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A 100-year old company with 150,000 direct employees, responsible for the safe transportation of countless millions every day, all day long, year after year—as

A 100-year old company with 150,000 direct employees, responsible for the safe transportation of countless millions every day, all day long, year after year—as well as being one of the largest military contractors responsible for everything from ICBMs to space flight—and a single questionable design decision for a single passenger aircraft has people calling for their ultimate demise. Nice.

emptybottle 7y ago
They weren't calling for Boeings demise specifically. One could argue that it is indeed self-destructive behavior for an aerospace company to speed commercial flight products to market, minimize documentation and training regarding safety critical differences in new models, while lobbying for reduced safety driven government oversights. There have been many questionable design decisions coming to light in the past decade. Battery fires, cracking pickle forks, and the max8 disasters to name a few. And these issues really can have a significant negative impact and ripple effect, regardless of past track record.
mark-r 7y ago
Not "calling for their ultimate demise", just projecting based on recent knowledge of how they do business. The "questionable design decision" is a symptom, not a cause.
bronson 7y ago
Calling for? No. Don't shoot the messenger. In the first year of flying their most important new airplane, they managed to kill 350 passengers. This is unprecedented in modern air travel, worse than all others combined (including DC-9, Tu-154, and A320). Boeing had information on MCAS's twitchiness in 2015, so why did they allow a second plane to crash? And now they've bungled the grounding, originally suggesting to airlines they might be flying again in May: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/business/boeing-737-software.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/business/boeing-737-softw... You must admit, their ineptitude through this whole ordeal is just incomprehensible. I'm sure you're right, and Boeing probably better people in charge of their other divisions ... but, if so, then they need to put them on the MAX!
- sunstone 7y ago
  When you kick out the engineers and call in the Harvard MBA's it's a near certainty you'll start to lose altitude it's just a question of how fast the descent will be. In this case it was very fast indeed.
aphextron 7y ago
>A 100-year old company with 150,000 direct employees, responsible for the safe transportation of countless millions every day, all day long, year after year—as well as being one of the largest military contractors responsible for everything from ICBMs to space flight—and a single questionable design decision for a single passenger aircraft has people calling for their ultimate demise. This is part of the problem. Boeing needs to be broken up. They should have never been allowed to merge with McDonnell Douglas, and their civil aviation unit should be a separate entity from their government contracting business.
scottlocklin 7y ago
> a single questionable design decision for a single passenger aircraft has people calling for their ultimate demise. It's not a single questionable design decision; it's multiple insane management decisions interfering with design decisions involving human lives. And yes, this company deserves the death penalty; it's executives should be jailed, and its assets broken up and sold off, and the military bits nationalized. The 787 was already basically an act of treason; outsourcing critical military technology because .... muh MBA just in time says it will be cheaper. Well it wasn't, and those secrets ain't jumping back in the bag.

emptybottle 7y ago

They weren't calling for Boeings demise specifically. One could argue that it is indeed self-destructive behavior for an aerospace company to speed commercial flight products to market, minimize documentation and training regarding safety critical differences in new models, while lobbying for reduced safety driven government oversights. There have been many questionable design decisions coming to light in the past decade. Battery fires, cracking pickle forks, and the max8 disasters to name a few. And these issues really can have a significant negative impact and ripple effect, regardless of past track record.

mark-r 7y ago

Not "calling for their ultimate demise", just projecting based on recent knowledge of how they do business. The "questionable design decision" is a symptom, not a cause.

bronson 7y ago

Calling for? No. Don't shoot the messenger. In the first year of flying their most important new airplane, they managed to kill 350 passengers. This is unprecedented in modern air travel, worse than all others combined (including DC-9, Tu-154, and A320). Boeing had information on MCAS's twitchiness in 2015, so why did they allow a second plane to crash? And now they've bungled the grounding, originally suggesting to airlines they might be flying again in May: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/business/boeing-737-software.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/business/boeing-737-softw... You must admit, their ineptitude through this whole ordeal is just incomprehensible. I'm sure you're right, and Boeing probably better people in charge of their other divisions ... but, if so, then they need to put them on the MAX!

sunstone 7y ago
When you kick out the engineers and call in the Harvard MBA's it's a near certainty you'll start to lose altitude it's just a question of how fast the descent will be. In this case it was very fast indeed.

aphextron 7y ago

>A 100-year old company with 150,000 direct employees, responsible for the safe transportation of countless millions every day, all day long, year after year—as well as being one of the largest military contractors responsible for everything from ICBMs to space flight—and a single questionable design decision for a single passenger aircraft has people calling for their ultimate demise. This is part of the problem. Boeing needs to be broken up. They should have never been allowed to merge with McDonnell Douglas, and their civil aviation unit should be a separate entity from their government contracting business.

scottlocklin 7y ago

> a single questionable design decision for a single passenger aircraft has people calling for their ultimate demise. It's not a single questionable design decision; it's multiple insane management decisions interfering with design decisions involving human lives. And yes, this company deserves the death penalty; it's executives should be jailed, and its assets broken up and sold off, and the military bits nationalized. The 787 was already basically an act of treason; outsourcing critical military technology because .... muh MBA just in time says it will be cheaper. Well it wasn't, and those secrets ain't jumping back in the bag.