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‘This Has Been Going on for Years’: Boeing’s Manufacturing Mess

324 points by eduction 3y ago

dangle1 3y ago
https://archive.ph/C9kRR https://archive.ph/C9kRR
jqpabc123 3y ago
Eventually, Boeing management will probably decide it is cheaper to just buy planes from Airbus with the word "Boeing" conspicuously engraved on various components. American management style is to focus on marketing as the source of all revenue to be exalted. Engineering, design and manufacturing are expenses to be minimized and controlled. Right now, Boeing management is looking hard to find reasonable manufacturing scapegoats and when they do, heads will roll. Clearly, management had no involvement. Gives you that warm, fuzzy and safe feeling doesn't it?
- megablast 3y ago
  Why would an airline buy an Airbus, or a Boeing branded Airbus with Boeing markup?
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    They’re already buying an Airbus branded Bombardier with an Airbus markup so why not?
  - LgWoodenBadger 3y ago
    People do strange things, like buying John-Deere-badged excavators manufactured by Hitachi, or JD-badged dozers manufactured by Liebherr.
    - mindslight 3y ago
      Or JD-badged lawnmowers built by MTD.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > Why would an airline buy an Airbus Because they're the best planes available? > or a Boeing branded Airbus with Boeing markup? Because the Boeing markup is less than the US import tariff?
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Because they have no choice. There are currently 2 aircraft companies in the world that make commercial jets: Boeing and Airbus (we'll ignore Comac for now). If Airbus somehow bought up all of Boeing's manufacturing facilities and capability, leaving Boeing as just a re-badger, then airlines would have no choice but to buy an Airbus that either has an Airbus badge or a Boeing badge.
  - jqpabc123 3y ago
    In a word ---- marketing. For the same reason people currently buy "American" autos (and planes) built from parts sourced around the world. In American management culture, marketing is the knee jerk solution to any problem and the holy grail from which all revenue is gifted. They are true believers in the "magic" of being able to "game" people into making decisions based on something other than logic. This same culture explains how/why the internet we have today is built around privacy invasion and (wait for it) ... marketing.
- Havoc 3y ago
  > Boeing management is looking hard to find reasonable manufacturing scapegoats Bit like when the two planes fell out of the sky and the third world pilots were blamed / strongly hinted at as being inferior
  - therealbilly 3y ago
    There was some truth to that. The 737 MAX is a hot aircraft (a light airframe with new powerful engines) that could quickly get away from you. Most US pilots come from the military and are typically top notch. Third world pilots to be quite honest, don't measure up in all areas.
rdtsc 3y ago
https://archive.is/t0lZc https://archive.is/t0lZc
Morte42 3y ago
Boeing intentionally spread its operations to as many states as possible in the US to guarantee itself some level of privilege amongst a large number of politicians from both major parties. There are clearly downsides to having manufacturing split up like this but the decision wasn't made for its engineering perks. Boeing is a sinking ship but nobody is eager to rock the boat lest their part of the ship take on more water than the others.
- stefan_ 3y ago
  That’s not really any different from how Airbus works (and explicitly so). But I learned that Boeing literally outsourced the fuselage and that makes you wonder if they are really fit to build airplanes…
  - Sirizarry 3y ago
    Do you have an article or two where I could start the airbus rabbit hole?
    - pcurve 3y ago
      Here's a growing list of approved suppliers for Airbus. https://www.airbus.com/sites/g/files/jlcbta136/files/2023-04 https://www.airbus.com/sites/g/files/jlcbta136/files/2023-04... Their larger planes are assembled in Toulouse, but smaller planes are made globally.
  - dreamcompiler 3y ago
    Boeing outsourced the fuselage to Boeing in Wichita, which had always built them. Boeing spun off that branch into a separate company now called Spirit, which is still basically Boeing except for its name.
    - hakfoo 3y ago
      If it's "still Boeing except for the name", that still smells funny. They got something out of spawning a new corporate entity. Without a convincing TL;DR I think most of us will assume it's for reasons that sound good to Boeing business people, but not to outside people. (I. e. being a "new entity" to avoid existing labour contracts, or serving as a liability firewall in the event chunks of plane start flying off)
rdtsc 3y ago
The paper from 2001 by Dr. LJ Hart-Smith, referenced in the article is just as interesting as the article itself https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-outsourcing https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-... If you squint, could apply some of those observation to the world of software. For a TL;DR just skip to Hart-Smith's recommendations list at the end of the paper. Here are the ones I liked: > Look continuously at the entire activity. Do not minimize costs in isolation. Understand that one global cost minimization is worth far more than even 20 sub-optimum cost reductions. > Retain sufficient in-house production manufacturing that it is possible for future engineers to acquire the skills needed to develop new products, without which all businesses will fail. Even the work that is out-sourced requires internal expertise to write the specifications. > Acknowledge that cost-saving techniques that work in other high-volume industries are often quite inappropriate for low-volume industries like aerospace. > Listen more to your own employees about how to save cost than to any outside business consultants who have never run a factory producing your kind of product. In any event, if the advice they offer changes every year, it cannot possibly be correct.
