What fraction of airline customers even try to find out what airplane model their flight will be on? My intuition is it's irrelevantly low...

Because they have hundreds of new airplanes sitting on the ground, as well as a tooled up production line as well as the innumerable companies involved in the supply chain.

The 737 Max issues have been causing layoffs at supplier companies that were heavily reliant on the Max as a source of income.

Yes but that only explains the magnitude of this disaster for Boeing. People will not merrily board these planes just because Boeing is between a rock and a hard place, because of their own wrongdoing no less.

Yeah but nobody is going to get on that thing. The moment someone tries to use that model again there will be headlines like "XX Airlines puts death plane back in the sky" etc.

It's a waste of money trying to get it back on track.

> Yeah but nobody is going to get on that thing

People absolutely will. Boeing is literally too big to fail and people don't care enough either. If someone can have a 50 Euro flight from Berlin to London they won't mind if it's a reintroduced 737 MAX.

A lot of people forget that Boeing doesn't sell 50 Euro flights. Or any flights, or any 50 Euro item.

The people who buy carelessly for 50 Euro aren't Boeing's customers.

The people who are Boeing's customers are airlines, who pay eight- and nine-digit sums and perform due diligence. "Well, one group of customers won't care" is not due diligence. So if, say, Lufthansa concludes that the 50-euro customers won't care but the 500- and 2000-euro ones might, that has an impact on what price Lufthansa is willing to pay.

We'll see about that. Why would airlines accept to operate these planes at a significant loss after the loss they incurred with this whole fiasco to begin with?

I personally wouldn't board this plane until it had a spotless record a decade in the air even if they paid me for it. And I'm someone who loves flying so no specific phobia involved.

> Why would airlines accept to operate these planes

Because their other option is getting at the end of the line for an A320neo and get delivery in 6 years (or worse)

Ryanair, the largest supplier of such flights, has never had a fatal accident, and is quite proud about that. They’re sticking by Boeing for now, but if the ultimate fix is questionable, who knows.

They had however incidents involving underfueled machines.

And there's the problem for Boeing: They better make sure that no more MAX's fall out of the sky due to their fault otherwise airlines will skip the machines. What would happen with Ryan Air if they had one or two accidents like those happened? Knowingly using machines with the past of the MAX. Rage would be allo over the net, I am sure. And Ryan Air would be in a very tough position.

They'll just rebrand it, an average flyer won't know the difference between 737MAX and the older model by looks. At best they might be able to tell that it's a 737.

Cheating is what has gotten Boeing into this place to begin with. Another cheat (sorry, "rebranding") won't exactly increase confidence.

Oh don't worry flying public. This isn't the shit 737max. This is the 737-8! Totally different thing! Believe me, it's true.