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The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max crisis

• JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Why has antitrust died completely in America? Any hope of it coming back? I don’t want one movie studio, one airplane manufacturer...
  • HenryKissinger 7y ago
    Regulatory capture. Corporations entice regulators with cushy jobs when they leave public service, with the implied understanding that they won't act against their interests while they work in government.
    • Ididntdothis 7y ago
      That’s another effect of income inequality. Some players can pay so much money that people are willing to compromise some values. I am pretty sure I could overlook some things if I suddenly got paid ten times as money as before.
    • favorited 7y ago
      That's only one theory. The other is that it is natural to expect people who exit high-level positions in public service to enter high-level positions in private industry, particularly in the same field.
  • munificent 7y ago
    > Why has antitrust died completely in America? 1. The Citizens United ruling allows unbounded money to flow into campaigns. 2. Campaign funding determines election results. 3. Elected officials determine what America does in terms of law and regulation. 4. Billionaires pour tons of money into campaigns. When you allow dollars to effectively determine elections instead of votes, the end result is oligarchy and the rule of the rich.
    • jessant 7y ago
      Do you know what Citizens United actually was about or allowed for? This video on campaign finance might surprise you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhpy1uzOvrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhpy1uzOvrY
    • bumby 7y ago
      I used to ascribe to this notion, but 2016 proved me wrong about #2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/campaign-finance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
      • ngngngng 7y ago
        This proves nothing. Both candidates raised outstanding amounts of money. Without that, neither of them would have had a chance. Also, it's a completely different ball game talking about which laws get passed vs which candidate gets elected.
        • bumby 7y ago
          If a 46% increase in funding is negligible, then I would think "2. Campaign funding determines election results." would have to be modified. Is your claim that above a certain dollar threshold money no longer has an impact?
      • munificent 7y ago
        I think the full story is more complex. A relatively smaller amount of money will influence state elections, and state-level politicians determine things like district boundaries (i.e. gerrymandering), vote roll purges, polling stations, etc. All of those have a very large impact on elections too.
      • typon 7y ago
        1. More people voted for Clinton than Trump in 2016. If you look at the notion "More campaign funding = more votes", then this instance does not prove that wrong. It says a lot about Clinton's campaign strategy and America's election system, however, that she still lost the election despite more votes. 2. Trump still raised about a billion dollars. That is an insanely large amount of money. 3. Campaign financing for elections and financing for lobbying for policy are different things. For the latter, it is all but proven that financing is all that matters: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
  • Ididntdothis 7y ago
    When you read the press there is this constant celebration of companies hitting ever higher market values or billionaires weighing on on issues. It seems the bigger and richer the more respect companies and people get.
  • Mr_Shiba 7y ago
    For anyone interested in this topic I strongly recommend: The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon Serious research with data, but also approachable for noneconomist.
  • howard941 7y ago
    Thank Judge Bork. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/20/antitrust-was-defined-by-robert-bork-i-cannot-overstate-his-influence/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/20/antit...
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • hinkley 7y ago
    I’ve heard someone claim that the US Government was responsible for this merger in the first place. I wasn’t clear on whether they actively pushed it or it was a result of policy change around defense contracting. The implication was that it was the former.
  • jobu 7y ago
    NPR's Planet Money Podcast did a fantastic 3-part series on Antitrust in America: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/antitrust-in-america https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti... Here's an excerpt that starts to answer your question: > The 1970s was a turning point in the other direction. In the decades leading up to the '70s, the government had grown increasingly aggressive—intervening in the free market to defend competition in more and more ways over time. Then a lawyer named Robert Bork completely transformed the way courts would interpret antitrust law. The approach to enforcement reversed direction away from protecting firms and toward a consumer focus, paving the way for today's tech giants.
    • bumby 7y ago
      I read recently in the book "A Generation of Sociopaths" an interesting perspective I hadn't before considered. The book's claim was that as the Baby Boomer generation aged into a capital owning class, they used their democratic voting influence to impact companies they increasingly owned via stocks. I don't know if I buy it, but it was an interesting take on the political and tax changes that began in the late 70s and early 80s.
