21 ms·

Boeing missing key elements of safety culture: FAA report

380 points by elorant 3y ago

chongli 3y ago
I think the ultimate problem with Boeing is that they're too big to fail. They're too important to the US's strategic interests so the government won't allow them to go out of business despite gross incompetence. A classic case of "putting all your eggs in one basket."
- jajko 3y ago
  No pressure for excellence usually leads to lack thereof
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Isn't this what our version of capitalism encourages? Grow to dominate so much of the market and of stock and pension portfolios at all costs, that you'll have to be bailed out no matter your incompetence. So as long as this behavior only gets rewarded and never punished, why would you expect different results?
  - nequo 3y ago
    Car manufacturing is similar in a lot of ways yet notably different in the putting all eggs in the same basket sense that parent mentions. Ford and GM are too big to fail yet they do compete and it does lead to at least one of them making decent cars that don’t fall apart under you.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Ford and GM have much more competition than Being. It's a lot easier to enter the auto market than the aircraft market.
      - nequo 3y ago
        That is true, but Boeing wasn't always the only player in aircraft manufacturing either. Even subsidizing two or three players so that they can compete might be better for safety and quality than letting them merge and operate as a complete monopoly.
- velcrovan 3y ago
  The federal government should buy a controlling share in the company, problem solved.
  - godzillabrennus 3y ago
    Federal government can’t run itself today. Probably not going to be effective running Boeing either.
    - velcrovan 3y ago
      Federal government can run itself fine as long as congresspeople aren't staging stunt shutdowns. They owned a controlling share in GM from 2009–2013 to bring the company out of bankruptcy. They own the Tennessee Valley Authority which operates no better or worse than other utility companies. The Alaskan sovereign wealth fund owns hundreds of companies and properties throughout the US. There isn’t a meaningful difference in competence or bureaucracy between a too-big-to-fail company the size of Boeing and a large state institution. The difference would be in who can set the org-wide incentives and goals. Clearly shareholders aren't interested in safety being one of the goals.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    Isn't there some precedent for this in the automotive industry ? For example, in running Chrysler ?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 3y ago
  Maybe true for the company, but certainly not for its management.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    The last one fired got a $60M golden parachute and then became CEO of another company. There seems to be little incentive there.
    - chii 3y ago
      what gets to me is how anyone would hire the fired CEO given the reputation.
      - lenerdenator 3y ago
        Typically it happens when buddies are on the board.
      - tass 3y ago
        I haven’t looked at their financials, but I’m assuming he successfully increased profits for Boeing. He’s probably hireable so long as there’s no culture of safety or engineering to be destroyed.
      - godzillabrennus 3y ago
        A known quantity to the industry who managed to deploy billions in budgets for a massive player is valuable at the helm of any company that wants those kinds of things.
      - lucianbr 3y ago
        Seems like nobody hired him as CEO. Him and some buddies tried to start something, and it didn't get anywhere, and they lost money with it. Sounds quite reasonable to me :) https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/former-ceo-muilenburgs-next-venture-after-boeing-fails/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/forme...
    - 3y ago
- Sebb767 3y ago
  I think the problem is not that Boeing is too big to fail, it's the massive cost of designing, certifying and efficiently building a new airframe, which makes it hard for a competitor to emerge. The US doesn't really have another basket to put eggs into.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Except that they have had issues with other things as well. Over on the space side, their Starliner crew capsule has had several safety debacles over the past 4 years, such that maybe it'll finally carry crew this year. First it was poorly tested software, then stuck valves, then the tape they wrapped certain wires in to make them more fire resistant turned out to not work, and then finally after all that testing, their parachute system had issues. Boeing has had cultural issues for a while now, part of their rocketry division was forced to be spun out (by the government) with Lockmart's into ULA because Boeing was caught conducting espionage on Lockmart, which would've potentially disqualified them from bidding on launches. They had also had information leaked to them about bidding on the Artemis lunar lander contracts. Plus other incidents like trying to get people at ULA proposing things like orbital refueling systems fired because if they allowed such technology to emerge, Boeing couldn't get blank checks from the government for building near-useless rockets. That last one, in my opinion, making it clear that they're exploiting the perception that they're too big to fail.
  - gmerc 3y ago
    Why is Airbus not falling out of the sky?
    - giva 3y ago
      They do, the just need more effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
      - thelastgallon 3y ago
        "Air France and Airbus have been investigated for manslaughter since 2011, but in 2019, prosecutors recommended dropping the case against Airbus and charging Air France with manslaughter and negligence, concluding, "the airline was aware of technical problems with a key airspeed monitoring instrument on its planes but failed to train pilots to resolve them"
- mrtksn 3y ago
  How does a failure look like? I mean, this is not a financial institution and in the case of a financial failure people who make planes, the machines they use and all the IP wouldn't disappear. The Boing might actually be too big to fail but their failure, IMHO, looks like what we have today: An inability to make high quality cutting edge aircraft. For the USA, the disaster would be to be reliant on EU/Russa/Brazil/Canada/China for conducting its transportation operations in this massive country. What happens if people start freaking out when their planes are not Airbus? Would increase in government contracts keeping the stocks and profits the same mitigate the problems? So maybe Boing has failed already, its just that its still institutionally solvent for one reason or another.
  - adolph 3y ago
    > in the case of a financial failure people who make planes, the machines they use and all the IP wouldn't disappear. Things get lost all the time. People move on, retire, machines require maintenance and remanufacturing, IP might describe an end state but not how to get there. Some say Boeing itself is an example of this after the MD merger.
- dboreham 3y ago
  This argument doesn't make sense: the US military is also too big to fail, yet apparently reasonably competent.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    The US military is a massive inefficient bureaucracy. Just look at the $5 billion and 8 years wasted on their failure to implement an ERP software system that is standard in large organiations https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-air-force-oracle-erp-failure/ https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-ai... Note the senate investigation report that describes an “organizational disaster” that caused the failure. Don't assume competence because of size and persistence.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      The US military is the largest employer on Earth, some amount of bureaucracy is inevitable. But they are not a business and do not optimize for dollar-efficiency like for-profit businesses do. They optimize for other goals. 'Wasting' 5 billion out of an 842 billion dollar budget, for an organization that doesn't even have to make money, is nothing. Plenty of startups squander even more money, and never accomplish any of the entire point of a for-profit company, making money.
    - CobaltFire 3y ago
      I think this is a common civilian misunderstanding of how the military breeds competence. The US Military is absurdly competent at what its mission is, war fighting and logistics. What it is not competent at is things that are not yet internalized as part of that mission. Unfortunately non visible logistics (software) hasn’t made that cultural shift yet, and once it does will take a long time to breed the institutional competence that the military leans on, primarily due to the compensation gulf.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      What does efficiency have to do with anything? Efficiency and robustness are often opposed (one hates redundancy and the other loves it, for example).
- lp4vn 3y ago
  Modern capitalism supresses competition, that's what happens. What if McDonnell Douglas had never been merged? What if Embraer had been bought by Boeing? That's the harm that monopolies do to society and yet somehow they have been even incentivized in recent times.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  This is when you split the company's civilian aircraft operations into two companies.
- spamizbad 3y ago
  IIRC Boeing's defense and airliner business units are separate. So they really aren't too big to fail: the defense side is insulated from the commercial airliner side.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    Commercial airline manufacture is also in our global strategic interest.
    - adolph 3y ago
