host of other factors that make supersonic flight difficult. As a counter to that assertion I would point out that Boeing had a supersonic engineering team that started in 1952. They even designed a supersonic airliner that was never built in the 1960s. Hard to believe that they chose not to make the 747 supersonic because they lacked the experience to design an SST while they simultaneously had an SST design and supersonic research team before the 747 was conceived.
The 747 was a groundbreaking airplane, but it wasn't all of the things being claimed here.
To your point, the large airport I worked at was annoyed at small, slow aircraft landing because it jacked up the spacing and slowed down the customers who paid the vast majority of the bills. But the feds required the airport to allow it for a low (relatively) fee, so the airport could only be annoyed.
To be fair, they did not operate in today’s world. The airlines they sold to back then before deregulation had government-guaranteed profits and so were much less focused on cost cutting than in today’s deregulated environment.
For decades after deregulation the total net profit of all airlines was negative. (Might still be, I’m not sure.) The industry got really cost competitive, and so the planes they purchased had to as well.
> I have a book here somewhere
You can't just say that, mention a bunch of interesting things, and not tell me the name of the book...
Am not OP, but wondering if the book being referred to is '747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet' by Joe Sutter.
Sutter was one of the people who led the design of 747.
> That is not today's Boeing.
How do you know they don't take all this into account when designing their planes?
Everything he described, mission requirements, sizing, trade studies, is taught in undergrad aerospace engineering curricula today. It's part of every new clean sheet design, civil, military, fixed wing or helo. It'd be the computer science equivalent of extolling how Windows was built with OOP and compiled programming languages on 8 mb ram. Pretty amazing if you're not familiar with the concepts but SOP if you're in the industry.
That's because Boeing is primarily a defense contractor these days.
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/
> And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.
Interesting how in the eyes of Joe Public, Southwest had nothing to do with it. Wonder if the Southwest board figures their cynical calculation worked out well enough to try again?
i dont know anything about how these companies are run, but couldnt it simply be their engineers were busy working on other projects?
i assume there is a limited talent pool of the required people
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.
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.
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.
I think you're right about the F-16 being the first. My money would have been on the F-117, but that apparently started development three years later – the F-16 is surprisingly old!
Isn't the high landing speed one of the unstable traits of this plane?
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.
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_...
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.
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.
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.
This is not correct and a gross simplification of the true issue.
All aircraft with underslung engines have similar pitch up tendencies 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 §25.203(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.
If every aircraft has such pitch up tendencies, why did only the 737MAX violate regulation?
That reg says:
>No abnormal nose-up pitching may occur. The longitudinal control force must be positive up to and throughout the stall.
(how do airbus planes pass that I wonder....)
I guess most planes are "not abnormal" but the behavior of the MAX crossed into "abnormal"
And boeing's whole philosophy is that they should make a passenger jet feel like Cessna, which is an increasingly tenuous fiction.
> boeing's whole philosophy is that they should make a passenger jet feel like Cessna
Where did you get this?
Passenger aircraft are stable by design. Fighter jets are unstable as this reduces drag and increases maneuverability.
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.
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...
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.
>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.
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.
The software I wrote for them had to be legal to ship to every country except The Four, which created some new copyright scenarios I’d never dealt with before. When you’re trying to sell to 190 countries, you gotta be ready for a lot, and I’m not surprised that the external stairs are still a thing. Doubly so for a regional jet, which could be flying from all of your country to the nearest international airport.
also common in south america in my experience
Can confirm, about to board an airplane with an air stair in Peru. An A320, actually.
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.
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.
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.
> One would think this question would have been answered directly in the FAA report
No, one would not, as it is of no interest to any regulator. They’re not dealing with any sort of non-mcas non-737 max.
> We got zero data on how often MCAS made adjustments and how often in the report.
This has no relevance to what I am talking about.
> we only have Boeing's word for it
We don’t have that because it is of no interest to Boeing either.
It'd be a new airframe and not an elongation of an elongation of an existing one... So we might be lucky this time.
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)
> 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?
Boeing would get a bailout and hopefully do better next time. No way, they are ever going under unless there is a superior domestic alternative.
