Boeing is such an embarrassment to our country

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MountainDude

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I wonder if there is a single root cause (the management?) of their incompetence over the last few years?
 
Lawson_Stone said:
They went from being an engineering centered company that hired some administrators to being a bean-counter company that hired a few engineers.
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Back when I was at Boeing, the story went that to save money on the KC-46, they packed the program with less-experienced engineers (lower salaries) and expected the managers to take up the slack.

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
Back when I was at Boeing, the story went that to save money on the KC-46, they packed the program with less-experienced engineers (lower salaries) and expected the managers to take up the slack.
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Textron did the same thing with us. They figured they could hire three guys for the price they were paying me, without bothering to figure out just what I was doing for the company. The managers couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. I was back a year later as a consultant at a extremely high rate, but my heart wasn't in the ruined company and I didn't stick around long.

I knew we were in trouble from day one. My philosophy as the engineering manager was to cherry pick guys right out of college and bring them along. The first meeting they had a manager come down from Providence and tell us that they set the salaries by surveying the industry and using the median value. I turned to the guy sitting next to me and said "Mediocrity starts here" (Textron's silly ass slogan at the time was Excellence starts here). I never kept "average" guys around. If you didn't excel in short order, I didn't have time to waste with you.
 
MountainDude said:
I wonder if there is a single root cause (the management?) of their incompetence over the last few years?
Click to expand...


"Greed" is a good one-word answer.

If you want it in cartoon form:

1774134273592.png​

If you want it in two words: Jack Welch.

If you want that elaborated a bit:

When Boeing acquired McDonnel Douglas, part of the deal placed MD executives into key positions at Boeing. Stonecipher was one, of course, but not the only one. Many of these managers, including Stonecipher, were disciples or even proteges of Jack Welch, and they brought to MD and to Boeing that Welch style of cutthroat management that values stock performance over product quality. Slash & burn cost-cutting, extreme levels of outsourcing, and product development shortcuts became common.

One impartial mediator described the new executives from MD as "hunter-killer assassins" and the legacy Boeing executives as "boy scouts."

That type of management might work (for a while) when a company is producing lightbulbs or toaster ovens. It is wholly inappropriate for producing airplanes. If you want to understand what happened, this Stonecipher quote is quite telling:
This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”​
Stonecipher is a fool, both in business management, having wrecked two aerospace businesses, and in his personal life, having wrecked a 50-year marriage.

And it's not just the managers. It's also the organizational structure they put in place. Engineers report to program managers who have OSP responsibility, rather than reporting in an independant structure. This removes the engineers' professional autonomy and creates a culture where engineers are viewed as labor rather than as professionals.

By contrast, at Lockheed engineering has its own reporting chain, through chief engineers and VPs up to the CTO. Engineering and program management only converge at the CEO, and if engingeering and PM haven't worked out a solution by that level, heaven help everyone down below. At LockMart, I have personally held up deliveries, flight tests, and other items until the engineering was satisfactory, and PMs had no authority to override us.

If you want even more elaboration, read https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Tragedy-Fall-Boeing-ebook/dp/B08P98854S/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20CHW867P09RV&keywords=book+flying+blind&qid=1672435463&sprefix=book+flying+blind,aps,434&sr=8-1 . It's not a technical book; don't expect accurate descriptions of engineering issues. But it does dig deeply into the company's culture and how it got that way.
 
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Of all the T1’s I worked with, Boeing was by far the worst. Arrogant, adversarial, and inflexible.
 
Bill said:
Of all the T1’s I worked with, Boeing was by far the worst. Arrogant, adversarial, and inflexible.
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Was fortunate in my last ~25 years there to work in a "skunk works" organization in Boeing. Highly classified, Government wouldn't clear more than a few upper level managers. Able to set up our own procedures and standards, for the most part. Had our own IT department that had a credit card and went to the retail stores to buy computers for us. Ticked off a lot of execs that felt that *they* should be aware of what we're doing.

We were hiding within a closed area for another, broader classified program. At one point (?1995) they loosened the criteria for that program (we said "goodbye" to it, may be enough of a hint for some folks). However, ours stayed restricted. You'd come up to the entry door and here'd be one of those execs running his badge over and over again through the reader, expecting that he now come in and see what we're doing. All they got was the red light.