      Why is that? Could it be that reduced commercial aircraft lead to better outcomes for high speed rail and future suborbital passenger rockets? Is seeing a strategic interest in commercial aircraft a local minima that prevents further improvement?
      - tsunamifury 3y ago
        This is some paranoid nonsense. It’s that keeping capacity for one of the leading forms of global travel is a strategic interest. Don’t let your conspiracies get in the way of the obvious. Also I feel like the rail circle jerk is so unearned. Last time I was in London it cost 100 pounds to fly to paris from London downtown airport and 600 to take the Chunnel. How “superior”.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        I don’t see the paranoia or conspiracy in their comment. Plane based infrastructure could be a local minima that we’ve bungled our way into without any need for coordination.
        adolph 3y ago
        Hey, no paranoid conspiracy intended. Simply thinking out the counterfactuals. Is tying a particular activity to "national interest" itself a form of paranoia? What about passenger aircraft is a strategic interest? For example, the US seems to do ok with little large-scale shipbuilding outside military concerns. People seem to take cruises from the US in ever-larger cruise ships without a domestic capacity for building them. Additionally, no disagreement on my part regarding the high regard people have for hypothetical rail. On the other hand, I'm open to the idea that high capacity terrestrial transportation similar to rail would have cause to improve if airplanes weren't in an optimization sweet spot.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  Sure, but maybe fire and prosecute some of the execs? Given that they are largely not responsible in delivering the value that will ensure continued success of the company, signal that risking the lives of people is not a good business strategy, and may act as a wake up call for others in leadership positions that they should be leading towards what is best for customers and the business and not what is going to give them the biggest short term payday.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    > maybe fire and prosecute some of the execs? Call me a cynic - but isn't an organization like Boeing designed to diffuse responsibility, so as to shield the guilty behind corporatespeak ? Sure you can subpoena millions of pages of documents and countless emails, but then the sheer size of the legal effort threatens to defeat the entire idea of assigning responsibility.
    - ActionHank 3y ago
      You're correct, but my point is that it should not be allow, especially in cases where the corp involved is directly responsible for the safety of end users.
bux93 3y ago
It's not that Boeing doesn't have any safety policies or procedures, it's just that no-one is aware of them, so nothing gets reported or fixed? Those findings are worse than you'd expect.. Wonder what it's like over at Airbus and Embraer.
- atoav 3y ago
  As far as I know they have a very strict safety culture at Airbus. Living in Hamburg, close to their location there, made a factory tour once and met multiple employees during the years and had chats with them about general ways how things are done at the place. But a few chats with employees and a factory tour isn't the most reliable source to judge this.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  It's not that no-one is aware of them. I read at least two different sets of problems in this report. But first, some background. In the following paragraphs you can substitute "safety" with "quality" in every instance to get equivalent statements that might be more analogous to your experiences. There is big letter "Safety Culture". This is what happens when you study emergent behavior that you want to replicate, and try to systematize it as much as possible. For excample - as noted in the report, "Safety Culture" consists of 5 pillars - this categorization is purely the result of research and analysis and post-hoc reasoning. The point of "Safety Culture" is that we noticed some organizations that have (little letters) "safety cultures" or "cultures of safety" which were able to achieve long-term excellence in terms of safety, and decided to study their common elements. A company "implements" a big letter "Safety Culture" in hopes of inoculating and maintaining an actual "safety culture". A Safety Management System is a tool used to achieve and maintain the Safety Culture. For those not sure of what "X management system" means - it's basically a stack of documentation that defines a meta-process and processes that all of your other processes need to conform to, and by doing so, your employees will be forced into "doing the right thing", and aligning their actions and outputs with the goals of Safety Culture, and therefore eventually getting you an actual culture of safety. In the worst case when you fail at actually sustaining a real safety culture, an SMS then becomes a tool to enforce a minimal standard of safety, from even the most apathetic employee. This comes at enourmous cost of course. Anyone who has had to wait for 3 different authorizations to get a replacement computer at work has witnessed an analogous situation. Another point that's relevant is that the "Safety Culture" model that Boeing (and ICAO) is referencing is acutally quite young compared to Boeing's overall age. The Safety Culture references in the report are from 1997. The first edition of the ICAO Safety Management manual is from 2006. Boeing has been building safe plans for decades before these "new fangled" capital letter things have even existed. It's absolutely possible for an organization to build safe product without formalized adherence to the formalized "Safety Culture". Back to problems identified in the report: The first is that Boeing rolled out a new Safety Management System (SMS) in the last 5-8 years, along with adopting "Safety Culture" policies. But they seem to have blotched the roll out. The report notes that Boeing has its legacy policies and processes for dealing with safety, and those continue in parallel to the new policies and procedures defined in their SMS. They also noted that employees were skeptical of the sustainability of the SMS - ie, they were not sure if this was just some management fad. Many of the findings about "lack of knowledge" read exactly as I'd expect from someone who apathetically clicked through an online training module because they assumed it was useless fluff, because all the real work they've ever seen was handled through legacy processes. Note that a blotched roll out is not the predestined result, even in an environment which was previously lacking a real safety culture, or even middling management. This is a problem, but could maybe be tolerable (from the perspective of short-term safety), except for the fact that it seemed that that legacy backbone has been rotting away in terms of its effectiveness. The dual system surely isn't helping with its effectiveness. In other words, while this report focuses on Boeing's failure to achieve "big letter" Safety Culture, reading between the lines also implies a general lack of actual safety culture, and a lack of competent change management.
GiorgioG 3y ago
Maybe if companies stopped kneeling before the almighty alter of the shareholder, they might actually care what happens beyond the next quarter.
- markus_zhang 3y ago
  That's the whole point of Capitalism.
  - GiorgioG 3y ago
    The stock market is not a requirement of capitalism. Nor is it a requirement for management to be beholden to shareholders in the short term. It's a culture problem. Apple for example, gives two shits about shareholder short/medium term concerns about sinking billions into the Apple Car and Apple Vision Pro that may take a very very long time to become profitable (if ever.)
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    The stock market used to be a pretty dull place. Now it is a bit too interesting.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
  Why would the shareholders want to risk turning the company into a smoking hole in the ground and making their shares worthless? That said I think it’s a bit suspicious when so much of the ownership is institutional investors who seem to just own each other, and appear to work against the very interest of maintaining and growing the value of the investment, which is what one would think being a shareholder is all about.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > Why would the shareholders want to risk turning the company into a smoking hole in the ground and making their shares worthless? Because they're getting out long before the stock craters.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
dboreham 3y ago
The KPIs are all good though.
- jeffrallen 3y ago
  Except "number of days since last door fell off" which is trending a bit lower than we'd like to see. And "number of days since last damning report from our regulator saying our safety culture is totally messed up" which is (checks notes) 1 day.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
How close is the FAA to detecting that safety is not a business model? "We don’t ‘sell’ safety; that’s not our business model." -Boeing CEO ref: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/10/30/when-companies-prioritize-profits-over-employee-and-consumer-safety-after-fatal-boeing-737-max-crashes-ceo-tells-congress-that-safety-is-not-our-business-model/?sh=748379bb151a https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/10/30/when-compa...
- hef19898 3y ago
  In aerospace, saftey actually is the business model so?
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > In aerospace, saftey actually is the business model so? I should have inc the relevant quote(fixd). Anyway, that was my understanding. But in my linked article, Boeing's CEO corrects me: "We don’t ‘sell’ safety; that’s not our business model." This is his day job after all.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Well, seems he was somewhat mistaken after all, wasn't he?
