It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s.
There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company.
Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:
To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.
The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere.
It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee.
If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them.
My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I think you might have the chain of causality mixed up. From what I've seen, the sheer scale of the company creates large committees because you've got lots of managers and they all know that getting involved in the project is essential to their career advancement. And then that creates scope creep. Partially due to design by committee effects, but also because the manager in charge of flobnix realizes their opportunity for career advancement by shoehorning problems that need to be solved with flobnix into the requirements.
I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside.
Concrete example: why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.
>why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo?
The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200 billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of Apollo before it even finished its original set of missions.
In the 1980s I read articles in the “science fact” columns in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that told me that NASA sold out a much more ambitious lunar program for something that was little more than a stunt.
The reality was that Von Braun looked at dozens of mission architectures before discovering one that was much more feasible than any of the others and made it possible to realize Kennedy’s dream.
The moon is not far away in terms of miles but in terms of energy and momentum it is very far away if your goal is to fly there and fly back. Right now the best idea we have for a moon lander is to hope that SpaceX gets Starship to orbit and masters orbital refueling it’s not like they can fly 100 tons there and back, but rather they can land about what Apollo did with a much bigger spacecraft that’s really tall and tippy, needs an elevator, can get the ascent rockets smashed on rocks, etc. if they had a set of those chopsticks on the Moon or Mars they could land it easily but on generic inner solar system bodies covered with boulders, craters and stuff good luck. Plan B is basically the same from Blue Origin.
If you could refuel there the math changes, maybe you can, there might be usable ice at the poles but nobody has seen it, unless we have a Drexler machine we’re going to have to launch a huge number of missions with a marginally effective system until we have a system in place that can reliably deliver fuel.
So it’s tough, any honest analysis of space colonization makes you come to the conclusion that Drexler did, rocketry has very little to do with it, being able to pack a self-sufficient industrial civilization into the smallest package has everything to do with it.
We'd pay $xxx billion to have a permanent moon base, something Apollo never had. If that can't efforts excite people enough to keep funding flowing I doubt a space station in lunar orbit will move the needle
To add another data point: the Chinese lunar program also plans to land humans on the moon and later establish a manned research outpost on the surface. But there don't seem to be any plans for an orbital stations, despite China having very successful space stations in LEO
Snark aside: the goal is Mars because it might be possible to colonize the planet and to have a place that acts as a reserve for humanity should shit really hit the fan (i.e. WW3).
The moon isn't suitable as much for that purpose due to a complete lack of any atmosphere and because it's too close to Earth.
That’s not Elon’s plan. He’s too smart for that shit and wants to aerobrake down to the surface where there is abundant CO2 and probably H2O somewhere to make fuel for the return trip.
> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane
> Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft?
For pitch, yes. For width, no —- you run into quantization pretty quickly. The difference between sardines and standard economy is less than the difference between 3+3 and 3+2 — it’s not really feasible for most traditional airlines to choose a different number of seats across than the design point. And for a 3+3 setup, adding 6” to fuselage diameter makes a noticeable difference to (wider) passengers, which the airlines can’t really take away.
Pretty much. You can outfit pretty much any airframe you want to be business class only seating but not enough people will buy when it pops up on Expedia at 2+ times the price of the alternative.
I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.
There is a business-class only airline that flies from Newark to Europe and they're profitable. A little more expensive than 2x the price though, but less than 10x.
That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades).
So, yes, sticker price for upper class service is pretty expensive. In a world where upper class service was the norm on certain routes on certain planes it would probably be pretty expensive but probably cheaper than the upgrade on mixed class service.
Yup, as another poster noted, the seating density and comfort are decided by airlines. Aircraft manufacturers install standardized rails for seating and console selection, and allow for many different configurations.
> The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans.
The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.
1. Modern airliners with fly by wire have capability similar to MCAS the difference is it is not half baked but has numerous degraded states it can run in when sensors are out and pilots are trained on all that. Any new airplane will have that under the name “flight envelope protection”
2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it.
3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution.
4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs
I think the days of Boeing being able to make the plane with a small focused team is probably in the past. Way too much engineering talent has been outsourced and the R&D just isn't there. It requires a level of vertical integration that was long since divested for cost saving reasons. That's why it is so beathtakingly expensive to develop a new plane. coordination between literally thousands of contractors is a nightmarishly complex task that requires an enormous team of middle managers and lawyers. It may even be the case that modern planes are just plain too complex to realistically do the majority of the work in-house.
> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
> With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket
With rare exception people just buy what they can afford. If people had so much money that they could afford to fly first class and it wouldn't impact their budget very few would get the lowest price they can find knowing that their experience in the air will be miserable.
They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible.
The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.
No. If they could fill the entire plane with business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even less) of it, you bet they would.
The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.
So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn’t say that they need the economy passengers.
>If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane.
And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.
The number of passengers you can fit in a commercial plane is based on how quickly you can evacuate them, with the doors being a major bottleneck. Many ULCCs in Europe have planes that are right up against that limit.
> Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up.
Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.
> with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets
It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT.
Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
Hasn't Tim Apple done his share by releasing apple watch and airpods, which have been good successors to other ancillary products which apple had earlier (ipad / ipod).
And right now as well, no laptop comes close to the overall experience that the Mac provides so he has been able to maintain market leadership in
Far better than Zuck for whom the only source of innovation has been acquisitions rather than releasing original products.
The basic Airpods are crap, noise cancellation is useless, they fall off the ear. You're better off with Sony or JBL at half the price. The Pro ones are good.
I don’t have AirPods basic but I’ve got 2nd gen AirPods Pro and they’re one of the best products I’ve bought in a long time. I’d put them up there with my 2011 kindle I still use every day.
My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out
> My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out
Because the Software Update page under System Settings is all that normies will ever read and so what's in the text there is focused on normies.
Meanwhile techies may be interest in the CVEs listed in the security update list:
I believe I read somewhere that announcing new emoji drives noticeably more OS upgrades compared to more boring security and stability update release notes.
> There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod.
It's more likely than not that they will, in my opinion. As an owner of both an AVP and Quest 2, the former is a lot nicer to use than the latter with the exception of VR games, and my hunch is that Valve is going to eat Meta's lunch for gaming with Deckard (which will be at least as good as the Quest 3, but much more open, paired with a vastly more populated and popular marketplace, probably won't treat PCVR as an afterthought, and won't be saddled with the Quest's somewhat painful sideloading experience).
The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well within their capabilities.
Having experienced the Quest Pro I can say that Apple has absolutely no clue what the focus should be on.
Hint: being able to grab a well balanced headset that is so easy to put on as a cap. This makes you not think if you are going to watch or play in VR, you just do it.
I think Apple knows exactly what they're doing, but was forced to choose between making the product more about demonstrating their tech and end goals or being mass market mediocre and chose the former. Nobody would've cared about what amounted to a Quest wrapped in a Cupertino design with similar performance, specs, etc. It's very much in line with the original iPod and iPhone, both of which took a few iterations before becoming category-defining hits. It'll probably be the second or third-gen Vision device that'll fix the AVP's nits while also keeping or improving upon its strong points.
That's why they bought up Luxotica shares. Because scuba gear is for scuba diving. Even if it's white, it's still scuba gear. Remember the PDAs with resitive screens and styluses? They were a lot more convenient than scuba gear.
There’s a beautiful conference (which I’ve lost) saying that science and technology can regress. We always talk about “the progress” but things do regress all the time; Tests I’ve cleared for employment can’t be passed by newcomers, the NASA wouldn’t be able to put a rocket on the moon today, and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore.
In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance. Nothing gets maintained, it’s either new or collapsing, but no-one enjoys the middle part. Which is sad. It’s a form of inflation.
Boeing is perfectly right to design a new plane right now. Engineers who interned on the 787 have bought a house on the countryside a few years ago.
This here should trigger a red flag when you hear anyone say "The government should be run like a business".
Businesses kill themselves all the time from the loss of institutional knowledge. We see stuff like "government spends X a year paying people Y to build almost no product Z". Instead, we're paying people Y to be ready to build Z when something goes terribly wrong like war.
When they say run like a business that doesn't mean that it should be done like a reckless business. Plenty of businesses invest into things like disaster recovery or insurance which they may never need.
Running like a business means providing services to profitable customers. This is, surprisingly, the exact opposite of what government is supposed to be doing. The USPS would be plenty profitable if it didn’t have to maintain the infrastructure to deliver a letter from Honolulu to Barrow for 50 cents. Medicare? Not the best business model. Roads? Forget it.
So Uber wasn't a business for its first 14 years? There are more objectives a business can have than maximize immediate profit. There are other metrics it can try and move.
