7 ms·

Staff emails claim Boeing 777X ‘shares Max problem’

riffraff 7y ago
Have airlines cancelled orders of the 737 Max? If yes the will they be canceling orders of this one too?
- gsnedders 7y ago
  > Have airlines cancelled orders of the 737 Max? Yes. (Though IAG did agree a letter of intent—not an actual order, though—with Boeing for 200 aircraft. It was rumoured this was the biggest discount seen in the aviation world since Ryanair's large post-9/11 order.) > If yes the will they be canceling orders of this one too? Probably not? The 777X will be looked at incredibly closely prior to certification, and doesn't have the design oddities of the 737 MAX, so it probably is much lower risk, even with the cultural problems.
  - comfymatrix 7y ago
    > The 777X will be looked at incredibly closely prior to certification One would hope so...
dehrmann 7y ago
That's a disingenuous headline (I blame the Telegraph). > In an email from June 2018, before the first Max crash, one Boeing worker wrote: “Best part is we are re-starting this whole thing with the 777X with the same supplier and have signed up to an even more aggressive schedule.” > Another member of staff warns about a relentless cost focus... > Last September, the 777X suffered a setback when it failed a ground test of its strength, suffering an explosive decompression that tore the fuselage and blew off a passenger door. None of those are what I would call the "Max problem," (I'd consider that to be MCAS) but there does seem to be a systemic problem off cost cutting and aggressive deadlines.
- neuro_image3 7y ago
  Still doesn’t fill me with reassurance about the safety of flying on one of these.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    Cost cutting and aggressive timelines will always happen, and in a company as large as Boeing, someone will have made a comment like this about pretty much anything, so I have a really hard time telling if this is telling data or hindsight bias.
    - pgsbathhouse 7y ago
      These are qualified engineers who treat their job seriously. It's not hindsight bias, they are proactively warning about the same pipeline issues.
    - salawat 7y ago
      >Cost cutting and aggressive timelines will always happen, and in a company as large as Boeing, someone will have made a comment like this about pretty much anything, so I have a really hard time telling if this is telling data or hindsight bias. Considering you accept that it's 100% certain it'll be be said it seems to be pretty telling data. I know we all laugh that management automatically fudges the numbers out of engineering, but mayhaps in Boeing's case the MBA logic of doing so is running into the issue of physics not being amenable to change just because management wants an earlier delivery date.
    - crdoconnor 7y ago
      China's approach with its 737MAX competitor, has, ironically been the exact opposite of this. Their fear wasn't getting the price low enough to satisfy shareholders but not getting the airline approved by US and European regulators. I was dubious before the crashes but after Boeing's reaction to the crashes I'm fairly sure I'd feel safer on their planes than Boeing's.
      - 7y ago
jonplackett 7y ago
I can’t read the whole article because of the paywall. But from the lead in it doesn’t look like it really is ‘the same issues’ as in problems with a lack of redundant sensor and overly aggressive correction due to engines that are too big. Anyone whose read the whole thing care to correct me?
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  The sensors and correction are a symptom of the issue at Boeing, which is an aggressive pursuit of profit over safety.
  - jonplackett 7y ago
    That's not the same as being the same issue. Issue implies something more specific.
    - ouid 7y ago
      > Issue implies something more specific. Why? No it doesn't.
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      Not at all. The 'issue' could be a technical issue, a cultural issue, a corporate issue, a documentation issue, a legislative issue, a personal issue. If you stop diagnosing when you find a faulty part, you aren't diving deep enough. Ask why some more -- what allowed us to even ship a faulty part in the first place? The sensors in the plane are a faulty technical design, but what systemic issues enabled that faulty design to be shipped at all? Those are the root cause issues.
shadow-banned 7y ago
Please, anyone let this be a lesson: you can destroy a brand that took decades to build in a matter of months.
- spamizbad 7y ago
  yeah but you can walk away with a massive exit package. If you are ambitious, unscrupulous and mostly motivated by your own self-interests you needn't burden yourself with such sentimental matters like the age and reputation of your former employer.
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  The decision to launch a product and the immediate after process take a few months, but the entire product development process took years likely. Also....it makes me uncomfortable when news stations report "internal email says X". Like...a) if it's not a news outlet that's tech knowledgeable that's always scary b) let's say 5000 employees worked on this. 20x emails per day. 5 year period (10000 days). That is a lot of emails that went into discovery for the attorneys or forensic guys to parse. Theres probably a lot of knowledge in there but humans are smart about that they selectively email (I knew someone that interned in the Obama White House and a large email flow was "documenting for posterity what they wanted to be in the record" through emails to no one in particular, was what she said). The 777 could be messed up, but "staff emails" is such an uncomfortable source. Did the likely top tier law firm really leak email contents?
  - kortilla 7y ago
    > documenting for posterity what they wanted to be in the record The correct term is “re-iterate the talking points on the record to help shape the narrative”. It’s not for posterity, it’s for ass covering. If all corporate emails were to become a matter of public record, they would be filled with PR-speak as well.
    - salawat 7y ago
      It isn't PR speak when you just tell the truth in an email and don't let management bully you into not saying what needs to be said to prop up their take on it. It can end up a bit dangerous, because they'll be more than happy to drag you through the mud in court to try to discredit you, but a lot of people kinda expect that anyway.