      • Vraxx 7y ago
        I don't personally, it conflates boomers with capitalists, and there are plenty of boomers who aren't a part of the capitalist class by any stretch of the imagination. Just because some of them benefited from it, doesn't mean they had any part in its construction, execution, or intention. This story just obfuscates the fact that this tension between capital and labor existed long before this generation and pretends like the entire generation was in on it, when it was really just the boomer capitalist class, not all boomers.
        • bumby 7y ago
          It does group (majority white) boomers together but I don’t think the auther conflates them with capitalists exactly. It was more so making the point that as a collective voting block, they tended to vote to their own selfish interests and had the numbers to sway policy. For example, reducing capital gains taxes which wasn’t necessary until they, as a collective, had enough vested interest in the stock of companies later in their life.
  • Symmetry 7y ago
    In the progressive era we had pretty good anti-trust enforcement. But during the early 20th century the fashionable view was that dog-eat-dog competition was inefficient and it would be better if the economy was made up of a series of well regulated monopolies like Ma Bell or at least cartels like the airlines used to be. Back when the USSR was reporting huge economic growth this theory was something people pointed to to explain how communism could be so much more efficient than capitalism. Thankfully the pendulum has been swinging back in the other direction for various reasons like the fall of the USSR, realization of the dangers of regulatory capture, etc. But then we've been allowing all these horizontal mergers recently which just doesn't make any sense to me.
  • andrewla 7y ago
    The book by Matt Stoller, Goliath, is a deep exploration of this. The blame is scattered all over the place, but the main idea is that government has become increasingly technocratic; trusting industry leaders to tell us that their industries are too complicated for politicians to interfere in. This is not just a question of "regulation" -- the problem is bigger than regulation since anti-trust is generally not a regulatory issue so much as a law enforcement issue. Regulation is actually part of the problem to a degree, as regulating fewer larger entities is "easier" than regulating a diverse healthy industry. In the 1970s, a combination of things -- Bork and the Chicago school's notion that "consumer protection" was the main objective of anti-trust action, Ralph Nader and the burgeoning consumer rights movement that joined forces with this (because of the regulatory pressure above), and the switch of the Democratic party from a populist party to principally a social justice party. All three of these had positive effects as well (prosecuting abusive monopolies, increasing customer safety and dropping consumer prices for goods, and advancing the civil rights movement), but between them they ended up dismantling the New Deal era protections against big businesses that led to the massive consolidations of the 80s and 90s across almost every sector. There are many things that Stoller points to as positive things that I was dubious about but he makes a compelling case -- specifically pricing controls (where the manufacturer can set retail price ceilings and prevent discounting). Some of it has been things that I have had trouble specifically elucidating -- why it's bad that Disney controls both content production and distribution, and how Congress can wield (and has wielded, in the past) power directly.
• ratsmack 7y ago
  I spent 45 years in this industry and the following describes exactly what happened in the mid 90's throughout the entire industry. As subcontractors, we were told that we needed to get on board with the new way of thinking, or we would lose our contracts. >Inside the company, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction. A formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned employees they needed to “quit behaving like a family and become more like a team. If you don’t perform, you don’t stay on the team.”
  • jbigelow76 7y ago
    Stonecipher Always have an eye on the exit if your new exec sounds like he belongs in the next Bond movie.
    • jonplackett 7y ago
      Sounds like an AOL nickname.
      • mc3 7y ago
        Sounds like an easy to crack encryption scheme, probably used on IoT devices and cryptocurrency exchanges.
• legitster 7y ago
  “We thought that we’d kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the ropes,” he said. “I still believe that Harry outsmarted Phil and his gang bought Boeing with Boeing’s money. We were all just disgusted.” More than that, he added, the company had “paid way, way too much money [for McDonnell Douglas] and we’re still paying for it. We wrote off so many tens of billions of dollars for that whole mess.” A good lesson to not play games with hustlers. McDonnell Douglas was famous for being slimy, financial rent-seekers. They got hustled.
