EDIT: To be clear, I think the best outcome is for the 737 Max to be made safe and to fly again. If it can't be made safe, obviously cancelling production of useless planes is a good idea.
Aerospace is a sizable part of the US economy. It really isn't FUD at all.
Oh shit, let's bail them out!
This is assuming that airbus isn't doing the same things that Boeing was doing....
Impacts to GDP growth are almost always measured relative to total GDP, not to expected growth.
That includes all stages of engineering knowing the big picture, even if they don't happen to be acting upon it, so that there are safety checks possible at every stage of design and implementation.
The A320 costs about what the 737 costs and it has a flight envelope protection system with much better safety. It's had problems in the past that Airbus has learned from and that Boeing has applied to their newer airliners, but that Boeing got amnesia for when it came to the legacy 737.
(The A320 fly-by-wire also improves fuel efficiency, lowers maintenance costs, rides out turbulence to improve comfort, etc.)
Also the lack of safety has not saved anybody any money. I think now Boeing is saying they've lost $8 billion because of the MAX problems, and if they took that plus what they spent to make the MAX they could have been a clean sheet replacement for the 737.
People are so used to the 737 that they don't realize what a backwards airplane it is. Every other airliner from every manufacturer makes some claim that it is comfortable on their official web page. The 737 doesn't because it is the least comfortable airliner (and thus is the baseline everything is compared to.) The 737 is loud for passengers, pilots, and people on the ground. The A220 and E190 are smaller planes that are much more comfortable because they are designed around the human body as opposed to 1960's aeronautics. Compared to a clean sheet design, the 737 wastes fuel, causes excess global warming, has a higher seat-mile cost, and it makes everybody miserable while doing so.
The 737 is what secular stagnation looks like.
This is always touted around. Fine, you're not wrong. I think the missing implicit assertion that also needs the same level of preaching is "and truly free markets".
Last I checked, the plane industry was not a free market
In a company with failing engineering quality, what typically happens is that, of all the engineers qualified to sign off, management over time tend to choose the ones who are more willing to sign off. The more careful engineers who refuse to sign off, or attempt to negotiate harder for safety before signing off, are not promoted over the less careful engineers. The result is that the engineers in a position to sign off increasingly comprise the less careful ones.
Who is to blame in this case: the management who drive the process that selects the less careful engineers, or the less careful engineers?
The leadership (including the board who are proxies for stockholders) is ultimately liable - they hire, fire, set the strategy, values, and goals for the company. They reap the rewards of profits and take on some risk. That's the difference between a regular employee and an officer. When you have a business that involves public safety like car and airplane manufacturers, a large part of your business should be ensuring that everyone from the lowest level employee to the CEO is at or above industry standards for safety.
No doubt there would be an economic impact but the writing is just full of hyperbole and doesn't name any sources for it's claims (like 0.6% of GDP growth rate - note the growth rate, not 0.6% of GDP or 0.6% of GDP growth ...). It also fails to differentiate between the impact of existing planes not able to fly and continued production.
This smells like a PR campaign to put pressure on regulators.
Only, in this instance, the FAA probably won't risk further embarrassment by declaring the plane safe while EASA is holding out. Most of the world will wait for them rather than go with the FAA.
You're taking it way too far in the other direction. It's not whether we have safety or not, it's a matter of some very close to 100% number vs. a different very close to 100% number. (And at this point it's more likely the same future safety level but different amounts of training.)
0.6% of 2% of $19 trillion is $2.2 billion. Theoretically, if enough of that could be captured and used to directly reduce airfare on 737 MAX planes (and/or provide a fat guaranteed payout in the event of death) then I bet a lot of people would choose to fly--possibly even in the U.S., but certainly in many parts of the world where people already assume substantial risks when traveling.
It would be difficult to capture it, though, especially because Boeing would be better off shutting down production and waiting as the manufacturer duopoly means Boeing is likely to sell all or most of those planes eventually rather than lose out on a large number of sales entirely.
But if we were able to somehow force Boeing to factor in the real costs to employees of labor disruption (i.e. if Boeing was forced to be 100% unionized now and for the indefinite future) then I imagine Boeing might choose to keep a minimal production line going and sell at discounted prices, in turn permitting some regional airlines to sell cheaper tickets. Actually, more likely Boeing would be better off paying their labor to sit around (and their employees richer for it) by giving labor a greater share of the future expected surplus from duopoly pricing. Or maybe some combination of the above.
