I do get the impression that the current Boeing CEO is attempting to turn the culture around, to a more "admit the problem and fix it" kind of attitude. The problem is that, if you are doing this after many years of "deny the problem and ship it", the number of apparent problems is actually going to go up for a while. I wonder if Boeing's customers and shareholders will have enough patience for him to complete the transformation (assuming that's even possible in a company this size)?
He now adopted the "admit the problem and fix it" attitude because he was "caught", before that was business as usual for Boeing. It was/is more a "don't ask, don't tell", dump the risk on other separate entities/companies and cross your fingers because we need to get those planes out of the assembly line as fast and cheaply as possible no matter what.
Boeing is and has been under pressure, but it's their own fault. They have been fucking around for DECADES now and when there were "difficulties" they always called the US government to "facilitate" sales or their buddies inside the regulatory bodies to put the green check on their garbage.
Nothing about this is news, it has been known for years and years.
Unfortunately Boeing always has a sweet defense contract waiting to compensate any "rough year", so they keep fucking around..
>Unfortunately Boeing always has a sweet defense contract waiting to compensate any "rough year", so they keep fucking around.
And because once airlines have their fleets locked into a specific airplane brand, swapping it for the competition is almost impossible without crazy expense, so they coasted on this vendor lock in for decades knowing their existing customers have no choice but to keep buying their planes.
And also probably because "nobody ever got fired for buying Boeing".
For what it's worth, in "Flying Blind", the book written about the first round of 737 max issues, the author has a pretty negative outlook on Calhoun as being mostly aligned with Muilenburg.
> Robison, however, finds little reason for optimism. While Boeing has now accepted responsibility for one of the crashes as part of a settlement, no one at the company besides Forkner has been charged with a crime. Muilenburg was ousted as C.E.O., but still collected a $60 million golden parachute. After being grounded for more than a year, the 737 Max is back in service. And today, Boeing is led by Dave Calhoun, another Jack Welch protégé who was on the Boeing board for years, and was intimately involved in the company’s botched response to the crashes.
Ya, Calhoun has been there four years already, so he's had plenty of time. Also, he decided to continue outsourcing to Spirit despite Spirit's known issues. Everything in your post indicates he's not inclined to make fundamental alterations to the post Stonecipher strategy which fits with all this.
Can ELI5 why do investors (owners of the company) accept CEO's pay packages that involve golden parachutes? It doesn't make sense to me (I mean, it might in case of offensive takeovers, but who's gonna take over Boeing?!)
Boeing needs to dump the CEO and install someone from an engineering lineage if they want to build their reputation back.
An engineering company run by a longtime manager with a background in accounting is in large part how Boeing got here. Fire the guy and get someone with a technical background in there.
> Boeing needs to dump the CEO and install someone from an engineering lineage if they want to build their reputation back.
I'd argue they need an effective engineering culture, and leadership that enables and values and fights for it, not a former-engineer figurehead. Good engineers within Boeing need to be enabled to do their job properly, within normal business constraints, and bad engineers need to be removed. The business needs to understand that good engineering is a necessity and a profit centre in aerospace.
I don't know how they'd achieve this change. The company seems to have rotted from the head down since it merged with McDonnel Douglas, and its possible that the senior leadership lack the self awareness to comprehend the problem.
Interesting. Last night I watched the excellent 2018 biopic "First Man" (starring Ryan Gosling) about Neil Armstrong and was struck by NASA's selection criteria for Gemini and Apollo astronauts: they required pilots with an engineering background.
Frank Borman, chosen for Gemini and Apollo missions, "earned a Master of Science degree at Caltech in 1957, and then became an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point." [Wikipedia]
"After retiring from NASA and the Air Force in 1970, Borman became senior vice president for operations at Eastern Air Lines. He became chief executive officer of Eastern in 1975, and chairman of the board in 1976. Under his leadership, Eastern went through the four most profitable years in its history...." [Wikipedia]
I don't buy the oft-repeated claim that you can re-make a company simply by replacing the CEO. I don't believe that CEOs in large companies have much influence on the company's direction, except in terms of decisions to downsize/outsource, how to use money, and who's on the board. There's only so much one person can do (and accordingly, I think all big-company CEOs are vastly overpaid).
Moving the deckchairs in the boardroom isn't going to solve systemic problems in a company.
I think you think Boeing's purpose in life is to make planes. I think it's primary objective is to make money for execs and short term traders. If airplanes come out of the company, it's a random side-effect.
Muilenburg was an aerospace engineer by training, that is how he ended up at Boeing. To be fair, though it sounds like he was on the management track early on, so not sure how much engineering he did after graduation.
Boeing apparently can't withstand the immense quarterly financial scrutiny it is under without making dangerous engineering trade offs. Time to take the company private?
