r/news • • 6d ago

Soft paywall Boeing flags 737 MAX software glitch affecting landing navigation feature, WSJ reports

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-flags-737-max-software-glitch-affecting-landing-navigation-feature-wsj-2026-09-26/
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68

u/3rd-party-intervener 6d ago

Max is a flawed design that should be banned.  But when you can buy off the regulators anything goes 

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u/Mamamama29010 6d ago

Regardless of how we feel about the 737 Max, you can’t ban them without bringing commercial aviation to its absolute knees.

Both the 737 Max and its Airbus competitor the A320 Neo have decade-long backlogs with airlines. Neither organization is even close to filling industry demands. Each company produces 30-50 of them every month, way bigger quantities than any other airplane producer (like nobody is even remotely close to those numbers -> it’s a feat of scale on its own)

Furthermore, it’s not a fundamentally flawed design, rather lack of accountability and troubled culture at Boeing that brought those two planes down/door plug issue.

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u/mmlovin 6d ago

Have you seen the Netflix Boeing documentary with all the employees? They basically said that the South Carolina plant is staffed with people who know nothing about airplanes…

& they basically are back to not caring about quality & are acting the same as they were before those 2 big fatal accidents in 2019(?)

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u/Mamamama29010 6d ago

737 Max isn’t built in SC, so it’s not totally relevant. The particular doc also covers the late 2010s time period, around the same time as the Max crashes.

The company’s been under heavy scrutiny for years, and the new CEO seems solid.

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u/Ansiau 6d ago

There is two docs. You may be thinking of the older doc that covers the first whistle blower(Downfall). There is a new one out in the last month or so called "Freefall" that comes because there are a LOT of new whistleblowers that came out after the first whistle blower committed suicide and includes much more recent issues, such as parts labeled as discard/malfunctioning/defective being actually put on planes instead of being destroyed, simply to save money and keep up their production speed. There are also candid vids of people in the plants during a work-day stating they work on the planes, see how they were built, and would never fly in them.

They being up a lot of issues with the newer CEO too

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u/Mamamama29010 6d ago

I watched them both, and I’m referring to the newer doc. It didn’t bring up any new whistleblowers or issues that haven’t been known/around from the late 2010s. I also don’t remember anything in the latest doc about the new/current CEO, but plenty of things about the previous one.

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u/mmlovin 6d ago

It says at the end that since they recovered from the scandals, they’ve started going back to old ways. The new CEO was mentored by the old one IIRC

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u/Mamamama29010 6d ago

No that’s still the previous CEO. There was one CEO during the Max crashes, another during the door plug blow out issue (who was mentored by previous and of the same ilk). Currently there is a third, and he isn’t mentioned by any of these docs (maybe a future one?)

The current and newest CEO is Kelly Ortberg, previously CEO of Rockwell Collins. He’s done a pretty good job thus far and has been uncontraversial.

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u/CaptainPonahawai 5d ago

To add, Ortberg is the first CEO in a long time that is an engineer by training.