  • dade_ 7y ago
    One great company after another destroyed by financial shenanigans. Avaya & Silver Lake Partners is another that comes to mind, but there have been many.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  > With the dawn of the 1980s, however, Boeing’s traditional way of doing things seemed increasingly out of touch. Deregulation under US presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had changed the economics of the industry, Greenberg said. “The idea was that if you had more competition, it would drop prices for consumers. Suddenly, airlines are looking at this and saying, ‘Oh my God, we can’t pass on the cost by continuously raising ticket prices.’ That put pressure back on Boeing, and on Airbus eventually, to become cost-conscious.” I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs. I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers. Compare the union workers for the Big Three during the 1970's to that of the gig economy workers now. Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions is what is best in the long term? Or maybe, we need to alternate periods of disruption and highly competitive markets with periods of stability and oligopolies? I suspect we as a society will have to try to figure that out, and that it is not a simple answer.
  • SftwrSvior81 7y ago
    I think you're right that highly competitive markets can push down quality but that happens because the customer accepts the lower quality. If air lines or the customers actually flying on these planes decided that they were not going to buy/fly on Boeing planes, the quality issue within the market would be resolved fairly quickly. Either Boeing would produce higher quality planes or they would go out of business and their market share would be taken over by a competitor with higher quality. Of course, I'm assuming that such a competitor exists. In case they don't, my argument becomes invalid.
    • somurzakov 7y ago
      if US allowed foreign airlines to serve domestic routes, that would be the case
    • EarthIsHome 7y ago
• djsumdog 7y ago
  I dunno. At first this article almost felt like damage control: it wasn't Boeing, it was those McDonnell Douglas peeps. But then it seemed to focus more on the engineers themselves and try to make them seem like a cozy family shop .. even before the big merger; Boeing was hardly that. It was (and is) a massive employer that has tactically distributed manufacturing to as many different states as possible (to help with lobbying efforts under the banner of job creation; distributed with a very wide net of employees). Even without the Douglas acquisition, would we still be here with the 737-Max8 failure as bad as it is? I think all industry over the past two decades have gone down the route of maximizing profits and cutting costs. Hell, there are startups build around the idea of just ignoring or lobbying against legislation (Uber, AirBnB) and marking that arrogance as being "disruptive," as if they were some kind of civil rights pioneers. It's really impossible to tell what would have happened without Boeing buying MCD, but I there is a good chance we would have ended up here eventually anyway. Focusing on MCD in this article feels more of a narrative tool than an objective critique and analysis.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • hbosch 7y ago
    Maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's the retro mindset of work as a way of life, maybe it's just "how things used to be"... but I've spoken with a few old, retired Boeing engineers that are acquaintances or family friends (I live in Seattle) and a lot of them really make out the 70's/80's Boeing to be a "family". There is a warmth and camaraderie and a fondness that is hard to describe. Lot of these old engineers stay in touch, godfathers to each others kids, go on fishing trips, go to church together. Still have Thanksgivings together. At one late family member's remembrance I think more than half the attendees were retired Boeing engineers, or their families. I really do think that, rose-colored-glasses aside, it sounds like a few decades ago it really was the kind of place where aerogeeks ran the show and obsessed together over making great products like the article suggests. I know two people who work for Boeing today, as well, and I don't think either of them really like it very much.
    • 7y ago
• Aloha 7y ago
  I dispute that McDonnell Douglas was 'on the ropes' before the merger - the MD-80/90/95 family was selling well, and while the MD-11 was not, the market at that time for wide-body jets was fairly soft. In addition the C-17 was still being made as fast as it could be at that time. I'd also point to the success of the Delta II heavy lift vehicle too. Whats interesting to me, is the merger between McDonnell Aircraft and Douglas Aircraft was effectively a shotgun marriage. DAC was capital starved in the late 60's and merged for an infusion of capital.
  • bronson 7y ago
    Not many people would dispute that. From the article: "In 1996, Boeing took approximately 60% of the industry’s new commercial aircraft orders. Airbus, the European consortium, lingered far behind it, at 35%. McDonnell Douglas took the remaining 5%." And falling fast. New military contracts had dried up too, with no meaningful wins coming in the foreseeable future. Agreed, the parallels with the Douglas merger are interesting. Even including the military branch, not just DC.
  • cameldrv 7y ago
    The MD-80/90/95 didn't have a very big order book, and there was no replacement for it. The MD-11 was a failure, and the MD-12 was cancelled. Douglas essentially had no future after 2000. The military side was better, but the A-12 was cancelled, and they lost the JSF. The only bright spot was the Super Hornet, which was supposed to have been an interim aircraft until the JSF started to be produced.