I think you also need to be expecting the CEO to "clean house" at the top if you realistically want anything to change.
The CEO may set the culture, as much as that is set from the top down, but by the time a company actually starts having problems visible to the outside, its entire suite of executives, VPs, etc, have optimized their career for the sort of problematic attitude the previous CEOs demanded.
Ah yes the fantasy that an IC can just magic this all away.
This would likely result in a CEO with no pull and a CFO that had all the hard power to call the shots.
The reality seems to be, for some reason, building profitable and safe planes in America is becoming increasingly difficult.
A company most be able to do both: build a quality and safe product and make a margin. It can’t exist without revenue.
I’m guessing the real problem is somewhere between low quality or overworked and poorly trained line workers, complex systems, and a revenue strategy that obscures what the company is selling.
It takes more than a random ic manager to fix that — but I agree they should come from that past maybe.
It's not just about safety, it's about the flying experience and environmental responsibility.
If you think "flying sucks" it's probably because you've flown in a 737 and similar (A320) aircraft.
Many people find it highly stressful to fly in a 737-class airplane because the curve of the fuselage is circular. My neck starts to lock up just thinking about it, but you don't have the same problem riding in a car, bus, or train because those vehicles have straight sides. Modern aircraft like the A220 and E2-Jet have a shape compatible with the human body such that today's "regional jets" feel more like riding in a widebody airliner than a 737. It's the kind of thing that's hard to believe until you experience it for yourself.
The 737 is exceptionally loud, particularly for the flight crew, but also for the passengers and innocent people on the ground. If you think flying sucks it could be because you remember walking out of a 737 with your ears ringing -- and nobody told you it doesn't have to be that way.
The A320 has a reliable fly-by-wire system with numerous benefits, not least the plane being able to automatically cancel out some turbulence, another small thing that leaves you feeling better when you reach your destination.
The 737 struggles to take off under good conditions, requiring much more runway than many much larger planes. Next summer you'll see headlines that "airplanes" are grounded at some airports in the US Southwest, you should replace "airplanes" with "737s".
Airplane manufacturers have wasted enough resources on widebody airliners that nobody wants
and the industry needs to get real to the fact that narrowbody airliners are responsible for most of the flights and most of the social and environmental impact of aviation: domestic flyers in the U.S. deserve something better than a 1967 design.
I was just commenting to a friend (who was on a massively delayed flight out of SFO yesterday) that, when I'm in Economy, I want a window so I can see what's going on outside. I feel anxious during delays and just want to get off the ground.
When I'm in business class, I simply don't care what's going on outside. Let me know when we land.
Now, bear with me, because this might sound obvious, but I don't think it is. You can have in-flight-entertainment in Economy. You can have videos playing on your tablet or whatever. We have far more distractions than ever before. You can read your book, listen to your music. The seats are comfortable enough in the first hour of your delay. At 5'10" I have sufficient legroom.
I think the difference is the seat pitch. I don't consider myself claustrophobic, but staring at a seatback 2 feet in front of my face just makes me want to see what the hell is going on to get me off the ground and to my destination. I think this is far more of an issue than the curvature of the fuselage.
> domestic flyers in the U.S. deserve something better than a 1967 design.
Or maybe the market has spoken. Similar to how people complain about lack of legroom but proceed to book with airlines that have less legroom because it's cheaper, they're happy to fly on 1967 design planes to save a buck.
> domestic flyers in the U.S. deserve something better than a 1967 design.
And Boeing was working on a replacement for the entire 737-757 line, a brand new airplane using many of the same concepts as the 787 "Dreamliner" but it took a long time and in 2011 Southwest blackmailed them if they need to retrain their pilots then they might as well buy Airbus.
> Boeing chairman and CEO Jim McNerney told a conference Thursday that Boeing probably will offer an all-new aircraft to replace its current generation of Boeing 737s.
> McNerney says Boeing prefers the new-airplane option to a second option -- re-engineering its current 737 lineup to accept a more fuel efficient engine.
> Boeing has begun work on the 737-RS, a research program to build a new aircraft to replace the 737, which carries roughly 170 passengers. By mid-2009 Boeing expected to arrive at a design template for the 737 replacement, with "notional entry into service" around the year 2015.
> Boeing's long term plan as of 2005 seemed to involve three aircraft, designated Y1, Y3 and Y3. The Y1 is the 737RS.
> Not only did Southwest management not want their pilots who flew the earlier model 737 NG to have to train in a flight simulator for the MAX, they insisted to Boeing that even classroom training be off the table, the filing shows. Southwest insisted on a clause in the sales contract stipulating a penalty of $1 million per airplane delivered if that standard wasn’t met.
> As the MAX’s most influential customer, Southwest’s insistence on this “infected every aspect of the birth and development of the new 737,” the legal filing asserts.
