Airlines in a Crisis

On Max 9 an extra emergency exit door is replaced with a blank if you don't want it instead of not cutting the hole for it in the first place. And it was mechanically fastened instead of welded in place. And since the inner panel is just a normal panel making it impossible to do frequent checks on the blank, of course it eventually fell out taking the inner panel with it. And in this case after only 147 flights. That is less than 1 year in use.  On the other hand larger (in the hundreds) and original Max orders like the one from Ryanair get its own no mentioning of Max version number (737-8200) and  just uses a easily inspected normal door as it was originally designed for. This hole covered by a blank must be a financial quick fix to avoid producing 2 different versions of the airframe (with or without a door hole) and not something engineers recommended. And with it came a number of uncertainties, lets call them risks, that for the economists was a case of numbercrunchi...

Braathen and his suited team didn't get his 1/5 billion nkr from the Nowegian government but there is about 100 million USD available together with the Norwegian name for a company that is willing to commit taking some new planes from Boeing.  As a manufacturer they care more about how many new airlines the can sell than how many of the older planes get parked. Norwegian never got to an agreement for how much the problems with their new ExMax and Dreamliner planes was goeing to cost the manufacturer because Beoing prefer to pay that sort of money in discounts rather than cash.  A new-Norwegian without most of the commitments and liabilities of the Schram-Norwegian could make a deal and have a fleet partially financed. That would also give them a good base for getting a good deal with the banks so any ticket sales will end up in the airline instead of being kept by the card issuers and banks for security against future refund claims.   

 There are speculations that Ryanair will place a further 150 ExMax orders before Christmas if the plane is given the all clear to fly again by then. But in case what would this order consist of. To get the best deal they would probably have to take some of the estimated 100 white tails. These are built planes where the customer have gone or cancelled the order and most of them are of versions 8 or 9. Ryanair have ordered version 10 with 230 seats a longer fuselage, an extra emergency exit and a levered landing gear to avoid tail strikes. Not many of them are built or abandoned. Running 2 types of the airplane would be against the grain of Ryanair. However the group now consists of 3 airlines. Ryanair DAC, Buzz, Malta Air and Lauda. And the last one have earlier this year abandoned its Airbus order. There is nothing in the Low Cost rulebook saying that Lauda couldn't be an ExMax 9 only airline. Lauda air is the airline for the german speaking part of Europe. One could speculate in ...

Don't exactly know what degrees Boeing top management have but it don't seem to be psychology, or pr for that sake. They think the most important thing is to get the 737 ExMax past the FAA scrutiny. And for that they are playing the stubborness card. As little change as they can get away with for as cheap as is possible. And that means software only. Reprogramming is cheap but it doesn't really give the press anything to take a picture off. And a picture is worth a thousand words. It is not the FAA that is going to pay to be passengers on the plane. That is the general public and they go by what the press says. And since the press have been touting for many months now that the plane is unsafe and aerodynamically flawed, the potentially flying public is expecting something to be done about it. And noen of them have any real belief in safe software thanks to Microsoft's work during the past 2 decades. They know it is always flawed and full of bugs and need to be rectif...