Well, the "Jedi mind tricking regulators and customers" stuff revealed a level of frivolousness that you'd accept from a Silicon Valley company but not from a company that you entrust your life to.

Muilenburg also took notes out of the Silicon Valley Congressional Hearing Playbook, including answering "Congressman, I'm not aware of <item discussed> but I'm happy to follow up" to about every question. When it concerns the safety of lives, the last thing you want to hear is a lying CEO claiming to be unaware of everything that happens in his company, except for his bonuses, and who prefers to talk about his upbringing on an Iowa farm instead of the 737 MAX.

He, again, definitely didn't help Boeing's case this week.

they only have 14 frames. Just return them or EBay them to Drake or whatever. Oscar has an easy way out.

Gary Kelly OTOH...

COB of $BA on CNBC this AM talking about how the company has full confidence in the CEO and that they absolutely would not be pursuing any kind of claw-back in bonuses around this event. My guess is Muilenburg is toast when re-certification is done. They just don't want to deal with that turnover in the middle of that process. Not sure who decided to put the COB on CNBC but he really didn't show particularly well. Internal PR at the company seems to be pretty tone deaf.

I imagine CNBC asked for the COB. While Boeing’s PR sucks, it is tough to argue that silence makes more sense at this point.

The reason why the MAX has so many problems relative to the NEO is driven by the landing gear positioning and height. The 737 gear are short. The 320 gear are long. (Just look at how much higher the fuselage of a 320 sits relative to a 737). Because the 737 gear are short, Boeing has had all sorts of problems fitting new engines to it. More efficient engines have a much larger diameter than the torpedo-shaped low-bypass engines that were fitted on original 737-100 and -200 models.

The only way that Boeing found to fit the new MAX engine to the MAX (and still have the short landing gear provide adequate ground clearance) was to place the engine further forward relative to the wing. This creates all sorts of upward nose-push problems when the engines are accelerated. Boeing's solution was the MCAS software that would move the horizontal stabilizer to push the nose down. The rest is history.

So the big technically-challenging difference between the 737 and 320 is the gear length, not the fuselage width.

Nope! If anything the higher and further forward positioning causes less pitch up when the engines are accelerated.

Father forward doesn't affect the pitching moment from thrust application. It is the distance below the center-of-gravity that affects the pitching moment as that is the moment-arm of the thrust.

The lower the engines, the greater the pitching-moment that is produced. Moving the engines forward created the clearance from the wing which allowed the engines to be positioned higher. That higher position reduces the thrust's moment-arm for the purposes of applying a nose-up pitching moment. Bottom line, the higher engine position reduces the pitching moment produced from thrust application.

None of that has anything to do with MCAS, though. The problem that MCAS addresses has nothing to do with pitching-moment from thrust application. It comes from the aerodynamic pitching-moment from the larger engine nacelle at very high angles-of-attack (much higher AoAs than would be encountered in normal flight operations). In this case, since the aerodynamic lift from the nacelle is in the upward direction, it is the more-forward position of the nacelle that is increasing the moment-arm, not the higher position of the engine.

Primarily, and in static conditions, you're right; but tractor engine configurations have better dynamic stability than pusher engine configurations.

Bingo, which was the big problem with the post I was replying to.

So was looking to book a flight in April and the 737MAX is showing as the plane. So booking away from the MAX and probably United for the flight.

Was surprised to see the MAX on the schedule for April 2020.

Which US airlines do not use the 737MAX?

Schedules this far out are placeholders. UA has already said that they will allow people to move away from MAX flights once they actually start flying again.

AFAIK, Delta, Hawaiian, Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant, and Sun Country, and, of course, any number of regional carriers. Alaska has some on order, but wasn't operating them when they were grounded.

United CEO has stated they will work with passengers who don’t want to fly the MAX by placing them on other flights.

so if UA has a good price go for it.

Delta is probably the way to go. Overall the consensus seems to be that DL is the most consistently decent product in the US market. They also fly no 737MAX aircraft and have zero on order.

and JetBlue I believe.

Thanks; I knew I was forgetting somebody.

Perhaps easier to just say that AA, UA and WN have them, and AS has them on order (though it's possible that I missed some other airline that has MAX on order).