Southwest's announcement that it is delaying scheduling 737 Max until mid-late Feb makes me wonder if the aircraft will ever regain its credibility? Even when it comes back (and it will) will passengers avoid it at the start? What does this mean for those certified to fly this aircraft? Would love to hear what you think.

Yes.

Practically nobody remembers the 737's rudder PCU issues of the 90s that directly caused two fatal accidents and possibly/probably contributed to others.

Exactly right.

They will probably rename it, because that is such a simple change, and the public will immediately forget about the MAX. I think Ryan Air already renamed it.

Si Oui Yes

The 737 will clearly continue on - too much in capital investment to just throw it all away. But the future will not be the 737 MAX. The future will be newer and more efficient designs. In retrospect Boeing tried to get one too many models grandfathered under the 737 type and it’s going to cost them money and credibility. They HAVE to come up with a new competitive narrow body and that relatively quickly or Airbus is going to eat their lunch.

The 74 had two cargo doors open spontaneously, one in flight. The 787 - battery fires, anyone? As previously mentioned, the venerable 737 had rudder PCU issues. About two weeks after an accident less than 1% of the traveling public can tell you anything intelligent about it and probably even less than that take it into consideration when buying a ticket. History will repeat itself.

You can point to historic events and definitely come to this conclusion. I will add, however, that this was prior to two things:
The internet and the peer to peer spread of (mis)information.
The irresponsible crisis factory reporting by the press, often from dubious sources.

I think it’s gonna be different this time around. It will fly, pax will forget over time, but this is going to be handled way differently. People expect air travel to be 100 percent reliable and safe because that’s the standard over the last decade or so. When two planes from the same model crash like this, there will be some long lasting aftershocks.

The Max is the first airplane grounded by Facebook and Twitter. I highly doubt it will be the last, but this is virgin territory. By the time this thing flies again, it will be the most thoroughly reviewed and scrutinized airplane in history.

Two crashes with the same MO in a few months is probably good cause for grounding. Since the second crew was aware of the issue, awareness was obviously not a sufficient fix to the problem. In the past sometimes it took more than two crashes because it was harder for the information to get out and elevate public awareness (which is sometimes necessary to get regulators to move out expeditiously).

Case study: Boeing 737 Rudder Servo. VERY, VERY similar history to MAX/MCAS (2x crashes, plus additional inflight control incidents). 737 was never grounded for that issue. Should it have been?

I guess that’s kinda my point. The old way doesn’t work any more. If this happened 20 years ago, would the airplane have been grounded? Doubtful.

The PCU issue was arguably way more dangerous and yet it continued flying.