Ironic that while the aviation community is threatened in its existence, the Corona pandemic will turn out to be the saviour of Boeing.
(If) they are going to get away with a software uodate😡 Nobody cares at the moment..

I was actually wondering if the situation wasn't a good opportuinity to can the entire project. It would be much cheaper now.

With a backlog of over 4000 orders how can it possibly be cheaper to can it? there are tens of airliners that have gone from design to production and sold much less than a tenth of that. 4000 orders is in the region of 200billion, how is that ever going to get canned? even if they had to do a clean sheet design that sort of cash will still make it way more than viable.

AND yes for the last couple of months we do have a pandemic going on but these are projects with a horizon of decades. Several Booms and Busts are unavoidable and expected.

Many of the customers having a perspective of survival in the current situation might be happy to defer their orders for a 737 replacement or happily accept cancelation without penalty.
I guess I am not a follower of the "V-shaped" recovery theory.

With the current situation in the South China Sea, the Chinese government are unlikely to approve any solution Boeing come up with, particularly as the aircraft already in China aren't needed anyway due to the reduction in air traffic.

A downturn of 1 - 2 years would suit COMAC very well as it gives them time to catch up with the C919 program and be ready once airlines start buying again, possibly grabbing a few orders which would have gone to Boeing because their aircraft wasn't ready earlier.

Bit of the topic, did Boeing ever develop any combi or freighter variants of the Max?

Nope........

I don't think Boeing has built a narrow-body freighter or combi since the mid 1980s ...

There are military versions of the 737NG with a big cargo door used in combi coniguration. USN is one operator.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the C-40A (based on the -700C). Seventeen built for the USN, plus five more -700Cs in total with Aramco, TAAG Angola and Air Algerie.

Thanks for answering my question, case closed.

FYI, yes the 737-700C has a big cargo door, but the "C" in 737-700C stands for "convertible," not "combi." I believe the FAA approval allows the airplane to be operated in either all passenger or all cargo configurations. I don't believe it is FAA approved for "combi," or partial passenger and partial cargo on the main deck, operation. See the FAA TCDS for TC A16WE on page 47, available on rgl.faa.gov.

The military utilization is not necessarily limited by the FAA approval, though, so it's possible a military service somewhere has a combi configuration. However, in general these days the US military is having the FAA approve all basic configurations of airplanes that are also civil products, so I doubt the US military is using a combi configuration.

The Navy (which operates 17 out of the 22 -700Cs built) seems to think they can be configured as combis:

https://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_d...0&tid=600&ct=1

Duck
After the Helderberg disaster, the regulations governing "Combi" aircraft were significantly changed. While out of my area of expertise, those who are in the know have told me it would be close to impossible to certify a new Combi style aircraft to the updated regulations.
All the Combi's currently in operation where certified prior to the regulations being updated in response to the Helderberg.
As DR notes, military operations do not need to comply with commercial certification restrictions.

The notion that all, or most, or even 20% of those orders will remain on the books is, in my view, optimistic. Most of the companies that have placed orders are no longer forecasting the same future and / or planning the same expansion, or even fleet replacement, as they were pre-Covid. And many are simply no longer in a financial position to pursue the orders.

If successfully certified, the MAX will be around for anywhere between 20 and 30 years, I think. For that long a period, we'll likely witness at least two or three complete boom-and-bust cycles, with all their associated effects. The fact that many airlines won't take their deliveries in the next 2 years doesn't mean that they won't in the subsequent 20 years either. The existing aircraft will not last forever, the pressure to lower costs will not go anywhere and aviation will not remain forever in a state of global crisis.

Either way, any deliveries for now are a far cry away. FAA certification this fall might easily mean that EASA certification will not happen before 2021. And who knows what life will look like by then.

The situation post 9/11 was not much different - aircraft were being parked by the hundreds (if not thousands), airlines were in no position to take delivery of new aircraft and had no money to pay for them. Yet nearly every order that Boeing and Airbus had on the books on the first of September, 2001 was eventually delivered. Most months to years later than the original schedule, but aside from a few operators that went bankrupt and disappeared, the aircraft on the books were delivered.

I recognize I'm continuing a major thread drift, but this information may be of interest to some:

TD - It wouldn't be impossible - just more costly. The main deck cargo compartments on the various combi jet transports produced in past decades were Class B compartments as defined in 14 CFR 25.857 at the time. Class B compartments are required to have fire /smoke detection, but are not required to have built in fire extinguishing/suppression. The change in the definition of a Class B cargo compartments in the rule effective in 2016 went from one where the crew had to have adequate access to enter the compartment and fight a fire to now requiring the crew to be able to effectively fight any fire in the compartment with a handheld fire extinguisher from one access location without entering the compartment. This has the effect of severely limiting the size of compartments that can meet the Class B definition relative to the old definition. "Combi" large main deck cargo compartments on passenger airplanes as previously designed typically were much too large to meet that new requirement, forcing any such compartment on a new airplane to be classified as a Class C cargo compartment like the lower deck compartments, which requires an extinguishing (suppression) system.

So it's not impossible to obtain a type certificate for a combi today, but it's apparently not cost effective to design, certificate, build, and operate a combi compared to running cargo separately on all-cargo airplanes that have less costly fire safety requirements, as evidenced by combis not being proposed in recent years.

Changes were required by AD after the 1987 South African Airways 747-200 Combi accident prior to this rule change, but this 2016 change was one of the eventual part 25 changes that resulted from that accident. The FAA lessons learned library has an extensive section on this accident and the various actions that resulted. Here's a link to it:

https://lessonslearned.faa.gov/ll_ma...abID=1&LLID=33

Well, if 80% or more of the orders get cancelled, and the industry is slow to pick up, that would be a good opportunity to launch a new clean sheet model to replace the Max.

Using what funding, exactly?
Boeing is borrowing money in the tens of $billions just to stay in business, while Airbus is apparently going to be getting billions in bailout funding from the EU.
It'll be a tad difficult to come up with another ten or twenty billion dollars to launch a new clean sheet design when they're struggling to remain solvent...