13 ms·

What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

46 points by kqr2 3y ago

kqr2 3y ago
https://archive.is/NGA9H https://archive.is/NGA9H
lessbergstein 3y ago
[dead]
jackhack 3y ago
How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"? What's gone wrong, is what goes wrong at most major corporations -- a focus more on "business" (which itself falls victim to fashion/fad such as image and perception of "fairness", KPIs, "mission statements", and other easy-to-measure-yet-made-up BS) rather than the main purpose : execution of engineering and ABSOLUTE INSISTENCE on quality. Boeing used to have an engineering-driven culture, but that has been destroyed. The CEO has deliberately driven the pendulum away from quality as #1 task to more concern over costs. Why is anyone surprised that they are now getting less quality? It's not just Boeing, it's the buyers (the airlines). They are customers too. They want Good, Fast AND Cheap. But they can't get it. They're forgetting what the final consumers (the flying public, and the private airlines such as UPS & FedEx that fly packages) want -- a reliable aircraft that doesn't fall out of the sky. That decision to buy a crappier aircraft to save a few bucks is being made. By whom? Board of Directors? C-class decision makers whose bonuses are based on saving millions of dollars. Accountants? Middle management? But the "savings" are a temporary sugar-high. Once the reputation is damaged, it will costs many times any savings to restore confidence, if ever. No-one ever falls out of the sky in a shoddily designed/built aircraft coming apart mid-air and thinks "well at least they saved a few bucks on manufacturing." I just hope enough of the old-guard engineers are still around to try to restore the old culture and save this company from itself.
- chmod600 3y ago
  How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"? The two of those that are easy to measure will always get chosen. It's not that people don't want "good", it just takes a lot of effort to figure out if you are getting something good or not. Reputation is one way, but that can be, and often is, spent for short-term gain.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  This "good, fast, cheap, pick two" thing is peddled often, but it skips over the fact that costs also come down over time as technology improves. As an aerospace example, SpaceX's F9 is better, faster and cheaper than the competition. The issue at Boeing is allowing things to swing deep into maximizing profit margins rather than forward-looking investment in technology improvements which reduce costs while maintaining or improving quality.
  - yifanl 3y ago
    Waiting for technology to catch up to what you want is exactly what it means to be the sacrificing "fast".
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      They wouldn't have to be waiting for things to catch up if they were investing into R&D in the years leading up to the current failures. Boeing already isn't fast.
      - TheCleric 3y ago
        Investing in R&D usually eliminates cheap.
- ponector 3y ago
  But you cannot apply any of Good, Fast, Cheap to the Boeing products. And they know airlines are going to buy their planes anyway. What are the alternatives? To wait 10 years to get Airbus? And hire second set of technicians and maintenance bases for Airbus while have the same for existing Boeing fleet?
  - jackhack 3y ago
    Following the "John Deere" style brand lock-in strategy: "Sure the Kubota is half the price and I can fix it myself, but all of my implements work with my Deere." And unless I switch over the tractor, the combine, the baler. I'll have to maintain both brands. I guess I'll just stick with JD one more season..."
- kwertyoowiyop 3y ago
  You CAN get all three, but it depends on your definition of “good.”
chmod600 3y ago
This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” What's wrong with a great engineering firm? And is it possible to somehow reflect that greatness in the stock price better so that people don't feel a need to come in and change it?
- soco 3y ago
  As with a business the CEO gets a nice golden parachute when the plane crashes.
- AaronM 3y ago
  Maybe he believes that a great business makes more money for the shareholders than a great engineering firm
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Boy was he wrong! https://valustox.com/BA https://valustox.com/BA
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- a_square_peg 3y ago
  Not an issue if one can do both but when there's a conflict, a great engineering firm will prioritize safety & quality over profit, whereas a business will prioritize profit & stock price over safety & quality.
goodSteveramos 3y ago
In free market/bean counter ideology, nothing a private company does can be wrong because competition will correct all mistakes in the long run. This meshes perfectly with the ultimate bean counter goal of having all companies in an industry owned by the same 4 bean counter-run hedge funds and run by the same bean counter executives. That way the bean counters can squeeze the public dry and have maximum leverage when society has no choice but to start handing out bailouts.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  A private company makes mistakes. Competition corrects it by either forcing the private company to adapt or driving them out of business. There are issues with that plan when there are not enough competitors.
  - xyzzy4747 3y ago
    There also are problems with having too many competitors. For example having much less money (due to lower margins) to hire and pay your employees and creating lengthy processes to ensure quality. Competition isn’t necessarily the best solution or even a good one. More competition is similar to “defunding” all the competing companies.
    - goodSteveramos 3y ago