This is, of course, the legalese version of the blackmail mentioned above.
I don't get that impression at all. He only went on a PR fest the day after boeing stock tanked (which was after the weekend the door plug flew off). He was actively trying to get faa exceptions to other max's to get them in the air prior.
Boeing’s customers have no choice. There is only one other option in town, and Airbus is at capacity for quite a few more years. The only threat Boeing has is governments fining them. So as long as governments (or the US government) let Boeing continue to function, there should be sufficient time to fix culture.
>> I do get the impression that the current Boeing CEO is attempting to turn the culture around, to a more "admit the problem and fix it" kind of attitude.
I thought I read they were planning to cut back on quality control staff this year. Was that true? Did it change?
I said this in a previous thread, a QA/QC/SOP firm either has a culture where nobody would dare violate SOP or it doesn’t. It’s not about “admitting” a problem, they already have the SOPs and inspection protocols that reveal defects and proscribe ways to identify, document and address any defect. But as the QA guys where I work say, they are a cost center.
There are two real questions here, can Boeing strictly follow their QA/QC regime and remain profitable. Second, can they get through their current period where FAA inspectors have set up shop on their premises and are now effectively another layer of supervisors. They’re in the stage now where the FAA are on the shop floor basically as cops to ensure Boeing actually does what they said they would do via the documentation in their Quality suite. They either have the war chest or the financial backing to pull that off without an immediate price increase or they’re toast.
> They either have the war chest or the financial backing to pull that off without an immediate price increase or they’re toast.
Boeing has gotten Too Big To Fail, way too much military/space contracts. The US government can't let them fail because then the only remaining space capability would be SpaceX who can't fulfil everything (and is under control of an increasingly erratic billionaire).
What should happen is that the government should do it just like with the banks in the late '00s: assume control over Boeing+Spirit Aerosystems if not outright nationalize it (without compensation to shareholders, to incentivize other shareholders of other companies to make sure their leadership doesn't prioritize profits over safety), enact sweeping changes, and then after a few years either sell the remains off again or keep it under government control.
> they already have the SOPs and inspection protocols that reveal defects and proscribe ways to identify, document and address any defect
it's great to have those protocols, but when employees are retaliated against for bringing issues with no corrective changes made, what's the point in having the protocols?
Current QA/SOP's are onerous and very expensive to follow. But are based on having someone 'monitor' and 'check' everything. So two people, someone doing the work, and someone checking the work.
But seems like the old Boeing culture, was each employee cared about quality, so would check themselves. So needed less QA people, because everyone would 'do the right thing'.
So now that the culture is broken. Enforcing current QA/SOP's with additional QA people is un-profitable.
I have the exact opposite impression. I don't know why the board hasn't fired him yet. He was brought in to change the company culture. It's been 4 years and this happen. 4 years is a long time, and this failure shows that he failed at what he was hired for (no, making money is not his main job.)
Of course he is going to say whatever is needed to save his job, but in my eyes Boeing should move on and choose someone else. Time is running out.
Muilenburg was an engineer who worked his way up to CEO at Boeing. He totally mishandled the 737 Max crisis.
Meanwhile, Airbus had an engineer CEO who nearly bankrupted the firm with the A380 project.
I think trying to put management into buckets doesn't work very well. Some engineer CEOs have bad product sense and some sales CEOs have great product sense. I mean, Steve Jobs for crying out loud.
The airlines that have lots of 787 max have a vested interest in being able to use them.
The whole max mcas debacle happened because of the high cost of pilot re-certification. So what are they going to do, re-certify all their boeing pilots to fly airbus?
Airbus won't even have the capacity to take over all of boeing's market share. And the US can't let that happen anyway from a strategic point of view.
It's not like customers picking a brand of detergent on a shelf.
They cannot drop the aircraft. They simply have to keep using them. The only option is lawyers. The airlines could demand compensation from Boeing for any time/effort put into rectifying unreasonable issues with recently-delivered Boeing aircraft.
This title is extremely misleading, to the point of being factually incorrect. Boeing didn't find the fault, Spirit did and notified Boeing, and the problem only affects undelivered fuselages.
The problem has only been observed on undelivered fuselages, because those are the ones that Spirit has on-hand to check. They are not confident the problem is absent in delivered aircraft.
You could also say, "the problem affects all of the delivered aircraft that have been checked for the problem".
From another article:
> As of Friday, the "non-conformance" or quality defect had been found in 22 fuselages out of 47 inspected up to that point, spread between Boeing and Spirit, and may exist in some 737s in service, the sources said.
I cannot help but get the feeling that Boeing woes are like a canary in a coal mine for larger structural issues in the US government as a whole. Too much effort is put into spin, public relations and propaganda instead of actual just getting things done.