    • Aloha 7y ago
      2000 is a bit premature, also in 97, the MD-95 was still a paper aircraft (first flight was not until 1998) - and the last MD-95 rolled out of Long Beach in 2006. Nor was a replacement for the MD-90 obviously needed The MD-11 had the same issues the 767 had at that time, meaning the market for wide body aircraft was slow, very slow. I suspect that had the merger with Boeing not happened, the MD-11, MD-90 and MD-95 would have continued on in sales for a while. I'm lead to believe Boeing didn't try as hard to sell the MD-95 (Boeing discontinued the MD-90 entirely because it competed in the same space as the 737) as McDonnell Douglas would have. I also suspect Boeing would rather have cancelled the ship as soon as the merger happened, but it would have cost them more to cancel it then, than it did by waiting 8-odd years. Growing up in Long Beach, it was clear to all the people who worked at DAC, that Boeing bought them for their Military side, not for the commercial aircraft though. In the end, 9/11 made the whole new aircraft market go squishy, and it lead to several project ends across the industry - most notably the 757.
• wallace_f 7y ago
  Imagine if the FTC actually still did their job, not just how much more innovation and competition there'd be, but also lives saved.
• oefrha 7y ago
  Previous discussion on basically the same story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304277
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• rb808 7y ago
  Looks like Boeing is the biggest producer of aircraft in the world. What is the problem again?
  • simsla 7y ago
    People dying, because cutting costs was considered more important than due diligence. Might doesn't make right.
    • maxharris 7y ago
      I agree with you, but what do you think of the point I have made here, which is that there's an even more fundamental problem drove the awful, immoral cost-cutting? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656
• cptskippy 7y ago
  This piece kind of reads like the HP / Compaq merger.
  • Iwan-Zotow 7y ago
    You mean Xerox/HP merger
    • ggm 7y ago
      You mean the Digital-Equipment Corp/Compaq merger
• Cyder 7y ago
  Capitalism is working in this case. Boeing is being punished. Market forces are not always instantaneous. The China boom made investors demand unreasonable returns for domestic companies as well. A good business plan and making solid money over time is no longer acceptable. The China boom changed the expectations of investors to unreasonable rates. But the China boom wasn't capitalism. The Chinese economy is highly controlled and this influence on more capitalistic markets is what happens where the two separate markets converge.
  • bgutierrez 7y ago
    Yes. If enough customers die using a product, people will stop using that product.
    • maxharris 7y ago
      Both of you have a point! I believe that I have identified a crucial factor in my comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656) that identifies the root of the problem. I hope that it helps in resolving this disagreement.
  • gnulinux 7y ago
    Capitalism is not working in this case since making faulty aircrafts should not be possible, by regulation, in the first place. Waiting for market to react gives companies to sort of "binary search" the market to find a sweet spot where they don't overspend on engineering, or underspend on engineering by making faulty aircrafts. The point of having regulation is to force companies not be able to perform this "binary search" so that there is a baseline they have to spend on engineering to be able to produce a commercial airliner.
  • thendrill 7y ago
    Yeh also "capitalism is working" is a very biased expressions. I am pretty sure you would be singing a different tune, if "market forces" were directly effecting you ( example: if u had family on a crashed 737 Max). Or you lost your job coz it is cheaper elsewhere.
• maxharris 7y ago
  I have a different view of the situation. I believe that the 737 Max disaster was directly caused by the idea that management is a valuable skill on its own, that management is somehow separable from the domain-specific knowledge required in order to make an honest buck. There are plenty of examples of engineers that make terrible managers, to be sure. But there are also plenty of examples of managers with business backgrounds that have absolutely no idea about the consequences of their decisions. An optimal result requires skill in both domains. By this point, you might be thinking, "Hey wait, isn't it true that cost-cutting also had a role in the crisis? Wasn't there at least one engineer that sounded the alarm in a memo?" And my answer to that is a resounding yes. But the question remains, where the hell did that idea come from? At no point did anyone think, "I'd love to spike my profits this quarter here and have huge disaster that will tank us in the next quarter." Therefore the problem isn't one of simple pursuit of the profit motive, because it is quite clear that Boeing hasn't profited from this situation long-term. And that's why I have focused explicitly on this foolish, self-defeating management fashion at the top of my mini essay here. This brings us to the topic of Boeing's future. I could be wrong about him, but the fact that they have selected a person who majored in accounting to be their new CEO does not bode well for them. At the very least he has a major gap in his background to overcome, and at best I can only see them just managing to hang on instead of growing. How does this relate to the merger issue? This management fashion I am speaking would have likely infected both McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing had they remained separate. That's because companies hire people out of the same pool of people that learn this stuff in their universities! Maybe there is a case to be made that having separate companies would make it slightly harder for them to both fail, but I believe that this isn't a very strong argument.