      Yes. There is literally never enough competition for bean counter arguments to matter. Saying “competition” is the solution to a problem is just a bad excuse to not fix it. In the real world, large organizations make decisions based on political pressure from governments and the public.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    I think of the WW1 Christmas Truce and wonder how many competitors are able to stop competing for mutual benefit. It's good when competition in war ceases, but it's not good when several "competing" companies decide to cease competition for mutual benefit. If people can do it in the highly charged situation of trench warfare, why can't companies do it to? Could a market with 10 competing companies cease competing for mutual benefit? What about 20? Competition is not enough. It must be easy for new competitors to enter the market to ensure a nefarious trust doesn't form between companies.
PreInternet01 3y ago
So, I think this article, like many others, does not really answer the question? Everyone can agree that "well, this airplane almost dropped from the sky because we apparently forgot to tighten some bolts" is a really really bad thing, but the cause seems less than clear? 1. Yeah sure, outsourcing bad, union-busting worse, but the fact remains that Spirit AeroSystems (the contractor that Boeing outsourced to, possibly for union-busting reasons) also assembles lots and lots of airframes for Airbus. Apparently without major issues? 2. The MCAS disaster was also really, really bad, but seems mostly unrelated, at least from a process point of view, from what has happened here (since it was fixed by updating the documentation, pretty much, and ultimately possibly not that different from initial Airbus struggles with flight automation)? 3. The 737-MAX (and 787, which is assembled using pretty much the same supply chain) seem, statistically speaking, much safer than older aircraft generations. It surely does not feel that way, but incidents-per-flight, not to mention incidents-per-flight-hour and incidents-per-flight-mile, strongly disagree. The only facts that I can gather from amidst the wreckage of speculation, are that, yes, Boeing does seem to have an issue with basic tooling, which should definitely be corrected ASAP, but they're in the process of doing so, and then will be be pretty much as good and/or bad as their competition for the foreseeable future? I would like to see the deep-dive on the cause of this (which we definitely will get, some months or years from now) before judging. And, for the record: I'm a huge Embraer 19x-E2 fan, love the A22x as well (engine issues notwithstanding), and will fly any version of the 737 as required.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  Lot of strong opinions based on feelings and bad research. There are even books and leaked internal studies that describe the change of culture and engineering at Boeing. You can't just use the last incident and it's circumstances to come to a conclusion. It's systemic failure. Look up interviews of Spirit AeroSystems CEOs or their counterparts at Airbus and Boeing and you'll see that they get handled differently. The information is out there you'll just need to take it. 5 mins of googling is just not enough for a topic like this.
- aredox 3y ago
  Spirit does smaller assemblies for Airbus, whose production is mostly in Europe. They don't do whole airframes for them afaik. The client still has the responsibility of doing quality controls at reception, or have good reasons to lighten them. Boeing has a lot to answer, especially since FAA gave them (after a ton of lobbying) the right to self-control themselves.
macintux 3y ago
Heaviest Boeing threads over the past several days: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002255 (26 comments, today) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 (145 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979196 (293 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705 (310 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969466 (350 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38956323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38956323 (345 comments)
nabla9 3y ago
> “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” Both Boeing and Intel did this. They reduced the number of people in C-suite who had STEM background until they didn't know how to make big technical decisions, or allocate money for R&D and production. Scientists and engineers learn how to do business all the time, but you rarely see a lawyer or sales person getting STEM degree.
- dboreham 3y ago
  Except patent lawyers. Perhaps it's time to have regulations like the medical industry has where the care providing organization must be run by someone with a medical license?
  - nabla9 3y ago
    Patent examiners working in patent office are engineers and scientists. Albert Einstein was patent examiner in Swiss Patent Office in Bern for 7 years.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      I agree, but I don't know that I'd use Einstein as an example for 99.999999% of humans. Now I'm also curious about Einstein's work product as a patent examiner.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    That's a brilliant idea. 60% of the board + the CEO needs to have engineering degrees to run an aircraft company.
- pc86 3y ago
  > They reduced the number of people in C-suite who had STEM background until they didn't know how to make big technical decisions, or allocate money for R&D and production. This is not on its face a bad thing, however if you're in the C-suite of an engineering company and you're not an engineer, you should probably have engineers close by that you trust, and listen to them. It's as bad for the business to have engineers put into the finance office with no finance expertise as it is to have accountants run an engineering firm with no engineering expertise available.
kolbe 3y ago
