12 ms·

Is this the kind of problem that is being uncovered because of the extra scrutiny that Boeing is currently under? To put it another way, is this the kind of pro

by jl6 2y ago

Is this the kind of problem that is being uncovered because of the extra scrutiny that Boeing is currently under? To put it another way, is this the kind of problem that is endemic across industry and we’re only finding out now because we are taking the time to look? One can only imagine the horrors lurking in industries lucky enough not to have had any famous failures recently.

yareal 2y ago
Boeing used to have a safety culture and and engineering excellence culture. That changed over the past twenty to thirty years as leadership rotted the company and monetized that rot by choosing to skip safety and engineering in favor of profits.
cjk2 2y ago
I work in a different sector. If we built planes it'd be raining bodies. If you go looking you will find. And it's almost never pretty stuff. There is however a lot of paperwork filled in that says everything is fine.
_ache_ 2y ago
You are inverting cause and consequence. It's because Boeing has had so many failures that it has come under particular scrutiny. Failures which, from a statistical point of view, suggest that there may be a cause to look for. Other companies do not have as many (and as basic) problems.
nolok 2y ago
Depends what you mean by industry. If you mean the US big airliner industry, then Boeing is essentially it, so yes, And I presume it comes directly from the FAA delegating so much of their job to Boeing meaning Boeing had to inspect itself. The you had the bad deal grand fathered between USA and EU : FAA inspect Boeing planes, EASA has to accept that certification without checking by themselves. Airbus need to be certified by the EASA, they have much less if any delegated authority for that (though they do pay a lot into that, there is a difference between you need to pay into your regulator and you are your own regulator through your own employees). And then they need to separately be certified by Boeing. This means the surface area for Boeing screwing around is much, much larger. I don't doubt there are flaws if we looked into airbus assembly, but I highly doubt they would be systemic and part of a larger screwed process like what is being found at Boeing.
- p_l 2y ago
  The delegation of authority was a Bush Jr. policy about deregulation and making airline aviation "more agile" or some other BS. It involved defunding FAA efforts at control and explicit policies for more self-governance in the industry. There wasn't a "bad deal grandfathered" - there was a general acceptance of FAA flight certificates in many regulatory areas due to previous good performance of those, which was wrecked by 737 MAX crashes. Even then it wasn't automatic pass, it was more that local certification authorities would let you submit it in lieu of some checks but could require more. Also, apparently Airbus has wildly different policies for dealing with suppliers, which are seen as both bad (they aren't easy to work with and most importantly they mean more risk to supplier) but also good (better oversight, integration, and Airbus will actually help you deal with your suppliers, and the risk is shared)
  - nolok 2y ago
    > There wasn't a "bad deal grandfathered" It's a grandfathered deal from the formation of the EASA. Before that, most national aviation authority in europe didn't have the ability to check all planes, so they accepted others'; while the FAA checked the planes of everyone. When the EASA was formed, we kept that part.
linuxftw 2y ago
Thanks to M&A's, Boeing is the industry (at least in the US). Then the bean counters figured out that they can outsource a lot of the manufacturing to '3rd parties' who pinky-promise they have a functional QA process. When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!." All the airframe problems? Well, that's Spirit Aerosystems! There should be a lot of Boeing execs in prison for manslaughter.
- phonon 2y ago
  > When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!." They did not say that.
doikor 2y ago
The owners/economy has demanded for things to become more efficient then last year every year for decades now. If no massive technological breakthrough happens at some point the operation is as efficient as it can be while producing safe products but still you have to become more efficient for next quarterly/yearly results to keep the shareholders happy (if you can't find new clients to expand to). It is at that point that you start cutting corners and end up in situations like this. This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean.
- gruez 2y ago
  >This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean. Is that so bad? According to the IIHS there were 43k automotive deaths in the US in 2021. Meanwhile the last passenger death in a scheduled commercial flight[1] in the US was 4 years ago. In the past decade there has only been 2 deaths. [1] this excludes flights like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Mutiny_Bay_DHC-3_Otter_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Mutiny_Bay_DHC-3_Otter_cr..., because they're essentially flying general aviation planes which are far less reliable than airliners that people typically associate with air travel. If you include them the number goes up to 27.