Best thing about it was the government. Yes, the government. We set up an office for them on the main engineering floor, and they were welcome to come and contribute to any and all technical and management discussions (excluding those related to finance). High level of trust; they KNEW we couldn't hide much from them, and for the most part, we didn't try. Very good relationship. Minimized wasting time writing reports, they were THERE all the time. They'd even sat in as Test Conductors in some of our long duration tests.

In contrast I was loaned out at one point to a conventional program. At one point, I suggested bringing government engineers in to work directly with us, like we did. You'd have thought I had suggested we all go out and piddle on Bill Boeing's grave.

Massive waste in such adversarial relationships. Not all the contractor's fault of course, but still.

About four years before I retired, I found out there was a move afoot to transfer me to the KC-46 program. Someone figured out that not only was I familiar with FAA certification procedures (though not those with airliners), I could actually *write*.

And yes, me and my fellow retirees are saddened by how the company has fallen.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Had Boeing's shift in culture to a pure profit mechanism worked, the value of the company, and the investors value proposition could be argued 'it was worth changing'. However, after their profit drive change, the value to all shareholders decreased significantly. So, it was a double edged failure. Not only did they wreck the engineering reputation, they also stunk up their investors faith and fortune. Unforgivable.

We can see that the new agents of change at Boeing never read, or didn't understand the Deming treatise and his simple 'stereo instructions' on quality and production methods. AKA: The Japan model, that served their culture so amazingly well.
 
flyingron said:
Well, Boeing is hoping their acquisition of Spirit will open doors for them.
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So Boeing is basically hoping to open doors with assets that they once owned but sold to the investors that started Spirit Aero
 
Wait, McBoeing is trying to reacquire their once-already-shed fuselage division? You can't make this stuff up. And retail suckers hold stock in these money laundering operations with a straight face lulz. The Onion is gonna go out of business thanks to what passes for reality since the 2020s started.
 
wellknow said:
not for nothing but how did boeing get blamed for 200 hour indonesian pilots not knowing how to deal with runaway trim
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Rhetorical tone to that "question" aside, I'll play: because they purposely occluded MCAS from the technical manuals. You may not think that's relevant or fair, but that the reason good bad or indifferent. Don't wanna catch strays in life? Keep your books in order. It's what we tell the working poor (personal responsibility dogwhistles), should be good enough for the aerospace hegemons.
 
Half Fast said:
If you want it in two words: Jack Welch.
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But, but, but.... Stock prices! P/E ratio! This quarter.

I worked for a yuge company when a Jack Welch disciple took over. Price to earnings ratio went through the roof. Amazing what happens when you divide by zero.

But back to the topic, the company was brought back by a former Boeing exec... (an engineer)
 
The true value of a company is their capacity to earn money. If you chase the short term stock price, you're going to squander that value for some short term blip.
Our pre-Textron CEO knew exactly how much money he needed to feed engineering to keep the development process going so we could develop more product to sell. That all got gutted after they forced him out.
 
hindsight2020 said:
I'll play: because they purposely occluded MCAS from the technical manuals. You may not think that's relevant or fair, but that the reason good bad or indifferent.
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Then how do you explain why 2 pilots involved with the Lion 737 were able work through the MCAS failure?
 
Half Fast said:
"Greed" is a good one-word answer.

If you want it in cartoon form:


If you want it in two words: Jack Welch.

If you want that elaborated a bit:

When Boeing acquired McDonnel Douglas, part of the deal placed MD executives into key positions at Boeing. Stonecipher was one, of course, but not the only one. Many of these managers, including Stonecipher, were disciples or even proteges of Jack Welch, and they brought to MD and to Boeing that Welch style of cutthroat management that values stock performance over product quality. Slash & burn cost-cutting, extreme levels of outsourcing, and product development shortcuts became common.

One impartial mediator described the new executives from MD as "hunter-killer assassins" and the legacy Boeing executives as "boy scouts."

That type of management might work (for a while) when a company is producing lightbulbs or toaster ovens. It is wholly inappropriate for producing airplanes. If you want to understand what happened, this Stonecipher quote is quite telling:
This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”​
Stonecipher is a fool, both in business management, having wrecked two aerospace businesses, and in his personal life, having wrecked a 50-year marriage.

And it's not just the managers. It's also the organizational structure they put in place. Engineers report to program managers who have OSP responsibility, rather than reporting in an independant structure. This removes the engineers' professional autonomy and creates a culture where engineers are viewed as labor rather than as professionals.