Uber was a Business trying to gain a market share in hopes to cement itself as competitor or even become monopoly. It's also clear Uber was building massive ride hailing network so when self-driving cars became a thing, out with human drivers, in with computer drivers. Obviously, that didn't happen.
Government does not really have that. All their businesses have 100% market share so to run it profitable, they would have to stop doing unprofitable thing. Like providing healthcare to poor people or delivering from Hawaii to some rural area.
Nope. When people say governments should run like a business, they always mean the most reckless version of business you can think of.
It's even the only interpretation of that phrase that makes sense, because if you take the optimizing into large risks interpretation away, there's no other way those two can act in similar ways.
> In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance.
Instead, the most important innovation are the ones that reduce maintenance needs.
Automating farms, moving mechanical computation into general purpose processors, simplifying science theories so that people can learn in a semester stuff that took decades to mature... All of those have a tremendous impact. All of those speed everything up, and make room for more innovation to appear.
Battery does seem to be a limiting factor and I don't wear mine unless I'm doing activities where it's especially useful. But, for a lot of people, something else to charge doesn't seem a big impediment.
When we heard young people don't wear watches any longer at the time. And certainly many people didn't think yet another bluetooth earphones were anything to get excited about.
AR does seem to be a potential big deal. But the tech and implementation probably has a ways to go before it's interesting outside of a bubble audience.
Yeah, we have basically infinite battery on "dumb" watches, as long as you use them. You know, so you can rely on them.
The Apple Watch to me just seems like a worse earbud. If I want to be that interrupted in tge middle of something might as well hear the thing and not have to look at it.
Andy Grove, Steve Job's friend (if not mentor), agreed:
"Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. ....abandoning today’s 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry." https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-bas...
This feels apt to my years at $large_cloud_provider, where the current cohort of folks manage some of the largest web services, but would not be able to develop them from the ground up today. The brain drain from these orgs, the shift to maintenance / KTLO, and the focus on sales/AI "features" rather makes this feel spot on.
A couple years ago, when I was interested in working at a huge cloud provider (and, in less-humble moments, imagine myself as one of the people who could've helped build that up from scratch)...
I was recruited directly by a manager(!), and to work on a relatively small new piece that I thought my systems programming skills would be up to... but then the big company required me to do a corporate grunt screening in Python, as well as memorize some behavioral corporate drone interview answers.
I decided this would be a litmus test for whether the manager would be able to insulate me well enough from megacorp drone BS, and from some of the more aggressive org chart culture that the company was said to have. Nope, it turns out, the huge cloud provider really does insist that I do the corporate drone screening first.
I could've passed the screen with a day of memory refreshing prep on Python. (The last time I used it at that point, I had been switching back and forth each day between it and Swift, and had to look up details like how to get the length of a string. Yet I built something in Python with perfect uptime, over a year, in a critical production line, despite tricky complicating factors. And other comparable track record.)
Though I think I could've passed the nonsense screening, I decided that I already had enough negative signal, to bow out of the tempting cloud provider job. (I had a very positive impression of the manager. I was only scared of corporate culture outside of the team. If you're going to be a corporate drone, and jump through nonsense hoops, you should do it at a company widely regarded as treating its employees well.)
This dynamic is a core theme in Asimov's "Foundation." The Empire's technological stagnation is defined by its inability to create new atomic devices. They had the old ones, and they had technicians to maintain them, but the actual knowledge of how to design and construct one from the ground up had been lost to institutional rot. They could patch the old world together, but they couldn't build the new one.
This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance. And in that comment the idea was that LLMs are accelerating this dynamic.
I dont want to stretch the analogy too thin but in this case instead of LLMs being a catalyst, perhaps its a monopoly.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Has a degree that’s basically informatics management.
My coworker took a class with case studies and the theory presented by that class was that all successful projects have at least one person who has fit the entire system into their head. They can tell you what happens if you pull on this thread. What the consequences are of trying to remove this feature. Lose them and you are fucked. Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same. If they can’t it’s the beginning of the end.
For software, the easiest way to design for this is to keep systems small enough that fitting it in your head is relatively feasible in a reasonable time for a competent engineer.
Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all that often, and you can build pretty big things.
My yard stick is discoverability. If you don’t touch things for a while they get fuzzy, and someone might have refactored it. So you need to be able to familiarize yourself with bits of the code you haven’t looked at recently. Helps with code reviews, onboarding, and production outages.
