According to the article Boeing has halted production, but this leaves the door open to producing them again in the future after design updates. I predict they'll try to rename the model and fly it again after making changes and certifying.
That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
> That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
Yeah you will. Good luck selectively avoiding the most popular international route plane. Historically, people have been very quick to forget mishaps with particular airframes and revert to flying the most convenient/economical routes.
And by the time it's flying again, it will be hands down the safest plane that's being operated because every minute detail of it will have been checked with far more scrutiny than any other newly launched platform.
The 737NG is out of production, and Airbus currently has something like a 5 year backlog of A320 orders. The only other direct competitor is the Comac C919. Boeing has already made about 1000 737MAXes. The 737MAX is going to be a significant part of the global airline fleet whether you like it or not. There will be many routes where the 737MAX is the only aircraft flying that route.
I think it's fairly unlikely that there's some other massively dangerous failure mode of the 737MAX, because the fleet has flown enough hours, and the only crashes have been the result of the MCAS. When that's fixed, it's quite possible that there are other gremlins that cause crashes, but they probably will be much less severe/likely than the MCAS problem.
MCAS is not the fundamental problem. The new CEO has said they may require training for this 737 variant after all. Given a failure to simply drop MCAS, do extra pilot training and move on, we can conclude the plane isn't safe without additional computer control - of the quality MCAS was not. I hope I'm wrong about that, but the longer it drags on the more it looks like that may be the case.
Yea it is hilarious how Comcast thinks rebranding to xfinity etc is going to help. To be fair to them, the internet service mostly has been excellent where I live. The issue is the predatory pricing/cost and ever decreasing TV channels for existing customers.
I don't know what you're talking about, Comcast has had amazing support the last few months in my area. We even had a rep come to our house, and leave a handwritten note on the door when we didn't answer, asking if we had any questions or concerns and to give them a call if there was anything they could do for us.
... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our neighborhood... ;-)
I'd assume this is only temporary. How many orders for the Max do they still have unfulfilled? That'd be a significant loss if they intended to not fill them sometime in the future.
Edit: It says in the article
> The assembly line in Renton, Washington, has stopped building Boeing's bestselling plane, the company confirmed late Monday. Boeing announced plans to temporarily halt production for an undetermined period in December, but it had not previously announced a precise day for the shutdown.
I'm almost there, after reading about how much Boeing has spent on stock buybacks (5x all of R&D over the past six years) I think I'm going to start looking into which model typically services a route and avoid all modern Boeing planes.
Boeing made a lot of executives super rich with buybacks and equity compensation, this led directly to the shoddy engineering choices.
First, if you think Airbus is any better, you should think again.
Second, what do you mean by "all modern Boeing planes"? If you just mean "planes designed after the merger with McDonnell Douglas", that's just the 787 and the 737 Max. The latter is grounded and the former only flies select long haul routes. For the average US business traveler they're a non-issue.
How many people even check what kind of equipment they are flying on before booking a ticket? I know a lot of people who are not even vaguely aware which manufacturer the plane they are flying on was made by.
I think you’re underestimating how much fear people have of flying. If there’s a plane that is considered “dangerous” then people are going to avoid it. It’s not like airlines losing your luggage which people just put up with.
Just look on FlightAware or similar. They've all got the historical record for a given route (though of course it's possible an airline might substitute after you've bought the ticket, it's unlikely; most flights fit a specific profile and most airlines have only a couple of models to fit that profile).
The major users from North American airlines are Southwest (34 planes), Air Canada (24), American (24), United (14), and Aeromexico (6), so it's not super common here at least.
I've heard that the "Max" name doesn't appear on FAA filings and the like, they use the name "737-8". I'm guessing that they'll be switching to using that name once the issues are ironed out.
MAX is Defective by Design. Leave the aerodynamically unstable designs for the hotshot fighter planes; everyone else just wants to get from A to B without cratering into the ground inbetween.
