The 737-MAX has been in the news due to a door plug blowing out in flight, but there’s another story about the same plane family (not exact model) that you might have missed:
SEATTLE – Little noticed, days before the holiday break, Boeing petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration for an exemption from key safety standards for the 737 Max 7 – the still-uncertified smallest member of its newest jet family.
Since August, earlier models of the Max flying passengers in the U.S. have had to limit use of the jet’s engine anti-ice system after Boeing discovered a defect with potentially catastrophic consequences. The flaw could cause the inlet at the front end of the pod surrounding the engine – known as a nacelle – to break and fall off.
In an August Airworthiness Directive, the FAA stated debris from such a breakup could penetrate the fuselage, putting passengers seated at windows behind the wings in danger, and could damage the wing or tail of the plane, “which could result in loss of control of the airplane.”
Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, the union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots, said the flaw in the engine anti-ice system has “given us great concern.”
He said the pilot procedure the FAA approved as an interim solution – urging pilots to make sure to turn off the system when icing conditions dissipate to avoid overheating that within 5 minutes could seriously damage the structure of the nacelle – is inadequate given the serious potential danger.
Adding yet another item to the flight crew’s workload instead of delivering a working aircraft is so on brand for the new MBA-driven Boeing that this would merit little more than a LOL if it weren’t for the possibility that a plane could fall out of the sky. Also, nice to see that the regulatory capture of the FAA that’s been in evidence for the whole MAX program is still in place. I guess the $2.5 billion that Boeing had to pay for the first MAX debacle wasn’t enough of an incentive for them to get their MAX shit together. Maybe they’ll get it right after a few hundred more people die.
Alison Rose
Now that’s a post title I never thought I’d see.
XeckyGilchrist
Boeing just keeps making the case for high speed rail.
Chief Oshkosh
Yep, Boeing is the poster child for the “success” of the MBA mentality. Those dumb motherfuckers had everything you could possibly want in a company. Damned-near guaranteed profits and market share FOREVER, a dedicated, expert workforce and highly-invested community.
But no, they just HAD to be fuck-up greed-heads.
And now they’re getting their asses handed to them by Airbus.
Urza
Seems like the families of anyone that dies should be able to sue the regulatory agency if there was not enough effort put in. And the company if it hid evidence.
Really all of this needs to be adjusted so corporations are not a shield to bad behavior by individuals, and that corporations should not be allowed to be purely about the profit of the shareholders at the expense of everyone else. Not that its even remotely possible in today’s politics.
suzanne
I hate flying.
I know, it’s safer than driving. I hate doing that, too.
I hate that Boeing used to be a company driven by a pursuit of engineering excellence and now is a company driven by a shameless pursuit of short-term profit.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Profit ruins everything except the accounts of profiteers.
Ivan X
@suzanne: I like flying. I hate flying largish single aisle planes with a 3×3 layout like 737 (and A320) though. And that’s most of the domestic sky. I sometimes buy an empty middle seat (most airlines you have to call in to do this, though JetBlue makes it easy in their website) if the ticket is price is real cheap.
lollipopguild
“Quality is Job ONE!” Unless of course it’s not.
Gary K
I was reading about this yesterday while getting ready for my cross-country flight on a United 737-MAX.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Gary K: The FAA grounded the MAX-9 fleet but maybe you’re on a MAX-8. United flies both according to their website…
Another Scott
@$8 blue check mistermix: Also, it’s only the 737-9s with the door plugs. The other ones aren’t affected by the mandated groundings and inspections.
Still…
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
I refuse to fly on any version of the MAX. As I live in Memphis, pretty much anywhere I go, goes through ATL, which means that I fly Delta. I read yesterday that they are set to receive MAX planes (didn’t say which version) starting in 2025. Ugh.
Snarki, child of Loki
“the families of anyone that dies should be able to
sue the regulatory agencyshoot a Boeing MBA”Edited for improved safety efficiency.
eclare
@Another Scott:
I bet a cross country flight uses the bigger seat configuration, so it wouldn’t have the plugs.
eclare
@Snarki, child of Loki:
Yep. Boeing has gone downhill since it merged with McDonnell Douglas and let the finance people takeover from the engineers.
suzanne
@Ivan X: I don’t like any part of it, as an experience. (I obviously do it when it’s the most feasible option.) I dread it. I sit there for God knows how long, feeling low-grade uncomfortable, without good snacks, invariably with some creepy man up in my grill.