avalys 7y ago
These articles are getting a little tiresome. Private enterprise is about competition and cost reduction. That’s what drives improvement, innovation, and efficiency, and it’s what differentiates private enterprise from government spending, which is about justifying why things need to be so expensive. Yes, Boeing was too aggressive about reducing cost to compete with Airbus and they need some major reform because hundreds of people are dead. But let’s not forget that this drive towards cost reduction is what still allows you today fly across the country in perfect safety for $300. All these people saying “Of course Boeing should have designed a totally new plane from scratch with quadruple-redundant systems, only the most experienced factory workers to build it, all parts made out of unicorn tears for safety’s sake, etc.” have a misguided view of how engineering is done. Perfectly reasonable decisions by Boeing to try to reduce costs for their customers and passengers are now being characterized negatively, merely because they are intended to reduce cost. People don’t seem to realize that it’s easy to build an expensive airplane - the hard part of engineering is not always choosing the easy, expensive option.
- gregoriol 7y ago
  You probably are a developer, but engineering in life critical fields can't be reduced to cost efficiency.
  - avalys 7y ago
    I’m a developer and a pilot. I understand that cost is not the only factor. My frustration is, the attitude in the media today is to report negatively on every single instance they can find of Boeing trying to reduce costs as if that is a sin in itself, when it’s actually the most fundamental driver of improvement in the entire economy!
    - mattrp 7y ago
      I sympathize with your view that the media tends to lump things together in a gross and unfair way. However we happen to be talking about a company with a culture that apparently sees nothing wrong with openly trashing the faa’s certification process while another division spends $22B of taxpayer money on an unflyable space launch system. One kind of wonders if they care about the American public at all.
bookAlot 7y ago
Howd they get those emails? Maybe they sent them themselves? Boycott telegraph ty.
gordon_freeman 7y ago
On another note: I just wish if every website would charge based on pay-per-read (e.g. $0.50/article) instead of forcing me to register or start a free trial or pay for a monthly subscription.
- craigharley 7y ago
  It’s all because of card fees. It’s not economical to charge $0.5
  - Numberwang 7y ago
    what about cybercoins or bitdongles?
  - jiofih 7y ago
    That “problem” has been solved two decades ago. In the EU debt reins, with zero fees, and there are dozens of micro-payments systems operating all over the world. Isn’t Venmo big in the US?
    - tjohns 7y ago
      Venmo is far from ubiquitous. (None of my friends or family have a Venmo account, for instance. They prefer other apps like Square Cash / Google Pay / PayPal, or don’t use payment apps at all.) Debit cards are not popular here because they tend to lack robust fraud protection - and even if they did, your bank account could easily be zeroed for weeks while they work to reverse the fraudulent charges. Also, debit cards still have an interchange fee here. It’s cheaper than credit cards, but even for a small purchase there’s usually a $0.20 minimum fee - which is too much for microtransactions.
      - jiofih 7y ago
        > they tend to lack robust fraud protection That’s funny. Debit cards have always been PIN based and way safer than credit. I’ve never personally heard of a single case of fraud. There is nothing stopping micropayments from happening as a technology, except political/market incentives. It’s already a reality everywhere else, even north Africa. Rationalizing it just solidifies the status quo.
userbinator 7y ago
It's not just planes; I've noticed a lot of things seem to get better over time, then take a nosedive (pun not intended). I wonder if it's an inherent property of systems to do this, or if it's the result of some perverse incentives to have "progress" at all costs.
- pgt 7y ago
  Yes, it's a type of evolutionary gradient descent: you see an entity get stuck in a locality-constrained hill-climb before it gets culled by another entity that climbed a different hill (of regulation).
OliverJones 7y ago
If William Langeweische's NYT article from last September (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...) is accurate, Boeing is scrambling to make a transition from selling airplanes requiring extremely high pilot skill ("airmanship", Langeweische calls it) to requiring medium pilot skill. They're trying to make the transition due to competition from Airbus. They're partly using public relations and market position to do it. "No transition training needed to fly this differently-shaped airplane!" It's not terribly surprising this is causing all kinds of upheavals at Boeing. Richard Feynman is right again. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." Boeing changed my life. My family traveled a lot when I was a little kid. The advent of the 707 meant we no longer had to spend five days on a ship in the North Atlantic to get from Europe to New York or vice versa. I sure hope they can pull their company out of its present poorly controlled descent.
- yc-kraln 7y ago
  Oof. I have to assume your last sentence was intended.
mxscho 7y ago
Boeing is the stock with the biggest weight within the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Trump often uses this index as a public measure of his personal success. Is it too much to assume that the government would try to figure out some rescue operations (whatever they may look like) to save Boeing financially in case that this is required? One reason for the trade dispute with the EU is Airbus.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  Not just for that reason - Boeing are pretty important for the military for all sorts of reasons. They would never let them go bankrupt.
  - Traster 7y ago
    Well, they don't need to go bankrupt to tank the DJIA. Having said that, Trump would cite the Eurostoxx 50 if he felt it made him look good. It's more a case of selecting data that makes him look good than actually being committed to one understanding of success.