Total clickbait. Based on the title "Boeing has officially stopped making 737 Max airplanes" I thought maybe they had finally decided the plane was unsalvageable. No, they just finally implemented the widely reported decision to temporarily stop construction.
What's more annoying, if you run an adblocker, their player will stall while it tries to load and ad and you get surprised ~20 seconds later with sound blasting at you.
I can't wait to read a senior Boeing manager's future book about the way the company mishandled the development of the 737 Max and how the upper echelons of decision makers managed the ensuing crisis. How many screaming matches occurred between VPs and engineering directors behind closed doors, how many angry emails were exchanged, how many panicked phone calls from the investor relations department to Muilenberg, etc.
What's incredible to me is how this could be allowed to happen. Are the higher echelons of these industries staffed by charlatans? Has something changed in the engineering culture? Did greed override diligence and if so, how was this allowed to happen when the consequences can be so catastrophic both to passengers and to the company? It just doesn't make sense to me how, with such high stakes, a company could manage to let things go so awry. Seems to me like the entire management team for years should have the entirety of their assets seized, as I assume they were very well rewarded for presiding over failure.
At some point, engineering gets displaced by short-term business concerns, driven by managers who have incentives to cut costs and deliver faster even if it destroys the company in the long term. Make a management chain long enough, and most of the decisions will get made this way. Each layer in the hierarchy serves both to insulate decision-makers from the impacts of their decisions and to amplify perverse incentives (e.g. a VP is asked to cut costs, who asks a middle manager to use cheaper solutions for problem X and recoup costs where possible, who asks a direct manager to spend no more than $Y and Z weeks on problem X, and the engineers can no longer do it safely).
This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure.
The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this.
As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you).
Systems are usually to blame more than people are.
It's precisely due to this lack of real accountability that these kinds of things happen in C-suites everywhere. Massive golden parachutes are the "punishment".
Asset seizure and jail time work wonders, too bad they're not being used.
I've found real life to be very complicated and making good decisions to be difficult in cases with strongly competing goals.
It's very easy to see that the wrong decision was made in this case, but this is just one of thousands (or more) that were made in this program; much less the company as a whole.
So while this was definitely bad, it's much simpler to say "this decision was bad and you shouldn't done this" than it is to say "you shouldn't make bad decisions"
They are betting that a key component of the US Military Industrial Complex survives long enough to pay back the interest or whatever profit tool the loans operate under. I'd take that bet.
What is the cost to restart both the supply chain and production line? If this lasts long enough, then there are portions of the supply chain that will start to simply disappear as vendors go under or switch away to different customers and de-prioritize Boeing.
It isn't just the monetary cost to re-calibrate machining and tooling, also the staff time and monetary cost to fill in gaps that appeared during the shutdown, both material and vendor relationships. And an abundantly clear lesson (as if the domain experts in sourcing shouldn't know this already) from the debacle is that outsourcing is not plug-and-play: there will be both product and relationship re-alignment and re-certification going on anywhere vendors are swapped out in the supply chain.
If Boeing was forward-looking, then they would bite the bullet and keep production going, but use the downtime to crawl through every aspect of production to look for and fix any quality and safety-related concerns on the line (including absolute bottom-up authority for production line escalating concerns through to engineering and design) and in the supply chain. It massively slows down the production, which is perfectly fine right now. It wouldn't matter if they slowed to 10% of normal output, if the deliverable was absolute confidence in what is built on that line; they should have started this a long time ago when the shutdown passed 90 days.
Even after the design is amended, planes modified, re-certification awarded by all the aviation agencies around the world, there will be a titanic push to run the line as fast as possible. And if they don't completely debug every piece of that line to an inch of its life, there will be guaranteed production quality problems when it restarts, and if those problems lead to more crashes, Boeing is getting bailed out by taxpayers and unalterably changed. Better to keep the line on "warm standby" while debugging it before the pressure is on.