  - 0xAFFFF 2y ago
    It's not so bad yet because the aviation industry comes from a place of extremely high safety standards, but it could get worse pretty fast.
  - rapatel0 2y ago
    Airline ------------ Total number of global flights per year: ~38.9 Million Total deaths over the last decade (3,562) -> 21.2 deaths per million trips Cars ------------ Total number of driving trips per year US: 227 Billion (using your number of 43K deaths per year) -> 1.9 deaths / million trips Wow, I'm surprised but actually airline travel is less safe then driving. Links: - https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-number-of-flights/#:~:text=Global%20air%20traffic%20%2D%20number%20of%20flights%202004%2D2024&text=The%20number%20of%20flights%20performed,to%2016.9%20million%20in%202020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-.... - https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra...
masklinn 2y ago
> Is this the kind of problem that is being uncovered because of the extra scrutiny that Boeing is currently under? Yes. > To put it another way, is this the kind of problem that is endemic across industry and we’re only finding out now because we are taking the time to look? That is a completely different matter. The increased scrutiny on Boeing can simply be uncovering that the wheels have been coming off for a while as result of the stock-chasing policy they’ve been following for 25 years. Previously it could be covered up because their primary regulator was too hands off but recent events have led to the FAA dedicating more resources to Boeing, and thus having a lot more opportunities to trip over malfeasance.
burkaman 2y ago
Yes, I mean obviously cargo ships are not well inspected, they lose power all the time and companies just hope it doesn't happen near anything important. The oil industry is like this, you've got bottom-of-the-barrel tankers (https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-Tankers/dp/0977647900 https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-...), spills continuing for decades (https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-fines-for-california-oil-spills https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-f...), leaking methane wells permanently abandoned by "bankrupt" companies, etc. You're definitely right that we're all paying extra attention to Boeing at the moment, but if you look around I think you'll find that there actually have been pretty recent famous failures in quite a few industries.
- dawnerd 2y ago
  I thought ships were a little different since they can just follow the regulations of their flagged country and skirt a lot of rules.
  - hunter2_ 2y ago
    With the amount of overlapping vocabulary, I would've thought airplanes are basically just ships in the sky. Ports, captains, boarding, etc. Or are these used metaphorically, like virtual computer stuff versus physical office stuff (desktop, folder, etc.) where there's enough similarity to avoid making new words but they're operated quite differently?
    - philipwhiuk 2y ago
      The need to overfly a country, vs just sail round, means that airlines need country's permission to fly into/through a country. Overflight privileges cost money. In addition protectionism has meant that you generally have to land or take off at an airport run by the flag you carry. So unlike shipping, a Malaysian airline can't fly from the US to UK. This means that airlines need to be based at their 'real' base of operations, they can't just register in a tax-shelter.
jerf 2y ago
It is endemic across society. People confuse goals with results all the time, and accept that inspections are scheduled or that some box was checked in lieu of an "actual" inspection all the time. It is one of the major reasons that I am always very skeptical of the "just throw more regulations at it" solution to anything; generating paperwork and generating compliance are two very different things. The fundamental error of bureaucracy is to conflate paperwork with reality. The shocking thing is that as cynical as that may sound, things do in fact generally work. This suggests that the problem is less on the side of reality and more on the side of the paperwork and the bureaucracy. You see this one instance where the mismatch is problematic, but honestly there's immense mismatch everywhere, and generally, things work, because while in bureaucratic theory a mismatch between paperwork and reality is itself intrinsically a problem, in reality, it's only a problem if something goes wrong, and usually it doesn't. If that doesn't make sense to you, consider that there is an evolutionary process in play. The particular ways in which mismatches cause real problems tend to get squeezed out of the system by the very failures they create, whereas all the harmless mismatches can persist. And yeah, eventually some of those "harmless" mismatches will get upgraded to "whoops less harmless than we thought", but they will be the exceptions, not the rule, and calling in advance which they will be is a lot harder than meets the eye. There's kind of a variant of Gell-Mann Amnesia at work here; $YOU know that in the specific place you work, paperwork is a faint echo of reality, documentation is perpetually underinvested in, processes are constantly diverging from the paper processes, the field workers in charge of managing paperwork generally coevolve a particular "flavor" of compliance that passes initial checks but may have shall we say "complicated" relationships with reality... but $YOU think that all the other paperwork in the world is being done studiously by superhumans with unflagging concentration, impeccable ethics, and presumably, about 96 hours in their day. It seems to be built into the human condition somehow. Somehow, we are all bureaucrats at heart.
