Originally Posted by
tdracer
That's pretty accurate pattern... With the introduction of the 737-900 (Next Generation), it could do nearly everything a 757 could do (except for range), and cost much less to buy. When Boeing made the decision to pull the plug on the 757, orders had dried up and the rate was down to one/month (while production officially ended in 2004, the decision was made in the aftermath of 9/11 - long lead parts mean it takes a couple years to wind down a production line). Since the 757 required a dedicated assembly line, that meant a huge amount of overhead to build one aircraft per month, while the 737 rate was approaching one aircraft per day - spreading that factory overhead cost over a much larger number of aircraft.
The other problem for the 757 was that it had a huge wing - fine for the 180-220 passenger market, but trying to shrink it down for the 150-180 passenger market would have meant carrying far more wing than you needed - more weight, more drag, more costs (that's why 'shrinks' seldom work, while stretches usually do).
In the 2010 time-frame, Boeing was working on a new, clean sheet of paper replacement for the 737 (I had friends that were working it). But Airbus pretty much caught Boeing off-guard when they launched the A320 NEO. A new clean sheet design would have taken years longer to reach the market - then years more to bring the production rate up to the 40-50/month rate that the 737 and A320 series were at. It would have meant conceding nearly the entire single aisle market to Airbus for the better part of 10 year, while the 737 MAX could reach the market shortly after the NEO and the 737 rate was already in the 40-50/month range. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight and the MAX fiasco, going with an all-new aircraft looks a lot better, but at the time the MAX was launched, it seemed like the best option.
The B737 is not one of may favourite Boeings, I prefer their ring in, the
MD95 PT17 Stearman, and almost everything else they have built before the B737, but I've owned a B737, and it did what we needed it to. The fundamental aircraft is OK, the coin flip side of "old" is "established". The MAX was a shocker, and that followed 20+ years of alarming trends in the move from an engineering centric company that on occasions had issues that everyone in the industry faces, to one going out of its way to place weak links in the production chain. The MAX was still an aberration IMHO, but it arose from making a decision to considerably alter an existing design, which is reasonable, and then a discovery of an issue that really should have been determined far earlier as being a consequence of the design. The process of repurposing a system, while frugal and arguably elegant at the time, was ill conceived given a cursory at best assessment of the consequences of that expediency. There are a number of people at TBC that had the competency to circumvent this issue ever arising, some have retired in the period of economic rationality that Stonecipher introduced. I would have preferred an aerodynamic fix to an aerodynamic issue. The historical THS drive stall issue and the acceptance of the 6-flags solution, forgotten over time remains an irritant. Systems wise, the plane is as subject to service difficulties as any other, thats what planes do, they teach us about design.
The MAX will resolve it's issues, and we can hope that someday TBC will substantively change their board, the C level management and everyone else that has allowed the decay of the company since the mid 90's. The minor inconvenient truth in that is, the shareholders are the ones that drive the companies event horizon, and no one ever holds the shareholders to account for bitching on one hand over the mis-steps of the company and then bitching about their dividend and share price, which drive the event horizon to being suitable for "10-second Tom's" wonderment. The companies lawyers who were involved with the debacle over the QA Inspector firings in the early 2000's on their reporting component fabrication that can only considered to be fraudulent by a supplier to Boeing, with the company and US Govts response being to attack the QAI's, and then never rectify the findings of those inspection reports, those involved from the company side, they own the MAX, KC46, B787 and the rest of the sordid mess that has grown from obsequience towards the beancounters.