> If Boeing was forward-looking, then they would bite the bullet and keep production going, but use the downtime to crawl through every aspect of production to look for and fix any quality and safety-related concerns on the line (including absolute bottom-up authority for production line escalating concerns through to engineering and design) and in the supply chain.
Where would they put them? These things ain't small.
Airliners are expensive. The manufacturers do not build a large number speculatively and then find customers. They find customers, then build what has been ordered. They have enough storage space to serve as a buffer between output and delivery so that minor glitches on either don't affect the other.
Also because airliners are expensive, and they get paid on delivery not on order, once past the initial production current production is paid for from recent deliveries. If deliveries have to stop for an extended time, there is no money to fund more production.
Good point. IMHO the company's survival is on the line, and the storage opex expense is worth it if it takes dropping production rate to 1% (about 0.6 737 MAX per month) or less to find out what other quality problems are lurking outside of the design realm, and catch technical debt that they would regret later. This is far preferable to writing off the entire product, and would be a concrete start to re-establishing the old company culture's emphasis upon quality. They're under a regulatory and compliance microscope now, and any production problems when they restart are going to get a lot of negative attention.
They're tapping more debt and still plan on issuing dividends. Those dividends are likely going to be accompanied by equity buybacks. Those buybacks are measured in billions [1]. Carve out from the buyback funds what it costs to ensure quality where they can control it while waiting for clearance to reassure regulators, politicians and the general public, and tell the investors that it is either hold on with the team until quality is re-established within the culture, sell and come back later, or eventually zero out the investment because no one wants to buy from a plane manufacturer with suspect quality.
I'm amazed to see such a big fleet grounded for such a long time. Since MCAS was employed to avoid retraining of pilots, I'd assume that at this point retraining the pilots out of their pockets would be cheaper for Boeing than paying airlines' damages for grounded planes.
Is that training of no use because disabling MCAS would also need re-certification? Is the process of getting certification for a MCAS-free version roughly the same as getting the fixed version certified? Speculating way out my depth now: maybe it would still be worth it to pursue parallel certification to have the option of retraining when MCAS should be deemed uncertifiable.
EDIT: And an hour after writing this Boeing just now announcing (surprise, surprise) they don’t expect return-to-service until July and stock is currently trading down 5.5%)
I shorted BA for a few months based on many HN posts after the crashes, but covered my position after it seemed to stabilize at ~320. I think it will probably head lower, but as a general rule I try to find companies I believe in rather than companies I don’t.
It was a very interesting choice to maintain the dividend for now. I think they will have to revisit that and it will kick-off the next big swing downward.
Last week the WSJ reported [1] that they are in the process of raising a new $5 billion round. Now [2] the word on the street is they’re looking for $10 billion over 2 years - a “mid term” debt round, structured as a line they can draw on over several years - somehow this is supposed to limit the effect it will have on their debt rating. A significant Moody’s downgrade seems like it’s past due, and Moody’s recently announced they put BA “on review”. [3]
Their debt at the start of Q4 was $15 billion and then rose to $20 billion by the end of Q4. Back in 2018 it was closer to $12 billion. I wouldn’t be surprise to see it near $25 billion at the end of Q1.
Supposedly Boeing keeps about $10 billion in liquidity “available” but they’ve burned through that by now.
The “charges” they take against the MAX disaster which started at $5.6 billion could balloon as high as $20 billion as the ramifications continue to unfold. [4]
Lastly I would point out that over the last decade plus timeframe the FAA hollowed out as a regulatory agency into a box checker. Today they have as I understand it just ~750 total pilots and engineers on staff to review technical data from the plane manufacturers. The FAA said last year to do it themselves they would need 10,000 more. [5]
> “It would require roughly 10,000 more employees and another $1.8 billion for our certification office,” Elwell told the Senate subcommittee on aviation and space.
> The FAA Aircraft Certification Service had a budget of $239 million for fiscal 2019 and about 1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production.
I recall news articles claiming Congress recently approved significant new funding for the FAA, but looking at their budget [6] PDF page 37 it seems like “Regulation & Certification” remains level-funded at $1.3 billion the last three years.
