Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens
reuters.com
reuters.com
When your brand is suffering a crisis of confidence, you don't rebuild it by missing deadlines and dodging reality. The amount of hubris it takes to be so flippant in these circumstances is indicative of a deeply flawed corporate culture, and that falls at the feet of the CEO.
Also, how do you allow Starliner mission to occur without 100% confidence in ability of mission to be executed flawlessly? There are certainly complexities, but it almost seems like they passed the point when they could have quietly bumped the launch, and ended up in a literal PR gamble.
Calling a space capsule a product and treating it like some kind of tech product launch and framing it's success that way is weird. It's a spacecraft and the mission was meant to test its capabilities and get data about it during an actual orbital flight, then go from there.
The reason everyone is trying to be so cheerful and optimistic is because it was a partial success - the capsule stayed together and landed, which were part of its mission parameters. But (clearly) the public perception of this mission is that it failed because it didn't get to the ISS, so I imagine people are trying to be cheerful to remind people that they're not upset cause they didn't fail, they just didn't fully succeed.
I'm no fan of Boeing or how they've handled 787 MAX or ULA or Starliner or their relationship with NASA, but calling this not too promising is a bit unfair.
That's why it's not encouraging - and why it's not at all unfair to be scathing.
Apparently, 20 years of progress and "promise" ain't what it used to be.
That is, the amount of project surface that it increased confidence in is as great or greater than the amount it called into question.
Deliberately false and misleading statements that should be prosecuted by the SEC.
I think it’s just the (well deserved) media narrative Boeing is in now. When you kill hundreds of people and then pretend it wasn’t your fault, you get what’s coming to you.
These are known engineering problems with known engineering solutions. The explanation from Boeing was that a timer was set incorrectly. This sounds like a trivial error to me (though I'm not a "rocket scientist" just a "kerbal scientist", I guess, but we've been using timers for a long time afaik to properly manage burns to orbit).
Most complex engineering projects are hard not because of one thing, but because of the mind-bogglingly large number of things that must all be done correctly.
(1 - x) ^ y, where x is the chance of each small mistake and y is the total number of opportunities, doesn't need a very large x, if y is large enough, for things to start looking dicey.
There are a lot of things I'd love to know the accepted name for, as I came into understanding through the backdoor. I regret that my college CS track didn't include more borrow-courses from physical engineering on reliability (and control theory). So many valuable, applicable lessons.
I don't know how much the systemic issues that clearly compromised the design of the plane extend to the design of the capsule, but trivals errors seem to be very possible.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the process failures like lack of communication between domains rather than acquiesce to simple conclusions that are more clear only in hindsight.
This design is bad, but it makes sense as a update of the 737. The flight computer setup is each pilot gets a computer under their chair, each computer gets its own set of sensors and the computers take turns each flight. The flight computer is generally safe (i don't think it's been implicated in any crashes?), but that's because in case of issues in flight, the system usually will disengage and alert the pilot, or if the system takes poor actions, it will disengage when the pilot opposes it, or the pilot will disengage it.
Adding MCAS to the flight computer makes sense, the flight computer needs to be aware of it. It's understandable, but negligent, to add a new feature to the computer without considering the original design. The problem comes in when MCAS was not disclosed to pilots, doesn't disengage on errors, doesn't disengage when pilot input opposes it (partially by design), and can't be disabled except by disabling electric trim, which is more or less needed to recover from the error condition MCAS puts the plane into.
I think this is fixable, but the public information on the current fix doesn't include being able to turn MCAS off, so it doesn't seem like they've really done enough.
I would guess that at least in part the difference in attitudes is because SpaceX is considered more startup-y and Boeing is more associated with the "failure is not an option" ethos.
Anyway, I do not care too much about pointing fingers elsewhere. The parachute thing was quite embarrassing and IMO this problem should have been prevented as well.
Regardless, testing all of the flight software is certainly not exclusive to SpaceX. I would bet any amount of money that Boeing also tested their software and performed simulated launches, moreover that testing is probably mandated by their contract with NASA. My uninformed guess is that one of two things happened:
1. Their tests were incomplete. e.g. they didn't find some edge case that would cause problems when the T-0 changed.
2. Someone goofed the procedures on the day of launch and didn't update their configuration properly.
Then when something like this happens, you can have your PR call up journalists they know and suggest a name or two that is likely to say what you'd hope for.
To reiterate, the procedure is:
1. restore trim to normal with the electric thumb switches
2. throw the stab trim cutoff switches
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
This AD was sent to all MAX flight crews. It works because the first incident of MCAS failure (Lion Air) was safely dealt with by doing just this.
The way to make things safe is to address ALL points in the zipper that led to the accident. That includes the pilot error aspects.
I can understand if the AD was intended as a short term fix but I would question the rationale if it were considered a long term solution
It was not, Boeing at the time was working on a solution.
Regardless, however, the pilots MUST know how to deal with runaway trim. This was true before MCAS, and is true after. It was true on the 757 (I spend 3 years working on the design of the 757 stab trim system). The cutoff switches are prominently within easy reach on the center console for very good reason, 40 years before MCAS.
It is not acceptable that pilots were unaware of the cutoff switches. It is unacceptable that MAX pilots did not read, understand, and remember the Airworthiness Directive sent to all MAX crews.
Similarly, airplane engineers work hard to keep the airplane from catching fire. But pilots also MUST learn to properly use the airplane's fire suppression systems. Most of pilot training consists of learning emergency procedures.
It's why airplanes still have pilots, instead of using automation instead.
Boeing still deserves blame for the flawed MCAS implementation. But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with.
But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with
I don’t necessarily disagree with this either, but it does come across as if we’re being distracted by proximate causes rather than focusing on the root cause. To someone on the outside, it sure seems like there are deeper engineering and cultural problems that deserve a greater priority at this point. Not to belabor the point, but simply issuing a procedural AD doesn’t appear to address the root causes and should just be a stop gap measure
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
Put another way, would you want to board an airplane where the pilot did not take EMERGENCY instructions seriously? I wouldn't.
> distracted
Pretty much 100% of the popular media (and its repeated appearances on HN) has been on the MCAS design shortcomings. Which distract from dealing with the other causes of the accidents.
As I mentioned previously, the AD was issued as a stopgap measure while Boeing worked on an MCAS fix.
Procedural is meant as an administrative action as opposed to a designed engineering action.
Think of a hazardous system that has software involved with controlling a pressure hazard. A procedural mitigation may be to have an operator monitor system pressure and push a non-software shut-off emergency button if the system overpressurizes. Even though it's an emergency, it's still a procedural mitigation. An engineering mitigation, on the other hand, may have mechanical pressure relief devices in place to mitigate the hazard. Whether or not it's an "emergency" just relates to the severity and time criticality of the hazard, not the mechanism of mitigation.
In safety design the hierarchy of hazard control preference is generally engineering controls, followed by procedural controls, followed by PPE as the least desirable control scheme.
Which distract from dealing with the other causes of the accidents.
One of the common flaws in mishap investigation is jumping to “solving” proximate causes at the expense of finding the root cause. This is applicable to MCAS as well if that isn’t the root cause (although my hunch is MCAS will be closer to the root issue than pilot actions). As long as people aren’t pointing to the AD as the “fix” I think there’s not a problem with it being an interim measure
The Ethiopian crew tried the cutout switches and found they couldn't trim the airplane with the hand cranks because Boeing lied. How is that a pilot training issue?
But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with.
A Boeing employee concern trolling over pilot training is pretty rich considering that Boeing knowingly hid crucial details from pilots.
The Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX crews says:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
> A Boeing employee
I left Boeing about 40 years ago.
If the graphs are to be believed neither the electric commands nor hand crank were able to move the stabilizer. Again, how is that a pilot training issue?
1. trim to normal with the electric trim switches
2. cut off the stabilizer trim
What the EA pilots did was:
1. cut off the stabilizer trim
2. try to use the hand cranks to trim to normal
Graphs of the FDR data from the (preliminary) accident reports. The Ethiopian authorities even annotated theirs with things like "automatic trim command with no change in pitch trim". You can see quite plainly the stabilizer was not moving as intended.
2. try to use the hand cranks to trim to normal
Per Boeing's documentation this should've worked. Unfortunately Boeing's documentation is mostly wishful thinking. Boeing's also suggested that a pilot try unloading the stabilizer with a roller coaster type maneuver. Unfortunately Boeing removed detailed instructions on this maneuver decades ago and the FAA's already demonstrated that with the altitude that the Ethiopian crew had, unloading the stabilizer would've just flown the plane into the ground.
There's a reason Boeing's largely backed off of the whole pilot error nonsense: the 737 MAX crashed due to shitty design not pilot error.
So how do you propose training against an unfinished product? Boeing still hasn't given the FAA a completed software package to evaluate. At the time of the 737 MAX crashes there were, what? two? 737 MAX simulators, and none of them emulated MCAS or even the forces required to crank the stabilizer manually.
One Lion Air flight got lucky because they had a third set of eyes that could spend time going through reams of documentation.
To even begin discussing pilot "error" is disingenuous when the pilots weren't informed or trained on new 737 MAX behavior. MCAS activation is not, and was not, a runaway stabilizer situation.
It presented as a runaway stab trim. Repeatedly coming on and driving the nose down is runaway trim. No two ways about it. And the usual, standard, runaway trim procedure would stop it.
> they had a third set of eyes that could spend time going through reams of documentation
From my reading of that incident, nothing of the sort happened. The 3rd pilot simply reached forward and flipped off the cutoff switches. The crew landed safely and went on with their day. Nobody bothered to inform the next crew flying that same airplane.
No, it didn't. From the latest QRH:
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
Well that's not met as MCAS doesn't run continuously. By design it stops periodically. Put it another way. You're arguing semantics while the 737 MAX remains a smoldering pile of aluminum and hubris.
2.) Control airplane pitch attitude manually with control column and main electric trim as required.
4.) If the runaway stops after the autopilot is disengaged ....
MCAS also stops after the trim switches are hit. So, again MCAS activation is not a runaway trim condition.
From my reading of that incident, nothing of the sort happened. The 3rd pilot simply reached forward and flipped off the cutoff switches.
Reread the report. The third pilot went back into the cabin to fetch reading material.