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        Where was he mistaken? He knew his job, did it to completion and was very well rewarded the entire time. His work at Boeing is so well regarded that investors couldn't wait to firehose capital his way. ref:https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/former-boeing-ceo-muilenburg-heads-200m-blank-check-venture/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/forme... Boeing's CEO is what success looks like.
        hef19898 3y ago
        And yet Boeing became the posterchild, and but of jokes, for really bad engineering. And sold products that killed a couple of hundred people... Truely long term success for the company.
whitej125 3y ago
20 years ago nobody thought there'd be a another US automaker beyond the big three (Ford, GM, Chrysler)... yet today here we are with Tesla and a list of others. Are there any other US companies today that could ostensibly be viable alternatives to Boeing's spot 20 years from now? Electric-first-and-only was the differentiator for Tesla vs big three... what differentiator will it be in the aero industry?
- wand3r 3y ago
  Boom is taking a Tesla approach to aerospace focusing on high end first with a Concord replacement. I am sure there are others working their way up the value chain
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Boom still isn't dead yet?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Boom has all these fans on sites like this--and to be clear I wish Boom well--who also wouldn't consider spending $10K for a comfortable lie-flat seating flight from the US to Europe.
    - notatoad 3y ago
      Boom won’t die until the saudis give up on supersonic flight as a method to increase the demand for oil.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    Has Boom found a new engine supplier yet?
    - buildsjets 3y ago
      Every major and minor engine manufacturer punted, so now they're making their own. https://boomsupersonic.com/symphony https://boomsupersonic.com/symphony Hired an experienced propulsion guy away from Boeing to run the show. https://boomsupersonic.com/team-members/scott-powell https://boomsupersonic.com/team-members/scott-powell They are not going to be able to do it, my opinion. There are very few people in the world who have deep experience doing 3D CFD on supersonic turbofans, I've talked to a few of them and none have been headhunted. The will need good analysis work, they are asking for a LOT out of a single stage fan. They certainly will not have the metallurgical research and manufacturing technologies of the engine manufacturers to use. But best of luck to Scott, his Porsche GT3 was getting kind of old and needs to be upgraded to the latest model.
redRabbit99 3y ago
China was able to create brand new planes in 2020, they’re not air maxes but smaller units. I believe their new value and sale has undercut the Boeing market, and significantly so, in a way that basically undermines the maintenance value of Boeing.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Besides Chinese airliners having nothing to do with Boeings, or Airbus, marketshare, what is "maintenance value"?
  - redRabbit99 3y ago
    Lol why you say that nothing to do with their market share. Boeings were grounded in China; while china isn’t the only market imagine decreasing a lion share of value from the largest population country? sure it won’t hit hard but it can hit enough to topple something… and seemingly it slightly has. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/24/boeing-delivers-737-max-jet-to-china-ending-four-year-freeze.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/24/boeing-delivers-737-max-... And its just that, the maintenance value I mean literally a dent like that in business trickles down to the bottom, that Chinese market share loss potentially is felt by the engineers and maintenance workers, not the CEOs, etc.
cameroncf 3y ago
Isn't this just confirming a seemingly widely held opinion that the safety culture started to break down after 1997 after the merger with McDonnell Douglas? See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26417095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26417095
- beowulfey 3y ago
  >Isn't this just confirming a seemingly widely held opinion Yes-- this represents formal acknowledgement by a regulatory agency. The hope is that agency can now use this formalization to enforce change within Boeing.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    And, what, undo capitalism? The motivating forces here are profit, plain and simple. I've come to think that it's not only probable, but _inevitable_ that any growth-oriented, profit-motivated company (read: any company) will reach a point that their only remaining growth path is to undermine quality.
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      Capitalism in practice is an artificial environment. People speak of it as if it is a force of nature, but anywhere it is put into practice it is put into practice in the context of norms and regulations. Undo capitalism is a conversation terminating tactic. If the Jack Welch style of capitalism is failing, it can be changed. For example, there is a national Labor relations board because we don't do this anarchically.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - anadem 3y ago
        > there is a national Labor relations board Unless/until Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX and Trader Joe’s manage to gut the NLRB with their recent legal challenges.
ardaoweo 3y ago
This is the real problem with Boeing. The MCAS design fiasco and the door plug falling off were not isolated incidents, but symptoms of broader issues. I can only wonder what remaining hidden flaws aircraft currently in the air may have, and what they might cause in the future. Recently I had the option to fly on either 737MAX or 20 year old A319, and chose the latter option simply because I have more faith in safety culture at Airbus.
- hef19898 3y ago
  If the Aircraft is 20 years old, you should worry a lot more about the airline's safety culture than the manufacturer's. Just saying.
  - slices 3y ago
    https://avgeekery.com/oldest-flying-airliners-in-the-united-states/ https://avgeekery.com/oldest-flying-airliners-in-the-united-...
  - ardaoweo 3y ago
    As long as maintenance is done properly there's nothing wrong with old aircraft, there are very well defined maintenance programs that specify which parts should be checked / changed and when. The airline in question is among the oldest in EU, and has an excellent safety record.
rapatel0 3y ago
Boeing is another in the long list of companies that were taken over by process and finance people and driven into the ground with short term thinking largely centered on reducing cost-structure and financial engineering. Elon has a great diatribe describing how the big automakers largely broke down and outsourced most parts manufacturing just became system integrators and customer support. In the short term, this is great for the bottom line, but it hollows out the engineering culture and make it extremely difficult to innovate. Imagine trying to get 100s suppliers to make small tweaks to each of their parts. Also, imagine when you need multiple suppliers to work together to build (NDAs, IP agreements, etc). You get buried in bullshit Great companies are generally lead by R&D (product, science, engineering) with strong finance / process acting as gravity to keep the company grounded & functioning. When finance / process take over, then gravity will dominate and you crash
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  Ironic for Elon to be complaining about the bureaucracy of automakers and how it drags down production quality.
  - fasteddie31003 3y ago
    Elon fan boy here. My Tesla has been a pretty solid car compared to any Crysler or GM car that I've owned before.
    - fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
      You should try owning a Toyota
      - psunavy03 3y ago
        . . . who had their own major scandal about self-accelerating vehicles.
        idontpost 3y ago
Ligma123 3y ago
[flagged]
- hef19898 3y ago
  Rich, coming from the guy who's cars actually try to kill people.
- acdha 3y ago
  This problem started decades ago with McDonald Douglas, and given Tesla’s well-reported problems with safety and quality control you might want to pick a more credible source. Blaming DEI for the problem especially seems like you’re more interested in pushing a political agenda than fixing the problem, too. Boeing had some unqualified leaders but what they have in common isn’t that they were adding racial, gender, or class diversity. If you want to know why the 737-MAX failed, start with the Harvard MBA part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
dathinab 3y ago
