it’s not that anything is “missing,” it’s more that as we improve our understanding the realities of physics kind of force us into an “optimal” solution. Air travel is now all about “butts in seats” and “lowest $ per passenger-mile.” Automotive is all about fuel economy, and meeting myriad other regulations.
as a similar example, I’m into boat racing. Specifically hydroplanes. Over the years, people have tried many novel hull designs to get their boats to skim across the surface of the water at ~200 mph while not going airborne. 50 years ago, the “shovelnose” three-point hydroplane was the most common. Then people started experimenting with cutting the nose back, or removing some of the deck, or cutting the transom down to the bare minimum. Or even something as drastic as trying a four-point hydroplane. all of those fell by the wayside and now, they all are of the T6 design like this. I’m serious, they all look the same.
Things like planes, cars, boats, etc. used to be wildly different because we didn’t have to care how efficient they were and our tools were too primitive to find the optimum solution. Now, we’ve pretty much found the optimum solution so the best we can do is eke out another percent or two.
The Boeing thing is a historical anomaly. The 707 was designed in 1953ish. The 727 & 737 simply used exactly the same nose/cockpit when designed in 1963ish. That the 737 is still in production in 2017 using a 1950s nose is the surprising thing. All other Boeings designed since about 1964 (747, 757, 767, 777, 787) don’t have that distinct pointy inefficient noisy beak.
Jillions of gallons of jet fuel have been wasted and tens of thousands of pilots have suffered permanent hearing damage over the decades simply because it was cheaper for Boeing to re-use the tooling than go through the expense and hassle of designing a new nose and getting it FAA certified.
Which segues directly into this:
Exactly. Well said. My complaint was romantic / poetic, not practical.
The e.g. A350 & 787 noses look the same because the digital design tools accurately reflect the actual physics and they both converge on the same solution. Plus or minus some rounding errors, slight differences in the target design point they were optimized to, and (ref the actual OP) a finishing touch from the Marketing Department.
I think I read once that they seriously considered using the 757 nose on the 737NG, but airlines with large 737 fleets (like Southwest) hated the loss of commonality.
For reasons that might have made sense in 1940 but do not in the modern era, the FAA considers airplanes to be the same type for pilot training and currency purposes if the underlying metal innards are mostly the same shape regardless of what the cockpit (UI in modern parlence) is like.
So to FAA this 737-100 and this 737-MAX are the same airplane and no special training is needed to hop from one into the other.
But this 767-400 and this 777-200 are utterly different airplanes with utterly separate training and licensing requirements because one starts with “767” and the other starts with “777”. Despite being nearly button-push for button-push identical.
Similar silliness applies within the maintenance world. As long as they can keep calling it a 737 they can rely on testing and certification done in 1964 on hardware that hasn’t been present in the airplane since the 1980s.
The FAA is slowly coming around to recognizing this folly. In another 15 years they’ll be caught up to the realities of 2005. By then it’ll be 2030 though.
I admit there’s a *little *hyperbole there for dramatic effect.
Strictly speaking the 737-100 & 737-MAX are a common “type rating” which means instead of a two or three week training course that starts from scratch, all that’s needed is a day or so of “differences training”. It’s also the case that pilots can fly one or the other type from day to day or flight to flight as opposed to being restricted to one or the other for months at a time with further training required before switching back and forth.
Some actual examples:
We’re just now getting 737 MAXs to go along with our existing 737-800s. The -800s are admittedly a lot closer to a MAX than the -100 was. There is no training required at all for this changeover. Just a 100-page book explaining all the stuff that’s new or different. Folks will be hopping from one to the other at random over the course of a workweek.
In years past I’ve flown this DC-9 and this MD-80 on the same day. A couple years later I flew this 717 with only differences training from the first two.
All of which is kinda uncomfortable until you’ve got a bunch of experience in every flavor. And even then there’s a lot of reaching for where the gizmo isn’t.
As I said above, the Feds are starting to recognize they’ve built a bridge too far. Or said another way, they gave the manufacturers a foot of slack then let them run a mile with it. The Feds are now starting to reel in the leash.
The original 757 and 767 were built with a hybrid cockpit with some then-newfangled computerized instruments on CRTs (“glass cockpit”) and some then-conventional round dial needle-and-scale instruments: pic. These two types were the pioneers for common UI & common training for different aircraft. It works surprisingly well. It’s easy, and mostly harmless, to momentarily forget which sort you’re sitting in.
Over the years, many of these cockpits have been upgraded with new panels & computers so it looks about like the 737-800 above. (I couldn’t readily find good pix of these aftermarket upgrades and there are a couple of different vendors out there selling these upgrades.)
The Feds are just now imposing a requirement that although pilots can still switch back and forth between 757 & 767 daily, they can no longer switch between legacy and modernized cockpits unless they fly each type regularly. Going months on one kind (e.g. modernized) then jumping into the other (e.g. legacy) is no longer permitted. They’re still happy to have pilots jump between 757 & 767 despite the differences since they’re mostly nuances that effect emergencies rather than normal ops.
But when those genuine sheepskins (not shag) are sorta new they’re very comfy on a hot (or a cold) day. After they’re matted flat by thousands of hours of lard-asses strapped onto them, not so much.
That 777’s cockpit is awesome! All aglow with crazy lighting and such. It looks almost like the same effect produced by those old glow in the dark rock posters.