Trying to argue that the trim system erratically coming on and driving the nose down is not "runaway trim" is arguing semantics. Runaway trim is when the trim is doing something dangerous without command from the pilot.
If the cockpit voice recorder reveals them discussing the definition of "runaway trim" and deciding that the instructions Boeing provided didn't apply, I'd be surprised and interested.
> MCAS also stops after the trim switches are hit.
Exactly, the trim switches override the MCAS. That's why you use the trim switches to set it back to normal, then hit the cutoff switches. That's what the Emergency Airworthiness Directive says to do.
> Reread the report.
I haven't read that anywhere. I don't know what report that is. Reference, please.
On the 737 Max there is no way to disable the MCAS without also disabling the electric trim.
1. trim to normal with the electric trim switches
2. cut off the stabilizer trim
Do it in that order. Doing step 2 before step 1 won't work.
No, it's not.
So here's some context. Boeing installed known not-to-spec structural components on the NG. Boeing installed known to fail prematurely slat tracks on the NG and 737 MAX. Boeing installed (probably known) not-to-spec pickle forks in the NG and 737 MAX. Boeing falsified repair documentation for an Air Canada 787. Oh, and of course, Boeing hid any mention of MCAS. Point being Boeing doesn't have a lot of credibility left.
With that in mind:
Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT.
As the Ethiopian crew found out: it can't. The larger instruments of the NG required the hand cranks to shrink while the stabilizer itself grew. With the resulting lower mechanical advantage and increase in force required to move the stab itself the wheels became unusable. Sure, the Ethiopian crew went over the "maximum" speed but they were still under the max diving speed (Vd). That means the cranks were supposed to work.
It works because the first incident of MCAS failure (Lion Air) was safely dealt with by doing just this.
It worked because the first crew got lucky and had a third set of eyes that was free to dig through everything in search of a best guess.
Whatever you read about that is simply wrong. (I've seen a LOT of misinformation in popular print about this.) You're correct that the hand cranks were unusable. But the electric thumb switches WERE usable and were pointed out in the AD.
Note that the crews of BOTH the LA and EA crashes had already used the thumb switches to restore normal trim, the LA crew did so 25 times.
> best guess
No guessing required. Follow the training, which is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning they weren't supposed to need to consult a checklist nor dig through anything nor guess.
I am not a pilot, but I would not consider myself fit to fly unless I knew by memory what every single switch in the cockpit does, ESPECIALLY the ones prominently located within easy reach. You can bet it's not the infotainment system.
For damn sure I would read every Emergency Airworthiness Directive for the airplane I'm the pilot of, most especially one issued in response to a crash.
And if you enable the electric trim switches on a 737 MAX you get MCAS activation. MCAS, of course, trims faster than the switches. Using the electric switches is fighting a losing battle (look at the graphs of trim input vs output). How are you supposed to fly the plane when you can't trim the stabilizer?
Look at the graphs from the Indonesian report. The pilots were countering with trim up button presses and MCAS still managed to take the trim to a severe AND position.
Look at the graphs from the Ethiopian report. You'll see a long gap where the electric trim was disabled (leaving the pilots with no way to trim the stabilizer). Outside that gap you'll see an automatic (MCAS) AND command with no change in trim and a couple ANU clicks from the pilots with no resulting change in trim.
No guessing required. Follow the training, which is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning they weren't supposed to need to consult a checklist nor dig through anything nor guess.
And what memory items were they supposed to have in mind? Keeping in mind MCAS presented counter to how Boeing defines runaway trim.
The electric trim switches override MCAS. That is why the steps are:
1. use the electric trim switches to set the trim to normal
2. cut off the electric trim
That's all there is to it.
> MCAS presented counter to how Boeing defines runaway trim.
That's simply false. (And runaway trim does not need definition, Boeing does not define it.)
They pause MCAS but do not disable or override it it. The trim switches move the stabilizer slower than MCAS activation thus as seen by the Ethiopian and Lion Air crews using the electric trim switches is tantamount to fighting a losing batle.
1. use the electric trim switches to set the trim to normal
What happens when the electric trim switches don't work? They didn't in the Ethiopian crash.
runaway trim does not need definition, Boeing does not define it.
Sure they do, it's in the QRH plain as day.
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
MCAS activation isn't continuous, especially not if you're pausing it with the trim switches.
There are tests to prove out ideas during the course of development, but then there are tests which would perhaps be more accurately called "demonstrations"; where you're not trying to find flaws and refine your designs, but rather prove that you're [insert thing-name you're proving here] actually works the way you are representing it to work.
I understood this test to be more in the demonstration category, where Boeing would/should have had very high confidence, but they needed to prove to NASA that their spacecraft worked as advertised. If that's true, it was almost more a test on how much NASA should trust the confidence of the Boeing team than it was a test engineering and manufacture.
If that wasn't the character of the test, then I apologize for the distraction.
"It was unclear whether NASA would require Boeing to fly another test mission without crews onboard before allowing its astronauts to fly in the Starliner. Bridenstine said he wouldn’t rule out a mission with crews onboard, pointing out that the space shuttle had been piloted by astronauts, not computers."[0]
While Boeing makes noises about how there's no systemic problem with their ability to write software in general, earlier in the same article NASA comes to their defense by pointing out that if the craft was manned then the test would have been... saved? That seems strong to me but that is word used in the quote.
"NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a news conference Friday that the failure would not have been life-threatening had astronauts been onboard. He said that had the spacecraft been crewed, the mission might have been saved. “They are trained to deal with a situation where the automation is not working according to plan,” he said."
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/20/boeing-...
has worked for Elon, and now his stock is trading at an all time high. $420
Haven't you heard?
When a company creates a culture of sweeping problems under the rug, and then tries to go back and change that, it creates an impossible situation for people at all levels of the hierarchy. Where management once told people it was OK to hide things from them, now they've changed the rules and are telling them, hey, show us all the things we told you we didn't want to know about.
First of all, when you're told this, you have no way of knowing if they really mean it. Are they saying, hey, actually show us the dirt so we can deal with it? Or are they saying, hey, show us the dirt WINK WINK, but we want the answer to be that nothing too bad happened because that's the easy way out? (In other words, you have to judge whether they've had a sincere change of heart or you're playing a new phase of the same game as before.)
But even if you really believe them, now you have a difficult calculation to make. Maybe you will reveal some dirt and they will say, wait a second, we meant for you to hide dirt, but not dirt that was that bad, and that's your fault, and you were supposed to know that. And now you're in trouble for telling the truth. Unless management offers you complete immunity (if that's even possible), you still have a reason to keep hiding stuff to protect yourself.
TLDR, if your organization made sure everybody's closets are full of skeletons, then you're going to have a hard time getting people to open those closet doors.
There is also the need for an organisation wide culture built on processes, procedures and channels that then enables the company to quickly and efficiently find solutions to these kind of problems.
When a company for a long time has being building a culture of ignoring problems, the effort required to rebuild that problem solving culture is massive.
It is not helped by the fact that the individuals holding the power at the different levels within the organisation tend to be the ones who oversaw the demise of that engineering culture in the first place.
What space program with new hardware has ever executed 100% flawlessly?
No question at this point that he needed to be replaced. The question is - why didn't the board act sooner?
[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/18/boeings-misplac...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/business/boeing-dennis-mu...
They sure look being a 'reliable' and 'competent' gang now.
Most likely some PR firm working for Boeing fed some hints to the the Times.
Boeing then waited until it was released to have a coordinated PR push and put as much blame as possible on Muilenburg.
And the board looks horrible, slow to act, behind the curve, reacting to external pressure instead of leading. So it would not be in the board's interest to do a "coordinated PR push" and fire Muilenburg after the stories were published.
It's a bad look, because Boeing is consistently way too late to recognize what is obvious to those of us watching from home.
I continue to be astounded that our most senior leaders will not act in the long-term best interest of the organizations they lead.
It's been 37 years since the Tylenol crisis, where seven people in Chicago died after someone tampered with the pain reliever and contaminated it with potassium cyanide.
Way back then, Johnson & Johnson did far more than they were required to do. They pulled all Tylenol from all store shelves everywhere, and kept it off the market until they completely redesigned the packaging. They took complete responsibility. They over-communicated with regulators and with the public. Their market share plunged from 35% to 8% and they took a huge financial hit.
But what was bad for J&J in the short term was fantastically positive in the long term. Their brand recovered, stronger than ever, and they regained their dominant market share.
But today, leaders across the public and private sectors rarely act with this kind of understanding and foresight. Muilenburg downplayed the catastrophes, blamed the pilots, pressured regulators, tried to find cheap shortcuts to fix the problem, and made promises to suppliers and customers he couldn't keep.
So often what's best in the immediate term is worst for the long term. Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost?
If America stayed home in World War 2, how do you know the Allies wouldn't have won anyway?
Though any speculation we have there is just that - pure speculation.
> Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost?
I'm not sure it's so simple. At the head of the Boeing bureaucracy, Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs. He was ineffective because he accepted it and pushed it outward - to the board and the wider public - rather than challenging it and getting to the bottom of the crisis. Internally challenging the members of your organization during a crisis is incredibly politically difficult to pull off and has little to do with short-term vs. long-term perspectives. Of course, someone with his experience and compensation, working at his level, should be able to pull it off. He didn't.
I'm sure in 1982, the Johnson & Johnson CEO was also "being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs".
That's how big organizations work.
But in 1982, J&J leadership could see beyond that, cut through the noise, push back on short-sighted recommendations, and do the right thing for the company in the long term.
My question is why we rarely see "enlightened self-interest" like this today.
From Boeing to Facebook, Wells Fargo to Uber, it's hard to think of companies that do the right thing in difficult situations, even when that would be in the company's own long-term best interest.
This is not necessarily a given. In the Tylenol case an external saboteur was to blame, so little or no internal CYA was necessary. Easy and correct for everyone to just blame it on the saboteur and then do the right thing to fix the problem.
In the Boeing case the culprit was internal, which likely resulted in a tangled web of CYA, leading to a diet of wrong and horrible information.
Not excusing Boeing, they acted wrongly. But it’s clear how and why the odds of bad corporate behavior were much higher in Boeing’s case than in J&J’s case.
