The Coming Boeing Bailout?
mattstoller.substack.com
mattstoller.substack.com
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/us-issues...
As a result Bombardier, Canadian's only large aviation manufacturer, was sold to AirBus:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bombardie...
The cause was a Canadian province (equivalent to a US state) did a $1B equity investment in Bombardier in order to help it survive a tough spot -- a bailout. Thus 300% duties were imposed on the company as a result, thus killing any potential plane sales to the US.
But if the US government bails out Boeing, should countries around the world also impose business destroying duties of 300% on Boeing because of the unfair government support? Or do business destroying duties of 300% only get imposed on the aviation industries of smaller countries who do not have as much clout?
Ultimately, their plan backfired and forced them to acquire a large stake in Embraer to remain nominally competitive (I say that because the C-Series planes are much better than similar Embarer aircraft, both longer range and more comfortable) -- all while simultaneously empowering Airbus. They also significantly soured their relationship with the Canadian government jeopardizing both current and future military procurement opportunities.
This was an unmitigated failure on their part.
(EDIT) To be clear, Bombardier wasn't sold to Airbus, they gifted majority control of the C-Series program to Airbus. The new equity split is 50.01% Airbus, 31% Bombardier and 19% Invesissment Québec.
They also are smaller planes that have better comfort than the 737 in most respects; it is like the Japanese cars of the 1970s which were big on the inside and small on the outside compared to American cars of the time. You have to fly it to believe it.
I could see these eating into the 737/A320 market from the small side the same way that the 777/787 classes ate into the 747 market. The A220/E2 Jets would have been even more appealing had the airliners known that 737 MAX pilots will require simulator training. (And they will... Boeing will probably delay the 737 MAX return to service by trying to insist that they won't, but the FAA has one way to get credibility back, and that is requiring simulator training of an MCAS failure, just as A320 pilots need training on what to do if the fly-by-wire system gets in a degraded state)
I wonder, if the merger hadn't happened and Boeing hadn't been taken over by penny-pinchers, what would Boeing's small jet offering look like now? Would they still be iterating on the same obsolete design? Was there some new replacement small jet already in the early design stages that got canned?
Which incidentally is the major reason why it is the Ryanair main aircraft.
I believe the fleet is mostly 737-800s, and having the option to avoid staircars and skybdridges saves money.
All Ryanair flights I have witnessed have used the airstairs.
Because the procurement procedure would take 10-20 years, have to go through congress several times, and get pork barreled everywhere, and the 'modern freighter' would still likely be old as dirt once it's all done.
Look at the fuss over the KC-X/KC-30/KC-45/KC-46 for an example of how it would pan out. (The KC-X procurement started in 2002, settled on the KC-30 from airbus, modified to include pork barrelled 'Northrop Grumman' changes to be the KC-45, boeing objected to a non-US company winning the contract, and thus the KC-46 (a modified KC-767) was the only option left)
When the 737 was built, the aircraft industry thought that the supersonic transport (SST) was going to be the big thing. In particular, being so much faster, it could get more flights in per day and have a much lower cost per seat mile.
That didn't happen, and the 747 turned out to be the future instead. Through the 1970s and 1980s there was intense competition for widebody planes, but the 737 slowly gained in capability and gained market share.
The 777 was developed just as the Boeing-Airbus duopoly was settling into place; in some ways it is an answer to the A300 (make a huge 2-engine airliner and make it so reliable you can fly over sea), but a greatly improved answer. 777 found product-market fit, but Airbus blazed the way with the A330/340 which you could get with 2 or 4 engines respectively.
The 787 not so much. When it was originally conceived, fuel prices were low and Boeing wanted to make a "sonic cruiser" that traveled at just below the speed of sound but a little faster than current jets.
(Here is the business jet version of that)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulfstream_G650
Then fuel prices spiked and they made a plane for balls-to-the-walls fuel efficiency, then fuel prices dropped. So it wasn't really the airplane that airlines wanted.
The A380 is the canonical advantage of a good plane at the wrong time. It came in as a 747 competitor just as the 777 and 787 started to eat the 747's lunch.
Given that the lifespan of a plane can be so long I can't blame plane makers for being apprehensive that they're going to invest a lot of money in a clean sheet design that the market may or not be interested in by the time it is ready.