In particular it’s difficult to train new people to take up on-call duties if they cannot sit in the corner of the room and try either the same things you’re trying or their own pet theories without taking your attention or interfering with your tests. They need to be able to hear the repro steps and spool up their own snapshot in a similar state. That scales. Gatekeepers do not. Discoverability is necessary but insufficient to achieve this. There’s more to it but the foundation is discoverability and reproduceability.
Occasionally I make an analogy to stage acting or opera. In order for the people in the medium priced seats to see the action on the stage, all the actors have to over-emote to make everything that is happening dreadfully obvious.
In a system that is the composition of 30-300 different functional units, nobody will be close to any one part unless they’re the bus number for it. So each piece needs to be dead obvious so you can worry about the consequences of composing them. At the end of the day it’s Kernighan’s Law but rephrased so as not to ignore Conway or Brooks.
You forget, they also clean-sheet designed the starliner starting in 2014 and that project... also happens to exactly prove your point. (at least 2B over budget, and 8 years after it's original operational target of 2017, has yet to fly a fully successful mission)
I worked on the 787 but far from the engineering team.
Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that.
They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time, and doing an impression of Captain Ahab in trying to union bust in Seattle by fucking off to South Carolina. Boeing customers would figure out which plane numbers were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them.
The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines.
I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).
Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers.
I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again.
In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.
> They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time
The 787 was a straight up MDD pants-on-head plan (pushed by Stonecipher and McDonnel themselves), the entire point was to shift the costs of design and development to suppliers, with the idea that they'd fund the aircraft you could sell.
The modular structure of the aircraft was also meant to reduce or remove the need for gantry cranes. It required 2- or maybe it was 3-axis forklifts but no gantries. Gantries need tracks and structural support and those make the building the planes are built in quite expensive. I joked at the time that they could buy an old Walmart Superstore and use it to assemble the 787. Though I’m relatively sure they’d crack the concrete.
I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.
>> There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets.
A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.
> A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral
(n of 1 observation)
Yeah, I just purchased an OrangePI ultra and that fact gushes through like a flood in a canyon. I wonder if I will ever have a u-boot for the board that isn't based on 10 repositories glued together with references to unchangeable branches which are patterned after dates like 2017. There are official images with binaries and dog-knows-what-else in them. It's like the computer wasn't meant to operate for more than a few years (at most.) AFAICT, a person working on so many parts of the OrangePI ultra just stopped as the money ran out and there is a mess of repositories left behind. Don't get me started on the security mindset of the whole situation. /rant
I work with a lot of Chinese. I can confirm that they like to work in 1st gear a lot, rebuilding the same stuff over and over in reaction to changing requirements. Because of their immense capacity for work, it more than compensates for what westerners might desire in long term planning. I have gained quite a bit of respect for this way of work due to the results they have gotten.
Boeing in particular has been about "maximizing shareholder value" to detrimental levels for decades now. Absolutely pushing out its most experienced (and expensive) employees in favor of less skilled and experienced staff often with an ageist bent. Beyond this has been a cultural shift and ever expanding increase to woke HR policies and practices to levels that are more harmful than good.
I should note that I'm entirely in favor of diversity of background and thought, not to mention various educational backgrounds. That said, actually having "unofficial" policies against promoting people of a certain race and gender combination (no white men hired or advancing in management, especially old white men) is as problematic as any other racial/gender/ageist bigotry.
I don't work for Boeing as I don't have a formal education that prevents me from ever being considered. I do know several people that do. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer or anyone else.
One of the reasons the 787 was fraught with problems is because it was peak decision-making by finance and accounting people. Specifically, Boeing outsourced everything for the 787s. There were layers of subcontractors upon subcontractors to produce the different parts because, you know, outsourcing was "cheaper" or "more efficient". So of course the logistics pipeline is hellishly complicated.
All because Boeing just didn't want to employ people directly who can build up expertise.
Is this the New Midsize Airplane, the "797", again? [1] That's been on and off for over a decade. Should have been shipping by now.
The COMAC C919 is finally shipping, although it's not a great aircraft and China still imports the engines. COMAC will probably do better in the next round.
Will Embraeier build something in that size range? They could. They already build small midsize aircraft.[3]
This looks like Boeing missing the market.
And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.
I hope they design and build the airframe properly this time. A plane that needs [cheaply outsourced] software (that relies on one sensor) to correct bad behavior at the flight envelope is just not acceptable.
