Originally Posted by
Nil by mouth
When the dust has finally settled, the cost of this Max debacle, redesigning, legal and compensatory, plus cancellations could have funded a completely new model, the Boeing hindsight?
That could be a distinct possibility, however it's important to remember the state of play that led Boeing to green-light the 737 MAX project in the first place.
Firstly, in 2011 Boeing had started to pull together ideas as part of the "Yellowstone" project to have a clean-sheet 737 replacement ready by 2020. But it would appear that they found themselves utterly wrong-footed by the apparently overwhelmingly positive customer response to the A320neo. Boeing were confronted with several major US airlines asking them if they had a response (and if not, why not?). Boeing's original plan to have a 737 replacement by 2020 would be no use if a significant number of airlines (particularly in the US) had already standardised their short-haul fleets on the A320neo series, which would not only be available and ready by 2015, but would require minimal conversion training from the original A320 series.
The other "elephant in the room" as I see it (and I'm surprised that there hasn't been much mention of this) is Southwest. Because a major aspect of their business model has always been an "all-737" fleet, that airline is the closest thing Boeing has (within the US) to a captive market. Southwest would undoubtedly be deeply unhappy if their competitors were given a five-year head start on significantly lower operating costs as a result of being Boeing's most loyal 737 customer, and even if Boeing was able to bring forward the launch of the 737 replacement, the cost of conversion training to the new type would have been a significant obstacle.
In effect, the 737 became a victim of its own success in part because Boeing seem to have been content to rest on their laurels for too long. The signs were there all the way back to the '90s when complaints were made about the limited FDR parameters during the rudder controversy. The limits weren't due to the FDR units themselves, rather the expense of fitting sensors to the '60s-vintage control mechanisms. So it went with the MAX - there is nothing fundamentally wrong with its flying characteristics, but the differences in those characteristics exceed what the FAA can allow while using the grandfathered type certificate. And while a type based around a digital flight control system can be programmed to compensate for those differences relatively easily, the same is not true of the '60s technology underpinning the 737. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, MCAS looks like an unbelievably crude workaround - however it would not have been necessary had Boeing not painted themselves into a corner.