The A320 is similar to the 737 in terms of materials, but it has a fly-by-wire system that Airbus has perfected and proven -- it's flight-envelope protection capabilities is as far ahead of MCAS as Chess is to Checkers.
Airbus has made the A321XLR which is a scaled-up A320 to a much larger airplane than Boeing can deliver with the MAX-ed out 737 platform.
Just to clarify to casual readers: The G650 is _not_ a business jet version of the Boeing 787.
Parent poster meant that the G650 was, like the initial 787, designed to cruise at speeds above Mach 0.9. Note that the production 787 cruises at Mach 0.85 like most other large jet airliners.
Also quite more expensive and less fuel efficient. The comparison is more complex than that.
To be more clear. Bombardier WAS indeed sold to airbus. 50.1% for 1 Dollar.
Bombardier draw the short straw as it was smaller and wasn't able to combat the duopoly of Boeing/Airbus. (Embraer, Sukhoi and Irkut are also in the game but more in niche market shares).
It was able to compete though on the merit of its products before the duties came into play. The duties were designed to kill its momentum and it did -- look at the loss of orders in 2017 compared to 2016. But once the issue is resolved, the orders in 2018 are huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A220_orders_and...
This was a classic case of stifling threatening competition via government regulation.
Merit, and a billion dollar subsidy from the government.
There is clearly government interference on both sides.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bombardier-quebec-deal-1.36...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bombardier-boeing-tariffs-1...
It’s not a question of fairness but of self-interest. If it’s in those countries’ best interest (accounting for things like soured international relationships and whathaveyou) then the answer is “yes”.
I wish someone had put that on the side of the bus, maybe then my compatriots would have believed it.
It's just a shame that "While the EU is not perfect and probably does need some reform, it is on balance a net positive for the UK and not anywhere near as bad as the press would have you believe" also didn't fit on a bus.
Which means open access for their products into the UK market without out many of the consumer protections that the EU mandates.
Besides, well, the strong do as they will and the weak endure as they must?
Uhm, this makes me think about the engineering-first of Google. I wonder if Google will end in the same path...
Apple survived when Jobs came back and focused on products/engineering/creativity.
Microsoft survived post-Ballmer after returning to product/engineering led decision making and power structures.
Amazon is top of their game due to their relentless focus on product innovation and research and development.
Google, I hate to say it, is Microsoft 2004-5, slipping away from product/engineering focus, using their position as business/marketing leverage rather than product/engineering/creativity focused leadership similar to how Microsoft made that same mistake.
Companies that don't realize that business and marketing should cede power to product/engineering/creativity and return more to the open mode over the closed mode, well they end in stagnation after the last bit of value is extracted and all grace and position in the market gone.
Companies that realize that product/engineering/creativity is most important and then their business/marketing teams boost those efforts in the marketplace, well those companies go on to live a long time and have well established research and development as well as risk taking adventures.
Companies that are led by product/engineering/creative respect the open and close modes you must enter so you don't force creativity but let it flow [1].
> We've become fascinated by the fact that we can usually describe the way in which people function at work in terms of two modes: open and closed.
> CLOSED MODE
> So what i can just add now is that creativity is not possible in the closed mode.
>Let me explain a little. By the "closed mode" I mean the mode that we are in most of the time when {we are} at work.
>We have inside us a feeling that there's lots to be done and we have to get on with it if we're going to get through it all.
>It's an active (probably slightly anxious) mode, although the anxiety can be exciting and pleasurable.
>It's a mode which we're probably a little impatient, if only with ourselves.
>It has a little tension in it, not much humor.
> It's a mode in which we're very purposeful, and it's a mode in which we can get very stressed and even a bit manic, but not creative.
> OPEN MODE
> By contrast, the open mode, is relaxed… expansive… less purposeful mode… in which we're probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor (which always accompanies a wider perspective) and, consequently, more playful.
> It's a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.
>But let me make one thing quite clear: we need to be in the open mode when we're pondering a problem but once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.
>Humor is a natural concomitant in the open mode, but it's a luxury in the closed {mode}.
>But here's the problem: we too often get stuck in the closed mode.
>Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.
Businesses that develop products, especially in entertainment, that kill the open mode will kill the company. But default, the HBS MBA and bizdev metric focused production as if resources are mere parts, kills the open mode first, because it isn't quantifiable.
