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, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company.
Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:
To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
One of the most exceptional CEOs I've worked with was a lawyer. I still think the proverb is largely correct, along with the other proverb about the exception proving the rule.
There are always people who work out despite common sense saying they shouldn't that doesn't mean common sense is wrong, it just means we don't understand what the real factors are.
He initially turned down the job because he felt that a lawyer wasn't the right person to run an engineering company, and from reports of people who worked with him he knew his knowledge limits and listened to the engineers. He took serious risks with the 707 and 747 projects because he trusted the people who understood the technology.
MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.
Fun fact the 707 had the first implementation of “MCAS” because the plane had a tendency to pitch up in a certain flaps configuration. They added a stick nudger which applied light pressure in said config. Not a stick pusher, as it did not alert the pilots, it simply applied an extra input independent of the pilots. However this was made aware to all pilots of the plane and likely contributed to its certification.
Also the 707 tail was extended by 40ft to give it better minimum ground speed control, this was retroactively applied to already built planes. Very interesting to see how this was applied in the past with a lawyer at the helm vs the current ceo during the launch of the 737Max
Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.
The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere.
It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
I got to briefly try a N900 back in the day. When it powered on you would briefly see the raw X background stipple and the x-shaped cursor before the window manager loaded. I liked the nerd factor of it but I knew at that point the company was in the weeds.
True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.
Maemo was an actual GNU/Linux, not just kernel with custom userland. Logging into a cluster from my N900 and having plots just appear on screen thanks to X network transparency is still one of the most futuristic things I have ever seen a computer do.
Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change.
Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them.
Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
If the 770 was anything like the N900 then the screen was resistive and the stylus was passive. So you could use your fingers but in my experience, for any finer task, you needed the stylus.
Damn, I really miss the N900. I was seriously using it as recently as about 4-5 years ago.
Dennis Muilenberg has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was Boeing’s CEO during and after the MAX disaster. He cannot be blamed for the first crash, but he absolutely bears a direct responsibility for every person who died in the second crash, as by that point he knew that he had delivered a product that had not been correctly and fully certified by the regulatory authority.
An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded.
I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
In most cases,the successor to a founder CEO is a finance person - because their mandate is to massage the stock on the behalf of the appointing board.
It's interesting how that infects every aspect of a company.
I used to work tech support for a mid sized company selling some specialized networking eqipment, late 1990s and early 2000s. Our big deal was we answered the phone immediately, and we were good at what we did, we solved problems, resolved the issue right then and there on the phone.
Customers paid through the nose for our support contracts because it was worth it and they were happy. Happy customers were actually happy customers.
Company grew and was acquired and acquired other companies and so on.
By the end of my time there happy customers was a metric. It really didn't reflect actually happy customers, it was an amalgam of arbitrary stats. We could hit or surpass those numbers, nothing really mattered. Nobody was more happy if the numbers went up, or more sad if the numbers went down. Someone closed a ticket, did it solve anything?, who knows, but it was one more ticket closed!
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 them.
My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
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 opportunity for career advancement by shoehorning problems that need to be solved with flobnix into the requirements.
I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside.
Concrete example: 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? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.
>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.
We'd pay $xxx billion to have a permanent moon base, something Apollo never had. If that can't efforts excite people enough to keep funding flowing I doubt a space station in lunar orbit will move the needle
To add another data point: the Chinese lunar program also plans to land humans on the moon and later establish a manned research outpost on the surface. But there don't seem to be any plans for an orbital stations, despite China having very successful space stations in LEO
It was cool to get bragging rights by being the first to land and come back - in the ultimate show of “soft power” against the Soviet Union. But a permanent moon base? We can’t even fund the ISS.
Frankly, a moon base might be cool, but nobody has sold me on it is worth having for any other reason. Some smart people have given good arguments that it isn't worth having.
And here I'm sitting in my basement not working on space projects and realizing money spent on space is money I don't have for something else I want (even it is is only $.10 that is still money that adds up).
A moon base gets us a platform to test what long term low gravity does to a human body, and an environment to test ISRU for various materials like water, oxygen, iron, titanium, etc...
Being able to prove that people can live in an environment like the moon long term and develop materials that can make their stay there sustainable by reducing consumables and developing replacement parts from lunar material is a great stepping stone.
Being able to demonstrate the doubling of usable pressurized space by building and burying modules that can be stocked with equipment brought from Earth would be a remarkable accomplishment.
It's a stepping stone to building very large spacecraft/space stations that have rotating habitat rings that would be used to colonize the solar system.
These kinds of things can be put into cycler orbits around the Moon or Mars[0] which would allow relatively comfortable and cost effective journeys to these locations. As the scale of these kinds of craft expand they could eventually become destinations themselves akin to massive cruise ships in the sky where some people live out their entire lives.
Biosphere 2 was obviously a flawed experiment but it seems that Mir, the ISS, and Tiangong have shown that long term habitation in micro-G is possible, it seems like the extension of that is to try long term habitation of a body with gravity and material to experiment with.
What's the future for humanity if the moon is colonized? What does the moon provide us that the Earth does not?
One interesting (admittedly small in scope, but huge in impact) thought experiment is the following- let's say that the doomsayers are correct. The Earth has been destroyed and inhabitable, leaving just our extra-planetary outposts. How do we supply the necessary high-tech manufacturing capability to survive?
Have we spun up all of the supply chain to reproduce the state-of-the-art technology required just required to sustain life on that celestial body? As an example, even with all our experience on Earth, we have exactly one physical location on our entire planet that can crank out the most advanced chips used in our modern technology we take for granted. That build-out took massive investment of deca-billions of dollars plus a massive, deep supply chain to build, even with all the advantages we have here on Earth (things like, oh, breathable air, access to vast carbon energy storage, access to millions of humans and existing factories... just as a start...)
Are we expected to replicate all of that on our next celestial body? If not, how do we expect to replace failing parts and continue progress?
What about even more basic concerns about things like... literal population growth? We understand ... a little... about how very healthy adult human bodies react to prolonged periods in zero-g (hint: not well, where "prolonged" == 437 contiguous days [0]). What about pregnant women? Babies? Spaceflight crews are required to exercise two hours every day to counteract muscle and bone atrophy [1]. How is that expected of say... an infant?
Don't get me wrong, I find spacefaring fascinating. I idolize the Apollo era. But we haven't even scratched the surface of how we can sustain any sort of population off this planet. We need to find ways to get along here, because ... this is all we've got, folks.
Yes? Why do we need to colonize the moon with squishy meatbags with billions of years of evolutionary optimization for life on Earth?
All these dreams of star-trek like interstellar travel (or even interplanetary travel beyond taking a selfie and going home) require major advances in the physics tech tree. Might come, might not.
In the 1980s I read articles in the “science fact” columns in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that told me that NASA sold out a much more ambitious lunar program for something that was little more than a stunt.
The reality was that Von Braun looked at dozens of mission architectures before discovering one that was much more feasible than any of the others and made it possible to realize Kennedy’s dream.
The moon is not far away in terms of miles but in terms of energy and momentum it is very far away if your goal is to fly there and fly back. Right now the best idea we have for a moon lander is to hope that SpaceX gets Starship to orbit and masters orbital refueling it’s not like they can fly 100 tons there and back, but rather they can land about what Apollo did with a much bigger spacecraft that’s really tall and tippy, needs an elevator, can get the ascent rockets smashed on rocks, etc. if they had a set of those chopsticks on the Moon or Mars they could land it easily but on generic inner solar system bodies covered with boulders, craters and stuff good luck. Plan B is basically the same from Blue Origin.
If you could refuel there the math changes, maybe you can, there might be usable ice at the poles but nobody has seen it, unless we have a Drexler machine we’re going to have to launch a huge number of missions with a marginally effective system until we have a system in place that can reliably deliver fuel.
So it’s tough, any honest analysis of space colonization makes you come to the conclusion that Drexler did, rocketry has very little to do with it, being able to pack a self-sufficient industrial civilization into the smallest package has everything to do with it.
Snark aside: the goal is Mars because it might be possible to colonize the planet and to have a place that acts as a reserve for humanity should shit really hit the fan (i.e. WW3).
The moon isn't suitable as much for that purpose due to a complete lack of any atmosphere and because it's too close to Earth.
That's surface habitation, not an orbital station around the planet or one of its moons.
The problem with using a space station as a waypoint on the way to and from the surface of a remote body is that it make the mission more expensive. For example, the Lunar Gateway increases the delta-v requirement by 15-20% (can't remember exact number) compared to a more direct mission. Which then, all else being equal, increases the total mission cost by much more than 15-20% because the rocket equation always wins. And that's just the actual visit, we're not even considering the cost of putting the station there in the first place.
So I keep going back to, why a space station? If we're going to spend all that extra money on turning hydrogen and oxygen into hot water, why put it toward a space station out in the middle of nowhere instead of, say, more time or more equipment on the surface of the body?
Also, IIRC, none of Elon's proposed mission architectures for going to Mars involve an orbital station. And, while SpaceX did get the Artemis lander contract, they weren't involved in the decision to have a Lunar Gateway.
It won't be. Even an extinction level asteroid or comet impact will be easier to handle on a planet with breathable atmosphere, water, and other resources. Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that. Still, Mars would require much more self-sufficiency than we've ever attempted. It's worth the effort to expand human exploration.
Mars isn’t exactly habitable either. Not to mention the myriad of issues we face even getting there, let alone thriving.
Read the book A City On Mars recently which had a lot of interesting concerns not widely discussed in the pro space colonization community : https://www.acityonmars.com/. Highly recommended.
That’s not Elon’s plan. He’s too smart for that shit and wants to aerobrake down to the surface where there is abundant CO2 and probably H2O somewhere to make fuel for the return trip.
> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane
> Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft?
For pitch, yes. For width, no —- you run into quantization pretty quickly. The difference between sardines and standard economy is less than the difference between 3+3 and 3+2 — it’s not really feasible for most traditional airlines to choose a different number of seats across than the design point. And for a 3+3 setup, adding 6” to fuselage diameter makes a noticeable difference to (wider) passengers, which the airlines can’t really take away.
Seat and aisle widths are customer selectable options. Hence, a customer may order a 787 with 3-3-3 seating or 2-4-2 seating. The vast majority of airlines chose sardines instead of comfort. In a 737, customers only can get 3-3 seating, but they can choose wide (17.8”) seats and skinny aisles, like Southwest does, or they can choose skinny (17.1”) seats and wider aisles, like Alaska does.
Boeing is in constant communication with the airlines on new airplane designs, as they want to build the most profitable airplane for their customers that they can. This means the airline has a lot of input on fuselage diameter.
There's no incentive. Passengers rarely know what type they'll be flying on when they book, and prioritize it over price even less. For airlines, a bigger airplane is a distinct disadvantage though, as it's operationally more expensive (increased cross section equals increased drag equals increased fuel burn).
It was an old airplane too and not as optimized as newer airplanes in terms of engines, aerodynamic design, weight and so forth.
The A380 was a step up in size and had additional problems such as there not being that many airports which had upgraded their gates and other facilities to support an airplane that big.
The real issue with the 747 is people will take a point to point route if at all possible. Worse, flying a small plane point to point is cheaper for the passenger than flying 2 747s. If you live in Lincoln NE - sorry your city is too small to get direct flights to anything but close major hubs (even then odds are you drive to nearby Omaha thus further reducing demand options). However if you live in a Larger non-hub city airlines can undercut each other by just doing direct flights to other large non-hub cities.
Pretty much. You can outfit pretty much any airframe you want to be business class only seating but not enough people will buy when it pops up on Expedia at 2+ times the price of the alternative.
I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.
There is a business-class only airline (La Compagnie) that flies from Newark to Europe and they're profitable. A little more expensive than 2x the price though, but less than 10x.
Never heard of this airline so I just checked: Over the next few months the cheapest flight from EWR to their base in Orly is ~$2,500 vs ~$365 for Economy (French Bee to be exact). That seems like its still a separate class and would exclude most Economy flyers.
That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades).
So, yes, sticker price for upper class service is pretty expensive. In a world where upper class service was the norm on certain routes on certain planes it would probably be pretty expensive but probably cheaper than the upgrade on mixed class service.
Do you have a source showing $/sqft of economy vs business/first class? This video is basically saying the opposite of you: that business/first class subsidizes economy.
It might be better to say that they form a system which is economically optimized as a whole. It is genius, for instance, that frequent fliers get upgrades from coach to first class when they're available because it means if a first class flier changes their plans or wants to fly on short notice an economy flier just says in coach and won't feel mad about it -- the first class seats are 100% occupied in terms of providing somebody a somewhat premium experience but are 50% occupied with full revenue customers and that 50% occupation is part of the completely premium experience because it means it is always available.
Yes, I was imprecise in what I wrote. There's a lot of cross-subsidization in various forms going on that makes all-business class at business-class prices tough for airlines even on routes like NYC to London--which have existed but not sure they do at the moment.
> That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades).
That's the complete 100% opposite of truth. For most airlines, the economy class is just a nice addition to the business class.
Yup, as another poster noted, the seating density and comfort are decided by airlines. Aircraft manufacturers install standardized rails for seating and console selection, and allow for many different configurations.
> The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans.
The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.
> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
> With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket
With rare exception people just buy what they can afford. If people had so much money that they could afford to fly first class and it wouldn't impact their budget very few would get the lowest price they can find knowing that their experience in the air will be miserable.
They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible.
The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.
No. If they could fill the entire plane with business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even less) of it, you bet they would.
The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.
So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn’t say that they need the economy passengers.
1. Modern airliners with fly by wire have capability similar to MCAS the difference is it is not half baked but has numerous degraded states it can run in when sensors are out and pilots are trained on all that. Any new airplane will have that under the name “flight envelope protection”
2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it.
3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. (a) Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution.
4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs
(a) when organizations in my town do a SWOT analysis they almost always put the bad state of the local airport as a disadvantage they have relative to competitors —- the county and state would spend money to improve what they can but it comes down to out-of-town airlines that have their own priorities, a pilot shortage, etc.
I think the days of Boeing being able to make the plane with a small focused team is probably in the past. Way too much engineering talent has been outsourced and the R&D just isn't there. It requires a level of vertical integration that was long since divested for cost saving reasons. That's why it is so beathtakingly expensive to develop a new plane. coordination between literally thousands of contractors is a nightmarishly complex task that requires an enormous team of middle managers and lawyers. It may even be the case that modern planes are just plain too complex to realistically do the majority of the work in-house.
It might be because of how airlines price tickets.
For a 10 hour flight that costs $500 (economy) it will cost +$80 1-way to pick a seat. Not a special seat, just a seat in general. An exit row seat costs +$160 1-way.
> Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up.
Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.
The 737, like all large commercial aircraft, also requires an artificial control feel force feedback system in order to meet design requirements. It has always had one going back to 1967.
A question that has never been adequately answered: if MCAS was conceived of in order to meet the 14 CFR Part 25.143 requirements for a positive control force feedback gradient, why did Boeing not modify the existing Elevator Differential Feel Computer (a mechanical/hydraulic computer with no electronic components) instead of inventing a half-assed, undocumented, slow moving, open-loop fly-by-wire contraption using the trim tab actuator?
>If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane.
And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.
The number of passengers you can fit in a commercial plane is based on how quickly you can evacuate them, with the doors being a major bottleneck. Many ULCCs in Europe have planes that are right up against that limit.
> with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets
It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT.
Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
Hasn't Tim Apple done his share by releasing apple watch and airpods, which have been good successors to other ancillary products which apple had earlier (ipad / ipod).
And right now as well, no laptop comes close to the overall experience that the Mac provides so he has been able to maintain market leadership.
Far better than Zuck for whom the only source of innovation has been acquisitions rather than releasing original products.
My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out
> My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out
Because the Software Update page under System Settings is all that normies will ever read and so what's in the text there is focused on normies.
Meanwhile techies may be interest in the CVEs listed in the security update list:
I believe I read somewhere that announcing new emoji drives noticeably more OS upgrades compared to more boring security and stability update release notes.
Apple is rumored to have a strategic emoji reserve. The more they want people to install an update, the more emojis from the reserve they release as part of it. Because this is basically the only thing that drives OS updates among average people.
The basic Airpods are crap, noise cancellation is useless, they fall off the ear. You're better off with Sony or JBL at half the price. The Pro ones are good.
I don’t have AirPods basic but I’ve got 2nd gen AirPods Pro and they’re one of the best products I’ve bought in a long time. I’d put them up there with my 2011 kindle I still use every day.
I got the pros. I think they are great in every way except (1) they fall out of my ears, but that’s cause I’ve got a genetic polymorphism that makes me make crazy amounts of earwax and my doctor warned me that one of these days I’m gonna wake up and not be able to hear cause my ears are clogged —- I don’t wear them outside, I just wear them where having them fall out is not a problem, (2) the noise cancellation is supposed to turn itself off when I talk to somebody and it seems like they always turn it off whenever I mutter to myself, but when I actually talk to somebody, they don’t, and (3) young people these days walk around with AirPods in and they just can’t hear you. It’s just like they’re 95 years old.
They were designed so that they'd get easily lost and they prevent you from replacing the battery. With enough marketing even a low quality product like airpods can be a commercial success
> There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod.
It's more likely than not that they will, in my opinion. As an owner of both an AVP and Quest 2, the former is a lot nicer to use than the latter with the exception of VR games, and my hunch is that Valve is going to eat Meta's lunch for gaming with Deckard (which will be at least as good as the Quest 3, but much more open, paired with a vastly more populated and popular marketplace, probably won't treat PCVR as an afterthought, and won't be saddled with the Quest's somewhat painful sideloading experience).
The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well within their capabilities.
Having experienced the Quest Pro I can say that Apple has absolutely no clue what the focus should be on.
Hint: being able to grab a well balanced headset that is so easy to put on as a cap. This makes you not think if you are going to watch or play in VR, you just do it.
I think Apple knows exactly what they're doing, but was forced to choose between making the product more about demonstrating their tech and end goals or being mass market mediocre and chose the former. Nobody would've cared about what amounted to a Quest wrapped in a Cupertino design with similar performance, specs, etc. It's very much in line with the original iPod and iPhone, both of which took a few iterations before becoming category-defining hits. It'll probably be the second or third-gen Vision device that'll fix the AVP's nits while also keeping or improving upon its strong points.
That's why they bought up Luxotica shares. Because scuba gear is for scuba diving. Even if it's white, it's still scuba gear. Remember the PDAs with resitive screens and styluses? They were a lot more convenient than scuba gear.
> The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro.
AirPods and the Apple Watch are also major new product lines, by some accounts each alone bigger than many major technology firms, that were released in the Tim Cook era of Apple.
There’s a beautiful conference (which I’ve lost) saying that science and technology can regress. We always talk about “the progress” but things do regress all the time; Tests I’ve cleared for employment can’t be passed by newcomers, the NASA wouldn’t be able to put a rocket on the moon today, and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore.
In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance. Nothing gets maintained, it’s either new or collapsing, but no-one enjoys the middle part. Which is sad. It’s a form of inflation.
Boeing is perfectly right to design a new plane right now. Engineers who interned on the 787 have bought a house on the countryside a few years ago.
This here should trigger a red flag when you hear anyone say "The government should be run like a business".
Businesses kill themselves all the time from the loss of institutional knowledge. We see stuff like "government spends X a year paying people Y to build almost no product Z". Instead, we're paying people Y to be ready to build Z when something goes terribly wrong like war.
When they say run like a business that doesn't mean that it should be done like a reckless business. Plenty of businesses invest into things like disaster recovery or insurance which they may never need.
Running like a business means providing services to profitable customers. This is, surprisingly, the exact opposite of what government is supposed to be doing. The USPS would be plenty profitable if it didn’t have to maintain the infrastructure to deliver a letter from Honolulu to Barrow for 50 cents. Medicare? Not the best business model. Roads? Forget it.
So Uber wasn't a business for its first 14 years? There are more objectives a business can have than maximize immediate profit. There are other metrics it can try and move.
Uber was a Business trying to gain a market share in hopes to cement itself as competitor or even become monopoly. It's also clear Uber was building massive ride hailing network so when self-driving cars became a thing, out with human drivers, in with computer drivers. Obviously, that didn't happen.
Government does not really have that. All their businesses have 100% market share so to run it profitable, they would have to stop doing unprofitable thing. Like providing healthcare to poor people or delivering from Hawaii to some rural area.
Nope. When people say governments should run like a business, they always mean the most reckless version of business you can think of.
It's even the only interpretation of that phrase that makes sense, because if you take the optimizing into large risks interpretation away, there's no other way those two can act in similar ways.
> In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance.
Instead, the most important innovation are the ones that reduce maintenance needs.
Automating farms, moving mechanical computation into general purpose processors, simplifying science theories so that people can learn in a semester stuff that took decades to mature... All of those have a tremendous impact. All of those speed everything up, and make room for more innovation to appear.
> and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore.
How much are you or your enterprise willing to pay for that?
See, the economics just don't make sense. Give me some VC money, a small team of experts in the domain and some runway and I'll give you a self-hosted alternative to Jira.
But the cost for you would be too high and I will go out of business trying to sell software while everyone else is renting it out.
Battery does seem to be a limiting factor and I don't wear mine unless I'm doing activities where it's especially useful. But, for a lot of people, something else to charge doesn't seem a big impediment.
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.
Yeah, we have basically infinite battery on "dumb" watches, as long as you use them. You know, so you can rely on them.
The Apple Watch to me just seems like a worse earbud. If I want to be that interrupted in tge middle of something might as well hear the thing and not have to look at it.
I never had any interest in wearing a watch to bed. Still don’t, although theoretically I could charge it for a few minutes in the evening to make that possible.
The Watch has helped me lose 30 pounds, has significantly helped motivate me to exercise more, and has let me keep my phone on silent mode for at least 5 years now. For me, it’s a great device.
I don't personally sleep with my watch on, so I just charge it every night. But it actually only takes about 15 mins to charge a decent amount, so if I did I'd just charge it while I was in the shower...
Andy Grove, Steve Job's friend (if not mentor), agreed:
"Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. ....abandoning today’s 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry." https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-bas...
Well, if I was CEO of Boeing, first day I'd basically be Microsoft and move heaven and earth getting the Dave Cutler of aviation (I have no idea who that is). He's in charge and if you don't like it you come to me.
Second problem are the MBA's. I don't have a solution for that, other than keep them far away from Cutler's division.
Honestly, the technical part is "easy"; it's the day to day politics that gets in the way when what is needed is longterm thinking. Take for example when NYC hired Andy Byford and Cuomo The Child couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. Shame.
The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain and product-market fit. The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design, and has been an exceptional machine since then.
> The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain
Which was a decision of boeing to outsource to their suppliers the design and development of those components. this combined with boeing doing some interesting pricing decisions lead to suppliers being rather screwed on the project.
> The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design
Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues.
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.)
This dynamic is a core theme in Asimov's "Foundation." The Empire's technological stagnation is defined by its inability to create new atomic devices. They had the old ones, and they had technicians to maintain them, but the actual knowledge of how to design and construct one from the ground up had been lost to institutional rot. They could patch the old world together, but they couldn't build the new one.
This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance. And in that comment the idea was that LLMs are accelerating this dynamic.
I dont want to stretch the analogy too thin but in this case instead of LLMs being a catalyst, perhaps its a monopoly.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Has a degree that’s basically informatics management.
My coworker took a class with case studies and the theory presented by that class was that all successful projects have at least one person who has fit the entire system into their head. They can tell you what happens if you pull on this thread. What the consequences are of trying to remove this feature. Lose them and you are fucked. Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same. If they can’t it’s the beginning of the end.
For software, the easiest way to design for this is to keep systems small enough that fitting it in your head is relatively feasible in a reasonable time for a competent engineer.
Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all that often, and you can build pretty big things.
My yard stick is discoverability. If you don’t touch things for a while they get fuzzy, and someone might have refactored it. So you need to be able to familiarize yourself with bits of the code you haven’t looked at recently. Helps with code reviews, onboarding, and production outages.
In particular it’s difficult to train new people to take up on-call duties if they cannot sit in the corner of the room and try either the same things you’re trying or their own pet theories without taking your attention or interfering with your tests. They need to be able to hear the repro steps and spool up their own snapshot in a similar state. That scales. Gatekeepers do not. Discoverability is necessary but insufficient to achieve this. There’s more to it but the foundation is discoverability and reproduceability.
In my experience (and I generally have found myself in the position of 'person that has the system in their head'), it's not necessarily about size but about being able to sit down and work with the system. It's not just about having the theory but also having the time actually working with the system and learning how things act in practice, which is a kinda weird mix between being a senior role with a high-level view of the system and a theoretically quite junior role of more or less technician.
(It also usually involves some quite proactive learning of the form of finding the specialist in some part of the system and sitting next to them and going "explain to me how this part works", and then repeating more or less indefinitely)
Occasionally I make an analogy to stage acting or opera. In order for the people in the medium priced seats to see the action on the stage, all the actors have to over-emote to make everything that is happening dreadfully obvious.
In a system that is the composition of 30-300 different functional units, nobody will be close to any one part unless they’re the bus number for it. So each piece needs to be dead obvious so you can worry about the consequences of composing them. At the end of the day it’s Kernighan’s Law but rephrased so as not to ignore Conway or Brooks.
I've been on large projects where we didn't have one such person but was nevertheless very successful.
The key there was that one qualified representative for each part of the affected organization and other relevant parties in the core team, and there were frequent alignment meetings where they were all present. The representatives were close to the action, not some three-levels-removed manager.
In the meetings processes and such would get discussed step by step in detail, and any representative could chime in at any point to say "this won't work" or similar.
Hard to do though, and quite costly in terms of organizational resources required.
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 were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them.
The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines.
I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).
Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers.
I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again.
In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.
> 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.
Nothing really exceptional about that, risk-sharing projects were common in aerospace in the 80s onwards. 21% of the 777 ( yes the beloved Triple Seven ) was farmed out to a Japanese consortium which took risk for the design and production of the fuselage.
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)
>> There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets.
A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.
