Originally Posted by
Lookleft
Thats still "around the corner" in aviation terms. You seem to have missed the point entirely. The A320 and B737 are still the biggest sellers and they are 40-60 years old in terms of when the design process started. With your example of the A350 and 787 they will still be on the production line by the turn of the century. A 20 year old F/O will be 100 and probably have finished his/her career on a 350 or 787.
The systems on the 737 MAX have almost zero commonality with the systems in a 737-100/200. Yes, the structure is largely the same, and the flight control cables are still there, but the avionics and particularly the automation are a world different.
I was an aircraft designer for 40 years - the stuff I worked on in 1977 had almost no relationship to what I was doing 40 years later before I retired - I basically had to learn a new job (more than once).
50 years from now, people will be going to the airport in fully autonomous taxi's, over roads where the accident rate has dropped to near zero because they don't let humans drive on most of them. But you'll still have people trying to explain to grieving survivors that they family members are dead because a human pilot decided to commit suicide and took a planeload of passengers with them when they did it, or because a human pilot tried to land at over 200 knots with the wheels up.
You can correct errors in avionics and automatics. We've not had as much luck doing that with the humans that pilot the things.
BTW, while the people in charge at Boeing and Airbus probably hope they are still building 787s and A350s eighty years from now, I rather doubt that will be the case - and if it is about the only thing that'll still be the same is some of the structure.