I am taking Amtrak tomorrow, and it isn’t something I would say I’m excited about, but I don’t dread it. It’s utterly forgettable.
cain
Interestingly enough, that door fell near our home – maybe about 2 miles or less? I didn’t know about it until late yesterday.
cain
@eclare:
Its’ always bad to have MBAs take over from engineers.
trollhattan
@lollipopguild:
Post-merger revision: “Quality is ONE job.”
McDonnell Douglas (itself a merger product) was the guppy that swallowed the Boeing whale, when it came down to management philosophy.
Alison Rose
@Ivan X:
If I still got on planes, I’d do the same thing, so I would have somewhere to put all the tiny soaps I stole from the Pez dispensers in the bathrooms.
Hoodie
@eclare: Not necessarily, the larger seat configuration may be for high-volume routes (e.g., LAX-LAS) with lesser fuel requirements. A lot of this is driven by treating air travel as if it is mass transit, which is exacerbating greenhouse emissions and leading to problems like this. Boeing is trying to suck the last bit of life out of the original 737 airframe and compete with the A320neo (which IIRC is not as highly a modified airframe like the MAXes), but you wonder if regulatory capture led the FAA to allow modifications that basically turned the MAX into a new plane that should have been treated like a clean sheet design. This made it cheaper to build the MAXes, but now we’ll be stuck with this intrinsically inferior series of planes for decades.
NotMax
@suzanne
Have a happy!
eclare
@suzanne:
Happy birthday! I finally found you on a live thread.
eclare
@trollhattan:
That is what I have read about the merger.
Feathers
As someone who worked at a business school, one thing I remember whenever I read about Boeing was that moving company headquarters is always a recipe for disaster. Also, it’s usually done after hiring a new CEO, who moves to HQ city, then decides to move the company to his home base.
It is never the right decision.
suzanne
@NotMax: Thank you!
The weather is super-gross, so I am indoors getting a pedicure. Might go home and take a nap with the puppy. I did that yesterday and it was fan-fucking-tastic.
suzanne
@eclare: Aw thank you! I have been in-and-out today. I was thinking about going running here in a bit. Not sure that’s gonna happen. The weather is absolute crap and I always interpret that as a sign to stay indoors with a book.
scav
@cain: Applies to more than just engineers.
Ivan X
@eclare: I personally wouldn’t make a flying decision based upon whether it was MAX or not. My risk is still considerably greater every time I drive. I feel like MAX is like Covid — once really bad and something to make a point to avoid, and now less bad, and a fact of life I can live with and no longer choose to shape my life around. YMMV, of course.
The good news for you is Delta is also investing in A220’s, and that’s a great plane, with a 2×3 layout, sized between a 3×3 mainline jet like the 737 and A320, and a 2×2 regional jet. (I wish Delta had a more rewarding frequent flyer program, though; so I avoid them unless they’ve really got the best deal in town — but I am not in a hub-captive city, so I have choices.
Origuy
I’m flying to Cincinatti in April on Southwest, which I think exclusively flies 737s. My itinerary currently shows a 737-700, 800, 700, and MAX8. I will be interested to see if that changes
I’m also driving all over southern Ohio and to Indianapolis and back. I’m sure that’s riskier.
Ivan X
@Feathers: United is, I think, contemplating moving HQ from Chicago to Denver, so I’m sure that will be wonderful. Probably less due to CEO predilection (he doesn’t live there) and more to having an equally important central hub there, and due to Colorado incentivizing them like hell to do it.
Another Scott
@Hoodie: My understanding was the big reason for the MAX was to keep the training costs down for airlines like Southwest that fly zillions of 737s of various vintages. That meant they had to claim to the FAA that it was a tweak of the existing design and that roughly the same training and certification would be fine. The cockpit is apparently extremely noisy – like the old planes – because they couldn’t change the window angles, etc.
Of course, with the engines being so far forward on the MAX, it flies like a completely different airplane, so they try to hide that with software. With the predictable results early on when the pilots didn’t understand what the software was doing to compensate for the different flight characteristics…. :-(
It sure seems like the FAA let itself be played by Boeing. The FAA should have told Boeing – NOPE, it intrinsically flies differently, it’s a different plane. Suck it up, do it right, tell the cheap-assed airlines to train their pilots on it, and come back when it’s done.