> A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral
(n of 1 observation)
Yeah, I just purchased an OrangePI ultra and that fact gushes through like a flood in a canyon. I wonder if I will ever have a u-boot for the board that isn't based on 10 repositories glued together with references to unchangeable branches which are patterned after dates like 2017. There are official images with binaries and dog-knows-what-else in them. It's like the computer wasn't meant to operate for more than a few years (at most.) AFAICT, a person working on so many parts of the OrangePI ultra just stopped as the money ran out and there is a mess of repositories left behind. Don't get me started on the security mindset of the whole situation. /rant
Not to mention their customer service is amazing. I travelled several times, been to Shenzen, but mostly travelled to Shanghai for training and procurement of large manufacturing machines. To be honest I am a software person and was never really trained or taught fixing and maintaining moulds/machines.
But they have always been gracious and insanely dedicated to making sure my problems are solved and they show me how to rebuild everything. I have a dedicated WeChat group with their engineers and get back to me 7 days a week.
Compare that with a Candian machine, where I can rarely get a hold of a technican and they lack any deep expertise on anything even just to have a informal conversation on how to improve things at my plant.
I work with a lot of Chinese. I can confirm that they like to work in 1st gear a lot, rebuilding the same stuff over and over in reaction to changing requirements. Because of their immense capacity for work, it more than compensates for what westerners might desire in long term planning. I have gained quite a bit of respect for this way of work due to the results they have gotten.
What problems were there with the 787? IIRC it was the first major composite airliner and they had the advantage of hoovering up all the unemployed post Berlin Wall cream of the crop Soviet aerodynamicists to work on it for them.
Boeing in particular has been about "maximizing shareholder value" to detrimental levels for decades now. Absolutely pushing out its most experienced (and expensive) employees in favor of less skilled and experienced staff often with an ageist bent. Beyond this has been a cultural shift and ever expanding increase to woke HR policies and practices to levels that are more harmful than good.
I should note that I'm entirely in favor of diversity of background and thought, not to mention various educational backgrounds. That said, actually having "unofficial" policies against promoting people of a certain race and gender combination (no white men hired or advancing in management, especially old white men) is as problematic as any other racial/gender/ageist bigotry.
I don't work for Boeing as I don't have a formal education that prevents me from ever being considered. I do know several people that do. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer or anyone else.
One of the reasons the 787 was fraught with problems is because it was peak decision-making by finance and accounting people. Specifically, Boeing outsourced everything for the 787s. There were layers of subcontractors upon subcontractors to produce the different parts because, you know, outsourcing was "cheaper" or "more efficient". So of course the logistics pipeline is hellishly complicated.
All because Boeing just didn't want to employ people directly who can build up expertise.
Is this the New Midsize Airplane, the "797", again? [1] That's been on and off for over a decade. Should have been shipping by now.
The COMAC C919 is finally shipping, although it's not a great aircraft and China still imports the engines. COMAC will probably do better in the next round.
Will Embraeier build something in that size range? They could. They already build small midsize aircraft.[3]
This looks like Boeing missing the market.
And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.
> And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.
Interesting how in the eyes of Joe Public, Southwest had nothing to do with it. Wonder if the Southwest board figures their cynical calculation worked out well enough to try again?
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 enables it.
There are few companies on earth I’m as mad at as Boeing. As I see it, they are not done repenting for their crimes.
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 this state of things, and so if there must be software, it should be good software.
War planes dropped natural stability a while ago, IIRC the F16 was the first relaxed stability production aircraft (it's naturally stable at supersonic speeds but not subsonic).
In fact there was a flying airliner with relaxed stability (though only neutral not negative) when Airframe was published: the MD-11. Though I don't know that there have been others since.
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.
When that book was published, the F-117 Nighthawk was already retired after 10 years in service. The thing doesn't even look like it could fly on account of the rudimentary stealth features.
The 737-MAX is not "unstable by design". It has the exact same positive stability as other planes in 99% of it's flight envelope.
The remaining exception is that, at a certain AoA, speed, thrust, etc, there is a case where adding thrust pushes the nose up more than it does for the normal 737
The nose push is not abnormal, it is not unsafe, it is not unexpected. All planes with engines below the inertial "center" of the plane have this, including every 737 and every A320.
The problem was, this meant that it's flight characteristics were "different" from the older 737s. The entire point of any plane that is even a little bit 737 is to sell to airlines as "This is still a 737 and you don't need to train anyone in anything extra".
MCAS was built to change how the plane acts in this very specific regime, to act more like older 737s and counteract this nose push.
MCAS was entirely unnecessary except for business and policy goals. MCAS killed people because properly training aircrews for it would have gone against the entire point of the 737 MAX.
This is not correct and a gross simplification of the true issue.
All aircraft with underslung engines have similar pitch up tendencies to varying degrees and different handling characteristics between models are fine.
As seen with 757/67, 777/787 and A330/40/50 sharing type ratings despite being massively different aircraft.
> As the nacelle is ahead of the C of G, this lift causes a slight pitch-up effect (ie a reducing stick force) which could lead the pilot to inadvertently pull the yoke further aft than intended bringing the aircraft closer towards the stall. This abnormal nose-up pitching is not allowable under 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall characteristics". Several aerodynamic solutions were introduced such as revising the leading edge stall strip and modifying the leading edge vortilons but they were insufficient to pass regulation. MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during elevated AoA when flaps are up.
This is no different than modern traction control, and in no way is "wrong" from a design perspective. If I recall, the more fundamental flaw here is the degraded behavior of MCAS with dual-sensor AoA system was not they adequately trained pilots for, which was clearly part of the business case for Boeing, negligent or not.
The 737 is a clusterfuck because the giant engines throw off the physics of the plane both inertially and aerodynamically.
It’s easier to make a turbofan more efficient by making it bigger. But power density also tends to go up with new models, so there’s at least a chance that there’s a smaller, lighter engine with the same thrust and fuel economy out there, allowing them to improve (restore) the physics of the aircraft.
While not great, the MAX would have been fine if Boeing (and their airlines) had not clung so hard to the type rating. Without that, MCAS could have been left out entirely alongside its utterly botched implementation.
But that would have required a heavier certification process, and some pilot re-training. And they couldn't have that.
Of course that wouldn't have freed Boeing from the rest of its dismal record (MCAS didn't cause door blowouts), but...
Indeed. A fully new airframe likely won’t try to avoid training and certification overhead. Ripping that bandaid off will cut a lot of bullshit. But, there’s only so much engine you can shove under a narrow body aircraft. Landing gear is limited by physics and just making it taller won’t fix everything.
I just looked and from what I can find on Wikipedia this may warrant a new model from P&W or CFM because I’m not seeing a documented turbofan family with similar thrust and smaller diameter except ones with much lower bypass ratios and thus garbage fuel efficiency.
RR seems to be concentrating on bigger engines. They have a demonstrator that’s 2x the diameter of the Max’s engines. JFC.
>Landing gear is limited by physics and just making it taller won’t fix everything.
Every other plane is higher than the 737. The only reason the engines needed to be pushed forward on the 737, is that the 737 was built back in the day to be lower to the ground for easier operations at poorer airports, with things like stairs and baggage.
The 737 doesn't need to be as short as it is anymore because the vast majority of them now fly to airports with jetbridges and modern bag handling equipment.
The A320 is not as short as the 737 despite serving the same market, and can handle bigger engines.
But the entire problem stems from wanting to abuse the 737 type rating even further. If they were fine with a new type rating, they could put the engines pretty much wherever they want, put nice tall landing gear, etc.
That isn’t really true. Air stairs are still very common in much of Europe and Asia. It’s only places like the US and the Middle East that jet bridges are ubiquitous.
This is at best a Boeing talking-point. We don't have any data that states it is safe to operate the MAX without MCAS. It's quite possible that probable scenarios would result in stall faster than a human can react.
Afaik all analysis of the max’s design have come to the conclusion that its natural behaviour was nothing special or dangerous. It’s just that in some edge cases the nose would lift faster than on an NG, and that was not acceptable if it was sold as a 737 with no retraining.
One would think this question would have been answered directly in the FAA report, but it got zero mentions. We got zero data on how often MCAS made adjustments and how often in the report.
Basically, we only have Boeing's word for it, which is worthless. They self-certified everything, and we see how that went.
Boeing today is so obviously a different organisation to the one that built their rapidly dwindling reputation.
The 747 was an amazing engineering marvel. They started designing it in '65, the first one rolled off the production line in '68, and they were still making and selling them right up to 2023.
I have a book here somewhere that talks about how so many of the design decisions were based on cold hard physics facts combined with engineering pragmatism. They needed to run the engine at peak efficiency, and the tradeoff between air density and air temperature set the cruising altitude to ~35,000 feet. They knew they didn't know enough to be able to build a supersonic plane, so that set the top speed at just under mach 1 at 35,000 feet. They wanted to carry 2-3 times as many passengers as the 707 which set the payload and the all up weight. It needed to go slow enough to land safely at typical airport altitudes, which set the wing loading and given the weight the wing area. It needed to be as efficient as possible which meant a high aspect ratio, but given the required wing area and the available engineering capability for wing spars and aluminum construction that set the wing span.
It was hard engineering tradeoffs like that which then set a whole bunch of aviation standards. Runway lengths, terminal and jetway heights, landing approach speeds - all those types of "standards" which still exist today in airports around the globe, are heavily influenced by the 747 and it's design parameters. Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.
> Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.
Cessnas approach at less than half the speed of 747s. The safe maximum cruising speed is 20-30 kts short of a 747 approach speed. You would have to be willing to risk your airplane and your life to get a Cessna up to the approach speed of a 747.
My experience landing Cessnas and other light aircraft at airfields where they land the big boys (including busy international ones) is that you approach and land at the speeds that the aircraft you are flying is designed for. I have had controllers ask me to keep speed up for spacing, but they aren't expecting miracles, they know that you simply can't get a Cessna to go above a certain speed.
The rest of your comment also has some dubious claims. I suspect that the top speed was set just below mach 1, not because Boeing had no engineering knowledge about supersonic flight, but because fuel efficiency, and a host of other factors that make supersonic flight difficult. As a counter to that assertion I would point out that Boeing had a supersonic engineering team that started in 1952. They even designed a supersonic airliner that was never built in the 1960s. Hard to believe that they chose not to make the 747 supersonic because they lacked the experience to design and SST while they had an SST design and supersonic research team before the 747 was conceived.
The 747 was a groundbreaking airplane, but it wasn't all of the things being claimed here.
This will be Boeings answer to the Bombardier C Series, aka the Airbus A220 series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220 , which is one of the nicest planes for short haul in service at the moment.
Edit: indeed, not the 'Neo', I got the name wrong but the link right.
AirBaltic was my introduction to the series as well and it felt for the first time in 30 years or so that I was in a modern aircraft. The last time before that was in a then brand new 747, which I absolutely loved to fly.
And while a plane with good bones, the A220 has not been all positives for Airbus: AFAIK they still loses money on the thing, ramping up has been hell as it's not part of any of Airbus's existing lines of procurement, and it's contributed to the already awkward 319neo being DOA.
Boeing's only answer to the A220 was to get the US administration to impose a 220% import tarif on it. It didn't even compete with Boeing models. Fuck Boeing.
Why, though? I am just wondering how it takes effect. The carriers often lease the planes from special-purpose entities. If such an entity is based in Liberia, where does the tariff apply?
This has been a long time coming. The big buyer for 737 consistently has been Southwest. Before a recent ownership shakeup, Southwest wanted to only operate the 737 airframe, and avoid as many new features as possible to keep training costs low, and maintenance costs low.
New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames. Boeing doesn't want to make 737s, but they are locked in because of this demand.
Source: Family member trains pilots at Southwest after retiring from a major airline carrier after a career as pilot/check-airman.
People blame Boeing for the 737 MAX. They were elbows deep in a clean sheet design. Yeah, they shouldn’t have built the plane but the demand was made by Southwest and American who both said straight up if you don’t make a new 737, we’re switching to Airbus.
My understand is that the 737 Max was fine if they treated it as a new airplane. The problem was the put gizmos on it to make it behave like a regular 737 so pilots didn't need to get retrained on it. Those gizmos are what crashed it when you didn't know how they behaved when they failed.
The problem is that the whole point of the 737 Max was that airlines didn't have to treat it as a new airplane. If they did, it would have lost a lot of the value proposition and there would have been more support for an entirely new replacement instead. It would be a fascinating case study in perverse incentives and unintended consequences if it wasn't for the loss of life that resulted.
This is not a surprise. The timeline for this plane aligns exactly with the timeline for Airbus's a320/321 replacement which aligns exactly with when it is believed the next generation of engines will be ready.
Both Boeing and Airbus are spending a lot of time evaluating the next engine options. Last year there was an article that Airbus is more optimistic about CFM's open rotor designs while Boeing thinks the next generation geared turbofan models will win out. That is entirely based on leaks and no-one actually knows how true those assessments are.
The 737 Max was designed with the expectation that the 8 variant would be the sweet spot. Since that time it is clear that there is massive demand for up-gauging and the A321neo is dominating and there is significant demand for the Max10 variant despite it not being certified yet.
I would expect that both Boeing and Airbus are looking at that size (maybe slightly larger) for their next narrowbody with some flexibility for shrinks and/or stretches.
This is not a response to any existing planes. The A320/321 family is very old (50 years mid 2030) and it is expected that both Boeing and Airbus are going to be introducing new airframes to fit the new engine technology.