The moment you see a research and development department killed or sapped you know that it is just a matter of time for that company unless they can return to the right focus, with business and marketing as the secondary supportive force to a solid product/engineering/creative focus.
This is also mentioned in 'How Software Companies Die' which is almost law now:
> "The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa." [2]
I wonder when this knowledge will make it back to HBS MBA business school, there are plenty of examples in the market.
Business and marketing should be the multiplier of your value, they are not the value creators, the product / engineering / creative / research / development / design departments and the people you have are the value creators.
[1] https://genius.com/John-cleese-lecture-on-creativity-annotat...
[2] http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/rants/how-comp...
I'd also point to AMD. After AMD64 came out, Ruiz focused on marketing and cut back in engineering. He also bought ATI, which was a good long term but cost a lot of money at the time. They only turned around after betting the company on Zen, but it took 3-4 years to get the design to market. They seem to be pretty focused on engineering now - even adding staff to support Linux drivers.
I think they already have. The big difference is that when Google screws up, people don't die in a sufficiently dramatic fashion to make the evening news.
I think the pure business guys can't handle the unpredictability of engineering. there is a lot of tension at company when they push for "commitments" to deadlines. Often the response is "Honestly we don't know. We can start, see how things go and cut features as needed for the deadline."
According to that article [0], the fix is running too slowly on the Flight Control Computers, that are based on a 80286 architecture.
I am not sure how reliable this info is, and that should not be surprising given the cost of verification or certification of an aircraft, but I am still surprised that a 2019 plane, has still some HW and SW from the 1980ies.
Edit : There are actually more details in Wikipedia [1]
>In June 2019, "in a special Boeing simulator that is designed for engineering reviews"[75], FAA pilots performed a stress testing scenario – an abnormal condition identified through FMEA after the MCAS update was implemented[76] – for evaluating the effect of a fault in a microprocessor: as expected from the scenario, the horizontal stabilizer pointed the nose downward. Although the test pilot ultimately recovered control, the system was slow to respond to the proper runaway stabilizer checklist steps, due to an 80286[77] microprocessor being overwhelmed with data. The FAA characterized the slow responsiveness as "catastrophic", whereas Boeing initially classified it as "major". The solution appears to consist in rerouting data across multiple chips. Boeing stated that the issue can be fixed in software.[78] The software change will not be ready for evaluation until at least September 2019.[79] Boeing also said that it agreed with additional requirements that the FAA required it to fulfill, and added that it was working toward resolving the safety risk. It will not offer the MAX for certification until all requirements have been satisfied.[80]
[0] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/06/boeings-software-fix-f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
See, that's the nice thing. All they have to do is push the Turbo button, it will work like a charm.
All the above is speculation but I can imagine that I'd like very old, boring, predictable and very understood tech rather than the latest. That said, it is a bit unexpected.
Usually, if you see something old in a plane it's a matter of certification as it's a long and really, really expensive process. If the chip has enough power to do what is needed, the only reason to change it is that procurement for new parts become more expensive than recertification. Given the price of certification, companies make sure these parts remain available for decades as that's still cheaper.
"The RAD750 is a radiation-hardened single board computer manufactured by BAE" and "The RAD750 system has a price that is comparable to the RAD6000 which is US$200,000 per board (per 2002 reference)" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750>
More general info here, inc. use of an 8086 and a MIPS R3000: "The CPUs of Spacecraft Computers in Space" <http://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html> which backs up the chip cost mentioned above. Generally interesting.
Completely agree that if it's fast enough, why change it.
If company can't be allowed to fail (strategically important or government regulated sector like banking) there should be 'fluid bankruptcy' option. When they default or fail their obligations, the next day the government owns them without operations being disrupted. Shareholders lose everything overnight and any private debt would have standard 50% haircut (lenders would know this beforehand). Government would then sell the stocks back to the market within 10 years or so.
Bailouts are subsidies for risk.
For example, the excessive litigation in the 1970s against general aviation just led to Cessna and co. making planes designed in the 1940s.
Im against shareholder is immune because of bailout, but I don't think government handling business can be better.
I trust my government and in the controls around it, even when parties that I didn't vote for were in power.
Goverment did a bailout and turned the bank into a state owned enterprise until recently.
There have been some kind of "understanding" betweens the finance minister of that time and a big belgian investor having stakes in BNP Paribas.
Yseterday the same minister was elected President of the european Council.