They presume something is wrong when I don't think that's at all been established fact. Airline travel has been steadily safer by the year[1]. Accidents and engineering snags have been a part of every single mode of transit since the Industrial Revolution, and it's low-sample-size populist fodder like a door blowing off that fear mongers people, but has no statistical significance in the grand scheme of safety. Is there room for improvement? Sure. But some of y'all are acting like this is a fundamental failure of capitalism when the small handful of accidents over the past few months is actually evidence of how good planes are--not how bad. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety
- tgv 3y ago
  > evidence of how good planes How good other planes are. The MAX record is abysmal. https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    So, there is one single model of airplane being manufactured that reaches 10% of the Max kill-rate, and it's a quite old one.
  - kolbe 3y ago
    One model, representing a nearly infinitesimally small percentage number of miles for Boeing. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is the 737MAX tried to do some relatively innovative things that backfired. And that product is now just as bad in terms of safety as the average plane was 30 years ago (but many times more efficient). It is far from a condemnation of Boeing and capitalism that one of their more innovative products is suffering some setbacks, and those setbacks amount to it being as unsafe as the average plane 30 years ago. Think about that: in 1970 the average flight was 2x worse, and still people chose to accept that risk voluntarily. Today, that level of risk just means Boeing will try to refine the product. Failures of "-isms" are when millions starve in famines--not when a new product suffered a pushed back timeline for being a relatively unsafe compared to other contemporaneous models. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-per-million-flights https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-...
6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago
seems they were more interesting in making money before making good planes. that's short term : sure, you make more money by lowering standards, putting pressure on workers and sending their jobs to smaller off-site companies. you do make more money. but now that planes have issues, crash, kill people and companies have customers telling them there is no way they are going to buy tickets if the flight goes on a boeing plane.... reputation is gained by tea-spoon. lost by the liter. the damage to boeing's reputation is gonna take DECADES. if boeing does not die from it. so.. how does that short-term stupid money before safety view feels now ?
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Today it’s Boeing. What if we’re approaching a complexity crisis and practically no one sees it happening? I make things. I think I can see it. But what would it look like if we are making systems so complex that it is exceeding the gasp of any one human to understand it, and at the same time exceeding the ability of humans to even explain parts of it effectively to other humans? What would that look like? I can give you a clue. The headlines would look like “What’s gone wrong at xxxx”. It’s not The Issue (tm) of course. It’s complexity, it’s the MBA-ification, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, it’s all the things that aren’t going to get better.
anonymousiam 3y ago
This article gets it mostly right. It was the Douglas culture that damaged Boeing's corporate ethics. Boeing has had a continuous streak of ethical breaches ever since the Douglas "merger" occurred. https://sites.tufts.edu/corruptarmsdeals/the-boeing-tanker-case/ https://sites.tufts.edu/corruptarmsdeals/the-boeing-tanker-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/business/boeing-chief-is-ousted-after-admitting-affair.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/business/boeing-chief-is-... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/21/nasa-doug-loverro-executive-resignation-boeing https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/21/nasa-doug-lo... https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2603EZ/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2603EZ/ https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-... https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/08/the-ethical-failures-behind-the-boeing-disasters/ https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/08/the-ethical-failures-b...
wolverine876 3y ago
Beware a major bias in these Boeing analyses: They bring to light long-term problems, flaws, critics who warned about the problems, etc. But those things are not correlated with the outcome. Remember that correlation requires both if A then B and if not A then not B. In this case, every enterprise of the scale and complexity of Boeing has problems, critics, flaws, etc. - there is no 'not A' condition, there is no correlation. Airbus has those issues too - they are in the 'A' state - but they didn't lose a door plug. What we're seeing is that when something goes wrong, a sufficiently well-examined enterprise (even sports teams) will have someone to say 'I told you so'. Their analysis may be no more worthwhile than a stopped clock. And even to the extent flaws are true, that's not at all conclusive. Anyone who has had to manage anything of a certain scale - not even a very large scale - knows that such flaws are inevitable; there is not enough time, labor, or money in the world to fix them all (and imagine doing that on the scale of commercial airliners!). The art to expert, technological management is to deliver results despite the flaws, to know how to make sausage. The question is not, why was Boeing in the 'A' state; that's inescapable. The question is, why did Boeing management fail to do their job, which is to deliver results while in the A state? If it was an IT business, I might have some perspective. Making airplanes - I have no clue how the sausage is made. We need an industry expert. (I'll also add that one failed door plug on one plane, out of all the planes Boeing flies, is questionable data for this analysis. It's not ok, it's a failure, but it may not be data. I'd guess that more planes will be struck by lightning this year.)