Well since the 787 program will very likely never break even, let alone turn in profit, for Boeing, the 737's replacement will be a do or die project for Boeing. They cannot afford another money-losing product.
seeing how much power shifted from legislative branch to executive, and how often executive branch changes its mind, I wouldn’t count on the unwavering government support
There are only two¹ major manufacturers of commercial airliners: one in the US and one in the EU. Both are essentially state backed. Both blocs want to have their own manufacturer, for strategic reasons, and they won't let it go under.
1. There will probably be three in a few years, since China is building up Comac.
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.
The article said Boeing is talking to Rolls Royce for the new plane. American Airlines used to have a fleet of 757s powered by Rolls Royce engines assembled in Montreal Canada. I used to work on those engines many many years ago.
The A321 is an elongated/bigger version of the A320. Similarly to the B737 - which also went through this process a few times (e.g. compare the B737-400 vs B737-600 vs B737-MAX) - it means the engines are moving a heavier&bigger plane.
Boeing currently has an awkward gap between the 737 and the widebodies that was previously filled by the 757 - the 737 Max 10 (which still isn't certified!) only has about two thirds of the range of the A321XLR, and a slightly lower passenger capacity. Airlines that currently have 757 fleets and who need that range are going for Airbus instead, and Boeing just doesn't have an answer for it. So while, yes, any new Boeing design is likely to be fly by wire and composite and everything, it also seems likely that it's going to try to fit that market.
The 737 Max 7, the smallest of the Max series, is longer than the 737-200, the stretched version of the original design. A brand new design is going to be able to ignore that market (which basically doesn't exist any more, the Max 7 only has a handful of orders) and scale upwards to also be a 757 replacement. But it's also going to have basically no commonality with the 737, so it's going to have to genuinely be better than the Airbus product because existing Boeing customers aren't going to benefit from being able to move existing pilots to it without retraining or benefit from common maintenance plans and so on. It obviously should be better - the A320 program started over 40 years ago, it's not that much newer than the 737 - but given Boeing's myriad series of failures in recent years and how painful the 787 program was, it's not impossible that they'll fuck this up entirely.
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?
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.
Would probably add that it likely has reliable real-time constraints as part of this. While I can imagine simpler ARM and RISC-V chips having similar properties, depending on the application it would likely be hard to certify any modern CPU design for a lot of medical or aerospace applications.
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 on these things know arguably infinitely more than I do.
The scenario that comes to my mind is: these chips had a lot of potential customers 30 years ago, and now may be down to just one or two customers left buying too few units to make it worthwhile.
Presumably, they have "guaranteed" buyers but also, if so, why would Airbus have issues sourcing CPUs, for example?
That mindset is inevitably going to leave you in a ditch though. Either you run out of suppliers for the chip that are willing to produce on a shitty inefficient old node under certified conditions (mostly because it inevitably gets really expensive to keep the machines for production running!), or you run out of developers able and willing to write code for these old designs where the toolchain probably is also certified and has nowhere near close to the bells and whistles of modern IDEs or the automatic benefits from modern programming languages such as pointer safety.
Anything should have a replacement budget and timeline attached.
Overly nerdy question: I'm curious regarding AoA sensor failure, is there an ability to manually source select the AoA, if not, how about the FMC? This might be called master source select, or which side is controlling (captain or first officer).
China recently started building and delivering airplanes. It will be interesting to see if Boeing can actually compete with what is coming out of China over the next few years: https://www.voanews.com/a/7528331.html
In the short-term, I imagine USA-based airlines will not be allowed to buy any airplanes from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-comac-military-...
And perhaps they would not even be allowed to fly in our airspace. But if China decides that it wants to build planes at lower prices than Boeing (or Airbus), then I imagine they will. Their marketshare would grow elsewhere in the globe, reducing Boeing's sales. Can Boeing deal with that? Would the USA borrow China's playbook, and nationalize (or something similar) Boeing to keep it solvent?
China is very good at subsidising development like this. Other commenters are rightly pointing out that they cannot currently compete with Boeing. But if you look at the way the chinese approached car manufacturing, 20 years ago, I wouldnt have even ridden in one, these days they are honestly fantastic. Its because they got the chance to make those really bad cars, that they were able to improve to where they are today. 20 years from now, its possible that the gap closes to the point that Boeing is displaced from everywhere but the US.
Biggest issue I can see is that the US will try and weaponise national security against them. Much like how Cisco and Juniper fought to have Huawei and friends blacklisted in most western countries. Just as they become competitive, Boeing and Airbus might start screaming that the chinese planes have communist killswitches and that planes will fall out of the sky if theres a war with China.
COMAC can only compete (geopolical drama aside) if engine efficiency improves or fuel prices decreases. TLDR every bit of COMAC can be modern / tier1 (and most of it is), but at current aviation fuel prices, 10-15% efficiency gap in engines will save more money on fuel over airframe lifetime. C919 is basically a 2025 narrow with a 2015 engine, but that old engine alone makes it not economically viable in most markets AT current aviation fuel prices. COMAC makes a lot of sense for PRC economically, not giving a cent to boeing, can build out COMAC specific support across country easily, but it's still commercially not well priced.
The caveate being COMAC is only expensive / has limited room to discount because it uses a lot of western components (for easy regulation/certification only). If PRC moves to a full soveign civil aviation stack, it would probably be very possible to price COMAC competitively, but that's more a medium/long term project. That's probably how it goes the way things are gonig, US probably not going to even certify/liimt where PRC planes can land to kneecap COMAC. PRC + RU can probably do some shenanigans like prevent US planes from flying over their airspace in retaliation and then it's a matter of how much divertion (extra fuel+travel costs) impact bottom line. At the end of the day geopolitics will determine how viable civil aviation projects are.
I'm admittedly very much not an expert in this area. But my post is less about the C919 specifically, and more about China's track record of developing manufacturing processes very rapidly such that they compete on the world market. Specifically I'm thinking of how China is suddenly exporting tons of EVs throughout the world at prices that USA/EU auto-makers can't really compete with. Over 50% of EVs sold in the world are Chinese (and none of those cars are allowed in the USA).
If China decides they want to continue developing and building commercial airplanes, where will they be in 5-10 years? Where will Boeing be?
Has there been any sign of change in their corporate culture?
Last I heard they're pushing hard to ramp up production and FAA is back to letting them self-certify stuff. And they're under worse financial pressure now than when they made the last round of questionable decisions.
...I'm all for competition & avoiding a monopoly but colour me unconvinced that the root cause has been fixed.
The obvious move is to take cues from the 787 program in terms of composites, to cut fuel burn. Adds some creature comforts like larger windows as a side bonus.
During the MCAS scandal I saw a report that the software developers who wrote it were offshored and being paid something like $13/hr.
While there weren't actually coding flaws in MCAS in that it did what the spec said, I've met people who work in avionics and they would have pushed back against the specification because they tend to think about how their component integrates into the system.
Obviously it's impossible to prove that, had the software been developed by people specializing in avionics they would have caught the problem but it's just another hole in the swiss cheese model: when you outsource your avionics software development to an offshore contractor who was making a webstore yesterday and will be making an iphone app tomorrow, you eliminate the possibility that the implementers could do an informed critique of the spec.
You’re absolutely right! The engines do not appear to be working. What I actually meant to do is, of course, turn the engines on. As you can see, they should now be working correctly. Sorry about that, thanks for correcting me!
You’re absolutely right! The engines do not appear to be working. What I actually meant to do is, of course, turn the engines on. As you can see, they should now be working correctly. Sorry about that, thanks for correcting me!
Hey hey hey, the $9/hr software engineer will be doing all the work, unless they can find a $1/hr guy. The first guy should just become a vendor and subcontract down to the $1/hr guy, that's what the rest of Boeing's supply chain is doing already.
I mean, they botched one piece of software in order to retrofit an old plane with catastrophic results. God knows what the Wall Street zombie version of Boeing will do with a whole new plane, especially in the age of AI enshittification.
You're absolutely right! Unfortunately, the MAX replacement will have strict weekly limits on how many hours it can be flown fully loaded - and most airlines will hit the weekly limit after just a couple flights.
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, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company.
Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
One of the most exceptional CEOs I've worked with was a lawyer. I still think the proverb is largely correct, along with the other proverb about the exception proving the rule.
There are always people who work out despite common sense saying they shouldn't that doesn't mean common sense is wrong, it just means we don't understand what the real factors are.
Or we don't care because it's a rule of thumb not a law of physics.
He initially turned down the job because he felt that a lawyer wasn't the right person to run an engineering company, and from reports of people who worked with him he knew his knowledge limits and listened to the engineers. He took serious risks with the 707 and 747 projects because he trusted the people who understood the technology.
MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.
Fun fact the 707 had the first implementation of “MCAS” because the plane had a tendency to pitch up in a certain flaps configuration. They added a stick nudger which applied light pressure in said config. Not a stick pusher, as it did not alert the pilots, it simply applied an extra input independent of the pilots. However this was made aware to all pilots of the plane and likely contributed to its certification.
Also the 707 tail was extended by 40ft to give it better minimum ground speed control, this was retroactively applied to already built planes. Very interesting to see how this was applied in the past with a lawyer at the helm vs the current ceo during the launch of the 737Max
Assume 40 inches rather than 40ft
Adding 12 meters to an aircraft is quite a big change.
Nokia’s CEO between 2006 and 2010 was their former chief lawyer.
It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.
Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.
The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere.
It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
I got to briefly try a N900 back in the day. When it powered on you would briefly see the raw X background stipple and the x-shaped cursor before the window manager loaded. I liked the nerd factor of it but I knew at that point the company was in the weeds.
True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.
Maemo was an actual GNU/Linux, not just kernel with custom userland. Logging into a cluster from my N900 and having plots just appear on screen thanks to X network transparency is still one of the most futuristic things I have ever seen a computer do.
Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X
Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them.
Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
If the 770 was anything like the N900 then the screen was resistive and the stylus was passive. So you could use your fingers but in my experience, for any finer task, you needed the stylus.
Damn, I really miss the N900. I was seriously using it as recently as about 4-5 years ago.
They also threw away Meego, which was praised for UI and design.. and it was Linux.. not often heard in the same phrase. Build with Qt.
I have an n9 that I turn on once in a blue moon.
Even today it looks better than any of the major mobile OSs, is more responsive and just _feels_ better to hold and use.
The road not taken.
Dennis Muilenberg has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was Boeing’s CEO during and after the MAX disaster. He cannot be blamed for the first crash, but he absolutely bears a direct responsibility for every person who died in the second crash, as by that point he knew that he had delivered a product that had not been correctly and fully certified by the regulatory authority.
An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded.
I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
In most cases,the successor to a founder CEO is a finance person - because their mandate is to massage the stock on the behalf of the appointing board.
It's interesting how that infects every aspect of a company.
I used to work tech support for a mid sized company selling some specialized networking eqipment, late 1990s and early 2000s. Our big deal was we answered the phone immediately, and we were good at what we did, we solved problems, resolved the issue right then and there on the phone.
Customers paid through the nose for our support contracts because it was worth it and they were happy. Happy customers were actually happy customers.
Company grew and was acquired and acquired other companies and so on.
By the end of my time there happy customers was a metric. It really didn't reflect actually happy customers, it was an amalgam of arbitrary stats. We could hit or surpass those numbers, nothing really mattered. Nobody was more happy if the numbers went up, or more sad if the numbers went down. Someone closed a ticket, did it solve anything?, who knows, but it was one more ticket closed!
Sad stuff really.
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 them.
My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
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 opportunity for career advancement by shoehorning problems that need to be solved with flobnix into the requirements.
I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside.
Concrete example: 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? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.
>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.
We'd pay $xxx billion to have a permanent moon base, something Apollo never had. If that can't efforts excite people enough to keep funding flowing I doubt a space station in lunar orbit will move the needle
To add another data point: the Chinese lunar program also plans to land humans on the moon and later establish a manned research outpost on the surface. But there don't seem to be any plans for an orbital stations, despite China having very successful space stations in LEO
What does a moon base get us, though?
It was cool to get bragging rights by being the first to land and come back - in the ultimate show of “soft power” against the Soviet Union. But a permanent moon base? We can’t even fund the ISS.
Frankly, a moon base might be cool, but nobody has sold me on it is worth having for any other reason. Some smart people have given good arguments that it isn't worth having.
And here I'm sitting in my basement not working on space projects and realizing money spent on space is money I don't have for something else I want (even it is is only $.10 that is still money that adds up).
A moon base gets us a platform to test what long term low gravity does to a human body, and an environment to test ISRU for various materials like water, oxygen, iron, titanium, etc...
Being able to prove that people can live in an environment like the moon long term and develop materials that can make their stay there sustainable by reducing consumables and developing replacement parts from lunar material is a great stepping stone.
Being able to demonstrate the doubling of usable pressurized space by building and burying modules that can be stocked with equipment brought from Earth would be a remarkable accomplishment.
Stepping stone to… what exactly?
We couldn’t even handle a closed source experiment on earth (see biosphere 2), why would one on another celestial body fare any better?
Less Money went into biosphere 2. You could probably have automated everything and lowered the workload and bioload significantly.
It's a stepping stone to building very large spacecraft/space stations that have rotating habitat rings that would be used to colonize the solar system.