> The panel expressed concern that the confusion might discourage employees from reporting what they see as safety problems. so who is opening bets that this was at least partially intentional? Quite often when there are overly complicated reporting pipelines and people not knowing how to use them is because the company doesn't want you to report because that leaves a paper trail which could screw them over if they ignore it and something goes wrong.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Dieselgate is an example of what happens when managers are rewarded for achieving goals they haven’t been given the resources to achieve. When you promote people for achieving the impossible without investigating how they achieved it, that’s how you end up with superfund sites, pollution, or giant safety recalls. They didn’t do what you asked. They found a way to cheat. And worse, their coworkers and reports know what they did, and see them getting rewarded. The “morally flexible” copy, and the boy scouts leave, or burn out.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Dieselgate started as far up the top of VWs fod chain as you can get: the CEO handpicked and protected by the god father himself, Ferdinand Piech. Well possible that Piech was involved in all of that as well. It started as a deliberate decision to limit AdBlue tank volume to safe money, and extend AdBlue usage to the point drivers didn't have to replenish themselves between inspections, which allowed VW to make more money on service. That cheating was not engineers cutting corners to please management, it was engineers at the very top of management deliberately ordering the organization to cheat.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      I think you have a different story. The TDIs involved with Dieselgate shipped with no adBlue tank. VW claimed to have some special process where they could catalyze the soot without the nitrogen supply to manage it. But that was all a lie. Adblue (the accepted solution) wasn't added until 2014 at the earliest. The naughtiest thing they did was that the vehicles detected if they were being run in inspection mode, and adjusted the fuel mixture to avoid exceeding particulate emissions. They may also not have been telling people to refill the tanks on cars that had them, but actively circumventing EEA/EPA compliance checks was what infuriated governments.
hammock 3y ago
The deficiencies found in the report were in Just Culture and Reporting Culture. The five Key Elements of Safety Culture are: 1) Informed Culture- the organization collects and analyses relevant data, and actively disseminates safety information. 2) Reporting Culture- cultivating an atmosphere where people have confidence to report safety concerns without fear of blame. Employees must know that confidentiality will be maintained and that the information they submit will be acted upon, otherwise they will decide that there is no benefit in their reporting. 3) Learning Culture- an organization is able to learn from its mistakes and make changes. It will also ensure that people understand the SMS processes at a personal level. 4) Just Culture- errors and unsafe acts will not be punished if the error was unintentional. However, those who act recklessly or take deliberate and unjustifiable risks will still be subject to disciplinary action. 5) Flexible Culture- the organization and the people in it are capable of adapting effectively to changing demands. Sources: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/Sec103_ExpertPanelReview_Report_Final.pdf https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/Sec103_ExpertPanelReview_Report... https://www.airsafety.aero/safety-information-and-reporting/safety-management-systems/safety-culture https://www.airsafety.aero/safety-information-and-reporting/...
- burnerburnson 3y ago
  > errors and unsafe acts will not be punished if the error was unintentional. No sane organization would ever implement this. If someone repeatedly makes mistakes, they're going to get fired even if the mistakes are unintentional. Anything else is going to cause more safety issues in the long-term as inadequate employees are allowed to proliferate.
  - zettabomb 3y ago
    Every sane organization implements this. Failure to do so leads to fear of reporting mistakes, and you get Boeing. This isn't news.
  - jjk166 3y ago
    If it's possible for an employee to unintentionally make the same mistake twice, that's purely management's failure. It's impossible to make systems completely fool proof, but once you know of a specific deficiency in your process you fix it. If you've corrected the issue, it should take deliberate effort for someone to do it again. An organization that knows its processes are deficient but makes no changes and expects a different result is insane.
mvkel 3y ago
A great example of what will happen when the libertarian mindset takes hold of any industry. The risk/reward among market forces is entirely different; many lives lost become "the cost of doing business" despite being entirely preventable.
marcofrancesco 3y ago
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burnerburnson 3y ago
The average engineer at Boeing makes $120k/year. That's about $50k less than what a new grad with no experience will get from big tech. Boeing doesn't have a culture problem, they have an idiot problem. The idea that you can hire competent engineers offering salaries like that is absurd. They need to adopt a pay for performance mentality and bring in managers who are not afraid to fire underperformers.
- kghe3X 3y ago
  Just where is an inexperienced new grad making $170k out of the gate? I find this difficult to believe. Are you normalizing for cost of living? I suspect, most Boeing employees aren't based in the Valley.
  - StevenXC 3y ago
    A major Boeing campus is in Huntsville, AL, which is going to affect that average for sure.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
Safety culture is too hard for the MBA's to put a dollar value on, until it's too late. Having worked in the (network) Security domain for some time, the same thing there. When things are going well, "what do we pay you for?", and when they turn catastrophic, "what do we pay you for?"
iancmceachern 3y ago
They sold their soul to make the people at the top rich. It's not about airplanes, it's about human nature.
dogman144 3y ago
I knew a Boeing swe, and several years back the QA approach with code sounded hugely disconcerting considering big picture controlled an airplane - variables named “A, B, C,” variable reuse, shell staffing/multi-hats on their desk due to retention issues, on and on.
NoPedantsThanks 3y ago
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AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
Something that helps a lot: have a safety incident team with absolutely no connection to HR. They have no ability to fire anyone or report on your performance review, they don't talk to managers about people and just record and compile safety related issues. Yeah, you may have an employee or two who screams wolf a lot, but their job is just to investigate, fix the specific issue, anonymize, and aggregate the reports. This lack of connection should be very public so everyone feels comfortable talking to them. This is part of how the FAA vastly reduced the fatality rate in GA. They stopped playing cop and started playing engineer.
- kmonad 3y ago
  I like the idea, but I am pessimistic. The more experienced I get (aka getting older), the more I see administrative bloating as the cancer of institutions---a somewhat equally inescapable fate. Installing a safety reporting administration may do what it set out to do, initially. But at some point, promotions may be handed out to those with most reports, perhaps perverting the initial intent. In another thread I read that the EASA and FAA used to send Airbus/EASA engineers to Boeing (and maybe vice versa) who could raise all sorts of hell if mistakes were found. Such a setup seems perhaps harder to "game". I do not know this for a fact, I recall it from reading another debate, so take it as hearsay.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    These sound like variations on "tiger teams". And they sound appropriate.
andruby 3y ago
The stock market doesn’t seem to care about this report. Unless it was already rumored a while ago and priced in. BA (Boeing’s stock ticker) has been trading sideways this week.
neilv 3y ago
If company leadership recklessly eroded safety practices, of a well-understood safety-critical national institution... is there individual criminal liability? Prosecuting willful bad behavior at the top that led to deaths might help push the culture back.
- WheatMillington 3y ago
  I don't know the situation in the USA, but it would appear there is virtually never indivdiual liability. Here in New Zealand there is absolutely personal director and executive responsibility and accountability where it comes to safety.
heisenbit 3y ago
Reading Admiral Cloudberg‘s latest https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-fall-of-the-viscount-the-crash-of-capital-airlines-flight-20-b22148c17cc1 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-fall-of-the-viscount... history on deicing of air inlets and that these systems are now automatic and the 737 system was grandfathered in was interesting: „(The Boeing 737 is of course the one big exception, because its 1960s-era crew-activated engine anti-ice system has been repeatedly grandfathered in with no automatic mode for the last half century.) „ Did not Boeing ask for an exemption recently due to a dangerous heat up situation if these heaters were not turned off in time?
aydyn 3y ago
I know this is beating a dead horse at this point, but the "key element" missing is not safety culture, it's accountability: people need to start facing real jail time for all the deaths they've caused. None of this distributed blame horseshit. Downstream will fall in place once the correct incentives are in place.
black_13 3y ago
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schainks 3y ago
The leaders of Boeing are clearly fumbling the ball, paying themselves more than ever, shitting on their labor and supply chain sub-contractors, all while costing ME as a taxpayer and occasional user more money and stress than ever. Such a small group of leaders extracting maximum value for themselves at both the cost of the company, greater economy, AND the US Taxpayer sounds, I don't know... criminal?
- letsdothisagain 3y ago
  It's not new either. Teddy Roosevelt ran on trust busting and defeated both the dems and republicans.
- euroderf 3y ago
  But in the absence of criminal enforcement, it just sounds... clubby. Welcome to Techno-Neo-Feudalism. Your superiors are handling their own compensation quite nicely, thank you. Now get back to work !!