By contrast, at Lockheed engineering has its own reporting chain, through chief engineers and VPs up to the CTO. Engineering and program management only converge at the CEO, and if engingeering and PM haven't worked out a solution by that level, heaven help everyone down below. At LockMart, I have personally held up deliveries, flight tests, and other items until the engineering was satisfactory, and PMs had no authority to override us.

If you want even more elaboration, read https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Tragedy-Fall-Boeing-ebook/dp/B08P98854S/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20CHW867P09RV&keywords=book+flying+blind&qid=1672435463&sprefix=book+flying+blind,aps,434&sr=8-1 . It's not a technical book; don't expect accurate descriptions of engineering issues. But it does dig deeply into the company's culture and how it got that way.
Click to expand...
Couldn’t have said better myself. We saw the same thing within the Air Force Material Commands Aeronautical Systems Center, the procurement arm for the AF. It started in late 1990’s where Engineering lost their independence, reporting to PM’s. Guess where the technical excellence of the newly developed systems and quality went?
 
Bell206 said:
Then how do you explain why 2 pilots involved with the Lion 737 were able work through the MCAS failure?
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A few months ago, I was driving on a divided highway. There was a car gradually passing me on the left. A deer ran out in front of us. The car next to me hit the deer. Luck, skill, or both saved my grill and some, but not all, plane loads of people sharing their fate with an MCAS fault.

Surviving a systems fault should not depend on the identity of the pilot or his astrological sign. It should depend on a fault-tolerant systems design, complete and honest documentation, and good training based on the same.
 
Half Fast said:
If you want it in two words: Jack Welch.
Click to expand...
Ah, yes, Jack Welch, high priest of the cult of Six Sigma. Relentless attention to standardization and near-zero defects.

When I moved to the last house I had before retirement, it had a GE microwave over the range. Worked fine. Made during the Welch era. When it did fail, I realized it had a good long life, so I bought a GE microwave to replace it. Made during the Welch era. Looked almost identical to the old one in fact. But when I tried to install it, never an easy task for an over-range model with just a whisper of clearance between the cabinets, I learned that the new mounting plate was different. Not in a meaningful way, just enough that I had to replace the old plate. And the electrical cord was in a slightly different location, so the hole that had been drilled for the cord to reach the outlet in the above-microwave cabinet now wouldn't work...and a new hole had to be drilled an inch over.

10 years later, that microwave failed, but it had given us good service, so I bought yet another. Looked almost identical to the previous two. But--you guessed it--it required yet another just-barely-different mounting plate, just different enough that the old one wouldn't work, and the cord had again been moved another inch or two, requiring a third hole be drilled in the cabinet above so that I could plug it in.

Relentless attention to standardization my ass.
 
GaryM said:
Ah, yes, Jack Welch, high priest of the cult of Six Sigma. Relentless attention to standardization and near-zero defects.
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1774229695764.png
Yeah, Textron was always big on six sigma, but they never told me which side of the median I was supposed to be six sigmas from.

Textron is big on doing all kinds of meta-things rather than actually doing the things they claim was a goal.

Another big stupidity was plastering signs all over our facility that said "Rethink Diversity" (this was 15 years ago before DEI was a dirty word). It took me a year to figure out what they were trying to accomplish. I'm going, well, I was for it before, but if you want me to change...
 
Half Fast said:
"Greed" is a good one-word answer.

If you want it in cartoon form:


If you want it in two words: Jack Welch.

If you want that elaborated a bit:

When Boeing acquired McDonnel Douglas, part of the deal placed MD executives into key positions at Boeing. Stonecipher was one, of course, but not the only one. Many of these managers, including Stonecipher, were disciples or even proteges of Jack Welch, and they brought to MD and to Boeing that Welch style of cutthroat management that values stock performance over product quality. Slash & burn cost-cutting, extreme levels of outsourcing, and product development shortcuts became common.

One impartial mediator described the new executives from MD as "hunter-killer assassins" and the legacy Boeing executives as "boy scouts."

That type of management might work (for a while) when a company is producing lightbulbs or toaster ovens. It is wholly inappropriate for producing airplanes. If you want to understand what happened, this Stonecipher quote is quite telling:
This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”​
Stonecipher is a fool, both in business management, having wrecked two aerospace businesses, and in his personal life, having wrecked a 50-year marriage.

And it's not just the managers. It's also the organizational structure they put in place. Engineers report to program managers who have OSP responsibility, rather than reporting in an independant structure. This removes the engineers' professional autonomy and creates a culture where engineers are viewed as labor rather than as professionals.