- baby 3y ago
  > Retain sufficient in-house production manufacturing that it is possible for future engineers to acquire the skills needed to develop new products, without which all businesses will fail. Even the work that is out-sourced requires internal expertise to write the specifications. Damn, that really reminds me of a previous company I worked for, that wanted to replace important core internal libraries with open source libraries. My argument was always that we should always have in-house knowledge of the core technologies. I think a lot of companies fail to think long-term. > Listen more to your own employees about how to save cost than to any outside business consultants who have never run a factory producing your kind of product. In any event, if the advice they offer changes every year, it cannot possibly be correct. This one is the difference between management-driven company and engineers-driven company.
  - groestl 3y ago
    Open source is different, in that you as a company can become maintainer and therefore expert of that component _and_ profit of other work being upstreamed. In case the library is not your USP, I think it's not that clear cut.
outside1234 3y ago
Note: Alan Mulally, CEO of Boeing, was briefly in the running for CEO at instead of Satya. Just shocking to think how bad a choice that would have been. * https://www.businessinsider.com/alan-mulally-as-microsoft-ceo-2013-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/alan-mulally-as-microsoft-ce...
- chihuahua 3y ago
  Very interesting, I had no idea. After all these years, I'm still stunned that Microsoft got a new CEO who didn't run it into the ground. They used to make so many bone-headed decisions at the top levels.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    They were comically thin skinned in the Ballmer era. My boss used to have us flaunt MacBooks and iPhones when we would have senior MS execs come in to get yelled at or for a hard negotiation. They’d get visibly agitated. It was funny.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    They did but running it into the ground they did not. Questionable business practices sure, but they were successful.
    - chihuahua 3y ago
      I'm still amazed they ended up with 0% market share in mobile phones. That took a some effort, considering they had Windows CE and Windows Mobile for years. Then Windows Phone, and they kept changing the APIs with every release so that nothing was ever backwards compatible. In a CMD shell I still have to use the goddamned backslash because of slavish compatibility with CP/M from 1974, but on the phone they create an incompatible set of APIs with every release. Congratulations, guys, well done.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Bad? That would have been a great choice! I wish I could see the parallel universe where Mulally became CEO of Microsoft. Even better, it'd be nice to see him as CEO of Apple.
gumby 3y ago
This point (I put it in italics) should be discussed more: > At the time, then-Boeing executive Alan Mulally said selling the factory to a private-equity firm would let Boeing focus on final assembly, where it could add the most value to its airplanes. By now I think we’ve learned that products made in factories owned by PE firms should carry warning labels. They are proactively anti-quality organizations, focused on extracting the maximum cash out in the short term at the cost of long term value.
- ldoughty 3y ago
  You could say the same about publicity traded companies. It all depends on who is in charge... And unfortunately self-serving people tend to reach the top more easily in both scenarios. You don't get Dan Price's very often (relatively). In public companies, there is more public information, but that doesn't stop a company from doing "bad" things of the short term stock movement is good enough. Look at all the merger promises that are broken. They all know what they are doing. Uphold the promise a year, then it's to late to undo the merger when you start to ignore the promise. Can also look at all the fines companies get for willfully breaking laws (or treading the line).. (fine < profits)? success!
  - gumby 3y ago
    I think the PE companies have a specifically pathological and parasitic business model. There is more info about public companies and the majority of them don't suffer from the things you mention (which are real phenomena), and when they occur in the majority they do more from incompetence than malice. (I'm not talking about microcap companies). The PE model is: - buy company with debt. - after purchase company assumes the debt (pays off PE company) and pays further fees to acquirer - company therefore cannot make a profit, cuts staff which cuts output over time - company goes bankrupt This is the canonical business model from the big PE companies like Bain (Romney), KKR, Blackstone, CVC, Carlyle, etc.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      Something does not add up. Banks would not lend to PE firms of they would all then go on to default.
healthdare 3y ago
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PedroBatista 3y ago
Since the late 90s/early 00's this type of concerns / horrible culture shifts and strategic mistakes were known and by the time the Dreamliner came out it was common knowledge even in the mainstream. Of course when the Max 8's started to fall and killing people everybody pretended to be shocked and surprised again. And of course the "incidents" are always "different and not related", but as any very complex system goes, these "incidents" always end up happening due to the same root cause. And yet again another evidence nobody learned anything with the latest big scandal of 2018/19, Boeing actively lobbied to reduce and get even more exceptions for QA and safety rules AFTER 2019. During the 00's it was already clear many of their planes were clearly not the best on the market for various reasons, but a few phone calls from key people in the US government to the prospective buyers would always "help" the customer to make the "right buying decision", so new orders were always arriving, money coming in, stock and compensations for the big wigs was obviously sky high so anyone who raised any concerns was always ignored or fired, but by that time Boeing was already rotten. I just pray I'm wrong and all of those planes don't crash until they are retired, but the new ones seem to be even worse.. so I don't know..