46 points by kqr2 3y ago

kqr2 3y ago

https://archive.is/NGA9H https://archive.is/NGA9H

lessbergstein 3y ago

[dead]

jackhack 3y ago

How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"? What's gone wrong, is what goes wrong at most major corporations -- a focus more on "business" (which itself falls victim to fashion/fad such as image and perception of "fairness", KPIs, "mission statements", and other easy-to-measure-yet-made-up BS) rather than the main purpose : execution of engineering and ABSOLUTE INSISTENCE on quality. Boeing used to have an engineering-driven culture, but that has been destroyed. The CEO has deliberately driven the pendulum away from quality as #1 task to more concern over costs. Why is anyone surprised that they are now getting less quality? It's not just Boeing, it's the buyers (the airlines). They are customers too. They want Good, Fast AND Cheap. But they can't get it. They're forgetting what the final consumers (the flying public, and the private airlines such as UPS & FedEx that fly packages) want -- a reliable aircraft that doesn't fall out of the sky. That decision to buy a crappier aircraft to save a few bucks is being made. By whom? Board of Directors? C-class decision makers whose bonuses are based on saving millions of dollars. Accountants? Middle management? But the "savings" are a temporary sugar-high. Once the reputation is damaged, it will costs many times any savings to restore confidence, if ever. No-one ever falls out of the sky in a shoddily designed/built aircraft coming apart mid-air and thinks "well at least they saved a few bucks on manufacturing." I just hope enough of the old-guard engineers are still around to try to restore the old culture and save this company from itself.

