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Tópico destinado as discussões sobre o grounding dos Boeing 737 MAX e seus desdobramentos. O antigo tópico encontra-se no link abaixo.

A idiossincrasia latinoamericana não tem limites _________________________________________________ By Cyntia Aurora Barrera Diaz and Lorena Rios January 17, 2020, 1:51 PM GMT-2 Updated on January 17, 2020, 5:51 PM GMT-2 Mexico is considering a lottery to get rid of of the nation’s presidential jet, after a year of failed attempts to sell the aircraft. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said this week that Mexico is flying back the Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliner, which has been stored in a California hangar since December 2018, just after he took office, to resume sale efforts. Under the plan, the country would sell 6 million raffle tickets at 500 pesos each ($27). Lopez Obrador has said the plane is a poor use of resources in a country where many live in poverty. “There were two buyers from the U.S. One of them offered $125 million, but we can’t sell it below the valuation from the United Nations,” he said during this morning conference at Mexico City’s National Palace. That bid fell 4% short of the aircraft’s estimated value. The U.N., commissioned by the Mexican government to appraise the presidential plane, put a $130 million tag on the aircraft, considerably below the price paid for it two administrations ago. Lopez Obrador has also talked with the country’s richest man, Carlos Slim, about what to do with the plane. He called upon the business community to help him “repair the damage” of buying the plane in the first place. He is offering to sell shares of the aircraft to a group of twelve Mexican companies, each worth $11 million dollars, but he said it would be a tough sell. He is entertaining other options such as renting it by the hour or exchanging it for medical equipment from the U.S. government. If the president decides on a raffle, he said he’d throw in the cost of maintenance for up to two years in case the winner doesn’t have the funds for upkeep. “Not even the wealthiest, most extravagant people have these kinds of planes,“ Lopez Obrador said. “Not even Barack Obama, with all due respect to the former president.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-17/mexico-s-air-force-one-may-be-given-away-as-a-lottery-prize Mexico Doesn’t Know What to Do With Its Presidential Dreamliner By Cyntia Aurora Barrera Diaz January 14, 2020, 1:57 PM GMT-2 Updated on January 14, 2020, 5:40 PM GMT- A state-of-the-art $130 million presidential Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliner is becoming a headache for the government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Mexico is flying back the luxurious aircraft from California after failing to sell it for over a year, Lopez Obrador said Tuesday in his daily press conference, adding that they are rethinking options to get rid of the plane that he has deemed as too ostentatious. AMLO, as the Mexican president is known, put the Dreamliner on the block right after his inauguration in December 2018, choosing to fly commercial airlines instead to make a point about his frugal government style. The plane was flown to a Boeing hangar in Victorville, where the government has been paying maintenance and rent fees while trying to sell it. A dozen potential bidders surfaced last year but no deal was closed, Jorge Mendoza, chief executive officer of state bank Banobras, which is overseeing the sale process, said at the same conference. The plane has a market value of $130 million, Mendoza said, down from the $219 million that Mexico agreed to pay when it ordered it in 2012. Lopez Obrador said he even offered the plane to U.S. President Donald Trump and agreed to receive goods in exchange, to no avail. “We give them the plane, they can pay us in kind. We need X-rays, ambulances, tomographs, laboratories,” he said. “We didn’t get an answer.” The government is now open to renting the plane or splitting ownership among 12 holders, AMLO said, urging Mexicans to make offers for the plane and other aircraft, including helicopters and Gulfstreams, that the government is auctioning. In the meantime, the Air Force will keep the Dreamliner in custody. AMLO has repeatedly criticized the purchase of the plane as too lavish for the leader of a country with millions living in poverty. The president, who has yet to make his first international trip as head of state, also recently argued that the aircraft is too big and expensive for his traveling schedule, given that he can reach most locations in Mexico in less than two hours with commercial flights. — With assistance by Lorena Rios, and Andrea Navarro https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-14/mexico-doesn-t-know-what-to-do-with-its-presidential-dreamliner