- riffraff 3y ago
  Is the dreamliner bad? I was under the impression it was quite nice and had partially eaten the lunch of Airbus' A380 by making longer flights with smaller plane economically advantageous.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    The 787 is fine. It's by far the most comfortable aircraft I've ever ridden, and the batteries-going-up-in-flames issue was short-lived and if I recall stemmed from some manufacturing deficiencies at the Japanese OEM (I am brainfarting their name). That being said however, the kind of workmanship negligience we have reason to suspect of Boeing means absolutely no Boeing aircraft manufactured during the timeframe(s) concerned can be considered safe until inspections are done. For now we don't have reason to suspect this extends beyond 737 MAX 9, but that could change drastically depending on what FAA finds.
hacketthfk 3y ago
Boeing's core capability is regulatory arbitrage and getting gov contracts, so it makes sense for them to outsource everything non-core, like building planes. Similar to NASA. Boeing did the correct thing outsourcing the actual building of planes, so they could focus on their core competency. Standard tech industry advice.
- gchokov 3y ago
  Yeah they did the correct thing, only to get their airplanes falling like apples.
  - archerx 3y ago
    Apparently for some people the correct thing is profit over safety/quality which is quite sociopathic and the cancer that is killing our society.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Airplanes falling like apples isn't a bad thing; the only bad thing is delivering poor shareholder value. If some planes crash as a result of improved shareholder value, that's fine. Just ask the FAA (or just look at how the FAA "punished" Boeing for these failures that cost the lives of hundreds).
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  I'm sick and tired of "core competency" rhetoric. Business management should not rigidly follow the UNIX philosophy, there's plenty of reasons you wouldn't want to outsource everything. Furthermore, while those core competencies might sound correct to Boeing, they wouldn't sound like it to Boeing's customers. You're paying Boeing for a plane and support, not a trading company that can find five other companies who can outsource each task to a different firm that delegates responsibility to...
  - riffraff 3y ago
    I remember someone on this forum argued at some point that business management is basically just flip flop between "things are bad, we need more vertical integration" or "things are bad, we need more core focus".
mjfl 3y ago
Seems like a really good case study in how complex engineering technologies become unknowable overtime and this leads to a collapse as understanding of the core product declines.
- ImageXav 3y ago
  Boeing's competitors seem to be doing just fine. Rather, this is a clear case of poor management leading to a degraded engineering culture.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Boeing just has one big competitor in the civiiian space and it would be really interesting to know what management and organizational differences exist. Because Airbus is known to be pretty complex too in terms of manufacturing in different sites with staff speaking a dozen languages and so on. Are they doing the same thing better or something fundamentally different (such as outsourcing merely distributing work among their own facilities)?
- smcin 3y ago
  We could label that the 'Mad Max' theory of how safely building airplanes inexplicably became arcane lost knowledge... Anyway in reality, look at how post-merger, McDonnell Douglas’s professional managers hollowed out Boeing’s legendary engineering. And the stock market cheered that.
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electrondood 3y ago
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twen_ty 3y ago
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scrps 3y ago
This is what happens when the people who build the world we all live in are contravened by people who think they run the world we all live in.
082349872349872 3y ago
See also early (1960s) CAD/CAM saving a Boeing project in https://inria.hal.science/hal-01526813/document https://inria.hal.science/hal-01526813/document > “I just can’t get the wing data to match the body data, and time is no longer on my side.” “Show us your wing data. Hey where did you get this stuff?” “From the body project.” “But they’ve given you old data; you’ve been trying to fit an old wing onto a new body.” (The best time to make a design change is before you’ve actually built the thing!) An hour later life was restored and the 727 became a single numerical entity.
JohnCClarke 3y ago
Blaming "outsourcing" sounds like passing the buck. The MCAS software debacle and penny pinching walk-back on the MCAS remediations shows that the rot has set in within Boeing.
OhMeadhbh 3y ago
