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Boeing: How much trouble is the company in?

www.bbc.co.uk Boeing: How much trouble is the company in?

The US plane giant is under pressure from regulators and airlines, and its reputation is badly damaged.

Boeing: How much trouble is the company in?

"It's as if I'm watching a troubled child" is how Captain Dennis Tajer describes flying a Boeing 737 Max.

"The culture at Boeing has been toxic to trust for over a decade now," (Adam Dickson, a former senior manager at Boeing) says.

Five years ago Boeing faced one of the biggest scandals in its history, after two brand new 737 Max planes were lost in almost identical accidents that cost 346 lives.

The cause was flawed flight control software, details of which it was accused of deliberately concealing from regulators.

Meanwhile, further evidence of how production problems could endanger safety emerged this week.

The FAA warned that improperly installed wiring bundles on 737 Max planes could become damaged, leading to controls on the wings deploying unexpectedly, and making the aircraft start to roll.

If not addressed, it said, this "could result in loss of control of the airplane". Hundreds of planes already in service will have to be checked as a result.

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  • The founder, William Boeing, was a a white segregationist, active against mixed racial marriages, believed in the pure white blood and shit. His parents were Austrian/ German, Böing. America, the land of opportunity.

    • Sure, and Henry Ford was an out-and-out antisemite who published a newspaper where he serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Hitler kept a photo of him on his desk.

      That doesn't mean we should expect Ford cars to fall apart on the road.

      It's way too late to be pissed off about William Boeing or Henry Ford. Or Hugo Boss or Ferdinand Porsche, who directly worked with the Nazis.

      Or IBM or the Coca-Cola company, which did too.

      Etc.

    • Be that as it may, Boeing himself was a stickler for quality and set a vision of quality and excellence that made Boeing aircraft some of the safest in the fleet, up until their merger with McDonnell Douglas. It was said he'd rather go out of business than ship a shoddy product.

      The corporation isn't the person. That's sort of the point.

62 comments