Have airlines cancelled orders of the 737 Max? If yes the will they be canceling orders of this one too?

gsnedders 7y ago
> Have airlines cancelled orders of the 737 Max? Yes. (Though IAG did agree a letter of intent—not an actual order, though—with Boeing for 200 aircraft. It was rumoured this was the biggest discount seen in the aviation world since Ryanair's large post-9/11 order.) > If yes the will they be canceling orders of this one too? Probably not? The 777X will be looked at incredibly closely prior to certification, and doesn't have the design oddities of the 737 MAX, so it probably is much lower risk, even with the cultural problems.
- comfymatrix 7y ago
  > The 777X will be looked at incredibly closely prior to certification One would hope so...

That's a disingenuous headline (I blame the Telegraph). > In an email from June 2018, before the first Max crash, one Boeing worker wrote: “Best part is we are re-starting this whole thing with the 777X with the same supplier and have signed up to an even more aggressive schedule.” > Another member of staff warns about a relentless cost focus... > Last September, the 777X suffered a setback when it failed a ground test of its strength, suffering an explosive decompression that tore the fuselage and blew off a passenger door. None of those are what I would call the "Max problem," (I'd consider that to be MCAS) but there does seem to be a systemic problem off cost cutting and aggressive deadlines.

neuro_image3 7y ago
Still doesn’t fill me with reassurance about the safety of flying on one of these.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Cost cutting and aggressive timelines will always happen, and in a company as large as Boeing, someone will have made a comment like this about pretty much anything, so I have a really hard time telling if this is telling data or hindsight bias.
  - pgsbathhouse 7y ago
    These are qualified engineers who treat their job seriously. It's not hindsight bias, they are proactively warning about the same pipeline issues.
  - salawat 7y ago
    >Cost cutting and aggressive timelines will always happen, and in a company as large as Boeing, someone will have made a comment like this about pretty much anything, so I have a really hard time telling if this is telling data or hindsight bias. Considering you accept that it's 100% certain it'll be be said it seems to be pretty telling data. I know we all laugh that management automatically fudges the numbers out of engineering, but mayhaps in Boeing's case the MBA logic of doing so is running into the issue of physics not being amenable to change just because management wants an earlier delivery date.
  - crdoconnor 7y ago
    China's approach with its 737MAX competitor, has, ironically been the exact opposite of this. Their fear wasn't getting the price low enough to satisfy shareholders but not getting the airline approved by US and European regulators. I was dubious before the crashes but after Boeing's reaction to the crashes I'm fairly sure I'd feel safer on their planes than Boeing's.
    - 7y ago