  • gnulinux 7y ago
    I agree with this analysis, and find it overall reasonable, but it seems to need a little more evidence, e.g. do we have any data that shows companies who put "generic managers" on top on regular fail more than those who put engineers on top. I'm disappointed that you're being downvoted, I wish someone who downvoted you wrote a reply.
    • 7y ago
• metabagel 7y ago
  Qatar Airways refuses to take Dreamliners built in South Carolina, due to quality issues. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner-production-problems.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
  • mzs 7y ago
    Then Boeing tried to deliver them just days before the end of the year but Qatar Airlines had them fly back. My guess is it really was that Boeing had not met the schedule for fitting the Qsuite and QA was having none of it. https://simpleflying.com/qatar-airways-flies-brand-new-boeing-787-9s-back-to-the-us/ https://simpleflying.com/qatar-airways-flies-brand-new-boein...
    • nexuist 7y ago
      >Qatar Airlines had them fly back Must be quite a somber experience piloting an aircraft just deemed unreliable by your employer...
      • mzs 7y ago
        It was eight months later, the planes were fine. This was about Boeing trying to deliver planes CY19 for accounting reasons that did not have business class seating that can turn into a conference room, the reason QA chose to buy them in the first place.
• pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  A Scapegoat has entered the arena.
• ausjke 7y ago
  Recently the highly controversial bill S.386(https://antis386.org/ https://antis386.org/) that mentioned Boeing used $9/hr India engineers to write some level of the software used on its airlines, is this true if there are any insiders who know something about it? Without a competitor Boeing has no intention to make the safest product anymore, however, Airline unlike others, must make sure safety/quality remains to be the No.1 priority. Any outsourcing should be carefully thought out before running towards the cheapest offer offshore.
• bynkman 7y ago
  > Stonecipher seems to have agreed with this assessment. “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.” Wow. In retrospect, this is an amoral path. Basically it's money over lives. Furthermore, this "intent" has cost them more financially.
  • jgeada 7y ago
    And yet for Stonecipher it was a personally financially successful personal decision and none of the consequences will hurt him personally. When the rewards always go to the top (aka shareholders) and consequences always fall elsewhere, this is the predictable consequence. We need some system such that shareholders and executives become personally responsible for these tragic yet predictable consequences.
    • MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
      Exactly this. No skin in the game will lead to these outcomes.
      • senderista 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
• vanusa 7y ago
  Companies merge, split up, get acquired, go bankrupt. It's what they do, and there's nothing inherently dysfunctional about that. By themselves, these actions don't cause mines to collapse, plans to fall from the sky and highly polluting vehicles to be put on the road with full knowledge of the company's senior leadership. If there is a systemic cause for these things -- it's yawning gaps regulatory oversight (and enforcement). But these gaps aren't accidents, and don't arise in a vacuum, either. Nor are they mere byproducts of what should otherwise by a working system. In effect, they're there by design. They are exactly the desired outcomes of a system -- and the governing ideology behind it -- that enshrines the "right of capital" as a fundamental right. And which (not coincidentally) seeks to protect the exercises of this "right" from the inevitable consequences of their actions, as much as it can get away with doing so. With carnage and tragedy being the inevitable results. Because that's what it was designed to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
• typon 7y ago
  What I don't understand is why the Boeing executives are not on trial for the negligent killing of 189 + 157 people?
  • d33 7y ago
    Shouldn't then car industry executives be also to blame for negligent killing of the ones whose death was a result of a car failure related to planned obsolescence?