I don't think this will change until Boeing's compensation committee cuts pay and bonuses for their execs. Even then they'll just move on to the next corporate job and the new execs will negotiate bonuses based on improving metrics which can be gamed. In the mean time airlines are stuck with Boeing planes (at least part of) the public thinks of as ticking time-bombs. Some (many? most?) are stuck with planes that they've sunk a fair bit of cash into. Or, more likely, the airlines' corporate parents own a company that owns planes that leases them back to the operating airline for tax reasons. And while that might seem to reduce pressure on the carriers, it's unlikely their corporate parents will want to walk away from that investment. The last time we had a problem with the 737-900 MAX's, Alaska started flying Airbusses. This time my monthly SEA -> SJC flight is on an Embraer. This can't be good for anyone (except Airbus and Embraer.) Maybe it's time for corporate America to get serious and only pay the c-suite bigbux if they don't destroy the company.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Embraer isn't competition for Boeing or Airbus; they only make very small regional jets, nothing even close to the size of a 737 let alone one of the larger jets.
awongh 3y ago
A lot of people blame the current toxic culture on the McDonnell Douglas merger that happened in the late 90s. One of the reasons that merger needed to happen though, was that Boeing didn't know how to be profitable in a non-government regulated market (post deregulation of the airlines). It's easy to make well engineered planes when the government has a hand in guaranteeing you good profit margins and you don't have to worry too much about costs.
tuber3 3y ago
Can someone explain why the tiny risk of death associated with Boeing's safety issues matters at all compared with the far greater risks that we take for granted (driving, etc.)? I don't get it. It seems like we all make riskier tradeoffs whenever we buy a used car instead of a newer, safer one, or when we buy a slightly less safe new car instead of the safest new car. By not spending more on a safer vehicle, we're saying that we're willing to trade a certain amount of savings for a certain amount of risk. How much more are we willing to spend to make aviation safer, when it's already so much safer than driving? One argument I've seen on HN is that most car accident deaths are preventable by a responsible driver, while passengers have no control. Ok, even if 99% of car accident deaths were preventable, that leaves 1% that are unpreventable. 1% of the ~35,000 car accident deaths in the US each year = 350. Compare that to ~zero commercial aviation deaths/year in the US over the last decade or so. Source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/airplane-crashes/#:~:text=Reflecting%20this%20increase%20in%20miles,2020%20to%20376%20in%202021 https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics.... If we include Boeings 737 MAX overseas deaths, that adds ~350 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... Which doesn't seem to change the picture.
- smegger001 3y ago
  because a plane falling out of the air has much larger potential for distruction than car running into another. Because its easier to regulate 30,000 planes owned by a few dozen airlines made by a handful of manufacturers, than it is to regulate over a billion cars owned and maintainted by hundreds of millions of drivers and made by hudreds of manufacturers.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  You want KFC for dinner. Down the street are 2 different KFCs. One uses oil that sometimes, a very small percentage of the time, will instantly kill you. The other does not. They arrived at using the riskier oil because it saves them 5c a day and it makes the books look better. Are you really asking why anyone would even bother differentiating these two because the drive to the KFC carries more risk? Why would you as a consumer want to fly on something with an ever worsening safety record? Why would you as an airline want the bad press, loss of revenue, and loss of reputation associated with a safety incident?
TobyTheDog123 3y ago
I just love how we can have a critical study about a failure that could have possibly led to the death of dozens if not 100+ people, a failure in something as routine and critical as flying in an airplane, and the article is behind a paywall. We're getting very close to the point where the combination of the competency crisis and the greed crisis are going to start causing more people to think twice about doing things that were once common, like flying commercial. Personally, I cancelled my flight later this month and am going to start getting in the habit of doing long road trips again. Just-as-if-not-more dangerous? Maybe, but at least I have a higher chance of my fate being in my own hands (swerving out of the way of an oncoming truck vs being sucked out from a fuselage plug failing). More inconvenient? Yep, don't care. More expensive? Maybe, don't care.
g9yuayon 3y ago
Ken Thompson in the most recent Sharp Tech podcast also talked about the management style of Boeing after their merger with McDonnell Douglas. They mentioned that when Boeing's HQ was still in Chicago, their CEO boasted that the HQ was thousands miles away from Seattle so that the management didn't have to get involved in day-to-day operations. This is just staggering how arrogant Boeing's the executives could be. Contrasting this with how old Boeing worked, how old Lockheed worked, how Elon Musk worked. No wonder Boeing has been in decline. It's just sad that so many talented engineers are stuck in this monopoly, when they could've leave the company and build something groundbreaking. For that matter, I feel extremely lucky that the IT industry have had a bustling culture of startups, so corrupted companies can die and new companies can innovate. I also feel extremely sad that how aviation industry has become complacent and ossified. I also worry that the US's industries are going the British way, as how British government forced their auto industry to consolidate many years ago, ending up destroying their the entire auto industry.
nobodyandproud 3y ago
A parallel discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705
DrNosferatu 3y ago
Indeed years - Al Jazeera 2014 documentary / exposé: https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?si=YdVyOoYTNKkPBn6w https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?si=YdVyOoYTNKkPBn6w

