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Currently reading "Flying Blind", which was recommended on another recent Boeing thread. Not done yet, but I think it boils down to - Boeing had a pretty stron
by fcsp 3y ago
Currently reading "Flying Blind", which was recommended on another recent Boeing thread. Not done yet, but I think it boils down to
- Boeing had a pretty strong engineering driven culture for a long time
- In the 90s, McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money and McDD management took over, which was a mostly Jack Welch inspired bunch of value extraction types
- Engineering culture started decaying, drastic cost cutting, outsourcing and value extraction started taking place, with Boeing spending up to 80% of free cash on stock buybacks instead of investments
- Dreamliner program started in the early 2000s, 737 MAX several years later
I think it boils down to the erosion of the company not having progressed as far when the Dreamliner was being designed
- jfoster 3y agoInteresting. I didn't realize that 737 MAX started after Dreamliner. That would seem to be a possible explanation.
- fcsp 3y agoAlso, maybe to add to that, the Dreamliner was a new design, of which apparently even considering some setbacks along the way Boeing was still capable of at that point in time. For the 737 Max, they were very late and had to react to Airbus much better neo offering, and didn't have the time and/or money and/or capabilities to develop a new airplane, so a lot of in the end deadly compromises had to be made to somehow bypass training and security certification as much as possible using the old airframe at low cost.