From what I’ve read he changed the engineering nature of the company to a marketing one. Some people are concerned with manufactufing cutting corners and defects that have nothing to do with the Max design problem. Those things will get you eventually.
Things going south may seem like bad luck, but they usually aren’t.
Many people won’t care about the plane . But at a minimum some people will at least ask what model of plane their flight uses.
___SNARK WARNING! ___
Question; How can you tell when a Boeing CEO is lying?
Answer; His lips are moving.
----SNARK WARNING REMOVED-----
Just think, it used to be that the motto was “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.”
Now, it’s “Anything but Boeing”
Southwest could be hit hard since all they fly is the 737.
Oh don’t get me wrong racer72, once they are back out and properly recertified they’ll be known to have inspected and vetted both for hardware and software like nothing else out there, and the crews will have been trained thoroughly.
But it should have been that way all along.
That may antedate Mullenberg, though; *The Atlantic *in their articles on this suggested that it went all the way back to Condit and the move of business ops from Seattle to Chicago in the aftermath of the McDonell-Douglas merger.
They are commonly pointed to for the deal by which if a new version of the plane requires retraining/recert for the crews, they’d get a rebate – I believe they are not the only ones but as the largest customer of that line they probably have a lot of weight in it. But that sort of incentive would have only further reinforced the decision to sell the MAX as requiring virtually no requalification of crews even after the additional MCAS modifications, and hiding away those changes from the operation manuals.
The whole shindig has ended up costing everyone not just two whole planefuls of lives and the public good will towards one of the USA’s industrial giants and the trust of the major aviation regulators in one another, but also billions of dollars,and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s* billions more than it would have cost to go simply thru the process of vetting and certifying the changes and doing the requalifying*.
How much would it have cost to recognize that it was time to retire a 50 year old airframe design and go with something designed to take modern engines?
That’s what Boeing is doing right now with the 797, which might enter service in the next seven years.
As for the MAX, Boeing was in such a rush because it was trying to snag an order from American Airlines, which had been threatening to go with the A320neo instead.