First the auto industry asked and revived $25 billion in TARP money and $5 billion in loans for auto industry suppliers. That was not enough and they asked another $25 billion and this time the government refused. Only after that GM and Chrysler went bankrupt.
> MAZZUCATO: What the U.S. government actually did with Tesla was the opposite of what they should do. They said, thinking they were quite wise, “If you fail to pay back the loan, we get three million shares in your company.” And you have to ask yourself why all these Goldman Sachs guys who were in Obama’s government didn’t actually come through when they were needed, because they should have said the opposite: “If you do pay back the loan, we get three million shares.” And the price per share, when the loan was taken out in 2009, was $9 a share. When it was paid back in 2013, it was $90 a share. That difference multiplied by three million would have more than paid back the Solyndra loss and the next round. Then the question becomes: how do you share not only the risks but also the rewards? So we don’t get what we get with the banks, which is that when things go bad the state has to bail them out, and when things go well, the banks take the profits.
It has been suggested that high AofA readings should have been rejected unconditionally, but that approach can have its own problems, as in AF447 where the stall warnings stopped as the airplane became more deeply stalled. One should not leave the decision as whether to do that up to the programmer's discretion.
for things like this, there is a layer of 'systems engineering', that decides (hopefully using an engineering process) how the airplane will work. this is codified into a 'specification', that is then handed over to software to implement.
if you are a software engineer given this task, you implement it per the specification. nothing more and nothing less. of course, if you have a concern, you bring it up (both informally and formally). there is no 'discretion' by the programmer.
The number of AOA sensors, how much control authority, how often the inputs are applied, are all decided by systems engineers (with aeronautical engineers input and analysis). the software engineer cannot 'second guess' if AOA failure has been considered and change the implementation.
making an airplane is a huge endeavor that crosses across many domains. you have to have competency up and down the 'stack'. Boeing does.
Maybe this will cause a re-look at outsourcing policies.
(edit. yes, this software was not outsourced. but it may add another dimension other than cost for future decisions)
Where did the article say that? To me it explicitly claims it was outsourced:
the McDonnell Douglas influenced Boeing new one tried to patch the problem with software. And it was bad software, written by to engineers paid $9/dollar an hour.
And I am not blaming the software engineers for building it to the specification. In contrary, I clearly stated, that just building it to specification isn't enough for such critical software. Such software needs to be developed in teams where enough team members are senior enough to properly raise concerns where appropriate.
This article (The Coming Boeing Bailout?) wrongly asserts that MCAS was outsourced. There's no corroboration for that.
Mind you, I'm not on Boeing's side. I'm just clarifying what's been reported so far.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...
>In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
>The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
1. HCL wrote the code for MCAS; or
2. HCL wrote all the code of the Max.
But again, I'm not defending Boeing. I think they made some (deadly) mistakes. But so far there's no proof that the MCAS software was outsourced.
First, none of the software in question was outsourced to the company.
Second, the Bloomberg article does not describe the problems Boeing had with the software engineers from HCL, beyond a cryptic, "it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly." Was it a genuine misunderstanding of ambiguous language? Was it because the programmers did not have a background in the aerospace problem domain? Or was it because the engineers had a poor grasp of the vocabulary? It seems improper to assume the third situation in the absence of any additional evidence.
Finally, I am not sure what part of "software being outsourced" is considered outrageous. Is there evidence that a software engineer employed by Boeing, rather than by company XYZ, is less likely to produce faulty code? Or is more likely to understand the complex downstream effects of their actions and the equally complex upstream design decisions which informed them? Also, countries don't write code. Companies don't write code. People do. That "India doesn't have a deep background in aerospace" doesn't mean much at the level of individual engineers. I am skeptical that the most highly skilled American programmer has a deep background in aerospace either.
Sorry about the rant: something about the Blookmberg article came across as xenophobic innuendo.
your comment expresses my feelings exactly on 'was this a software failure?'. No. But software was involved.
I am working as a "software engineer" in the semiconductor industry. By education, I am a physicist. I am in my job for more than 10 years now, and beyond my university education, I have quite a grasp of electrical engineering. Furthermore, most of my colleagues are eletrical engineers. So in doubt, I can just walk over to their desk and discuss any question beyond pure software development issues. And some of the software developers here are just electrical engineers, which expanded their skill profile into software territory.
Doing business this way is quite more expensive than having software developed by a contractor, but it creates safeguards.