If J&J had behaved like Boeing, they would have blamed the saboteur, blamed law enforcement, and blamed retailers while gradually and secretly fixing the packaging problem before regulators could force them to do it.
If Boeing had behaved like J&J, they would have taken immediate responsibility, voluntarily grounded the entire fleet even before all the causes were known, and put passenger safety first.
Do you have a citation for that? I don't doubt it's possible but I've never heard it. As far as I know no major pain medications had tamper resistant seals at that point in history.
I've read a lot about this (being from Chicago myself) and do not believe you're representing it correctly. J&J took responsibility insomuch as they pioneered tamper resistant packaging, but they very clearly blamed a saboteur. The initial allegation was that Tylenol was unsafe. J&J successfully re-spun it, correctly, as an external terrorist poisoning their medication. And, to their credit, they did a great job making future Tylenol very safe.
But the bottom line is that these two incidents are very different. In J&J's case they were not at fault. In Boeing's case they were.
Info taken from https://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/dodjcc/groups/02C2/Johnson%20&%2...
Your job as CEO, or any leader of a large organization civilian or military, is to ferret out when you're being fed loads of BS. It's frustrating because Muilenberg was a engineer and started there as an intern in the 80s, so he at least should have some domain expertise in what the problems were. Perhaps him being a "company man" in this case was a hindrance, or conflicted with the new culture at Boeing that is, apparently, run by MBAs concerned with quarterly profits. In either case, he needed to go as this failure happened on his watch.
I get where you are coming from, but I would reframe it as "Your job as a CEO is to create a culture with integrity and transparency"
It is also pretty clear that a time of crisis is the time that your true corporate culture manifests, it seems that the culture at Boeing is not long on integrity or transparency.
I think it may be too early to claim this. I think we can only judge these companies' well-being (especially with respect to their recent controversies) on a medium- to long-term scale.
I've banked at Wells Fargo since 2013, and I intend to close my 2 WF accounts and open up new ones at Chase soon. If I could remove my information from Equifax or another credit bureau, I would. By all standards, these companies are "doing just fine" at present. But what about 5 years from now, 15 years from now? The damage to a companies' reputation and the impact it has on consumer decision-making can be slow-moving and hard to notice/quantify.
you're just moving from one crappy, uncaring bank to another (i've banked at both in the past). a credit union or local/regional bank will treat you like a real human rather than a necessary inconvenience: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/reviews/
you don't get good customer service (via phone or otherwise) at a big bank, as they see it as a cost center to be minimized. smaller banks use good service as a differentiator/product enhancement.
but yes, international charges can vary a bit.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/johnson-johnson-baby-powder...
it's disappointing and frustrating, but not all that surprising, given the decades of eroding honor, responsibility, and governance (both corporate and political) of large companies and their senior managers.
i'm more appalled that we tolerate obviously poor incentive structures that implicitly endorse such behavior.
compensation for senior managers should be better tied to long-term results, and punishments should more easily pierce the corporate veil.
(and whew, glad i covered that tylenol case in my mba program... would not have looked forward to asking for a refund! =)
I’m no fan of Boeing but the truth is, betting your entire business requires a much higher burden of proof than journalism does.
This is totally wrong. The New York Times depends on its reputation for accuracy.
Which, to me at least, is a perfectly legitimate thing for a newspaper to do. Yes, they should check facts and vet sources, but their primary responsibility is to do the best they can and get the information out there for the public.
Their record of accuracy has suffered quite a bit in the past few years.
That's not reflecting reality at all. In a big enough company you don't really decide, you do both. Alternatively, you choose all three of the options. There's often no reason to fully go for one thing. This as in a big enough company there's enough resources that someone somewhere else does something else, likely the opposite of some other decision.
Eventually something will fail, or it'll succeed. The things which succeed will hopefully be implemented everywhere.
It takes a long time for a company as big as Boeing to crater. But I feel like in the last year, we've seen the start of the process.
As with all things Elon, SpaceX is built on a financial pyramid. It either wins big, or loses big. And Boeing is a clear loser if SpaceX succeeds. A rule of thumb is that the rare big projects that will do well starts announcing that they are ahead of deadlines early, and that continues. Big projects that won't do not declare slipping deadlines until they can't hide it, and there is never any sense of what the real schedule is.
Right now SpaceX is announcing that they are ahead of deadlines. Boeing is consistently slipping.
What would the losses be? Well consider:
Boeing is counting on billions of dollars for deliveries to the ISS. They are being heavily subsidized and do not have a proven technology for doing so. SpaceX is running routine missions and if their Super Heavy works out will see a dramatic cost drop.
Boeing has billions more at stake with the SLS system for deep space launches and a return to the Moon. But the project is in peril and missing deadlines. Political connections favor Boeing. But if Super Heavy is anything close to what is promised, Elon can as a publicity stunt afford to (unpaid) do missions for a few million dollars that Boeing failed to deliver for 10s of billions. How long will the gravy train continue?
And the giant wildcard is SpaceX suborbital flights. Suppose that SpaceX delivers in the next 5 years on a point to point flight time from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else in a maximum of 1 hour. It will take time for people to conclude that it is safe. But consider, a first class transatlantic flight costs $10,000 and takes ~14 hours. If the SpaceX launch costs their estimated $2 million and carries an average of 250 people, they can charge first class prices for a 30 minute flight, and take home a $500k profit per trip. Anyone who has done a long plane trip will see the appeal of not spending 14 hours in the plane. So your first class passengers switch to SpaceX.
The economics of airline travel are that first class tickets pay a very large chunk of the fixed costs of the flight, while economy tickets pay the marginal costs of adding a person to the flight. Take away the first class tickets and average tickets have to go up in price. The result? Higher ticket prices, more passengers per plane, and a consolidation in the airline industry. SpaceX does not have to take that large a fraction of the volume to trigger that consolidation.
The phrase "consolidation in the airline industry" should be extremely worrying to airplane manufacturers. Fewer and fuller long-range flights means that nobody needs to buy new airplanes for a while. Which means that Boeing's core business craters.
The long and short of it is that if SpaceX delivers, Boeing dies. We will know one way or the other in 5-10 years.
They do not separate NASA from defense department spending, but government was about 35% of revenue and only 16% of profit.
The rest is consulting.
The upshot is that if SpaceX embarrasses Boeing in space, it is a black eye and a sizable chunk of Boeing's business but not critical. But if suborbital flights replace even a modest chunk of long-haul commercial flights, Boeing will be in a world of hurt.
Consider, aircraft tend to operate for about 30 years. If SpaceX causes a 20% reduction in long-haul flights, it would result in a period of 6 years where nobody wants to buy new aircraft, followed by a resumption in sales at about 80% of the previous volume. There is no way that Boeing is prepared for that kind of business shift.
And SpaceX does NOT have to replace 20% of passenger trips to do it. If only the most profitable few percent of passenger trips disappear, then between more expensive seats and fuller flights, the number of flights will drop by a lot more than what SpaceX does. The impact on Boeing will be outsized.
The real question is, why is BA stock still trading above 330? Why are big money guys so confident about the company's future?
We have seen incredible growth in market cap. Ultimately Boeing does big business with the Department of Defense and their spending is up, but the lion's share of Boeing's profits come from commercial aviation if I'm not mistaken. The tax cuts and cash repatriation holiday were great too, but how much can that reduction in tax burden really account for this rally in the value of BA? Seems like a sell to me on first glance, but the fact that there is strong support here at 330 despite all that has happened is telling that some big money players are confident that Boeing is irreplaceable.
A friend of mine refuses to bet against BA because it makes up a large component of the DJIA, which the President appears to treat as his own personal economic scoreboard.
Until now, Boeing's business plan is that they will be building a starship for NASA in 2060, but you will still be stuck with a 737 on Southwest Airlines, a A320 on Jetblue, and never know that aviation could be better.
The 737 throws off a lot of cash, but the single-aisle monoculture makes flying miserable.
A 737 replacement will be expensive, take time to develop, and involve risk, but the end product could be the resurrection of the Boeing brand. Since there are so many 737-class airplanes flying, anyone who wants to see a better flying experience or is concerned about environmental impacts of aviation such as airport noise or carbon emissions would realize that a 737 replacement could have a greater impact than the widebody planes where competitive developments are happening.
You shouldn't have to fly international to benefit from 50 years of aviation improvements.
First of all, smaller planes such as the A320 and E195 feel bigger inside than the 737 does. It's like the difference between the "boat of car" from American manufacturers to the Japanese cars that were small on the outside but big on the inside.
If you just want a low-cost plane at the A320 level of technology, China is coming online with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
It will put up great production numbers by selling to Chinese airlines first, they will have all the protectionism and subsidies they need to grow to an economy of scale where at 2030 the C919 will beat the pants off the 737.
If Boeing doesn't take advantage of it's comparative advantage and develop a much better aircraft, they are doomed.
I was going to go all "what do you mean, smaller??? ... surely you mean the A220", but had to good sense to look it up and you are right, the A320 Neo is actually a tad smaller than, for example, the 737-800. Also lighter.
Just carries more passengers a longer distance faster with slightly wider seats.
Hmm..
Not that the A320 is any spring chicken (dates back to the 80s), however that's still a quantum leap in technology (e.g. universal fly-by-wire) and I'm guessing more modular as it was intended as a family of planes sharing a type (from the 318 to the 321, though the 318 was dropped for neo).
The 321neo carries up to 240, even the 737-900 ER is left behind (220), though the 321 is longer than the -900 by quite a bit 44.5m to 42).
A 737-800 is 39.6m long to the 320neo’s 38.6, they have the same wingspan, the 320neo seats up to 195 versus 189 for the 737.
The 320 also has significantly more range (6500km to 5500) and needs a bit less runway (1950m to 2300).
The 737 MAX 200 is a modified 737 MAX 8 with an extra pair of exit doors so that it can seat up to 200 passengers. It will be used by Ryanair. Assuming the 737 MAX does fly again of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530964
Jules Dupuit, describing rail carriages, though the same logic applies:
It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity.
Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich.
https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...
I tend to try to travel on Qatar, and their new business class cabins are amazing: https://www.qatarairways.com/en/onboard/qsuite.html
It's also cheaper than the (worse) business class on many other airlines.
