“It’s as if I’m watching a troubled child” is how Captain Dennis Tajer describes flying a Boeing 737 Max.
“The culture at Boeing has been toxic to trust for over a decade now,” (Adam Dickson, a former senior manager at Boeing) says.
Five years ago Boeing faced one of the biggest scandals in its history, after two brand new 737 Max planes were lost in almost identical accidents that cost 346 lives.
The cause was flawed flight control software, details of which it was accused of deliberately concealing from regulators.
Meanwhile, further evidence of how production problems could endanger safety emerged this week.
The FAA warned that improperly installed wiring bundles on 737 Max planes could become damaged, leading to controls on the wings deploying unexpectedly, and making the aircraft start to roll.
If not addressed, it said, this “could result in loss of control of the airplane”. Hundreds of planes already in service will have to be checked as a result.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.
Which car company did you say you worked for again?
A major one.
Why do you expect it to be different for any of them?
It’s a sequence of quotes from Fight Club
They have to factor in the cost of the reputational damage too. But yeah, it’s all a dollar game.
Reputational damage is almost negligible in the modern market. Market capture in most hard-good industries, especially specialized industries like aerospace, is complete enough that you have very few options - sure, you could just not buy a Boeing airliner for your airline, but you have exactly two choices in large aircraft, and it’s not like production is easily-scalable.
the first rule…
we don’t talk about Bruno
Boeing: How much trouble is the company in?
Not as much as they should be in, probably.
They also likely murdered John Barnett, but I’m sure they are too big to fail or be tried for murder.
Kinda hard to try a corporation for murder and stick it in jail, even though we all know it’s a person.
Whole company? Very difficult.
Whole board of directors? That’s easy
Objectively? In a lot of trouble. Real world, though? They are one of the largest companies that feeds/works for the American Military Weapons Complex plus they are also among the largest lobbying/donors of the Federal Government. Just behind pharma.
I’d say no trouble at all. They should be sweating drops but they are not. Like you said, huge company with a “handle shit” budget. Am fully expecting nothing will happen and if they get sued they will settle outside of court, like they did with 737MAX issue. And problem solved.
The real world has a habit of catching up even to the biggest budgets.
My suspicion of what is currently going inside the company is that an army of consultants are going through every inch trying to produce reports of how to improve the “processes” to avoid such future incidents. However the percentage of change that will be implemented is only as big as management’s willingness to upset current stakeholders including itself. So unlikely to be very big.
I would expect a continuous decline with ever-decreasing new orders from airlines - fire sales to attract new customers, reduced investment because of declining revenues etc.
The government titty will keep them operating for a while though - or at least until their incompetence embarrasses the government/army sufficiently.
works for the American Military Weapons Complex
That is where this will fuck Boeing, you can buy regulators for having the side of your plane fall off in flight, or an Auto piolet that loves to use the lithobreak, but don’t fuck with the US military contracting system. The DOD contracts for things with very specific and some times stupid standards, but they get exactly what you paid for or else.
The founder, William Boeing, was a a white segregationist, active against mixed racial marriages, believed in the pure white blood and shit. His parents were Austrian/ German, Böing. America, the land of opportunity.
Sure, and Henry Ford was an out-and-out antisemite who published a newspaper where he serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Hitler kept a photo of him on his desk.
That doesn’t mean we should expect Ford cars to fall apart on the road.
It’s way too late to be pissed off about William Boeing or Henry Ford. Or Hugo Boss or Ferdinand Porsche, who directly worked with the Nazis.
Or IBM or the Coca-Cola company, which did too.
Etc.
Henry Ford is also the reason kids learn square dancing in school. I actually had to learn how to dance like a hillbilly in gym class because some long-dead antisemite was once convinced that jazz music and the Charleston (read: black people and anything cultural that they contribute) would corrupt the youth, who could only be saved by the purity of barnyard dancing.
I don’t know how this contributes to the conversation at hand, but I think about it a lot.
Ugh. I hated square dancing so much.
Swing your partner round and round,
Pick her up and throw her down.Makes sense given the crowd.
Did you learn other kinds of dance too? That sounds…not bad.
No, just square dancing. Nothing else.
That was my grade school experience as well. Even as a child I was confused by how much square dancing they made us do and absolutely no other forms of dance.
It was a PE activity in my school.
Yes, it’s truly wild how often things in the United States often originate from a fascistic or cultish source. Daylight savings time, cereal, etc. granted it’s been almost 40 years. I don’t know if they still do it. But they did back in the '70s and '80s for sure. But with all the satanic panic of the '90s I doubt they started pushing it any less LOL.
How does DST tie in?