A more recent report on the MAX specifically [7] said;
> The report said the FAA had just 45 people in an office overseeing Boeing's Organization Designation Authority (ODA) and its 1,500 employees.
...
> The FAA's office oveseeing Boeing has just 24 engineers and they face a wide range of tasks to ensure compliance in overseeing Boeing's 737, 747, 767, 777, and 787 programs.
> The review added there are only two technical FAA staff assigned per Boeing program and some are "new engineers with limited airworthiness experience."
The full report which this article is excerpting I believe is this one. [8] See specifically PDF Page 47 but put down any objects you might be prone to throwing before beginning to read.
I would imagine engineers qualified to actual critically review detailed 737 specifications aren’t unemployed and take a long time to hire. How long will it take the FAA to even staff up to the point where they can start doing their job if they are only just now getting the money to hire? Pundits saying they expected the 737 return-to-service to happen before New Years and now say it’s happening any day now I think don’t comprehend the massive gap between what the FAA used to do and what they are now tasked with doing, and that they literally don’t have the qualified people in-house to even start doing much of this work. All that assumes necessary funding has even been appropriated and there are the people and the culture in place to even do the work. Big IFs.
To me that points to a extremely delayed return to service as new engineers are hired and brought on to critically review documentation which used to be rubber stamped — let alone dealing with the actual software failures and faulty design specifications which straight up didn’t/don’t conform to modern safety standards.
In short, my prediction is that BA will inevitably have to suspend its dividend, it will take a charge upwards of $20 billion for the MAX, return to service will be extremely delayed beyond analysts wildest expectations, they will be downgraded by Moody’s and their debt load will increase to nearly $30 billion over the course of 2020 into 2021, and there is a remote chance of a debt squeeze, and the company declaring bankruptcy and having to restructure.
I don’t currently own any position in Boeing (other than through holdings in the S&P500) and do not plan on initiating any BA position in the next 72 hours. This is not investment advice.
They have 1300 total employees and only 24 review all of Boeing's planes? That's insane! What the fuck are the others doing? Can't be all HR (no offense to HR)
> Today they have as I understand it just ~750 total pilots and engineers on staff to review technical data from the plane manufacturers. The FAA said last year to do it themselves they would need 10,000 more. [5]
Not 10000 more pilots and engineers. 10000 more employees. Now they have "1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production."
Well they aren’t talking about hiring 10,000 for the mail room.
This is the number he gave to answer what it would take to do the whole thing internally with no delegation whatsoever. Hard to say how of this number is just political grandstanding.
Your claim here is that FAA's Certification practice has been hollowed out, but your evidence is that it's been funded consistently. Can you further support the claim? 230MM is less than 0.2% of DoT's budget; what would the incentive have been to downsize it?
The top-level Certification & Regulation line item is constant over just the last 3 years. I did not look at historical data going back decades. I thought that I had read reports of the FAA getting a massive funding increase for Certification but the budget seems to dispute that. So this piece of the puzzle — whether or not major new funding has been made available for Certification in the last few months — I am not very clear on.
Delegation seems to have steadily increased in scope since the 1930s. A brief and interesting history of Delegation from the FAA is here. [1] It has evolved over decades to become what it is today.
The specific concept of the ODA - Organization Designation Authorization — which is the program which delegates certification work to Boeing, didn’t exist until 2009. Last year Boeing had 1,500 people working internally in their ODA Compliance program, and there were just 45 people at the FAA BASOO (Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office).
Cost was one factor, but perhaps not the primary driver. Wanting to leverage private industry expertise is usually the reason cited. I don’t think it was downsizing necessarily as a cost control measure. It was downsized as a policy decision that delegating increasing amounts of the compliance work to industry was the right way to get the job done because that’s where the experts were.
In concept it’s almost reasonable. In practice they underestimated the degree to which Boeing could fuck up on the designs, overestimated the level of independent authority would vest in the ODAs to correct deficiencies, and I think eventually you lose “critical mass” back at home base (the FAA) and the ability to actually oversee the people doing the work.