While the QSuites and the cabin crew are nice, you rarely get QSuites in reality. But you always get a stopover in Doha, and those stopovers generally include business lounges so busy you can rarely get a shower with a < 3 hour stopover, rarely get use of an airway for boarding (even at destination airports with numerous available, eg Stockholm), and you sit in the premium bus for 30+ minutes after "boarding" commenced waiting for other passengers (with dusty, fuel fume filled, unairconditioned Doha airport air).
The business class lounge at Doha is the best I've ever been to. You do need to go to the premium lounge though. They have a separate lounge for people with gold cards, and that one was a huge disappointment.
Without that, there's no motivation to do anything but shave every marginal dollar. Competitive forces are limited and will get more so over time. My uncle drives freight trains for living, and they pay extra to remove seat cushions on the locomotives because they don't want to spend opex on replacing torn cushions down the road.
My point is, when you optimize exclusively for cost, you will only get cheap and will not get any kind of improvement in customer experience. The only reason that Spirit Airways doesn't dangle you from a net hanging from the ceiling is that safety regulations don't allow for it.
A very short-sighted action. Driver seats are not like passenger seats, the drivers will strike if they are discomforted by the seat.
What is it that people expect when they say flying is miserable? I expect safety, which is why I'll never get on a 737 MAX. Other than that, I just put sandwiches and snacks in my pocket, fill my water bottle, and in X hours I'm thousands of miles away. Air travel is actually pretty amazing.
What you’re probably thinking of is the US airline specific “comfort/extra/plus” add-on that is priced 10%-20% extra. There is a few more inches legroom but the seats are the same small economy seats.
The former uses larger seats and is typically available on long-hauls. The seat is somewhat similar to old-style business class seats, or modern domestic first class seats. It is not priced at 10% extra, it is usually close to double.
The latter is priced at around 10% extra, but is the same old economy seat just with a couple of inches more legroom.
It would be nice to have to pay only 10% extra to get 10% more space, but the lack of scaling is by design on the airlines part, and textbook market segmentation.
Edit: this article has pictures showing the difference: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...
As far as I understand, the reason for this is that foreign airlines are not allowed to fly US domestic routes, and most US people don't fly international which means they don't know that things could be better.
It also seems like people in the US to a greater extent than other countries only cares about ticket price, which means that even if an airline wants to improve their quality they can't use it to compete because customers will simply not see them, since they sort by price on the travel site and pick the first one on the list.
With regards to quality, do airlines in other places generally provide more bang for the buck or are they just generally more expensive than US flights to provide for the higher quality?
That said, flights throughout Asia at distances similar to US domestic flights tend to be reasonably cheap.
I decided to make a comparison:
Fly Singapore Airlines from Singapore to Hong Kong. This will cost you 225 USD in economy.
A domestic US flight of the same distance would be San Francisco to Albuquerque on United Airlines. This flight will cost you 468 USD.
So it seems to me that Singapore Airlines is able to provide better quality at much lower cost. Perhaps the US airlines simply don't have to be better because there is no one that shows it can be done?
A better comparison with about the same distance in the US is New York to Miami, which can be done nonstop for under $200 on Delta, or $135 on whatever "Frontier" is.
EDIT: In fact you can go from New York to Las Vegas for under $200, round-trip, which is considerably farther.
My point was that even though the regular flights are similarly priced in the US and Asia, the quality in the US is so much worse. I now see that my attempt at explaining this discrepancy had some flaws, but what other explanations do you suggest?
The fact seems to be that even the best US Airlines are significantly worse than the ones in other places. When the best rated ones are hovering around average, there is something wrong.
It's probably important to be specific when I say "quality." By that I'm referring to ease of purchase, fair baggage prices, web/app UX, on/off-flight customer service including pilot communication with passengers, and even landings (as a pilot, I am absolutely judging beyond "did we get to the ground safely or not"). Price and seating are secondary for me, although I certainly understand why they are list-toppers for others.
I suspect flying up front on any of the majors is fine. Economy experience is driven by a race to the bottom price-wise, but if you want cheap travel, it’s readily available. If you want comfortable travel, that’s also on offer.
I flew Frontier the first time this Spring - was helping ferry an open cockpit biplane from Colorado to Illinois - and it was a stupid cheap one way fair. I really can't think of a single perk Frontier did not try and up charge a fee for. Boarding, luggage, carry on, seat assignment... I'm sure there were others. Funny enough, the guy I was ferrying with also picked the cheapest seats in the plane, so we ended up next to each other on the flight out. I was fully prepared too wear the kevlar helmet on the flight rather than pay the $60 carry on fee.
What's so awful about United?
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/04/22/a-lack-of-compe...
Ryan Air, EasyJet, and other discount airlines suggest that Europe cares significantly more about price.
I'm not so sure people do it any different elsewhere. I mostly fly in Europe and have definitely never considered anything else than price and suitable flight times. I consider all airlines to provide the same standardized service. Yes I'd pick BA over Ryanair, but wouldn't pay extra for it.
A lot of people I know and myself choose to pay more for a better experience.
It's not always about the race to the bottom in my opinion.
You wouldn't think being obese would impact knees not having enough space, but my ass shrank in multiple directions and I have about four to five inches of free space now between the seat in front of me and my knees. Unless you're much taller than I am, it's likely that losing weight will not just help with your health, but make flying more comfortable.
If you are taller, well, life sucks for us tall people in many ways and we can't expect airlines to build comfortable seats for people two or three standard deviations beyond the normal height.
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
There more certainly is a statistically average height.
> Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions.
This article is comparing 10 dimensions of variability and we're talking about just one here, the one you yourself mentioned, height.
On many leisure routes from Toronto there is very little choice in flights either, so pay more means pay their business class rate which is quite expensive, or well go some very complex non-direct routing.
All of these options are horrible.
This is either a triumph of choice, markets, and abundance or grim, barbaric end to flight as uplifting experience.
It's also safer than it's ever been.
We can each decide, I suppose.
I have arthritis and literally cannot fly anymore because I can't afford tickets with enough leg room to not be in crippling pain for the entire flight. I've had to miss important family events because of this.
Even if you personally could, some people that can currently fly would not be able to afford the higher prices. Why are your consumer preferences more important than theirs?
All to say I’m happy to have transitioned all my 401k years ago!
[1] I worked in the defense industry. Nothing to do with planes: my company was acquired by Boeing and operated relatively independently.
[1] If your employer goes belly up after you retire, you are screwed.
[2] Because it's fixed contribution, as opposed to fixed payout, if you lived longer than you planned, you are screwed.
Generally speaking, the majority of (non DOD) Boeing employees should not be restricted by insider trading; It's often rumored to have broader reach than it does. In order to be an insider, you would need to have direct impact or insight into an unannounced project, corporate, or financial disclosure. It may even take some authority to be able to materially impact delivery deadlines or financials before you're considered an insider.
In 1935 when SS was enacted, life expectancy was 61.7 years. benefits didn't kick in until the average person was dead by 3.3 years.
If this chart is accurate: http://vis.stanford.edu/jheer/d3/pyramid/shift.html -- it looks like in 1930 less than ~5% of the population was older than 65.
If this chart is accurate: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO.ZS?locat... -- it looks like ~15% of the population is currently older than 65.
What was the life expectancy at age 18? At retirement age?
If you made it past childhood, you were pretty likely to die far later than 61 years.
Sidenote: It's laughable when companies say they think options are a better choice for the employee than a 401k match.
* with the current state of medical science.
If you retire during a recession, your planned 20 years of 401K runway may not last you more than 12. Or you might end up living longer than 20 years. Or both.
With a guaranteed payments pension, you will continue receiving benefits as long as you live. This aspect of it wont matter to you if you fall over dead at 68, but will matter greatly if you end up living longer than planned.
Right now, less than 5% of my retirement savings are going towards a pension (Social security). I would be much happier if that number (And the expected returns from it) were closer to 25% - and that's with the expectation that SS payments will unexpectedly drop in the future. Having an investment instrument that will pay me until I die is great for diversifying my portfolio.
Thanks to that, a fixed benefit pension as part of your retirement strategy is much more fiscally responsible than going all in on either a 401K, or a pension.
Maybe there's some way to have an insurance product to handle cases where people live longer than normal. That could be an improvement. But that should be handled by a fourth party.
That sounds like an annoying number of parties. But trust me -- mixing up of money for today with money for 30 years from now is just not a good system (in the private sector or government).
I thought that was the norm? I've only worked at one public company and they did matching in company stock as well - I'd periodically sell it and reinvest so only about 20% of my holdings was in company stock. I wish I'd kept more in their stock since they've done quite well.
At a not-Boeing company, I believe all of our 401k match was company stock, although we could move it to other funds after it came in as company stock.
SP500 closed at 3221 today. In Jan 2009, it was about $890 and that is only a 3.6x return.
Hindsight is 20/20, but you might've been even happier if you kept all your 401k in Boeing.
C.f. Enron employees with company stock...
The new CEO has a degree in accounting. I bet he’ll do great.
My cohort has Civil Engineers, Materials engineers, Physicians, Finance, Accountants.. and also art students and communication students.
All this to say you can't generalize a whole degree.
MBA is a set of methodologies that are hilariously unfit for purpose unless your business is about making widgets in large volume.
It seems that some of these fluffy C-level people are actually good at their jobs, but we haven't found how to reliably distinguish them from the fluffy C-level people that slash and burn everything and juice the stock price with buybacks and financial engineering, then ride it out until a catastrophe happens.
One of my requirements when taking on a job (and I work in smaller companies) is having a sit down with the executive and making sure they know what they're doing - after googling them and making sure they aren't just the child of some famous person. Being in a c-level position and having a famous relative is a bad sign for the company.
Muilenburg was promoted internally.
I bring this up because software is incredibly important for flying these planes, and the 737 MAX disaster was caused in part by bad software (MCAS). They were outsourcing its development to $9/hr contractors, which if they treated software as more of the core competency that it actually is for them, they would never have done.
Having an engineering degree and being an engineer aren’t exactly the same thing. Like, Colbert has an engineering degree to do with “information systems”. Deal’s resume is mostly about supply chains. Hyslop gets to call himself an engineer, so ok, that’s one. Uddanwadiker is an engineer, but IT.