jonplackett 7y ago

I can’t read the whole article because of the paywall. But from the lead in it doesn’t look like it really is ‘the same issues’ as in problems with a lack of redundant sensor and overly aggressive correction due to engines that are too big. Anyone whose read the whole thing care to correct me?

Pfhreak 7y ago
The sensors and correction are a symptom of the issue at Boeing, which is an aggressive pursuit of profit over safety.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  That's not the same as being the same issue. Issue implies something more specific.
  - ouid 7y ago
    > Issue implies something more specific. Why? No it doesn't.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Not at all. The 'issue' could be a technical issue, a cultural issue, a corporate issue, a documentation issue, a legislative issue, a personal issue. If you stop diagnosing when you find a faulty part, you aren't diving deep enough. Ask why some more -- what allowed us to even ship a faulty part in the first place? The sensors in the plane are a faulty technical design, but what systemic issues enabled that faulty design to be shipped at all? Those are the root cause issues.

shadow-banned 7y ago

Please, anyone let this be a lesson: you can destroy a brand that took decades to build in a matter of months.

spamizbad 7y ago
yeah but you can walk away with a massive exit package. If you are ambitious, unscrupulous and mostly motivated by your own self-interests you needn't burden yourself with such sentimental matters like the age and reputation of your former employer.
texasbigdata 7y ago
The decision to launch a product and the immediate after process take a few months, but the entire product development process took years likely. Also....it makes me uncomfortable when news stations report "internal email says X". Like...a) if it's not a news outlet that's tech knowledgeable that's always scary b) let's say 5000 employees worked on this. 20x emails per day. 5 year period (10000 days). That is a lot of emails that went into discovery for the attorneys or forensic guys to parse. Theres probably a lot of knowledge in there but humans are smart about that they selectively email (I knew someone that interned in the Obama White House and a large email flow was "documenting for posterity what they wanted to be in the record" through emails to no one in particular, was what she said). The 777 could be messed up, but "staff emails" is such an uncomfortable source. Did the likely top tier law firm really leak email contents?
- kortilla 7y ago
  > documenting for posterity what they wanted to be in the record The correct term is “re-iterate the talking points on the record to help shape the narrative”. It’s not for posterity, it’s for ass covering. If all corporate emails were to become a matter of public record, they would be filled with PR-speak as well.
  - salawat 7y ago
    It isn't PR speak when you just tell the truth in an email and don't let management bully you into not saying what needs to be said to prop up their take on it. It can end up a bit dangerous, because they'll be more than happy to drag you through the mud in court to try to discredit you, but a lot of people kinda expect that anyway.

avalys 7y ago

These articles are getting a little tiresome. Private enterprise is about competition and cost reduction. That’s what drives improvement, innovation, and efficiency, and it’s what differentiates private enterprise from government spending, which is about justifying why things need to be so expensive. Yes, Boeing was too aggressive about reducing cost to compete with Airbus and they need some major reform because hundreds of people are dead. But let’s not forget that this drive towards cost reduction is what still allows you today fly across the country in perfect safety for $300. All these people saying “Of course Boeing should have designed a totally new plane from scratch with quadruple-redundant systems, only the most experienced factory workers to build it, all parts made out of unicorn tears for safety’s sake, etc.” have a misguided view of how engineering is done. Perfectly reasonable decisions by Boeing to try to reduce costs for their customers and passengers are now being characterized negatively, merely because they are intended to reduce cost. People don’t seem to realize that it’s easy to build an expensive airplane - the hard part of engineering is not always choosing the easy, expensive option.

