The big customers are pissed.
“I am more than frustrated and disappointed. I am angry,” Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci told “NBC Nightly News” in an interview that aired Tuesday night. “My demand on Boeing is, what are they going to do to improve their quality programs in-house?”
United CEO Scott Kirby said that Boeing needs “real action” to restore its previous reputation for quality.
Boeing workers at its 737 factory stopped work on Thursday to hold a special session to focus on quality.
Great, a one day "safety standdown" that will really do nothing. Boeing has to change the cuture that it has instituted since Harry Stonecipher changed it from a company run by engineers to one run by beancounters.
Remember when it came out that Boeing was outsourcing critical flight-control software to a company that paid its engineers less than burger flippers? Apparently, it is worse than that. Boeing outsources a number of sub-assemblies to other countries. Ones from South Korea look like precision instruments. the ones from a country about two hundred miles across the Yellow Sea to the west appear to have been hammered out by kids in the Kyber Pass and then dragged through the mud before crating them up.
I have heard that Boeing has a system in which anyone noticing a defect in something fills out a report chit. The thing is, there is zero incentive to find problems. Quite the opposite; a worker who files too many chits will find themselves in another (and not as good) job. It's sort of a Russian zero defects system: There's zero defects if nobody reports any defects.
Boeing is a fucking shitshow. Within the span of 25 years (1958-1983), Boeing certified the 707, 720, 727, 737, 747, 757 and 767. In the forty years since then, they've designed and certified two new airplanes, the 777 and the 787. They have nothing in the pipeline to replace the 737, which was 60% of a 727, anyway. Oh, they say they do, but it's not an active project, as far as I can tell.
To be fair, part of that is the fault of their customers who don't want to pay for their pilots' new type ratings. So they demanded that Boeing squeeze every bit of juice they can out of a sixty-year old design. But they didn't push Boeing to buy parts from third-world sheet-metal fabricators. They didn't make Boeing partially divest itself, that was the doing of Wall Street and the financial vultures, who don't care if Boeing slowly suffocates itself, as long as they can make a buck in the process.
Boeing, as I have commented repeatedly, began walking down the road it is on when it merged with McDonnell-Douglas and McD-D effectively took over the company. That was 27 years ago; changing the culture of Boeing will require massive reworking of the executive roster, which isn't going to happen. The company's board is made of the same level of compliant hacks as is that of the NRA.
Boeing is settling in to becoming a company that survives only on the Federal teat. The way Boeing is going, if you fly on a new full-sized airliner in fifteen or twenty years, it's going to be an Airbus.
6 comments:
The die was cast with the decision to NOT redesign the B-737 to accommodate the larger diameter engines for the Max’s. With the engines now literally protruding ever so slightly above the upper surface of the wing, it took lots of lines of computer software to find a fix. The conventional answer would have been a redesign of the “37” to an updated model taking advantage of advances and knowledge from decade of operation, but that’s expensive up front. The problem I have with the pilot training argument is that the 57 and 67 both carried the same pilot cert, so Boeing could have done this while keeping the new cockpit in common to reduce airline impacts…that they chose not to says something about Boeing as well, that the beancounters have indeed completely destroyed the culture that took decades to create.
An MBA school triumph, spreadsheets never lie...but shit falls out of the sky.
[sigh]
Man, I hate the decision being "do I not fly Airbus" or "do I not fly Boeing"
- Borepatch
Will frequent flyers move their business elsewhere? Will orders start falling off and cancellations mount?
I’ll pay more not to fly the unfriendly Boeing skies. Don’t particularly like United either.
JM, I suppose the problem is also how full Airbus's order book is. According to Wikipedia, the Airbus A320neo family has over 7,000 airplanes on order and they're delivering less than 600 a year. So it's going to take a very long time to get them, unless Airbus can ramp up production without suffering Boeing-like problems.
CM, excellent points and that got me to do a deeper dive.
It seems Airbus has been planning phased in production increases across the board for a while now:
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-05-airbus-provides-suppliers-with-an-update-on-production-plans
Boeing has handed them a big opportunity if they do as you suggest.
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