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I always had great respect for aerospace and thought they'd put safety above all else but seeing all this, Boeing seems like a fucking travesty.
by magtux 7y ago
I always had great respect for aerospace and thought they'd put safety above all else but seeing all this, Boeing seems like a fucking travesty.
- ilikehurdles 7y agoBoeing opened its South Carolina plant to avoid a unionized workforce, and that plant has been responsible for producing these horrific excuses they call airplanes. They had the benefit of a doubt before, but now it's clear that Boeing's leadership, like that of other public companies, values cheap labor over safety.
- ogn3rd 7y agoGosh, it's almost like corporate greed is ruining our country.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThis is not a manufacturing issue. It is all on poor engineering and poor management making poor decisions.
- tomatotomato37 7y agoI'm not sure how unions have any relations to this. They exist as a mediator between management and workers for pay and rights; customer satisfaction or safety is completely outside their domain
- ilikehurdles 7y agoUnions give employees the knowledge and leverage to push back against unrealistic demands, deadlines, and cost-cutting measures without retaliation. These kinds of rushed solutions causing more problems down the line are caused by a culture that rewards employees who put up with managers breathing down their neck.
- CamperBob2 7y agoIrrelevant in this case, though. While concerns have indeed been raised about SC production quality, this particular story involves an engineering failure, not a production issue. Boeing engineers are unionized through SPEEA. They can bring the company to its knees at contract negotiation time, and they have done so in the past.
- robocat 7y agoI disagree, it is also a production issue because: "One whistleblower reported to the FAA that they had seen damage to the electrical wiring connected to the plane’s angle of attack sensor from a foreign object, which feeds data to the MCAS system so it can determine whether it needs to engage to prevent the plane from stalling. This wouldn’t be the first time Boeing’s manufacturing process reportedly had problems guarding plane components against foreign object debris produced by the fabrication process."
- CamperBob2 7y agoStuff happens. The fact that damage to a single AOA sensor -- whether in the factory or in the field -- could cause this sort of event is strictly an engineering issue.
- robocat 7y agoIt is most definitely not "strictly" an engineering issue. By that logic you can say it is a quality control, FAA or management issue (and not an engineering issue) - because the engineering problem was not caught by other systems. Also "engineering" created the AoA disagree alert. Whoever decided to make that an optional feature should be "strictly" at fault? Maybe it is the fault of the airlines that decided not to have that feature installed? Engineering is just one part of a complex system so why do you think engineering should be blamed 100% for failures that occurred due to the whole system?
- 7y ago
- vkou 7y agoAnother poster cited a small anecdote about a Boeing whistleblower: > In another case, a whistleblower in charge of defective inventory found that some of the items marked defective were going missing and ending up installed on aircraft to meet production goals rather than wait for a proper replacement, the red paint marking them defective having been clumsily rubbed off. In a unionized workforce, people are far more confident about pushing back on this sort of criminal bullshit, when their manager asks it of them. (Because getting rid of someone in a union shop requires a paper trail. And people making illegal demands hate, hate, hate paper trails.) In a non-unionized workforce, the only recourse we, as the public have is to jail the line workers who scrubbed the paint, while their managers will quietly deny any wrongdoing (Of course we didn't suggest this sort of thing, of course we had no idea this was happening, of course we didn't pressure anyone into doing something so blatantly unethical, under express or implied threat of termination...) We just told people that we need them to ship 100 parts, and waggled our eyelashes suggestively at a box labeled '100 defective parts'.
- bgorman 7y agoI'm pretty sure the 737 Max planes has been entirely assembled in Washington State, where the Boeing employees are unionized.
- loceng 7y agoThings would change if there was accountability transferred all the way along the chain of command, and then the salaries C-level executives would certainly be much more warranted; the not just fines but hard jail time argument.
- benttoothpaste 7y agoIn South Carolina Boeing produces 787 Dreamliners. The 737 Max is produced in Washington.
- tastygreenapple 7y agoIt didn't always used to be this way - at one point Boeing delivered planes that were substantially safer than their competitors. Moving the HQ to Chicago was a terrible idea. Companies like boeing should be managed by engineers not salespeople.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoIt's hard to keep a mistress when she lives in the same city as your wife.
- tastygreenapple 7y agoWhat does this even mean? Boeing has one job - making airliners that don't fall out of the sky. People have been putting planes in the air for over 100 years, it should be getting safer and easier to do so each year but apparently not. Boeing is failing at their one job.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoFormer CEO Phil Condit opened the Chicago office at least in part so he could have his secretary/mistress shack up in a company provided apartment.
- PhantomGremlin 7y agoCompanies like boeing should be managed by engineers not salespeople. Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO, is an engineer.[0] And he apparently doesn't even have an MBA. It's hard to know exactly how and when he became seduced by the dark side. Here's a summary (which I've posted before) of his egregiously bad behavior: Oct 29, 2018 Lion Air crash, 189 dead Nov 10, 2018 pilots already talking about Boeing emergency airworthiness directive related to MCAS[1] Mar 10, 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash kills 157 Mar 11, 2019 Boeing CEO "confident in 737 MAX safety"[2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg [1] https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/614857-indonesian-aircraft-missing-off-jakarta-49.html#post10307740 https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/614857-indonesian-aircra... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo/boeing-ceo-confident-in-737-max-safety-after-second-deadly-crash-idUSKBN1QS2PJ https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo...
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago> thought they'd put safety above all else The bottom line is always above all else. Or is it executive compensation? I always forget which is first.