I have no idea how to even attempt to pencil that out, though. My point is merely that it could work, depending on the numbers; not that it necessarily would work. In other words, your question can be answered quantitatively, whereas I assume you intended it rhetorically with an implied, categorical, "no".
While it's not a lot relative to the mass of the GDP, aerospace is one of the key areas that the US has had a strong presence in over the years.
US Health Care spending is approaching 20% of GDP but this is because health care is a bloated corrupt mess. Other parts of the GDP also have debatable reality - overprices infrastructure project also are added to the GDP. But selling advanced airplanes is something real the US does - though with Boeing's many shenanigans, maybe not as much as before.
Of course, it's Boeing gutting itself and stretching every area of safety and regulation that brought us here and the regulators letting this go wouldn't stop a fall at all.
This is what I think is going on:
Part of the 737MAX fundamentally is that 737 NG pilots did not need retraining to fly it.
That's a nice goal, but it is not compatible with MCAS. With MCAS in the picture, pilots need to fly out two situations in a simulator: (1) MCAS goes bezerk and they have to manually disable it, and (2) they get into the kind of trouble that MCAS is supposed to stop and then MCAS doesn't stop it.
I think Boeing is hoping they can do a software fix but not add a training requirement and I think that's a major reason why the fix is taking so long. I can't believe that regulators will clear the MAX to fly again without the training requirement. If Boeing is trying to avoid simulator training, they are doing a lot of harm to themselves, their shareholders, their employees, airlines, their suppliers, the U.S. Economy, etc. If they bite the bullet and accept the simulator requirement they can probably get back in the air soon -- they might have to pay for the simulator training that they promised airlines wouldn't have to pay for, but that's probably less than what they are going to pay because of delays.
Another problem with their foot dragging is that delays beget more delays. The more time they waste, the more new problems will be discovered, the more it will cascade. The fast way out is the way through, but from the beginning to this moment, Boeing has not appeared to recognize the gravity of this situation.
Airbus just had an excessive pitch problem in the A321neo, nearly the same as the 737-MAX troubles. https://simpleflying.com/airbus-a321neo-pitch-problem/ Suddenly, the FAA might take aggressive action to ban that aircraft. Maybe the EASA doesn't really object to the 737-MAX as much as they thought they did.
CAAC would like smooth approvals for Chinese aircraft. Huawei is also having issues. Things could suddenly change after a day of golf at Mar-a-Lago. Lots of things could change, some quietly and some publicly.
High-bypass turbofans are finicky things. It seems likely there will be more teething problems in that area. The GE-9x increases the bypass ratio by 11% from 9 to 10 over the GE-90 based on comparison of specs published in wikipedia. [1,2]
So the interesting question for launch is what else pops up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE9X
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE90#Specific...
Anything can be made to fly if you spend enough money on it. But Boeing are in the business of making money. So they can't just get the 737 Max to fly at all costs. Even if they went all out the reputational harm is very much deHavilland Comet. They fixed the Comet and it was a lovely plane, but nobody wanted it. With the 737 it needs a full redesign, otherwise it is just an exercise in polishing a turd. Even if the MCAS works perfectly it is still an ugly hack.
To Boeing the decision to be selling single aisle short-hop planes might be something they get completely out of. They can finish orders for 737 oeo (old engine option) and just shut the whole thing down.
After 2008 the US auto sector was pared down a bit, GM getting rid of Pontiac to shutter it for good was needed to solve the bigger GM venture, similarly 737 MAX might be best closed in order to save the company. Much like how quick they were with the Dreamliner, in 5-10 years time Boeing could be back with another Ryanair grade offering.
Ford, GM and FCA decided to give up on making saloons for the domestic market, they let the Germans fill that niche. Similarly, with the 737 it might be better to be realistic about the competition, not just from Airbus but China, Russia and anywhere else. If China has a good plane to rival the 737 in 2-3 years time then it would be hard for Boeing's unionised workers to compete with their robots.
>... if the grounding of its most popular plane persists ...
as if the grounding was an uncontrollable event, like - say - weather.
I would have written it as:
"if we (Boeing) cannot soon find a solution that is considered safe enough by the relevant Authorities ..."
