The economic loss of losing by far their biggest money maker which most likely means bankruptcy.

They already took that gamble and lost, twice. Would not be surprised to see them gamble with human lives again. Got to hit those quarterly sales figures.

I think you scrap the plane, then start over with a wholly compliant design. This whole ordeal is a great example of regulatory capture. You have a plane with a ton of new flaws, and all the flaws of the old design, and business decided it was cheaper to pressure the regulator to be okay with these flaws and to kill a few hundred people than to build a proper plane, but let's give them one more chance to kill a few hundred more people, so they're not financially inconvenienced over a problem of their own making.

There have been thousands of passenger jet crashes and on the broad scheme of things this plane is still extremely safe. The fact that it wasn't a redesign means it builds off all the lessons learned over the 30+ years the 737 has been in service.

"Got to hit those quarterly sales figures." An aircraft that crashes is pretty detrimental to achieving this goal. Achieving sales figures doesn't preclude safety

Chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term losses is a popular pastime of management/C-suite executives who are motivated more by "what's good for me" than by "what's good for my company/employees/customers". It creates a culture where everyone is acting more out of self-interest than they ought to.

Eventually, the company pays for it, but it can take a while.

The culture at Boeing has changed, and it seems to me that the quarterly numbers are more important now than previously.

>The fact that it wasn't a redesign means it builds off all the lessons learned over the 30+ years the 737 has been in service.

No, obviously it didn't, since the redesign changed the fundamental flight dynamics of the plane. It was not improving the design, it was piggybacking off the good record and past training of the old design to push out a fundamentally different product as quickly and cheaply as possible.

>Achieving sales figures doesn't preclude safety.

Then how did these fatal 737 MAXs ever get released in the first place?