s_dev 2y ago
A lot of people defending Boeing are simply using the Trump playbook. Which always goes as follows: Yes it's true -- Boeing may be bad -- but even Airbus is worse! It must be the entire industry that is doing this due to increased scrutiny on Boeing -- drain the airline industry swamp! McDonnell-Douglas have no involvement with Airbus and Airbus still maintains an immaculate safety record the past few years relative to Boeing. Boeing alone was never the issue -- their partnership with McDD however has caused these issue perhaps the US gov should buy out their stake with a compulsory purchase order for the sake of national security. Boeing is only a few disasters away from a complete loss in confidence in the company at this point.
renegade-otter 2y ago
No, this is relatively new. This is the result of decades of the quest to "dismantle the regulatory state". The book Flying Blind is a thorough account of how Boeing transformed from a respectable engineering shop to a business-school-jock-run FAA revolving door. Unabated capitalism sort of doesn't work when your planes are losing pieces mid-air and Airbus is eating your dinner. Not surprisingly, there are solid arrows leading to GE and Jack Welch.
hosh 2y ago
According to the Netflix documentary on Boeing’s culture and engineering problems, those have been there for years. Falsifying quality reports had been going on regularly at Boeing. Quality engineers were harassed out of their positions, and this was all lead by the executives in charge. This was the stuff that former quality engineer and whistleblower was in the middle of a five day deposition when he died to a gunshot wound. Allegedly “self-inflicted”. This stuff isn’t being uncovered so much that there had been people loudly trying to tell this to the world for years now. What’s changed is that with the series of very public failures and flight safety, it’s become difficult to spin this away. In addition, the executives may be facing felonies — not for harassing whistleblowers, but in regards to flight safety. It’s galling to hear them “celebrate” the whistleblower for the issues reported in this article. Boeing used to have a culture where quality was the top concern, ahead of profits. With three whistleblowers dead in the past several months, the optics is not looking good for Boeing. Maybe this is more spin.
- TedDoesntTalk 2y ago
  > With three whistleblowers dead I thought it is 2…?
  - hosh 2y ago
    Looks like I was wrong. The Guardian article published four days ago reports two, not three.
dylan604 2y ago
Auto manufactures issue recalls fairly regularly. To me, this shows how easy it is to "miss" something, or let something questionable pass and hope for the best while knowing there is a mechanism in place to bring things back. Food industry also has recall notices frequently. Both of these industries have inspections not by the manufacturing company. Boeing weaseled their way into self inspection and certification. OF COURSE things went bad. I can think of no examples of self policing working, ever. They eye of Sauron is on Boeing, but it is of their own making.
lenkite 2y ago
It is the result of the McDonnell Douglas Merger. McDonnell Douglas' focus on affordability and shareholder value replaced Boeing's passion for great planes. It is kinda funny - Boeing bought the company but it was McDonnell Douglas executives who held the rulership of the merged company Boeing's Downfall: A Tale of Corporate Culture, Greed, and Safety Compromises https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boeings-downfall-tale-corporate-culture-greed-safety-epuvc https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boeings-downfall-tale-corpora....
- p_l 2y ago
  The person who started critical changes in culture was a Boeing lifer - who also merged in McDonnel-Douglas.
constantcrying 2y ago
This is a Boeing specific problem. Boeing does things which no other company would dare doing, the failure on engineering the MAX is simply inexcusable. The same goes for the failure to correctly plug a door. These things don't happen by chance, they can only happen if you have a deep institutional rot in your organization. These things don't happen by chance, because the systems are designed in a way such that they can never happen. If they do happen the system has failed. The entire airline industry knows that if you are lax on safety critical issues, there will be consequences. The consequences over the last few years have focused on Boeing, because it actually is a Boeing problem.
- MuffinFlavored 2y ago
  How am I supposed to have any confidence I won't be the next casualty/news headline if I travel on a Boeing plane (which feels like the majority of planes in America)?
  - kiicia 2y ago
    insert meme: that's the neat part, you don't

