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I worked on the 787 but far from the engineering team. Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fu

I worked on the 787 but far from the engineering team. Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time, and doing an impression of Captain Ahab in trying to union bust in Seattle by fucking off to South Carolina. Boeing customers would figure out which plane numbers were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them. The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines. I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).

tracker1 1y ago
Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers. I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again. In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.
- hinkley 1y ago
  If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, we already knew how shitty we were being in Afghanistan by the point the question was asked.
masklinn 1y ago
> They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time The 787 was a straight up MDD pants-on-head plan (pushed by Stonecipher and McDonnel themselves), the entire point was to shift the costs of design and development to suppliers, with the idea that they'd fund the aircraft you could sell.
- hinkley 1y ago
  The modular structure of the aircraft was also meant to reduce or remove the need for gantry cranes. It required 2- or maybe it was 3-axis forklifts but no gantries. Gantries need tracks and structural support and those make the building the planes are built in quite expensive. I joked at the time that they could buy an old Walmart Superstore and use it to assemble the 787. Though I’m relatively sure they’d crack the concrete. I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.
- dingaling 1y ago
  Nothing really exceptional about that, risk-sharing projects were common in aerospace in the 80s onwards. 21% of the 777 ( yes the beloved Triple Seven ) was farmed out to a Japanese consortium which took risk for the design and production of the fuselage.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    But never the wings. That was always Boeing’s. Until MD fucked everything.
sbierwagen 1y ago
Same thing down on the production floor. Each program (737, 767, etc) has its own part number series. I'm sure there has to be some parts commonality, somewhere, with the same part getting two different numbers printed on it at the factory, but I saw no hint of it happening. Fun fact: the two big Puget Sound factories (Everett and Renton) number their hand tools differently. It's true. A socket wrench will be EVT12345 or whatever, and the same tool in Renton will be inventoried differently. The two factories have very different cultures. Renton does two planes a week, Everett does one plane a month. There was much grumbling during the webinars and retrainings after the Door Plug Incident that all this was being inflicted on us because of the cowboys down in Renton and their maniacal obsession with production rate, something which is not quite so much a focus at Everett.

tracker1 1y ago

Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers. I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again. In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.

hinkley 1y ago
If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, we already knew how shitty we were being in Afghanistan by the point the question was asked.

masklinn 1y ago

> They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time The 787 was a straight up MDD pants-on-head plan (pushed by Stonecipher and McDonnel themselves), the entire point was to shift the costs of design and development to suppliers, with the idea that they'd fund the aircraft you could sell.

hinkley 1y ago
The modular structure of the aircraft was also meant to reduce or remove the need for gantry cranes. It required 2- or maybe it was 3-axis forklifts but no gantries. Gantries need tracks and structural support and those make the building the planes are built in quite expensive. I joked at the time that they could buy an old Walmart Superstore and use it to assemble the 787. Though I’m relatively sure they’d crack the concrete. I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.
dingaling 1y ago
Nothing really exceptional about that, risk-sharing projects were common in aerospace in the 80s onwards. 21% of the 777 ( yes the beloved Triple Seven ) was farmed out to a Japanese consortium which took risk for the design and production of the fuselage.
- hinkley 1y ago
  But never the wings. That was always Boeing’s. Until MD fucked everything.

sbierwagen 1y ago

Same thing down on the production floor. Each program (737, 767, etc) has its own part number series. I'm sure there has to be some parts commonality, somewhere, with the same part getting two different numbers printed on it at the factory, but I saw no hint of it happening. Fun fact: the two big Puget Sound factories (Everett and Renton) number their hand tools differently. It's true. A socket wrench will be EVT12345 or whatever, and the same tool in Renton will be inventoried differently. The two factories have very different cultures. Renton does two planes a week, Everett does one plane a month. There was much grumbling during the webinars and retrainings after the Door Plug Incident that all this was being inflicted on us because of the cowboys down in Renton and their maniacal obsession with production rate, something which is not quite so much a focus at Everett.