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Ethiopian Airlines Settles With Boeing, Expects Resumed 737 Max Flights in January (bakersfield.com) 40

Posted by EditorDavid from the up-in-the-air dept.
"Two-and-a-half years after the deadly Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash, with the final investigation report into the accident still pending, the airline's management has reached a settlement with Boeing and said it expects to resume flying the jet again by January," reports the Seattle Times: The financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The Seattle Times reported exclusively in January that Boeing had then offered an amount on the order of $500 million to $600 million, a large portion of which was not cash but concessions, including discounts on future airplane sales and waivers on maintenance costs... A person with knowledge of the final settlement said Saturday that it included a payment of $280 million in cash, discounts on future planes, free maintenance and parts for three years, and replacement of the aircraft that crashed — with an estimated value for the total package less than $600 million.

The settlement comes as Ethiopia is torn by a bloody civil war in the northern region of Tigray that has frayed relations with the U.S. and undermined its economy. Meanwhile, the state-owned airline has struggled for 18 months with the extreme downturn in air travel due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Parallel to the settlement over the MAX, Ethiopian Airlines this week made public a related agreement: Boeing will partner with Ethiopian to make the airline's base in Addis Ababa "Africa's aviation hub" and to set up a manufacturing facility there to make airplane parts.
The Times also looks at what's changed for Boeing since their two fatal crashes: This summer, the FAA slowed certification of Boeing's next new plane, the 777X; directed Boeing to rework its flight manuals for both the 777X and MAX 10 to include detailed emergency pilot procedures; and ordered Boeing to improve the independence of engineers working on airplane certification, after a third of those surveyed by the FAA said they feel they cannot raise safety concerns without interference... With deliveries of the 787 suspended, restoring the MAX to market acceptance is now central to Boeing's cash generation.

The jet has been back in service since late December, and more than 300 MAXs are now carrying passengers globally. Even as the pandemic continues to suppress air travel, Boeing is building new MAXs at a rate of 16 jets per month with a plan to increase production to 31 per month early in 2022. By year end, Boeing hopes to deliver more than 200 of the MAXs that were parked during the prolonged grounding...

In January, Boeing escaped serious consequences from a criminal investigation into the MAX crashes when the Department of Justice imposed a fine of $244 million, a relatively small amount for Boeing. Boeing's ongoing estimate of the total cost of the MAX crisis in financial filings has stabilized at about $21 billion, of which almost $9 billion is compensation to airline customers. Wall Street doesn't expect that to grow...

The upgraded flight controls on the MAXs flying today include fixes to the MCAS design flaws. And all MAX pilots undergo simulator training specific to the system before they fly the aircraft.
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Ethiopian Airlines Settles With Boeing, Expects Resumed 737 Max Flights in January More

Ethiopian Airlines Settles With Boeing, Expects Resumed 737 Max Flights in January

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  • Wages of the shortcut (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Sunday September 05, 2021 @12:23AM (#61764593)

    The 737 MAX should never have been built. That isn't to say that the current rendition isn't safe after all the fixes, but they should have implemented a new design from the ground up. I bet they would have saved a lot of money and ended up with a better product.

    As I understand it, the only reason that makes the MAX make sense is that they avoid having to re-train all the 737 pilots. A new design would put the Airbus competitor on equal footing in that market. But why not make a better plane and keep the customers that way?

    • Re:Wages of the shortcut (Score:5, Informative)

      by CaptQuark ( 2706165 ) on Sunday September 05, 2021 @02:37AM (#61764837)

      The 737 MAX should never have been built. ... they should have implemented a new design from the ground up. I bet they would have saved a lot of money

      You'd lose that bet. A new aircraft design takes at least a decade to design, test, and certify. What do you offer your customers during that time?

      The 737 MAX was an upgrade specifically designed to be equal or better than the new AirBus A321neo. To do that, they needed to increase the size of the engines to be more efficient, which meant moving them higher and farther forward on the wing pylon. This resulted in a change to the pitch response when increasing throttle, which would have required re-certifying all existing 737 pilots before they could fly the 737 MAX 10. Boeing decided instead to modify the behavior of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to make the plane handle the same way as previous models and avoid the cost to the airlines of re-certifying their pilots. The results of this decision caused the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air crashes.

      As with most plane crashes, the investigation into the tragedy led to changes to make the aircraft safer. New warning systems, new training procedures, more scrutiny from the FAA, less reliance on self certification, more input from engineers instead of accountants, etc.

      To put your suggestion in car terms, if a car has an augmented steering system to offer lane centering while driving, and that system caused cars to suddenly veer to the right and off the road, are you suggesting that car manufacturer should should immediately stop selling that model car and begin designing a new car from scratch? The correct action would be to find and fix the software problem, then recall all those model cars for a software upgrade. Which is essentially what Boeing did.

      --
      "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" -- Thomas Murner, 1512

      • A new aircraft design takes at least a decade to design, test, and certify. ... The 737 MAX was an upgrade specifically designed to be equal or better than the new AirBus A321neo.

        So they pitted a derivative of a 1964 airplane against a derivative of a 1984 airplane? I mean, even if one doesn't demand a completely new design every time, which, as you point out, is infeasible, surely they could have done least as good a job as Airbus did.

        • Airbus had a much better success upgrading the 1980s A320 to the latest engines, because when A320 was originally designed, the bigger diameter high bypass ratio turbofans were already the wave of future. Boieng designed the original B737-100/200 to use low-bypass engines in the 1960s, and hence much lower height of the airplane under the wing.