This is the legacy of Jack Welch. His short-term thinking to bolster stock price has become the new norm. There is a whole generation of CEOs who are following in Jack's failed footsteps.
Wouldn't it be the canary in the corporate coal mine rather than the government coal mine? The corporation screwed up; the government is making them fix it, at an extreme level of completeness and correctness.
This transparency is good, don't punish them for it. There's no guarantee whatsoever that other plane manufacturers don't run into similar problems and don't announce them.
> This transparency is good, don't punish them for it. There's no guarantee whatsoever that other plane manufacturers don't run into similar problems and don't announce them.
Make no mistake, there is no real transparency here. There is no sudden "culture shift".
Boeing is under a magnifying glass and no-one is going to stick their neck out and say: "Well, geez this is such a small mistake I'm going to ignore it". Because if planes start falling from the sky (again) you want your ass covered. There is currently just very little incentive for anyone (employees, managers, FAA, etc.) to led things slide.
>"Well, geez this is such a small mistake I'm going to ignore it"
There are "mistakes" you ignore when you're building an aircraft but you don't call them mistakes, because they aren't. You have tolerances for everything. To be "correct" a dimension is specified, must be no bigger than this, no smaller than that. And that's it. You're either in the spec or not. If you're not there's no ignoring, parts were delivered out of spec. There isn't some secondary "out of spec but only a little".
Subcontractors (like Spirit), the prime contractor (Boeing), and everyone responsible for verifying (FAA, perhaps others) all share culpability for things going quite wrong. Hopefully the NTSB still has it's head on straight and the coming scathing reports will attract attention in Congress to light a fire under the FAA's ass to do its job, preferably with some direct legislation for things the FAA must do. (i.e. no more manufacturers doing self-verifications)
I have to wonder if they're using this opportunity to dump all of their known bad production issues so they don't get sued for misleading shareholders later. The kind of stuff that wouldn't have ever come to light if the door hadn't fallen off that Portland flight.
Maybe it's even something they can try to spin as improving quality control practices for brand rehabilitation. Or maybe I am just imagining things.
There is a pretty good chance (about 100%) that after that door fell off they are reviewing a lot of stuff and that is why this has been found, not so they can 'dump all of their known bad production issues' but simply because they are becoming aware of them and are legally mandated to report those issues.
> Or maybe I am just imagining things.
Quite possibly. I'm as cynical as they come but I'm actually happy that they report these issues and I hope that they will do this exhaustively until they have a proper inventory of what went wrong so they have a chance to really repair both the issues and their culture, and hopefully before there is another incident.
I think it is more like there was a systematic laziness that had been growing with regards to QA which is being replaced by paranoia, so under scrutiny we're seeing attempts to be on the extreme of doing things by the book to avoid the most painful oversight actions. In other words, extreme CYA behavior like this.
> As of Friday, the "non-conformance" or quality defect had been found in 22 fuselages out of 47 inspected up to that point, spread between Boeing and Spirit, and may exist in some 737s in service, the sources said.
Let's say 15 year old Toyota arrives on your Uber, instead of a shiny new one - would you cancel and wait for another car? Keep in mind that riding in both cars is statistically vastly more dangerous than flying any modern Boeing, including 737, by a huge margin.
Unless flying is the only mode of transportation you ever use, avoiding Boeing will not make your life safer, it will at most make you calmer.
Since November 2001, there has been one death aboard a major airline operating in the U.S.[1]. That was a Southwest flight where an entire engine self-destructed. It was an issue with the CFM engine, Not with anything Boeing did.
You might choose to include one more. An Asiana flight tumbled end over end after arriving short at SFO. Everyone survived the crash, but a passenger was killed when an emergency responder hit them with a vehicle, unable to see them due to firefighting foam.[2] The accident was again not caused by anything related to Boeing.
You are safer aboard any aircraft operated by a major American airline than you are on any other form of transportation. Including walking.
346 people died in two similar crashes of two Boeing 747 Max planes. Boing and the FAA initially cast the blame on supposedly lower standards at the Indonesian and Ethiopian airlines operating the planes, but this was completely unsupported and incorrect speculation. Poor processes at Boeing and the FAA were in fact responsible. Unfortunately the incorrect narrative has persisted.
That Boeing’s unforced errors have not killed many people on US soil is no excuse for shoddy manufacturing practices. We should no more accept plane doors falling off due to mismanagement, than we should accept railroad cars derailing due to mismanagement.
Boeing made several billion dollars a year of profits for ten years prior to Covid, but failed to reinvest it in their manufacturing practices to prevent unforced errors, which left unchecked caused a plane to catastrophically decompress in the sky. Their shareholders may think that’s acceptable, but their customers do not.
> It was an issue with the CFM engine, Not with anything Boeing did.