380 points by elorant 3y ago

I think the ultimate problem with Boeing is that they're too big to fail. They're too important to the US's strategic interests so the government won't allow them to go out of business despite gross incompetence. A classic case of "putting all your eggs in one basket."

jajko 3y ago
No pressure for excellence usually leads to lack thereof
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Isn't this what our version of capitalism encourages? Grow to dominate so much of the market and of stock and pension portfolios at all costs, that you'll have to be bailed out no matter your incompetence. So as long as this behavior only gets rewarded and never punished, why would you expect different results?
- nequo 3y ago
  Car manufacturing is similar in a lot of ways yet notably different in the putting all eggs in the same basket sense that parent mentions. Ford and GM are too big to fail yet they do compete and it does lead to at least one of them making decent cars that don’t fall apart under you.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Ford and GM have much more competition than Being. It's a lot easier to enter the auto market than the aircraft market.
    - nequo 3y ago
      That is true, but Boeing wasn't always the only player in aircraft manufacturing either. Even subsidizing two or three players so that they can compete might be better for safety and quality than letting them merge and operate as a complete monopoly.
velcrovan 3y ago
The federal government should buy a controlling share in the company, problem solved.
- godzillabrennus 3y ago
  Federal government can’t run itself today. Probably not going to be effective running Boeing either.
  - velcrovan 3y ago
    Federal government can run itself fine as long as congresspeople aren't staging stunt shutdowns. They owned a controlling share in GM from 2009–2013 to bring the company out of bankruptcy. They own the Tennessee Valley Authority which operates no better or worse than other utility companies. The Alaskan sovereign wealth fund owns hundreds of companies and properties throughout the US. There isn’t a meaningful difference in competence or bureaucracy between a too-big-to-fail company the size of Boeing and a large state institution. The difference would be in who can set the org-wide incentives and goals. Clearly shareholders aren't interested in safety being one of the goals.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Isn't there some precedent for this in the automotive industry ? For example, in running Chrysler ?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
amelius 3y ago
Maybe true for the company, but certainly not for its management.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  The last one fired got a $60M golden parachute and then became CEO of another company. There seems to be little incentive there.
  - chii 3y ago
    what gets to me is how anyone would hire the fired CEO given the reputation.
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      Typically it happens when buddies are on the board.
    - tass 3y ago
      I haven’t looked at their financials, but I’m assuming he successfully increased profits for Boeing. He’s probably hireable so long as there’s no culture of safety or engineering to be destroyed.
    - godzillabrennus 3y ago
      A known quantity to the industry who managed to deploy billions in budgets for a massive player is valuable at the helm of any company that wants those kinds of things.
    - lucianbr 3y ago
      Seems like nobody hired him as CEO. Him and some buddies tried to start something, and it didn't get anywhere, and they lost money with it. Sounds quite reasonable to me :) https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/former-ceo-muilenburgs-next-venture-after-boeing-fails/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/forme...
  - 3y ago
Sebb767 3y ago
I think the problem is not that Boeing is too big to fail, it's the massive cost of designing, certifying and efficiently building a new airframe, which makes it hard for a competitor to emerge. The US doesn't really have another basket to put eggs into.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Except that they have had issues with other things as well. Over on the space side, their Starliner crew capsule has had several safety debacles over the past 4 years, such that maybe it'll finally carry crew this year. First it was poorly tested software, then stuck valves, then the tape they wrapped certain wires in to make them more fire resistant turned out to not work, and then finally after all that testing, their parachute system had issues. Boeing has had cultural issues for a while now, part of their rocketry division was forced to be spun out (by the government) with Lockmart's into ULA because Boeing was caught conducting espionage on Lockmart, which would've potentially disqualified them from bidding on launches. They had also had information leaked to them about bidding on the Artemis lunar lander contracts. Plus other incidents like trying to get people at ULA proposing things like orbital refueling systems fired because if they allowed such technology to emerge, Boeing couldn't get blank checks from the government for building near-useless rockets. That last one, in my opinion, making it clear that they're exploiting the perception that they're too big to fail.
- gmerc 3y ago
  Why is Airbus not falling out of the sky?
  - giva 3y ago
    They do, the just need more effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
    - thelastgallon 3y ago
      "Air France and Airbus have been investigated for manslaughter since 2011, but in 2019, prosecutors recommended dropping the case against Airbus and charging Air France with manslaughter and negligence, concluding, "the airline was aware of technical problems with a key airspeed monitoring instrument on its planes but failed to train pilots to resolve them"
mrtksn 3y ago
How does a failure look like? I mean, this is not a financial institution and in the case of a financial failure people who make planes, the machines they use and all the IP wouldn't disappear. The Boing might actually be too big to fail but their failure, IMHO, looks like what we have today: An inability to make high quality cutting edge aircraft. For the USA, the disaster would be to be reliant on EU/Russa/Brazil/Canada/China for conducting its transportation operations in this massive country. What happens if people start freaking out when their planes are not Airbus? Would increase in government contracts keeping the stocks and profits the same mitigate the problems? So maybe Boing has failed already, its just that its still institutionally solvent for one reason or another.
- adolph 3y ago
  > in the case of a financial failure people who make planes, the machines they use and all the IP wouldn't disappear. Things get lost all the time. People move on, retire, machines require maintenance and remanufacturing, IP might describe an end state but not how to get there. Some say Boeing itself is an example of this after the MD merger.
dboreham 3y ago
This argument doesn't make sense: the US military is also too big to fail, yet apparently reasonably competent.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  The US military is a massive inefficient bureaucracy. Just look at the $5 billion and 8 years wasted on their failure to implement an ERP software system that is standard in large organiations https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-air-force-oracle-erp-failure/ https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-ai... Note the senate investigation report that describes an “organizational disaster” that caused the failure. Don't assume competence because of size and persistence.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    The US military is the largest employer on Earth, some amount of bureaucracy is inevitable. But they are not a business and do not optimize for dollar-efficiency like for-profit businesses do. They optimize for other goals. 'Wasting' 5 billion out of an 842 billion dollar budget, for an organization that doesn't even have to make money, is nothing. Plenty of startups squander even more money, and never accomplish any of the entire point of a for-profit company, making money.
  - CobaltFire 3y ago
    I think this is a common civilian misunderstanding of how the military breeds competence. The US Military is absurdly competent at what its mission is, war fighting and logistics. What it is not competent at is things that are not yet internalized as part of that mission. Unfortunately non visible logistics (software) hasn’t made that cultural shift yet, and once it does will take a long time to breed the institutional competence that the military leans on, primarily due to the compensation gulf.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    What does efficiency have to do with anything? Efficiency and robustness are often opposed (one hates redundancy and the other loves it, for example).
lp4vn 3y ago
Modern capitalism supresses competition, that's what happens. What if McDonnell Douglas had never been merged? What if Embraer had been bought by Boeing? That's the harm that monopolies do to society and yet somehow they have been even incentivized in recent times.
lenerdenator 3y ago
This is when you split the company's civilian aircraft operations into two companies.
spamizbad 3y ago
IIRC Boeing's defense and airliner business units are separate. So they really aren't too big to fail: the defense side is insulated from the commercial airliner side.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  Commercial airline manufacture is also in our global strategic interest.
  - adolph 3y ago
    Why is that? Could it be that reduced commercial aircraft lead to better outcomes for high speed rail and future suborbital passenger rockets? Is seeing a strategic interest in commercial aircraft a local minima that prevents further improvement?
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      This is some paranoid nonsense. It’s that keeping capacity for one of the leading forms of global travel is a strategic interest. Don’t let your conspiracies get in the way of the obvious. Also I feel like the rail circle jerk is so unearned. Last time I was in London it cost 100 pounds to fly to paris from London downtown airport and 600 to take the Chunnel. How “superior”.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        I don’t see the paranoia or conspiracy in their comment. Plane based infrastructure could be a local minima that we’ve bungled our way into without any need for coordination.
      - adolph 3y ago
        Hey, no paranoid conspiracy intended. Simply thinking out the counterfactuals. Is tying a particular activity to "national interest" itself a form of paranoia? What about passenger aircraft is a strategic interest? For example, the US seems to do ok with little large-scale shipbuilding outside military concerns. People seem to take cruises from the US in ever-larger cruise ships without a domestic capacity for building them. Additionally, no disagreement on my part regarding the high regard people have for hypothetical rail. On the other hand, I'm open to the idea that high capacity terrestrial transportation similar to rail would have cause to improve if airplanes weren't in an optimization sweet spot.
ActionHank 3y ago
Sure, but maybe fire and prosecute some of the execs? Given that they are largely not responsible in delivering the value that will ensure continued success of the company, signal that risking the lives of people is not a good business strategy, and may act as a wake up call for others in leadership positions that they should be leading towards what is best for customers and the business and not what is going to give them the biggest short term payday.
- euroderf 3y ago
  > maybe fire and prosecute some of the execs? Call me a cynic - but isn't an organization like Boeing designed to diffuse responsibility, so as to shield the guilty behind corporatespeak ? Sure you can subpoena millions of pages of documents and countless emails, but then the sheer size of the legal effort threatens to defeat the entire idea of assigning responsibility.
  - ActionHank 3y ago
    You're correct, but my point is that it should not be allow, especially in cases where the corp involved is directly responsible for the safety of end users.

