Are we doing an another round of armchair aviation engineers outlining ad nauseum all the reasons they believe the 737 Max cannot possibly fly and should never have been considered that ignores all the evidence that the two accidents were successfully root-caused to an issue that has now been fixed and is undergoing an understandably and embarrassingly lengthy process of certification? Seems to be an almost daily ritual on HN these days.

Yes Boeing has issues; especially in their senior management. That's why they are struggling to keep up with competitors in the cheaper/faster/more efficient/less noisy category (aka. the market). But also, the 737 is still one of the safest and most successful planes ever and last year was one of the safest years in aviation history with many thousands of them flying around every day. Once patched up, the max will be part of that fleet for decades to come and is unlikely to bend the excellent safety record in any statistically meaningful way regardless of the current sentiments or the recent accidents.

IMHO, Boeing has some corporate culture issues to sort out and it definitely does not help that they operate as a state protected monopoly that mostly acts to shovel defense money around and enrich contractors, share holders, politicians, lobbyists, etc. involved with cutting up that pie. But lets be real, every other big aviation manufacturer works exactly the same way and it seems to work fine in terms of safety.

Fundamentally there are no good technical reasons for the hundreds of 737 maxes to be permanently retired over real, perceived or imagined risks. Yes, there are some technical issues that are addressable, are being addressed, and require lengthy inspections & certification to verify that they have indeed been addressed. That's basically what's happening because they are fixable issues. There are no known un-fixable issues here, no known show stopping design flaws that can't be worked around, no known unacceptable (i.e. uncertifiable) hacks, etc. Some of the fixes may indeed lead to some retraining effort, which I'm sure is annoying but not fatal for Boeing. And yes, there's brand damage and Boeing is probably going to have to do some pro-forma rebranding (737 maxi-cosi, anyone?) and symbolic modifications.

When their choice is to go out of business or attempt to fix entirely fixable technical issues they'd be complete idiots to get sucked down the first hole. Permanently retiring many hundreds of planes that once fixed are perfectly good for decades to come is just not going to be a thing. Boeing going bankrupt over this under the current political climate is also not a thing. To big to fail means rules can be bended, changed, abused, or otherwise ignored. That's how this happened to begin with. One way or another the FAA will ultimately rubber stamp whatever needs rubber stamping.

Some time this year, the thing will resume flying and Boeing goes back to licking its wounds and planning the next iteration of its products. I imaging they'd be tempted to unshelve some projects they had for future products as well and dust off what lingering R&D capability they have to come up with something new. That'd be a smart investment.