12 ms·

Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

127 points by asn0 3y ago

ranger207 3y ago
> Ringgold joined Boeing in 2011 at the company’s North Charleston, S.C., production facility, where she rose to become a senior quality manager. Wasn't the South Carolina site the one that had all the 787 QC issues?
skynetv2 3y ago
I am surprised it takes this long to make someone accountable. But it is too little too late, though a step in the right direction. It is clear that this program was flawed right from the get go.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  As they say, the best time to start something was 10 years ago, the second best time is today.
- tr_user 3y ago
  accountable as a scapegoat
  - bavent 3y ago
    Yeah firing someone who was on the engineering side is not a good look when the problems are on the MBA side.
    - ajross 3y ago
      No, that's a meme. Clearly the problem with the door plug was a production process problem. They engineered a bad process[1] and it led to a failure. Was that due to pressure or interference from someone on the "MBA side"? Well, maybe? But that needs evidence before you can make a statement like you did, and so far we don't have it. [1] Seems like consensus at this point is that the repair/rework review process had a hole contractors/suppliers could use to skip reviews by changing a category. Again, that might be done for "MBA" reasons but if the process allowed it it's still a bug in the process.
    - jm4 3y ago
      Engineers designed and built that plane. The plane is fundamentally flawed. The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there. The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibility to design and build a safe airplane. If the budget prevents that, it's still the engineers' responsibility to make sure that whatever plane they can build is safe or they shouldn't build it. It's a total cop out to put it all on the MBA's when it's layer upon layer of failures that result in a plane as bad as the 737 MAX. Engineers in commercial aviation shouldn't ever be afforded the luxury of pointing the finger at their bosses. Their job above all others is to protect lives by building a good airplane.
      - dmix 3y ago
        > The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there. This engineer guy was the one that took over after they fired the last one after the 2 crashes...
      - class3shock 3y ago
        This is not how companies work. Engineers at Boeing didn't have a design labeled "not-good-enough-but-cheap" and another labelled "more-skookum-but-is-expensive" and because they were bad engineers decided to go with the cheap one. It's a systemic issue due to cost cutting by, you guessed it, people MBA's. No engineer, if given the choice, would have re-used the old plane design instead of designing a fully new, modern plane, that was an MBA trying to cut costs. No engineer, if given the choice, would have put the plane through as little testing as they did or sold it as not requiring much training for pilots, that was an MBA trying to cut costs. No engineer, if given the choice, would have separated the manufacturing facility out of Boeing, that was an MBA trying to cut costs. These are decisions that were pushed by higher ups (with MBAs) that engineers have to live with. They aren't "wrong" decisions, there is nothing in them an engineer could look at and say "this will, 100% cause a failure down the road and I demand we not do this". What they are is steps in the wrong direction, steps away from the "best" decision that could have made from a safety and quality standpoint. Take enough and eventually they add up into what happened. I think the best way I can put it is if, as an engineering org that deals with real world things, you aren't pushing towards best practices, higher standards, and technical excellence than you are either stagnating or declining. In either case your quality will decline without anyone doing anything "wrong" as you end up with people with increasingly less experience and resources being asked to do more work. And the worst part is you can get away with that and often companies do. But if you go to far eventually you cross a threshold where cumulative effects push you over the boundary of failure.
- ajross 3y ago
  He's only been on the job for two years, coming in to manage the project after the MCAS disaster. In some sense he's the easy person to eject. I don't think the individuals really matter that much here. The point to firing executives in charge of big failures is to incentivize the ones remaining to get their ships under control before another disaster. Clark clearly failed on that front, but again the 737 MAX program isn't the end of Boeing's problems.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Oh, individuals absolutely matter. Just not this one specific individual.
mikece 3y ago
A friend of mine who used to work for Boeing said the downward trend started when they acquired McDonnell Douglas and the MD bean counters took over a lot of top positions at Boeing, displacing engineers. After that cost-cutting became more of an obsession than building awesome aircraft. Makes me wonder how Boeing can avoid descending into bankruptcy at this point with multiple major projects having significant issues, recalls, and safety issues.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  There is so little competition, and it would be so expensive to spin something up… I could see it sputtering along for many years. Who can disrupt this? Need space X level money and research, and not sure the profit potential is as high.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    It is really hard. China, Russia and Japan have tried state sponsored schemes without success. Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel, and Embraer of Brazil almost did. Part of the problem is also that airlines have been very good at squeezing the duopoly while demanding ever more. The competition, if it manages to get a plane in the air, usually isn’t as fuel efficient and so the airlines have mostly not been interested.
    - margalabargala 3y ago
      > Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel To be fair, that's because Boeing forced them to sell the rights to the A220 for $1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Boeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        Boeing filed ta petition with the USITC, but it was ultimately the Department of Commerce that fined them for what they decided was unfair trade. The USITC reversed their own decision a year or so later, and Boeing chose to not appeal the decision, but Bombardier and Canada ended up deciding to not pursue things further.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tr_user 3y ago
Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs. > However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary. > Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 aircraft in the United States Air Force.
- varjag 3y ago
  There are bad engineers too.
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    Absolutely, but systemically, that's not been their problem. Too many MBAs are making decisions without Engineering involvement. I know because my industry works the exact same way le rage
    - slt2021 3y ago
      this is because shareholders (pension and investment fund managers) are all MBAs and they demand results a-la "quick wins" that forces management into short-term thinking, cutting corners and cutting costs
      - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
        The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’. I have absolutely no idea why techies can be so precious about every problem in their profession actually being a ‘systems problem’ yet are so quick to personally blame each and every person in another profession based on some ‘YouTube video essay’-level understanding of the context. As usual, it IS a system’s issue. It’s an incentive issue. If the people that made decisions were incentivised to prioritise long-term stability and performance, they would. They aren’t, and the reason they aren’t isn’t solved with a swift “get rid of them all”. You think that these big scary business people you demonise don’t themselves have KPIs? The pressure of corporate America, of short-term returns, is still going to be there. Have you seen how drastically the average shareholding lifespan has dropped over the last 10 years? Businesses are just operating in more of an environment where long-term stability and even growth don’t matter. Boeing is such an easy target. It’s very easy to just lazily say “Boeing is rotten!” and leave it at that, because then you get to pretend that the solution is easier than it is. Whilst there are definitely Boeing-specific circumstances that heavily heavily contribute, the reality is that Boeing has had few chances to ‘innovate’ in recent memory, especially with its new makeup. This is just what it looks like when they do. The reality is that this is merely a reflection of how the wider world works. And that’s the thing with systems problems. It’s intellectually dishonest to just sit back and “blame MBAs”. These sorts of problems fester in the wiring and the mechanics, with unpredictable consequences that are almost impossible to reverse by the time they’re realised. The wheels were set in motion before the Boeing merger. It wasn’t a trigger, it was a consequence. Similarly, some “MBAs” making decisions, either with Boeing or investors, were themselves not the trigger. Fate had already been decided several layers up the stack when personal and organisational incentives were set as they are in the first place.
entropicgravity 3y ago
Ah the dominoes start to fall yet again. I wonder how many between this and the CEO this time?
kazinator 3y ago
If you throw someone down an inflatable slide, does their golden parachute open?
uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago
Has there been any word/news on addressing the self-certifying portion of these issues? From what I gather, in addition to management prioritizing the wrong things, there has also been the issue of not enough external oversight to hold them accountable for safety.
OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
Ablative management: Layered heat shield of dispensable people that burn off to protect the capsule with the execs.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This is the job description for the CSO (chief security officer): Get fired when the inevitable security breach occurs.
  - Ancalagon 3y ago
    In a way is this not an appropriate response for multiple breaches? If I was CSO and my company was plagued by breaches that came about because of my lack of oversight when it was my job I’d fully expect to be fired. I don’t believe a single incident is equivalent in this case to what happened to the MAX platform, to much has gone wrong
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The usual problem is that the CSO is given things to do, no budget, and no authority. Which, again, if you go in open-eyed can be fine.
      - dave333 3y ago
        Back in the day there were moderate bounties offered ($100s) for finding security holes. It was far more cost effective than organized security review and testing.
      - Veserv 3y ago
        Untrue (in general). The CSO is frequently given lots of budget and authority. Having talked to some of the big bank executive teams, they have thousands of employees and hundreds of M$ budgets with wide latitude to enforce restrictions. It is just that the best commercial cybersecurity processes and “best practices” are useless against professional attackers with even minimal budgets and staff. Any technically competent CSO knows they are totally screwed even if they implement everything feasible perfectly (i.e. no inane solution like shutting down the whole company). It is not a problem of resources or commitment (though you could also have those problems), it is a problem of impossibility due to the incompetence of commercial IT cybersecurity processes. The only way to survive in a environment where you literally can not do what you were ostensibly hired to do is to lie and take the fall. The only other alternative is being too stupid to realize you are screwed, but every bank cybersecurity executive team I’ve ever met knew that someone could go in and steal all of their documents for less than 1 million dollars (you could also change things, but the out of band cross-checking makes that hard without intimate knowledge of the specific financial checks, more a question of knowing how banks work than hacking, the 1 M$ gives you full access rights, but you need to be careful not the drive the tank through the wall of the general’s office).
ironmagma 3y ago
Totally moronic to let someone go with 18 years of experience. Just move them.
- thefatboy 3y ago
  > Totally moronic to let someone go with 18 years of experience. Just move them. What is your moronic comment based on? experience isnt everything.
  - ironmagma 3y ago
    Based on the fact that we are experiencing a competence crisis right now, particularly in aviation but also more generally. Someone with that many years of technical experience should probably just be mentoring 100% of the time.
    - thefatboy 3y ago
      so what is the reason he was fired for? certainly not because of his years of experience?
      - ironmagma 3y ago
        and certainly not for the bolts missing which had nothing to do with the 737 MAX.
olliej 3y ago
Huh, does this mean they're going to oust all the executives that resulted in the environment that produced the 737max saga?
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  And the board? But boards of directors do not fire themselves.
AlbertCory 3y ago
anyone know if this guy came in with McDonnell-Douglas?
nottorp 3y ago
> Mike Fleming, who led the 737 MAX return-to-service push after the two fatal crashes and has since then led the drive to certify the MAX 7 and MAX 10, has been promoted to replace Lund as senior vice president and general manager of all Boeing Commercial airplane programs Ooo pretty. The person responsible for the self certification failures is getting promoted.
boringuser2 3y ago
This is absolutely reprehensible. Leaders should take responsibility for failure, not shuffle it around. If Boeing were a Japanese company, the CEO would personally be apologizing.
lamontcg 3y ago
They need to take Spirit AeroSystems back in-house again. Shuffling the deck chairs around in the executive lounge at Boeing isn't going to fundamentally change anything.
fargle 3y ago
and when they fire the rest of them and move the headquarters back to Renton (or wherever the engineers live), not VA. and pick some brilliant management with both engineering and business experience, that have strong incentives to make boeing a success long-term. and when pigs learn to fly. and somewhat after that, with a lot of work and good luck, it might get a little better.
sharts 3y ago
But who are the real culprits? Why are their heads not rolling also?