Sometimes, as with bargaining with drug companies, someone just has to say NO. It’s anyone’s guess when that happens though. :-/
My $0.02. Corrections welcome.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@scav: It’s everywhere. Money comes before all else. The product and the service only need to be passable if options are limited to a few mega-providers who are all on the same page about scraping civilization for all it’s worth so they can party hard until it all burns.
Leto
Another component to this is the fact they’ve moved more of their production to South Carolina, a right to work state, in another attempt to increase shareholder profits. As BMW found out, it’s going to be a long time before the workforce is capable enough. And I highly doubt that Boeing put in the education investment that BMW did.
trollhattan
@Ivan X: Stupid Southwest has a role in the Max saga, since they stick with their one-platform bidnez model and at least around these parts, dominate a good deal of traffic in and out of our mid-tier airport. There’s a Max around every corner.
The other significant carrier to the PNW: Alaska. 🙄
Gary K
@$8 blue check mistermix: Yes, it was an 8.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
My pilot friends all wanted Boeing to refresh the 757 as the 737 replacement. They love flying that thing, the 737 not so much.
Steve in the ATL
@Chief Oshkosh: yep—I’m on an Airbus plane right now! Which is the norm these days.
trollhattan
An update.
Finding that chunk will be, well, good luck with that. Maybe they’ll spot DB Cooper.
Miss Bianca
@Alison Rose: I thought the post was going to be about Musk.
wjca
Not unlike when Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, and the incompetents from the latter ended up taking over.
coin operated
$2.5B? Hell…they lost over $60B in orders, 1200 aircraft, after the MCAS failures crashed 2 of the early production MAX planes. You’d think *that* would have gotten their attention?
@Snarki, child of Loki:
That might be the only way they get the MAX design right.
@Another Scott:
They were not played…they colluded! From wiki:
3Sice
The decision to go with the MAX rather than a 757 derivative was a terrible read of the aviation market, and fucked the company.
Marc
My first airline trips alone (a plane freak at the age of 16) were from Boston to LaGuardia on the old East Airlines Shuttle. Hourly flights, no reservations, tickets, or security, just go to the gate, walk on the plane (guaranteed seating, if a plane was full they’d roll out another one, the flight attendants came down the aisle with cash registers when the plane reached cruising altitude). I used to time my arrival so I could avoid the primary plane type, the Lockheed Electra turboprop, a plane that had been grounded a number of times due to some spectacular crashes (I also thought the older Lockheed Super Constellations were way cooler).
Later on, DC-10s developed that reputation, after two big crashes, one due to a door design flaw, the other due to American Airlines taking short-cuts on maintenance (who’d have thought replacing engines using forklifts in a non-approved fashion might cause a problem?).
Then of course, Airbus was the manufacturer to avoid for a number of years, mostly due to bad software design choices in flight control systems. I remember videos of a prototype Airbus at an airshow, test pilot makes a low slow pass, quickly advances the throttle to pull up, computer says nope you might damage the engines, plane ends up plowing into the trees past the end of the runway. Another one lost when the crew incorrectly enters a glide slope for landing into the computer, pilot sees a hill in the way, tries to pull up hard at the last minute, computer says no. Or, the one that went into the ocean because the control sticks just connect to the computer, not to each other, when the pilot ends up pushing one way, the co-pilot the other, the computer just averaged out the two inputs.
My point is there has aways been at least one plane to avoid in the 50+ years I’ve been riding on the things. I figure Boeing designs are under much closer scrutiny at this point than some of the others, which might make them marginally safer overall going forward, but all of the aircraft companies have MBAs trying to maximize profits. The truth is that airline travel is still safe to an extent that no one would have imagined possible 50 years ago, so I no longer worry all that much about the type of plane.
Ascap_scab
Allow me to Musk-ify that for you:
If it weren’t for the possibility of a rapid decent and landing.
Chief Oshkosh
@Steve in the ATL: It kills me to say it, but Airbus simply makes a better product, from conception through production and support, than Boeing.
Hell, I used to be “that guy” who always said “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going!”
