A classic case of "putting all your eggs in one basket."
The Boing might actually be too big to fail but their failure, IMHO, looks like what we have today: An inability to make high quality cutting edge aircraft. For the USA, the disaster would be to be reliant on EU/Russa/Brazil/Canada/China for conducting its transportation operations in this massive country.
What happens if people start freaking out when their planes are not Airbus? Would increase in government contracts keeping the stocks and profits the same mitigate the problems?
So maybe Boing has failed already, its just that its still institutionally solvent for one reason or another.
Things get lost all the time. People move on, retire, machines require maintenance and remanufacturing, IP might describe an end state but not how to get there. Some say Boeing itself is an example of this after the MD merger.
Given that they are largely not responsible in delivering the value that will ensure continued success of the company, signal that risking the lives of people is not a good business strategy, and may act as a wake up call for others in leadership positions that they should be leading towards what is best for customers and the business and not what is going to give them the biggest short term payday.
Call me a cynic - but isn't an organization like Boeing designed to diffuse responsibility, so as to shield the guilty behind corporatespeak ? Sure you can subpoena millions of pages of documents and countless emails, but then the sheer size of the legal effort threatens to defeat the entire idea of assigning responsibility.
Boeing has had cultural issues for a while now, part of their rocketry division was forced to be spun out (by the government) with Lockmart's into ULA because Boeing was caught conducting espionage on Lockmart, which would've potentially disqualified them from bidding on launches. They had also had information leaked to them about bidding on the Artemis lunar lander contracts.
Plus other incidents like trying to get people at ULA proposing things like orbital refueling systems fired because if they allowed such technology to emerge, Boeing couldn't get blank checks from the government for building near-useless rockets.
That last one, in my opinion, making it clear that they're exploiting the perception that they're too big to fail.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/forme...
He’s probably hireable so long as there’s no culture of safety or engineering to be destroyed.
I mean, it's far less paradoxical than it sounded at first.
The E-4 and VC-25 aren’t really a fair one; you don’t need the divisions to be the same company for their integration (though I suppose it would make it vastly cheaper). We also don’t fly many at all (meaning cost per unit is relatively inconsequential).
I also somehow always forget the tankers. Thanks for that.
I’ll still maintain the links aren’t necessary. I honestly think a dedicated military platform for all of those would have been a smarter investment and that the current way of modifying airliners is suboptimal.
It's just a ton of financial risk. I guess the new supersonic startups like Boom think they bring enough novelty to the market to justify that risk.
I do wonder why the heavy lift platforms won’t work (C-17, etc.).
It’s that keeping capacity for one of the leading forms of global travel is a strategic interest. Don’t let your conspiracies get in the way of the obvious.
Also I feel like the rail circle jerk is so unearned. Last time I was in London it cost 100 pounds to fly to paris from London downtown airport and 600 to take the Chunnel. How “superior”.
Is tying a particular activity to "national interest" itself a form of paranoia? What about passenger aircraft is a strategic interest? For example, the US seems to do ok with little large-scale shipbuilding outside military concerns. People seem to take cruises from the US in ever-larger cruise ships without a domestic capacity for building them.
Additionally, no disagreement on my part regarding the high regard people have for hypothetical rail. On the other hand, I'm open to the idea that high capacity terrestrial transportation similar to rail would have cause to improve if airplanes weren't in an optimization sweet spot.
Note the senate investigation report that describes an “organizational disaster” that caused the failure. Don't assume competence because of size and persistence.
The US Military is absurdly competent at what its mission is, war fighting and logistics. What it is not competent at is things that are not yet internalized as part of that mission. Unfortunately non visible logistics (software) hasn’t made that cultural shift yet, and once it does will take a long time to breed the institutional competence that the military leans on, primarily due to the compensation gulf.
'Wasting' 5 billion out of an 842 billion dollar budget, for an organization that doesn't even have to make money, is nothing. Plenty of startups squander even more money, and never accomplish any of the entire point of a for-profit company, making money.
There isn’t a meaningful difference in competence or bureaucracy between a too-big-to-fail company the size of Boeing and a large state institution. The difference would be in who can set the org-wide incentives and goals. Clearly shareholders aren't interested in safety being one of the goals.
Grow to dominate so much of the market and of stock and pension portfolios at all costs, that you'll have to be bailed out no matter your incompetence.
So as long as this behavior only gets rewarded and never punished, why would you expect different results?
That's the harm that monopolies do to society and yet somehow they have been even incentivized in recent times.