Norwegian is dropping the 737 MAX because they're practically bankrupt and are significantly downsizing. I wouldn't read too much into this — it's a business and marketing decision, not a safety decision.
Safety is good business for airlines. The marketing aspect is good too, since people are not so easily fooled by product renames, once a couple of successive disasters have caught their attention.
Business decision AND safety decision. It can be both.
Now if I find out that they are planning to order the renamed model in the future.... for example if the 737NG is just a tweaked and renamed Max... then this would just be PR and nothing else.
Yes, safety is good for business. But there is no indication that safety was the consideration in this decision. The fact that they cancelled basically all outstanding orders of any airplane points to the simple fact that they just don't want to buy any new airplane. So putting the 737 Max in the headline produces exactly the wrong impression.
I’ll feel safer flying their airline due to my perceptions about Boeing and that makes their business incrementally more likely to survive.
They know this, too, so I would not be surprised they want customers aware, regardless of any other underlying financial reasons.
By making customers aware of this as though it’s more of a safety thing than you believe it is, even if you’re right, which you probably are, everyone wins. Well, everything except Boeing. Too bad the article didn’t do that.
If anything the article bent over backwards way too far to assiduously avoid mentioning the safety issue at all, when it perfectly well could have since it is so glaring, so I don’t see what your concern is.
> putting the 737 Max in the headline produces exactly the wrong impression.
Perhaps you did not glance beyond the headline and fell victim to your own well-justified negative preconceptions about the Max.
No, you did. You consider this a safety related matter, not me. Personally, I think the MAX (after the fix) is the safest 737 available. If safety played a role in their decision, you should also consider Airbus unsafe, as they are cancelling also their Airbus orders.
That would be a simplistic
logic error, which you are making, not me, as evidenced by your suggestion here and by your previously stated belief that a headline simply mentioning an airline model caused an impression of unsafeness.
To me the deaths in Boeing 737 Max incidents and the revelations about mismanagement are much more reliable indicators of unsafeness.
The max didn't crash because of aerodynamic reasons, heck, without MCAS, it was a perfectly stable, flyable airplane. (It just didn't fly like a 737 without it)
The issue is the stability augmentation system (MCAS) pitched the thing into the ground in the most critical phase of flight, takeoff.
It doesn't fly like a 737 without MCAS, and has a tendency to stall under certain conditions ( unlike previous 737s), hence the MCAS was present ( and very poorly made).
You can say the 737 Maxes crashed due to aerodynamic reasons, since that was the only reason the buggy MCAS existed.