127 points by asn0 3y ago

> Ringgold joined Boeing in 2011 at the company’s North Charleston, S.C., production facility, where she rose to become a senior quality manager. Wasn't the South Carolina site the one that had all the 787 QC issues?

skynetv2 3y ago

I am surprised it takes this long to make someone accountable. But it is too little too late, though a step in the right direction. It is clear that this program was flawed right from the get go.

credit_guy 3y ago
As they say, the best time to start something was 10 years ago, the second best time is today.
tr_user 3y ago
accountable as a scapegoat
- bavent 3y ago
  Yeah firing someone who was on the engineering side is not a good look when the problems are on the MBA side.
  - ajross 3y ago
    No, that's a meme. Clearly the problem with the door plug was a production process problem. They engineered a bad process[1] and it led to a failure. Was that due to pressure or interference from someone on the "MBA side"? Well, maybe? But that needs evidence before you can make a statement like you did, and so far we don't have it. [1] Seems like consensus at this point is that the repair/rework review process had a hole contractors/suppliers could use to skip reviews by changing a category. Again, that might be done for "MBA" reasons but if the process allowed it it's still a bug in the process.
  - jm4 3y ago
    Engineers designed and built that plane. The plane is fundamentally flawed. The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there. The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibility to design and build a safe airplane. If the budget prevents that, it's still the engineers' responsibility to make sure that whatever plane they can build is safe or they shouldn't build it. It's a total cop out to put it all on the MBA's when it's layer upon layer of failures that result in a plane as bad as the 737 MAX. Engineers in commercial aviation shouldn't ever be afforded the luxury of pointing the finger at their bosses. Their job above all others is to protect lives by building a good airplane.
    - dmix 3y ago
      > The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there. This engineer guy was the one that took over after they fired the last one after the 2 crashes...
    - class3shock 3y ago
      This is not how companies work. Engineers at Boeing didn't have a design labeled "not-good-enough-but-cheap" and another labelled "more-skookum-but-is-expensive" and because they were bad engineers decided to go with the cheap one. It's a systemic issue due to cost cutting by, you guessed it, people MBA's. No engineer, if given the choice, would have re-used the old plane design instead of designing a fully new, modern plane, that was an MBA trying to cut costs. No engineer, if given the choice, would have put the plane through as little testing as they did or sold it as not requiring much training for pilots, that was an MBA trying to cut costs. No engineer, if given the choice, would have separated the manufacturing facility out of Boeing, that was an MBA trying to cut costs. These are decisions that were pushed by higher ups (with MBAs) that engineers have to live with. They aren't "wrong" decisions, there is nothing in them an engineer could look at and say "this will, 100% cause a failure down the road and I demand we not do this". What they are is steps in the wrong direction, steps away from the "best" decision that could have made from a safety and quality standpoint. Take enough and eventually they add up into what happened. I think the best way I can put it is if, as an engineering org that deals with real world things, you aren't pushing towards best practices, higher standards, and technical excellence than you are either stagnating or declining. In either case your quality will decline without anyone doing anything "wrong" as you end up with people with increasingly less experience and resources being asked to do more work. And the worst part is you can get away with that and often companies do. But if you go to far eventually you cross a threshold where cumulative effects push you over the boundary of failure.
ajross 3y ago
He's only been on the job for two years, coming in to manage the project after the MCAS disaster. In some sense he's the easy person to eject. I don't think the individuals really matter that much here. The point to firing executives in charge of big failures is to incentivize the ones remaining to get their ships under control before another disaster. Clark clearly failed on that front, but again the 737 MAX program isn't the end of Boeing's problems.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Oh, individuals absolutely matter. Just not this one specific individual.

