Going back to OTR with Schneider Lease Purchase!

The reason the Boeing 737 MAX is grounded is because instead of retiring the 737 and drawing up an expensive clean-sheet replacement, they decided to take a shortcut and troubleshoot their way around a 50 year old airframe, trying to fit too big engines under a plane with too low ground clearance. All because Airbus was stealing the show with their A320Neo and Boeing's 737 was losing market share.

The Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 are competitors in the narrow-body jet market. Think of them as Coca Cola and Pepsi. If one creates a better product, the market will shift drastically. That's what Airbus did with the A320Neo. It had bigger, much more efficient engines, but flew just like the old A320. This meant immediate savings in operating costs, and since the plane was essentially the same, training current A320 pilots on the Neo was also cheap and easy. The market shifted to Airbus. So then Boeing tried to fit the same big engines on the 737. With lower ground clearance than the A320, engineers had to troubleshoot their way into shoehorning the engines on the 737. They did it, and also claimed it flew just like the old plane. Spoiler Alert: IT DIDN'T.

Now the engines changed the handling of the aircraft. The plane now liked to pitch up excessively into the sky during takeoff, which risks the plane stalling and falling out of the sky. This "necessitated" the silent introduction of the autonomous MCAS system that's at the heart of why 2 737 MAX 8s fell from the sky months apart, killing almost 350 people. It wasn't a big-plane small-plane issue. Corporate greed grounded the world's most popular jet airliner.

The 737 MAX's MCAS debacle draws so many comparisons with the McDonnell Douglas DC-10's cargo door scandal in the 70s. The funny thing is, Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas in the 90s, as their reputation never recovered from the DC-10s missteps. Only problem was, this was more like a McDonnell Douglas takeover of Boeing when it came to the boardroom brass, and so McDonnell Douglas leadership tore apart Boeing's engineering culture and replaced it with cost cutting practices and a shareholder first mentality. As soon as the merger was announced, the die was cast. The DC-10 would soon have a successor. And that successor, is the 737 MAX.