These kinds of things can be put into cycler orbits around the Moon or Mars[0] which would allow relatively comfortable and cost effective journeys to these locations. As the scale of these kinds of craft expand they could eventually become destinations themselves akin to massive cruise ships in the sky where some people live out their entire lives.
Biosphere 2 was obviously a flawed experiment but it seems that Mir, the ISS, and Tiangong have shown that long term habitation in micro-G is possible, it seems like the extension of that is to try long term habitation of a body with gravity and material to experiment with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler
Can you see a future for humanity where the moon isn’t colonised?
What's the future for humanity if the moon is colonized? What does the moon provide us that the Earth does not?
One interesting (admittedly small in scope, but huge in impact) thought experiment is the following- let's say that the doomsayers are correct. The Earth has been destroyed and inhabitable, leaving just our extra-planetary outposts. How do we supply the necessary high-tech manufacturing capability to survive?
Have we spun up all of the supply chain to reproduce the state-of-the-art technology required just required to sustain life on that celestial body? As an example, even with all our experience on Earth, we have exactly one physical location on our entire planet that can crank out the most advanced chips used in our modern technology we take for granted. That build-out took massive investment of deca-billions of dollars plus a massive, deep supply chain to build, even with all the advantages we have here on Earth (things like, oh, breathable air, access to vast carbon energy storage, access to millions of humans and existing factories... just as a start...)
Are we expected to replicate all of that on our next celestial body? If not, how do we expect to replace failing parts and continue progress?
What about even more basic concerns about things like... literal population growth? We understand ... a little... about how very healthy adult human bodies react to prolonged periods in zero-g (hint: not well, where "prolonged" == 437 contiguous days [0]). What about pregnant women? Babies? Spaceflight crews are required to exercise two hours every day to counteract muscle and bone atrophy [1]. How is that expected of say... an infant?
Don't get me wrong, I find spacefaring fascinating. I idolize the Apollo era. But we haven't even scratched the surface of how we can sustain any sort of population off this planet. We need to find ways to get along here, because ... this is all we've got, folks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_longest_spacefligh... [1] https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/07/16/muscle-an...
Yes? Why do we need to colonize the moon with squishy meatbags with billions of years of evolutionary optimization for life on Earth?
All these dreams of star-trek like interstellar travel (or even interplanetary travel beyond taking a selfie and going home) require major advances in the physics tech tree. Might come, might not.
Would you not like to see major advances in the physics tech tree? The way you get those advancements, is to have a goal. And funding.
A moon colonization program provides both.
The Azores wasn't exactly instrumental in the colonization of north america.
In the 1980s I read articles in the “science fact” columns in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that told me that NASA sold out a much more ambitious lunar program for something that was little more than a stunt.
The reality was that Von Braun looked at dozens of mission architectures before discovering one that was much more feasible than any of the others and made it possible to realize Kennedy’s dream.
The moon is not far away in terms of miles but in terms of energy and momentum it is very far away if your goal is to fly there and fly back. Right now the best idea we have for a moon lander is to hope that SpaceX gets Starship to orbit and masters orbital refueling it’s not like they can fly 100 tons there and back, but rather they can land about what Apollo did with a much bigger spacecraft that’s really tall and tippy, needs an elevator, can get the ascent rockets smashed on rocks, etc. if they had a set of those chopsticks on the Moon or Mars they could land it easily but on generic inner solar system bodies covered with boulders, craters and stuff good luck. Plan B is basically the same from Blue Origin.
If you could refuel there the math changes, maybe you can, there might be usable ice at the poles but nobody has seen it, unless we have a Drexler machine we’re going to have to launch a huge number of missions with a marginally effective system until we have a system in place that can reliably deliver fuel.
So it’s tough, any honest analysis of space colonization makes you come to the conclusion that Drexler did, rocketry has very little to do with it, being able to pack a self-sufficient industrial civilization into the smallest package has everything to do with it.
Gateway is also a trial run for conducting operations at a Mars/Phobos/Diemos station.
But then you've got to ask why would we want an orbital Mars/Phobos/Deimos station?
Because Elon.
Snark aside: the goal is Mars because it might be possible to colonize the planet and to have a place that acts as a reserve for humanity should shit really hit the fan (i.e. WW3).
The moon isn't suitable as much for that purpose due to a complete lack of any atmosphere and because it's too close to Earth.
That's surface habitation, not an orbital station around the planet or one of its moons.
The problem with using a space station as a waypoint on the way to and from the surface of a remote body is that it make the mission more expensive. For example, the Lunar Gateway increases the delta-v requirement by 15-20% (can't remember exact number) compared to a more direct mission. Which then, all else being equal, increases the total mission cost by much more than 15-20% because the rocket equation always wins. And that's just the actual visit, we're not even considering the cost of putting the station there in the first place.
So I keep going back to, why a space station? If we're going to spend all that extra money on turning hydrogen and oxygen into hot water, why put it toward a space station out in the middle of nowhere instead of, say, more time or more equipment on the surface of the body?
Also, IIRC, none of Elon's proposed mission architectures for going to Mars involve an orbital station. And, while SpaceX did get the Artemis lander contract, they weren't involved in the decision to have a Lunar Gateway.
Even if WW3 were to happen, I'm not sure it could let Earth be in a worse state than Mars for supporting human life.
It won't be. Even an extinction level asteroid or comet impact will be easier to handle on a planet with breathable atmosphere, water, and other resources. Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that. Still, Mars would require much more self-sufficiency than we've ever attempted. It's worth the effort to expand human exploration.
Mars isn’t exactly habitable either. Not to mention the myriad of issues we face even getting there, let alone thriving.
Read the book A City On Mars recently which had a lot of interesting concerns not widely discussed in the pro space colonization community : https://www.acityonmars.com/. Highly recommended.
If any faction is on Mars during WW3, there’s a nuke landing there 6 months after the show is over here.
That’s not Elon’s plan. He’s too smart for that shit and wants to aerobrake down to the surface where there is abundant CO2 and probably H2O somewhere to make fuel for the return trip.
> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane
> Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft?
For pitch, yes. For width, no —- you run into quantization pretty quickly. The difference between sardines and standard economy is less than the difference between 3+3 and 3+2 — it’s not really feasible for most traditional airlines to choose a different number of seats across than the design point. And for a 3+3 setup, adding 6” to fuselage diameter makes a noticeable difference to (wider) passengers, which the airlines can’t really take away.
Seat and aisle widths are customer selectable options. Hence, a customer may order a 787 with 3-3-3 seating or 2-4-2 seating. The vast majority of airlines chose sardines instead of comfort. In a 737, customers only can get 3-3 seating, but they can choose wide (17.8”) seats and skinny aisles, like Southwest does, or they can choose skinny (17.1”) seats and wider aisles, like Alaska does.
Boeing is in constant communication with the airlines on new airplane designs, as they want to build the most profitable airplane for their customers that they can. This means the airline has a lot of input on fuselage diameter.
There's no incentive. Passengers rarely know what type they'll be flying on when they book, and prioritize it over price even less. For airlines, a bigger airplane is a distinct disadvantage though, as it's operationally more expensive (increased cross section equals increased drag equals increased fuel burn).
A fully loaded 747 is extremely profitable, the large size has economies of scale. That's why the 747 was very very popular with the airlines.
So, yes, a 747 burns more fuel. But the fuel burn per paying passenger is less.
It was an old airplane too and not as optimized as newer airplanes in terms of engines, aerodynamic design, weight and so forth.
The A380 was a step up in size and had additional problems such as there not being that many airports which had upgraded their gates and other facilities to support an airplane that big.
The real issue with the 747 is people will take a point to point route if at all possible. Worse, flying a small plane point to point is cheaper for the passenger than flying 2 747s. If you live in Lincoln NE - sorry your city is too small to get direct flights to anything but close major hubs (even then odds are you drive to nearby Omaha thus further reducing demand options). However if you live in a Larger non-hub city airlines can undercut each other by just doing direct flights to other large non-hub cities.
Pretty much. You can outfit pretty much any airframe you want to be business class only seating but not enough people will buy when it pops up on Expedia at 2+ times the price of the alternative.
I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.
There is a business-class only airline (La Compagnie) that flies from Newark to Europe and they're profitable. A little more expensive than 2x the price though, but less than 10x.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Compagnie
Never heard of this airline so I just checked: Over the next few months the cheapest flight from EWR to their base in Orly is ~$2,500 vs ~$365 for Economy (French Bee to be exact). That seems like its still a separate class and would exclude most Economy flyers.
I would buy an upgrade if it was twice the price. In reality it's more like 10x.
That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades).
So, yes, sticker price for upper class service is pretty expensive. In a world where upper class service was the norm on certain routes on certain planes it would probably be pretty expensive but probably cheaper than the upgrade on mixed class service.
Do you have a source showing $/sqft of economy vs business/first class? This video is basically saying the opposite of you: that business/first class subsidizes economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc
It might be better to say that they form a system which is economically optimized as a whole. It is genius, for instance, that frequent fliers get upgrades from coach to first class when they're available because it means if a first class flier changes their plans or wants to fly on short notice an economy flier just says in coach and won't feel mad about it -- the first class seats are 100% occupied in terms of providing somebody a somewhat premium experience but are 50% occupied with full revenue customers and that 50% occupation is part of the completely premium experience because it means it is always available.
Yes, I was imprecise in what I wrote. There's a lot of cross-subsidization in various forms going on that makes all-business class at business-class prices tough for airlines even on routes like NYC to London--which have existed but not sure they do at the moment.
> That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades).
That's the complete 100% opposite of truth. For most airlines, the economy class is just a nice addition to the business class.
Yup, as another poster noted, the seating density and comfort are decided by airlines. Aircraft manufacturers install standardized rails for seating and console selection, and allow for many different configurations.
> The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.
I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans.
The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.
> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket. They moan and complain about this or that, but they still do the same thing.
So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.
> With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket
With rare exception people just buy what they can afford. If people had so much money that they could afford to fly first class and it wouldn't impact their budget very few would get the lowest price they can find knowing that their experience in the air will be miserable.
> So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.
By cutting the number of economy seats and increasing the number of business and first class ones?
Airlines don’t care about the economy traveller. They are there just to fill the space for a marginal profit.
They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible.
The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.
> They need both.
No. If they could fill the entire plane with business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even less) of it, you bet they would.
The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.
So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn’t say that they need the economy passengers.
> > They need both.
> No (...) The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t.
in other words, in nearly all cases they need both
Maybe you want a small team of big people.
1. Modern airliners with fly by wire have capability similar to MCAS the difference is it is not half baked but has numerous degraded states it can run in when sensors are out and pilots are trained on all that. Any new airplane will have that under the name “flight envelope protection”
2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it.
3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. (a) Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution.
4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs
(a) when organizations in my town do a SWOT analysis they almost always put the bad state of the local airport as a disadvantage they have relative to competitors —- the county and state would spend money to improve what they can but it comes down to out-of-town airlines that have their own priorities, a pilot shortage, etc.
I think the days of Boeing being able to make the plane with a small focused team is probably in the past. Way too much engineering talent has been outsourced and the R&D just isn't there. It requires a level of vertical integration that was long since divested for cost saving reasons. That's why it is so beathtakingly expensive to develop a new plane. coordination between literally thousands of contractors is a nightmarishly complex task that requires an enormous team of middle managers and lawyers. It may even be the case that modern planes are just plain too complex to realistically do the majority of the work in-house.
> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
In practice people in general vote with wallets for cheaper sardine-like flights.
(though more spacious seats typically can be bought)
It might be because of how airlines price tickets.
For a 10 hour flight that costs $500 (economy) it will cost +$80 1-way to pick a seat. Not a special seat, just a seat in general. An exit row seat costs +$160 1-way.
> design it without sardines in mind
Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is determined by the airline customer.
> Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.
The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up.
Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.
The 737, like all large commercial aircraft, also requires an artificial control feel force feedback system in order to meet design requirements. It has always had one going back to 1967.
A question that has never been adequately answered: if MCAS was conceived of in order to meet the 14 CFR Part 25.143 requirements for a positive control force feedback gradient, why did Boeing not modify the existing Elevator Differential Feel Computer (a mechanical/hydraulic computer with no electronic components) instead of inventing a half-assed, undocumented, slow moving, open-loop fly-by-wire contraption using the trim tab actuator?
I think what parent was about is open vs. closed loop control, not fly-by-wire or not. Both their and your point stand of course.
They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)
Can’t wait to fly in the 737-AI.
All the executives first, please.
Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin with!
>If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane.
And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.
The number of passengers you can fit in a commercial plane is based on how quickly you can evacuate them, with the doors being a major bottleneck. Many ULCCs in Europe have planes that are right up against that limit.
> with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets
It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT.
Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
Hasn't Tim Apple done his share by releasing apple watch and airpods, which have been good successors to other ancillary products which apple had earlier (ipad / ipod).
And right now as well, no laptop comes close to the overall experience that the Mac provides so he has been able to maintain market leadership.
Far better than Zuck for whom the only source of innovation has been acquisitions rather than releasing original products.
> apple watch and airpods
Fair point.
My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out
> My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out
Because the Software Update page under System Settings is all that normies will ever read and so what's in the text there is focused on normies.