In regulatory parlance, this specifically means the airframe (the specific physical assembly of parts that collectively determine the flight characteristics of the object in question) possesses an "instability" that disqualifies it from being certified airworthy as a Civil Transport Aircraft unless the FAA amends or reinterprets the requirement.
The penultimate Lion Air flight only recovered thanks to The intervention of a third pilot; a luxury not universal to every cockpit.
>MCAS should be active only at angle of attacks, which wouldn't be reached at extreme angle of attacks.
The potential for MCAS subroutine activation is active during all phases of manually controlled (Autopilot off), flaps up flight,and is gated only by readings from an AoA sensor; which can fail in flight to catastrophic effect.
>The sole purpose of MCAS is to emulate the exact reactions of the older 737 machines in this domain, as this was required for maintaining the same type rating.
Incorrect. The sole purpose of MCAS is to induce an intentional "mistrim" during certain points of the flight envelope to counter the extra lift generated by the repositioned engines, with the end goal of smoothing out the non-compliant stick force response curve. Note, jury is still out whether this should even be allowed. I've gotten wildly different responses based on who I've talked to. Pilots seem to express horror or extreme discomfort. Aerodynamicsts are disconcertingly quiet, but tend toward hard reconfiguration to obviate the need for a software based solution.
Also, MCAS specifically deviates from oldaircraft behavior in that it removes an override of auto-trim commands activated by heavy back pressure on the yoke. There were also specific reconfiguration of the stabilizer trim cutout switches that removed any capability of locking out the MCAS system's ability to actuate the trim motor, while leaving pilot's thrim switches active.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
Make no mistake: Boeing screwed the pooch. Big Time.
No, there isn't. The Verge (and IIRC other sources) have reported that the crashes were due to failures in the angle of attack (AoA) sensors. No program in the world is going to give you correct output with garbage input.
Verge link: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-cr...
The software that carries your tweets has to deal with exceptional situations including hardware failure so to must software that runs life critical hardware. Seems to me that if the proper response to faulty sensors was to disable MCAS perhaps it should have just done that for the pilot.
Even without a second AoA sensors perhaps something could have been derived from the fact that the pilot was furiously pulling up while the aircraft was losing altitude?
Defense in depth is always a good thing.
People keep saying this. But AF 447 was caused by this. Pilot furiously pulling up, plane rapidly approaching the ground... And the steps to fix it would have been to push down. None of this is as simple as you seem to think.
Pilots speak of being ahead of the plane as the mental state of understanding the current condition of the aircraft, and being able to correctly forecast the end result of any control action on the current state.
This is like driving a well maintained car. You know the car will "follow" your directions.
Reasoning "behind the plane" is a state where the plane has started to do something, and you have to figure out what changed; I.e. the actual plane is no longer equivalent to your mental model of the plane. You can no longer with any certainty forecast the end behavior of the plane on your understanding alone. You're essentially in a reactive state. You have to rebuild your model.
AF447 suffered a major automation casualty. The pilot's didn't realize this, and attempted to fly off their flawed mental models of the plane's behavior. For instance, the Stall alert becoming active when the pilot tried pitching the aircraft down being unsilenced due to the automation coming back within non-extreme input regimes. The pilot attempted to avoid the alert by returning to the extremis instead of pitching down through the alert to recoverable flight.
Did the pilot's know that the alert would silence beyond an extreme value? No, but instinct told them if they did something that caused a stall response, reverse it to get away. Without the extra intelligence around how the automation worked, heuristic reasoning led to a valid, but ultimately lethally unsound course of action.
My guess is they expect well more than this amount to be paid out in lawsuit winnings. Any single lawsuit in the US here over this could easily result in an award of tens of millions of dollars -- and they have several hundred deaths on their hands.
The military-industry complex, the revolving door scheme, pretty much everything. I mean the system still works because the United States, so far, is still the most powerful country.
But for how long?
The elites are not doing their job, so the people should pick up from here. But the thing is, the people are not able to do this either.
What would be the competition to the US other than China (which is insular, nationalist to the extreme and protectionist to the extreme)?
If China is the only superpower competitor, then the structure you just described will continue to work perpetually as there is no alternative.