    • markdown 7y ago
      Absolutely. If there is a direct link between wilful negligence and death, executives need to go to jail.
    • typon 7y ago
      They absolutely should. This is why in engineering there are safety factors built in and ethical considerations seriously taken when designing projects.
  • axaxs 7y ago
    Agreed. I think holding executives criminally liable for their company would change a -lot- in a good way. More hiring, increased wages, increased safety standards just to name a few. I know if I were liable and in charge, I'd only want the best of the best working for me. And if it's customer facing, I sure as hell am not hiring the kinds of people typically associated with minimum wage jobs. Then again, maybe paying those folks more would lead to better behavior, who is to say...
  • Japhy_Ryder 7y ago
    The sad truth is that some people truly are above the law. Us normal people would go to jail. "They" will not.
• soapboxrocket 7y ago
  This is absolutely on target. I am hearing from friends in Wichita that the Textron Aviation merger with Beechcraft is creating the same situation as the Douglas-Boeing merger. I have friends that have been with Textron for a long time that are getting new bosses from Beechcraft and the term that is getting used is "well that was Beeched."
  • senderista 7y ago
    Hope they find making cluster bombs a rewarding career choice.
• cletus 7y ago
  I am not an aeronautical engineer. A year or two ago I read a comment here that certainly seemed legitimate that talked about airplane design and it went something like this (paraphrased because I can't find it now): > As soon as you move the engines, you probably need to move the wings. As soon as you move the wings, you need to redesign the airframe. As soon as you do that you're designing a whole new plane. I can't even remember if this was talking about the Max at all. So it seems to me the core problem here is Boeing had reached the limit of what they could do with a 50 year old airframe while maintaining the common type rating and aircraft and engine design have simply changed. Airbus may eventually have that problem with the A320 family. I really don't know. But they don't have it yet. Part of controlling costs at a budget airline is maintaining a single fleet (in type rating terms). The two choices here seem to be the 737 or the A320. The Max came about because there was a huge captured demand for it from the likes of Southwest. Would this have happened without the MD merger? I can't say but I'd be surprised if it couldn't given the demand from budget airlines. Of course people like to take an issue like this and tie it to whatever axe they want to grind too.
  • temac 7y ago
    > Airbus may eventually have that problem with the A320 family. I really don't know. But they don't have it yet. Airbus is already fly-by-wire on the A320, and they know how to do it not too stupidly. They can provide the same control laws and feedbacks to new models without introducing ugly hacks on top of mechanical commands. That helps. I believe other Airbus families already use controls that are very similar to the ones used in the A320, and even if that's not of the same type rating that probably also ease training a lot. The 737 will eventually have to go; even the somehow modernized versions are a quite outdated way to make big commercial airplanes nowadays. (And the whole idea of grandfathering regulation is utterly stupid, btw.)
  • Gibbon1 7y ago
    I think the thought is without the merger there is a deterrent timeline where Boeing maintains enough management competence to not turn development of the 787 into an outsourced/vendor funded cluster fuck. Which might have left them with enough funding to replace the 737 with something modern and safe. Meaning failure to develop the 787 on time an on budget left them with no time to develop a proper replacement for the 737 without losing customers to the Airbus 320. Seriously it took Boeing about 9 years to develop and deliver the 787.
• Stierlitz 7y ago
  McDonnell Douglas to blame for 737 Max crisis? I don't think so. But full marks to the PR team that thought up that retrospective self serving disinformation.
• cryptozeus 7y ago
  Sure lets blame 40 year old merger
• dzonga 7y ago
  political corruption brought the 737 max to the ground. once a manufacturer has power to do their own QA instead of the FAA or any other independent authority, you're doing stuff on a 3rd world status level. no oversight. investor driven.