The engine cowling was made by Boeing and was supposed to stay on when the engine lost fan blades, the cowling was what struck the side of the aircraft and broke the window in question. Boeing is redesigning the 737 cowlings to better respond to blade out failures.
Why are you including only US airlines for comparing a plane model's safety? That seems very convenient. And even worse you are using other planes data as well.
There were a total of three fatalities resulting from Asiana 214. Two passengers died onboard, as a direct consequence of the crash.
As for the third, it was later speculated that they could possibly have already died before encountering airport fire and rescue vehicles. This is still controversial; it is also possible that the original sequence of events was correct.
The primary cause of the crash was a profound lack of airmanship by the flight-deck crew. There was also some mode confusion with the autopilot and autothrottle; however they should have overcome this using fundamental aviation skills. Nobody was minding the actual throttle state.
Either way, it is worth noting the other two fatalities. Thank you.
For distance traveled flying is safer than any other form of transportation (maybe except trains?). I wonder however, what the stats are for time spent. How much safer is time spent flying, compared to other forms of transportation? Is it about equal, a bit safer or an order of magnitude safer?
Is this as much of a non issue as I think it is? I'm thinking non structural bits of aluminum fuselage having a few extra holes is embarrassing but probably easily fixed/painted over and not that critical. Not generally a reason to get all upset and replace the part. But kind of embarrassing to have on a new part (i.e. get a discount).
I've been watching a lot of rebuild rescue on Youtube lately where a bunch of mechanics are trying to rebuild a decades old plane nicknamed the bird house (because birds were nesting in it for well over a decade and they got absolutely everywhere). That seems to involve a lot of rivets, usage of all sorts of power tools, cleaning up old lots of parts, and generally not being too delicate banging things back into shape. Massive project and makes you realize just how complicated even a relatively small plane is.
It depends on how pervasive the issue is. Is it just two slightly nonconforming holes, or is it random sampling that suggests many nonconformances?
It is not really feasible to test an installed rivet without destructive testing, because usually we are talking about blind rivets, which are remarkably complex fasteners. Think of them more like "small, ultra-precise one-time use machines", not "nails". This is part of the reason aircraft have so many rivets: each rivet is often capable of supporting a substantial fraction of the load where it is installed (sometimes even the entire load), but we install a huge number of them.
The fact that this defect was caught during what seems like normal inspection processes also moves it closed to being a "non-issue". Manufacturing defects happen all the time and liability is massive, so there are extensive inspection and quality regimes in place.
Your best guess: if we checked closely for this sort of thing on Airbus planes, would it be found? I'm guessing not, but then I'm wondering if I'm naive.
The article is light on details, only stating: "...a worker at a Boeing supplier flagged that two holes in the plane’s fuselage may not exactly meet specifications."
This statement is missing the information needed to grasp the seriousness of the issue. For example, if 100% of holes inspected (very unlikely), then 2 nonconforming holes out of hundreds of thousands of rivet holes on large craft might be acceptable and possibly even within acceptable quality limits; however, if the inspection plan calls for random sampling of two holes anywhere on the fuselage, and both of them happen to be nonconforming... not good.
Non-conforming rivet holes may have many underlying causes. Even if they are missed during panel fabrication, a nonconforming hole is likely to cause a rivet installation failure, which are likely to be caught by downstream quality control processes.
If by "closely", you mean "check every single rivet hole on a large commercial aircraft", you are going to quickly discover just how difficult this problem is. The tolerances are extremely tight, the holes are very small, and you are often actually dealing with multiple holes and sealant layers (a rivet holds multiple sheets together).
I would be stunned if any large aircraft on the planet has 100% perfect rivet preparation.
Readit News
He now adopted the "admit the problem and fix it" attitude because he was "caught", before that was business as usual for Boeing. It was/is more a "don't ask, don't tell", dump the risk on other separate entities/companies and cross your fingers because we need to get those planes out of the assembly line as fast and cheaply as possible no matter what.
Boeing is and has been under pressure, but it's their own fault. They have been fucking around for DECADES now and when there were "difficulties" they always called the US government to "facilitate" sales or their buddies inside the regulatory bodies to put the green check on their garbage.
Nothing about this is news, it has been known for years and years.
Unfortunately Boeing always has a sweet defense contract waiting to compensate any "rough year", so they keep fucking around..
And because once airlines have their fleets locked into a specific airplane brand, swapping it for the competition is almost impossible without crazy expense, so they coasted on this vendor lock in for decades knowing their existing customers have no choice but to keep buying their planes.
And also probably because "nobody ever got fired for buying Boeing".