So there is one actual aero engineer in the C suite. I exaggerated (it’s the internet so what fun it is to exaggerate) but not by much. Point is, these people aren’t the dream team I’d pick to design airplanes.
https://www.blackstone.com/the-firm/our-people/person?person...
And, if Wikipedia is to be believed, once worked for GE!
>The decision to launch the MAX was taken by James McNerney, the company’s first boss without a background in aviation, with a résumé that included Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, General Electric and 3M. At GE McNerney was schooled under the hard-nosed bottom-line philosophy of Jack Welch.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-bean-counters-court...
One of my first thoughts was: "Who is paying for that?" - the transport cost and decommissioning of those aircraft, the loss of revenue, the leasing of alternative aircraft to replace them, etc.? Short answer is that I am pretty sure SilkAir will be suing Boeing for all costs, as would most other operators of the 737-MAX. I don't see Boeing's commercial aircraft division surviving something like this.
Given that Jack Welch popularized this cost cutting and financial shenanigans at the expense of engineering, and they are making a former General Electric executive the CEO, I do not have high hopes that Boeing has learned its lesson.
- remove the hack that is MCAS for the purpose of being able to piggyback on the old 737 type certificate;
- start the process of type-certifying 737-MAX as the individual design that it is without MCAS instead of trying to make it behave like the old 737 just to keep things on the cheap side;
- and offer free type certification for existing 737 pilots to obtain their certification for the un-augmented 737-MAX.
Even if they fixed MCAS bugs and added a couple of redundant angle of attack sensors the public won't trust the hack. And even if the public doesn't know to care, airlines will.
Do you know that it would be impossible to fly without MCAS (or something very similar)?
They (B engineers) made MCAS not only for max to look like NG, but for compensate for very serious additional momentum due to engines moving forward
There would be big piece of software to watch for pitch and stall and react accordingly, no matter how you call it
"Pilots who flew Boeing 737 MAX planes registered complaints about the aircraft suddenly pitching downwards last year. ... eerily echoing reports from American pilots who complained of problems with the plane late last year."
This might not be possible. The 737 is uncertifiable today without grandfathering of some rules
Those exceptions might not apply if you're doing it from zero
It might just be a feel thing, but the "constant backpressure when approaching stall" feel is required by the FAA certification for all aircraft.
An alternative solution:
- Split the MAX off from the 737 type certificate.
- Make MCAS super easy to disable while leaving electric trim enabled
- Train Pilots to recognise MCAS failures and turn it off
- Training all 737-MAX pilots to fly with MCAS disabled in simulators.
- Require both MCAS failure and flying with the degraded feel in pilots yearly simulator training.
- MCAS needs to die. I doubt I could have written a subsystem that tries harder to kill you if I tried. Everything about that hack is grossly negligent and possibly criminal.
- Both AoA sensors need to go to both computers.
- All planes get AoA indicators.
- All planes get pitch trim indicators.
- Any kind of MCAS2 should just be an alarm rather than moving control surfaces on its own. If the Max8 diverges too quickly for a human to handle, then Boeing is (and should be) well and truly fucked.
- Regulatory agencies need to have a streamlined 'subtype' certification that recognizes when 99% of the plane is the same and only review the differences. All this MCAS bullshit was to sneak in under a too-strict type certification system in the first place.
On Lufthansa 1829, two of the three AOA sensors on an A321 erroneously agreed, causing a system similar to MCAS to kick in[1]
The sensors can fail due to being frozen, or also be damaged by birds traveling in flocks
[1] Third bullet point under the A321 heading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
It would be ideal to use different technologies for the AoA sensors to help minimize common-mode failures. Integration and crosschecking against other systems (IMU, radar altimiter, DGPS, an open-loop model of the plane based on engine settings and control surface positions, etc) could give the pilots and flight envelope protection systems a better understanding of their situation. Also, the signature of a failed/frozen vane-type AoA sensor is pretty obvious and I'm surprised the software doesn't take that into account.
Good writeup on LH-1829: http://avherald.com/h?article=47d74074
I don't have numbers but I do realize it's very, very expensive. That's exactly why Boeing has tried to avoid a new type certification for decades, that's why they added MCAS to make MAX behave like the old 737, and I do think it's about the damn time they bite the bullet on that one. All this hassle will end up costing Boeing a lot more than a new type-certificate which would allow them much more runway in the future.
https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/pilot-procedure-co...
I'm sure they have neutered the software enough that it is much harder for it to kill you when it comes back, but the fact that MCAS still exists and is operational should put at least half a twist in your stomach when you get on one of these things. Any less is bravado.
> He opted out of his bonuses for 2019 and 2020 a few months ago. Looking at the Boeing 2019 shareholder voting information [2], he had a base pay of $1.7 million in 2018, and his retirement package seems to have totaled about $32.4 million. Tack another $6.6 million on if the board treats this as a layoff instead of a retirement. He may also be eligible for another $807,018 per year in retirement pay. See pp. 46-48 for details.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/eelg8h/breaking_boei... [2] https://s2.q4cdn.com/661678649/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
If I recall Boeing asks the US to tariff Bombardiers aircraft (300%?)[1] that pushed a potential competitor (Bombardier) to work with Airbus (The Airbus 220 is a Bombardier design).
edit: Added: [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/boeings-trade-dispute-canada...
[1]https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/analy...
I worked in defense as a boeing sub. Boeing was the prime on radars and all manner of defense contracts that will keep them afloat (defense industry is another not very competetive one..).
Anyone have a link to this statement?
"The Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders. " is quite brutal indeed, more something I'd expect from commentary.
Management doesn’t get anything “done”. Their job is to faithfully represent the interests of the managers above them. Maintaining good terms with their superiors is their only actual job. Everything else can be going to shit and as long as their superior feels they are faithfully representing their will, then that lower level manager is in good standing. In fact being in an inferno of chaos and still continuing to represent the interests of your superior, over the cries of the ICs, that is truly star-level manager performance.
As a side note, this is why managers don’t have employment protections (right to organize, etc). Their job is not to work, but to represent the company. In an important way they are not producing labor.
For someone like that, it’s actually crucial to leave on good terms. Especially the closer you get to the billionaire class, the circles get smaller and smaller, and it’s your ability to maintain good feelings with other people in that class that determines your ability to get future work.
So, the company can be failing... that’s fine. It’s important to management personnel that they leave with a kind word, because otherwise it meant they stopped doing their one job.
Prior Boeing CEO’s severance package seemed like ~$12M plus over $3M/yr for life. With that level of severance, I don’t need a good recommendation for my next job as there won’t be one...
When its top-down only, something's unhealthy.
For most of us, severance pay is maybe enough to cover basic living expenses at a lower quality of life for a few months. A difference of that magnitude definitely deserves its own jargon.
> A difference of that magnitude...
This neatly highlights the problem with claiming this is somehow objective: what magnitude, and why? And how is your judgement here objective?
It's pretty rare that the press release explicitely says the board ousted the CEO.
Richard Smith said, "Serving as CEO of Equifax has been an honor, and I'm indebted to the 10,000 Equifax employees who have dedicated their lives to making this a better company.
"The cybersecurity incident has affected millions of consumers, and I have been completely dedicated to making this right. At this critical juncture, I believe it is in the best interests of the company to have new leadership to move the company forward," Smith added.
"On behalf of the Board, I express my appreciation to Rick for his 12 years of leadership," Feidler said. "Equifax is a substantially stronger company than it was 12 years ago. At this time, however, the Board and Rick agree that a change of leadership is in order."
https://investor.equifax.com/news-and-events/news/2017/09-26...
- Equifax PR - sentiment score: +25.7
- Boeing PR - sentiment score: -100 (!!):
"The Board of Directors decided ... to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders"
https://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/corporate-govern....
These are their background.
Biotech
Private equity
Medical device
Former chief of staff
Energy
US ambassador
Former airline ceo
Us ambassador
Insurance head
Chief of navy
Former us trade rep
Health insurance head
Advisor to blackstone, GE head
> Over the past decade Boeing has skimped on research, development and capital spending, investing only 7% of its sales on average, compared with around 10% at Airbus.
(From the article in The Economist: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/18/boeings-misplac... )
Wasn't the design sound, except for the lack of hardware sensor redundancy and naively written software?
Why do they need to stop production and so on?
How would you possibly know that? If they missed two serious issues what makes you think they didn't miss more?
Err, make that three serious issues: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/26/politics/boeing-737-max-flaw/...
Edit: 4 serious issues if you count "identifying problems and not fixing them": https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/us/boeing-737-max-disagree-al...
What's so sound about a plane that stalls by default?
There are lots of things on planes where "if you don't do this" then "the plane crashes and burns". Having to adjust horizontal stabilizer trim as you gain speed is a minor addition.
MCAS was problematic because of how it went about doing so, and how pilots weren't properly trained on the change in how the trim needs to be adjusted. The idea of adjusting the trim doesn't seem fundamentally flawed to me.
(Not that I think the design is necessarily sound, see my direct reply to gp for why).
If the end result is that a new type certification is required for the 737 MAX, it may still be a viable product but not the one customers were originally sold on.
The MCAS system itself is flawed in a number of ways, but the core problem (in my opinion) is the attempt to fit large engines under a too-small airplane, in the name of saving regulatory / training costs.
If you would retrain pilots then the 737 MAX can be safely flown without MCAS. Pilots just need to be familiar with the different aerodynamics.
And if they're doing the new-plane certification and training anyway, the MCAS no longer has any point and could perhaps just be turned off?
Edit: Perhaps not— this comment asserts that the handling of the airframe sans MCAS is non-compliant with FAA requirements: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21864584
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
I doubt that doing a new type cert is tantamount to engineering an entirely new airframe. I think the thing that makes it less appealing to airlines now is the lack of faith in the integrity of Boeing engineering in general.
Airlines are in a tough spot as the only competitors to the 737 are made by Airbus. Airbus is, of course, up to its ears in orders and slowly scaling up the ex-Bombardier lines.
They might actually be better off just axing the MAX entirely and continuing to produce the 737 NG.
NG production ended (not without its own issues), it's not coming back. There is nearly zero chance of the supply chain attempting to retool for the NG. If Boeing can get the 737 MAX certified it will sell.