324 points by eduction 3y ago

https://archive.ph/C9kRR https://archive.ph/C9kRR

Eventually, Boeing management will probably decide it is cheaper to just buy planes from Airbus with the word "Boeing" conspicuously engraved on various components. American management style is to focus on marketing as the source of all revenue to be exalted. Engineering, design and manufacturing are expenses to be minimized and controlled. Right now, Boeing management is looking hard to find reasonable manufacturing scapegoats and when they do, heads will roll. Clearly, management had no involvement. Gives you that warm, fuzzy and safe feeling doesn't it?

megablast 3y ago
Why would an airline buy an Airbus, or a Boeing branded Airbus with Boeing markup?
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  They’re already buying an Airbus branded Bombardier with an Airbus markup so why not?
- LgWoodenBadger 3y ago
  People do strange things, like buying John-Deere-badged excavators manufactured by Hitachi, or JD-badged dozers manufactured by Liebherr.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    Or JD-badged lawnmowers built by MTD.
- lmm 3y ago
  > Why would an airline buy an Airbus Because they're the best planes available? > or a Boeing branded Airbus with Boeing markup? Because the Boeing markup is less than the US import tariff?
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Because they have no choice. There are currently 2 aircraft companies in the world that make commercial jets: Boeing and Airbus (we'll ignore Comac for now). If Airbus somehow bought up all of Boeing's manufacturing facilities and capability, leaving Boeing as just a re-badger, then airlines would have no choice but to buy an Airbus that either has an Airbus badge or a Boeing badge.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  In a word ---- marketing. For the same reason people currently buy "American" autos (and planes) built from parts sourced around the world. In American management culture, marketing is the knee jerk solution to any problem and the holy grail from which all revenue is gifted. They are true believers in the "magic" of being able to "game" people into making decisions based on something other than logic. This same culture explains how/why the internet we have today is built around privacy invasion and (wait for it) ... marketing.
Havoc 3y ago
> Boeing management is looking hard to find reasonable manufacturing scapegoats Bit like when the two planes fell out of the sky and the third world pilots were blamed / strongly hinted at as being inferior
- therealbilly 3y ago
  There was some truth to that. The 737 MAX is a hot aircraft (a light airframe with new powerful engines) that could quickly get away from you. Most US pilots come from the military and are typically top notch. Third world pilots to be quite honest, don't measure up in all areas.

rdtsc 3y ago

https://archive.is/t0lZc https://archive.is/t0lZc

Morte42 3y ago

Boeing intentionally spread its operations to as many states as possible in the US to guarantee itself some level of privilege amongst a large number of politicians from both major parties. There are clearly downsides to having manufacturing split up like this but the decision wasn't made for its engineering perks. Boeing is a sinking ship but nobody is eager to rock the boat lest their part of the ship take on more water than the others.

stefan_ 3y ago
That’s not really any different from how Airbus works (and explicitly so). But I learned that Boeing literally outsourced the fuselage and that makes you wonder if they are really fit to build airplanes…
- Sirizarry 3y ago
  Do you have an article or two where I could start the airbus rabbit hole?
  - pcurve 3y ago
    Here's a growing list of approved suppliers for Airbus. https://www.airbus.com/sites/g/files/jlcbta136/files/2023-04 https://www.airbus.com/sites/g/files/jlcbta136/files/2023-04... Their larger planes are assembled in Toulouse, but smaller planes are made globally.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  Boeing outsourced the fuselage to Boeing in Wichita, which had always built them. Boeing spun off that branch into a separate company now called Spirit, which is still basically Boeing except for its name.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    If it's "still Boeing except for the name", that still smells funny. They got something out of spawning a new corporate entity. Without a convincing TL;DR I think most of us will assume it's for reasons that sound good to Boeing business people, but not to outside people. (I. e. being a "new entity" to avoid existing labour contracts, or serving as a liability firewall in the event chunks of plane start flying off)

rdtsc 3y ago

The paper from 2001 by Dr. LJ Hart-Smith, referenced in the article is just as interesting as the article itself https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-outsourcing https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-... If you squint, could apply some of those observation to the world of software. For a TL;DR just skip to Hart-Smith's recommendations list at the end of the paper. Here are the ones I liked: > Look continuously at the entire activity. Do not minimize costs in isolation. Understand that one global cost minimization is worth far more than even 20 sub-optimum cost reductions. > Retain sufficient in-house production manufacturing that it is possible for future engineers to acquire the skills needed to develop new products, without which all businesses will fail. Even the work that is out-sourced requires internal expertise to write the specifications. > Acknowledge that cost-saving techniques that work in other high-volume industries are often quite inappropriate for low-volume industries like aerospace. > Listen more to your own employees about how to save cost than to any outside business consultants who have never run a factory producing your kind of product. In any event, if the advice they offer changes every year, it cannot possibly be correct.