That’s sad, in my elementary school we learned square dancing, but also the Mexican Hat Dance and Tinikling and the Polka, I can’t remember if there were others since it was back in the 1960s. I think learning the Charleston would have been fun! When I taught 2nd grade, dance wasn’t part of PE but for a countries around the world assembly I taught my class some Russian (and, now I know better, some of it was Ukrainian) folk dances I had learned from my Russian ballet teacher. They got a kick out of it.
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I mean it’s too late to expect people to blame the problems of the companies on that.
My dad used to refuse to buy VW cars because “the Beetle was designed by Hitler.” As if money to Volskwagen went back in time to the Nazi coffers. He didn’t have anything to say about the emissions scandal.
Edit: It would be like blaming Steve Jobs for any bad thing Apple has done since he died as if it were his fault and not Tim Cook’s.
Sure but we can’t automatically blame the people alive today for something that happened long before they were around, lol
Coca Cola?
From what I understand they severed all business with Germany when the war started and because of this Germany had to start making Fanta.
Coca-Cola didn’t officially sever ties until 1941, when America entered the war, not when it started. Fanta was manufactured by Coca-Cola’s facilities in Nazi Germany with the full expectation that those facilities would re-merge with Coca-Cola when the war was over. And guess what happened when the war was over?
Well yeah the bottling plants were the property of Coca-Cola before the war. After the war it would be expected that property would be returned to Coca Cola. Bottling plants are physical things that couldn’t be instantly teleported from Germany when Germany declared war on the US, so they continued to operate. The existence of Fanta proves that Coca Cola didn’t support the bottling plants in Germany, not evidence they were colluding with the Nazi government. If they were secretly supplying those bottling plants they would’ve been able to continue producing Coca Cola and Fanta wouldn’t exist.
Yes Coca Cola existed in the same time period as the Nazis. Maybe they should’ve stopped doing business with Germany earlier. But the idea that a business is going to push political ideals seems like an unreasonable expectation. There’s no clear path for a business on this other than following the law which Coca Cola did. The real question should be about why the US government didn’t impose sanctions on Germany earlier for their horrible politics. It’s really elected governments that should decide foreign policy, not private entities.
I really think this is beside my point.
You’re point being that anyone that people in the past should have known the future?
History is like a mystery novel where you’ve read the last chapter first. People in the past didn’t immediately think Nazi=bad like we do today. The full extent of how evil they were hadn’t happened yet. Remember there are many things that you’re associated with now that in the future will be seen as monstrous.
Right now there are many acts of violence towards Jews by certain movements. How careful have you been in making sure you have no associations with that?
No, my point was that the antisemitism of Henry Ford (and other issues there) have no bearing on the problems their companies are responsible for today.
And do tell me, and I’m Jewish incidentally, how to disassociate myself from violence towards Jews.
Be that as it may, Boeing himself was a stickler for quality and set a vision of quality and excellence that made Boeing aircraft some of the safest in the fleet, up until their merger with McDonnell Douglas. It was said he’d rather go out of business than ship a shoddy product.
The corporation isn’t the person. That’s sort of the point.
That has little to nothing to do with the current state of affairs at Boeing. The current situation was brought about by the merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, with the MDD executives joining Boeing’s board of directors and continuing the same shitty behaviour. Eg, with the MD-10 and its cargo door, the issue was raised at design stage, denied until after 2 massive fatal accidents occurred, and then they tried to get around it with “gentleman’s agreements” with the FAA - just like with the MCAS issue on the 737 MAX.
The problems can be pinned down to a very small number of executives, who belong in prison.
And part of the problem is that McDonnell Douglas left the commercial aviation market because they couldn’t compete with Boeing.
If you can’t beat them, merge and rot them from the inside out!
Are you asserting 737 Max issues and the latency to mechanically resolve them is caused by a family legacy of white supremacy haunting the board rooms of present day Boeing HQ?
Because I otherwise don’t see your point in the context of this article and news.
I don’t see the point either, though it’s an interesting (and sad) piece of trivia, which I didn’t know.
No trouble at all. It’s impossible to get into trouble when there is no competition.
except from Airbus… so yeah. there’s competition.
hardly. airbus can’t double it’s production overnight.
Et moi, Bombardier?
And what aboot Canadair?
They’re not American, the US government would sooner ban them than levy consequences on the American company.
Likely not a all… The only chance these behemoth companies get punished is by the public turning on them but they have already insulated themselves from that (most people would not know how to avoid their planes when booking the next vacation on Expedia)
In a properly working environment, even a Capitalist one, the government should intervene, jail the board, and either nationalize it or auction it off for parts… The most important part is really the jailing of the board
Boeing and the american government are too deep in bed. Nothing significant will happen. Maybe a few executives get fired just to satisfy the demands for action. In fact the american government will likely bail the company out when things take a dive (their stock as well as their aircraft).
