The 737 predates the 747 and the Concorde, and both of those are out of passenger service.
The circular cross-section, for one thing, makes it like the old American cars that were huge on the outside and small on the inside. The only way you'll really understand this is ride on an modern plane such as the E175 or A220 -- you'll get that you hate to fly not because you hate to fly but you hate to fly on a 737 and never get to fly on anything else.
The overall design of the aircraft is not compatible with high-bypass engines. Thus they bolted MCAS onto it. Even there the 737 Max does not support the geared turbofans that are available for modern airliners and the A320. These are so quiet that it isn't that you hate living near an airport, it is that you hate living at an airport where 737s land.
Modern airplanes use fly-by-wire which reduces weight (sometimes dramatically because the size of the control surfaces can be reduced) and enables flight envelope protection (like MCAS) in a way that is a lot more rational and thought-through than MCAS.
An all-electric plane like the 787 might also improve air quality on the flight. I don't think small airplane competitors have this yet.
Boeing has used it's market power to suppress alternatives to the 737 so you will pay more for tickets, suffer in transit, have noisier airports, and have more global warming. The MCAS system was just one part of this scheme.
The 737 Max is a case of the "undercompetition and underinvestment" connected with secular stagnation; it is like how your internet service sucks...
The 737 has the _fundamental_ problem of having wings very low to the ground during ground operations. Taller landing gear is not an option, in fact the 737-max has slightly-extending landing gear to resolve this issue. It is part of the reason the plane is called "max" - they maxed out things like ground clearance, fuselage length, wing chord, and other parameters.
Back to the low wings: there is no room for a large (quieter, more efficient) engine. In the earlier 737s, the engine was just as high as it could go, you could even see the cowling squished at the bottom. In the max, the larger engine is placed in front of the wing, which means that it sits much further forward than the airframe was designed for. Thus, MCAS was needed to have the plane "behave in flight like the old 737".
These are _fundamental_ issues that cannot be fixed on the current airframe. Just as the 2019 Ford Mustang chassis is better (stiffer, lighter, safer) than the 1964 Ford Mustang chassis, newer airframes resolve many of the issues that were not designed into their 1960's counterparts.
Because the plane wasn't designed that way in the 1960s, that's why. They can't change it without designing a different chassis, which means it's a different plane and a whole new type rating that pilots have to be trained for and certified on.
747 is out of domestic passenger service in the U.S. but it's definitely still used a ton for international passenger service including to/from the U.S.
It's really old, and the main problem is that it's avionics are old, and don't have the same level of electromechanical flexibility that new planes.
Think of the difference between slapping IoT / real-time monitoring capabilities onto an old factory process versus building from the ground up with those capabilities kept in mind.
Obsoletion happens when there is a better alternative available, and there are plenty of better options to the aging 737 airframe.
The design has been iterated and improved many times. The field of aviation is very conservative. What's old is generally what works. New designs are prohibitively expensive. The 787 won't be profitable for some time, even a decade after it was launched.
> it's avionics are old
They're brand new. Where do you think they get them for brand new planes ?
>versus building from the ground up with those capabilities kept in mind.
They have done that, just the other way around: the avionics are built from the ground up with the capabilities of the well-understood (at least before -Max) aircraft in mind.
> They're brand new. Where do you think they get them for brand new planes ?
I have some industry experience- there are still new planes that get large, ugly beige Honeywell units in them that're slow and clunky while there are much better avionics packages available. The Honeywell packages are generally pretty newly built, but are still really old. The Raspberry Pi Foundation still sells the original Raspberry Pi, even though they've gone through 3 different generations and like 6 iterations since. The original Raspberry Pi is old, no matter when it was manufactured. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ is new, and has more features and power. Sure, they have similar names and functionality, but there is a world of difference between the two.
Imagine that you've designed a product around the original Raspberry Pi. The projects needs include GPIO, internet connectivity, and video output. The expectations have been trimmed appropriately to fit within the hardware available. Custom PCB's have been made for the Pi to socket into, and there's a standardized system in place for testing the Pi.
Later on, you decide that you want to replace the old Pi with a new one. Compared to the current Pi, the old one has less GPIO, less processing power, a weaker GPU, lamer internet, and less IO- and, although you can just drop in the new Pi with an adapter cable, you're still missing out on all the pins, and your code isn't exploiting all the available resources.
This "not everything gets updated" cycle has serious compounding effects the longer you go. After a few decades of Raspberry Pi releases, your product is a little bit antique, and needs some serious updating to be able to compete in the now-mature product category that you were in. Not starting over and working from the ground up has serious knock-on effects in the future, (for instance, the 737's wings were way too low, which is not future-proof for bigger engines).
This isn't just about avionics, either. It's about every single part of the airplane.
I don't see how anything is wrong with "large, ugly beige" electronics. 737's fly everyday just fine. What benefits are they going to get from sleek, thin Jony Ive-inspired UX? Are they going to get to destinations faster? Are they going to have a smoother ride? What product requirements could possibly change that would necessitate upgrading the avionics?
All these high-tech upgrades have downsides. Fiber optic is very slow to be adopted in aviation because movement generally destroys it. those fancy HUD obscure the runway and lighting. AIRDRU's malfunction, sometimes spectacularly [1]. Sometimes they kill people when working exactly as designed [2]. I'm not surprised to see a fetish for the fastest, sleekest electronics on Hacker News, but I'm shocked to suddenly see such sharp criticism for the '37 on here (aside from the Max issue). It's one of the most reliable and safe aircraft ever, yet somehow it needs the latest glass cockpit technology.
If you look at it, Boeing has put improved technology in all of the other planes it makes, just not the 737. For instance they have retrofitted the 747 with fly-by-wire.
Fly-by-wire offers huge avionics benefits, reduces weight, fuel consumption, etc.
Planes with fly-by-wire also have inertial measurement units that contribute to envelope protection so they would have another input to work from rather than just the AoA vanes.