• combatentropy 7y ago
  From the article: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm,” [Harry Stonecipher, the new CEO from McDonnell-Douglas] told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.” I lay the blame at the feet of each person at the company who acted selfishly. Selfishness gets an easy pass here on Hacker News --- well, just about everywhere these days, I guess. Take this recent thread, where the submitter confesses that he has been slacking off for 6 years at work. A lot of people egged him on. I remember one comment that advised him to double down and go Full Sociopath (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964204). I could not think of a good rebuttal. I mean, I work hard even when no one is watching, because I am religious, but I did not imagine it going well if I just laid out the idea of a transcendental world. But the only solution I see is reformation of the individual, one by one, not revolution of the social structure --- change from the inside out, instead of the outside in. The enemy is not the rich or the poor, the executive or the engineer. Any of these people can be dangerous, if their philosophy is maximum selfishness. Furthermore, no set of laws is clever enough to keep the peace if the majority of citizens are sociopaths. They will always find the legal loopholes. On the other hand, a country with the dumbest regulatory set-up would still run fine if peopled by saints, people who are the opposite of selfish, who are always asking, am I treating others how I wish to be treated?
  • noahtallen 7y ago
    I’ve got to agree with you. Selfishness in your job at Boeing, perhaps, means you care less about the safety of the plane and more about doing the minimum you can. Maybe that means you don’t report something you may have if you were more invested. At my job as a software engineer working on tools for making websites, it may just mean that a user can not accomplish X or that a bug goes unfixed for a while. But compounded over time, those little things done by a lot of people can mean a plane crashes — or in my case, that the company looses users and I may be out of a job. Of course, you should be selfish in that you should take care of yourself and not seriously stress yourself over work. But sometimes not doing an uncomfortable thing (for me, reaching out to an unfamiliar person) can seriously hinder the quality of my work. That quality definitely manifests itself in the product in big and small ways.
• deleted 7y ago
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• fargle 7y ago
  See also: Lockheed purchase of General Dynamics aircraft division in 1990s...
• mrtweetyhack 7y ago
  Boeing purchase MDD just so they can crash planes just like MDD used to do. Good job.
• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  Are we doing an another round of armchair aviation engineers outlining ad nauseum all the reasons they believe the 737 Max cannot possibly fly and should never have been considered that ignores all the evidence that the two accidents were successfully root-caused to an issue that has now been fixed and is undergoing an understandably and embarrassingly lengthy process of certification? Seems to be an almost daily ritual on HN these days. Yes Boeing has issues; especially in their senior management. That's why they are struggling to keep up with competitors in the cheaper/faster/more efficient/less noisy category (aka. the market). But also, the 737 is still one of the safest and most successful planes ever and last year was one of the safest years in aviation history with many thousands of them flying around every day. Once patched up, the max will be part of that fleet for decades to come and is unlikely to bend the excellent safety record in any statistically meaningful way regardless of the current sentiments or the recent accidents. IMHO, Boeing has some corporate culture issues to sort out and it definitely does not help that they operate as a state protected monopoly that mostly acts to shovel defense money around and enrich contractors, share holders, politicians, lobbyists, etc. involved with cutting up that pie. But lets be real, every other big aviation manufacturer works exactly the same way and it seems to work fine in terms of safety. Fundamentally there are no good technical reasons for the hundreds of 737 maxes to be permanently retired over real, perceived or imagined risks. Yes, there are some technical issues that are addressable, are being addressed, and require lengthy inspections & certification to verify that they have indeed been addressed. That's basically what's happening because they are fixable issues. There are no known un-fixable issues here, no known show stopping design flaws that can't be worked around, no known unacceptable (i.e. uncertifiable) hacks, etc. Some of the fixes may indeed lead to some retraining effort, which I'm sure is annoying but not fatal for Boeing. And yes, there's brand damage and Boeing is probably going to have to do some pro-forma rebranding (737 maxi-cosi, anyone?) and symbolic modifications. When their choice is to go out of business or attempt to fix entirely fixable technical issues they'd be complete idiots to get sucked down the first hole. Permanently retiring many hundreds of planes that once fixed are perfectly good for decades to come is just not going to be a thing. Boeing going bankrupt over this under the current political climate is also not a thing. To big to fail means rules can be bended, changed, abused, or otherwise ignored. That's how this happened to begin with. One way or another the FAA will ultimately rubber stamp whatever needs rubber stamping. Some time this year, the thing will resume flying and Boeing goes back to licking its wounds and planning the next iteration of its products. I imaging they'd be tempted to unshelve some projects they had for future products as well and dust off what lingering R&D capability they have to come up with something new. That'd be a smart investment.