MAX jetliner grounding crisis pushes Boeing to biggest-ever loss

Unapologetic Dennis Muilenburg still claims he is the right man to run Boeing...though so far he's running it into the ground, while his planes have flown into the ground!

In terms of longevity and popularity, the 737 is the nearest thing to a reincarnation of the DC3. But the basic design is now over 50 years old, and the cockpit, in terms of size and shape, is literally chopped off of the 707, which was the first US jetliner and began its design around 1954.

At least from an engineering standpoint, you have to give credit to Boeing for taking a 50 year old plane originally designed as a "regional jet" and pulling, pushing, tweaking and stretching it into a 200 passenger plane capable of flying the oceans. But at the end of the day there's only so much you can do to stretch a handkerchief into a tablecloth! Even without the Max fiasco, the later versions already have pretty high takeoff and landing speeds-- partly because their stretched length and short, stubby landing gear (with no room to make the legs longer and still able to fit into the fuselage when they fold up) means that pilots have to be unusually careful in not raising the nose too high on takeoff and landing, lest they scrape the tail.

As the final straw, they made the Max by hanging bigger, more efficient engines on the wing. But to make them fit with the stubby landing gear, they had to mount them high enough that at low speed and high power, the plane wanted to raise its nose, meaning that it didn't "Fly like a 737". So in order to make it fly familiarly, and thereby avoid the need for all pilots to get a lot of additional training, they implemented a software patch, and did not bother to tell people. That patch, the MCAS, is now the problem.

The long and short of it is that Boeing took a short cut, and maybe now they have to admit they've taken this design about as far as it can go, and if they want to compete with Airbus for this market, it's time for a clean sheet new design on a narrow-body plane. Unfortunately, that will take years--but they should have though of it years ago!