I mean, the FAA Director went on record saying they would need to hire 10,000 people to fully staff this function. This to me indicates they have lost the critical mass required to perform the role even primarily as an outsourced effort.
Excerpting from PDF Page 13 of the JATR report;
> The BASOO is required to perform a certification function, including making findings of compliance of retained (non-delegated) requirements, while also performing the oversight function of the Boeing ODA. The BASOO must have the resources to carry out these two primary functions without compromise. The JATR team concluded that FAA resource shortfalls in the BASOO (and other allocated resources) may have contributed to an inadequate number of FAA specialists being involved in the B737 MAX certification program. In some cases, BASOO engineers had limited experience and knowledge of key technical aspects of the B737 MAX program.
> The BASOO delegated a high percentage of approvals and findings of compliance to the Boeing ODA for the B737 MAX program. With adequate FAA engagement and oversight, the extent of delegation does not in itself compromise safety. However, in the B737 MAX program, the FAA had inadequate awareness of the MCAS function which, coupled with limited involvement, resulted in an inability of the FAA to provide an independent assessment of the adequacy of the Boeing proposed certification activities associated with MCAS. In addition, signs were reported of undue pressures on Boeing ODA engineering unit members (E-UMs) performing certification activities on the B737 MAX program, which further erodes the level of assurance in this system of delegation.
Further, from PDF Page 46;
> The FAA initially delegated acceptance of approximately 40% of the B737 MAX project’s certification plans to the Boeing ODA. Additional certification plans that were originally retained for acceptance by the FAA were later delegated to the Boeing ODA as the certification project progressed. While the JATR team did not conduct an exhaustive review of other ODAs, the team observed that delegating the acceptance of certification plans does not appear to be a widespread practice for the FAA.
“Does not appear to be widespread” seems to me to be a political way of saying “outside of acceptable practice and this should never have been done.”
The next paragraph continues;
> Finding F5.1-A: The FAA extensively delegated compliance findings on the B737-8 MAX project to the Boeing ODA. Safety critical areas, including system safety documents related to MCAS, were initially retained by the FAA and then delegated to the Boeing ODA. (See also Findings F4.1-A, F4.1-B, and F4.1-C.)
Delegation was used to an improper extent in the project, and what little staff they had dedicated to the BASOO appear to have insufficient experience, technical expertise, or knowledge of the 737-8 systems themselves.
Now the FAA is on record as saying those same people will have all the time they need to get it right without any compromises. In my experience, a team that failed under undue pressure the first time will take a deliberately exorbitant amount of time, given a second bite at the apple and the instructions to “do whatever it takes to get it done right.”
Readit News
That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
Yeah you will. Good luck selectively avoiding the most popular international route plane. Historically, people have been very quick to forget mishaps with particular airframes and revert to flying the most convenient/economical routes.
And by the time it's flying again, it will be hands down the safest plane that's being operated because every minute detail of it will have been checked with far more scrutiny than any other newly launched platform.
I think it's fairly unlikely that there's some other massively dangerous failure mode of the 737MAX, because the fleet has flown enough hours, and the only crashes have been the result of the MCAS. When that's fixed, it's quite possible that there are other gremlins that cause crashes, but they probably will be much less severe/likely than the MCAS problem.
No they're still rolling off the line for the military Poseidon and Wedgetail programs
... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our neighborhood... ;-)
Edit: It says in the article
> The assembly line in Renton, Washington, has stopped building Boeing's bestselling plane, the company confirmed late Monday. Boeing announced plans to temporarily halt production for an undetermined period in December, but it had not previously announced a precise day for the shutdown.
Boeing made a lot of executives super rich with buybacks and equity compensation, this led directly to the shoddy engineering choices.
First, if you think Airbus is any better, you should think again.