I still refuse to fly on the 737 MAX. I know it’s probably fine given what pilots now know about the how to control the thing, but I just refuse to support Boeing’s malicious negligence or any carrier that enables it.
There are few companies on earth I’m as mad at as Boeing. As I see it, they are not done repenting for their crimes.
I read "Airframe" by Michael Crichton probably twenty years ago, and it was around ten years old at that time. I remember that that book talked about how the planes were unstable by design and required software to maintain proper flight characteristics, and that this was so because it was more efficient. The book is fiction, but I doubt it was far off the mark at the time. I suspect that there is no going back from this state of things, and so if there must be software, it should be good software.
When that book was published, the F-117 Nighthawk was already retired after 10 years in service. The thing doesn't even look like it could fly on account of the rudimentary stealth features.
War planes dropped natural stability a while ago, IIRC the F16 was the first relaxed stability production aircraft (it's naturally stable at supersonic speeds but not subsonic).
In fact there was a flying airliner with relaxed stability (though only neutral not negative) when Airframe was published: the MD-11. Though I don't know that there have been others since.
Fighter planes are unstable by design, and require computer control to stay in the air, because they're expected to do some pretty insane things in the air. A passenger plane has a somewhat different performance envelope, and while they are by-and-large fly-by-wire these days, they aren't designed to be aerodynamically very unstable.
The 737-MAX is not "unstable by design". It has the exact same positive stability as other planes in 99% of it's flight envelope.
The remaining exception is that, at a certain AoA, speed, thrust, etc, there is a case where adding thrust pushes the nose up more than it does for the normal 737
The nose push is not abnormal, it is not unsafe, it is not unexpected. All planes with engines below the inertial "center" of the plane have this, including every 737 and every A320.
The problem was, this meant that it's flight characteristics were "different" from the older 737s. The entire point of any plane that is even a little bit 737 is to sell to airlines as "This is still a 737 and you don't need to train anyone in anything extra".
MCAS was built to change how the plane acts in this very specific regime, to act more like older 737s and counteract this nose push.
MCAS was entirely unnecessary except for business and policy goals. MCAS killed people because properly training aircrews for it would have gone against the entire point of the 737 MAX.
This is no different than modern traction control, and in no way is "wrong" from a design perspective. If I recall, the more fundamental flaw here is the degraded behavior of MCAS with dual-sensor AoA system was not they adequately trained pilots for, which was clearly part of the business case for Boeing, negligent or not.
The 737 is a clusterfuck because the giant engines throw off the physics of the plane both inertially and aerodynamically.
It’s easier to make a turbofan more efficient by making it bigger. But power density also tends to go up with new models, so there’s at least a chance that there’s a smaller, lighter engine with the same thrust and fuel economy out there, allowing them to improve (restore) the physics of the aircraft.
While not great, the MAX would have been fine if Boeing (and their airlines) had not clung so hard to the type rating. Without that, MCAS could have been left out entirely alongside its utterly botched implementation.
But that would have required a heavier certification process, and some pilot re-training. And they couldn't have that.
Of course that wouldn't have freed Boeing from the rest of its dismal record (MCAS didn't cause door blowouts), but...
Indeed. A fully new airframe likely won’t try to avoid training and certification overhead. Ripping that bandaid off will cut a lot of bullshit. But, there’s only so much engine you can shove under a narrow body aircraft. Landing gear is limited by physics and just making it taller won’t fix everything.
I just looked and from what I can find on Wikipedia this may warrant a new model from P&W or CFM because I’m not seeing a documented turbofan family with similar thrust and smaller diameter except ones with much lower bypass ratios and thus garbage fuel efficiency.
RR seems to be concentrating on bigger engines. They have a demonstrator that’s 2x the diameter of the Max’s engines. JFC.
>Landing gear is limited by physics and just making it taller won’t fix everything.
Every other plane is higher than the 737. The only reason the engines needed to be pushed forward on the 737, is that the 737 was built back in the day to be lower to the ground for easier operations at poorer airports, with things like stairs and baggage.
The 737 doesn't need to be as short as it is anymore because the vast majority of them now fly to airports with jetbridges and modern bag handling equipment.
The A320 is not as short as the 737 despite serving the same market, and can handle bigger engines.
But the entire problem stems from wanting to abuse the 737 type rating even further. If they were fine with a new type rating, they could put the engines pretty much wherever they want, put nice tall landing gear, etc.
