Mohacsy's Safe Portfolio Member Forum

[Elroy Jetson]

The 737-MAX is Boeing's very popular "super-economy model" far less costly than alternatives, like half the price so very popular with airlines in spite of the fact that the model should not be for sale.

Airbus was far more successful than Boeing's CEO had anticipated in re-engineering the A320 and the neo.

With the A320-neo Airbus did what Boeing would do, moved the engines forward, but the A320 is a computer flown interface for the pilot, so accommodating a different center of gravity doesn't affect what the pilot does or sees. The pilot makes the moves and the computer calculates how to implement each move with that aircraft.

In the Air France crash, we find even the most experienced Airbus pilots get like 3 hours of training for "manual flight" in the Airbus without the aid of the computer. It's not expected to be something that happens for more than a minute of reboot time, and with two redundant flight computers - but the pitot tube and some pilots managed to make them all reboot with a prolonged stall.

Boeing's MCAS was a primitive add-on to a pilot-flown aircraft rather than a software change to a computer-flown aircraft.


https://leehamnews.com/2019/03/20/boeing-didnt-want-to-re-engine-the-737-but-had-design-standing-by/

As Airbus moved toward re-engining the A320 in 2010, and with a program launch in December that year, Boeing, predictably, thumbed its collective nose at the neo and the entire re-engining concept.

At an employee meeting Jan. 14, 2011, Albaugh, dismissed the neo and its potential competitiveness vs the 737NG.

“I think Airbus will find re-engining the A320 more challenging than they think it will be,” he told employees during one of his periodic “Excellence” meetings. “When they get done, they will have an airplane that might be as good as the Next Generation 737. We think we can continue to make incremental improvements to the 737 to make sure that it is a more capable airplane than even the re-engined A320.
“I don’t think we will re-engine”

“At the same time, while we haven’t made a firm decision, I don’t think we will re-engine the 737. It’s really hard to come up with a compelling business case to do that. We think the right answer to probably do a new small airplane that might come out toward the end of this decade. We’ll make that decision probably sometime in the middle of this year,” he said.

“Every customer I talk to has a real hard time understanding why a re-engined airplane makes sense,” Albaugh said. “Airbus says it will cost them a billion Euros to re-engine. My guess is it’s going to cost them considerably more than that. The engines are bigger. They are going to have to redesign the wings, the gear. It’s going to be a design change that will ripple through that airframe.

“They have got to pass that cost on. The engines are going to weigh more. It’s going to be a different engine, so if you buy a neo and you have a classic 320, you’ll have mixed engines. It’s going to mean a lot of different maintenance and spares requirements.”

Albaugh wasn’t through.

“When you boil all that down, our view is a re-engined airplane gives about a 2 or 3% economic benefit to the customer. Right now, in our view, the 737 gives our customers about a 5 or 6% better economic value than the 320. They eat up about half of that with the 320 and we continue to incrementally improve the 737.”

But Boeing being Boeing, it devoted considerable engineering resources to studying a 737RE, as the re-engine was informally known, as well as an entirely new design. The latter was Albaugh’s clear preference, as it was for any airplane designer.

Inside thinking

“We were basically keeping the RE effort alive as a stalking horse for the new small airplane effort at that time,” recalled an engineer on the program years later. “It was good that we did, too, as we were able to put something together really quickly for that whole American Airlines debacle and get the MAX started as quickly as we did.

“The airplane as it was defined then was struggling to beat a reengined 737 from a performance standpoint and–if it contained significant composites–they had no idea how to build it at any kind of 737-like production rate (never mind all the handwringing about the where).”

Boeing looked at re-engining the 737NG two or three times. The company wanted minimal changes, but gaining significant improvements remained elusive.

As for the preferred solution, “at that time, they couldn’t make up their mind whether it would be a single-aisle or a twin-aisle,” the engineer said.

At one point, “the wind was blowing toward a new airplane.” The 737, he said, was structurally old technology, “with a 707 nose on the same sized body. We could never come up with anything better than a 737 and bring it to life.”