Second, what do you mean by "all modern Boeing planes"? If you just mean "planes designed after the merger with McDonnell Douglas", that's just the 787 and the 737 Max. The latter is grounded and the former only flies select long haul routes. For the average US business traveler they're a non-issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_...
It seems to have continued on for several years, though ultimate its poor safety record seems to have been a factor in its discontinuation.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/boeing-doesnt-expect-regulat...
Self admittedly, I don't fly as frequently as I used to, but do they still put the model of plane you're flying on anywhere on the ticket?
How can someone go about making sure you're not flying on this specific model?
The major users from North American airlines are Southwest (34 planes), Air Canada (24), American (24), United (14), and Aeromexico (6), so it's not super common here at least.
Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi
737 Max -> ?
Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.
Dead Comment
This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure.
The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this.
As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you).
Systems are usually to blame more than people are.
Asset seizure and jail time work wonders, too bad they're not being used.
It's very easy to see that the wrong decision was made in this case, but this is just one of thousands (or more) that were made in this program; much less the company as a whole.
So while this was definitely bad, it's much simpler to say "this decision was bad and you shouldn't done this" than it is to say "you shouldn't make bad decisions"
…
>Banks that have already committed to contribute to the loan include Citigroup, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan…
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/20/737-max-crisis-boeing-seeks-...
It isn't just the monetary cost to re-calibrate machining and tooling, also the staff time and monetary cost to fill in gaps that appeared during the shutdown, both material and vendor relationships. And an abundantly clear lesson (as if the domain experts in sourcing shouldn't know this already) from the debacle is that outsourcing is not plug-and-play: there will be both product and relationship re-alignment and re-certification going on anywhere vendors are swapped out in the supply chain.
If Boeing was forward-looking, then they would bite the bullet and keep production going, but use the downtime to crawl through every aspect of production to look for and fix any quality and safety-related concerns on the line (including absolute bottom-up authority for production line escalating concerns through to engineering and design) and in the supply chain. It massively slows down the production, which is perfectly fine right now. It wouldn't matter if they slowed to 10% of normal output, if the deliverable was absolute confidence in what is built on that line; they should have started this a long time ago when the shutdown passed 90 days.
Even after the design is amended, planes modified, re-certification awarded by all the aviation agencies around the world, there will be a titanic push to run the line as fast as possible. And if they don't completely debug every piece of that line to an inch of its life, there will be guaranteed production quality problems when it restarts, and if those problems lead to more crashes, Boeing is getting bailed out by taxpayers and unalterably changed. Better to keep the line on "warm standby" while debugging it before the pressure is on.
Where would they put them? These things ain't small.
Airliners are expensive. The manufacturers do not build a large number speculatively and then find customers. They find customers, then build what has been ordered. They have enough storage space to serve as a buffer between output and delivery so that minor glitches on either don't affect the other.
Also because airliners are expensive, and they get paid on delivery not on order, once past the initial production current production is paid for from recent deliveries. If deliveries have to stop for an extended time, there is no money to fund more production.
They're tapping more debt and still plan on issuing dividends. Those dividends are likely going to be accompanied by equity buybacks. Those buybacks are measured in billions [1]. Carve out from the buyback funds what it costs to ensure quality where they can control it while waiting for clearance to reassure regulators, politicians and the general public, and tell the investors that it is either hold on with the team until quality is re-established within the culture, sell and come back later, or eventually zero out the investment because no one wants to buy from a plane manufacturer with suspect quality.
[1] https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/06/boeing-enhances-...
Is that training of no use because disabling MCAS would also need re-certification? Is the process of getting certification for a MCAS-free version roughly the same as getting the fixed version certified? Speculating way out my depth now: maybe it would still be worth it to pursue parallel certification to have the option of retraining when MCAS should be deemed uncertifiable.
I shorted BA for a few months based on many HN posts after the crashes, but covered my position after it seemed to stabilize at ~320. I think it will probably head lower, but as a general rule I try to find companies I believe in rather than companies I don’t.