That isn’t really true. Air stairs are still very common in much of Europe and Asia. It’s only places like the US and the Middle East that jet bridges are ubiquitous.
This is at best a Boeing talking-point. We don't have any data that states it is safe to operate the MAX without MCAS. It's quite possible that probable scenarios would result in stall faster than a human can react.
Afaik all analysis of the max’s design have come to the conclusion that its natural behaviour was nothing special or dangerous. It’s just that in some edge cases the nose would lift faster than on an NG, and that was not acceptable if it was sold as a 737 with no retraining.
One would think this question would have been answered directly in the FAA report, but it got zero mentions. We got zero data on how often MCAS made adjustments and how often in the report.
Basically, we only have Boeing's word for it, which is worthless. They self-certified everything, and we see how that went.
This will be Boeings answer to the Bombardier C Series, aka the Airbus A220 series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220 , which is one of the nicest planes for short haul in service at the moment.
Edit: indeed, not the 'Neo', I got the name wrong but the link right.
And while a plane with good bones, the A220 has not been all positives for Airbus: AFAIK they still loses money on the thing, ramping up has been hell as it's not part of any of Airbus's existing lines of procurement, and it's contributed to the already awkward 319neo being DOA.
AirBaltic was my introduction to the series as well and it felt for the first time in 30 years or so that I was in a modern aircraft. The last time before that was in a then brand new 747, which I absolutely loved to fly.
Boeing's only answer to the A220 was to get the US administration to impose a 220% import tarif on it. It didn't even compete with Boeing models. Fuck Boeing.
Well since the 787 program will very likely never break even, let alone turn in profit, for Boeing, the 737's replacement will be a do or die project for Boeing. They cannot afford another money-losing product.
There are only two¹ major manufacturers of commercial airliners: one in the US and one in the EU. Both are essentially state backed. Both blocs want to have their own manufacturer, for strategic reasons, and they won't let it go under.
1. There will probably be three in a few years, since China is building up Comac.
This has been a long time coming. The big buyer for 737 consistently has been Southwest. Before a recent ownership shakeup, Southwest wanted to only operate the 737 airframe, and avoid as many new features as possible to keep training costs low, and maintenance costs low.
New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames. Boeing doesn't want to make 737s, but they are locked in because of this demand.
Source: Family member trains pilots at Southwest after retiring from a major airline carrier after a career as pilot/check-airman.
People blame Boeing for the 737 MAX. They were elbows deep in a clean sheet design. Yeah, they shouldn’t have built the plane but the demand was made by Southwest and American who both said straight up if you don’t make a new 737, we’re switching to Airbus.
AFAIK the 757 frame is too heavy to be powered by the LEAP engines. Those planes were powered by a class of engine between the old 737 and 777 engines, and nobody makes them anymore because they're not in demand, so a 757 MAX is just not financially viable.
The article said Boeing is talking to Rolls Royce for the new plane. American Airlines used to have a fleet of 757s powered by Rolls Royce engines assembled in Montreal Canada. I used to work on those engines many many years ago.
Overly nerdy question: I'm curious regarding AoA sensor failure, is there an ability to manually source select the AoA, if not, how about the FMC? This might be called master source select, or which side is controlling (captain or first officer).
Boeing currently has an awkward gap between the 737 and the widebodies that was previously filled by the 757 - the 737 Max 10 (which still isn't certified!) only has about two thirds of the range of the A321XLR, and a slightly lower passenger capacity. Airlines that currently have 757 fleets and who need that range are going for Airbus instead, and Boeing just doesn't have an answer for it. So while, yes, any new Boeing design is likely to be fly by wire and composite and everything, it also seems likely that it's going to try to fit that market.
The 737 Max 7, the smallest of the Max series, is longer than the 737-200, the stretched version of the original design. A brand new design is going to be able to ignore that market (which basically doesn't exist any more, the Max 7 only has a handful of orders) and scale upwards to also be a 757 replacement. But it's also going to have basically no commonality with the 737, so it's going to have to genuinely be better than the Airbus product because existing Boeing customers aren't going to benefit from being able to move existing pilots to it without retraining or benefit from common maintenance plans and so on. It obviously should be better - the A320 program started over 40 years ago, it's not that much newer than the 737 - but given Boeing's myriad series of failures in recent years and how painful the 787 program was, it's not impossible that they'll fuck this up entirely.
