This may not be completely accurate. According to [1], these pilots were part of a redundant program not related to the 737 MAX.<p>Doesn't make this a great move, I still question it, but the original article didn't include any response from Boeing, and they are claiming something quite different.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2020-09-22/boeing-engineers-union-clash-over-pilot-layoffs" rel="nofollow">https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2020-0...</a>
Is the 737 MAX actually needed by anyone?<p>With travel restrictions, people afraid of catching covid, economy crashing, and plenty of good competitor planes with better reputation, why would airlines need (or want) to buy these planes?
Btw, there's a 737 MAX update Sept 24 from blancolirio about Boeing and the FAA hammering out modifications to training and systems that will eventually put the idle birds back in the air.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/zpQUTa-8j9c" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/zpQUTa-8j9c</a><p>FAA Administrator Steve Dixon & Deputy Administrator Daniel Elswell will personally crew a 737 MAX next week:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/ObSLEiefHcE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ObSLEiefHcE</a><p>The EASA is aiming for November recert. FAA was last aiming for a no earlier than October for a final published AD to bring it back.
I've said it in every previous post where Boeing makes a profit vs safety trade-off:<p>We should nationalize Boeing.<p>It's in our strategic interest to be able to manufacture planes, Boeing provides lots of decent wage jobs, it has wildly overpaid executives, and it had shown that when given the choice it will choose profit over safety. Nationalization removes the profit motive, ends the bizarre tax subsidies that get pushed around.
Boeing should just fire everybody who’s not part of management, subcontract an Indian or Brazil company and buy back its own stocks from the remaining money.
It says they're outsourcing to this Manx company. The British regulations and so on are presumably similar to American ones, but it does mean there's probably less communication back to Boeing of any relevant feedback.<p><a href="https://cclaviation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cclaviation.com/</a>
I'm rolling my eyes at this. The dreaded MBAs salivating at obscenely huge bonuses doing this to benefit themselves and stockholders at the expense of humanity.
The current leaders of US companies proudly and strongly resist considering their product lines as meaningful, beyond ROI.<p>But that doesn't work when you're in aerospace and have no regard for engineering tradition or skill.<p>You can see that in the implosion of GE, and now Boeing.<p>The US government needs to come up with a requirement that private contractors mandate high-quality training and oversight embedded into their internal processes.<p>Ironically, flight training materials and evaluation is very high-quality in the US, but it's a single manufacturer, Boeing, that's struggling to meet quality standards across all of their airliner models.
And here one might have hoped that the bean counters at Boeing had learned from the various disasters of the last years.<p>Especially "amazing": even if every one of these pilots earns a million dollars a year and the "contractors" half of that, they'd still only save about 3.5 million dollars a year. Just... what the fuck? On the scale of Boeing, that's a drop in the bucket.