Did you mean Airbus?
Or dies instead of does ?
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.
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.
Boeing is absolutely to blame though, in the end they’re responsible for the safety of the aircraft and there was plenty wrong internally at Airbus. The customer isn’t always king.
My understand is that the 737 Max was fine if they treated it as a new airplane. The problem was the put gizmos on it to make it behave like a regular 737 so pilots didn't need to get retrained on it. Those gizmos are what crashed it when you didn't know how they behaved when they failed.
The problem is that the whole point of the 737 Max was that airlines didn't have to treat it as a new airplane. If they did, it would have lost a lot of the value proposition and there would have been more support for an entirely new replacement instead. It would be a fascinating case study in perverse incentives and unintended consequences if it wasn't for the loss of life that resulted.
According to my research (watching youtube videos), putting those big turbofan engines (which had to be pushed forward and up to fit) gave the plane different flying characteristics which, under the rules of whatever, required new pilots to be retrained to some degree (at least flight simulator training), which made it a real pain for some airlines to ship their pilots off to wherever those simulators are.
Doesn't that make it an even more important case study? I remember learning about the Therac-25 in CS undergrad specifically because it killed people.
> New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames.
Looks like a case of "broken clock is right twice per day"
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.
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.
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.
I had the exactly same experience with AirBaltic. It felt so modern!
Here's some anecdotes about it being heavy to maintain:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmaintenance/comments/1colti...
That's an amazing thread, thanks for sharing
The "Neo series" are re-engined A320 series (neo = New Engine Option) and has nothing to do with the A220.
Ah yes, you are right, I meant the A220 though. I've edited the comment, thank you for pointing out my error.
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.
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.
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.
How does such a tariff even work? Can't an airline finance all of its aircraft through an entity in the Maldives or whatever?
Airbus had to move production from Quebec to Georgia (US)
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.
Alabama not GA
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?
The timing may be right. The A220 is suffering from lousy engines from their supplier. Lots of engine turnover, lots of maintenance needed. Delta just made a huge commit to the A220 made in Mobile to replace their 717 fleet.
Lets hope Boeing can do it right this time.
While McDonnell Douglas seems to be the whipping boy for Boeing Commercial Aircraft (BCA) problems, many of the business decisions actually predate the merger. As a college student in 1988, a BCA executive was invited to speak in our capstone class about Boeing plans for the future. The executive spoke about their extensive outsourcing strategy. Where Boeing would still design the platform, but suppliers would be required to design/build to spec. This distribution of work was supposed to drive out the vertical costs of design/build inside Boeing. The 777 was at the time in testing out at Moses Lake and nearing release. The reaction in the class was somewhat of a shock. Boeing was essentially "giving away" their book on how to make an airplane (a quality one) and turning it over to all of these suppliers with a mandate to do it more cheaply. The Boeing exec was quite pleased with how much money this was going to save the company as they became only the prime assembly point, with essential components coming in JIT mode from around the world. Students were quick to challenge him during the Q&A asking how they were going to maintain quality by so much outsourcing, he stated that there would be contractual requirements and inspections to make sure the components met the spec. McDonnell Douglas business methods are not above it either as they too were looking to outsource MD-9x parts production overseas before they were bought out by Boeing. Their effort to partner with Airbus to build a super-jumbo by fusing certain MD-11 design elements (MD-12) is no secret.
So in summary, let me state for the record that Boeing's redirection into outsourced suppliers and engineering was moving forward by 1988. Well before the merger with MCD.
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.
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.
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.
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
> as long as the government wants to have a domestic passenger airline manufacturer. and they pretty clearly do want that.
Now.
Opportunistic politics mixed with the religion of infinite profit maximization produces a turbulent swampt to build the future of anything on top of.
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.
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).
The AoA failure logic does not allow for manual reversion of the master/monitoring FCC. It still requires cross-checking sides in the event of an AOA DISAGREE annunciation. But since the update, MCAS is disabled in this scenario. As far as the FMC, the relationship between AoA vanes, flight control computers and CMD A/B is not configurable. But the non-failed autopilot channel can be selected.