It was a very interesting choice to maintain the dividend for now. I think they will have to revisit that and it will kick-off the next big swing downward.
Last week the WSJ reported [1] that they are in the process of raising a new $5 billion round. Now [2] the word on the street is they’re looking for $10 billion over 2 years - a “mid term” debt round, structured as a line they can draw on over several years - somehow this is supposed to limit the effect it will have on their debt rating. A significant Moody’s downgrade seems like it’s past due, and Moody’s recently announced they put BA “on review”. [3]
Their debt at the start of Q4 was $15 billion and then rose to $20 billion by the end of Q4. Back in 2018 it was closer to $12 billion. I wouldn’t be surprise to see it near $25 billion at the end of Q1.
Supposedly Boeing keeps about $10 billion in liquidity “available” but they’ve burned through that by now.
The “charges” they take against the MAX disaster which started at $5.6 billion could balloon as high as $20 billion as the ramifications continue to unfold. [4]
Lastly I would point out that over the last decade plus timeframe the FAA hollowed out as a regulatory agency into a box checker. Today they have as I understand it just ~750 total pilots and engineers on staff to review technical data from the plane manufacturers. The FAA said last year to do it themselves they would need 10,000 more. [5]
> “It would require roughly 10,000 more employees and another $1.8 billion for our certification office,” Elwell told the Senate subcommittee on aviation and space.
> The FAA Aircraft Certification Service had a budget of $239 million for fiscal 2019 and about 1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production.
I recall news articles claiming Congress recently approved significant new funding for the FAA, but looking at their budget [6] PDF page 37 it seems like “Regulation & Certification” remains level-funded at $1.3 billion the last three years.
A more recent report on the MAX specifically [7] said;
> The report said the FAA had just 45 people in an office overseeing Boeing's Organization Designation Authority (ODA) and its 1,500 employees.
...
> The FAA's office oveseeing Boeing has just 24 engineers and they face a wide range of tasks to ensure compliance in overseeing Boeing's 737, 747, 767, 777, and 787 programs.
> The review added there are only two technical FAA staff assigned per Boeing program and some are "new engineers with limited airworthiness experience."
The full report which this article is excerpting I believe is this one. [8] See specifically PDF Page 47 but put down any objects you might be prone to throwing before beginning to read.
I would imagine engineers qualified to actual critically review detailed 737 specifications aren’t unemployed and take a long time to hire. How long will it take the FAA to even staff up to the point where they can start doing their job if they are only just now getting the money to hire? Pundits saying they expected the 737 return-to-service to happen before New Years and now say it’s happening any day now I think don’t comprehend the massive gap between what the FAA used to do and what they are now tasked with doing, and that they literally don’t have the qualified people in-house to even start doing much of this work. All that assumes necessary funding has even been appropriated and there are the people and the culture in place to even do the work. Big IFs.
To me that points to a extremely delayed return to service as new engineers are hired and brought on to critically review documentation which used to be rubber stamped — let alone dealing with the actual software failures and faulty design specifications which straight up didn’t/don’t conform to modern safety standards.
In short, my prediction is that BA will inevitably have to suspend its dividend, it will take a charge upwards of $20 billion for the MAX, return to service will be extremely delayed beyond analysts wildest expectations, they will be downgraded by Moody’s and their debt load will increase to nearly $30 billion over the course of 2020 into 2021, and there is a remote chance of a debt squeeze, and the company declaring bankruptcy and having to restructure.
I don’t currently own any position in Boeing (other than through holdings in the S&P500) and do not plan on initiating any BA position in the next 72 hours. This is not investment advice.
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-considers-raising-debt-a...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/20/737-max-crisis-boeing-seeks-...
[3] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/boeings-debt-on-review-for...
[4] - https://apple.news/AcnxFGCurRfW3l1BNvzr6aw
[5] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/03/27/want-...
[6] - https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/miss...
[7] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-faa-certificat...
[8] - https://www.faa.gov/news/media/attachments/Final_JATR_Submit...