chmod600 3y ago
How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"? The two of those that are easy to measure will always get chosen. It's not that people don't want "good", it just takes a lot of effort to figure out if you are getting something good or not. Reputation is one way, but that can be, and often is, spent for short-term gain.
dotnet00 3y ago
This "good, fast, cheap, pick two" thing is peddled often, but it skips over the fact that costs also come down over time as technology improves. As an aerospace example, SpaceX's F9 is better, faster and cheaper than the competition. The issue at Boeing is allowing things to swing deep into maximizing profit margins rather than forward-looking investment in technology improvements which reduce costs while maintaining or improving quality.
- yifanl 3y ago
  Waiting for technology to catch up to what you want is exactly what it means to be the sacrificing "fast".
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    They wouldn't have to be waiting for things to catch up if they were investing into R&D in the years leading up to the current failures. Boeing already isn't fast.
    - TheCleric 3y ago
      Investing in R&D usually eliminates cheap.
ponector 3y ago
But you cannot apply any of Good, Fast, Cheap to the Boeing products. And they know airlines are going to buy their planes anyway. What are the alternatives? To wait 10 years to get Airbus? And hire second set of technicians and maintenance bases for Airbus while have the same for existing Boeing fleet?
- jackhack 3y ago
  Following the "John Deere" style brand lock-in strategy: "Sure the Kubota is half the price and I can fix it myself, but all of my implements work with my Deere." And unless I switch over the tractor, the combine, the baler. I'll have to maintain both brands. I guess I'll just stick with JD one more season..."
kwertyoowiyop 3y ago
You CAN get all three, but it depends on your definition of “good.”

chmod600 3y ago

This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” What's wrong with a great engineering firm? And is it possible to somehow reflect that greatness in the stock price better so that people don't feel a need to come in and change it?

soco 3y ago
As with a business the CEO gets a nice golden parachute when the plane crashes.
AaronM 3y ago
Maybe he believes that a great business makes more money for the shareholders than a great engineering firm
- FredPret 3y ago
  Boy was he wrong! https://valustox.com/BA https://valustox.com/BA
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
a_square_peg 3y ago
Not an issue if one can do both but when there's a conflict, a great engineering firm will prioritize safety & quality over profit, whereas a business will prioritize profit & stock price over safety & quality.

goodSteveramos 3y ago

In free market/bean counter ideology, nothing a private company does can be wrong because competition will correct all mistakes in the long run. This meshes perfectly with the ultimate bean counter goal of having all companies in an industry owned by the same 4 bean counter-run hedge funds and run by the same bean counter executives. That way the bean counters can squeeze the public dry and have maximum leverage when society has no choice but to start handing out bailouts.

HWR_14 3y ago
A private company makes mistakes. Competition corrects it by either forcing the private company to adapt or driving them out of business. There are issues with that plan when there are not enough competitors.
- xyzzy4747 3y ago
  There also are problems with having too many competitors. For example having much less money (due to lower margins) to hire and pay your employees and creating lengthy processes to ensure quality. Competition isn’t necessarily the best solution or even a good one. More competition is similar to “defunding” all the competing companies.
  - goodSteveramos 3y ago
    Yes. There is literally never enough competition for bean counter arguments to matter. Saying “competition” is the solution to a problem is just a bad excuse to not fix it. In the real world, large organizations make decisions based on political pressure from governments and the public.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  I think of the WW1 Christmas Truce and wonder how many competitors are able to stop competing for mutual benefit. It's good when competition in war ceases, but it's not good when several "competing" companies decide to cease competition for mutual benefit. If people can do it in the highly charged situation of trench warfare, why can't companies do it to? Could a market with 10 competing companies cease competing for mutual benefit? What about 20? Competition is not enough. It must be easy for new competitors to enter the market to ensure a nefarious trust doesn't form between companies.

