Originally Posted by
hindsight2020
Bingo. Forget about MCAS potato and Americans waxing poetic about foreigners not being able to TP-stall recover an airliner like they're reliving their USAF UPT glory days. The quoted above is the real issue, and what needs to be talked about more. Boeing wanted to get away with not incurring certification costs of a new type by frankensteining the 73 certificate. It is therefore poetic justice they would get bent over questions of a sub-system allowed in under the very certification-stretching they've been mining for decades in the first place. About time their cost-cutting and 737 back alley plastic surgery clinic was finally exposed.
They got Capone under the lesser tax evasion, so frankly I couldn't care less whether the foreign case studies were 100% MCAS/sensor related or not. Win's a win. This ought to effectively wash out their gains in choosing to not design the "composite 757", to include accepting the certification costs a clean sheet design would normally incur.
Yep.
But Boeing (and airbus) did have good reason o extend their current narrow-bodies rather than do clean-sheet designs. There's lots of new technology looming which should be ready in a decade or so which will drastically improve economy, emissions, and carbon footprint. But it's radical enough to require a clean-sheet design, so if you spend the R&D on that now your new plane will likely be obsolete in ten years, and you won't have the R&D money to design the plane of the future.
Airbus had a big advantage... the bus is taller than the 73, so they could easily fit bigger fans under the wing to extend the economic life of their current product. Boeing had to jury-rig motor mounts, MCAS, build folding gear struts, etc.
Boeing also had to contend with keeping their modified product under a common type... they were already pushing the boundaries on that.
Tough for Boeing... the fact that the original 73 was designed for straight turbojets came back to haunt them.