Today, the 737 MAX has returned to the sky, albeit only for test flights. Still, that’s a major milestone in getting the plane recertified.
In another thread many months ago, which I can’t seem to find now, I predicted that the airlines that have already ordered the MAX would have no choice but to take delivery of them, simply because they needed the new planes and Airbus was pretty much sold out for years. But that was before COVID-19. Everything is completely different now, and airlines can very likely do without new planes for a few years. So it’s up in the air (pun intended) as to whether the MAX will be successful once it gains certification again. I’m still going to be cautiously optimistic and predict that while it will be a rocky couple of years for Boeing, after a few years the public will regain trust in the 737 MAX, like they did with the DC-10 decades ago.
Covid might not have as big a negative impact on the Max as you expect. As airlines struggle to cut down costs there will be some incentive to accelerate the replacement of older inefficient aircraft with newer models.
Where I’m working, they had always planned to retire the B777-200 and replace them with B787s. Covid has forced this to happen sooner. The replacement hasn’t happened yet because the demand isn’t there but the current B787s are doing as much flying as possible while the B777s have been sent to storage in Alice Springs, Australia. Likewise our A320 and A321 NEOs have been doing the bulk of the short haul flying while the CEOs fill the gaps. Although further NEO orders are on hold, you can be sure that once demand and cashflow returns there will be a push to resume the deliveries.
The difference in fuel efficiency between the new Max / NEOs compared to the older aircraft is remarkable, around 20-25%. Its to the point that you find it hard to believe you’ve got enough fuel loaded for the flight.
I think you will see the airlines that can afford to, going ahead with their fleet upgrades as soon as they can.
I was flying the MAX before the grounding. Both before and after both crashes.
I would not hesitate to fly an unmodified MAX today. I certainly would not hesitate to fly a modified MAX once they get past the political ballyhoo.
Did Boeing do an uncharacteristically crappy job of failure analysis when they released MCAS and its supporting systems the first time? Yes. Was it a death trap then? No. Will the new arrangements be a large improvement? Yes.
Somewhat related, there is another spate of stories this morning that the 747 is going away. Perhaps they made the final announcement. We knew production would end soon, that is why we had to buy two new presidential airplanes. In twenty years, the American president will be flying in a cute antique.
The remaining 16 in the construction pipeline are all cargo configurations. They’ll be flying those for a while. It’s the passenger models that are being phased out. But some will continue to fly for decades.
The latest passenger & freight versions are the -8I & -8F respectively. They were first delivered in 2011 & both have been slow sellers since Day 1. The 8I- hasn’t been ordered by anyone since 2016 and the -8F since 2018.
If nobody wants to buy them there’s not much reason to make them.
Back in 2018 they’d already slowed production to the point that due to overhead they haven’t made a profit on the last few units built nor will they make a profit on their few remaining unbuilt orders. The earliest parts for any given airplane need to be ordered from the most upstream suppliers about 2 years before that airplane will fly. Said another way, once the pipeline of unbuilt orders is shorter than about 2 years you’re about to start buying parts for planes you haven’t sold. Once you decide you won’t be able to sell them there’s not much reason to order those parts. And that signals the end of life.
The 747 has had a good long run; there’s nothing inherently embarrassing about it finally getting to the end of its natural life. But with all the other negative news about Boeing, there’s always an executive desire to keep some happy prestige thing looking healthy. The industry has been watching Boeing sidle up to pulling the trigger on this for at least a year now. It’s all still rumor today, but the betting is it’s real soon.
As folks just upthread have said, the existing airplanes will be flying for 20+ years to come. The existing passenger versions will probably be converted to freighters sooner rather than later.
OTOH, if nothing else, any business that was looking at an embarrassing decision of retrenchment now has a really handy excuse in COVID.
“COVID made me do it” can excuse a lot of executive goofs. Whether those goofs are smart people who predicted wrong, or dumb people doing dumb things. Or even criminal people doing criminal things. COVID makes a great cover story for all.
I’m going to MAX refresher school in about 3 weeks and we expect to have them carrying people shortly after New Years.
I wouldn’t hesitate to fly the unmodified ones. With the mods, the training is almost silly; we’re practicing the things that just about can’t go wrong any more, or said another way, don’t go wrong any differently now on a MAX than they’ve always been able to go wrong on prior models.
In your opinion, does the new MAX training, as redundant and unnecessary as it may be for pilots with your training and skills, nonetheless shore up deficiencies that may have been present (and may have contributed to the two total losses) with foreign pilots? Or is the new training mostly unrelated to the deficiencies that contributed to those two losses? Thanks.
It will be helpful for everyone. But more helpful for the weaker sisters (of whatever gender/sex), regardless of which company they work for in which country.
The amount of training (2 hours in a sim once) isn’t really enough to move the needle for the folks who are mostly subway motormen sitting at the controls of a jet. Flying has not (yet) been reduced to button-pushing.
As well, there’s really nothing about the syllabus outline for this training that says it’s any more applicable to MAXes than to other 737s or any other Boeing or Airbus product. Instrument failures or sensor failures leading to false instrument indications, often accompanied by false warnings, are a darn hard problem regardless of type.
Arguably AF447 was entirely about this same problem, yet neither a grounding of the fleet nor universal training was mandated in response.
So overall IMO there’s nothing wrong with what is being done, but weakness in what’s not being done at a whole-industry level. The massive global retrenchment caused by COVID will delay the day of reckoning. But not prevent it from arriving.
