Originally Posted by
neville_nobody
Cost money compared to what?
What value did they put on grounding a fleet of aircraft, losing public confidence, 300 something deaths, subsequent lawsuits etc etc?
I suspect the heart of this issue is short term thinking and noone thinking about the long term because they only get paid in the short term.
I'd bet right now that a cleansheet 737 with 2019 technology/system suite and aerodynamics is looking alot cheaper than the mess they find themselves in today.
Not as simple as that. MAX total order book value is somewhere around $600
billion - that is the size of the opportunity at risk long term if they didn't do the MAX.
These accidents, the groundings the lawsuits, the fallout, whatever subsequent band-aid they patch the plane up with (make no mistake, there will be one, and probably a political price with the rest of the world's regulators along with it), might cost several billion, or maybe into the tens or even towards a hundred (with lost orders), but that is
still cheaper than abandoning the market to Airbus.
Fact is that the timing was probably the biggest factor - the neo came along right when Boeing were putting everything into fixing their 787 screw up, if they
had gone for a cleansheet 737 they faced a huge execution risk and concurrently failing at 787 and new737 would have been very very bad.
Considering that they opted for the quick-cheap-easy solution (compared to cleansheet design) and
still seem to have managed to mess it up, avoiding the cleansheet may yet prove to have been a wise decision.