My recollection is that the Indian involvement in the software for the Max was a make work program to gratuitously add Indian content so as to be able to sell in India. The US engineers complained they spent so much time debugging the software that they might as well have written it from scratch.
Added:
During the .com bubble I talked to a gold & precious metals dealer in Palo Alto. He said people were flying back and forth to India loaded with the maximum allowable amount of gold.
So no wonder Boeing was looking for sales in India by any means necessary.
Ruskie birds:
Two the most fascinating paragraphs in this report:
After a few seconds, at 08:58:56 (time converted from CVR waveform),
HL8088 made an emergency declaration (Mayday x 3) for a bird strike
during a go-around.
Flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) were
installed in HL8088. However, both recordings stopped at 08:58:50 on
December 29, 2024. The airplane impacted with the embankment at
09:02:57, meaning the last 00:04:07 recordings were missing.
Engine dumps oil vapor/smoke into the cabin in response to fan blade out (FBO) event:
I watched the Mentour Pilot episode on this. When an engine fan is damaged by blade loss and becomes unbalanced from a bird strike, there ie a new system installed only on certain models, which reduces the vibration and prevents further damage. Unfortunately, it ejects the engine oil into the engine upstream from the fire box, where it burns. The destination of the resultant toxic vapor depends on which engine is affected, since the left engine supplies A/C to the cockpit, while the right supplies the cabin. Mentour is shocked by the official non-demand for immediate action to mitigate this problem (so am I).
Mentour’s episode is yet another (in a seemingly endless series) revelation as to the potentially deadly, and often unforeseeable, cascades of causation when it comes to (mal)function of complex devices and systems like modern airliners. I shudder to think of military fighters. It seems clear that flying a commercial airliner is today has become super human endeavor; AI has become essential to achieve an acceptable level of safety. Humans can’t think fast enough. Flying an airliner is not at all the same undertaking as the actual flying I did - joyfully, with the seat of my pants - in single and twin engine piston airplanes, in the era before “glass cockpits” replaced the “steam gauges”.
Here is a different kind of problem for Boeing – and for Airbus too. As the saying goes, Sanctions turn Customers into Competitors.
Russian Superjet makes milestone test flight (VIDEO) — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union
"… Russia’s aviation industry has faced increasing pressure to replace Western-made components due to sanctions imposed after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. In response, the SJ-100 program was developed to eliminate foreign reliance, replacing around 40 imported systems with Russian alternatives …
… This project has been implemented within an extremely tight timeframe by global aviation standards. After 2022, we essentially had to reassemble the Superjet from scratch. …
Only 3 years! It is amazing what a business can do if the Directors invest in production instead of playing financial games by buying back their own stock. If Russia can do it this quickly, so can China. And in a few years time Airbus & Boeing will face severe price competition trying to sell their older designs against newer Chinese & Russian planes.
According to Wikipedia (I know! I know!) for what it is worth, the LEAP engine is also used in the Airbus 320 Neo and the COMAC 919. Wonder why there is no mention of that in this announcement?
Three different sub-families of the engine.
Note the NTSB post:
and issued additional recommendations to evaluate the potential for the same issue with LEAP-1A and -1C engines.
Those are the Airbus and COMAC versions.
Latest Alaska Airlines door lawsuit:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70727112/stephanie-king-v-the-boeing-company/
First 300-passenger single aisle? 
The last time I flew on a United 737 (not sure which), economy seat, it was the last leg of ZRH - PIT via ORD. I was an unseasonably warm October 2025 day. The leg room was absent and the distance from my nose to the (seemingly very, very tall) seat back in front of me was so short I felt very claustrophobic. I vowed that IF I ever fly again, I will pay for premium economy. Fortunately, once we were airborne it cooled off. More fortunately, the time in the air was just about one hour. Any longer, I would have needed to OD on Ativan (which I always have in my pharmacopeia when traveling).
That’s why I refer to economy as “the cattle car”.
I have flown in the cattle car for many 8 and 12 hour flight to Europe and Asia. It is a horrible experience.
That sounds awful. Most all my overseas travel has been United, mostly EWR - ZRH in 767’s. I prefer 767’s because of 2-4-2 seating. Given my need to visit the toilet several times in 7+ hours and my preference to sleep leaning against the window in an A row seat (I have it down to a science with anesthesia-savvy-not-for-the-masses pharmacological assistance), that configuration works best for me. Usually I go premium economy outbound and - depending on fares at the time - regular economy coming back. I have found United’s economy seating not bad on that flight. Domestic, fugettaboutit.
Maybe we are our own worst enemies when it comes to air travel. We all (or mostly) want comfort on a long flight – but when we go to book it, we usually go for the lowest cost provider … even though we know that the way an airline can provide those low prices is by reducing comfort and squeezing more passengers on to the flight.
There is an analogy with telephone service. AT&T focused on improving sound quality; the early cell phone upstarts focused on the convenience of taking the phone with you. Even in the days of “few bars”, customers preferred convenience over quality. Marketers know us only too well!
