John Oliver discusses how Boeing went from being a company known for quality craftsmanship to one synonymous with crashes, mishaps, and “quality escape.” Wha...
I think a lot of people would actively refuse to fly on a 737 MAX in the future.
The design of the MAX was flawed to begin with. Essentially, the Boeing 737, designed in the 1960s,could not compete with the newer A320Neo on fuel efficiency due to Airbus redesigning the A320 around the much larger, state of the art CFM LEAP engines (Neo stands for “New Engine Option”), Boeing choose to jerryrig the CFM LEAP engines on their existing 737 airframe instead of redesigning another plane around the engine.
Now, since the engine is oversized with respect to the airframe, the newly christened 737 MAX has a tendency to tip upward due to too much lift when flying. Boeing opted to correct this in software by having the plane automatically correct its flight by tipping downward if it senses the plane was tipping up, which they called the MCAS. And of course, since one of the selling point of the 737 MAX Boeing promised was that no additional training was needed for the 737 MAX, the pilots did not know about MCAS, much less have a way to have a manual override for it.
So what if the sensors made a mistake and tipped downward when it’s not supposed to, you ask? We found out in 2018.
It is not something that is fixable barring a grounds up redesign. But that’s not going to happen.
I think a lot of people would actively refuse to fly on a 737 MAX in the future.
The design of the MAX was flawed to begin with. Essentially, the Boeing 737, designed in the 1960s,could not compete with the newer A320Neo on fuel efficiency due to Airbus redesigning the A320 around the much larger, state of the art CFM LEAP engines (Neo stands for “New Engine Option”), Boeing choose to jerryrig the CFM LEAP engines on their existing 737 airframe instead of redesigning another plane around the engine.
Now, since the engine is oversized with respect to the airframe, the newly christened 737 MAX has a tendency to tip upward due to too much lift when flying. Boeing opted to correct this in software by having the plane automatically correct its flight by tipping downward if it senses the plane was tipping up, which they called the MCAS. And of course, since one of the selling point of the 737 MAX Boeing promised was that no additional training was needed for the 737 MAX, the pilots did not know about MCAS, much less have a way to have a manual override for it.
So what if the sensors made a mistake and tipped downward when it’s not supposed to, you ask? We found out in 2018.
It is not something that is fixable barring a grounds up redesign. But that’s not going to happen.