Boeing is hurting.

 So said the Wall St Journal yesterday.  They cited a truckload of lawsuits resulting from the two crashes of brand new 737 MAX's.   They didn't talk about how the 737 MAX is selling now after the treacherous MCAS autopilot has been fixed.  How much revenue is Boeing bringing in from sales?  If it is enough to pay off the lawsuits, Boeing will survive.  If it isn't, bad things will happen.  

   They did mention that ONE Boeing employee, the senior test pilot, is in trouble with the law.  This guy convinced federal regulators that the very existence of the MCAS system did not need to be documented in any of the 737 manuals.   This seems like picking on a fairly low level employee who surely was just following direction from higher ups.  No mention of who the higher ups were. 

   The treacherous MCAS system was a band aid to make the 737 MAX fly just like the plain old 737 to avoid the cost of pilot training to fly the 737 MAX.  The 737 MAX was a plain 737 after an engine swap.  The new engines gave better fuel consumption, maybe 5% better.  With jet fuel going for $3 a gallon, and a full fuel load being a couple of 18 wheeler tank trucks, say 20,000 gallons, 5% fuel savings might be 1000 gallons, or $3000.  Nice chunk of change.  The new engines are bigger in diameter than the old ones, which meant they had to be slung somewhat lower under the wing.  Which meant that increasing the engine thrust, say for takeoff, had an increased tendency to push the aircraft's nose up.  Too much of this and the aircraft will stall, and fall like a stone.  So MCAS was supposed to give a bit of down horizontal stabilizer to counter the nose up tendency.  The two crashes of brand new 737 MAXs were blamed on the MCAS system going crazy and diving the plane into the ground.  

  The Journal piece did not mention who at Boeing, engineers or suits, OKed the MCAS design and what testing was supposed to be performed on each aircraft.