Originally Posted by
OldnGrounded
United pulls plans for Boeing’s biggest 737 Max jet, after Max 9 groundings prove to be ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’
United Airlines Holdings Inc. on Tuesday said it was rethinking its longer-term plans for Boeing’s biggest 737 Max jet, the Max 10, after the government’s grounding of dozens of Max 9s this month raised questions over whether the aircraft maker could still deliver planes on time.
United Chief Executive Scott Kirby said during the airline’s earnings call on Tuesday that it wasn’t canceling its orders for the Max 10. But he said the airline was taking the jet “out of our internal plans.”
“We’ll be working on what that means exactly with Boeing,” he said. “But Boeing is not going to be able to meet their contractual deliveries on at least many of those airplanes.”
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You would think that after a couple decades of conspicuous quality and safety failures in both civilian and military aerospace, along with a practice of adding of years going on a decade+ of delays to multiple programs, and catastrophic multiple billion dollar losing underbids that are still bleeding even more money, something would have changed in a major way.
One wonders if Northrop is thinking that "Northrop + Boom in civil aviation" might be extended to "plain old Northrop in civil aviation." After all, if Boeing starts today to sort out its Gordian knot of quality, safety, planning, contractual, and financial problems, it will be at least ten years down the road when a happy path emerges. That's long enough for a domestic competitor who isn't LockMart to go from a design to metal in the air. Or maybe Bombardier or Embraer takes a go at the midsize market. If Boeing can make a plane longer and add engines with bigger fans, why can't Canada or Brazil do that too?
One wonders if the Boeing board talks about these strategic things, or just about what remaining dollars they can squeeze out before the share price runs into a brick wall.
How does it happen that America's premier (and, formerly, the world's premier) commercial airframe manufacturer sets itself on a path into the wilderness, and 27 years later, no one is looking for the way back? Is it really as simple as a room full of financial elite are sucking out all the money they can from the former US #1 export industry, and aside from that they don't care?