Boeing's bestselling plane is fundamentally a 50-year-old design. At the beginning of this decade, it considered replacing the 737 with an all-new jet. Here's why that would have been a bigger business risk, and perhaps more of a safety risk as well.
of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 have led regulators around the world to ground the 737 MAX while investigators work to determine the cause.
“If you’d done a new, clean sheet of paper design you might have introduced more risk into the system,” says R. John Hansman, an aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By comparison, the MCAS problem looks simpler, although the consequences have been infinitely more serious. Boeing is working on a software patch and enhancements to the angle of attack sensor inputs that, combined with training changes, are expected to solve the problem, experts say, assuming the two crash investigations don't uncover other issues.
There are business pressures on manufacturers to keep updating an old design, too. It's quicker, cheaper and the certification process is easier.
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