Sadly, I believe you are 100% right
I miss North American Aviation.
Even if Boeing doesn’t face any real consequences, I hope airlines take this time to just go full Airbus even if it’s out of fear from future litigation and not inherent customer safety. Airbus should also jump on this opportunity and offer some good deals for actual functioning and safety tested aircraft.
The main issue is that Airbus has a huge backlog for their aircraft which continues to grow. They’re slowly adding more capacity, but not nearly fast enough to satisfy their current demand, let alone what additional customers would bring.
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By what measure is it a much smaller company? By planes sold it appears negligible: between 2007 and 2016 Airbus delivered 5,644 and Boeing delivered 5,718, for a difference of 74. In terms of market share they’re roughly equivalent in twin-aisle jets and Airbus has a significant lead in single-aisle jets (for obvious reasons).
You’re right. i was pulling from something i read a couple weeks ago but looking at it now they do seem comperable. airbus even delivered more airframes last year than boeing did by a significant margin. although i imagine that boeings safety concerns do contribute to that lack of deliveries
I deleted my comment
Their market cap is comparable, but that’s after Boeing’s stock took a hit. About a 50% cut over the last 5 years. Airbus’ stock is slightly higher than it was 5 years ago.
Remember that Boeing is all over the military market on top of their civilian programs. Airbus does do a few conversions of their civilian aircraft for military use (transport and aerial refueling, mostly), but it’s not a huge part of their revenue. Boeing does that stuff (the hump in the 747, in particular, has led to some specialized uses), plus more specialized designs. They’re still cranking out new versions of the F-15, for example. In fact, military stuff is the largest part of Boeing’s revenue.
Sure but the context of the comment I replied to was that many airlines don’t have a choice but to buy aircraft from Boeing because Airbus is much smaller and therefore unable to service the required orders. In actual fact they deliver nearly an equivalent number of (civilian) aircraft over 10 years from 2007-2016 and Airbus has been delivering more aircraft per year recently. If everyone suddenly only ordered with Airbus then sure it would create a supply bottleneck but that’s not because Airbus is a smaller company.
I have a simple solution: force Boeing to go back to it’s management roots. Require all C-levels to have engineering degrees.
But the shareholders would rather see the company be shut down than give up some profit.
Also, put an end to their union busting garbage. Then quality that they were known for was established when all of their labor was done by well-compensated union labor, instead of outsourcing to get around union contracts.
I really hope this allows a third and perhaps even a fourth company to enter the market
Be careful what you wish for. Some of the most likely contenders are Lockheed, Raytheon, and a few other military contractors that haven’t broken into the civilian market yet.
Not really. The most likely contenders I could see now are Embraer and Comac (Chinese aircraft manufacturer). A few years ago Bombardier could have been a very likely contender, but not today.
I could see Lockheed and Raytheon entering the civilian market only if the demand on the military side starts drying up, which in this climate I find doubtful.
Comac
I remember reading the Chinese had stagnated investment into Comac because it was more cost effective for their airlines to buy Boeing planes instead. But after the two 737-MAX crash, the Chinese was restarting investment and R&D for a Boeing replacement, however because they were far behind due to lack of investments, they wouldn’t have anything ready until 2026 the earliest. So I doubt they will be able to compete anytime soon.
I look forward to seeing it play out. More competition is always better than less competition.
Volkswagen Aero
Imagine the emco2 emissions
A flying VW camping bus
A flying lada for ryanair
I had the pleasure of interviewing several engineers from Boeing with PhDs and almost the worst interviews ever. Very awkward interviews and possibly the worst in person interview ever.
Did you publish these? It would be interesting to read!
Or maybe give some more insight here onto what you mean by “worst interview”. That could be so many things… 😉
How can a PhD engineer fail an interview among barely junior engineers? And fail it so badly that it officially became our worse interview ever?
This person also had the audacity to call back and several times to demand to be interviewed again. During the interview I would ask simple engineering questions like “can you elaborate on F=ma” and the guy, instead of giving a straight answer “it’s the relationship between the force applied to a mass and the acceleration achieved” he would go in these crazy ass rants about stuff I can’t repeat and can’t remember. You know the stuff very well…like when your wife, husband or life partner starts talking to you about your mom and you love your mom so you shut down the listening port on your brain. Just ehem and uhumed the rest of the interview. It was bad. It was so bad that the junior engineers told me it was bad. Usually they hold judgment out of respect.
Reminds me of my worst interview, though the candidate wasn’t phd. It was a recent bachelor’s grad doing a remote interview and he obviously had someone helping him (we could hear them whispering). Funny part was neither of them had a clue so the guy cheated but still gave among the worst responses.
I can only assume he cheated his way to graduation, too.