Meanwhile techies may be interest in the CVEs listed in the security update list:
* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/125111
* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/100100
* https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
And corporate IT types may be interest in enterprise features, like TLS behavioural changes:
* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/121011
I believe I read somewhere that announcing new emoji drives noticeably more OS upgrades compared to more boring security and stability update release notes.
Apple is rumored to have a strategic emoji reserve. The more they want people to install an update, the more emojis from the reserve they release as part of it. Because this is basically the only thing that drives OS updates among average people.
What about Airpods?
Also, I expect Vision to eventually be a massive success.
The basic Airpods are crap, noise cancellation is useless, they fall off the ear. You're better off with Sony or JBL at half the price. The Pro ones are good.
I don’t have AirPods basic but I’ve got 2nd gen AirPods Pro and they’re one of the best products I’ve bought in a long time. I’d put them up there with my 2011 kindle I still use every day.
I got the pros. I think they are great in every way except (1) they fall out of my ears, but that’s cause I’ve got a genetic polymorphism that makes me make crazy amounts of earwax and my doctor warned me that one of these days I’m gonna wake up and not be able to hear cause my ears are clogged —- I don’t wear them outside, I just wear them where having them fall out is not a problem, (2) the noise cancellation is supposed to turn itself off when I talk to somebody and it seems like they always turn it off whenever I mutter to myself, but when I actually talk to somebody, they don’t, and (3) young people these days walk around with AirPods in and they just can’t hear you. It’s just like they’re 95 years old.
I don't own AirPods but it is a huge commercial success.
They were designed so that they'd get easily lost and they prevent you from replacing the battery. With enough marketing even a low quality product like airpods can be a commercial success
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/19/05/12/0256259/why-airpod...
You have to have the right ear form for ordinary AirPods. Comes with the design, sadly.
> There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod.
The jury is out on whether Cook can pull it off.
It's more likely than not that they will, in my opinion. As an owner of both an AVP and Quest 2, the former is a lot nicer to use than the latter with the exception of VR games, and my hunch is that Valve is going to eat Meta's lunch for gaming with Deckard (which will be at least as good as the Quest 3, but much more open, paired with a vastly more populated and popular marketplace, probably won't treat PCVR as an afterthought, and won't be saddled with the Quest's somewhat painful sideloading experience).
The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well within their capabilities.
Having experienced the Quest Pro I can say that Apple has absolutely no clue what the focus should be on.
Hint: being able to grab a well balanced headset that is so easy to put on as a cap. This makes you not think if you are going to watch or play in VR, you just do it.
I think Apple knows exactly what they're doing, but was forced to choose between making the product more about demonstrating their tech and end goals or being mass market mediocre and chose the former. Nobody would've cared about what amounted to a Quest wrapped in a Cupertino design with similar performance, specs, etc. It's very much in line with the original iPod and iPhone, both of which took a few iterations before becoming category-defining hits. It'll probably be the second or third-gen Vision device that'll fix the AVP's nits while also keeping or improving upon its strong points.
That's why they bought up Luxotica shares. Because scuba gear is for scuba diving. Even if it's white, it's still scuba gear. Remember the PDAs with resitive screens and styluses? They were a lot more convenient than scuba gear.
> The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro.
AirPods and the Apple Watch are also major new product lines, by some accounts each alone bigger than many major technology firms, that were released in the Tim Cook era of Apple.
Fair point.
There’s a beautiful conference (which I’ve lost) saying that science and technology can regress. We always talk about “the progress” but things do regress all the time; Tests I’ve cleared for employment can’t be passed by newcomers, the NASA wouldn’t be able to put a rocket on the moon today, and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore.
In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance. Nothing gets maintained, it’s either new or collapsing, but no-one enjoys the middle part. Which is sad. It’s a form of inflation.
Boeing is perfectly right to design a new plane right now. Engineers who interned on the 787 have bought a house on the countryside a few years ago.
This here should trigger a red flag when you hear anyone say "The government should be run like a business".
Businesses kill themselves all the time from the loss of institutional knowledge. We see stuff like "government spends X a year paying people Y to build almost no product Z". Instead, we're paying people Y to be ready to build Z when something goes terribly wrong like war.
When they say run like a business that doesn't mean that it should be done like a reckless business. Plenty of businesses invest into things like disaster recovery or insurance which they may never need.
Running like a business means providing services to profitable customers. This is, surprisingly, the exact opposite of what government is supposed to be doing. The USPS would be plenty profitable if it didn’t have to maintain the infrastructure to deliver a letter from Honolulu to Barrow for 50 cents. Medicare? Not the best business model. Roads? Forget it.
>means providing services to profitable customers
So Uber wasn't a business for its first 14 years? There are more objectives a business can have than maximize immediate profit. There are other metrics it can try and move.
Uber was a Business trying to gain a market share in hopes to cement itself as competitor or even become monopoly. It's also clear Uber was building massive ride hailing network so when self-driving cars became a thing, out with human drivers, in with computer drivers. Obviously, that didn't happen.
Government does not really have that. All their businesses have 100% market share so to run it profitable, they would have to stop doing unprofitable thing. Like providing healthcare to poor people or delivering from Hawaii to some rural area.
Nope. When people say governments should run like a business, they always mean the most reckless version of business you can think of.
It's even the only interpretation of that phrase that makes sense, because if you take the optimizing into large risks interpretation away, there's no other way those two can act in similar ways.
Is it this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
> In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance.
Instead, the most important innovation are the ones that reduce maintenance needs.
Automating farms, moving mechanical computation into general purpose processors, simplifying science theories so that people can learn in a semester stuff that took decades to mature... All of those have a tremendous impact. All of those speed everything up, and make room for more innovation to appear.
> and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore.
How much are you or your enterprise willing to pay for that?
See, the economics just don't make sense. Give me some VC money, a small team of experts in the domain and some runway and I'll give you a self-hosted alternative to Jira.
But the cost for you would be too high and I will go out of business trying to sell software while everyone else is renting it out.
What about the Apple watch?
The Apple Watch seems to have suddenly found its pace.
I am seeing them everywhere, around here.
I suspect that quite a few are SEs and maybe last year's model, but I do see a lot of Ultras.
Battery does seem to be a limiting factor and I don't wear mine unless I'm doing activities where it's especially useful. But, for a lot of people, something else to charge doesn't seem a big impediment.
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.
What about it? I'm not going to recharge my watch every night. Yawn.
Yeah, we have basically infinite battery on "dumb" watches, as long as you use them. You know, so you can rely on them.
The Apple Watch to me just seems like a worse earbud. If I want to be that interrupted in tge middle of something might as well hear the thing and not have to look at it.
I never had any interest in wearing a watch to bed. Still don’t, although theoretically I could charge it for a few minutes in the evening to make that possible.
The Watch has helped me lose 30 pounds, has significantly helped motivate me to exercise more, and has let me keep my phone on silent mode for at least 5 years now. For me, it’s a great device.
I don't personally sleep with my watch on, so I just charge it every night. But it actually only takes about 15 mins to charge a decent amount, so if I did I'd just charge it while I was in the shower...
There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro
Grab one when they go on sale, and keep it in the box for a couple of decades.
Have you seen what Lisas go for at auction these days?
Have you seen what they went for when they were new?
Andy Grove, Steve Job's friend (if not mentor), agreed:
"Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. ....abandoning today’s 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry." https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-bas...
No one listened to him, certainly not Intel.
Well, if I was CEO of Boeing, first day I'd basically be Microsoft and move heaven and earth getting the Dave Cutler of aviation (I have no idea who that is). He's in charge and if you don't like it you come to me.
Second problem are the MBA's. I don't have a solution for that, other than keep them far away from Cutler's division.
Honestly, the technical part is "easy"; it's the day to day politics that gets in the way when what is needed is longterm thinking. Take for example when NYC hired Andy Byford and Cuomo The Child couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. Shame.
> its design was fraught with problems
The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain and product-market fit. The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design, and has been an exceptional machine since then.
> The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain
Which was a decision of boeing to outsource to their suppliers the design and development of those components. this combined with boeing doing some interesting pricing decisions lead to suppliers being rather screwed on the project.
> The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design
Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues.
> Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues
What are you referring to?
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.)
This dynamic is a core theme in Asimov's "Foundation." The Empire's technological stagnation is defined by its inability to create new atomic devices. They had the old ones, and they had technicians to maintain them, but the actual knowledge of how to design and construct one from the ground up had been lost to institutional rot. They could patch the old world together, but they couldn't build the new one.
Very true! Unfortunately that is not present at all in the Apple series of Foundation…
Asimov was such a visionary he managed to predict the year 2025 in France.
This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance. And in that comment the idea was that LLMs are accelerating this dynamic.
I dont want to stretch the analogy too thin but in this case instead of LLMs being a catalyst, perhaps its a monopoly.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Has a degree that’s basically informatics management.
My coworker took a class with case studies and the theory presented by that class was that all successful projects have at least one person who has fit the entire system into their head. They can tell you what happens if you pull on this thread. What the consequences are of trying to remove this feature. Lose them and you are fucked. Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same. If they can’t it’s the beginning of the end.
For software, the easiest way to design for this is to keep systems small enough that fitting it in your head is relatively feasible in a reasonable time for a competent engineer.
Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all that often, and you can build pretty big things.
I imagine this is doable with hardware too
My yard stick is discoverability. If you don’t touch things for a while they get fuzzy, and someone might have refactored it. So you need to be able to familiarize yourself with bits of the code you haven’t looked at recently. Helps with code reviews, onboarding, and production outages.
In particular it’s difficult to train new people to take up on-call duties if they cannot sit in the corner of the room and try either the same things you’re trying or their own pet theories without taking your attention or interfering with your tests. They need to be able to hear the repro steps and spool up their own snapshot in a similar state. That scales. Gatekeepers do not. Discoverability is necessary but insufficient to achieve this. There’s more to it but the foundation is discoverability and reproduceability.
In my experience (and I generally have found myself in the position of 'person that has the system in their head'), it's not necessarily about size but about being able to sit down and work with the system. It's not just about having the theory but also having the time actually working with the system and learning how things act in practice, which is a kinda weird mix between being a senior role with a high-level view of the system and a theoretically quite junior role of more or less technician.
(It also usually involves some quite proactive learning of the form of finding the specialist in some part of the system and sitting next to them and going "explain to me how this part works", and then repeating more or less indefinitely)
> Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all that often, and you can build pretty big things.
Emphasis on clear. It's a challenging endeavor to properly draw and enforce these service boundaries.
Occasionally I make an analogy to stage acting or opera. In order for the people in the medium priced seats to see the action on the stage, all the actors have to over-emote to make everything that is happening dreadfully obvious.
In a system that is the composition of 30-300 different functional units, nobody will be close to any one part unless they’re the bus number for it. So each piece needs to be dead obvious so you can worry about the consequences of composing them. At the end of the day it’s Kernighan’s Law but rephrased so as not to ignore Conway or Brooks.
I've been on large projects where we didn't have one such person but was nevertheless very successful.
The key there was that one qualified representative for each part of the affected organization and other relevant parties in the core team, and there were frequent alignment meetings where they were all present. The representatives were close to the action, not some three-levels-removed manager.
In the meetings processes and such would get discussed step by step in detail, and any representative could chime in at any point to say "this won't work" or similar.
Hard to do though, and quite costly in terms of organizational resources required.
> Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same.
Or the company ponies up and rewrites the thing.
Sometimes legacy really is bad, and sometimes you really do need to throw the old product into the bin.
See Trello for an example.
That sounds like a very interesting theory, with an actionable result. Do you have any links for more reading?
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 were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them.
The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines.
I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).
Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers.
I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again.
In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.
If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, we already knew how shitty we were being in Afghanistan by the point the question was asked.
> 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.
Nothing really exceptional about that, risk-sharing projects were common in aerospace in the 80s onwards. 21% of the 777 ( yes the beloved Triple Seven ) was farmed out to a Japanese consortium which took risk for the design and production of the fuselage.
Here's a link to the same video but without the awful music inserted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
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)
Just ask ChatGPT how to design an airplane, easy.
> Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s
All of which are generally regarded as great aircraft by the people who fly them.
>> There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets.
A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.
> A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral
(n of 1 observation)
Yeah, I just purchased an OrangePI ultra and that fact gushes through like a flood in a canyon. I wonder if I will ever have a u-boot for the board that isn't based on 10 repositories glued together with references to unchangeable branches which are patterned after dates like 2017. There are official images with binaries and dog-knows-what-else in them. It's like the computer wasn't meant to operate for more than a few years (at most.) AFAICT, a person working on so many parts of the OrangePI ultra just stopped as the money ran out and there is a mess of repositories left behind. Don't get me started on the security mindset of the whole situation. /rant
Not to mention their customer service is amazing. I travelled several times, been to Shenzen, but mostly travelled to Shanghai for training and procurement of large manufacturing machines. To be honest I am a software person and was never really trained or taught fixing and maintaining moulds/machines.
But they have always been gracious and insanely dedicated to making sure my problems are solved and they show me how to rebuild everything. I have a dedicated WeChat group with their engineers and get back to me 7 days a week.
Compare that with a Candian machine, where I can rarely get a hold of a technican and they lack any deep expertise on anything even just to have a informal conversation on how to improve things at my plant.
