> It doesn’t save the engine, it keeps it from ripping the wing off. It’s a good system.

Sure, I get that it was added to prevent plane from disintegrating, but like you said integration thinking is gone and now we have those individual components that sure look homicidal from outside.

The other issue is that regulators are missing in action or worse. It’s no way to run the industry by relying on concerned youtubers..

I’m with you on all of this. It’s like all of the grownups left the building and the inmates are running the asylum.

Frikken clown world hijinks.

I am with you but that is quite a mixed up metaphor!

Exactly.

I think a lot of the problem here is that all of the forward looking design is looking at the 787 dreamliner where the air conditioning is done electrically rather than with bleed air. It seems entirely plausible to me that this situation arose due to a descoping halfway through the project, where an initial version of the design wasn't going to use bleed air, they then decided that doing that much design work would be expensive, and put the bleed air system back in "because it's exactly the same as what we've been doing for the past 100 years" and no one realized that in the meantime, someone else on the engine team had designed a system that would dump a couple gallons of oil into the bleed air system if there was an engine failure.

The air handling is exactly the same between the various 737 versions. The difference is that the engines are different. The CFM Leap is designed to shear the bolts on the fan if it goes sufficiently unbalanced, and incidentally the shock of this causes an oil leak. The A320neo will have a very similar problem of filling the plane with smoke if the LRD shears the fan bolts. It just does the air handling slightly differently, so it fills with smoke slower, and the entire cabin, rather than the flight deck first (if it’s the left engine that fails).

Guess if I have to choose killing the pilot last is better … I am not a pilot

Nah bleed air is a pretty major system. 787 was a ground up design, so benefitted from lots of new tech. 737 max was something that they hoped wouldnt need a recert.

So no this wasn’t the victim of a rescope.

But it was the victim of MBAs eating the world, since the 737-of-theseus concept wouldn't exist and we'd be flying in newer design planes.

“737 of Theseus” is my new favorite aviation phrase. Right up there with “unscheduled disassembly event”.

If engine detects malfunction -> close its breathing air pathway to humans.

How difficult is that?

That’s gonna cost tree fiddy.

Actually, I think this was less about cost and more about systemic creep of operational differentiation from earlier versions of the 737. A big selling point for the MBAs was that this was a 737 and pilot recertification was not necessary. So the MCAS system and its deadly potential was hidden from the pilot manual, as was the new failure mode introduced by this system. Acknowledgement that these systems required additional or different contingencies or checklists, or intruding an automatic shutdown of a pressurization would require recertification in type, or potentially even recertification of the aircraft if the changes were significant enough.

Significantly, for MCAS, the reason that the stability of the aircraft had to be patched in software, leading to hundreds of deaths, was that changing the empennage to reestablish aerodynamic stability might have been a big enough change to require recertification of the airframe. That would have been expensive, but it would have also opened the door to fixing all of these other issues that resulted from trying to pretend that the aircraft was not significantly different from earlier versions.

Its bean counters all the way down, and dead passengers is the price of that.

Absolutely: I’m sure the engineers proposed a solution or mitigation - and then it was buried at management level to keep away any possible need of recertification.