baby 3y ago
> Retain sufficient in-house production manufacturing that it is possible for future engineers to acquire the skills needed to develop new products, without which all businesses will fail. Even the work that is out-sourced requires internal expertise to write the specifications. Damn, that really reminds me of a previous company I worked for, that wanted to replace important core internal libraries with open source libraries. My argument was always that we should always have in-house knowledge of the core technologies. I think a lot of companies fail to think long-term. > Listen more to your own employees about how to save cost than to any outside business consultants who have never run a factory producing your kind of product. In any event, if the advice they offer changes every year, it cannot possibly be correct. This one is the difference between management-driven company and engineers-driven company.
- groestl 3y ago
  Open source is different, in that you as a company can become maintainer and therefore expert of that component _and_ profit of other work being upstreamed. In case the library is not your USP, I think it's not that clear cut.

outside1234 3y ago

Note: Alan Mulally, CEO of Boeing, was briefly in the running for CEO at instead of Satya. Just shocking to think how bad a choice that would have been. * https://www.businessinsider.com/alan-mulally-as-microsoft-ceo-2013-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/alan-mulally-as-microsoft-ce...

chihuahua 3y ago
Very interesting, I had no idea. After all these years, I'm still stunned that Microsoft got a new CEO who didn't run it into the ground. They used to make so many bone-headed decisions at the top levels.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  They were comically thin skinned in the Ballmer era. My boss used to have us flaunt MacBooks and iPhones when we would have senior MS execs come in to get yelled at or for a hard negotiation. They’d get visibly agitated. It was funny.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  They did but running it into the ground they did not. Questionable business practices sure, but they were successful.
  - chihuahua 3y ago
    I'm still amazed they ended up with 0% market share in mobile phones. That took a some effort, considering they had Windows CE and Windows Mobile for years. Then Windows Phone, and they kept changing the APIs with every release so that nothing was ever backwards compatible. In a CMD shell I still have to use the goddamned backslash because of slavish compatibility with CP/M from 1974, but on the phone they create an incompatible set of APIs with every release. Congratulations, guys, well done.
shiroiuma 3y ago
Bad? That would have been a great choice! I wish I could see the parallel universe where Mulally became CEO of Microsoft. Even better, it'd be nice to see him as CEO of Apple.

gumby 3y ago

This point (I put it in italics) should be discussed more: > At the time, then-Boeing executive Alan Mulally said selling the factory to a private-equity firm would let Boeing focus on final assembly, where it could add the most value to its airplanes. By now I think we’ve learned that products made in factories owned by PE firms should carry warning labels. They are proactively anti-quality organizations, focused on extracting the maximum cash out in the short term at the cost of long term value.

ldoughty 3y ago
You could say the same about publicity traded companies. It all depends on who is in charge... And unfortunately self-serving people tend to reach the top more easily in both scenarios. You don't get Dan Price's very often (relatively). In public companies, there is more public information, but that doesn't stop a company from doing "bad" things of the short term stock movement is good enough. Look at all the merger promises that are broken. They all know what they are doing. Uphold the promise a year, then it's to late to undo the merger when you start to ignore the promise. Can also look at all the fines companies get for willfully breaking laws (or treading the line).. (fine < profits)? success!
- gumby 3y ago
  I think the PE companies have a specifically pathological and parasitic business model. There is more info about public companies and the majority of them don't suffer from the things you mention (which are real phenomena), and when they occur in the majority they do more from incompetence than malice. (I'm not talking about microcap companies). The PE model is: - buy company with debt. - after purchase company assumes the debt (pays off PE company) and pays further fees to acquirer - company therefore cannot make a profit, cuts staff which cuts output over time - company goes bankrupt This is the canonical business model from the big PE companies like Bain (Romney), KKR, Blackstone, CVC, Carlyle, etc.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Something does not add up. Banks would not lend to PE firms of they would all then go on to default.

healthdare 3y ago

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PedroBatista 3y ago

Since the late 90s/early 00's this type of concerns / horrible culture shifts and strategic mistakes were known and by the time the Dreamliner came out it was common knowledge even in the mainstream. Of course when the Max 8's started to fall and killing people everybody pretended to be shocked and surprised again. And of course the "incidents" are always "different and not related", but as any very complex system goes, these "incidents" always end up happening due to the same root cause. And yet again another evidence nobody learned anything with the latest big scandal of 2018/19, Boeing actively lobbied to reduce and get even more exceptions for QA and safety rules AFTER 2019. During the 00's it was already clear many of their planes were clearly not the best on the market for various reasons, but a few phone calls from key people in the US government to the prospective buyers would always "help" the customer to make the "right buying decision", so new orders were always arriving, money coming in, stock and compensations for the big wigs was obviously sky high so anyone who raised any concerns was always ignored or fired, but by that time Boeing was already rotten. I just pray I'm wrong and all of those planes don't crash until they are retired, but the new ones seem to be even worse.. so I don't know..