> Robison, however, finds little reason for optimism. While Boeing has now accepted responsibility for one of the crashes as part of a settlement, no one at the company besides Forkner has been charged with a crime. Muilenburg was ousted as C.E.O., but still collected a $60 million golden parachute. After being grounded for more than a year, the 737 Max is back in service. And today, Boeing is led by Dave Calhoun, another Jack Welch protégé who was on the Boeing board for years, and was intimately involved in the company’s botched response to the crashes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/books/review/peter-robiso...
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
At this point pre-emptively firing any Jack Welch associated executive would probably be a good idea
That's why I hate the MBA types and the whole executive caste with a passion
An engineering company run by a longtime manager with a background in accounting is in large part how Boeing got here. Fire the guy and get someone with a technical background in there.
I'd argue they need an effective engineering culture, and leadership that enables and values and fights for it, not a former-engineer figurehead. Good engineers within Boeing need to be enabled to do their job properly, within normal business constraints, and bad engineers need to be removed. The business needs to understand that good engineering is a necessity and a profit centre in aerospace.
I don't know how they'd achieve this change. The company seems to have rotted from the head down since it merged with McDonnel Douglas, and its possible that the senior leadership lack the self awareness to comprehend the problem.
Frank Borman, chosen for Gemini and Apollo missions, "earned a Master of Science degree at Caltech in 1957, and then became an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point." [Wikipedia]
"After retiring from NASA and the Air Force in 1970, Borman became senior vice president for operations at Eastern Air Lines. He became chief executive officer of Eastern in 1975, and chairman of the board in 1976. Under his leadership, Eastern went through the four most profitable years in its history...." [Wikipedia]
Moving the deckchairs in the boardroom isn't going to solve systemic problems in a company.
The CEO may set the culture, as much as that is set from the top down, but by the time a company actually starts having problems visible to the outside, its entire suite of executives, VPs, etc, have optimized their career for the sort of problematic attitude the previous CEOs demanded.
This would likely result in a CEO with no pull and a CFO that had all the hard power to call the shots.
The reality seems to be, for some reason, building profitable and safe planes in America is becoming increasingly difficult.
A company most be able to do both: build a quality and safe product and make a margin. It can’t exist without revenue.
I’m guessing the real problem is somewhere between low quality or overworked and poorly trained line workers, complex systems, and a revenue strategy that obscures what the company is selling.
It takes more than a random ic manager to fix that — but I agree they should come from that past maybe.
If you think "flying sucks" it's probably because you've flown in a 737 and similar (A320) aircraft.
Many people find it highly stressful to fly in a 737-class airplane because the curve of the fuselage is circular. My neck starts to lock up just thinking about it, but you don't have the same problem riding in a car, bus, or train because those vehicles have straight sides. Modern aircraft like the A220 and E2-Jet have a shape compatible with the human body such that today's "regional jets" feel more like riding in a widebody airliner than a 737. It's the kind of thing that's hard to believe until you experience it for yourself.
The 737 is exceptionally loud, particularly for the flight crew, but also for the passengers and innocent people on the ground. If you think flying sucks it could be because you remember walking out of a 737 with your ears ringing -- and nobody told you it doesn't have to be that way.
The A320 has a reliable fly-by-wire system with numerous benefits, not least the plane being able to automatically cancel out some turbulence, another small thing that leaves you feeling better when you reach your destination.
The 737 struggles to take off under good conditions, requiring much more runway than many much larger planes. Next summer you'll see headlines that "airplanes" are grounded at some airports in the US Southwest, you should replace "airplanes" with "737s".
Airplane manufacturers have wasted enough resources on widebody airliners that nobody wants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380
and the industry needs to get real to the fact that narrowbody airliners are responsible for most of the flights and most of the social and environmental impact of aviation: domestic flyers in the U.S. deserve something better than a 1967 design.
When I'm in business class, I simply don't care what's going on outside. Let me know when we land.
Now, bear with me, because this might sound obvious, but I don't think it is. You can have in-flight-entertainment in Economy. You can have videos playing on your tablet or whatever. We have far more distractions than ever before. You can read your book, listen to your music. The seats are comfortable enough in the first hour of your delay. At 5'10" I have sufficient legroom.
I think the difference is the seat pitch. I don't consider myself claustrophobic, but staring at a seatback 2 feet in front of my face just makes me want to see what the hell is going on to get me off the ground and to my destination. I think this is far more of an issue than the curvature of the fuselage.
Or maybe the market has spoken. Similar to how people complain about lack of legroom but proceed to book with airlines that have less legroom because it's cheaper, they're happy to fly on 1967 design planes to save a buck.
The #1 issue for me is leg room, being unusually tall. Headroom was never a problem :-)
And Boeing was working on a replacement for the entire 737-757 line, a brand new airplane using many of the same concepts as the 787 "Dreamliner" but it took a long time and in 2011 Southwest blackmailed them if they need to retrain their pilots then they might as well buy Airbus.
Sources. First for the replacement airplane.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2011/02/11/boei...