Is the MAX really using a 286 CPU? Why would they pick that for a plane launched in 2014. I get that it's based on the 737 Next Gen, but they just opted to not update the electronics?
If the chips are cheap and easily available, and you know their failure modes, and they've been field tested for decades, why change?
It's very different from many software development attitudes, but remember that airframe manufacturers and avionics companies employ many people just to calculate risk and failure rates. The failure rates of these things are critical to the safety of your airframe.
Would probably add that it likely has reliable real-time constraints as part of this. While I can imagine simpler ARM and RISC-V chips having similar properties, depending on the application it would likely be hard to certify any modern CPU design for a lot of medical or aerospace applications.
At a dinner with a team of Airbus folks we were working with at a previous job, they talked about how difficult it was getting to source CPUs for the A320 after 30 years.
It's definitely a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing, but I ask myself a similar question: at some point whoever is producing these chips is going to stop finding it worthwhile and end production, no?
But then I also assume the people who work on these things know arguably infinitely more than I do.
The scenario that comes to my mind is: these chips had a lot of potential customers 30 years ago, and now may be down to just one or two customers left buying too few units to make it worthwhile.
Presumably, they have "guaranteed" buyers but also, if so, why would Airbus have issues sourcing CPUs, for example?
That mindset is inevitably going to leave you in a ditch though. Either you run out of suppliers for the chip that are willing to produce on a shitty inefficient old node under certified conditions (mostly because it inevitably gets really expensive to keep the machines for production running!), or you run out of developers able and willing to write code for these old designs where the toolchain probably is also certified and has nowhere near close to the bells and whistles of modern IDEs or the automatic benefits from modern programming languages such as pointer safety.
Anything should have a replacement budget and timeline attached.
China recently started building and delivering airplanes. It will be interesting to see if Boeing can actually compete with what is coming out of China over the next few years: https://www.voanews.com/a/7528331.html
In the short-term, I imagine USA-based airlines will not be allowed to buy any airplanes from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-comac-military-...
And perhaps they would not even be allowed to fly in our airspace. But if China decides that it wants to build planes at lower prices than Boeing (or Airbus), then I imagine they will. Their marketshare would grow elsewhere in the globe, reducing Boeing's sales. Can Boeing deal with that? Would the USA borrow China's playbook, and nationalize (or something similar) Boeing to keep it solvent?
The obvious move is to take cues from the 787 program in terms of composites, to cut fuel burn. Adds some creature comforts like larger windows as a side bonus.
Has there been any sign of change in their corporate culture?
Last I heard they're pushing hard to ramp up production and FAA is back to letting them self-certify stuff. And they're under worse financial pressure now than when they made the last round of questionable decisions.
...I'm all for competition & avoiding a monopoly but colour me unconvinced that the root cause has been fixed.
During the MCAS scandal I saw a report that the software developers who wrote it were offshored and being paid something like $13/hr.
While there weren't actually coding flaws in MCAS in that it did what the spec said, I've met people who work in avionics and they would have pushed back against the specification because they tend to think about how their component integrates into the system.
Obviously it's impossible to prove that, had the software been developed by people specializing in avionics they would have caught the problem but it's just another hole in the swiss cheese model: when you outsource your avionics software development to an offshore contractor who was making a webstore yesterday and will be making an iphone app tomorrow, you eliminate the possibility that the implementers could do an informed critique of the spec.
You’re absolutely right! The engines do not appear to be working. What I actually meant to do is, of course, turn the engines on. As you can see, they should now be working correctly. Sorry about that, thanks for correcting me!
You’re absolutely right! The engines do not appear to be working. What I actually meant to do is, of course, turn the engines on. As you can see, they should now be working correctly. Sorry about that, thanks for correcting me!
Hey hey hey, the $9/hr software engineer will be doing all the work, unless they can find a $1/hr guy. The first guy should just become a vendor and subcontract down to the $1/hr guy, that's what the rest of Boeing's supply chain is doing already.
I mean, they botched one piece of software in order to retrofit an old plane with catastrophic results. God knows what the Wall Street zombie version of Boeing will do with a whole new plane, especially in the age of AI enshittification.
You're absolutely right! Unfortunately, the MAX replacement will have strict weekly limits on how many hours it can be flown fully loaded - and most airlines will hit the weekly limit after just a couple flights.
And in upcoming news: "The new 737 Max replacement was built and received by several air carriers over the weekend, flying their maiden voyages. There were no survivors."