By contrast, at Lockheed engineering has its own reporting chain, through chief engineers and VPs up to the CTO. Engineering and program management only converge at the CEO, and if engingeering and PM haven't worked out a solution by that level, heaven help everyone down below. At LockMart, I have personally held up deliveries, flight tests, and other items until the engineering was satisfactory, and PMs had no authority to override us.

If you want even more elaboration, read https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Tragedy-Fall-Boeing-ebook/dp/B08P98854S/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20CHW867P09RV&keywords=book+flying+blind&qid=1672435463&sprefix=book+flying+blind,aps,434&sr=8-1 . It's not a technical book; don't expect accurate descriptions of engineering issues. But it does dig deeply into the company's culture and how it got that way.
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I was just thinking about the parallels of Boeing and GE. Have we stopped lauding neutron jack yet? Or are shows like 30 rock still needing kneepads
 
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iamtheari said:
Surviving a systems fault should not depend on the identity of the pilot or his astrological sign.
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Unfortunately in some cases it does and just as unfortunate there are a number of examples that shows that to include this one. Back to the question, why do you think a pilot in the jump seat was able to determined the necessary corrective action in previous Lion flight the crew flying could not? And why could the PIC for the next flight maintain control through 24 MCAS activations but the SIC crashed after 4?

As to fault tolerance, it merely provides a path to keep the aircraft in the air so the pilot has a chance to make a surviveable landing.

But I dont give Boeing a pass either. However, I agree with certain public assessments thats puts the root cause squarely on the FAAs and the airlines shoulders.
 
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Bell206 said:
Really? What airline do you fly for? Need to put that one on my personal DNF list.
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I have a friend that was at a carrier that only flies 737 during the whole max issue. I asked him what kind of training he got for the max vs the NG 737's. He said it was a 5 min iPad slide show. He had never heard of MCAS before the crashes.
 
Bell206 said:
Really? What airline do you fly for? Need to put that one on my personal DNF list.
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Which airlines are you aware of having trained flight crew on the existence of MCAS, much less abnormal procedures related to it, before the second fatal crash? I haven’t heard of one yet.

If there is one, I’d expect to hear crowing about how they’re better than every other 737 operator in the world, and then we can put that one on the Do Fly list. Your DNF list concept requires you to know about bad engineering decisions that even the airlines on the list have no way to know about.
 
Bell206 said:
Unfortunately in some cases it does and just as unfortunate there are a number of examples that shows that to include this one. Back to the question, why do you think a pilot in the jump seat was able to determined the necessary corrective action in previous Lion flight the crew flying could not? And why could the PIC for the next flight maintain control through 24 MCAS activations but the SIC crashed after 4?

As to fault tolerance, it merely provides a path to keep the aircraft in the air so the pilot has a chance to make a surviveable landing.

But I dont give Boeing a pass either. However, I agree with certain public assessments thats puts the root cause squarely on the FAAs and the airlines shoulders.
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What I found interesting is that the sensor that was required for the proper functionality of the MCAS was only dual redundant. For flight critical systems to get to the 10(-9) probability that airliners like to have, it almost always requires a triplex system. Relying on only a dual air data system for providing information to MCAS is a head scratcher. Of course, the redundancy and fault detection system of a triplex system AND the FMET testing of said system is costly. Hmmmm??
 
Rcmutz said:
What I found interesting is that the sensor that was required for the proper functionality of the MCAS was only dual redundant. For flight critical systems to get to the 10(-9) probability that airliners like to have, it almost always requires a triplex system. Relying on only a dual air data system for providing information to MCAS is a head scratcher. Of course, the redundancy and fault detection system of a triplex system AND the FMET testing of said system is costly. Hmmmm??
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I had read that the MCAS AOA input being redundant was a customer option. Was the choice a customer made between single vs. dual input or between dual vs. triple?
 
iamtheari said:
Was the choice a customer made between single vs. dual input or between dual vs. triple?
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I recall dual AoA baseline, but MCAS programmed to only use one sensor.
Also, AoA disagree caution would only be displayed if customer selected AoA display option during aircraft completion.