> Feb 11, 2011
> Boeing chairman and CEO Jim McNerney told a conference Thursday that Boeing probably will offer an all-new aircraft to replace its current generation of Boeing 737s.
> McNerney says Boeing prefers the new-airplane option to a second option -- re-engineering its current 737 lineup to accept a more fuel efficient engine.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/civ...
> Boeing has begun work on the 737-RS, a research program to build a new aircraft to replace the 737, which carries roughly 170 passengers. By mid-2009 Boeing expected to arrive at a design template for the 737 replacement, with "notional entry into service" around the year 2015.
> Boeing's long term plan as of 2005 seemed to involve three aircraft, designated Y1, Y3 and Y3. The Y1 is the 737RS.
Page last modified: 07-07-2011
Second, the blackmail.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/legal...
> Not only did Southwest management not want their pilots who flew the earlier model 737 NG to have to train in a flight simulator for the MAX, they insisted to Boeing that even classroom training be off the table, the filing shows. Southwest insisted on a clause in the sales contract stipulating a penalty of $1 million per airplane delivered if that standard wasn’t met.
> As the MAX’s most influential customer, Southwest’s insistence on this “infected every aspect of the birth and development of the new 737,” the legal filing asserts.
This is, of course, the legalese version of the blackmail mentioned above.
I thought I read they were planning to cut back on quality control staff this year. Was that true? Did it change?
There are two real questions here, can Boeing strictly follow their QA/QC regime and remain profitable. Second, can they get through their current period where FAA inspectors have set up shop on their premises and are now effectively another layer of supervisors. They’re in the stage now where the FAA are on the shop floor basically as cops to ensure Boeing actually does what they said they would do via the documentation in their Quality suite. They either have the war chest or the financial backing to pull that off without an immediate price increase or they’re toast.
Boeing has gotten Too Big To Fail, way too much military/space contracts. The US government can't let them fail because then the only remaining space capability would be SpaceX who can't fulfil everything (and is under control of an increasingly erratic billionaire).
What should happen is that the government should do it just like with the banks in the late '00s: assume control over Boeing+Spirit Aerosystems if not outright nationalize it (without compensation to shareholders, to incentivize other shareholders of other companies to make sure their leadership doesn't prioritize profits over safety), enact sweeping changes, and then after a few years either sell the remains off again or keep it under government control.
it's great to have those protocols, but when employees are retaliated against for bringing issues with no corrective changes made, what's the point in having the protocols?
Current QA/SOP's are onerous and very expensive to follow. But are based on having someone 'monitor' and 'check' everything. So two people, someone doing the work, and someone checking the work.
But seems like the old Boeing culture, was each employee cared about quality, so would check themselves. So needed less QA people, because everyone would 'do the right thing'.
So now that the culture is broken. Enforcing current QA/SOP's with additional QA people is un-profitable.
Anytime a corporation had 'culture of silence'.
Then turns it around to be 'speak up'.
There is a backlog of issues that comes out before the situation improves.
Of course he is going to say whatever is needed to save his job, but in my eyes Boeing should move on and choose someone else. Time is running out.
Meanwhile, Airbus had an engineer CEO who nearly bankrupted the firm with the A380 project.
I think trying to put management into buckets doesn't work very well. Some engineer CEOs have bad product sense and some sales CEOs have great product sense. I mean, Steve Jobs for crying out loud.
The airlines that have lots of 787 max have a vested interest in being able to use them.
The whole max mcas debacle happened because of the high cost of pilot re-certification. So what are they going to do, re-certify all their boeing pilots to fly airbus?
Airbus won't even have the capacity to take over all of boeing's market share. And the US can't let that happen anyway from a strategic point of view.
It's not like customers picking a brand of detergent on a shelf.
They breached the trust of their customers. I want to see new leadership, not someone who suddenly turns a new leaf.
The problem has only been observed on undelivered fuselages, because those are the ones that Spirit has on-hand to check. They are not confident the problem is absent in delivered aircraft.
You could also say, "the problem affects all of the delivered aircraft that have been checked for the problem".
From another article:
> As of Friday, the "non-conformance" or quality defect had been found in 22 fuselages out of 47 inspected up to that point, spread between Boeing and Spirit, and may exist in some 737s in service, the sources said.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-boeing-delays-73...
Turns out they're not even doing that.
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Make no mistake, there is no real transparency here. There is no sudden "culture shift".
Boeing is under a magnifying glass and no-one is going to stick their neck out and say: "Well, geez this is such a small mistake I'm going to ignore it". Because if planes start falling from the sky (again) you want your ass covered. There is currently just very little incentive for anyone (employees, managers, FAA, etc.) to led things slide.