Siddharth Vikram Philip 20/01/2020 13h01 A Boeing deveria renomear o 737 Max para ajudar a diminuir as preocupações sobre segurança dos passageiros quando os voos com o jato forem retomados, de acordo com Steven Udvar-Hazy, um veterano da indústria de leasing de aviões. A marca Max está com a reputação manchada após os dois acidentes fatais no ano passado, e não há motivo para a Boeing mantê-la, disse Udvar-Hazy, fundador e presidente do conselho da Air Lease Corp., durante conferência hoje em Dublin. "Pedimos à Boeing para se livrar da palavra Max", disse Udvar-Hazy. "Acho que a palavra Max deve constar nos livros de história como um nome ruim para uma aeronave". Como não há referência à marca Max como tal na documentação da Boeing enviada aos reguladores, a empresa pode simplesmente comercializar o modelo de acordo com a variante numérica, como o 737-8 ou o 737-10, disse. A Air Lease é um dos maiores clientes do Max, com cerca de 200 pedidos. Renomear o Max ajudará a enfrentar a relutância do público em voar no avião, especialmente em mercados mais supersticiosos, de acordo com Udvar-Hazy. Ele disse que companhias aéreas estudam que tipo de relutância ou preferência dos clientes por outros modelos e operadoras poderiam ser enfrentados e por quanto tempo. "Serão dois meses, seis meses, será diferente em diferentes partes do mundo?", questionou. "As pessoas nos EUA, depois de alguns meses, esquecerão os acidentes e perguntarão: 'Ah, é apenas outro 737?' Haverá partes do mundo em que as pessoas talvez sejam mais supersticiosas e levarão mais tempo para apagar esse estigma?" A Boeing trabalha com a Administração Federal de Aviação dos EUA e reguladores de companhias aéreas em todo o mundo para certificar novamente o avião. Em geral, as companhias aéreas esperam que os voos comerciais sejam retomados em meados do ano. Um porta-voz da Boeing não respondeu imediatamente a um pedido de comentário hoje, feriado nos EUA. Dennis Muilenburg, Ex-CEO da Boeing, disse em junho que não via necessidade de abandonar a marca Max. O comentário foi feito depois de o presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, ter dito no Twitter em abril que, no lugar da Boeing, renomearia o avião. Muilenburg foi substituído por David Calhoun, um veterano da General Electric, em 13 de janeiro. https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/bloomberg/2020/01/20/boeing-recebe-duro-recado-de-grande-cliente-tire-o-nome-max.htm

Natasha Frost January 3, 2020 Late in the summer of 1997, two of the most critical players in global aviation became a single tremendous titan. Boeing, one of the US’s largest and most important companies, acquired its longtime plane manufacturer rival, McDonnell Douglas, in what was then the country’s tenth-largest merger. The resulting giant took Boeing’s name. More unexpectedly, it took its culture and strategy from McDonnell Douglas—even its commercial aviation department was struggling to retain customers. Reporting on the deal, the New York Times made an observation that now seems prescient: “The full effect of the proposed merger on employees, communities, competitors, customers and investors will not be known for months, maybe even years.” Nearly 20 years later, one such effect has become the aviation story of the year, or perhaps the decade—the crashes of two 737 Max jets and the loss of 346 lives, not to mention the still-rising associated costs of around $10 billion. In a clash of corporate cultures, where Boeing’s engineers and McDonnell Douglas’s bean-counters went head-to-head, the smaller company won out. The result was a move away from expensive, ground-breaking engineering and toward what some called a more cut-throat culture, devoted to keeping costs down and favoring upgrading older models at the expense of wholesale innovation. Only now, with the 737 indefinitely grounded, are we beginning to see the scale of its effects. “The fatal fault line was the McDonnell Douglas takeover,” says Clive Irving, author of Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747. “Although Boeing was supposed to take over McDonnell Douglas, it ended up the other way around.” A turbulent path to an uneasy union Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” For a time, this served it well: An engineers’ company made planes to make its engineers proud, whatever the cost. Employees enjoyed watertight contracts, thanks to an assertive, family-like union, and an attitude to aviation that put design and quality above all else. In the process, it produced some of the world’s greatest planes. The 707, for instance, was the first commercially successful jet; the 727, launched in 1963, allowed airlines to reach airports in the developing world or with shorter runways. The company’s philosophy, as one close observer described it to researcher Edward Greenberg, was “go-for-it-and-damn-the expenses—but not damn the quality.” Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the company, and the US aviation industry more generally, found itself in an especially sweet spot, Greenberg told Quartz. It was “the golden age,” he said, “because the airlines—since the government actually controlled where planes could go, (assigning) landing rights in a variety of places—didn’t have competition on those routes. Any costs that the engineers at Boeing wanted to add to the plane—because it was real cool engineering, or made the plane faster or safer—didn’t matter to the airlines and they could just pass on the costs of all of that in ticket prices.” As engineers first, managers second, Boeing’s bosses answered to airlines: The plane that would become the 737, for example, was first ordered in 1964, after Lufthansa boss Gerhard Holtje found a need for a craft that could carry around 100 passengers on short, intercity European routes. By the plane’s third incarnation, in 1981, Boeing was onto a winner. With the dawn of the 1980s, however, Boeing’s traditional way of doing things seemed increasingly out of touch. Deregulation under US president Ronald Reagan had changed the economics of the industry, Greenberg said. “The idea was that if you had more competition, it would drop prices for consumers. Suddenly, airlines are looking at this and saying, ‘Oh my God, we can’t pass on the cost by continuously raising ticket prices.’ That put pressure back on Boeing, and on Airbus eventually, to become cost-conscious.” McDonnell Douglas was in an out-and-out nosedive. As costs climbed, the company’s stock price slumped. Everything seemed to point towards one solution: a leaner operation with more digitalization and a new openness to outsourcing and partnering. At the same time, management was desperately searching for more diverse ways to remain financially aloft. If, figuratively speaking, Boeing was suffering from engine trouble, McDonnell Douglas was in an out-and-out nosedive. The Missouri-based aerospace company was formed in 1967 after the merger of McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and Douglas Aircraft Company. By the 1990s, while its military wing remained robust, its commercial operations were waning. In 1996, Boeing took approximately 60% of the industry’s new commercial aircraft orders. Airbus, the European consortium, lingered far behind it, at 35%. McDonnell Douglas took the remaining 5%. Even its military operations had seen brighter days: The year before the merger, the Pentagon rejected its bid for new fighter jets, turning to Boeing and the Lockheed Martin Corporation instead. Boeing might have been struggling, but McDonnell Douglas seemed destined for failure. In 1996, Boeing acquired Rockwell, a smaller aerospace and defense manufacturer, for around $3 billion. Now, it had its sights on McDonnell Douglas. These decisions, made by Boeing CEO Phil Condit, were made with a close eye on the company’s bottom line ahead of a hotly anticipated commercial-jet boom. An ambitious program of cost-cutting, outsourcing, and digitalization had already begun. For Boeing, acquiring McDonnell Douglas held many attractions. On the one hand, it would be a victory lap of sorts, to finally take over the remnants of its oldest rival. On another, it was a prime opportunity to pick up McDonnell Douglas’ valuable military expertise and diversify its own offerings away from the turbulent commercial aircraft market, with its cycle of booms and busts. And then there was Airbus. In less than a decade, the European company had more than doubled its annual deliveries—an upwards trajectory Boeing executives feared meant the loss of its position as the foremost commercial plane manufacturer in an increasingly expensive world. After the intended merger was announced, antitrust regulators on both sides of the Atlantic considered their options. Airbus and Boeing were already one another’s only significant competitor. McDonnell Douglas’ very existence served a certain purpose—it appears to have made the market more competitive, in helping to drive down prices—but it remained in the doldrums. Regulators noted McDonnell Douglas “no longer [constituted] a meaningful competitive force in the commercial aircraft market,” and that, without a full line of large and small jets, it had no real plan to stave off the “grim prospect” of collapse. Without a takeover, there is every indication that the company might have failed all by itself. The honeymoon period? Eventually, after months of deliberation, regulators approved the match in August of 1997, with four out of five Federal Trade Commission members ruling that it would not “substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in either defense or commercial aircraft markets.” Boeing bought the McDonnell Douglas for $14 billion. Shares of both enjoyed a slight bump. Boeing’s new acquisition allowed Condit to move forward on his other key project: diversifying Boeing’s revenue streams. With the lucrative government contracts it picked up with McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell, Boeing’s comparatively fledgling space and defense operations could flourish. In the eyes of many Boeing employees, McDonnell Douglas executives seemed to do disproportionately well out of the merger: Many were given senior positions following the acquisition, with the company’s head, Harry Stonecipher initially appointed chief operating officer and holding more than twice the number of shares in the company as Condit, who remained CEO. Stonecipher and John McDonnell, formerly the chair of McDonnell Douglas’ board, were now the two largest individual shareholders of the merged companies. Stonecipher eventually became Boeing CEO in 2003, but was pushed out in 2005, after an internal investigation revealed that he was having a consensual, but extramarital relationship with a fellow Boeing executive. In a 2007 interview, Ron Woodard, the former president of Boeing’s Commercial Airplane Group, bemoaned the changes the merger brought with it. “We thought that we’d kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the ropes,” he said. “I still believe that Harry outsmarted Phil and his gang bought Boeing with Boeing’s money. We were all just disgusted.” More than that, he added, the company had “paid way, way too much money [for McDonnell Douglas] and we’re still paying for it. We wrote off so many tens of billions of dollars for that whole mess.” “If you don’t perform, you don’t stay on the team.” Inside the company, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction. A formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned employees they needed to “quit behaving like a family and become more like a team. If you don’t perform, you don’t stay on the team.” Everything seemed to be changing—the leadership, the culture, even the headquarters, with a move from Seattle to Chicago in 2001. The new location seems to have been especially disorienting for Boeing employees. “There was something about the locus of the company which was unique, that its whole history had almost been written on the same runway from the beginning, at Boeing Field” in Seattle, says Irving. Even the company’s ethos seemed to have changed, he says: “There was a kind of inherent ethic about how you went about designing and manufacturing and flying planes that carried passengers, as opposed to flying military planes.” For the former, you were serving individuals and airlines, interested primarily in the best way to fly; for the latter, you were playing a small part in the US’ global military operations. Meanwhile, increasing shareholder value, once scarcely a consideration, grew to be more and more of a priority. Many employees struggled to adjust, or resented what they saw as a changing of the guard, where investors took priority over passengers. “Many of the engineers happened to be the guys who pioneered the 707, and so took the company into the jet age and there was a kind of esprit de corps among them and an integrity of purpose among them,” says Irving. “And they had a collective sense of what the company was meant to do and what its responsibilities were.” Now, a passion for great planes was replaced with “a passion for affordability.” Stonecipher seems to have agreed with this assessment. “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.” How a change in approach led to the 737 Max Two decades on, perhaps the most lasting consequence of the change in culture has been in Boeing’s approach to aircraft building. Cutting costs and diversifying revenue ought to have served as an ideal way to subsidize the expensive process of plane development. Instead, with engineers now disempowered and management far away in Chicago, the actual building of new planes in Seattle all but stalled. Boeing would not actually announce even the plans for a new plane until 2003, with the 787 Dreamliner. Throughout this time, Boeing was led by its first chairman without a traditional aviation background: James McNerney had instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric—now, he was following a tried-and-tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting. That approach was applied to upgrading the 737, which had become the victim of its own success. In its five-decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more than 10,000 of the planes—an aviation rock star. But rather than retiring the plane, and replacing it with the next big thing, Boeing instead opted to keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to fit still more passengers. The version it called the Max, writes Irving in the Daily Beast, was the alternative, cheaper solution. “The airlines went for it because the new engines promised higher efficiency and—so it seemed—pilots would find it very simple to move from the [1997 737 Next Gen] to the Max.” “None of the above should have passed the ‘OK’ pencil.” Pilots have long been aware of the plane’s shortcomings. Writing in the engineering industry publication IEEE Spectrum, pilot and software developer Gregory Travis explains how these repeat redesigns have led to recent tragedies. The plane was designed for a time before machine-aided cargo loading and so sits low to the ground to aid ground crews hauling baggage. But as the planes grew larger, so too have their engines. Instead of being hung under the wing, as in earlier models, the engines have been moved forward and upward, potentially leading to an aerodynamic stall under certain circumstances. “Instead of going back to the drawing board and getting the airframe hardware right, Boeing relied on something called the ‘Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,’ or MCAS,” he writes. Put very crudely, this was a software fix for a hardware problem—and one that was far from perfect. In Travis’ estimation, the software relied on the wrong systems and sensors, without cross-checking them against other easily accessible information from the plane’s sensors. “None of the above should have passed muster,” he writes. “None of the above should have passed the ‘OK’ pencil of the most junior engineering staff.” Light through the clouds? For Boeing, here’s the good news: Airlines are mostly quite profitable—and profitable airlines buy airplanes. The global population able to afford to fly is growing at a staggering pace, which should also mean yet more airline purchases. Boeing may not be the absolute world number one any more, but it enjoys a duopoly with Airbus and is still a preferred supplier for a huge number of airlines. But there’s no denying that the Max has damaged the company. Boeing has now halted production of the plane altogether; earlier this month, CEO Dennis Muilenberg was very publicly fired by the board. Some 400 planes orders are presently on hold, while 387 already-delivered MAX planes have been grounded for months. Early assurances that recertification by the FAA would be easy to come by are now looking decidedly hollow. In the months since the crashes, longtime Boeing customers, such