There is a common fantasy that the US is suddenly going to collapse, because 'all empires end.' It's nothing more than a fantasy because US wealth and power is derived from its domestic economic output, not from conquering foreigners or invading countries like Afghanistan (despite what the collapse-fantasy types would like to believe; the US already had the largest economy by 1890, long before the dollar became the global reserve standard). The US economy is built on its enormous scientific and R&D output, which is unrivaled in world history. That positioning of strength spans aerospace, spacetech, medtech, biotech, pharma, agriculture, software, mobile, semiconductors, intellectual property broadly, media & cultural export, finance & banking (Visa is worth $400b, Deutsche Bank is worth $16b; US banks are eating Europe right now, because of how weak their financial position is in contrast). The US is the world's #2 manufacturer by a large margin and is likely to regain ground on China from here forward (they will lose manufacturing share globally). The US has a position in energy that is unrivaled overall, including its oil and natural gas potential. The US has by far the strongest and most profitable airlines, which are now looking outward and beginning to buy into the rest of the world's weaker airlines.
The US still has 19 of the world's top 20 universities, and 40x of the top 50. That's one of its critical foundations supporting its economy in the post WW2 era. The rest of the world has nothing even remotely like it.
The US position is still expanding, not contracting. It has added an economy the size of Germany + France since the great recession. Simultaneously, China is gobbling up position / influence / economy / power in the other half of the world the US doesn't control.
There is no peer to the US in the 'West' and there is not going to be. Most of Europe has seen zero economic growth since 2006-2007, their stagnation is going to get worse rather than better. They will fall further behind (and their politics will get much worse as that happens). Japan (third largest economy) is going to see little to no economic growth for the next 20 years at least. So where's the competitor going to come from? It's not. The US will continue to grow more powerful, wealthier, and its economy will continue to out-grow Europe and its military capabilities will continue to expand far beyond what Europe is capable of.
China will be the sole competitor to the US in the 21st century and the two will split the world in half.
Nope.
"and 40x of the top 50."
Nope.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
But nice try.
Really? How do you measure this? Based on GDP Europe and China should be the same level. Based on PPP China may have surpased the US already. Military might? Questionable how effective carriers are against an able opponent. Paul Kennedy would argue, that increased military spending against an upcoming opponent might be a sign of weakness.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/02/donald-trum...
Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.
In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
Don't feel sorry for them and hope the govt doesnt give them a penny.
Outside of that, it will be interesting to see how endemic the issues were. Here is hoping that this was an isolated incident.
The nightmare scenario would be multiple models suffering from a wide range of issues. Even though there haven’t been crashes, the optics and responses would be complicated.
If investigations or whistleblowers uncover other issues in other models it could fall apart very quickly. This would crush the economy with travel and shipping grinding to a halt. A bailout of Boeing would be the least of our worries...
The simple solution is for either Airbus or a large Chinese company to buy up all the assets for dirt-cheap, or perhaps even a Japanese conglomerate, and get back to work building airplanes.
However, allowing mergers until there are only one or two companies which can make strategically important things means you have painted yourself into a corner. You can bet that these companies will be well aware that they are immortal, and behave in ways which exploit this. You will not get the efficiencies often ascribed to private enterprise.
In the arguable case of a market where extensive capital is needed where no one would enter and/or competition really isn't feasible, that's a case for government granted monopolies with stringent oversight (similar to utilities like water, power, ...) or an actual public system.
Instead here we are, yet again, with corporate welfare and socialism potentially on the table for groups that shouldn't need it while the average citizen gets little-to-no breaks when they make mistakes (which often aren't even due to greed driven corner cutting).
Fortunately, Boeing has no other new plane besides the 737 MAX. The 787 is their second newest, but it's already been flying for eight years with no loss of life. If there were some undiscovered fundamental problems with that design they would've made themselves known by now (like with the Li-ion batteries that were fixed).
People are really going to be looking closely at whatever comes next after the 737 MAX, though.
Oh? How can you talk about Boeing's current financial state and the trade tension between US and China?
Assuming this permeates a considerable amount of the US military spending I'm curious how much it deflates the true value?
The US spends more than double China on military, and although it is likely a portion of their (China) budget goes towards graft and corruption my suspicion is that actual design, development and manufacturing is much more efficient (e.g. lack of environmental controls and labor unions) and would support the argument that the US is on course to losing its position of top military force (to China) within the next two decades.
The article talks about how the McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merger was evil. But there is no discussion on why Airbus is okay when Airbus is a merger of various European defence interests with different cultural values.
