.... imo the 737 Max should have been put down and out of business.
Unfortunately this it is not possible.
Background: It takes billions and billions of Dollars to develop and certify a new aircraft. Boeing doesn't have anything in the bank to cover that anymore. With so many undelivered airframes sitting at their premises and thousands of unfulfilled ordered, they cannot shut down the program anymore. It has to go forward or it is game over for them. They cannot return the thousands of dollars in orders and if they don't have anything to give to customers then the customers will go to Airbus.
The kink is that they had to develop a new airframe to be able to compete with the A320 NEO which was much cheaper than the excellent selling 737-800 model.
Competition drove Boeing to tweak the old airframe design to become the MAX. It was quicker and cheaper to do that than spend money to develop a completely new airframe.
And with the company already deep into the 787 program which took resources and the need to develop the new 777-8/9/10 large twins, there simply isn't enough funding to develop a new single-isle airframe.
As stated, the time and cost is astronomical in modern times. Even nations struggle to single handedly develop new fighter aircraft. It has become just too expensive to go it alone.
Even though they can still produce more 737-800 series, the operating margin compared to the A320 NEO will be a killer for airlines. It will squeeze the operators of the 737-800 (its a series actually the 737-700 / 737-800 / 737-900 family known as the 737NG New Generation family).
And the time lost now would gift the market over to Airbus.
So, they only have
two options left and with both options they are well and truly screwed actually.
Option 1. Shut down the company or sell it to someone.
Option 1: Fix the 737 MAX to eliminate any possibility of anything every happening to any of them. Which in fact is impossible. Anything unforeseen can happen at any time. Another one will go down again at some point in future and that crash would have had
absolutely nothing to do with MCAS which should now be properly fixed.
The problem for Boeing is that
when another one goes down, the resulting investigation will take at least a year if not longer to determine the cause.
And it would not matter that the cause is not related to the current issues, the flying public will from then forth not want to fly on the MAX. It would have been poisoned.
And we have a similar case in the not too distant past (Boeing featured in that too).:
The Douglas DC-10 had a design flaw on it's cargo door which led to spectacular bad publicity when a couple of them became lawn darts. Even though they fixed the problem, the sales were not steller afterwards.
What eventually happened? Douglas needed money to survive, couldn't get it and in fact Douglas was taken over by McDonnell to form McDonnell Douglas.
McDD then developed the airframe into the McDD MD-11 to get better operating margins (fuel efficiency and lower seat/mile costs to operators. Ahem... Hello 737 MAX.
And to twist the knife even further.... McDD was eventually itself .... taken over by Boeing.
The question is: Is Boeing too large to fail?
I can it it being split into many companies in the near future. Military (Manned/Unmanned), Space, Commercial (Single Isle/Twin Isle) and other military and civillian divisions.
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