by jl6 2y ago

yareal 2y ago

Boeing used to have a safety culture and and engineering excellence culture. That changed over the past twenty to thirty years as leadership rotted the company and monetized that rot by choosing to skip safety and engineering in favor of profits.

cjk2 2y ago

I work in a different sector. If we built planes it'd be raining bodies. If you go looking you will find. And it's almost never pretty stuff. There is however a lot of paperwork filled in that says everything is fine.

_ache_ 2y ago

You are inverting cause and consequence. It's because Boeing has had so many failures that it has come under particular scrutiny. Failures which, from a statistical point of view, suggest that there may be a cause to look for. Other companies do not have as many (and as basic) problems.

nolok 2y ago

Depends what you mean by industry. If you mean the US big airliner industry, then Boeing is essentially it, so yes, And I presume it comes directly from the FAA delegating so much of their job to Boeing meaning Boeing had to inspect itself. The you had the bad deal grand fathered between USA and EU : FAA inspect Boeing planes, EASA has to accept that certification without checking by themselves. Airbus need to be certified by the EASA, they have much less if any delegated authority for that (though they do pay a lot into that, there is a difference between you need to pay into your regulator and you are your own regulator through your own employees). And then they need to separately be certified by Boeing. This means the surface area for Boeing screwing around is much, much larger. I don't doubt there are flaws if we looked into airbus assembly, but I highly doubt they would be systemic and part of a larger screwed process like what is being found at Boeing.

p_l 2y ago
The delegation of authority was a Bush Jr. policy about deregulation and making airline aviation "more agile" or some other BS. It involved defunding FAA efforts at control and explicit policies for more self-governance in the industry. There wasn't a "bad deal grandfathered" - there was a general acceptance of FAA flight certificates in many regulatory areas due to previous good performance of those, which was wrecked by 737 MAX crashes. Even then it wasn't automatic pass, it was more that local certification authorities would let you submit it in lieu of some checks but could require more. Also, apparently Airbus has wildly different policies for dealing with suppliers, which are seen as both bad (they aren't easy to work with and most importantly they mean more risk to supplier) but also good (better oversight, integration, and Airbus will actually help you deal with your suppliers, and the risk is shared)
- nolok 2y ago
  > There wasn't a "bad deal grandfathered" It's a grandfathered deal from the formation of the EASA. Before that, most national aviation authority in europe didn't have the ability to check all planes, so they accepted others'; while the FAA checked the planes of everyone. When the EASA was formed, we kept that part.

linuxftw 2y ago

Thanks to M&A's, Boeing is the industry (at least in the US). Then the bean counters figured out that they can outsource a lot of the manufacturing to '3rd parties' who pinky-promise they have a functional QA process. When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!." All the airframe problems? Well, that's Spirit Aerosystems! There should be a lot of Boeing execs in prison for manslaughter.

phonon 2y ago
> When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!." They did not say that.

doikor 2y ago

The owners/economy has demanded for things to become more efficient then last year every year for decades now. If no massive technological breakthrough happens at some point the operation is as efficient as it can be while producing safe products but still you have to become more efficient for next quarterly/yearly results to keep the shareholders happy (if you can't find new clients to expand to). It is at that point that you start cutting corners and end up in situations like this. This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean.

gruez 2y ago
>This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean. Is that so bad? According to the IIHS there were 43k automotive deaths in the US in 2021. Meanwhile the last passenger death in a scheduled commercial flight[1] in the US was 4 years ago. In the past decade there has only been 2 deaths. [1] this excludes flights like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Mutiny_Bay_DHC-3_Otter_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Mutiny_Bay_DHC-3_Otter_cr..., because they're essentially flying general aviation planes which are far less reliable than airliners that people typically associate with air travel. If you include them the number goes up to 27.
- 0xAFFFF 2y ago
  It's not so bad yet because the aviation industry comes from a place of extremely high safety standards, but it could get worse pretty fast.
- rapatel0 2y ago
  Airline ------------ Total number of global flights per year: ~38.9 Million Total deaths over the last decade (3,562) -> 21.2 deaths per million trips Cars ------------ Total number of driving trips per year US: 227 Billion (using your number of 43K deaths per year) -> 1.9 deaths / million trips Wow, I'm surprised but actually airline travel is less safe then driving. Links: - https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-number-of-flights/#:~:text=Global%20air%20traffic%20%2D%20number%20of%20flights%202004%2D2024&text=The%20number%20of%20flights%20performed,to%2016.9%20million%20in%202020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-.... - https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra...

