Boeing to Suspend 737 Max Production in January

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...

Yes, you are correct in that part of the reason for it was to mimic the control forces of older 737's for avoiding the burden of simulator training.

However, you have to look at why it was a manufacturer would take the risk to make such a boneheaded implementation in the first place. Nothing goes into a mass-produced highly complex system without being very carefully thought through. It wasn't some "accident". It was a calculated act of value engineering. On the one hand, someone had wind tunnel results that said there would be a divergence from the old 737 force curves. On the other, you had a pile of solutions capable of fixing the problem, each with varying degrees of cooperation with regulators, time taken, and a price tag attached.

The FAA (if provided with the benefit of a doubt that they aren't covering their asses which I'm not necessarily willing to give given reports from the IG) has signalled that if they'd known what MCAS was, they'd have demanded more intense scrutiny and testing.

There was whistleblower testimony alleged in the 60 Minutes expose on the MAX, that Boeing intentionally engineered the system in such a way as to minimize outside scrutiny of the system (I.e. regulator attention) in order to get development done, and planes out the door.

What this signals is that there was pressure from management to get things done, which meant minimizing external exposure and exploiting every trick they knew to get a rubber stamp out of the regulator.

Now in terms of not being certifiable, I offer a brief bit of Boeing history. The D.P. Davies interview w.r.t the the certification of the 727 by the U.K. CAA. As a well-known test pilot, Davies goes into great detail to describe how the U.K. regulator was very particular about control forces on approach to stall for that aircraft; to the point that the 727 only got conditional airworthyness certification for civil transport via the addition of a stick pusher; a device intended to make it very clear the pilot was approaching a stall.

https://www.aerosociety.com/news/audio-the-d-p-davies-interv...

Some people at Boeing knew, or were in a position to know the behavior they were dealing with was of a type previously uncertifiable. Someone knew that if they could sneak the plane past the FAA, that reciprocity would shield the plane from further scrutiny unless something catastrophic happened.

I don't know who it was, nor do I know whether the paper trail will be enough to bear it out. American management nowadays tends to go out of their way to minimize paper trail and maximize "fill-in-the-blank" style communication to facilitate plausible deniability.

Boeing and Airbus don’t build their own engines. I don’t expect COMAC to try that in their first rodeo.

The metallurgy required to build a modern turbofan engine is incredibly exotic — outside of France, England, and the US it's simply not there.

If you’re betting on metallurgy to be the barrier to keep western technological advantage alive I think you’re in for a surprise.

Comac abandoned carbon fiber for the wings in favor of aluminum.

So they have gone back to using the material used to build every other narrow body plane on the market in this size category. I admit, a new design should use carbon fiber, but given that no one else is yet...

Sure they do. Network effects are huge with airliners. If your Embraer breaks down away from your maintenance base chances are you can buy / borrow parts from another airline. If you're the only one around flying, you're entirely reliant on the manufacturer — and Comac doesn't have any sort of international support network.

First off, airlines have purchased a ton of E175 family aircraft.

Second off, while a large international distribution is important, you don’t need to compete in the wide body market to get it.

Third off, COMAC can focus on the Chinese market to start and take it region at a time slowly expanding across Asia. From there South Asia and SEA is easy and both are big markets, Russia would welcome it with open arms and then they can take a whack at the middle eastern market and also be competitive anywhere Airbus and Boeing aren’t really playing that hard anyway. (Africa, etc.) All this well before getting around to Europe or North America.

If Boeing can deliver on a MAX replacement it's doubtful that Comac will move the needle much in the next 10-15 years.

Let’s see Boeing deliver the MAX again first.

I think it would be easy to win a bet that COMAC delivers C919 to commercial airline customers before Boeing delivers a new narrow body design to replace the 737 family.

My recollection is that Bombardier made (rejected) overtures in Boeing's direction before the trade spat. In either case BBD has gotten out of the commercial aircraft business completely, in large part due to the cost of developing the C-series.

The bigger issues I expect for the C919 will be fuel-efficiency, and trust that it is a safe plane. The fact that they're building it from scratch when the main competitors are using refreshed old designs of the 737 and A320 might help it achieve competitive fuel-efficiency, but it remains to be seen. Safety trust will be hard to make up, but a possible pathway would be to have Chinese airliners and cargo companies use it first to establish a track record free of major accidents before getting sales to international airliners.