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Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

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Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#111

Post by ryandrake »

nostrademons wrote: post #21

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s. There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybod…

Here's a link to the same video but without the awful music inserted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#112

Post by karmelapple »

rkomorn wrote: post #61
mrweasel wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the MAX really using a 286 CPU? Why would they pick that for a plane launched in 2014. I get that it's based on the 737 Next Gen, but they just opted to not update the electronics?

The more you change, the more you need to recertify, the more it costs, the more time it takes, the less your shareholders profit.

This is the answer, and correct in many ways.

If the chips are cheap and easily available, and you know their failure modes, and they've been field tested for decades, why change?

It's very different from many software development attitudes, but remember that airframe manufacturers and avionics companies employ many people just to calculate risk and failure rates. The failure rates of these things are critical to the safety of your airframe.

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#113

Post by karmelapple »

rkomorn wrote: post #91
mrweasel wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make you wonder how long management figured they can keep using ancient technology, just to avoid updating certifications.

At a dinner with a team of Airbus folks we were working with at a previous job, they talked about how difficult it was getting to source CPUs for the A320 after 30 years. It's definitely a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing, but I ask myself a similar question: at some point whoever is producing these chips is going to stop finding it worthwhile and end production, no? But then I also assume the people who work o…

They do :)

And if the companies who produce these chips continue to make a healthy profit, why would they stop?

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#114

Post by petre »

ghaff wrote: post #76
Gee101 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the Apple watch?

When we heard young people don't wear watches any longer at the time. And certainly many people didn't think yet another bluetooth earphones were anything to get excited about. AR does seem to be a potential big deal. But the tech and implementation probably has a ways to go before it's interesting outside of a bubble audience.

If people don't wear watches, they probably wouldn't wear scuba gear either. Unless AR comes in rose tinted glasses.

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#115

Post by tpurves »

nostrademons wrote: post #21

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s. There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybod…

You forget, they also clean-sheet designed the starliner starting in 2014 and that project... also happens to exactly prove your point. (at least 2B over budget, and 8 years after it's original operational target of 2017, has yet to fly a fully successful mission)

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#116

Post by neilv »

captainkrtek wrote: post #62
nostrademons wrote: post #21

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s. There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybod…

This feels apt to my years at $large_cloud_provider, where the current cohort of folks manage some of the largest web services, but would not be able to develop them from the ground up today. The brain drain from these orgs, the shift to maintenance / KTLO, and the focus on sales/AI "features" rather makes this feel spot on.

A couple years ago, when I was interested in working at a huge cloud provider (and, in less-humble moments, imagine myself as one of the people who could've helped build that up from scratch)...

I was recruited directly by a manager(!), and to work on a relatively small new piece that I thought my systems programming skills would be up to... but then the big company required me to do a corporate grunt screening in Python, as well as memorize some behavioral corporate drone interview answers.

I decided this would be a litmus test for whether the manager would be able to insulate me well enough from megacorp drone BS, and from some of the more aggressive org chart culture that the company was said to have. Nope, it turns out, the huge cloud provider really does insist that I do the corporate drone screening first.

I could've passed the screen with a day of memory refreshing prep on Python. (The last time I used it at that point, I had been switching back and forth each day between it and Swift, and had to look up details like how to get the length of a string. Yet I built something in Python with perfect uptime, over a year, in a critical production line, despite tricky complicating factors. And other comparable track record.)

Though I think I could've passed the nonsense screening, I decided that I already had enough negative signal, to bow out of the tempting cloud provider job. (I had a very positive impression of the manager. I was only scared of corporate culture outside of the team. If you're going to be a corporate drone, and jump through nonsense hoops, you should do it at a company widely regarded as treating its employees well.)

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#117

Post by hinkley »

masklinn wrote: post #99
hinkley wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on the 787 but far from the engineering team. Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time, and doing an impression of Captain Ahab in trying to union bust in Seattle by fucking off to South Carolina. Boeing customers would figure out which plane numbers…

> They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time The 787 was a straight up MDD pants-on-head plan (pushed by Stonecipher and McDonnel themselves), the entire point was to shift the costs of design and development to suppliers, with the idea that they'd fund the aircraft you could sell.

The modular structure of the aircraft was also meant to reduce or remove the need for gantry cranes. It required 2- or maybe it was 3-axis forklifts but no gantries. Gantries need tracks and structural support and those make the building the planes are built in quite expensive. I joked at the time that they could buy an old Walmart Superstore and use it to assemble the 787. Though I’m relatively sure they’d crack the concrete.

I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#118

Post by mrguyorama »

bunderbunder wrote: post #86
imoverclocked wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee. If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find…

I think you might have the chain of causality mixed up. From what I've seen, the sheer scale of the company creates large committees because you've got lots of managers and they all know that getting involved in the project is essential to their career advancement. And then that creates scope creep. Partially due to design by committee effects, but also because the manager in charge of flobnix realizes their opportun…

>why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo?

The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200 billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of Apollo before it even finished its original set of missions.

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#119

Post by kjs3 »

silverquiet wrote: post #45
Esophagus4 wrote: post #40

I hope they design and build the airframe properly this time. A plane that needs [cheaply outsourced] software (that relies on one sensor) to correct bad behavior at the flight envelope is just not acceptable. I still refuse to fly on the 737 MAX. I know it’s probably fine given what pilots now know about the how to control the thing, but I just refuse to support Boeing’s malicious negligence or any carrier that enab…

I read "Airframe" by Michael Crichton probably twenty years ago, and it was around ten years old at that time. I remember that that book talked about how the planes were unstable by design and required software to maintain proper flight characteristics, and that this was so because it was more efficient. The book is fiction, but I doubt it was far off the mark at the time. I suspect that there is no going back from t…

Fighter planes are unstable by design, and require computer control to stay in the air, because they're expected to do some pretty insane things in the air. A passenger plane has a somewhat different performance envelope, and while they are by-and-large fly-by-wire these days, they aren't designed to be aerodynamically very unstable.

Re: Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

#120

Post by KerrAvon »

selectodude wrote: post #39
winstonp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the 757 frame is too heavy to be powered by the LEAP engines. Those planes were powered by a class of engine between the old 737 and 777 engines, and nobody makes them anymore because they're not in demand, so a 757 MAX is just not financially viable.

You can use the most powerful LEAP engine on a lightened 757 “neo”, it’ll just be a complete dog like the A321 and not a rocket ship like the old one.

Just ‘cause I’m totally ignorant about this stuff: why is that?
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