bux93 3y ago

It's not that Boeing doesn't have any safety policies or procedures, it's just that no-one is aware of them, so nothing gets reported or fixed? Those findings are worse than you'd expect.. Wonder what it's like over at Airbus and Embraer.

atoav 3y ago
As far as I know they have a very strict safety culture at Airbus. Living in Hamburg, close to their location there, made a factory tour once and met multiple employees during the years and had chats with them about general ways how things are done at the place. But a few chats with employees and a factory tour isn't the most reliable source to judge this.
icegreentea2 3y ago
It's not that no-one is aware of them. I read at least two different sets of problems in this report. But first, some background. In the following paragraphs you can substitute "safety" with "quality" in every instance to get equivalent statements that might be more analogous to your experiences. There is big letter "Safety Culture". This is what happens when you study emergent behavior that you want to replicate, and try to systematize it as much as possible. For excample - as noted in the report, "Safety Culture" consists of 5 pillars - this categorization is purely the result of research and analysis and post-hoc reasoning. The point of "Safety Culture" is that we noticed some organizations that have (little letters) "safety cultures" or "cultures of safety" which were able to achieve long-term excellence in terms of safety, and decided to study their common elements. A company "implements" a big letter "Safety Culture" in hopes of inoculating and maintaining an actual "safety culture". A Safety Management System is a tool used to achieve and maintain the Safety Culture. For those not sure of what "X management system" means - it's basically a stack of documentation that defines a meta-process and processes that all of your other processes need to conform to, and by doing so, your employees will be forced into "doing the right thing", and aligning their actions and outputs with the goals of Safety Culture, and therefore eventually getting you an actual culture of safety. In the worst case when you fail at actually sustaining a real safety culture, an SMS then becomes a tool to enforce a minimal standard of safety, from even the most apathetic employee. This comes at enourmous cost of course. Anyone who has had to wait for 3 different authorizations to get a replacement computer at work has witnessed an analogous situation. Another point that's relevant is that the "Safety Culture" model that Boeing (and ICAO) is referencing is acutally quite young compared to Boeing's overall age. The Safety Culture references in the report are from 1997. The first edition of the ICAO Safety Management manual is from 2006. Boeing has been building safe plans for decades before these "new fangled" capital letter things have even existed. It's absolutely possible for an organization to build safe product without formalized adherence to the formalized "Safety Culture". Back to problems identified in the report: The first is that Boeing rolled out a new Safety Management System (SMS) in the last 5-8 years, along with adopting "Safety Culture" policies. But they seem to have blotched the roll out. The report notes that Boeing has its legacy policies and processes for dealing with safety, and those continue in parallel to the new policies and procedures defined in their SMS. They also noted that employees were skeptical of the sustainability of the SMS - ie, they were not sure if this was just some management fad. Many of the findings about "lack of knowledge" read exactly as I'd expect from someone who apathetically clicked through an online training module because they assumed it was useless fluff, because all the real work they've ever seen was handled through legacy processes. Note that a blotched roll out is not the predestined result, even in an environment which was previously lacking a real safety culture, or even middling management. This is a problem, but could maybe be tolerable (from the perspective of short-term safety), except for the fact that it seemed that that legacy backbone has been rotting away in terms of its effectiveness. The dual system surely isn't helping with its effectiveness. In other words, while this report focuses on Boeing's failure to achieve "big letter" Safety Culture, reading between the lines also implies a general lack of actual safety culture, and a lack of competent change management.

GiorgioG 3y ago

Maybe if companies stopped kneeling before the almighty alter of the shareholder, they might actually care what happens beyond the next quarter.

markus_zhang 3y ago
That's the whole point of Capitalism.
- GiorgioG 3y ago
  The stock market is not a requirement of capitalism. Nor is it a requirement for management to be beholden to shareholders in the short term. It's a culture problem. Apple for example, gives two shits about shareholder short/medium term concerns about sinking billions into the Apple Car and Apple Vision Pro that may take a very very long time to become profitable (if ever.)
- Zigurd 3y ago
  The stock market used to be a pretty dull place. Now it is a bit too interesting.
Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
Why would the shareholders want to risk turning the company into a smoking hole in the ground and making their shares worthless? That said I think it’s a bit suspicious when so much of the ownership is institutional investors who seem to just own each other, and appear to work against the very interest of maintaining and growing the value of the investment, which is what one would think being a shareholder is all about.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > Why would the shareholders want to risk turning the company into a smoking hole in the ground and making their shares worthless? Because they're getting out long before the stock craters.
- lenerdenator 3y ago

dboreham 3y ago

The KPIs are all good though.

jeffrallen 3y ago
Except "number of days since last door fell off" which is trending a bit lower than we'd like to see. And "number of days since last damning report from our regulator saying our safety culture is totally messed up" which is (checks notes) 1 day.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

How close is the FAA to detecting that safety is not a business model? "We don’t ‘sell’ safety; that’s not our business model." -Boeing CEO ref: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/10/30/when-companies-prioritize-profits-over-employee-and-consumer-safety-after-fatal-boeing-737-max-crashes-ceo-tells-congress-that-safety-is-not-our-business-model/?sh=748379bb151a https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/10/30/when-compa...

hef19898 3y ago
In aerospace, saftey actually is the business model so?
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > In aerospace, saftey actually is the business model so? I should have inc the relevant quote(fixd). Anyway, that was my understanding. But in my linked article, Boeing's CEO corrects me: "We don’t ‘sell’ safety; that’s not our business model." This is his day job after all.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Well, seems he was somewhat mistaken after all, wasn't he?
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      Where was he mistaken? He knew his job, did it to completion and was very well rewarded the entire time. His work at Boeing is so well regarded that investors couldn't wait to firehose capital his way. ref:https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/former-boeing-ceo-muilenburg-heads-200m-blank-check-venture/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/forme... Boeing's CEO is what success looks like.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        And yet Boeing became the posterchild, and but of jokes, for really bad engineering. And sold products that killed a couple of hundred people... Truely long term success for the company.