I work with a lot of Chinese. I can confirm that they like to work in 1st gear a lot, rebuilding the same stuff over and over in reaction to changing requirements. Because of their immense capacity for work, it more than compensates for what westerners might desire in long term planning. I have gained quite a bit of respect for this way of work due to the results they have gotten.
Does this also apply to Apollo?
What problems were there with the 787? IIRC it was the first major composite airliner and they had the advantage of hoovering up all the unemployed post Berlin Wall cream of the crop Soviet aerodynamicists to work on it for them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian...
I think its too big and expensive for the market right now, its like a cadillac escalade in a corolla market
Microsoft seems to do ok re-inventing itself, maybe through internal conflict and cage fights.
I wonder who the IBM/Xerox of today is? Amazon? Facebook?
The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009
That seems very quick to design a whole jumbo jet. I know they're not starting from scratch, but how long does something like that typically take?
Boeing in particular has been about "maximizing shareholder value" to detrimental levels for decades now. Absolutely pushing out its most experienced (and expensive) employees in favor of less skilled and experienced staff often with an ageist bent. Beyond this has been a cultural shift and ever expanding increase to woke HR policies and practices to levels that are more harmful than good.
I should note that I'm entirely in favor of diversity of background and thought, not to mention various educational backgrounds. That said, actually having "unofficial" policies against promoting people of a certain race and gender combination (no white men hired or advancing in management, especially old white men) is as problematic as any other racial/gender/ageist bigotry.
I don't work for Boeing as I don't have a formal education that prevents me from ever being considered. I do know several people that do. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer or anyone else.
One of the reasons the 787 was fraught with problems is because it was peak decision-making by finance and accounting people. Specifically, Boeing outsourced everything for the 787s. There were layers of subcontractors upon subcontractors to produce the different parts because, you know, outsourcing was "cheaper" or "more efficient". So of course the logistics pipeline is hellishly complicated.
All because Boeing just didn't want to employ people directly who can build up expertise.
Is this the New Midsize Airplane, the "797", again? [1] That's been on and off for over a decade. Should have been shipping by now.
The COMAC C919 is finally shipping, although it's not a great aircraft and China still imports the engines. COMAC will probably do better in the next round.
Will Embraeier build something in that size range? They could. They already build small midsize aircraft.[3]
This looks like Boeing missing the market.
And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_New_Midsize_Airplane
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
[3] https://www.embraer.com/e-jets-e2/e195e2/en/
> And it's all because the Southwest CEO wanted to have only one kind of airplane. That's the cause of the 737 MAX.
Interesting how in the eyes of Joe Public, Southwest had nothing to do with it. Wonder if the Southwest board figures their cynical calculation worked out well enough to try again?
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 enables it.
There are few companies on earth I’m as mad at as Boeing. As I see it, they are not done repenting for their crimes.
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 this state of things, and so if there must be software, it should be good software.
War planes dropped natural stability a while ago, IIRC the F16 was the first relaxed stability production aircraft (it's naturally stable at supersonic speeds but not subsonic).
In fact there was a flying airliner with relaxed stability (though only neutral not negative) when Airframe was published: the MD-11. Though I don't know that there have been others since.
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.
Starting with the F-16, many fighter jets are designed to be intentionally unstable to improve maneuverability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability#Intentional_...
When that book was published, the F-117 Nighthawk was already retired after 10 years in service. The thing doesn't even look like it could fly on account of the rudimentary stealth features.
The 737-MAX is not "unstable by design". It has the exact same positive stability as other planes in 99% of it's flight envelope.
The remaining exception is that, at a certain AoA, speed, thrust, etc, there is a case where adding thrust pushes the nose up more than it does for the normal 737
The nose push is not abnormal, it is not unsafe, it is not unexpected. All planes with engines below the inertial "center" of the plane have this, including every 737 and every A320.
The problem was, this meant that it's flight characteristics were "different" from the older 737s. The entire point of any plane that is even a little bit 737 is to sell to airlines as "This is still a 737 and you don't need to train anyone in anything extra".
MCAS was built to change how the plane acts in this very specific regime, to act more like older 737s and counteract this nose push.
MCAS was entirely unnecessary except for business and policy goals. MCAS killed people because properly training aircrews for it would have gone against the entire point of the 737 MAX.
And boeing's whole philosophy is that they should make a passenger jet feel like Cessna, which is an increasingly tenuous fiction.
This is not correct and a gross simplification of the true issue.
All aircraft with underslung engines have similar pitch up tendencies to varying degrees and different handling characteristics between models are fine.
As seen with 757/67, 777/787 and A330/40/50 sharing type ratings despite being massively different aircraft.
> As the nacelle is ahead of the C of G, this lift causes a slight pitch-up effect (ie a reducing stick force) which could lead the pilot to inadvertently pull the yoke further aft than intended bringing the aircraft closer towards the stall. This abnormal nose-up pitching is not allowable under 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall characteristics". Several aerodynamic solutions were introduced such as revising the leading edge stall strip and modifying the leading edge vortilons but they were insufficient to pass regulation. MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during elevated AoA when flaps are up.
http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm
The feeling of the aircraft is not the problem. The stall characteristics not complying with the regulation is.
This is no different than modern traction control, and in no way is "wrong" from a design perspective. If I recall, the more fundamental flaw here is the degraded behavior of MCAS with dual-sensor AoA system was not they adequately trained pilots for, which was clearly part of the business case for Boeing, negligent or not.
The 737 is a clusterfuck because the giant engines throw off the physics of the plane both inertially and aerodynamically.
It’s easier to make a turbofan more efficient by making it bigger. But power density also tends to go up with new models, so there’s at least a chance that there’s a smaller, lighter engine with the same thrust and fuel economy out there, allowing them to improve (restore) the physics of the aircraft.
While not great, the MAX would have been fine if Boeing (and their airlines) had not clung so hard to the type rating. Without that, MCAS could have been left out entirely alongside its utterly botched implementation.
But that would have required a heavier certification process, and some pilot re-training. And they couldn't have that.
Of course that wouldn't have freed Boeing from the rest of its dismal record (MCAS didn't cause door blowouts), but...
Indeed. A fully new airframe likely won’t try to avoid training and certification overhead. Ripping that bandaid off will cut a lot of bullshit. But, there’s only so much engine you can shove under a narrow body aircraft. Landing gear is limited by physics and just making it taller won’t fix everything.
I just looked and from what I can find on Wikipedia this may warrant a new model from P&W or CFM because I’m not seeing a documented turbofan family with similar thrust and smaller diameter except ones with much lower bypass ratios and thus garbage fuel efficiency.
RR seems to be concentrating on bigger engines. They have a demonstrator that’s 2x the diameter of the Max’s engines. JFC.
>Landing gear is limited by physics and just making it taller won’t fix everything.
Every other plane is higher than the 737. The only reason the engines needed to be pushed forward on the 737, is that the 737 was built back in the day to be lower to the ground for easier operations at poorer airports, with things like stairs and baggage.
The 737 doesn't need to be as short as it is anymore because the vast majority of them now fly to airports with jetbridges and modern bag handling equipment.
The A320 is not as short as the 737 despite serving the same market, and can handle bigger engines.
But the entire problem stems from wanting to abuse the 737 type rating even further. If they were fine with a new type rating, they could put the engines pretty much wherever they want, put nice tall landing gear, etc.
That isn’t really true. Air stairs are still very common in much of Europe and Asia. It’s only places like the US and the Middle East that jet bridges are ubiquitous.
also common in south america in my experience
Can confirm, about to board an airplane with an air stair in Peru. An A320, actually.
This is at best a Boeing talking-point. We don't have any data that states it is safe to operate the MAX without MCAS. It's quite possible that probable scenarios would result in stall faster than a human can react.
Afaik all analysis of the max’s design have come to the conclusion that its natural behaviour was nothing special or dangerous. It’s just that in some edge cases the nose would lift faster than on an NG, and that was not acceptable if it was sold as a 737 with no retraining.
One would think this question would have been answered directly in the FAA report, but it got zero mentions. We got zero data on how often MCAS made adjustments and how often in the report.
Basically, we only have Boeing's word for it, which is worthless. They self-certified everything, and we see how that went.
It'd be a new airframe and not an elongation of an elongation of an existing one... So we might be lucky this time.
> I just refuse to support Boeing’s malicious negligence
I get, but if everyone does that, Boeing does and we're left with a monopoly. Is that better? Will you feel safer flying on a COMAC?
Did you mean Airbus?
Or dies instead of does ?
The only instability most comercial planes have is the so called Dutch roll caused by swept wings and is compensated by the yaw damper (no sw needed)
Boeing today is so obviously a different organisation to the one that built their rapidly dwindling reputation.
The 747 was an amazing engineering marvel. They started designing it in '65, the first one rolled off the production line in '68, and they were still making and selling them right up to 2023.
I have a book here somewhere that talks about how so many of the design decisions were based on cold hard physics facts combined with engineering pragmatism. They needed to run the engine at peak efficiency, and the tradeoff between air density and air temperature set the cruising altitude to ~35,000 feet. They knew they didn't know enough to be able to build a supersonic plane, so that set the top speed at just under mach 1 at 35,000 feet. They wanted to carry 2-3 times as many passengers as the 707 which set the payload and the all up weight. It needed to go slow enough to land safely at typical airport altitudes, which set the wing loading and given the weight the wing area. It needed to be as efficient as possible which meant a high aspect ratio, but given the required wing area and the available engineering capability for wing spars and aluminum construction that set the wing span.
It was hard engineering tradeoffs like that which then set a whole bunch of aviation standards. Runway lengths, terminal and jetway heights, landing approach speeds - all those types of "standards" which still exist today in airports around the globe, are heavily influenced by the 747 and it's design parameters. Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.
That is not today's Boeing.
> Cessna 172s flying into international airports have to fly their landing approach way faster than usual for that type of plane because _everybody_ flies approaches at 747 speeds.
This isn't even close to true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_approach_category.
Cessnas approach at less than half the speed of 747s. The safe maximum cruising speed is 20-30 kts short of a 747 approach speed. You would have to be willing to risk your airplane and your life to get a Cessna up to the approach speed of a 747.
My experience landing Cessnas and other light aircraft at airfields where they land the big boys (including busy international ones) is that you approach and land at the speeds that the aircraft you are flying is designed for. I have had controllers ask me to keep speed up for spacing, but they aren't expecting miracles, they know that you simply can't get a Cessna to go above a certain speed.
The rest of your comment also has some dubious claims. I suspect that the top speed was set just below mach 1, not because Boeing had no engineering knowledge about supersonic flight, but because fuel efficiency, and a host of other factors that make supersonic flight difficult. As a counter to that assertion I would point out that Boeing had a supersonic engineering team that started in 1952. They even designed a supersonic airliner that was never built in the 1960s. Hard to believe that they chose not to make the 747 supersonic because they lacked the experience to design and SST while they had an SST design and supersonic research team before the 747 was conceived.
The 747 was a groundbreaking airplane, but it wasn't all of the things being claimed here.
> That is not today's Boeing.
How do you know they don't take all this into account when designing their planes?
This will be Boeings answer to the Bombardier C Series, aka the Airbus A220 series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220 , which is one of the nicest planes for short haul in service at the moment.
Edit: indeed, not the 'Neo', I got the name wrong but the link right.
The "Neo series" are re-engined A320 series (neo = New Engine Option) and has nothing to do with the A220.
Ah yes, you are right, I meant the A220 though. I've edited the comment, thank you for pointing out my error.
The A220 is an absolute treat. Can't put exactly my finger on why, but it just feels right in size, noise, the little screens at the top.
Flown it once or twice with AirBaltic, and would love to take it again.
AirBaltic was my introduction to the series as well and it felt for the first time in 30 years or so that I was in a modern aircraft. The last time before that was in a then brand new 747, which I absolutely loved to fly.
I had the exactly same experience with AirBaltic. It felt so modern!
The A220 is unrelated to the Neo. The Neos are re-engining of the 320 and 330 series (neo stands for "new engine option"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320neo_family
And while a plane with good bones, the A220 has not been all positives for Airbus: AFAIK they still loses money on the thing, ramping up has been hell as it's not part of any of Airbus's existing lines of procurement, and it's contributed to the already awkward 319neo being DOA.
Replacing the 737 MAX with a competitor to the A220? Something does not make sense.
The A220 series' maximum capacity is basically the 737 MAX series' minimum capacity.
Boeing's only answer to the A220 was to get the US administration to impose a 220% import tarif on it. It didn't even compete with Boeing models. Fuck Boeing.
How does such a tariff even work? Can't an airline finance all of its aircraft through an entity in the Maldives or whatever?
Airbus had to move production from Quebec to Georgia (US)
Alabama not GA
It wasn't Airbus yet, so more like: Bombardier had to sale a controlling stake to Airbus to gain access to its Georgia production facilities.
Why, though? I am just wondering how it takes effect. The carriers often lease the planes from special-purpose entities. If such an entity is based in Liberia, where does the tariff apply?
This has been a long time coming. The big buyer for 737 consistently has been Southwest. Before a recent ownership shakeup, Southwest wanted to only operate the 737 airframe, and avoid as many new features as possible to keep training costs low, and maintenance costs low.
