Originally Posted by
El Bunto
With the 737 Max orderbook clocking-in at well over $600 billion I don't think a few million spent for a patch-up fix will matter much.
We don't know how long the MAXs will be grounded. Perhaps 3 months. Aside from lots of missed new orders, what will that cost Boeing?
But I agree, the reengineering and deployment of the fix will not be financial killers. The most financial damage will likely come from the time it takes to work through the process.
The problem with the fix for this is not in figuring out what to do. From the time the flight data becomes available to the time they have a specific design and plan shouldn't be more than a week.
And the implementation should only take a week as well. But then they need to demonstrate that the what they have done works, addresses the problem, and doesn't introduce other problems.
Those involve generating more test procedures, test plans, test execution and documentation, and reviews at many levels.
It appears that there is a close connection between what happened at Lion, so they have some head start. But that also implies a flaw in their reasoning: if they fully understood what happened with Lion, why didn't they ground the MAXs until the fix was deployed? Bad luck? There is only one palatable answer, they did not understand the gravity of the problem - which puts that original fix into serious doubt and scrutiny. If the fix prepared for the Lion was not based on a full understanding of the problem, then it is not going to pass the scrutiny that it must go through before it can be deployed - and especially deployed and deemed sufficient to to restore the MAXs airworthiness.
If the reviewers do their job, this is what will realistically happen: Those at Boeing, FAA and others will be reviewing this change. But before they even look at the change, they will want to look at the design, development, and testing histories for the systems that are involved. They will need to do that simply to make themselves expert enough to understand how this process broke down. Then they will look at the process that was use to design, develop and test this change - and if they do not find reason for increased confidence - the will send the entire process back to Boeing.