Boeing: How much trouble is the company in?
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.
"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.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
They have to factor in the cost of the reputational damage too. But yeah, it’s all a dollar game.
Reputational damage is almost negligible in the modern market. Market capture in most hard-good industries, especially specialized industries like aerospace, is complete enough that you have very few options - sure, you could just not buy a Boeing airliner for your airline, but you have exactly two choices in large aircraft, and it's not like production is easily-scalable.
the first rule...
we don’t talk about Bruno
Boeing: How much trouble is the company in?
Not as much as they should be in, probably.
They also likely murdered John Barnett, but I'm sure they are too big to fail or be tried for murder.
Kinda hard to try a corporation for murder and stick it in jail, even though we all know it’s a person.
Whole company? Very difficult.
Whole board of directors? That’s easy
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.
Henry Ford is also the reason kids learn square dancing in school. I actually had to learn how to dance like a hillbilly in gym class because some long-dead antisemite was once convinced that jazz music and the Charleston (read: black people and anything cultural that they contribute) would corrupt the youth, who could only be saved by the purity of barnyard dancing.
I don't know how this contributes to the conversation at hand, but I think about it a lot.
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.
No trouble at all. It's impossible to get into trouble when there is no competition.
Likely not a all... The only chance these behemoth companies get punished is by the public turning on them but they have already insulated themselves from that (most people would not know how to avoid their planes when booking the next vacation on Expedia)
In a properly working environment, even a Capitalist one, the government should intervene, jail the board, and either nationalize it or auction it off for parts... The most important part is really the jailing of the board
Boeing and the american government are too deep in bed. Nothing significant will happen. Maybe a few executives get fired just to satisfy the demands for action. In fact the american government will likely bail the company out when things take a dive (their stock as well as their aircraft).
Sadly, I believe you are 100% right
I miss North American Aviation.
Even if Boeing doesn't face any real consequences, I hope airlines take this time to just go full Airbus even if it's out of fear from future litigation and not inherent customer safety. Airbus should also jump on this opportunity and offer some good deals for actual functioning and safety tested aircraft.
The main issue is that Airbus has a huge backlog for their aircraft which continues to grow. They're slowly adding more capacity, but not nearly fast enough to satisfy their current demand, let alone what additional customers would bring.
I have a simple solution: force Boeing to go back to it's management roots. Require all C-levels to have engineering degrees.
But the shareholders would rather see the company be shut down than give up some profit.
Also, put an end to their union busting garbage. Then quality that they were known for was established when all of their labor was done by well-compensated union labor, instead of outsourcing to get around union contracts.
I really hope this allows a third and perhaps even a fourth company to enter the market
Be careful what you wish for. Some of the most likely contenders are Lockheed, Raytheon, and a few other military contractors that haven't broken into the civilian market yet.
Not really. The most likely contenders I could see now are Embraer and Comac (Chinese aircraft manufacturer). A few years ago Bombardier could have been a very likely contender, but not today.
I could see Lockheed and Raytheon entering the civilian market only if the demand on the military side starts drying up, which in this climate I find doubtful.
I look forward to seeing it play out. More competition is always better than less competition.
I had the pleasure of interviewing several engineers from Boeing with PhDs and almost the worst interviews ever. Very awkward interviews and possibly the worst in person interview ever.