The issue is that a culture of self-interested mismanagement from factory floors up to our highest political offices has led the global economy to depend on the success of this plane which kills people.
Even if somehow by chance they manage to make this plane kill fewer people in the future, there will be no reason to think the actual problem has been addressed.
In France the train is ~50 x more carbon efficient. We will not be able to keep emitting like crazy forever (we actually should have stopped completely already :/ ) , especially when reasonable alternatives exist (the train if going not too far, teleconferences, ...). If we believe in the markets, the price of an air ticket should be maybe 50x higher than what it is today, in order to stop the insane emissions. Alternatively there could be an authority who decide if we have a good reason to take the plane.
People certainly immigrated before the airplane, but in general those were individuals without many options at home. Skilled immigration really took off during the Jet Age.
Most planes have airframes that are aerodynamically stable in and of itself. The 737 Max requires software assistance to be at the same level of stability.
That, to me, is a fundamental flaw. In a multilayer system each layer needs to be safe in and of itself. The purpose of higher layers is to add functionality not to fix flaws in lower layers.
Given the fundamental flaws in design it was obvious there was a cultural problem at Boeing and the CEO needed to go. "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Einstein.
Fighters like relaxed aerodynamic roll stability for roll rate. Now pitch stability issues are troubling. I don't think engineers would purposely relax pitch stability unless they had to.
I guess I'm saying you might want an airplane aerodynamically unstable in roll, but pretty much never in pitch so the fly by wire argument might not be valid here.
Not passenger aircraft. Only military.
They all do this. You have giant engines on the underside of the wing; what else would you expect to happen when you throttle up at low airspeed?
Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...
Any standard-configuration airliner will pitch up when you throttle up at low speed.
The pitch-power coupling has been problematic on the 737 since Boeing went with GE engines. Thomsonfly almost got a classic to stall in Bournemouth ages ago and flyDubai managed to wreck an NG in Russia a couple years ago. It's possible, but unlikely, the 737 MAX is better behaved in this regard.
If there weren't significant aerodynamic problems with the 737 MAX it would be flying by now. This whole type cert / training thing is a red herring. The cost of slow and shuttering production both in financial and diplomatic terms far outstrips the cost of a separate type. Beyond that Boeing has a captive market. The only 737 MAX alternatives out there are made by Airbus, and Airbus has a healthy backlog for both the A220 and A320. While some airlines may be able to take the range / consumption hit with an NG other airlines, like Norwegian, were counting on the increased range of the MAX for certain routes.
You have two massive sources of thrust below the centre of gravity. If you advance the throttle it will create a nose-up pitching moment.
Correct. An A320 won't pitch up as dramatically as a 737, mostly due to FBW magic.
Ok, glad we agree it'll still pitch up.
Sure, the difference is that a 737 Classic, NG, or MAX with all of the nannies working can be flown into a stall with lots of throttle at low speed whereas the Airbus cannot. The pitch-power coupling on a 737 is far more problematic than on its competitors.
Just firing the CEO isn’t enough, they need to root out everyone complicit in this crime.
On the grand scale of things, the bigger issues with Boeing are how they do business and all the problems with their facturies that have surfaced recently. Beyond getting the 737 MAX to flight status, they have to resolve all the issues and the management problems which lead to them.
I think this is entirely true, but it's an interesting commentary on the structure of regulation: it's some small part technical investigation, and a much larger part public relations. I can't even argue they're wrong to operate that way, since their mission is to build public trust in air travel, but it produces absurd results in other areas, e.g. airport security theater.
At this point they could probably still turn the 737 Max into a sellable product, but it will be different from the one promised if it requires a new type certification for pilots due to the different flight characteristics (which Boeing was trying to hide/minimize with MCAS).
They seem to have some serious cultural issues, I wouldn’t trust them to do the job correctly. I’d suspect in the end what your suggesting is probably what’ll happen.
Wasn't it Boeing's supposed MBA-led culture that got it into this mess?
That's the smell of 300 souls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion
Pretty much all safety measures are written in blood.
We have culturally evolved to care more about physical safety today; a good sign that our State worked by being held accountable to people. The stuff that is happening with Boeing is a total regression, and it will be interesting to see how regressions like this can be prevented in the future.
I understand that ensuring the safety of new airplane designs is more complicated than adding odor to natural gas. But this is not a product where society wants producers to "move fast and break things". We expect a minimum level of safety i.e the plane not falling out of the sky.
I very highly recommend Charles Perrow's work, particulary Normal Accidents and The Next Disaster. Perrow himself died just this past November.
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3APerrow%2C+Charles%2C&...
I've been clipping similar stories, under a set of themes which I find related:
- Risk
- Accidents
- Technological Debt
- Techology as Debt
- Manifestation -- this is the notion of manifest vs. latent phenomena, perceptibility, and awareness. See Robert K. Merton among others.
- Denial. Itself one of the stages of grief, which seems more generally a response to a change in worldview and/or an invalidation of previously reliable models.
- Motivated asset inflation. The desire to sustain high levels of valuation of extant assets (real property, IP, technological mechansism, rents), often through activities which decrease net social welfare. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937, is fascinating reading in this regard. Stern doesn't quite fully make the case, but he sets the board for the final mate. NIMBYism, Merchants of Doubt, "fake news", and numerous other phenomena can be tied to this.
In whole, the narrative, if it is valid and holds, undermines many of the sacred cows of technological optimism and property-based market economics.
I'd mentioned it on G+ on the date, in comments (I've a full archive on my own systems, but at least the post survives at the Internet Archive):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115030822/https://plus.goog...
Brought up as well on this post (also not in a captured comment):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115024757/https://plus.goog...
Because consumers will choose the cheaper product. If a politician tries to "value" safety over convenience for a potential problem, voters will vote for the other politician that promises lower taxes and claims there is no safety issue.
Of course, there is a balance that needs to be met, taking all of the risk out of life is also excessive and may impede progress or waste resources.
But a good job for a CEO is building shareholder value, which is now understood as "[wringing] all the money out of the company that they can [for the shareholders]." That's a different job than building an organization that consistently chooses safety over schedule and cost.
... is apparently the argument.
I mean, see also: drug tests for the minimum wage workers, but the CEO? Of course not. Mere employees better not be moonlighting or doing anything else, but the CEO? On two other boards, "advising" a startup on the side, working on another part-time (also as CEO—their "executive assistant" at their 20-person startup actually runs the company)
The issue with the 737MAX is that Boeing was too risk-averse: they should have made a brand new plane, but went with what they thought was the low-risk route with the 737 re-engine. The 787 disastrous development ($36B of deferred production costs I think) was certainly a huge cause of this.
if they just stuck to evaluating technical risk first, and only then the risk of selling the plane - perhaps that route would have led them to developing a new completely plane.
But then again it's so obvious in his case, I mean I and probably many saw it coming — the man just does not operate at the same level, he's stellar you know, like the Jobs and Musks and Waltons of this world).
I have no hope for Boeing to recruit such a great man, I don't think that kind of business actually wants that. Imagine a Dorsey / Musk disruptor, pushing open standards, thinking of direct B2C, whatever... That just wouldn't fly with Boeing's board and mindset (oh pun so very much unintended yet so apt).
It seems to me that if the promise of a golden parachute led to CEOs simply not caring if they do well or not, then there'd be no point in paying them well or trying to hire the best. Heck, there'd be no measure of "best", because all the candidates would just have a string of disasters behind them.
There's an S curve to the utility of money. Anyone who works at the kind of level that could become the CEO of a company like Boeing is already quite rich. So money alone isn't the incentive. But thinking of money as sole incentive is kind of characteristic for those of us who actually have to work for a living.
Why are you assuming that I think money is their only incentive?
I was replying to a comment contemplating that "the incentives may be correct now". The amount of money guaranteed to executives chasing short-termism provides a perverse incentive working against any desire to do their job well. There are multiple incentives, but they are not aligned.
> There's an S curve to the utility of money.
Seems to me that it's more like a bell curve, with the optimal center waaaay to the left of where it is today. Pay too much money and the temptation for CEOs to max out their own gains at the expense of the company's long term health rises.
> David Calhoun will take over as CEO and president
Ah this is the penny pinching accountant who was involved in the decision to try to avoid recertification to avoid training costs, and with a history of pulling similar stunts at GE which also lead to their troubles.
So, the worst possible man for the job was selected.
> Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries.
> Less than a month after the crash of the second 737 Max jet, Boeing called North Charleston employees to an urgent meeting. The company had a problem: Customers were finding random objects in new planes.
Turns out trying to squash the unions by moving to a different state helps show why the unions existed...
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
It’s strange to present them as some sort of solution in this case, where there was widespread engineering and management cultural issues, and would therefore somehow have prevented major air disasters.
Workers rights and forcing higher wages might be great for the working poor and it might actually make economic sense in certain niche industries where protectionism can prevent the companies entire business being eaten by Chinese/global ones without the myriad of rules and restrictions that unions being - rules that go well, well beyond wages. But it is not some grand solution to high level engineering problems caused by stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives and other weakness in quality down the line.
Further, non-union companies are more often the default these days, and tons of these companies are producing high quality American engineering and manufacturing products.
Even in the romanticized history of US labor only a minority of working Americans were ever in unions even during the hayday when it actually made sense to have unions (when America had tons of factories and manufacturing but little global competition and plenty of protectionism to artificially keep them alive).
It’s not like unions are bad or evil, this sort of scope creep and beaurucratic self destruction is common in countless organizations.
If unions were reformed, or we could get some form of union-lite where it really was just about wages and sane working hours/conditions then I’d be much more in support of them.
It’s just the disconnect between what it sounds like on paper (great for the working poor!) and what they actually do in practice with the myriad of negative side effects which heavily contributed to massive inefficiencies and making America (and other countries) less competitive... it’s just difficult to square the two.
That these unions stick around suggests to me that people like them more than they're willing to admit.
You will lose that at your peril. In a way the whole gig-economy is trying to do an end-run around any kind of social safety net, and looked at from that angle it will likely end bad to very bad for the participants, even if from their present day perspective it looks like a great deal.
They’ll work their ass off regardless if some piece of paper says they don’t really have to and if they don’t their peers will look down on them.