riffraff 3y ago
Is the dreamliner bad? I was under the impression it was quite nice and had partially eaten the lunch of Airbus' A380 by making longer flights with smaller plane economically advantageous.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The 787 is fine. It's by far the most comfortable aircraft I've ever ridden, and the batteries-going-up-in-flames issue was short-lived and if I recall stemmed from some manufacturing deficiencies at the Japanese OEM (I am brainfarting their name). That being said however, the kind of workmanship negligience we have reason to suspect of Boeing means absolutely no Boeing aircraft manufactured during the timeframe(s) concerned can be considered safe until inspections are done. For now we don't have reason to suspect this extends beyond 737 MAX 9, but that could change drastically depending on what FAA finds.

hacketthfk 3y ago

Boeing's core capability is regulatory arbitrage and getting gov contracts, so it makes sense for them to outsource everything non-core, like building planes. Similar to NASA. Boeing did the correct thing outsourcing the actual building of planes, so they could focus on their core competency. Standard tech industry advice.

gchokov 3y ago
Yeah they did the correct thing, only to get their airplanes falling like apples.
- archerx 3y ago
  Apparently for some people the correct thing is profit over safety/quality which is quite sociopathic and the cancer that is killing our society.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Airplanes falling like apples isn't a bad thing; the only bad thing is delivering poor shareholder value. If some planes crash as a result of improved shareholder value, that's fine. Just ask the FAA (or just look at how the FAA "punished" Boeing for these failures that cost the lives of hundreds).
kmeisthax 3y ago
I'm sick and tired of "core competency" rhetoric. Business management should not rigidly follow the UNIX philosophy, there's plenty of reasons you wouldn't want to outsource everything. Furthermore, while those core competencies might sound correct to Boeing, they wouldn't sound like it to Boeing's customers. You're paying Boeing for a plane and support, not a trading company that can find five other companies who can outsource each task to a different firm that delegates responsibility to...
- riffraff 3y ago
  I remember someone on this forum argued at some point that business management is basically just flip flop between "things are bad, we need more vertical integration" or "things are bad, we need more core focus".

mjfl 3y ago

Seems like a really good case study in how complex engineering technologies become unknowable overtime and this leads to a collapse as understanding of the core product declines.

ImageXav 3y ago
Boeing's competitors seem to be doing just fine. Rather, this is a clear case of poor management leading to a degraded engineering culture.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Boeing just has one big competitor in the civiiian space and it would be really interesting to know what management and organizational differences exist. Because Airbus is known to be pretty complex too in terms of manufacturing in different sites with staff speaking a dozen languages and so on. Are they doing the same thing better or something fundamentally different (such as outsourcing merely distributing work among their own facilities)?
smcin 3y ago
We could label that the 'Mad Max' theory of how safely building airplanes inexplicably became arcane lost knowledge... Anyway in reality, look at how post-merger, McDonnell Douglas’s professional managers hollowed out Boeing’s legendary engineering. And the stock market cheered that.

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electrondood 3y ago

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scrps 3y ago

This is what happens when the people who build the world we all live in are contravened by people who think they run the world we all live in.

082349872349872 3y ago

See also early (1960s) CAD/CAM saving a Boeing project in https://inria.hal.science/hal-01526813/document https://inria.hal.science/hal-01526813/document > “I just can’t get the wing data to match the body data, and time is no longer on my side.” “Show us your wing data. Hey where did you get this stuff?” “From the body project.” “But they’ve given you old data; you’ve been trying to fit an old wing onto a new body.” (The best time to make a design change is before you’ve actually built the thing!) An hour later life was restored and the 727 became a single numerical entity.