There are "mistakes" you ignore when you're building an aircraft but you don't call them mistakes, because they aren't. You have tolerances for everything. To be "correct" a dimension is specified, must be no bigger than this, no smaller than that. And that's it. You're either in the spec or not. If you're not there's no ignoring, parts were delivered out of spec. There isn't some secondary "out of spec but only a little".
Subcontractors (like Spirit), the prime contractor (Boeing), and everyone responsible for verifying (FAA, perhaps others) all share culpability for things going quite wrong. Hopefully the NTSB still has it's head on straight and the coming scathing reports will attract attention in Congress to light a fire under the FAA's ass to do its job, preferably with some direct legislation for things the FAA must do. (i.e. no more manufacturers doing self-verifications)
>There is currently just very little incentive for anyone (employees, managers, FAA, etc.) to led things slide.
What is "real" transparency?
Maybe it's even something they can try to spin as improving quality control practices for brand rehabilitation. Or maybe I am just imagining things.
> Or maybe I am just imagining things.
Quite possibly. I'm as cynical as they come but I'm actually happy that they report these issues and I hope that they will do this exhaustively until they have a proper inventory of what went wrong so they have a chance to really repair both the issues and their culture, and hopefully before there is another incident.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-boeing-delays-73...
Unless flying is the only mode of transportation you ever use, avoiding Boeing will not make your life safer, it will at most make you calmer.
Since November 2001, there has been one death aboard a major airline operating in the U.S.[1]. That was a Southwest flight where an entire engine self-destructed. It was an issue with the CFM engine, Not with anything Boeing did.
You might choose to include one more. An Asiana flight tumbled end over end after arriving short at SFO. Everyone survived the crash, but a passenger was killed when an emergency responder hit them with a vehicle, unable to see them due to firefighting foam.[2] The accident was again not caused by anything related to Boeing.
You are safer aboard any aircraft operated by a major American airline than you are on any other form of transportation. Including walking.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
Boeing made several billion dollars a year of profits for ten years prior to Covid, but failed to reinvest it in their manufacturing practices to prevent unforced errors, which left unchecked caused a plane to catastrophically decompress in the sky. Their shareholders may think that’s acceptable, but their customers do not.
The engine cowling was made by Boeing and was supposed to stay on when the engine lost fan blades, the cowling was what struck the side of the aircraft and broke the window in question. Boeing is redesigning the 737 cowlings to better respond to blade out failures.
As for the third, it was later speculated that they could possibly have already died before encountering airport fire and rescue vehicles. This is still controversial; it is also possible that the original sequence of events was correct.
The primary cause of the crash was a profound lack of airmanship by the flight-deck crew. There was also some mode confusion with the autopilot and autothrottle; however they should have overcome this using fundamental aviation skills. Nobody was minding the actual throttle state.
Either way, it is worth noting the other two fatalities. Thank you.
A Delta Connections commuter flight killed 49 in Lexington, KY in 2013.
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Don't forget that Airbus also uses Spirit AeroSystems.
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I've been watching a lot of rebuild rescue on Youtube lately where a bunch of mechanics are trying to rebuild a decades old plane nicknamed the bird house (because birds were nesting in it for well over a decade and they got absolutely everywhere). That seems to involve a lot of rivets, usage of all sorts of power tools, cleaning up old lots of parts, and generally not being too delicate banging things back into shape. Massive project and makes you realize just how complicated even a relatively small plane is.
It is not really feasible to test an installed rivet without destructive testing, because usually we are talking about blind rivets, which are remarkably complex fasteners. Think of them more like "small, ultra-precise one-time use machines", not "nails". This is part of the reason aircraft have so many rivets: each rivet is often capable of supporting a substantial fraction of the load where it is installed (sometimes even the entire load), but we install a huge number of them.
The fact that this defect was caught during what seems like normal inspection processes also moves it closed to being a "non-issue". Manufacturing defects happen all the time and liability is massive, so there are extensive inspection and quality regimes in place.
This statement is missing the information needed to grasp the seriousness of the issue. For example, if 100% of holes inspected (very unlikely), then 2 nonconforming holes out of hundreds of thousands of rivet holes on large craft might be acceptable and possibly even within acceptable quality limits; however, if the inspection plan calls for random sampling of two holes anywhere on the fuselage, and both of them happen to be nonconforming... not good.
Non-conforming rivet holes may have many underlying causes. Even if they are missed during panel fabrication, a nonconforming hole is likely to cause a rivet installation failure, which are likely to be caught by downstream quality control processes.
If by "closely", you mean "check every single rivet hole on a large commercial aircraft", you are going to quickly discover just how difficult this problem is. The tolerances are extremely tight, the holes are very small, and you are often actually dealing with multiple holes and sealant layers (a rivet holds multiple sheets together).
I would be stunned if any large aircraft on the planet has 100% perfect rivet preparation.