No, I was talking about the 737's

As luck would have it, I've known some of the engineers and flight test people on the MD80/90. Douglas really did die because they were undercapitalized and refused to do anything "new." It was thought that a derivative design was cheaper to execute. Instead they had an expensive to build airplane that sold cheaply. They could never drive the sort of efficiency of manufacture or price premium that Boeing was able to command. Douglas would end up spending more trying to make an old design work than if they had bitten the bullet and just created a clean sheet design. The derivative MD11 was the final straw.

The MD88/90 is the "Moneyball" of airplane design. "There's rich teams, there is poor teams, there is 50 feet of crap then there is us." Yet the Oakland A's won more consecuive games making the most of a cheap team than any of their rich competitors.

The joke about getting FAA Certification late in the day on Friday was told to me as true by the guy who submitted it.

Capt. Carl knows some of these same people. It would be interesting if he chimed in.