Boeing now hopes to have permission to fly the 737 Max in mid-2020. Boeing will likely be losing about $1 billion every quarter until it the Max is permitted to fly and for Boeing to be allowed to sell the 400 planes they have built.
Airbus already a larger backlog of orders and this incident is driving more future orders to Airbus instead of Boeing.
Boeing brand and image is damaged. There has been nearly a 30% drop in orders for non-737 Max Boeing planes.
The loss of around $10-15 billion over a 15-18 month grounding will also weaken Boeing’s ability to invest in new planes and technology.
The US government will not allow Boeing to go bankrupt, but it will take many years to rebuild trust in Boeing engineering.
There will be a shift to electric hybrid and all-electric regional planes in the 2020s. Boeing will have drastically weakened finances when they will need to execute on new technology.
A lot of investment is needed for the new technology and designs.
The 737 Max problems show that Boeing has to rebuild its engineering culture. This will also take a lot of time.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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ALL OF THIS started when they went from having engineers in charge of the company to having accountants and money people. They made the company geared to provide money to its shareholders instead of aircraft to its customers. Now we see the seeds grown out.
BTW pretty much all of American Corporations are like this now
How will customers react when they see 737 max (or whatever they are going to call it ) on their booking website or ticket ? How aware is the general flying public of all the other faults that had to be rectified?
I am sure it will be a very safe plane after it has been so extensively scrutinised, but how will people perceive it?
It’s the Chicago way.
Bean counter short cut corporate culture.
That’s the Chicago way…
To help them recover they got that house bill for space exploration to pretty much hand them billions for continuing SLS, develop EUS and a fat cost plus lunar lander contract.
The fear of flying is real. Airplane builder is one of the few businesses where reputation for safety is crucial. Is will take a while to recover and it will take the good luck of none of their planes crashing for the next couple of years.
The challenge, when they face an engineering failure, and are rescued from destruction by political considerations, is that they may just decide to double down on political efforts, rather than rebuild the engineering. I don’t think the bean counters really understand engineering, but they DO understand politics.
Which is why they got here in the first place.