PreInternet01 3y ago

So, I think this article, like many others, does not really answer the question? Everyone can agree that "well, this airplane almost dropped from the sky because we apparently forgot to tighten some bolts" is a really really bad thing, but the cause seems less than clear? 1. Yeah sure, outsourcing bad, union-busting worse, but the fact remains that Spirit AeroSystems (the contractor that Boeing outsourced to, possibly for union-busting reasons) also assembles lots and lots of airframes for Airbus. Apparently without major issues? 2. The MCAS disaster was also really, really bad, but seems mostly unrelated, at least from a process point of view, from what has happened here (since it was fixed by updating the documentation, pretty much, and ultimately possibly not that different from initial Airbus struggles with flight automation)? 3. The 737-MAX (and 787, which is assembled using pretty much the same supply chain) seem, statistically speaking, much safer than older aircraft generations. It surely does not feel that way, but incidents-per-flight, not to mention incidents-per-flight-hour and incidents-per-flight-mile, strongly disagree. The only facts that I can gather from amidst the wreckage of speculation, are that, yes, Boeing does seem to have an issue with basic tooling, which should definitely be corrected ASAP, but they're in the process of doing so, and then will be be pretty much as good and/or bad as their competition for the foreseeable future? I would like to see the deep-dive on the cause of this (which we definitely will get, some months or years from now) before judging. And, for the record: I'm a huge Embraer 19x-E2 fan, love the A22x as well (engine issues notwithstanding), and will fly any version of the 737 as required.

Zetobal 3y ago
Lot of strong opinions based on feelings and bad research. There are even books and leaked internal studies that describe the change of culture and engineering at Boeing. You can't just use the last incident and it's circumstances to come to a conclusion. It's systemic failure. Look up interviews of Spirit AeroSystems CEOs or their counterparts at Airbus and Boeing and you'll see that they get handled differently. The information is out there you'll just need to take it. 5 mins of googling is just not enough for a topic like this.
aredox 3y ago
Spirit does smaller assemblies for Airbus, whose production is mostly in Europe. They don't do whole airframes for them afaik. The client still has the responsibility of doing quality controls at reception, or have good reasons to lighten them. Boeing has a lot to answer, especially since FAA gave them (after a ton of lobbying) the right to self-control themselves.

macintux 3y ago

Heaviest Boeing threads over the past several days: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002255 (26 comments, today) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981921 (145 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979196 (293 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705 (310 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969466 (350 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38956323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38956323 (345 comments)

nabla9 3y ago

> “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” Both Boeing and Intel did this. They reduced the number of people in C-suite who had STEM background until they didn't know how to make big technical decisions, or allocate money for R&D and production. Scientists and engineers learn how to do business all the time, but you rarely see a lawyer or sales person getting STEM degree.

dboreham 3y ago
Except patent lawyers. Perhaps it's time to have regulations like the medical industry has where the care providing organization must be run by someone with a medical license?
- nabla9 3y ago
  Patent examiners working in patent office are engineers and scientists. Albert Einstein was patent examiner in Swiss Patent Office in Bern for 7 years.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    I agree, but I don't know that I'd use Einstein as an example for 99.999999% of humans. Now I'm also curious about Einstein's work product as a patent examiner.
- FredPret 3y ago
  That's a brilliant idea. 60% of the board + the CEO needs to have engineering degrees to run an aircraft company.
pc86 3y ago
> They reduced the number of people in C-suite who had STEM background until they didn't know how to make big technical decisions, or allocate money for R&D and production. This is not on its face a bad thing, however if you're in the C-suite of an engineering company and you're not an engineer, you should probably have engineers close by that you trust, and listen to them. It's as bad for the business to have engineers put into the finance office with no finance expertise as it is to have accountants run an engineering firm with no engineering expertise available.

kolbe 3y ago

They presume something is wrong when I don't think that's at all been established fact. Airline travel has been steadily safer by the year[1]. Accidents and engineering snags have been a part of every single mode of transit since the Industrial Revolution, and it's low-sample-size populist fodder like a door blowing off that fear mongers people, but has no statistical significance in the grand scheme of safety. Is there room for improvement? Sure. But some of y'all are acting like this is a fundamental failure of capitalism when the small handful of accidents over the past few months is actually evidence of how good planes are--not how bad. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