New activist ownership has pushed to diversify frames and phase out reliance on the 737 frame which is significantly more inefficient than modern frames. Boeing doesn't want to make 737s, but they are locked in because of this demand.
Source: Family member trains pilots at Southwest after retiring from a major airline carrier after a career as pilot/check-airman.
People blame Boeing for the 737 MAX. They were elbows deep in a clean sheet design. Yeah, they shouldn’t have built the plane but the demand was made by Southwest and American who both said straight up if you don’t make a new 737, we’re switching to Airbus.
My understand is that the 737 Max was fine if they treated it as a new airplane. The problem was the put gizmos on it to make it behave like a regular 737 so pilots didn't need to get retrained on it. Those gizmos are what crashed it when you didn't know how they behaved when they failed.
The problem is that the whole point of the 737 Max was that airlines didn't have to treat it as a new airplane. If they did, it would have lost a lot of the value proposition and there would have been more support for an entirely new replacement instead. It would be a fascinating case study in perverse incentives and unintended consequences if it wasn't for the loss of life that resulted.
This is not a surprise. The timeline for this plane aligns exactly with the timeline for Airbus's a320/321 replacement which aligns exactly with when it is believed the next generation of engines will be ready.
Both Boeing and Airbus are spending a lot of time evaluating the next engine options. Last year there was an article that Airbus is more optimistic about CFM's open rotor designs while Boeing thinks the next generation geared turbofan models will win out. That is entirely based on leaks and no-one actually knows how true those assessments are.
The 737 Max was designed with the expectation that the 8 variant would be the sweet spot. Since that time it is clear that there is massive demand for up-gauging and the A321neo is dominating and there is significant demand for the Max10 variant despite it not being certified yet.
I would expect that both Boeing and Airbus are looking at that size (maybe slightly larger) for their next narrowbody with some flexibility for shrinks and/or stretches.
This is not a response to any existing planes. The A320/321 family is very old (50 years mid 2030) and it is expected that both Boeing and Airbus are going to be introducing new airframes to fit the new engine technology.
Well since the 787 program will very likely never break even, let alone turn in profit, for Boeing, the 737's replacement will be a do or die project for Boeing. They cannot afford another money-losing product.
boeing will never die as long as the government wants to have a domestic passenger airline manufacturer. and they pretty clearly do want that.
it'll take more than financial losses to kill boeing.
seeing how much power shifted from legislative branch to executive, and how often executive branch changes its mind, I wouldn’t count on the unwavering government support
The US will bail out Boeing, if necessary.
There are only two¹ major manufacturers of commercial airliners: one in the US and one in the EU. Both are essentially state backed. Both blocs want to have their own manufacturer, for strategic reasons, and they won't let it go under.
1. There will probably be three in a few years, since China is building up Comac.
Semi-unrelated, but that photo is taken from the Hyatt Regency Lake Washington, which looks over Boeing's Renton facility from many of the rooms.
Nice hotel on its own (though a bit out of the way from most Seattle tourist stuff), but extra-nice if you're an aviation geek.
> new single-aisle airplane
Does that mean it's not trying to be "another 737" but actually a truely new type?
They already did that, it’s called the 757 and nobody bought it. Maybe we’ll get a 757 MAX with MCAS to make it type compatible with the 737.
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.
The article said Boeing is talking to Rolls Royce for the new plane. American Airlines used to have a fleet of 757s powered by Rolls Royce engines assembled in Montreal Canada. I used to work on those engines many many years ago.
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?
The 757 was powered by rb211-535e4 which had about 40k pounds of thrust each.
https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/civil-aero...
The 737 MAX is powered by CFM LEAP which has about 30k pounds of thrust each.
https://www.cfmaeroengines.com/leap
The A321 is an elongated/bigger version of the A320. Similarly to the B737 - which also went through this process a few times (e.g. compare the B737-400 vs B737-600 vs B737-MAX) - it means the engines are moving a heavier&bigger plane.
Can't wait to beta-test it as a pax.
Boeing currently has an awkward gap between the 737 and the widebodies that was previously filled by the 757 - the 737 Max 10 (which still isn't certified!) only has about two thirds of the range of the A321XLR, and a slightly lower passenger capacity. Airlines that currently have 757 fleets and who need that range are going for Airbus instead, and Boeing just doesn't have an answer for it. So while, yes, any new Boeing design is likely to be fly by wire and composite and everything, it also seems likely that it's going to try to fit that market.
The 737 Max 7, the smallest of the Max series, is longer than the 737-200, the stretched version of the original design. A brand new design is going to be able to ignore that market (which basically doesn't exist any more, the Max 7 only has a handful of orders) and scale upwards to also be a 757 replacement. But it's also going to have basically no commonality with the 737, so it's going to have to genuinely be better than the Airbus product because existing Boeing customers aren't going to benefit from being able to move existing pilots to it without retraining or benefit from common maintenance plans and so on. It obviously should be better - the A320 program started over 40 years ago, it's not that much newer than the 737 - but given Boeing's myriad series of failures in recent years and how painful the 787 program was, it's not impossible that they'll fuck this up entirely.
Will it still be controlled by dual redundant 80286 chips like the MAX, with its software outsourced to the Indian 3rd party contractor?
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.
Would probably add that it likely has reliable real-time constraints as part of this. While I can imagine simpler ARM and RISC-V chips having similar properties, depending on the application it would likely be hard to certify any modern CPU design for a lot of medical or aerospace applications.
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 on these things know arguably infinitely more than I do.
They do :)
And if the companies who produce these chips continue to make a healthy profit, why would they stop?
The scenario that comes to my mind is: these chips had a lot of potential customers 30 years ago, and now may be down to just one or two customers left buying too few units to make it worthwhile.
Presumably, they have "guaranteed" buyers but also, if so, why would Airbus have issues sourcing CPUs, for example?
> […] too few units to make it worthwhile.
Not if the price of those units are really high.
Forever if someone keeps making new chips.
That mindset is inevitably going to leave you in a ditch though. Either you run out of suppliers for the chip that are willing to produce on a shitty inefficient old node under certified conditions (mostly because it inevitably gets really expensive to keep the machines for production running!), or you run out of developers able and willing to write code for these old designs where the toolchain probably is also certified and has nowhere near close to the bells and whistles of modern IDEs or the automatic benefits from modern programming languages such as pointer safety.
Anything should have a replacement budget and timeline attached.
That's my gut feeling too but... I don't build certified airliners with lifespans of multiple decades for a living (or run companies that do).
All I know from having worked in an Airbus subsidiary for a couple of years is that their world is nothing like mine.
Anyone with 737MAX cockpit time?
Overly nerdy question: I'm curious regarding AoA sensor failure, is there an ability to manually source select the AoA, if not, how about the FMC? This might be called master source select, or which side is controlling (captain or first officer).
Might be easier for them to try and license and produce the A320 under their own name.
couldn't predict that I'd ever say this but I hope they test this one and don't discount on costs
China recently started building and delivering airplanes. It will be interesting to see if Boeing can actually compete with what is coming out of China over the next few years: https://www.voanews.com/a/7528331.html
In the short-term, I imagine USA-based airlines will not be allowed to buy any airplanes from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-comac-military-... And perhaps they would not even be allowed to fly in our airspace. But if China decides that it wants to build planes at lower prices than Boeing (or Airbus), then I imagine they will. Their marketshare would grow elsewhere in the globe, reducing Boeing's sales. Can Boeing deal with that? Would the USA borrow China's playbook, and nationalize (or something similar) Boeing to keep it solvent?
China is very good at subsidising development like this. Other commenters are rightly pointing out that they cannot currently compete with Boeing. But if you look at the way the chinese approached car manufacturing, 20 years ago, I wouldnt have even ridden in one, these days they are honestly fantastic. Its because they got the chance to make those really bad cars, that they were able to improve to where they are today. 20 years from now, its possible that the gap closes to the point that Boeing is displaced from everywhere but the US.
Biggest issue I can see is that the US will try and weaponise national security against them. Much like how Cisco and Juniper fought to have Huawei and friends blacklisted in most western countries. Just as they become competitive, Boeing and Airbus might start screaming that the chinese planes have communist killswitches and that planes will fall out of the sky if theres a war with China.
COMAC can only compete (geopolical drama aside) if engine efficiency improves or fuel prices decreases. TLDR every bit of COMAC can be modern / tier1 (and most of it is), but at current aviation fuel prices, 10-15% efficiency gap in engines will save more money on fuel over airframe lifetime. C919 is basically a 2025 narrow with a 2015 engine, but that old engine alone makes it not economically viable in most markets AT current aviation fuel prices. COMAC makes a lot of sense for PRC economically, not giving a cent to boeing, can build out COMAC specific support across country easily, but it's still commercially not well priced.
The caveate being COMAC is only expensive / has limited room to discount because it uses a lot of western components (for easy regulation/certification only). If PRC moves to a full soveign civil aviation stack, it would probably be very possible to price COMAC competitively, but that's more a medium/long term project. That's probably how it goes the way things are gonig, US probably not going to even certify/liimt where PRC planes can land to kneecap COMAC. PRC + RU can probably do some shenanigans like prevent US planes from flying over their airspace in retaliation and then it's a matter of how much divertion (extra fuel+travel costs) impact bottom line. At the end of the day geopolitics will determine how viable civil aviation projects are.
The C919 isn’t even competitive with where Boeing was 20 or 30 years ago.
I'm admittedly very much not an expert in this area. But my post is less about the C919 specifically, and more about China's track record of developing manufacturing processes very rapidly such that they compete on the world market. Specifically I'm thinking of how China is suddenly exporting tons of EVs throughout the world at prices that USA/EU auto-makers can't really compete with. Over 50% of EVs sold in the world are Chinese (and none of those cars are allowed in the USA).
If China decides they want to continue developing and building commercial airplanes, where will they be in 5-10 years? Where will Boeing be?
How about to just "virtually" fly? So Boeing could save on building an actual plane, but still getting the money!
well, for the safety critical sw, in addition to outsourcing to the cheapest indian shop they can find, they can also now use the cheapest ai models.
Has there been any sign of change in their corporate culture?
Last I heard they're pushing hard to ramp up production and FAA is back to letting them self-certify stuff. And they're under worse financial pressure now than when they made the last round of questionable decisions.
...I'm all for competition & avoiding a monopoly but colour me unconvinced that the root cause has been fixed.
I hope someone is working on a Boeing replacement.
I wonder if they will try for a blended wing
Non-paywall: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-st...
The obvious move is to take cues from the 787 program in terms of composites, to cut fuel burn. Adds some creature comforts like larger windows as a side bonus.
https://youtu.be/lapFQl6RezA?si=Nef60vinA7hXbnta
[stub for offtopicness]
Looking forward to what AI-generated flight control software can do!
During the MCAS scandal I saw a report that the software developers who wrote it were offshored and being paid something like $13/hr.
While there weren't actually coding flaws in MCAS in that it did what the spec said, I've met people who work in avionics and they would have pushed back against the specification because they tend to think about how their component integrates into the system.
Obviously it's impossible to prove that, had the software been developed by people specializing in avionics they would have caught the problem but it's just another hole in the swiss cheese model: when you outsource your avionics software development to an offshore contractor who was making a webstore yesterday and will be making an iphone app tomorrow, you eliminate the possibility that the implementers could do an informed critique of the spec.
You’re absolutely right! The engines do not appear to be working. What I actually meant to do is, of course, turn the engines on. As you can see, they should now be working correctly. Sorry about that, thanks for correcting me!
We are about to crash, did you really turn them on? I still have no control of the plane
You’re absolutely right! The engines do not appear to be working. What I actually meant to do is, of course, turn the engines on. As you can see, they should now be working correctly. Sorry about that, thanks for correcting me!
Fly-by-vibe?
VFR = Vibe Flight Rules
Prompt: "Do a barrel roll!"
The 367-80 did it fine [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_367-80#Barrel_roll
Hey hey hey, the $9/hr software engineer will be doing all the work, unless they can find a $1/hr guy. The first guy should just become a vendor and subcontract down to the $1/hr guy, that's what the rest of Boeing's supply chain is doing already.
https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...
Ah the hitman business model
I mean it couldnt be worse than what they released last time could it?
EDIT> what is scarier? the quality of the software they released or that someone on HN is defending it?
No situation is so bad that it cannot possibly be made worse
I mean, they botched one piece of software in order to retrofit an old plane with catastrophic results. God knows what the Wall Street zombie version of Boeing will do with a whole new plane, especially in the age of AI enshittification.
Also the maga tariff and bizarre interventions age.
The article just mentions "Boeing plane" with no details. Will it fly?
It said "Boeing", duh.
Like the sound it will make.
737 MAX Ultra Plus Alpha?
737 HBO
Hulu in the on-deck circle
Boeing √543169, technically not a new model.
Boing 737 Pro Max.
Still prefer the 737 Air
https://archive.ph/Cqgtc
That link doesn't work. "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"
Endless captcha loops for me.
You're absolutely right! Unfortunately, the MAX replacement will have strict weekly limits on how many hours it can be flown fully loaded - and most airlines will hit the weekly limit after just a couple flights.
737 with fly-by-wire avionics would be what 737MAX should have been.
Don't think it would have sold - behind the airbus neos on fuel efficiency. Hence the janky mcas solution to make the reengine work
Cancelled?