I highly recommend this video to highlight the cultural differences between the UK vs Germany (particularly the bit about using Facebook at work), which I think do matter a lot in these conversations:
I also think Americans are worse for challenging authority than the UK culture highlighted in that show clip.
> But it is not some grand solution to high level engineering problems caused by stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives and other weakness in quality down the line.
They're not a panacea to all problems, but they could be the solution or part of a solution to many of them. In this case the "stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives" were the major issue, and how do you deal with that? You increase the power of other, non-management stakeholders. Unions are the way you do that for labor.
Of course, in this case they're not the complete solution. Increased and more effective oversight by the FAA is probably more important, and there are other things as well. However, unions could be helpful by protecting employees who want to make a fuss over management decisions from management reprisal, for instance.
This to me sounds like that old regex joke, now you have two problems.
Could you point out where you see a link between unions and the poor quality control that was observed in the plant?
Unions empower employees, and the quality control issues were getting raised by employees and getting ignored by management. Empowered employees could have more effectively pushed back.
Also, the union employees were more qualified to do this type of work. However management gave instructions not to hire any, so the Boeing hired less qualified non-union people to assemble the planes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
> A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, reveals a culture that often valued production speed over quality. Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees....
> Mr. Barnett, who filed a whistle-blower complaint with regulators, said he had repeatedly urged his bosses to remove the [dangerous metal] shavings [near wiring]. But they refused and moved him to another part of the plant....
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees. “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly. “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account....
> In the interest of meeting deadlines, managers sometimes played down or ignored problems, according to current and former workers. Mr. Barnett...learned in 2016 that a senior manager had pulled a dented hydraulic tube from a scrap bin, he said. He said the tube, part of the central system controlling the plane’s movement, was installed on a Dreamliner. Mr. Barnett said the senior manager had told him, “Don’t worry about it.” He filed a complaint with human resources, company documents show....
> But several former employees said high-level managers pushed internal quality inspectors to stop recording defects. Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager, said her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on the factory floor after she flagged wire bundles rife with metal shavings and defective metal parts that had been installed on planes.“It was intimidation,” she said. “Every time I started finding stuff, I was harassed.”...
> Mr. Barnett was reprimanded in 2014 for documenting errors. In a performance review seen by The Times, a senior manager downgraded him for “using email to express process violations,” instead of engaging “F2F,” or face to face. He took that to mean he shouldn’t put problems in writing. The manager said Mr. Barnett needed to get better at “working in the gray areas and help find a way while maintaining compliance.”
That assertion relies on a lot of hand waving and unrealistic claims. If the problem was that "objects" were being left everywhere in the planes that were being delivered, those objects weren't being left out by management while they were pushing paper in their office. Thus even if it's an operations problem caused by the lack of worker oversight then this means the problem is being created by the worker's lack of care and attention to detail.
Thim means its either a process problem, which unions have absolutely nothing to do with, or it's an incompetence problem which actually is addressed by the exact opposite of what a union does: increase worker scrutiny and quality control. I mean, when was the last time you heard a Union representative state "yes we are to blame for this... Better ramp up oversight and penalties for us screwing up our job."
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.
> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.
The problem was the move. (True, the move was to get away from the union, but it's the move that was the problem, not the presence or absence of the union.)
> Turns out trying to squash the unions by moving to a different state helps show why the unions existed...
You think that the existence of unions are the reason why they didn't have these problems in Seattle? Nothing to do with, say, a more experienced (and perhaps better trained) workforce?
Now, sure, the move was to avoid unions, and the move (to a less experienced workforce) probably has something to do with the problems. But you make it sound like these problems wouldn't happen if North Charleston was unionized. I am extremely skeptical of that position.
The only way I could see unions having anything to do with it is if the foreign objects were left as sabotage by those who wanted to organize unions in North Charleston.
Mullenberg has been strongly criticized in part because he never accepted the buck stopping with him, didn't clean house, and acted as a mouthpiece, while saying nothing.
What people expect from Boeing is a gesture of humanity; an acceptance of culpability. An admission that something went wrong, and a genuine gesture of contrition and change.
The company culture needs a wholesale change, which means a hell of a lot more than the CEO need to be on their way out. Until you can rid Boeing of the taint of financial commoditization as a first order objective, Boeing is still going to suffer from a crisis of faith.
No one , or at least I don't, want to fly on a product of the "Boeing Corporation, stock ticker whatever". I want to fly on an aircraft made by the most committed people in the world to the challenge of designing and manufacturing the absolute best, most pilotable, most safe to be on, and most efficient/performant aerospace hardware in the world, all working under one group (if we take the over consolidation as a necessity in this day and age; I'm not personally sold on it). An engineering marvel built on human aspiration, commitment to good and safe work, and with profitability as an objective, but not an overriding principle. There needs to be a commitment to the nature of the endeavor as a physical struggle against the forces of Nature first and foremost, and an implicit understanding that the economic affairs of men must come secondary to the fulfillment of the requisite solution to the physical problems of aircraft making.
I know it's probably just a fiction in all likelyhood to expect all that. Some naive fantasy that I'm sure anyone whose run a business is shaking their head at. I'm not even sure I can wholeheartedly accept my own prioritization given the endless nature of the daily struggle with the balance sheet that is life, and the expectations placed on a publically traded company.
Alas, we have to accept that Boeing, and I think to a greater extent, any corporation should not be treated as primarily financial abstractions. We don't (or shouldn't be) running businesses just to make money. We should be out to solve physical problems first, with profitability keeping us from going overboard on the expenditure.
Sorry if this seems ranty. I always thought these ideas were a given; but the last few years have been real eye openers in terms of making clear that they are by no means universal, or at least universally applied.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again...
tl;dr engineers vs. accountants
Not convinced Boeing have learnt their lesson.
1. Drive MCAS with only one AOA sensor.
2. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements.
3. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights.
4. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all.
5. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data.
6. Give MCAS a ridiculous amount of control authority, operating cumulatively over repeated applications to exceed what the pilot can manually override.
7. Change how the trim stab switch has been wired since 1966 and not tell pilots.
It’s not the accounts or union stewards that should be facing criminal charges, it’s the engineers. At a minimum, any PEs should be yanked.
Can you point to where in the PE Code of Ethics it says that cutting corners due to "pressure to deliver" is okay? The whole purpose of the PE designation is to avoid circumstances like that.
https://www.enr.com/articles/38400-why-engineers-must-rememb...
“Many false theories persist about the cause of this fatal collapse. The failure was not due to poor workmanship, shoddy materials, a rushed schedule, swaying from dancing, “harmonic vibrations” from the music, poor contractor communication or design changes that did not receive proper review.
As documented in the official investigation report, two professional engineers issued sealed design drawings without performing critical calculations to determine whether sufficient load capacity existed.”
HackerNews, generally, has a hate on for "business people", who are seen as evil, ne'er-do-wells, while the "engineers" are innocent employees, merely following orders.
I think it's because most people here see themselves as the engineer type, and this mindset allows them to feel better about the work they're doing, be it emissions scandals, ad-tech, building the surveillance state apparatus or phony medical devices: "don't blame me, I'm just following orders!"
These are not the typical engineering biased organization if you ask me... but still they put very strong blame on the organizational and company culture changes created by 'accountants' allowing ineffective and in many cases oppressed situations, leading to repeated disasters!
Do not try to misdirect this very serious story into primitive occupation bias please!
The fact that MCAS was required was not a failure to design a safe plane. Rather it was a failure to make the plane behave like the 737.
Sounds like the typical stupid idea suggested by a marketer or accountant that engineers beg and plead not to do.
Frankly, the whole thing reeks of profit at the expense of engineering, safety, and security.
It sounds like we need to find out who that person was and arrest them.
Engineers told to "make it happen" while all safety backdrops they have get undermined by from the top business mandates end up having to make bad decisions.
I'll accept that the engineers involved had the chance too say no. I won't, however, accept the assertion the business/sales people do not share some level of blame for not realizing that they were making impossible demands, and that the resistance from engineering was not just something to be worked around by busting the union, or misleading customers and regulators.
So in short: all of those were caused by the accountants....
“One of the people familiar with MCAS’s evolution said the _system designers_ didn’t see any need to add an additional sensor or redundancy because the hazard assessment had determined that an MCAS failure in normal flight would only qualify in the “major” category for which the single sensor is the norm.
From his Wiki:
He graduated in 1982 from Sioux Center High School in Sioux Center, Iowa.[3] He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington.[1]
I think there's more to do it that just having an engineer or accountant as CEO.
Where did all the airplanes now being leased to fill the holes left by taking the 738Max8 out of the shedules come from?
It is amazing to me that there was that much available capacity?
Are those airplanes in general older and possibly less safe?
I would think right now a lot more airlines and leasing than usual. (I could be wrong).
that would mean that a lot of the airplanes are standing still most of the time. (I realize they would rotate, so a single plane was not being unsued for very long)
Whoever usually leases them are they out of luck now?
1. Spare capacity was used. This makes scheduling tighter and maintenance costs go up.
2. New routes and extra flights that were going to be added to the schedule, weren't.
3. Planes that likely would have gotten parked rather than go through another C/D check instead got the overhaul and are still flying.
4. Carriers that were trying to consolidate types, still fly whatever they were trying to get rid of (or have brought them back into service).
5. Carriers leased planes and probably brought some parked planes back online.
Airlines were lucky in that there weren't that many Max8's in service yet (which also speaks to how unsafe they were to rack up 2 crashes so early), so the grounding didn't eliminate that much capacity as delay planned growth and retirement of airframes.
There is also more spare capacity than you might expect because the fleets are sized for peak operations - thanksgiving, christmas, etc. The rest of the year, the extra capacity allows them to get by with fewer active maintenance people (peak demand vs average demand).
Similarly, there are probably more parked planes than you expect. Again, they are usually up against a C/D check and that check will only get done if it looks like that airframe can earn back the couple $million that the overhaul would cost. The engines usually stay in general circulation and again, smooth out the peak/average maintenance demand.
As I understand, Boeing wanted to use larger engines because larger, hotter engines burn less fuel. But increasing the diameter of the engine ordinarily means raising the wing in order to accommodate it but that would make the plane incompatible with existing infrastructure (such as jet bridges) at airports. For that reason Boeing positioned the engine forward on the wing instead of raising the wing.
