Comment Re:Good News, but Missed Opportunity (Score 2) 74
After that we only see variants on existing designs in order to maintain type-ratings.
Because this is what their customers, the people that pay $100-200M for a plane, want and have asked for: fewer types.
Common type-ratings are insanely important to airliners. It allows them to shuffle flight crews around when needed without solving an NP-hard type matching problem (well, airline scheduling is still NP, but fewer constraints is for sure better). Even flight attendants have to be type-rated since they are a critical part of air safety.
Being upset at Boeing (and Airbus, who has basically 2 types, or 3 if you count the out-of-production 380) to Boeing's 5 (or 6 if you count the 757) for meeting their customers' needs is bonkers.