masklinn 2y ago

> Is this the kind of problem that is being uncovered because of the extra scrutiny that Boeing is currently under? Yes. > To put it another way, is this the kind of problem that is endemic across industry and we’re only finding out now because we are taking the time to look? That is a completely different matter. The increased scrutiny on Boeing can simply be uncovering that the wheels have been coming off for a while as result of the stock-chasing policy they’ve been following for 25 years. Previously it could be covered up because their primary regulator was too hands off but recent events have led to the FAA dedicating more resources to Boeing, and thus having a lot more opportunities to trip over malfeasance.

burkaman 2y ago

Yes, I mean obviously cargo ships are not well inspected, they lose power all the time and companies just hope it doesn't happen near anything important. The oil industry is like this, you've got bottom-of-the-barrel tankers (https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-Tankers/dp/0977647900 https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-...), spills continuing for decades (https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-fines-for-california-oil-spills https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-f...), leaking methane wells permanently abandoned by "bankrupt" companies, etc. You're definitely right that we're all paying extra attention to Boeing at the moment, but if you look around I think you'll find that there actually have been pretty recent famous failures in quite a few industries.

dawnerd 2y ago
I thought ships were a little different since they can just follow the regulations of their flagged country and skirt a lot of rules.
- hunter2_ 2y ago
  With the amount of overlapping vocabulary, I would've thought airplanes are basically just ships in the sky. Ports, captains, boarding, etc. Or are these used metaphorically, like virtual computer stuff versus physical office stuff (desktop, folder, etc.) where there's enough similarity to avoid making new words but they're operated quite differently?
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    The need to overfly a country, vs just sail round, means that airlines need country's permission to fly into/through a country. Overflight privileges cost money. In addition protectionism has meant that you generally have to land or take off at an airport run by the flag you carry. So unlike shipping, a Malaysian airline can't fly from the US to UK. This means that airlines need to be based at their 'real' base of operations, they can't just register in a tax-shelter.

jerf 2y ago

It is endemic across society. People confuse goals with results all the time, and accept that inspections are scheduled or that some box was checked in lieu of an "actual" inspection all the time. It is one of the major reasons that I am always very skeptical of the "just throw more regulations at it" solution to anything; generating paperwork and generating compliance are two very different things. The fundamental error of bureaucracy is to conflate paperwork with reality. The shocking thing is that as cynical as that may sound, things do in fact generally work. This suggests that the problem is less on the side of reality and more on the side of the paperwork and the bureaucracy. You see this one instance where the mismatch is problematic, but honestly there's immense mismatch everywhere, and generally, things work, because while in bureaucratic theory a mismatch between paperwork and reality is itself intrinsically a problem, in reality, it's only a problem if something goes wrong, and usually it doesn't. If that doesn't make sense to you, consider that there is an evolutionary process in play. The particular ways in which mismatches cause real problems tend to get squeezed out of the system by the very failures they create, whereas all the harmless mismatches can persist. And yeah, eventually some of those "harmless" mismatches will get upgraded to "whoops less harmless than we thought", but they will be the exceptions, not the rule, and calling in advance which they will be is a lot harder than meets the eye. There's kind of a variant of Gell-Mann Amnesia at work here; $YOU know that in the specific place you work, paperwork is a faint echo of reality, documentation is perpetually underinvested in, processes are constantly diverging from the paper processes, the field workers in charge of managing paperwork generally coevolve a particular "flavor" of compliance that passes initial checks but may have shall we say "complicated" relationships with reality... but $YOU think that all the other paperwork in the world is being done studiously by superhumans with unflagging concentration, impeccable ethics, and presumably, about 96 hours in their day. It seems to be built into the human condition somehow. Somehow, we are all bureaucrats at heart.