Did Airbus not reprogram their software/update their training manual/design a better anti-icing system for their pitot tubes to try and prevent another AF447-like occurrence? If not, why not? I believe Air France improved their pilot training (since pilot error was clearly a big factor in this one). But no amount of hours in a simulator can ever totally ensure that pilots won’t panic when faced with a real emergency.
More generally, what is not being done - do you mean there has not yet been a big enough push for more automation/AI in commercial aircraft? And by “day of reckoning” do you mean another 100+ fatality event?
As I recall they had already issued a recall for the pitot tubes prior to the crash of AF447. The icing was a known issue. It was just that the ones on that particular plane hadn’t been replaced yet, because replacing them wasn’t considered that urgent, because when other A330 pilots encountered the issue nothing bad happened. Those pilots just maintained a known angle of attack and throttle setting, as they should, and a minute or so later the ice cleared up and everything went back to normal.
More generally what is not being done is a thoroughgoing investigation and change in training and checking standards to ensure that all pilots worldwide are good enough to handle the problems that can and do occur.
What is not being done is recognizing that the mere fact you’d like to hire another 1000 qualified people does not mean you can create another 1000 qualified people for low cost in a hurry. The industry cannot expand faster than skilled experienced people can be developed from scratch.
What is not being done is recognizing the hazards inherent in highly computerized highly complex systems and reprogramming all airplanes to deal better with defective sensor inputs and false warnings. Much of certification thinking is still based on 20 independent devices that are first integrated between the pilots’ ears. When instead a computer is pre-integrating them and presenting the outcome to the pilots, that brings up a whole new sort of GIGO error that is not, IMO, being addressed as thoroughly as it ought.
By “day of reckoning” I mean that the uncontrolled growth in the airline industry, and especially in the third world, has already resulted in a severe dilution of the skill levels of many / most crews. Which will continue to lead to brittle failures where otherwise manageable aircraft malfunctions proceed to pilot-looses-control-and-all-aboard-die accidents. Continuing to blame the manufacturers for each failure to build a pilot-proof airplane is going the wrong way. While pilot-proof airplanes may well be in our future, the current state of the art cannot build them.
Boeing totally screwed up the MCAS by making 2 dumb interrelated decisions that were never considered together by the relevant experts at Boeing or at FAA. But what killed those 300+ people was crappy piloting and poor systems engineering in general, not MCAS in specific. That’s just the place the accident occurred, not the why. Think surface cause versus deep cause.
After a slow / confused start, this thread from this summer covers some good ground and has relevant comments from both @Richard_Pearse & me. It bears reading if you’re curious along these lines.
This is the actual FAA webpage announcing the release of the final plan that @not_what_you_d_expect mentioned yesterday:
From there the interested reader can see the PDFs of what the FAA is ordering as to mechanical and procedural changes. And what’s being added to the various training syllabuses, both one-time for the MAX’s return to service and for future certification of new crews and for periodic refresher training of existing crews.
Lots of it is more detailed than will be interesting to most laymen, but there’s also a bunch of discussion about why they did what they did and also about why they didn’t do various "just one more thing"s that somebody had suggested. As such it’s an interesting look-in on the thought processes involved. Both those of the Feds and those of the other interested parties.
Reading the training syllabus in detail for the first time I see they have partly addressed one of my complaints from a few posts ago:
As well, there’s really nothing about the syllabus outline for this training that says it’s any more applicable to MAXes than to other 737s or any other Boeing or Airbus product. Instrument failures or sensor failures leading to false instrument indications, often accompanied by false warnings, are a darn hard problem regardless of type.
What they have done is add a small chunk of training along these lines to the 737NG syllabus as well. Which indicates a recognition that these sorts of difficult-to-handle situations are in no sense unique to MAXes, whether modified or as originally designed. One hopes to see that attitude spread across training for all types of complicated airplanes.
Yesterday I went to the sim for my mandatory MAX training. An interesting 2 hour experience. Which was preceded by about an hour of instructor-led teaching & briefing. Plus in recent weeks about 4 hours of self study via computer based training, reviewing impending procedure manual revisions, etc.
A lot of what we did was hands-on experience of how the various trim-related systems do their normal auto-magic stuff and also how they look & feel while malfunctioning. The hope is that you’ll more readily recognize the difference. It de-mystifies how the somewhat cryptic engineering explanations in the books actually manifest as behavior in flight. The various trim malfunctions are benign enough, and the procedures are simple enough for Joe/Jane Average to remember & do.
We also flew the same AOA failure that lost the two MAXes.
Which demonstrates that, yes, Boeing really has tamed the MCAS beast. It’s busy and distracting, but not a dangerous handful of crazed jet. It’s not possible any more to duplicate the full experience those crews had, whether in flight or in the sim.
The 737-NG is, and always has been, just as much at risk of AOA failures and the consequent instrument malfunctions and cockpit confusion as the MAX was/is. Over 20+ years times 7K plus airplanes-worth of NG ops these failures have been vanishingly rare. There’s every reason to expect the same reliability from the MAX. In any case, flying the scenario is a confidence builder.
The airplanes are being readied for service now and are being test-flown around the system to exercise them, and refamiliarize the station ground crews and maintenance folks with their daily care and feeding.
Soon I’ll be hauling customers around in them. As I was doing before this whole sorry saga began.