as United Airlines, have turned to Airbus instead—particularly amid fears passengers will refuse to fly the 737 when it returns to service. Having slumped by about 25% after the initial crashes, Boeing’s share price has since scarcely moved. Meanwhile, progress on new planes, including the proposed 797, has slowed as it continue its efforts to work with the FAA on the Max. There are no easy fixes for Boeing. A company that set the standard for jet-age manufacturing is now facing a crisis that goes to the heart of its identity: its ability to build airplanes. Scrapping the 737 altogether would mean the loss of untold billions—not scrapping it may yet cost even more. But if, as seems apparent, the company’s cost-cutters led it down the path towards this mess, its engineers may be the ones forced to bring it back out into the light. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1997-merger-paved-way-boeing-090042193.html

"Para que fique claro o que estou afirmando, vou repetir: se não for salva pelos contribuintes americanos, a Boeing vai quebrar." (Ivan Sant'Anna, trader no mercado financeiro) Vale a leitura: https://www.seudinheiro.com/apertem-os-cintos-a-boeing-esta-falindo/

Do NY Times de hoje, parte da materia sobre os prejuizos da Boeing com o MAX "Already, the tally is substantial. Boeing will take a pretax charge of $5.6 billion in the second quarter, its current estimate of what it will take to compensate its Max-flying customers" Se são 371 aeronaves paradas e outras não entregues, a conta bate provavelmente em mais de US$ 10 mm por unidade. Agora resta saber como a Boeing está comunicando isso a cada cia aérea. Teremos boas novidades no balanço da GOL em breve por exemplo.

29-May-2019 8:36 PM https://centreforaviation.com/members/direct-news/embraer-and-weg-sign-an-agreement-for-technological-cooperation-in-electric-aeronautical-propulsion-475657 Embraer and WEG, two of Brazil's largest high-tech manufactured products exporters, announced today a scientific and technological cooperation agreement to jointly develop new technologies and solutions to enable electric propulsion in aircraft. The partnership, in the context of pre-competitive research and development, seeks to accelerate the knowledge of the technologies necessary to increase the energy efficiency of aircraft from the use and integration of electric motors in innovative propulsion systems. The electrification process is part of a series of efforts carried out by the aeronautical industry aimed at ensuring its commitments to environmental sustainability, as is already being done with biofuels to reduce carbon emissions. “By creating this technological development agreement with WEG, we have combined more than 100 years of innovation from two leading companies in generating knowledge and strengthening the supply chain, as well as increasing Brazilian competitiveness in the global market,” said Daniel Moczydlower, Executive Vice President of Engineering and Technology at Embraer. “Advances in scientific research can make clean and renewable energy a major enabler of a new era of urban and regional air mobility that is more accessible to the population.” The cooperation between the research teams will support the creation of innovative technologies that can generate opportunities for future evolutions of new aeronautical configurations and the possibility of developing new market segments. Initiatives like this, combined with long-term incentive policies, also enhance Brazil's intent to become a world leader in sustainable technologies. “Our powertrain technology, developed over years for tried and tested applications in trains, buses, trucks and boats, and in constant evolution, has paved the way for this exciting scientific and technological cooperation project. Together with Embraer we will work not only to enable the electric propulsion of aircraft, but also to increase the technological capacity of WEG, of Embraer and of Brazil, taking our country to an even more competitive level,” says Manfred Peter Johann, Superintendent Director of WEG Automation. After testing these technologies in the laboratory, an aeronautical platform will be used for integration and testing of complex systems under real operating conditions. A small single-engine aircraft, based on the EMB-203 Ipanema, will be used as the test bed, which will carry out the primary evaluation of the electrification technology. The first flight of the electric powered demonstrator is scheduled for 2020. The proposed scientific development of aeronautical electrification, using a technology demonstration platform, constitutes an effective and efficient pre-competitive research instrument for learning and training, as well as for the maturation of the technologies before they are applied in future products. Embraer is committed to the open innovation model and maintains collaborations with dozens of universities and research centers in Brazil and abroad. Among the highlights are long-term partnerships with institutions such as FINEP, FAPESC, FAPESP, FAPEMIG and Embrapii, which are key to narrowing the gap between the scientific community and industry needs. By establishing strategic partnerships through more agile cooperation mechanisms, Embraer is stimulating knowledge networks to allow a significant increase in the country's competitiveness and the construction of a sustainable future. This press release was sourced from Embraer on 28-May-2019.