Not 10000 more pilots and engineers. 10000 more employees. Now they have "1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production."
This is the number he gave to answer what it would take to do the whole thing internally with no delegation whatsoever. Hard to say how of this number is just political grandstanding.
10,000 perhaps is too many, but 45 is too few.
Delegation seems to have steadily increased in scope since the 1930s. A brief and interesting history of Delegation from the FAA is here. [1] It has evolved over decades to become what it is today.
The specific concept of the ODA - Organization Designation Authorization — which is the program which delegates certification work to Boeing, didn’t exist until 2009. Last year Boeing had 1,500 people working internally in their ODA Compliance program, and there were just 45 people at the FAA BASOO (Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office).
Cost was one factor, but perhaps not the primary driver. Wanting to leverage private industry expertise is usually the reason cited. I don’t think it was downsizing necessarily as a cost control measure. It was downsized as a policy decision that delegating increasing amounts of the compliance work to industry was the right way to get the job done because that’s where the experts were.
In concept it’s almost reasonable. In practice they underestimated the degree to which Boeing could fuck up on the designs, overestimated the level of independent authority would vest in the ODAs to correct deficiencies, and I think eventually you lose “critical mass” back at home base (the FAA) and the ability to actually oversee the people doing the work.
I mean, the FAA Director went on record saying they would need to hire 10,000 people to fully staff this function. This to me indicates they have lost the critical mass required to perform the role even primarily as an outsourced effort.
Excerpting from PDF Page 13 of the JATR report;
> The BASOO is required to perform a certification function, including making findings of compliance of retained (non-delegated) requirements, while also performing the oversight function of the Boeing ODA. The BASOO must have the resources to carry out these two primary functions without compromise. The JATR team concluded that FAA resource shortfalls in the BASOO (and other allocated resources) may have contributed to an inadequate number of FAA specialists being involved in the B737 MAX certification program. In some cases, BASOO engineers had limited experience and knowledge of key technical aspects of the B737 MAX program.
> The BASOO delegated a high percentage of approvals and findings of compliance to the Boeing ODA for the B737 MAX program. With adequate FAA engagement and oversight, the extent of delegation does not in itself compromise safety. However, in the B737 MAX program, the FAA had inadequate awareness of the MCAS function which, coupled with limited involvement, resulted in an inability of the FAA to provide an independent assessment of the adequacy of the Boeing proposed certification activities associated with MCAS. In addition, signs were reported of undue pressures on Boeing ODA engineering unit members (E-UMs) performing certification activities on the B737 MAX program, which further erodes the level of assurance in this system of delegation.
Further, from PDF Page 46;
> The FAA initially delegated acceptance of approximately 40% of the B737 MAX project’s certification plans to the Boeing ODA. Additional certification plans that were originally retained for acceptance by the FAA were later delegated to the Boeing ODA as the certification project progressed. While the JATR team did not conduct an exhaustive review of other ODAs, the team observed that delegating the acceptance of certification plans does not appear to be a widespread practice for the FAA.
“Does not appear to be widespread” seems to me to be a political way of saying “outside of acceptable practice and this should never have been done.”
The next paragraph continues;
> Finding F5.1-A: The FAA extensively delegated compliance findings on the B737-8 MAX project to the Boeing ODA. Safety critical areas, including system safety documents related to MCAS, were initially retained by the FAA and then delegated to the Boeing ODA. (See also Findings F4.1-A, F4.1-B, and F4.1-C.)
Delegation was used to an improper extent in the project, and what little staff they had dedicated to the BASOO appear to have insufficient experience, technical expertise, or knowledge of the 737-8 systems themselves.
Now the FAA is on record as saying those same people will have all the time they need to get it right without any compromises. In my experience, a team that failed under undue pressure the first time will take a deliberately exorbitant amount of time, given a second bite at the apple and the instructions to “do whatever it takes to get it done right.”
[1] - https://www.faa.gov/about/history/deldes_background/