The company has sold more than 10,000 aircraft since 1968, being the 737 one of the best-selling aircraft in the world as this is a short and medium-range aircraft with large capacities, which is why many variables have been made to improve its performance and reduce maintenance costs, but in those redesigns of the original aircraft the 737 MAX was created and its problems have brought Boeing heavy losses.
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The Boeing Company
Boeing is a North American company that designs, manufactures and sells airplanes, helicopters, among other things, this company is one of the largest designer and seller of aircraft worldwide, competing against AIRBUS, its largest opponent in the sale of commercial aircraft to airlines.
The Company is also the second-largest defense contractor in the world and is currently designing and planning space flights. But due to the problems they have had with the 737 MAX, the company has generated financial losses in recent years.
Boeing 737
By the 1960s, world airlines were looking for a short and medium-range aircraft that had a lower cost and that was twin-engine. From there, Boeing began to design for 1964 an aircraft capable of solving all these requests, and by 1967 it was flying the first time his test plane and then a year later its sale to the different airlines begins.
The 737 was designed by uniting technologies that Boeing already possessed, such as the 727 fuselages and the 707 tail, this aircraft since its sale began has been redesigned to increase the number of passengers, thus lengthening the fuselage, amount of fuel, better engines, improved avionics, among other things.
The Boeing 737 MAX
The design of this aircraft began in 2011 to compete against the AIRBUS 320 Neo and has several variants which are the MAX 7, MAX 8, MAX 9 and MAX 10, each of these designed with specific characteristics to replace their old ones 737 NG, where can have a passenger capacity of between 170 to 230.
The main modification with respect to the old 737 is the change of the engines which are more efficient, less noisy and more powerful making them able to lift more weight at takeoff, and due to the reduction of maintenance costs, they were able to compete with the A320 Neo.
Problems with the 737 MAX
After delivering the 737 MAX 8 to various airlines and having many orders, in October 2018 he suffered his first fatal accident where Lion Air Flight 610 crashed due to problems with flight control and failure of the angle of attack sensors, then in less than 5 months another accident also occurs this time Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, which carry out the investigations many similarities were established between the two accidents and when reviewing all the tests well, it was found that the improvements were not part of instructing the pilots, in addition, the design of the aircraft was reviewed and problems in the design and software of the aircraft were exposed.
Due to all this, the governments of several countries found it necessary to force the grounding of all 737 MAXs due to safety problems and to ensure that this type of accident would not occur again since they had already more than 300 deaths due to these problems.
Boeing actions to reactivate the flights of the 737 MAX
After this series of accidents, organizations like the FAA found it necessary to review much more thoroughly all the airworthiness documents of the plane, in addition to the ways in which the different crews were instructed to solve all the problems that could occur in the flight and could cause the death of a large number of people.
That is why Boeing called its engineers and they looked for all the ways to modify the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) software to prevent this error from happening again, several simulators of the 737 MAX were also created in order to be able to train the pilots better. But by June 2019, new tests were carried out on the new simulators with the new software and the same problems occurred again where the aircraft abruptly plummeted.
These problems meant that by mid-2020 all 737 MAX airplanes are still on the ground and all improvements are being sought so that they can be put back into flight, due to this many of the orders have been cancelled, in addition of generating large amounts of costs for keeping the entire fleet on the ground, which is why even Boeing ordered the cessation of production of the fuselage so as not to have excessive stock of them.
What do you think about this topic? Do you think this 737 can fly again Worldwide?
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Image by Charly W. Karl via flickr.com under creative commons license.