Will it still be controlled by dual redundant 80286 chips like the MAX, with its software outsourced to the Indian 3rd party contractor?
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?
The more you change, the more you need to recertify, the more it costs, the more time it takes, the less your shareholders profit.
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.
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.
Make you wonder how long management figured they can keep using ancient technology, just to avoid updating certifications.
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.
They do :)
And if the companies who produce these chips continue to make a healthy profit, why would they stop?
But no one is producing 286 chips anymore, that's part of the problem Boing has. The chips fail, because they are used and old. Or is someone besides Intel making them?
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?
> […] too few units to make it worthwhile.
Not if the price of those units are really high.
Yeah, maybe the difficulty for the buyers is not getting price-gouged by a sole remaining supplier.
Forever if someone keeps making new chips.
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.
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.
No. It is an FCP-2002. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763398
It'll be interesting to see if they can turn around their reputation. For my own travel decisions, a flight scheduled on a Boeing plane has a genuine impact on considering other options, especially if I have flexibility. Not because I'm worried about an incident (I know that flying is incredibly safe, and feel very comfortable with it), but out of pure spite.
You're not alone, but I find it interesting that not too long ago[0] there was a common sentiment of "if it's not Boeing, I'm not going". I heard that often after the Air France 447 crash [1]
[0]OK, I guess 2009 is not as recent as I remember...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
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.
So given that both the basic recipe for the 737 and A320 are pretty old by now, how much "better" could a new clean sheet narrowbody realistically be, given recent in aircraft design?
And how much better would it _need_ to be, in order for large 737 operators to be convinced to place their next order for the new 7007? (yes, like nVidia, I trust they'll just add a number and start over when they run out of numbers).
This comment talks about next-gen engines as the driver for new airframe designs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45431849
Those engines will be a major driver of whether “better” is achieved, in particular maintenance costs and fuel economy will need to move the needle.
Might be easier for them to try and license and produce the A320 under their own name.
Airbus's suppliers already have a hard time keeping up with airbus right now. Why would they add a concurrent that depends on the exact same supply chain, when they have taken delivery engagements for the next decade.
Unless the price is truly astronomical ,but then it's not worth it for Boeing anyway.
And that's before touching reputational damage that come from building your concurrent's plane because you couldn't design your own.
> new single-aisle airplane
Does that mean it's not trying to be "another 737" but actually a truely new type?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just ‘cause I’m totally ignorant about this stuff: why is that?
The 757 was powered by rb211-535e4 which had about 40k pounds of thrust each.
https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/civil-aero...
The 737 MAX is powered by CFM LEAP which has about 30k pounds of thrust each.
https://www.cfmaeroengines.com/leap
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.
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?
China is very good at subsidising development like this. Other commenters are rightly pointing out that they cannot currently compete with Boeing. But if you look at the way the chinese approached car manufacturing, 20 years ago, I wouldnt have even ridden in one, these days they are honestly fantastic. Its because they got the chance to make those really bad cars, that they were able to improve to where they are today. 20 years from now, its possible that the gap closes to the point that Boeing is displaced from everywhere but the US.
Biggest issue I can see is that the US will try and weaponise national security against them. Much like how Cisco and Juniper fought to have Huawei and friends blacklisted in most western countries. Just as they become competitive, Boeing and Airbus might start screaming that the chinese planes have communist killswitches and that planes will fall out of the sky if theres a war with China.
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.
The C919 isn’t even competitive with where Boeing was 20 or 30 years ago.
I'm admittedly very much not an expert in this area. But my post is less about the C919 specifically, and more about China's track record of developing manufacturing processes very rapidly such that they compete on the world market. Specifically I'm thinking of how China is suddenly exporting tons of EVs throughout the world at prices that USA/EU auto-makers can't really compete with. Over 50% of EVs sold in the world are Chinese (and none of those cars are allowed in the USA).
If China decides they want to continue developing and building commercial airplanes, where will they be in 5-10 years? Where will Boeing be?
China "cheated" with EVs. They never managed to make a combustion engine that could hold a candle against western ones in terms of efficiency and reliability. Electric motors are waaay simpler.