s_dev 2y ago

A lot of people defending Boeing are simply using the Trump playbook. Which always goes as follows: Yes it's true -- Boeing may be bad -- but even Airbus is worse! It must be the entire industry that is doing this due to increased scrutiny on Boeing -- drain the airline industry swamp! McDonnell-Douglas have no involvement with Airbus and Airbus still maintains an immaculate safety record the past few years relative to Boeing. Boeing alone was never the issue -- their partnership with McDD however has caused these issue perhaps the US gov should buy out their stake with a compulsory purchase order for the sake of national security. Boeing is only a few disasters away from a complete loss in confidence in the company at this point.

renegade-otter 2y ago

No, this is relatively new. This is the result of decades of the quest to "dismantle the regulatory state". The book Flying Blind is a thorough account of how Boeing transformed from a respectable engineering shop to a business-school-jock-run FAA revolving door. Unabated capitalism sort of doesn't work when your planes are losing pieces mid-air and Airbus is eating your dinner. Not surprisingly, there are solid arrows leading to GE and Jack Welch.

hosh 2y ago

According to the Netflix documentary on Boeing’s culture and engineering problems, those have been there for years. Falsifying quality reports had been going on regularly at Boeing. Quality engineers were harassed out of their positions, and this was all lead by the executives in charge. This was the stuff that former quality engineer and whistleblower was in the middle of a five day deposition when he died to a gunshot wound. Allegedly “self-inflicted”. This stuff isn’t being uncovered so much that there had been people loudly trying to tell this to the world for years now. What’s changed is that with the series of very public failures and flight safety, it’s become difficult to spin this away. In addition, the executives may be facing felonies — not for harassing whistleblowers, but in regards to flight safety. It’s galling to hear them “celebrate” the whistleblower for the issues reported in this article. Boeing used to have a culture where quality was the top concern, ahead of profits. With three whistleblowers dead in the past several months, the optics is not looking good for Boeing. Maybe this is more spin.

TedDoesntTalk 2y ago
> With three whistleblowers dead I thought it is 2…?
- hosh 2y ago
  Looks like I was wrong. The Guardian article published four days ago reports two, not three.

dylan604 2y ago

Auto manufactures issue recalls fairly regularly. To me, this shows how easy it is to "miss" something, or let something questionable pass and hope for the best while knowing there is a mechanism in place to bring things back. Food industry also has recall notices frequently. Both of these industries have inspections not by the manufacturing company. Boeing weaseled their way into self inspection and certification. OF COURSE things went bad. I can think of no examples of self policing working, ever. They eye of Sauron is on Boeing, but it is of their own making.

lenkite 2y ago

It is the result of the McDonnell Douglas Merger. McDonnell Douglas' focus on affordability and shareholder value replaced Boeing's passion for great planes. It is kinda funny - Boeing bought the company but it was McDonnell Douglas executives who held the rulership of the merged company Boeing's Downfall: A Tale of Corporate Culture, Greed, and Safety Compromises https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boeings-downfall-tale-corporate-culture-greed-safety-epuvc https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boeings-downfall-tale-corpora....

p_l 2y ago
The person who started critical changes in culture was a Boeing lifer - who also merged in McDonnel-Douglas.

constantcrying 2y ago

This is a Boeing specific problem. Boeing does things which no other company would dare doing, the failure on engineering the MAX is simply inexcusable. The same goes for the failure to correctly plug a door. These things don't happen by chance, they can only happen if you have a deep institutional rot in your organization. These things don't happen by chance, because the systems are designed in a way such that they can never happen. If they do happen the system has failed. The entire airline industry knows that if you are lax on safety critical issues, there will be consequences. The consequences over the last few years have focused on Boeing, because it actually is a Boeing problem.

MuffinFlavored 2y ago
How am I supposed to have any confidence I won't be the next casualty/news headline if I travel on a Boeing plane (which feels like the majority of planes in America)?
- kiicia 2y ago
  insert meme: that's the neat part, you don't