Why is one merger bad and the other not put under the same scrutiny?
Also, why isn't there a supply chain where anyone can enter the market? Pratt and Whitney, Rolls Royce and General Electric make engines, so if you can make your own plane you just bolt on ready made engines. But that is as far as the system integration aspect seems to go.
Most auto manufacturers do make their own engines so they are not 'systems integrators'. However, if you want to make cars you could go to Bosch for the bits they make, Johnson Controls for the bits they make, Pirelli for a few tyres and before you knew it there would be everything needed for final assembly. You could even get a contract manufacturer to make the whole thing.
With computers anyone can build a PC. But there might only be 2-3 supplier choices for a given component. Some PCs are built for a specialist niche, e.g. point of sales systems, or medical. No heavy handed governments made the PC manufacturers merge into giant mega corporations, they did that themselves opening doors for new entrants in the process.
Planes could be more about systems integration, so a given airliner might be able to get a local place to build planes for its requirements from off the shelf parts. The governments could have rationalised the industry to work this way. Imagine if, as per the engine example there are 2-3 suppliers for wings, fuselages, avionics packages, cabin interiors, fuel interiors and so on.
This idea can be easily nitpicked, however, aeons ago the U.S. government legislated so that airliners could not build their own planes.
I'm of the feeling that electric planes may open up the market , though mindful it may be like the early days of plane making. Lots of small private companies that eventually merge over time into a handful of behemoths with the same governmental factors playing out.
https://www.designnews.com/aerospace/designed-disaster-dc-10...
I really wish people wouldn't grab onto this; I've found no authoritative source linking those outsourced to to the coding of the MCAS, and several that explicitly state that was not the case.
While the rest of the article has absolutely valid points, let's not cloud the issue with cheap mudslinging.
First, it uhm no longer exists and second the merger was in 1997 - more than two decades ago!
The current mess is flying under the Boeing flag one way or another.
The iPhone is certainly an Apple product just like the 737MAX is a Boeing product, but would you attribute the success of the iPhone to NeXT/Jobs culture or Apple/Amelio culture?
I've worked through half a dozen M&As, and I've seen the culture at the bigger partner in some of them change radically, often because the bigger company will promote executives from the smaller company as part of the deal. This really is a thing, and sometimes it's a very bad thing, though I've also seen it succeed wildly.
Executives often don't understand the culture in the companies they lead, or the companies they acquire or merge with. Sometimes they don't even have the luxury of choosing partners on the basis of cultural compatibility.
Now:
> In 1993, a Defense official in the Clinton administration, Bill Perry, called defense contractor CEOs to a dinner, nicknamed “the last supper.”
Bill you devil.
Jokes aside, now imagine you're this guy and have all this power in your hands, imagine that for a second, what would you do? If you ask him, he did great. Because all he knows is that, he can't see past the situation because he is a small minded creature. This begs a question is he responsible? Well I don't think so. It's us, us people that go to polls and vote.
Now imagine the frustration of the good Boeing engineers of that time. You probably can't because of the today's culture, a culture where nobody is giving a shit about anything.
No matter what though, it's very important not to lose the compass and not forget for what you have fought when the time comes.
Well yes he is. It doesn't matter that much what his original intentions were (not that we will ever learn true intentions of these backdoor deals, politics is dirty at every level), the result is what it is. And this meeting was the decisive push for it.
Will he stand trial for this? I can't imagine it happening. Can he claim to be a good moral person who did only the best possible choices for mankind/US citizens in his life? Absolutely not.
Boeing has plenty of business. 737 MAX sales may suffer, but that will not kill the Boeing Company.
Aviation is a deadly serious business. Design is done by people, which are highly flawed cogs in the system. The system was broken. (meaning design, verification, and certification process). The system can be fixed.
Incompetence at some levels; perhaps. Not murder and not criminal behavior.
Given a crew that has experienced an AOA sensor failure during MCAS operation in the simulator, I would fly on a 737 MAX as it was delivered. Without concern.
How about if the crew failed to recover in the simulator?
Pilots do not like to die. If the first attempt was incorrect, they will do it again. and again. and again.
A crew that was unsuccessful would not leave the training device until they had mastery of the situation. (and, the airline would not let them fly)
For a single crew, the simulator time is very cheap. very cheap * 10,000 crew members shows up on a spreadsheet; thus the avoidance of simulator training by management.