gregoriol 7y ago
You probably are a developer, but engineering in life critical fields can't be reduced to cost efficiency.
- avalys 7y ago
  I’m a developer and a pilot. I understand that cost is not the only factor. My frustration is, the attitude in the media today is to report negatively on every single instance they can find of Boeing trying to reduce costs as if that is a sin in itself, when it’s actually the most fundamental driver of improvement in the entire economy!
  - mattrp 7y ago
    I sympathize with your view that the media tends to lump things together in a gross and unfair way. However we happen to be talking about a company with a culture that apparently sees nothing wrong with openly trashing the faa’s certification process while another division spends $22B of taxpayer money on an unflyable space launch system. One kind of wonders if they care about the American public at all.

bookAlot 7y ago

Howd they get those emails? Maybe they sent them themselves? Boycott telegraph ty.

gordon_freeman 7y ago

On another note: I just wish if every website would charge based on pay-per-read (e.g. $0.50/article) instead of forcing me to register or start a free trial or pay for a monthly subscription.

craigharley 7y ago
It’s all because of card fees. It’s not economical to charge $0.5
- Numberwang 7y ago
  what about cybercoins or bitdongles?
- jiofih 7y ago
  That “problem” has been solved two decades ago. In the EU debt reins, with zero fees, and there are dozens of micro-payments systems operating all over the world. Isn’t Venmo big in the US?
  - tjohns 7y ago
    Venmo is far from ubiquitous. (None of my friends or family have a Venmo account, for instance. They prefer other apps like Square Cash / Google Pay / PayPal, or don’t use payment apps at all.) Debit cards are not popular here because they tend to lack robust fraud protection - and even if they did, your bank account could easily be zeroed for weeks while they work to reverse the fraudulent charges. Also, debit cards still have an interchange fee here. It’s cheaper than credit cards, but even for a small purchase there’s usually a $0.20 minimum fee - which is too much for microtransactions.
    - jiofih 7y ago
      > they tend to lack robust fraud protection That’s funny. Debit cards have always been PIN based and way safer than credit. I’ve never personally heard of a single case of fraud. There is nothing stopping micropayments from happening as a technology, except political/market incentives. It’s already a reality everywhere else, even north Africa. Rationalizing it just solidifies the status quo.

userbinator 7y ago

It's not just planes; I've noticed a lot of things seem to get better over time, then take a nosedive (pun not intended). I wonder if it's an inherent property of systems to do this, or if it's the result of some perverse incentives to have "progress" at all costs.

pgt 7y ago
Yes, it's a type of evolutionary gradient descent: you see an entity get stuck in a locality-constrained hill-climb before it gets culled by another entity that climbed a different hill (of regulation).

OliverJones 7y ago

If William Langeweische's NYT article from last September (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...) is accurate, Boeing is scrambling to make a transition from selling airplanes requiring extremely high pilot skill ("airmanship", Langeweische calls it) to requiring medium pilot skill. They're trying to make the transition due to competition from Airbus. They're partly using public relations and market position to do it. "No transition training needed to fly this differently-shaped airplane!" It's not terribly surprising this is causing all kinds of upheavals at Boeing. Richard Feynman is right again. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." Boeing changed my life. My family traveled a lot when I was a little kid. The advent of the 707 meant we no longer had to spend five days on a ship in the North Atlantic to get from Europe to New York or vice versa. I sure hope they can pull their company out of its present poorly controlled descent.

yc-kraln 7y ago
Oof. I have to assume your last sentence was intended.

mxscho 7y ago

Boeing is the stock with the biggest weight within the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Trump often uses this index as a public measure of his personal success. Is it too much to assume that the government would try to figure out some rescue operations (whatever they may look like) to save Boeing financially in case that this is required? One reason for the trade dispute with the EU is Airbus.

jonplackett 7y ago
Not just for that reason - Boeing are pretty important for the military for all sorts of reasons. They would never let them go bankrupt.
- Traster 7y ago
  Well, they don't need to go bankrupt to tank the DJIA. Having said that, Trump would cite the Eurostoxx 50 if he felt it made him look good. It's more a case of selecting data that makes him look good than actually being committed to one understanding of success.