whitej125 3y ago

20 years ago nobody thought there'd be a another US automaker beyond the big three (Ford, GM, Chrysler)... yet today here we are with Tesla and a list of others. Are there any other US companies today that could ostensibly be viable alternatives to Boeing's spot 20 years from now? Electric-first-and-only was the differentiator for Tesla vs big three... what differentiator will it be in the aero industry?

wand3r 3y ago
Boom is taking a Tesla approach to aerospace focusing on high end first with a Concord replacement. I am sure there are others working their way up the value chain
- hef19898 3y ago
  Boom still isn't dead yet?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Boom has all these fans on sites like this--and to be clear I wish Boom well--who also wouldn't consider spending $10K for a comfortable lie-flat seating flight from the US to Europe.
  - notatoad 3y ago
    Boom won’t die until the saudis give up on supersonic flight as a method to increase the demand for oil.
- consumer451 3y ago
  Has Boom found a new engine supplier yet?
  - buildsjets 3y ago
    Every major and minor engine manufacturer punted, so now they're making their own. https://boomsupersonic.com/symphony https://boomsupersonic.com/symphony Hired an experienced propulsion guy away from Boeing to run the show. https://boomsupersonic.com/team-members/scott-powell https://boomsupersonic.com/team-members/scott-powell They are not going to be able to do it, my opinion. There are very few people in the world who have deep experience doing 3D CFD on supersonic turbofans, I've talked to a few of them and none have been headhunted. The will need good analysis work, they are asking for a LOT out of a single stage fan. They certainly will not have the metallurgical research and manufacturing technologies of the engine manufacturers to use. But best of luck to Scott, his Porsche GT3 was getting kind of old and needs to be upgraded to the latest model.

redRabbit99 3y ago

China was able to create brand new planes in 2020, they’re not air maxes but smaller units. I believe their new value and sale has undercut the Boeing market, and significantly so, in a way that basically undermines the maintenance value of Boeing.

hef19898 3y ago
Besides Chinese airliners having nothing to do with Boeings, or Airbus, marketshare, what is "maintenance value"?
- redRabbit99 3y ago
  Lol why you say that nothing to do with their market share. Boeings were grounded in China; while china isn’t the only market imagine decreasing a lion share of value from the largest population country? sure it won’t hit hard but it can hit enough to topple something… and seemingly it slightly has. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/24/boeing-delivers-737-max-jet-to-china-ending-four-year-freeze.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/24/boeing-delivers-737-max-... And its just that, the maintenance value I mean literally a dent like that in business trickles down to the bottom, that Chinese market share loss potentially is felt by the engineers and maintenance workers, not the CEOs, etc.

cameroncf 3y ago

Isn't this just confirming a seemingly widely held opinion that the safety culture started to break down after 1997 after the merger with McDonnell Douglas? See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26417095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26417095

beowulfey 3y ago
>Isn't this just confirming a seemingly widely held opinion Yes-- this represents formal acknowledgement by a regulatory agency. The hope is that agency can now use this formalization to enforce change within Boeing.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  And, what, undo capitalism? The motivating forces here are profit, plain and simple. I've come to think that it's not only probable, but _inevitable_ that any growth-oriented, profit-motivated company (read: any company) will reach a point that their only remaining growth path is to undermine quality.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Capitalism in practice is an artificial environment. People speak of it as if it is a force of nature, but anywhere it is put into practice it is put into practice in the context of norms and regulations. Undo capitalism is a conversation terminating tactic. If the Jack Welch style of capitalism is failing, it can be changed. For example, there is a national Labor relations board because we don't do this anarchically.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - anadem 3y ago
      > there is a national Labor relations board Unless/until Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX and Trader Joe’s manage to gut the NLRB with their recent legal challenges.

ardaoweo 3y ago

This is the real problem with Boeing. The MCAS design fiasco and the door plug falling off were not isolated incidents, but symptoms of broader issues. I can only wonder what remaining hidden flaws aircraft currently in the air may have, and what they might cause in the future. Recently I had the option to fly on either 737MAX or 20 year old A319, and chose the latter option simply because I have more faith in safety culture at Airbus.

hef19898 3y ago
If the Aircraft is 20 years old, you should worry a lot more about the airline's safety culture than the manufacturer's. Just saying.
- slices 3y ago
  https://avgeekery.com/oldest-flying-airliners-in-the-united-states/ https://avgeekery.com/oldest-flying-airliners-in-the-united-...
- ardaoweo 3y ago
  As long as maintenance is done properly there's nothing wrong with old aircraft, there are very well defined maintenance programs that specify which parts should be checked / changed and when. The airline in question is among the oldest in EU, and has an excellent safety record.

rapatel0 3y ago

Boeing is another in the long list of companies that were taken over by process and finance people and driven into the ground with short term thinking largely centered on reducing cost-structure and financial engineering. Elon has a great diatribe describing how the big automakers largely broke down and outsourced most parts manufacturing just became system integrators and customer support. In the short term, this is great for the bottom line, but it hollows out the engineering culture and make it extremely difficult to innovate. Imagine trying to get 100s suppliers to make small tweaks to each of their parts. Also, imagine when you need multiple suppliers to work together to build (NDAs, IP agreements, etc). You get buried in bullshit Great companies are generally lead by R&D (product, science, engineering) with strong finance / process acting as gravity to keep the company grounded & functioning. When finance / process take over, then gravity will dominate and you crash

lenerdenator 3y ago
Ironic for Elon to be complaining about the bureaucracy of automakers and how it drags down production quality.
- fasteddie31003 3y ago
  Elon fan boy here. My Tesla has been a pretty solid car compared to any Crysler or GM car that I've owned before.
  - fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
    You should try owning a Toyota
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      . . . who had their own major scandal about self-accelerating vehicles.
      - idontpost 3y ago

Ligma123 3y ago

[flagged]

hef19898 3y ago
Rich, coming from the guy who's cars actually try to kill people.
acdha 3y ago
This problem started decades ago with McDonald Douglas, and given Tesla’s well-reported problems with safety and quality control you might want to pick a more credible source. Blaming DEI for the problem especially seems like you’re more interested in pushing a political agenda than fixing the problem, too. Boeing had some unqualified leaders but what they have in common isn’t that they were adding racial, gender, or class diversity. If you want to know why the 737-MAX failed, start with the Harvard MBA part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney

dathinab 3y ago

> The panel expressed concern that the confusion might discourage employees from reporting what they see as safety problems. so who is opening bets that this was at least partially intentional? Quite often when there are overly complicated reporting pipelines and people not knowing how to use them is because the company doesn't want you to report because that leaves a paper trail which could screw them over if they ignore it and something goes wrong.