JohnCClarke 3y ago

Blaming "outsourcing" sounds like passing the buck. The MCAS software debacle and penny pinching walk-back on the MCAS remediations shows that the rot has set in within Boeing.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago

I don't think this will change until Boeing's compensation committee cuts pay and bonuses for their execs. Even then they'll just move on to the next corporate job and the new execs will negotiate bonuses based on improving metrics which can be gamed. In the mean time airlines are stuck with Boeing planes (at least part of) the public thinks of as ticking time-bombs. Some (many? most?) are stuck with planes that they've sunk a fair bit of cash into. Or, more likely, the airlines' corporate parents own a company that owns planes that leases them back to the operating airline for tax reasons. And while that might seem to reduce pressure on the carriers, it's unlikely their corporate parents will want to walk away from that investment. The last time we had a problem with the 737-900 MAX's, Alaska started flying Airbusses. This time my monthly SEA -> SJC flight is on an Embraer. This can't be good for anyone (except Airbus and Embraer.) Maybe it's time for corporate America to get serious and only pay the c-suite bigbux if they don't destroy the company.

shiroiuma 3y ago
Embraer isn't competition for Boeing or Airbus; they only make very small regional jets, nothing even close to the size of a 737 let alone one of the larger jets.

awongh 3y ago

A lot of people blame the current toxic culture on the McDonnell Douglas merger that happened in the late 90s. One of the reasons that merger needed to happen though, was that Boeing didn't know how to be profitable in a non-government regulated market (post deregulation of the airlines). It's easy to make well engineered planes when the government has a hand in guaranteeing you good profit margins and you don't have to worry too much about costs.

tuber3 3y ago

Can someone explain why the tiny risk of death associated with Boeing's safety issues matters at all compared with the far greater risks that we take for granted (driving, etc.)? I don't get it. It seems like we all make riskier tradeoffs whenever we buy a used car instead of a newer, safer one, or when we buy a slightly less safe new car instead of the safest new car. By not spending more on a safer vehicle, we're saying that we're willing to trade a certain amount of savings for a certain amount of risk. How much more are we willing to spend to make aviation safer, when it's already so much safer than driving? One argument I've seen on HN is that most car accident deaths are preventable by a responsible driver, while passengers have no control. Ok, even if 99% of car accident deaths were preventable, that leaves 1% that are unpreventable. 1% of the ~35,000 car accident deaths in the US each year = 350. Compare that to ~zero commercial aviation deaths/year in the US over the last decade or so. Source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/airplane-crashes/#:~:text=Reflecting%20this%20increase%20in%20miles,2020%20to%20376%20in%202021 https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics.... If we include Boeings 737 MAX overseas deaths, that adds ~350 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... Which doesn't seem to change the picture.

smegger001 3y ago
because a plane falling out of the air has much larger potential for distruction than car running into another. Because its easier to regulate 30,000 planes owned by a few dozen airlines made by a handful of manufacturers, than it is to regulate over a billion cars owned and maintainted by hundreds of millions of drivers and made by hudreds of manufacturers.
ActionHank 3y ago
You want KFC for dinner. Down the street are 2 different KFCs. One uses oil that sometimes, a very small percentage of the time, will instantly kill you. The other does not. They arrived at using the riskier oil because it saves them 5c a day and it makes the books look better. Are you really asking why anyone would even bother differentiating these two because the drive to the KFC carries more risk? Why would you as a consumer want to fly on something with an ever worsening safety record? Why would you as an airline want the bad press, loss of revenue, and loss of reputation associated with a safety incident?

TobyTheDog123 3y ago

I just love how we can have a critical study about a failure that could have possibly led to the death of dozens if not 100+ people, a failure in something as routine and critical as flying in an airplane, and the article is behind a paywall. We're getting very close to the point where the combination of the competency crisis and the greed crisis are going to start causing more people to think twice about doing things that were once common, like flying commercial. Personally, I cancelled my flight later this month and am going to start getting in the habit of doing long road trips again. Just-as-if-not-more dangerous? Maybe, but at least I have a higher chance of my fate being in my own hands (swerving out of the way of an oncoming truck vs being sucked out from a fuselage plug failing). More inconvenient? Yep, don't care. More expensive? Maybe, don't care.

g9yuayon 3y ago

Ken Thompson in the most recent Sharp Tech podcast also talked about the management style of Boeing after their merger with McDonnell Douglas. They mentioned that when Boeing's HQ was still in Chicago, their CEO boasted that the HQ was thousands miles away from Seattle so that the management didn't have to get involved in day-to-day operations. This is just staggering how arrogant Boeing's the executives could be. Contrasting this with how old Boeing worked, how old Lockheed worked, how Elon Musk worked. No wonder Boeing has been in decline. It's just sad that so many talented engineers are stuck in this monopoly, when they could've leave the company and build something groundbreaking. For that matter, I feel extremely lucky that the IT industry have had a bustling culture of startups, so corrupted companies can die and new companies can innovate. I also feel extremely sad that how aviation industry has become complacent and ossified. I also worry that the US's industries are going the British way, as how British government forced their auto industry to consolidate many years ago, ending up destroying their the entire auto industry.

nobodyandproud 3y ago

A parallel discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705

DrNosferatu 3y ago

Indeed years - Al Jazeera 2014 documentary / exposé: https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?si=YdVyOoYTNKkPBn6w https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?si=YdVyOoYTNKkPBn6w