The Boeing 717 (which is really an MD-95 developed from the Douglas DC-9, MD-80, and MD-90) is still the best option for US domestic flights AFAIC. I always “shop” for them when planning a flight on Delta. The 717 has recorded zero fatalities and no hull losses, is reliable, and gets up and out fast. Pilots love them, though they come with a higher workload. There’s probably a lesson there…
Mousebumples
My cousin is an aerospace engineer and works for Boeing. I don’t think she loves her job, but she wanted out of her old job in Texas. (Washington > Texas) Can’t say it was definitely because of Dobbs, but as a 20-something woman, I’m guessing it may have played a role.
Doug R
@Hoodie: I heard it was cheap airlines flying out of cheap airports that didn’t want to spend the $ upgrading airport infrastructure for a new plane with a higher fuselage to accommodate the bigger more efficient engines. So we got this abomination with a terrible center of lift/gravity that needs software to get around that limitation. And now it looks like that’s not all that Boeing is slacking on. But the shuffling of the “fix” to pilots having to remember ONE MORE THING speaks to their terrible new attitude.
If an airport can’t be bothered to upgrade, the Dash 8 variations and even the ATR are almost as fast and even more fuel efficient.
Doug R
@Feathers: Yeah, Airbus is a European government consortium so you’re never going to dominate that market and moving 3 hours further away from a HUGE market in Asia doesn’t seem that smart.
Feels like they were trying to dodge the unions in Washington state more than anything.
Doug R
@trollhattan: And Canada’s second largest airline Westjet is mostly 737s which are mostly MAXs.
Geminid
@Doug R: I’m not saying this is the reason for Boeing moving their headquarters to Illinois, but it did leave them well-placed to lobby a second set of Senators. Their big plant in South Carolina gets two more on their side.
TheOtherHank
IANAP (I am not a pilot), but I have a memory of reading about an early Airbus design where the plane was in “flying around mode” or “landing mode” and the pilot had to manually put the plane in landing mode when they wanted to land. On an early test flight, they didn’t flip the switch. When landing a plane you basically stall it really close to the ground and it lands. When flying around and you stall, you put the plane’s nose down to regain speed and then keep flying around. In this case, the plane was in flying around mode instead of landing mode, detected that it was about to stall, put the nose down and went straight into the ground. Luckily it was a test flight so it wasn’t full of passengers.
RaflW
@eclare: FWIW the Max10 that Delta ordered isn’t even certified yet, so take that 2025 with a grain of salt. The 737-900s that Delta uses now are my absolute least favorite of the planes in their fleet in terms of comfort. But the bean counters love ’em, cause they’re cheap (relatively) to buy and operate.
They also have the door plug, akin to what failed on the Alaska plane, but no other -900 plug has ever done that, thankfully.
eclare
@RaflW:
Thanks for the info. No trips planned, but any that I take go through ATL.
Eyeroller
Returning from my Christmas trip, the first leg was on a 737 MAX-9 (on United). The next leg was an Embraer 175 regional jet. The Embraer was more comfortable and seemed to fly more smoothly. But it seems to have about half the capacity of the 787 MAX-9.
VFX Lurker
Thank you for posting this. I plan to take a plane trip in May this year. For me, this will be the first flight since December 2019. Your words bring me some comfort.
YY_Sima Qian
The Chinese civil aviation authority was the 1st major authority to ground the 737MAX series follow the 2 crashes in Indonesia & Ethiopia, & it was the last to reauthorize flight. The dramatically reduced demand during the pandemic meant Chinese airlines did not urgently need the new 737MAXes, & the Sino-US trade/tech war meant the PRC government has not been motivated to purchase any new Boeing planes. The Chinese civil aviation authority just issued approval for the 737MAXes to resume flight late last year, as part of the mini-thaw in the relationship, & now this happens.
Due the escalating trade/tech war, the PRC has been pushing to accelerate the adoption of the domestic C919 narrow body airliner (even though it has a lot of Western, especially American, critical components), a direct competitor to the 737MAX, while continuing to make large purchases of new Airbuses to renew its domestic fleet. Boeing is already facing huge headwinds in the PRC (& elsewhere), but it seems determined to lose what market share it could have grabbed.
PS: Back when the 737MAX crashed happened, I was really pissed off at all of the online comments claiming that those “brown” people are too corrupt & too incompetent to run safe airlines.
RaflW
As of 9:49pm EST, Icelandair has three Max9s en route Keflavik from US airports. All three flew to the US after the FAA grounding.
I’ll be very curious to see if they fly back to the US tomorrow…