mikece 3y ago

A friend of mine who used to work for Boeing said the downward trend started when they acquired McDonnell Douglas and the MD bean counters took over a lot of top positions at Boeing, displacing engineers. After that cost-cutting became more of an obsession than building awesome aircraft. Makes me wonder how Boeing can avoid descending into bankruptcy at this point with multiple major projects having significant issues, recalls, and safety issues.

brianwawok 3y ago
There is so little competition, and it would be so expensive to spin something up… I could see it sputtering along for many years. Who can disrupt this? Need space X level money and research, and not sure the profit potential is as high.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  It is really hard. China, Russia and Japan have tried state sponsored schemes without success. Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel, and Embraer of Brazil almost did. Part of the problem is also that airlines have been very good at squeezing the duopoly while demanding ever more. The competition, if it manages to get a plane in the air, usually isn’t as fuel efficient and so the airlines have mostly not been interested.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    > Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel To be fair, that's because Boeing forced them to sell the rights to the A220 for $1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Boeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      Boeing filed ta petition with the USITC, but it was ultimately the Department of Commerce that fined them for what they decided was unfair trade. The USITC reversed their own decision a year or so later, and Boeing chose to not appeal the decision, but Bombardier and Canada ended up deciding to not pursue things further.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tr_user 3y ago

Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs. > However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary. > Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 aircraft in the United States Air Force.

varjag 3y ago
There are bad engineers too.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  Absolutely, but systemically, that's not been their problem. Too many MBAs are making decisions without Engineering involvement. I know because my industry works the exact same way le rage
  - slt2021 3y ago
    this is because shareholders (pension and investment fund managers) are all MBAs and they demand results a-la "quick wins" that forces management into short-term thinking, cutting corners and cutting costs
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’. I have absolutely no idea why techies can be so precious about every problem in their profession actually being a ‘systems problem’ yet are so quick to personally blame each and every person in another profession based on some ‘YouTube video essay’-level understanding of the context. As usual, it IS a system’s issue. It’s an incentive issue. If the people that made decisions were incentivised to prioritise long-term stability and performance, they would. They aren’t, and the reason they aren’t isn’t solved with a swift “get rid of them all”. You think that these big scary business people you demonise don’t themselves have KPIs? The pressure of corporate America, of short-term returns, is still going to be there. Have you seen how drastically the average shareholding lifespan has dropped over the last 10 years? Businesses are just operating in more of an environment where long-term stability and even growth don’t matter. Boeing is such an easy target. It’s very easy to just lazily say “Boeing is rotten!” and leave it at that, because then you get to pretend that the solution is easier than it is. Whilst there are definitely Boeing-specific circumstances that heavily heavily contribute, the reality is that Boeing has had few chances to ‘innovate’ in recent memory, especially with its new makeup. This is just what it looks like when they do. The reality is that this is merely a reflection of how the wider world works. And that’s the thing with systems problems. It’s intellectually dishonest to just sit back and “blame MBAs”. These sorts of problems fester in the wiring and the mechanics, with unpredictable consequences that are almost impossible to reverse by the time they’re realised. The wheels were set in motion before the Boeing merger. It wasn’t a trigger, it was a consequence. Similarly, some “MBAs” making decisions, either with Boeing or investors, were themselves not the trigger. Fate had already been decided several layers up the stack when personal and organisational incentives were set as they are in the first place.