The real universe has enough failure modes without engineering our own pitfalls.
The engineers who signed off on this and their managers should be extradited to the countries involved to stand trial for criminal negligence.
Make sure your pilot is a bodybuilder or something.
"But Lemme said the Ethiopian pilots most likely were unable to carry out that last instruction in the Boeing emergency procedure — because they simply couldn’t physically move that wheel against the heavy forces acting on the tail."
“The forces on the tail could have been too great,” Lemme said. “They couldn’t turn the manual trim wheel.”
It would be amusing if the US government gives them money though. European alleged subsidy of Airbus is the latest accusation of Trump and one of the causes of the US-EU trade war.
Murdering 350 civilians with lies and negligence for profit and "shareholder value" just might suffice.
They put a plane into the air that flies itself automatically into the ground after all, with no opportunity for the pilots to save the plane. You can't fuck up more.
> It would be amusing if the US government gives them money though.
The US is already giving them money, indirectly. The EU is just also giving Airbus money. That's the core of the issue of Trumps position and why the conflict can't be easily solved.
Though Boeing has significant contribution, if you read the report on the Ethiopian Air 737-Max crash, I think it's easy to see several places where there was ample opportunity for the pilots to save the plane, particularly in light of the LionAir crash. Even in the LionAir case, a prior LionAir crew did save the airplane on an earlier flight by following the manufacturer provided checklist.
Boeing made a serious design error here. However, it's not nearly as serious as the quoted sentence, IMO.
Besides, did the pilots have opportunity to read and implement the new checklist?
The existing checklist was unchanged from other 737s and the required actions were all "memory items" (items which must be recalled and implemented by the crew from memory, prior to referencing and completing the written checklist in the QRH). Any 737 crewmember would have had to have demonstrated those checklist items, from memory, prior to receiving their type-rating to fly the jet. Runaway trim is a "no joke" event in nearly any type and is a memory item in any type I'm familiar with.
The Ethiopian Air crew seemed to correctly diagnose the issue, got the aircraft somewhat under control and then, in an attempt to fix the trim issue, undid the corrective checklist item, ran the trim aircraft-nose-up using the thumb switch (so far, excellent!!) and then, inexplicably, left the stab trim power enabled without commanding further aircraft-nose-up. So, they diagnosed the issue, initially did all the right things, then undid them [with good reason], then failed to re-do them.
(I agree that Boeing still wears a lot of blame here. It's just not the case that the crews were helpless and unaware passengers.)
I have seen some suggestions that this was also the reason for not having MCAS compare the two AofA sources to detect a fault, as the fault would have to be reported, and the documentation of that indicator would reveal the existence of MCAS.
Nevertheless, the provided checklist did work as evidenced by Lion Air 043.
It is quite possible that it would have been an adequate checklist when backed up with sufficient training that emphasized the differences between MCAS-induced trim runaway and that which might have been experienced in other variants. Simulator practice of manually trimming might help as well, though there is some doubt whether current simulators can adequately model the difficulties that may be experienced.
Also, that "checklist", and he existence of MCAS, was not even commonly known until after Lion Air went down.
The secrecy behind this is largely attributed to Boeing trying to keep MCAS from intense scrutiny by the FAA, based on whistleblower testimony reported in the 60 Minutes Expose.
https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DaO7_indbfME&ved=2ahUKEwiPp...
That means it was dumb luck (a third person being there) and not due to following procedures if those procedures are nearly impossible to follow, or require superhuman strength.
The excessive force on the trim required in the Ethiopian Air case was a consequence of the crew leaving the engines at high power, the trim having run farther nose down, and the elevator being held nose up, resulting in loading the horizontal stabilizer thus making the trim difficult to move. (Though I'm critical of their decision to restore and leave power to the trim system without commanding aircraft-nose-up after correctly diagnosing runaway trim, I don't really fault them for leaving excessive power in. That's a reasonable response to the initial indications and by the later time they realized it was a trim issue, they were pretty well loaded up struggling with the airplane that was well out of trim, so undoing their thrust command [which would typically result in a descent that they didn't want/couldn't afford] probably isn't reasonable to expect.)
From an armchair perspective a checklist for AoA sensor failure would have been required for the flight to end safely (maybe with "cutoff stab trim" on the list).