Boeing doesn't have a real business plan until they have a plan to replace the 737. Boeing and Airbus have been going crazy over the past 30 years developing widebody airliners, some of which were solidly rejected by the market, but domestic flyers (most of them) are stuck with a 1967 design. It's a disaster when it comes to managing the social and environmental impacts of air travel.

A ride in this plane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_family

radically changed my view of what is possible in a small airliner, because it has a squared-off cross section it feels much larger on the inside than a 737... And this is a previous generation plane, now there is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220

There's a crisis brewing at America's small airports in that they've really stopped building the sub-50 seat regional jets that serve smaller airports. (In the small city near me, almost every organization lists the local airport as a weakness in a SWOT analysis) Manufacturers know that airliners around 70 seats would be dramatically lower cost to operate than the status quo, enough that prices would drop and service quality would increase and filling the extra seats would be easy. Trouble is the unions won't let the airlines upgrade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_clause

Yes! I rode in an E195 recently and I was kinda dreading it because it's a much smaller plane than a 737. I was so pleasantly surprised how roomy the cabin was. And how quiet and convenient. There was even a little holder for my tablet.

It is quieter for folks on the ground too. And it doesn’t get grounded when the temperature is too high nearly as much as the 737.

If people realized you could get widebody comfort in a regional jet they’d quit flying on legacy airlines.

Is it more expensive? Where do you search for these flights?

In my case it was not more expensive, no. But I was flying in Europe. Not sure about the US.

They just use them for the quieter flights where they have trouble filling up a 737.

I was dreading it because the last time I flew on an airliner this size it was a 717 and it was horrible. Very noisy in particular (I was seated right beside the engine I have to say). The Embraer was really delightful and it has under-wing engines.

Here in the US basically all the regional airlines use them. Horizon Airlines is one that I know of specifically, and Wikipedia lists Sky West, Envoy Air, Mesa Airlines, Republic Airways, JetBlue, etc, etc. Many of them contract for the more well–known airlines like Delta, US Airways, and so on, so you could end up on an Embraer even if you don’t seek it out.

A lot of those are the smaller and older regional jets like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_ERJ_family

which personally I like less than

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8

The newer and larger E-Jets are on a whole different level in terms of comfort.

Delta has some A220s, I got put on an E-Jet on an American from Philadelphia to Montreal.

The A220 / CSeries is another great example of the corruption that exists between Boeing and the US government. Locking out new competitors via dubious anti-dumping petitions.

Seems to me the solution to the union problem would be some kind of direct deal with the union on outsourcing rather than a workaround based on staff rules relating to seat numbers.

The best part is that Boeing had EICAS, the engine indicating and crew alerting system, in the early 80s with the introduction of the 757/767.

In the mid-90s, when they updated the 737 to the Next Generation, they opted to stay with the six-pack recall light system that every 737 pilot hates. Same in the Max. Too expensive to change and would likely require a new type rating.

The A320 was such a technological leap forward in commercial aviation. Boeing wasn’t able to match it until the introduction of the 777, almost a decade later.

I can't imagine EICAS is that expensive, the P-8 has it. Requiring a new type rating seems far more likely given that's how we got MCAS.

The type rating is the big factor, and that's largely driven by desire and/or pressure from customers.

IMO type ratings, and particularly the categorization of types, needs an overhaul. The current type rating system is, IMO, the primary indirect factor leading to the max accidents (customers demanded the impossible - more efficient engines with a 37 type rating) as well as countless other design decisions that seem silly from the outside.

The P-8 having EICAS is more of an indictment of Boeing than anything (the P-8 is a Navy 737). It’s completely technologically possible, just that entrenched interests (namely, Southwest) kept Boeing from advancing the technology of their aircraft.

The integration of government and these big businesses is one thing. The fact that it always seems to run in the direction of undermining citizen safety and protections, and weakening the country's capacity to actually hold these companies accountable to even national level interests is astonishing.

What purpose does this integration serve if not to allow the government leverage? These days you have the US government acting like its a 2nd-world power, just desperately trying to hang on to any businesses willing to grace the US with their presence, instead of a nation that holds the key to glibal economic power. Frankly it's pathetic.

Which in itself is ironic as the US government spends a large portion of it's current time accusing China of the same thing. As usual you should always expect projection when shade is being thrown.

At least in China when greed kills people there are consequences for executives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...

Chinese system has a huge number of flaws but one thing it gets right is the government stands above corporations.

Corporate control over government is the path to dystopia, it's how the climate situation got out of control, why the drug epidemics keep coming back, why obesity is killing the country, etc. etc.

Occasionally people wake up and fight back for a moment but it's always fleeting because the deck is stacked against the people. The corporates have the money for the research and "lobbying" aka bribes to keep regulation at bay for decades usually.

Corporate greed is all consuming and thus regulation is meant to exist as it's counter-balance. When the corpos are the ones regulating themselves well... you can't be surprised when this is the result.