entropicgravity 3y ago

Ah the dominoes start to fall yet again. I wonder how many between this and the CEO this time?

kazinator 3y ago

If you throw someone down an inflatable slide, does their golden parachute open?

uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago

Has there been any word/news on addressing the self-certifying portion of these issues? From what I gather, in addition to management prioritizing the wrong things, there has also been the issue of not enough external oversight to hold them accountable for safety.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago

Ablative management: Layered heat shield of dispensable people that burn off to protect the capsule with the execs.

bombcar 3y ago
This is the job description for the CSO (chief security officer): Get fired when the inevitable security breach occurs.
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  In a way is this not an appropriate response for multiple breaches? If I was CSO and my company was plagued by breaches that came about because of my lack of oversight when it was my job I’d fully expect to be fired. I don’t believe a single incident is equivalent in this case to what happened to the MAX platform, to much has gone wrong
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The usual problem is that the CSO is given things to do, no budget, and no authority. Which, again, if you go in open-eyed can be fine.
    - dave333 3y ago
      Back in the day there were moderate bounties offered ($100s) for finding security holes. It was far more cost effective than organized security review and testing.
    - Veserv 3y ago
      Untrue (in general). The CSO is frequently given lots of budget and authority. Having talked to some of the big bank executive teams, they have thousands of employees and hundreds of M$ budgets with wide latitude to enforce restrictions. It is just that the best commercial cybersecurity processes and “best practices” are useless against professional attackers with even minimal budgets and staff. Any technically competent CSO knows they are totally screwed even if they implement everything feasible perfectly (i.e. no inane solution like shutting down the whole company). It is not a problem of resources or commitment (though you could also have those problems), it is a problem of impossibility due to the incompetence of commercial IT cybersecurity processes. The only way to survive in a environment where you literally can not do what you were ostensibly hired to do is to lie and take the fall. The only other alternative is being too stupid to realize you are screwed, but every bank cybersecurity executive team I’ve ever met knew that someone could go in and steal all of their documents for less than 1 million dollars (you could also change things, but the out of band cross-checking makes that hard without intimate knowledge of the specific financial checks, more a question of knowing how banks work than hacking, the 1 M$ gives you full access rights, but you need to be careful not the drive the tank through the wall of the general’s office).

ironmagma 3y ago

Totally moronic to let someone go with 18 years of experience. Just move them.

thefatboy 3y ago
> Totally moronic to let someone go with 18 years of experience. Just move them. What is your moronic comment based on? experience isnt everything.
- ironmagma 3y ago
  Based on the fact that we are experiencing a competence crisis right now, particularly in aviation but also more generally. Someone with that many years of technical experience should probably just be mentoring 100% of the time.
  - thefatboy 3y ago
    so what is the reason he was fired for? certainly not because of his years of experience?
    - ironmagma 3y ago
      and certainly not for the bolts missing which had nothing to do with the 737 MAX.

olliej 3y ago

Huh, does this mean they're going to oust all the executives that resulted in the environment that produced the 737max saga?

everybodyknows 3y ago
And the board? But boards of directors do not fire themselves.

AlbertCory 3y ago

anyone know if this guy came in with McDonnell-Douglas?

nottorp 3y ago

> Mike Fleming, who led the 737 MAX return-to-service push after the two fatal crashes and has since then led the drive to certify the MAX 7 and MAX 10, has been promoted to replace Lund as senior vice president and general manager of all Boeing Commercial airplane programs Ooo pretty. The person responsible for the self certification failures is getting promoted.

boringuser2 3y ago

This is absolutely reprehensible. Leaders should take responsibility for failure, not shuffle it around. If Boeing were a Japanese company, the CEO would personally be apologizing.

lamontcg 3y ago

They need to take Spirit AeroSystems back in-house again. Shuffling the deck chairs around in the executive lounge at Boeing isn't going to fundamentally change anything.

fargle 3y ago

and when they fire the rest of them and move the headquarters back to Renton (or wherever the engineers live), not VA. and pick some brilliant management with both engineering and business experience, that have strong incentives to make boeing a success long-term. and when pigs learn to fly. and somewhat after that, with a lot of work and good luck, it might get a little better.

sharts 3y ago

But who are the real culprits? Why are their heads not rolling also?