Exactly. United is aggressively going after used planes and have picked up other airlines Max orders. Love them, or hate them, but United and Southwest are going to have a ton of them running around. Hindsight is always 20/20, but at the time that the decision was made to go with the Max, it made sense. Not the best plane from a pilot’s perspective, but it is efficient, and will make the airlines plenty of money. It can’t take as much cargo, it doesn’t have the range, and it doesn’t have equal short field performance, but the max will still do the vast majority of what the 757 actually does do. It will fly SFO to places like EWR, MCO, and BOS, all day long on 2,000 less pounds of fuel per hour. Any new NB plane out of Boeing is years away and not an option.

 

Simple? Get on the 10+ year waiting list if you want airbuses. Not like they can just instantly fill orders.

 

Too bad considering that the 757 was the original Max. Throw on more efficient wings and engines. Lost opportunity, instead they went with a design that is as old as a 727.

 

They went with the max to save $15-20B on clean-sheet R&D. They would have gotten away with their Rube Goldberg update too, if they had managed it a little better.... look at their pre-crash order book. I hope the max 10 main gear has better engineering and oversight than mcas.

Their motive for saving the R&D was either short-term greed, or longer-term planning for the looming need to incorporate revolutionary new technology into future airliners to save fuel (and thereby carbon). The tech wasn't ready yet, probably need another ten years.

 

The tech will ALWAYS be better ten years out. You have to pull the trigger sometime. The 737 first flew in 1967. That’s 52 years ago.

To put that in perspective, 52 years before the 737 flew the most advanced fighter plane on earth was the Fokker Eindecker sporting a single Spandau 30 caliber machine gun. It’s 100 hp engine had a top speed in level flight of 76 KT.

Boeing screwed the pooch. If they survive it will only be because they are too big to fail - not on merit.

 

The 737 should of been put out to pasture after the 300,400,500. My uncle was an engineer at Boeing, he helped design the 757,767 cockpit. He was also on a team to design a clean sheet replacement for the 737 back then, and came to the same conclusion that it would of cost too much. So now you're stuck with an outdated design that had to do stupid workarounds due to the landing gear being too short which is due to the original wing box design of the 100/200. Yes, it is that stupid!

 

This is a REALLY bad time to pull the trigger...

a) The tech in question is specific for fuel efficiency/carbon reduction; both the US and EU governments are directly driving the R&D. It looks to be about ten years out, maybe less. Net fuel burn reduction might approach 60-80%, and further reduction could be accomplished with bio or synth fuel (certified today at 50% blend).

b) It's very likely that said tech (or something with equivalent environmental impact) will be mandatory due to climate change, either legislated by governments or de facto by popular demand of the flying public.

So in this case both the tech and the mandate will arrive at about the same time. Probably not wise to clean-slate a new plane which will be obsolete just as production reaches full swing. The new tech may require radical fuselage/engine designs, and would mostly not be suitable for retrofit on legacy designs.

Airbus was fortunate that the A320, designed in the 80's, was originally designed for higher-bypass turbofans than the 73, and thus has longer landing gear. Easier for them to fit even higher bypass fans under the wing.

Airbus got lucky on that, but not so much on other projects where they blew their R&D budget on the wrong plane at the wrong time. The A380, A330NEO, and A350 are inter-related due to mis-allocation of R&D.

 

You forget the A400M, which will also never recoup their R&D costs, but I disagree on this being the wrong time. Boeing waits ten years they may be stuck in lag to Airbus eternally.



Note who built this prototype:

 

I gave them a pass on the A400 since that was politically driven in Euro-land to become less reliant on foriegn defense products, and R&D timing was totally dependent on the customer, ie you either design a new plane or we'll buy one from Lockheed. It delivered on that, just not at the promised cost. I was actually surprised that several customer governments broke it off so hard in AB's butt, and made them eat the cost over-runs.