Don't newer Airbus planes also have larger engines? How did they maintain compatibility with existing airport infrastructure while accommodating a larger engine?
Airbus A320 has a much higher ground clearance.
One reason was probably that it is technically difficult to fit larger gear as they would not fit in the 737 wheel wells. Or something related to increased height...
But in fact it seems the nose gear was actually lengthened somewhat for MAX, but I guess that was not enough. The MAX 10 will also have longer main gear - it will be telescoping so it fits into existing wheel wells. (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX)
Being a public company CEO is a near-impossible job with so much out of your control, so I wouldn't say "down in flames". His legacy is tarnished, but the public has a short-term memory about these things.
Muilenberg became CEO 18 years after the merger. I wouldn't expect him to exemplify Boeing's old culture. It was also only 6 months before the first 737 MAX flight.
His lineage is in the Boeing culture, not the McDonnell Douglas culture.
> If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
There's real accountability for you. Corporate accountability these days is a sick joke.
Everybody here in Hacker News who has had some relation with a company board knows that the real decisions are done at the board level. The board is the one that ultimately decides the strategy to follow, whether to be pure profit seeking, quality seeking, etc.
The CEO can bring his humanity-responsible strategy to the quarterly meetings, but if the board does not agree, he is SOL. If this happens a lot with "cofounder CEOs" who have big chunks of company ownership, of course it also happens with a hired CEO, who has extremely little leverage with the board.
What is that?
Is that something like the unicorn?
The problems with Boeing are systemic problems with the way corporations work and the economy is structured.
Don't get me wrong: I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP. But until it is done, there is a need for a current 737. And certainly, you don't want them to cut corners when developing the 737 successor...
I don't think that's quite true. There's been a large swathe of other problems [0] involved in the production.
Broken or damaged parts, engine shutdowns and faulty hydraulics are just some of the concerns that Boeing seemed to have glossed over.
There has to be a reason that Boeing was willing to go so far as halt production [1] to reassess the plane, and that won't be just one flaw.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-w...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-weighs-cutting-or-haltin...
They don't have any internal controls to halt production for safety reasons, that much should be evident by now.
The 737 NG remains in production.
At this point, that plane has no goodwill whatsoever left to it. The onus is on it proving that it's safe, not on its critics proving it's unsafe, because the only sensible assumption is that it's not safe and that Boeing does not and ill not self-regulate (big duh).
> I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP
They announced that back in 2014, and probably several times beforehand.
Issue is demand has seen Boeing push the 737 into 757 territory (years after the 757 got cancelled), it's not that they haven't created a 737 successor it's that their customers don't want a 737 successor, they want 737s so they can just buy the frames and put existing crew on the new plane without retraining.
That's what the 737 MAX is about, and why it's broken. It's the 4th generation of 737 (original, Classic, Next Generation) and the frame can't take it anymore, but 737s is what e.g. Southwest want, because that's literally the only thing they fly.
Boeing should have bitten the bullet on new designs long ago. They failed in this.
Some actions have consequences which don't materialise for years, or decades, or centuries.
Which is a principle weakness of the notion of market economics. The booked profits of the past 20+ years of the firm deserve restating.
Keep in mind, there is a gold rush for new airlines right now. Africa/India/Asia are developing and are requiring thousands of planes to fill the demand (it's no coincidence Africa and Asia is where these new planes ended up crashing). If Airbus gobbled them up, they'd likely be airbus customers forever, as mixing plane types is more expensive for airlines.
I suppose, but if more people die because of the now well-known management failures at Boeing continue, their deaths will be even more unnecessary.
I'm betting we'll see a huge write down when the new CEO takes over, that way they can push as much blame as possible on the old regime and move forward with a clean-ish slate.
If the 787 recovers eventually, it's a windfall and the new CEO looks like a hero for implementing revolutionary change.
And well, if they'd pick some lower manager the critique would be the same. And if they pick an outsider the critique would be about them not understanding the business ... critique is always the easy part.
I mean, that's just one possible situation where someone coming from the board won't necessarily be more of the same, but I don't know why we should assume the board acts of one mind. That seems really unlikely to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os
https://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/boeing787/2014/09/i...
Reminds me of the HBO show Succession. I'm sure they had very similar discussions.
You don't get to preside over 346 deaths and get to keep your job. Sorry...
Simple as that.
Any details of the golden parachute that came with it?
If they wanted to restore my confidence, they’d have picked an engineer, not an accountant.
Whatever made this one to deviate from the engineering focus the apparent story is still the suffering of engineering focus against business management focus.
For restoring confidence in engineering the act is not to fire engineers but to use good ones....
If the last one was an engineer, why would another engineer restore your confidence any more?
So yes, if they were going to replace the CEO for the optics, “someone like Dennis Muilenburg” would have been the best-case scenario for me, rather than someone with non-engineering background/specialty.
For a sports analogy, CEO shuffling is kinda like coach/GM shuffling of pro sports teams - they’re there to take the blame when things go wrong, but picking a CEO without a related background is like picking a new coach from a different sport.
But why?
Is their problem an engineering one?
Or a culture, leadership and values ones?
Everyone's saying that they put profit before safety. That's a financial decision that they need to address not an engineering one!
You're just restating the same thing without any actual arguments. Why do you need to be an engineer to understand safety? I don't know what magic training or experience do you think engineers get that nobody else does? And as I've already said, it looks to me that Boeing's chronic problems are leadership not technical. Get a leader in.
How do you think for example the President of the United States effectively line manages people as diverse as defence and national parks without simultaneously being a soldier and a geographer? How do you think he judges qualification and competence of these people in globally significant safety jobs and how does he manage the buck stopping with him?
He's probably talking more about mindset than educational and professional background.
You can have a leader with the mindset of an ornery engineering-first engineer. You can also have a leader who's an ex-engineer with the mindset of a business executive. There's a big difference between the two.
I personally do not know which of those categories Dennis Muilenburg fell into, though.
His predecessor, James McNerney, was a cost-cutting business leader who had no background in aviation. And it was his decision to do this program instead of creating an upgraded model.[1]
Which kind of makes this choice even more bizarre.
[1] - https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-bean-counters-court...
> On December 17th, less than two months after the Lion Air crash, Boeing’s board of directors approved a twenty-per-cent increase in the company dividend and a twenty-billion-dollar stock-repurchase program, allowing Muilenburg, who had replaced McNerney as C.E.O. in 2015, to carry out even larger buybacks than in previous years. The board also awarded Muilenburg a thirteen-million-dollar bonus.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again...
Then I try to remain calm: what responsibilities they really take?! The consequences hit those remain, they should be compensated instead. Plus the salary given in vain taken back. Then we still listen about the damages caused!
They take it because they can. If they cared they wouldn't feel right taking so big portion of the profit generated by the teamwork of so many.
The idea that the next CEO will be incentivized to do anything other than pump and dump is laughable.
The executives lie and BS through all of it, and the soldiers on the ground kill themselves to get things done.
Compliance controls are a sham. Auditing is garbage. Corporate America is made up of executives who unirononically fail to execute on anything.
The few places that do execute are: startups (nobody trusts you or your product, you have to go the extra mile) and a few corporations with strong culture.
It’s impossible for eg regulations to guarantee that corporations will follow the intent and not just check boxes. So most don’t and indeed just check boxes.
The solution is pretty easy: bring back anti trust laws. Break up the old boys’ clubs; monopolies are driving the country to the ground.
1) on the individual level, maybe measuring other's (or one's own) worth by how much money you have or how much political power you have is the flaw.
2) on a collective level, if we do think that reward in the financial sense should go to the good people, we should think about what we consume; we have ultimate agency over all of that.
As for politicians, I'm less optimistic; the popularity contest in high school never selected for good people and I see no evidence it's any better among adults.
You can assume that stock price will take the front seat now, if it already had not. The bean counters have yet to internalise the fact that it is am engineering culture failure, stemming from the toxic MacDac merger. This is a further signal that things are going downhill for Boeing.
To be fair, Dennis Muilenburg was at least an engineer, lead the X-32 program (the funny looking bug plane that was runner-up for the JSF). An engineer, possibly at am advanced Peter principle level, but an engineer.
He was not ousted for being unable to undo the MBA damage. He was let go for being unable to jedi mind fuck the plane back into the air. This, as far as his employers are concerned, is the measure of his failing.
"Boeing’s 737 Max Was an Epic Error. So Why’s the Company’s Stock Still Going Up?" http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/after-boeings-737-max...
Why isn't this taught in public school?
I would not consider that so Geographically constrained. to me the most obvious textbook example [1] would be Nokia. I mean, there was no way the top management could have failed in the golden era of the dumb phones given the engineering talent (both for the electronics and the operations) within th ecompany. The single time when top management should/could have shown their value was the time when smartphones came. And they practically managed to destroy the company. I wonder if they themselves understand how literally clueless they were/are?
[1] Admittably with zero actual inside information
It's a really interesting concept to me, because it's been the dominant business culture my whole life in the US, so it's sort of like a fish discovering water. But once I started looking at business philosophy and history, I realized that there are a lot of other ways to do things. Toyota's example, of course: the managerialism of the big 3 let Toyota go from Japan's post-war decimation to the biggest carmaker on the planet.
I still don't feel like I have a great grip on the alternatives, and especially how to practice those alternatives when managerialism is the norm. But I definitely aim to find out. At least once, I want work at a place that really has its shit together. That gets things done well on purpose.
Basically, the whole of capitalism depends on the idea that individual incentives (for employees) can be aligned with organizational goals. Often, however, employees realize they can make more money by putting their efforts into getting a bigger slice of the pie instead of working to make the pie bigger. This is always true to some degree, and especially true for big, rich companies with low growth rates.
Outside of the economic theory, I suspect that people who make to the executive level are most likely to have engaged in this kind of behavior, since getting promoted is one of the best ways to get a bigger slice.
And here I was thinking it relied on the capital-owners having the state use its centralized coercive power (like the police and the military) to enforce the capital-owners' property rights. Silly me.
I'm old enough now that I just skip directly to wishing for powerball numbers.