          • But that's exactly what I had in mind. Why upgrade an airframe from an entirely different era?

            • They wanted to use different engines for the 737Max to increase efficency to compete with Airbus. Doing so changed the center of gravity for the whole plane, and hence they used MCAS to change flight characteristics of the plane so pilots would not have to be retrained.

              I could not find the exact video that gets into this, and it may have been deleted. But this very good youtube channel by a 737 pilot digs into the details of how it operates. [youtu.be]

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

                That's silly. You can easily move the centre of mass of an airplane around, in design or just by loading it differently.

                The problem with the MAX was that the engine cowlings generate lift forward of the normal centre of lift *at high angles of attack.* That's something that happens with pretty much any modern airliner but Boeing knew that the effect was different enough on the 737 NG and MAX that regulators would require pilots get a specific type certification for the new plane. So they implemented a (shit

              • You don't have to explain me *what* they wanted to do; I've already known that. The question is why they didn't put these different engines on something else that wouldn't suffer from these problems.

          • Re:Wages of the shortcut (Score:4, Interesting)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday September 05, 2021 @12:15PM (#61765793)

            Boeing designed the 737 to be loadable by hand. It's still quite prized in some places for that capability, but it was a really major selling point in the sixties.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        This isn't just a software problem, it's a dynamically unstable airframe that they attempted to make stable using software alone.

        • I don't think you understand what dynamic stability is. Take a bicycle, grab it by the seat, and push it forward. It will tend to straighten out its direction of motion. If it turns slightly to the right, that causes the front wheel to turn slightly to the left, straightening out its motion. That's dynamic stability. A deviation from stable motion causes a corrective motion which restores the stable condition.

          Now push it backwards. The moment it starts to turn, the front wheel will turn to make the turn

      • The 737 MAX should never have been built. ... they should have implemented a new design from the ground up. I bet they would have saved a lot of money

        You'd lose that bet. A new aircraft design takes at least a decade to design, test, and certify. What do you offer your customers during that time?

        What do you offer? A safe airplane that doesn't kill pilots and passengers shortly after bringing into the fleet. A company that doesn't sacrifice customers so they can hurry up and compete. A company that doesn't fake the handling characteristics of the plane. A company that informs pilots that MCAS existed, and could know to turn it off if need be.

        Shortcuts that prioritize profit over lives. P And here's the whacky thing - the 737 Max could work well if they would have simply not tried to eliminate s

      • The 737 MAX should never have been built. ... they should have implemented a new design from the ground up. I bet they would have saved a lot of money

        You'd lose that bet. A new aircraft design takes at least a decade to design, test, and certify. What do you offer your customers during that time?

        Gee, I dunno, the same perfectly functional product you've been buying and using for the last few decades?

        The saying "Don't reinvent the wheel" is timeless, because no matter how much Greed wants to insist there might be value in change, sometimes common sense comes along and dictates there isn't.

    • The real question is did all the costs of "doing it wrong" outweigh the costs of engineering the 737Max (or similar plane) correctly in the first place.

      As noted, the FAA became aware of the environment that created the plane and has demanded separation of engineering departments. But that does beg the question about what person or group of people made the decision to go with 737Max software in the first place?

      It kind of seems like the kind of managing mindset that sent Challenger to fly when it should not h

    • As someone who worked in Customer Support at Boeing for more than 20 years, customers had an outsized impact on the decision to upgrade the current design into the MAX variant. The same was true for the 737-NG. Major customers who solely fly 737s can apply significant financial pressure by indicating that they won't purchase a new model if it disrupts their current operations. Added to these pressures where the fiasco, at all levels, of the 787 program, the need for capital to pursue the 777x and the mid-ma

    • The 737 MAX should never have been built. That isn't to say that the current rendition isn't safe after all the fixes, but they should have implemented a new design from the ground up. I bet they would have saved a lot of money and ended up with a better product.

      And how. Taking the airframe of the 737 and putting those larger engines on a body that was already using squashbottom inlets because of ground clearance and putting the nacelles in a position where at high attack angles, it becomes a lifting surface, then trying to sneak it past the FAA who allowed them to self certify, then to complete the canard, they did all this without requiring simulator training, plus hiding the fact of the software that was supposed to be stabilizing the airframe.

      This whole thing smacks of a project where teh lead engineer was an accountant.

  • What about the families of those who died ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Sunday September 05, 2021 @01:32AM (#61764751) Homepage

    Will they be compensated ?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Will they be compensated ?

      Of course they will. Every member of the affected class will be awarded a $5 voucher good towards their next flight aboard a Boeing plane. Enjoy!

  • Got to love them claiming they fixed all the problems in a crash report which still isnt written yet.

    Any takers for being the first to find out they really did fix all the 737-8 issues?

  • ordered Boeing to improve the independence of engineers working on airplane certification

    Private Equities will be mad at the prospect of losing one of the core tools allowing them to profit obscenely from the companies they buy to destroy.

    Too bad for now this is only going to be valid for a single company in the "portfolio" of a single PE, and not a general imposition valid for the entire "portfolios" of all PEs.

  • The MAX was built under completely incompetent management who ignored the accumulated experience and wisdom of the engineers.

    This won't be the only lethal fuckup.

  • When a leading airline like the Ethiopian does it, there's no problem anymore.

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