tgv 3y ago
> evidence of how good planes How good other planes are. The MAX record is abysmal. https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  So, there is one single model of airplane being manufactured that reaches 10% of the Max kill-rate, and it's a quite old one.
- kolbe 3y ago
  One model, representing a nearly infinitesimally small percentage number of miles for Boeing. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is the 737MAX tried to do some relatively innovative things that backfired. And that product is now just as bad in terms of safety as the average plane was 30 years ago (but many times more efficient). It is far from a condemnation of Boeing and capitalism that one of their more innovative products is suffering some setbacks, and those setbacks amount to it being as unsafe as the average plane 30 years ago. Think about that: in 1970 the average flight was 2x worse, and still people chose to accept that risk voluntarily. Today, that level of risk just means Boeing will try to refine the product. Failures of "-isms" are when millions starve in famines--not when a new product suffered a pushed back timeline for being a relatively unsafe compared to other contemporaneous models. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-per-million-flights https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-...

6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago

seems they were more interesting in making money before making good planes. that's short term : sure, you make more money by lowering standards, putting pressure on workers and sending their jobs to smaller off-site companies. you do make more money. but now that planes have issues, crash, kill people and companies have customers telling them there is no way they are going to buy tickets if the flight goes on a boeing plane.... reputation is gained by tea-spoon. lost by the liter. the damage to boeing's reputation is gonna take DECADES. if boeing does not die from it. so.. how does that short-term stupid money before safety view feels now ?

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

Today it’s Boeing. What if we’re approaching a complexity crisis and practically no one sees it happening? I make things. I think I can see it. But what would it look like if we are making systems so complex that it is exceeding the gasp of any one human to understand it, and at the same time exceeding the ability of humans to even explain parts of it effectively to other humans? What would that look like? I can give you a clue. The headlines would look like “What’s gone wrong at xxxx”. It’s not The Issue (tm) of course. It’s complexity, it’s the MBA-ification, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, it’s all the things that aren’t going to get better.

anonymousiam 3y ago

This article gets it mostly right. It was the Douglas culture that damaged Boeing's corporate ethics. Boeing has had a continuous streak of ethical breaches ever since the Douglas "merger" occurred. https://sites.tufts.edu/corruptarmsdeals/the-boeing-tanker-case/ https://sites.tufts.edu/corruptarmsdeals/the-boeing-tanker-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/business/boeing-chief-is-ousted-after-admitting-affair.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/business/boeing-chief-is-... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/21/nasa-doug-loverro-executive-resignation-boeing https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/21/nasa-doug-lo... https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2603EZ/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2603EZ/ https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-... https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/08/the-ethical-failures-behind-the-boeing-disasters/ https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/08/the-ethical-failures-b...

wolverine876 3y ago

Beware a major bias in these Boeing analyses: They bring to light long-term problems, flaws, critics who warned about the problems, etc. But those things are not correlated with the outcome. Remember that correlation requires both if A then B and if not A then not B. In this case, every enterprise of the scale and complexity of Boeing has problems, critics, flaws, etc. - there is no 'not A' condition, there is no correlation. Airbus has those issues too - they are in the 'A' state - but they didn't lose a door plug. What we're seeing is that when something goes wrong, a sufficiently well-examined enterprise (even sports teams) will have someone to say 'I told you so'. Their analysis may be no more worthwhile than a stopped clock. And even to the extent flaws are true, that's not at all conclusive. Anyone who has had to manage anything of a certain scale - not even a very large scale - knows that such flaws are inevitable; there is not enough time, labor, or money in the world to fix them all (and imagine doing that on the scale of commercial airliners!). The art to expert, technological management is to deliver results despite the flaws, to know how to make sausage. The question is not, why was Boeing in the 'A' state; that's inescapable. The question is, why did Boeing management fail to do their job, which is to deliver results while in the A state? If it was an IT business, I might have some perspective. Making airplanes - I have no clue how the sausage is made. We need an industry expert. (I'll also add that one failed door plug on one plane, out of all the planes Boeing flies, is questionable data for this analysis. It's not ok, it's a failure, but it may not be data. I'd guess that more planes will be struck by lightning this year.)