I doubt that the same will happen in commertial aircraft engines. If China catches up it will be through industrial spionage or very slow grinding, that will take many years.
This isn't 2010 anymore. PRC more or less caught up in mainstream IC drive trains. They prioritized resources on diesel engines (heavy equipment) it's essentially on par with global leaders and leading in some applications. Gasoline engine at parity for mainstream since 5 years ago, all the major brands has domestic power trains that's basically parity for mass market consumer vehicles, i.e. not extreme highend performance oriented like motorsports, because by then they pivoted to EV, specially because it would be retarded to waste energy on last 5% for high performance gasoline engines, and real secret sauce / aka hard stuff was batteries.
Commerical turbofan harder, but ultimately it boils down to TCO, where fuel efficiency "major" factor, major factor in that 10-15% less efficiency kills margins / ability to discout for current COMAC builds which uses many overpriced western components for certification. PRC switches to all domestic aviation stack (which they already have for military aviation, i.e. most of pieces there already), they can feasibly undercut/discount where PRC commercial aviation is competitive, it doesn't matter if CJ1000A is 15% less efficient than leading if upfront cost (+ favourable PRC financing) makes up for lifetime of less efficient fuel costs (cheaper TCO). But TBH civil aviation is not actually a "commercial" sector, it'a a strategic (geopolitical) sector, US will do everything it can to kill COMAC, or prevent global exports, i.e. no certification, sanction countries that buy COMAC etc.
Can't wait to beta-test it as a pax.
I could care less. I am never flying with Boeing - ever.
Semi-unrelated, but that photo is taken from the Hyatt Regency Lake Washington, which looks over Boeing's Renton facility from many of the rooms.
Nice hotel on its own (though a bit out of the way from most Seattle tourist stuff), but extra-nice if you're an aviation geek.
remember when they built an unsafe plane and the FAA approved it
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.
737 Maximum ?
Its hard to imagine this will not have glaring issues too.
Self certified, according to other news...
I'm pretty ignorant here, but as I understand it
* The design time on a new plane is going to be tens of years
* Boeing is already losing customers to Airbus as a result of the max disaster, doors blowing off, etc.
* The major thing keeping Boeing in business is long delivery time orders of their older planes, and those are drying up
Given these things can this help them in time?
couldn't predict that I'd ever say this but I hope they test this one and don't discount on costs
Just in time for AI to design it.
Maybe Boeing should have done this before they murdered 346 people?
I wonder if they will try for a blended wing
How about to just "virtually" fly? So Boeing could save on building an actual plane, but still getting the money!
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
Who could even trust them to build something safe?
Non-paywall: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-st...
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.
I hope someone is working on a Boeing replacement.
[stub for offtopicness]
Looking forward to what AI-generated flight control software can do!
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.
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!
We are about to crash, did you really turn them on? I still have no control of the plane
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!
Hey! There's no emdash! This is human generated content. Flagging and also emailing @dang to have it taken down.
Fly-by-vibe?
VFR = Vibe Flight Rules
Prompt: "Do a barrel roll!"
The 367-80 did it fine [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_367-80#Barrel_roll
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...
Ah the hitman business model
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?
No situation is so bad that it cannot possibly be made worse
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.
Also the maga tariff and bizarre interventions age.
737 MAX Ultra Plus Alpha?
737 HBO
Hulu in the on-deck circle
Boeing √543169, technically not a new model.
Boing 737 Pro Max.
Still prefer the 737 Air
The article just mentions "Boeing plane" with no details. Will it fly?
It said "Boeing", duh.
Like the sound it will make.
https://archive.ph/Cqgtc
That link doesn't work. "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"
Endless captcha loops for me.
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.
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737 with fly-by-wire avionics would be what 737MAX should have been.
Don't think it would have sold - behind the airbus neos on fuel efficiency. Hence the janky mcas solution to make the reengine work
Cancelled?
No, they need a different landing gear to make room for bigger engines. Larger diameter engines are needed for better fuel efficiency. Fly by wire is nice, but fuel economy is more important.