hinkley 3y ago
Dieselgate is an example of what happens when managers are rewarded for achieving goals they haven’t been given the resources to achieve. When you promote people for achieving the impossible without investigating how they achieved it, that’s how you end up with superfund sites, pollution, or giant safety recalls. They didn’t do what you asked. They found a way to cheat. And worse, their coworkers and reports know what they did, and see them getting rewarded. The “morally flexible” copy, and the boy scouts leave, or burn out.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Dieselgate started as far up the top of VWs fod chain as you can get: the CEO handpicked and protected by the god father himself, Ferdinand Piech. Well possible that Piech was involved in all of that as well. It started as a deliberate decision to limit AdBlue tank volume to safe money, and extend AdBlue usage to the point drivers didn't have to replenish themselves between inspections, which allowed VW to make more money on service. That cheating was not engineers cutting corners to please management, it was engineers at the very top of management deliberately ordering the organization to cheat.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    I think you have a different story. The TDIs involved with Dieselgate shipped with no adBlue tank. VW claimed to have some special process where they could catalyze the soot without the nitrogen supply to manage it. But that was all a lie. Adblue (the accepted solution) wasn't added until 2014 at the earliest. The naughtiest thing they did was that the vehicles detected if they were being run in inspection mode, and adjusted the fuel mixture to avoid exceeding particulate emissions. They may also not have been telling people to refill the tanks on cars that had them, but actively circumventing EEA/EPA compliance checks was what infuriated governments.

hammock 3y ago

The deficiencies found in the report were in Just Culture and Reporting Culture. The five Key Elements of Safety Culture are: 1) Informed Culture- the organization collects and analyses relevant data, and actively disseminates safety information. 2) Reporting Culture- cultivating an atmosphere where people have confidence to report safety concerns without fear of blame. Employees must know that confidentiality will be maintained and that the information they submit will be acted upon, otherwise they will decide that there is no benefit in their reporting. 3) Learning Culture- an organization is able to learn from its mistakes and make changes. It will also ensure that people understand the SMS processes at a personal level. 4) Just Culture- errors and unsafe acts will not be punished if the error was unintentional. However, those who act recklessly or take deliberate and unjustifiable risks will still be subject to disciplinary action. 5) Flexible Culture- the organization and the people in it are capable of adapting effectively to changing demands. Sources: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/Sec103_ExpertPanelReview_Report_Final.pdf https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/Sec103_ExpertPanelReview_Report... https://www.airsafety.aero/safety-information-and-reporting/safety-management-systems/safety-culture https://www.airsafety.aero/safety-information-and-reporting/...

burnerburnson 3y ago
> errors and unsafe acts will not be punished if the error was unintentional. No sane organization would ever implement this. If someone repeatedly makes mistakes, they're going to get fired even if the mistakes are unintentional. Anything else is going to cause more safety issues in the long-term as inadequate employees are allowed to proliferate.
- zettabomb 3y ago
  Every sane organization implements this. Failure to do so leads to fear of reporting mistakes, and you get Boeing. This isn't news.
- jjk166 3y ago
  If it's possible for an employee to unintentionally make the same mistake twice, that's purely management's failure. It's impossible to make systems completely fool proof, but once you know of a specific deficiency in your process you fix it. If you've corrected the issue, it should take deliberate effort for someone to do it again. An organization that knows its processes are deficient but makes no changes and expects a different result is insane.

mvkel 3y ago

A great example of what will happen when the libertarian mindset takes hold of any industry. The risk/reward among market forces is entirely different; many lives lost become "the cost of doing business" despite being entirely preventable.

marcofrancesco 3y ago

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burnerburnson 3y ago

The average engineer at Boeing makes $120k/year. That's about $50k less than what a new grad with no experience will get from big tech. Boeing doesn't have a culture problem, they have an idiot problem. The idea that you can hire competent engineers offering salaries like that is absurd. They need to adopt a pay for performance mentality and bring in managers who are not afraid to fire underperformers.

kghe3X 3y ago
Just where is an inexperienced new grad making $170k out of the gate? I find this difficult to believe. Are you normalizing for cost of living? I suspect, most Boeing employees aren't based in the Valley.
- StevenXC 3y ago
  A major Boeing campus is in Huntsville, AL, which is going to affect that average for sure.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

Safety culture is too hard for the MBA's to put a dollar value on, until it's too late. Having worked in the (network) Security domain for some time, the same thing there. When things are going well, "what do we pay you for?", and when they turn catastrophic, "what do we pay you for?"

iancmceachern 3y ago

They sold their soul to make the people at the top rich. It's not about airplanes, it's about human nature.

dogman144 3y ago

I knew a Boeing swe, and several years back the QA approach with code sounded hugely disconcerting considering big picture controlled an airplane - variables named “A, B, C,” variable reuse, shell staffing/multi-hats on their desk due to retention issues, on and on.

NoPedantsThanks 3y ago

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AnarchismIsCool 3y ago

Something that helps a lot: have a safety incident team with absolutely no connection to HR. They have no ability to fire anyone or report on your performance review, they don't talk to managers about people and just record and compile safety related issues. Yeah, you may have an employee or two who screams wolf a lot, but their job is just to investigate, fix the specific issue, anonymize, and aggregate the reports. This lack of connection should be very public so everyone feels comfortable talking to them. This is part of how the FAA vastly reduced the fatality rate in GA. They stopped playing cop and started playing engineer.

kmonad 3y ago
I like the idea, but I am pessimistic. The more experienced I get (aka getting older), the more I see administrative bloating as the cancer of institutions---a somewhat equally inescapable fate. Installing a safety reporting administration may do what it set out to do, initially. But at some point, promotions may be handed out to those with most reports, perhaps perverting the initial intent. In another thread I read that the EASA and FAA used to send Airbus/EASA engineers to Boeing (and maybe vice versa) who could raise all sorts of hell if mistakes were found. Such a setup seems perhaps harder to "game". I do not know this for a fact, I recall it from reading another debate, so take it as hearsay.
- euroderf 3y ago
  These sound like variations on "tiger teams". And they sound appropriate.

andruby 3y ago

The stock market doesn’t seem to care about this report. Unless it was already rumored a while ago and priced in. BA (Boeing’s stock ticker) has been trading sideways this week.

neilv 3y ago

If company leadership recklessly eroded safety practices, of a well-understood safety-critical national institution... is there individual criminal liability? Prosecuting willful bad behavior at the top that led to deaths might help push the culture back.

WheatMillington 3y ago
I don't know the situation in the USA, but it would appear there is virtually never indivdiual liability. Here in New Zealand there is absolutely personal director and executive responsibility and accountability where it comes to safety.

heisenbit 3y ago

Reading Admiral Cloudberg‘s latest https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-fall-of-the-viscount-the-crash-of-capital-airlines-flight-20-b22148c17cc1 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-fall-of-the-viscount... history on deicing of air inlets and that these systems are now automatic and the 737 system was grandfathered in was interesting: „(The Boeing 737 is of course the one big exception, because its 1960s-era crew-activated engine anti-ice system has been repeatedly grandfathered in with no automatic mode for the last half century.) „ Did not Boeing ask for an exemption recently due to a dangerous heat up situation if these heaters were not turned off in time?

aydyn 3y ago

I know this is beating a dead horse at this point, but the "key element" missing is not safety culture, it's accountability: people need to start facing real jail time for all the deaths they've caused. None of this distributed blame horseshit. Downstream will fall in place once the correct incentives are in place.

black_13 3y ago

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schainks 3y ago

The leaders of Boeing are clearly fumbling the ball, paying themselves more than ever, shitting on their labor and supply chain sub-contractors, all while costing ME as a taxpayer and occasional user more money and stress than ever. Such a small group of leaders extracting maximum value for themselves at both the cost of the company, greater economy, AND the US Taxpayer sounds, I don't know... criminal?

letsdothisagain 3y ago
It's not new either. Teddy Roosevelt ran on trust busting and defeated both the dems and republicans.
euroderf 3y ago
But in the absence of criminal enforcement, it just sounds... clubby. Welcome to Techno-Neo-Feudalism. Your superiors are handling their own compensation quite nicely, thank you. Now get back to work !!