With all the difficulties the 737 MAX is facing, can it survive? A Boeing 737 MAX display at the Farnborough Airshow. It’s been a year since the Boeing 737 MAX was grounded. The 737 MAX’s planned date of return has been delayed again and again and even today, its return is still uncertain. The public opinion of the 737 MAX has fallen to a level so low that it’s hard to imagine it falling any lower. Calculations show the true cost of the grounding, saying it might lose the US GDP a fifth of its quarterly growth of 2%. Coupled with complications from the coronavirus, Boeing’s financial woes are expected to be much worse.
Despite all the challenges Boeing and the 737 MAX face, history says it will survive. In 2013, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner was grounded worldwide after two battery fire incidents. Nobody was harmed or killed, but the grounding dragged on for three months while Boeing made changes to the batteries. Today, Boeing has built almost one thousand 787s and it remains one of the safest aircraft in the skies without a single fatal accident. Back in 1979, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 was grounded after a crash in Chicago killed 273 people. Even before this, two incidents with the DC-10’s cargo door led to a near-accident and a crash, killing 346 people (the exact same number as the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes). The cargo door was eventually fixed, but the DC-10’s reputation was already failing when it was grounded by the FAA. Eventually, it was found that the accident in Chicago was caused by faulty maintenance and not by the manufacturer, and the jet was ungrounded two months later. Many similarities are shared between the DC-10’s cargo door issue and the 737 MAX’s MCAS issue, and in both cases (and in the grounding of the 787), the aircraft returned to service and continued to hold an important role in fleets worldwide. The DC-10 was eventually modified and rebranded as the MD-11 by McDonnell Douglas, and the MD-11 was also moderately successful.

Boeing also has the hidden advantage of added safety on their side. Getting an aircraft ungrounded requires evaluations of more than just the system that got it grounded in the first place, meaning that an aircraft that has just been ungrounded is even more unlikely to have any new issues surface than an aircraft that has stayed in the air. Once again, the history of the 787 and the DC-10 (and the MD-11) illustrate this idea. Once Boeing gets the 737 MAX into the skies again, history says it will be successful.
Now for some of the problems Boeing has to overcome. The most glaring of these problems is perhaps the fact that the aircraft has been grounded for over a year. The groundings of the 787 and the DC-10 lasted three and two months, respectively. The fact that the 737 MAX has stayed grounded for this long indicates that the MCAS problem is not a simple fix, and new issues have been found as time passes as well, issues that only lengthen delays. Furthermore, the complexity of the MCAS system adds to the difficulty of verifying that it is now safe. Before the MAX was first certified, the FAA gave Boeing a large role in proving that the MCAS system was safe because the system itself was so complicated that the FAA did not have sufficient guidelines or knowledge on how to test it. Now, the FAA is becoming much more involved in the testing process than they were before. Even after the 737 MAX is finally allowed back in the skies, actually getting it there is another issue.

Before the 737 MAX was grounded in March of 2019, Boeing delivered a total of 387 of them. Since the grounding began, Boeing built close to 400 more. In fact, Boeing has so many MAXs in storage that they were forced to halt production as they simply couldn’t produce any more without running out of space to store them. All of these aircraft have sat unused for nearly a year in the case of those that were already delivered, and nearly their entire lives for those that were built in the past year. Having seen no use for such a long time, all these aircraft will require extensive maintenance and safety checks before they can enter commercial service again. Even worse for Boeing, it’s almost a guarantee that 737 MAX pilots will require simulator training, something Boeing fought hard to avoid when the 737 MAX was created. Because Boeing indicated that current 737 pilots would require no simulator training to fly the 737 MAX, very few 737 MAX simulators were created. With so few simulators, getting all the world’s pilots certified to fly the 737 MAX will be no easy task.
Despite all these difficulties, the most difficult task for Boeing will be to convince the public that the 737 MAX is safe. The grounding of the 737 MAX is the first aircraft grounding that has become such a news spectacle, one that is constantly being drip-fed to the public in an endless cycle that means it’s unlikely the public will simply forget about it. Along with all this media coverage, simply accessing information regarding the situation with the 737 MAX is easier than ever before, which only increases the chance that the public will avoid flying on the 737 MAX at all costs. Some airlines have attempted to circumvent this issue by rebranding the aircraft; Ryanair has rebranded some of their 737 MAX aircraft as the “737–8200”, a name used by aviation agencies. Other airlines plan to offer special accommodations to passengers, including allowing them to switch flights to one operated by a different aircraft type, or by providing passengers with special safety information regarding the 737 MAX. Boeing has also created a webpage with information about the 737 MAX from pilots, engineers, and other officials to show the public that the jet is safe. Even if the public can be convinced that the aircraft is now safe, they may still be sold on avoiding it because of its history. Unfortunately for Boeing, the history of the 737 MAX is not something that can be washed over.

For Boeing, ensuring that the 737 MAX flies again is a matter of survival. The aircraft is the fastest-selling jet in Boeing’s history and still has about 4,500 unfilled orders. Before the grounding, Boeing was producing fifty-two 737 MAX aircraft per month. Right now, they’re producing zero. Without the 737 MAX, Boeing’s best source of cash has disappeared. The fact that 4,500 orders still exist for the type indicates that airlines still have confidence in it, but what will make or break the 737 MAX’s re-entry is how the public will respond. Chances are, reactions of acceptance will be hard to come by in the beginning, but as time passes, the public will gradually forget about the MAX’s history and will instead embrace its anticipated safety. For now, we can only hope that everything goes to plan, because few things have gone to plan with the 737 MAX so far.

Source: Johnnie Norsworthy