One thing that never gets brought up is all the other warnings triggered by the failed AoA sensor: the air data computers (instead of being programmed to reject an obviously abnormal value) used AoA to adjust IAS for pitot probe angle relative to airflow. As such, with AoA being very high (90°?), calculated speed became abnormally low, and all the bells and whistles related to such a low airspeed turned on. Try sorting out your real problem when this much additional noise gets thrown at you.
 
iamtheari said:
Your DNF list concept requires you to know about bad engineering decisions that even the airlines on the list have no way to know about.
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Not quite. My DNF comment was directed at someone’s answer to my question above that it was sheer luck those 2 pilots were able to work through those unknown MCAS movements.

Don’t know about you, but when someone flying for a living believes luck is the only reason a pilot successfully handles an emergency, I would prefer not to fly with them.

So do you have an answer for those questions?
 
Bell206 said:
Not quite. My DNF comment was directed at someone’s answer to my question above that it was sheer luck those 2 pilots were able to work through those unknown MCAS movements.

Don’t know about you, but when someone flying for a living believes luck is the only reason a pilot successfully handles an emergency, I would prefer not to fly with them.

So do you have an answer for those questions?
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Trusting to luck is never a good plan, but sometimes luck is the only difference. Sometimes you do everything right and lose.

That was the premise behind Gann's Fate is the Hunter title.
 
Half Fast said:
When Boeing acquired McDonnel Douglas, part of the deal placed MD executives into key positions at Boeing. Stonecipher was one, of course, but not the only one. Many of these managers, including Stonecipher, were disciples or even proteges of Jack Welch, and they brought to MD and to Boeing that Welch style of cutthroat management that values stock performance over product quality. Slash & burn cost-cutting, extreme levels of outsourcing, and product development shortcuts became common.

One impartial mediator described the new executives from MD as "hunter-killer assassins" and the legacy Boeing executives as "boy scouts."

That type of management might work (for a while) when a company is producing lightbulbs or toaster ovens. It is wholly inappropriate for producing airplanes. If you want to understand what happened, this Stonecipher quote is quite telling:
This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”​
Stonecipher is a fool, both in business management, having wrecked two aerospace businesses, and in his personal life, having wrecked a 50-year marriage.
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This is a good summary.

McDonnell Douglas management took over Boeing after the 1997 merger. The new leadership brought with them their McD ways, including with a relentless focus on stock price above all else.

Cutting costs and outsourcing are two easy levers to pull if you want to boost earnings (and the stock price). And it works, for awhile.

The problem is you're very much like the person who runs out of firewood, and starts to pull every other 2x4 out of their wall to burn. It works for a really long time, until one day you hear the building start to creak, and the next day the roof falls on your head.

You could look at all the challenges with the 787 as the house starting to creak, and the 737 MAX crashes as the roof falling on your head.

Now Boeing is trying to fix their house, but they've long since hollowed out the company. It's going to be a long road back, and I'm not entirely confident they can ever get there.

One of the related anecdotes I've heard is that McD gutted a lot of Boeing's internal training programs, and shifted manufacturing training to a lot of On the Job (OJT) training. Anyone who's ever been in that situation knows how it works out. Whenever there is a hiccup in production, OJT is the first thing to be sacrificed. So you have a lot of technicians running around the factory with spotty training. For a long time, you can rely on your older, more experienced technicians to pick up the slack. But what happens when all of those older folks retire (as has happened over the past ~10-15 years).

I don't know what the future holds for Boeing, but the causes of their current status are pretty well documented.
 
Bell206 said:
Not quite. My DNF comment was directed at someone’s answer to my question above that it was sheer luck those 2 pilots were able to work through those unknown MCAS movements.

Don’t know about you, but when someone flying for a living believes luck is the only reason a pilot successfully handles an emergency, I would prefer not to fly with them.

So do you have an answer for those questions?
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I’m not a Part 121 pilot and have never been through or otherwise part of their training programs. Nor can I speak to what another poster meant. But regarding the question of luck, the reality is that some of those pilots either had the skill to treat this curveball in a way that saved the ship (whether thinking “runaway trim” or some other corrective action) or the luck to save the ship without taking proper corrective action (such as turning on the autopilot since MCAS was evidently bypassed when the AP was connected). For passengers, that’s all purely luck. As far as I can tell, no part of the outcome was improved by (1) fault tolerant engineering, (2) honest systems documentation and potential faults, or (3) training on the system that faulted. And, the reason I think Boeing bears a large part of the blame here is that I have never heard of any airline having had, prior to these crashes, sufficient information to do better for reasons other than the luck of a far above-average-skill pilot being at the controls that day.
 
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