Those problems are systemic. It is the whole system called "Boeing" that is now rotten - and the rot can have extended anywhere and everywhere now.
The executive don't care. They earned enough to live rich until the end of their lives. Like locusts, they ate through Boeing's real value (its engineering, its reputation) and can now fly away their bellies full, leaving behind a devastated company.
Shoutout to a anonymous Boeing engineer sitting in some for a gruesome permanent crisis-meetings, where mostly pr- and mbas talk about what has to be done, but not what has to change, especially not about how engineering and QA should have a blocking-veto right for any decision and the ones actually talking about plans to change.
An MBA designed MCAS?
An MBA designed the door plug installation process?
Maybe it’s the Boeing engineers that need some scrutiny?
Engineering failures don’t just happen in some contextless organizational vacuum
Engineers can't fail, it's always management's fault.
Unironically, yes? Management is where the buck stops.
Engineers can fail, and when they don't QA may, but it's management that chose to believe otherwise
Yes, in fact the Captain is always responsible for literally everything that happens on the ship.
Engineering needs to be embedded in a system that can handle the fact that engineers fail and still produce reliable and effective outputs. The primary purpose of management is making sure such as system exists and functions. Managers are the engineers of the entire meta-system, basically.
Engineers can't fail, it's always management's fault.
or, what can engineers possibly know about engineering: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075
Normally I would agree if an engineer directly knew what they were doing was bad and didn't say no but in the case of MCAS: pilots had no idea it was there. Yes, it also wasn't properly redundant and that is bad but had the pilots known it had existed in the first place and understood it was operating off a single data source they would have acted accordingly and a lot of people would still be alive. Door plug I can't speak to.
Hiding MCAS to avoid recertification was well above the paygrade of an engineer at a bench poking a circuit.
Also, if you want a short version of how this stuff goes very wrong even when engineers do say something, the challenger disaster[1] movie is great. Chase it with the NASA documents[2] for the long version.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvv2-7iOD_8
[2]: https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/genindex.htm
Edit: typo
They don't put Boeing engineers in management or executive positions these days.
Heck, they fired the last CEO over the 737 crashes but he was literally only on the job for 3 years and had no involvement with the 737 design. The problem? He was an engineer and he was already stirring up shit inside. So they threw him under the bus and replaced with him another useless goon that spouts PR bullshit and has no technical experience other than milking companies dry.
Curious who believe makes so-called "executive" decisions in an organization...
If you believe it should be engineers, we're fully in agreement, but then why do we have managers...
Found an MBA! It's fascinating how obvious hints miss you people by a mile :)
Maybe the QA engineers were fired because they were doing their job but the MBAs optimised for the wrong metric?
The three dimensions of every project are always:
Cost
Quality
Time
MBA push for cost, then time (to market), above quality.
If you want to be the change you want to see in the world, shout in the ether that this engineer will have a job at your organization.
That’s what is keeping so many of them silent: a mortgage, school fees, maybe a H1B.
A man with nothing to lose is the most dangerous.
By far the most effective leadership I’ve worked for are the ones that already have a very comfortable nest egg or are independently wealthy.
They’re the ones that aren’t afraid whatsoever to rock the boat or do what they think is right, and are actually able to drive change.
Just imagine how people would work if everyone had some basics assured!
I can imagine that some would be incredibly lazy and some efficient. Question is which group would be bigger.
No the question is which group will have a bigger influence.
Lazy people tend to self sort into irrelevance.
What a silly designation to assign to one of the cushiest, indoor, high paying jobs in our society.
shout in the ether that this engineer will have a job at your organization.
This. Or crowdfund a mega million dollar bounty for evidence of certain types of malfeasance.
The market seems to generally punish whistleblowers, and understandably so. I have never worked for a company that wasn't violating some contract, regulation, or law. In my first job we were forging stuff for PCI compliance. The next job stored medical records in a Git repo.
So most people have something to lose if there is a whistleblower personality around, as much as we might admire them when they reveal the secrets of others.
I wouldn't want to work with one. I am not a manager and even as a low level individual contributor I cut regulatory and security corners to keep bosses happy.
You would get far more whistleblowers if it didn't essentially mean wrecking your livelihood, even if you are willing to sacrifice your career.
crowdfund a mega million dollar bounty for evidence of certain types of malfeasance
Yes and:
Make whistleblowing-for-hire official.
IIRC, there's a law practice whose sole activity is suing prescription management practices. Basically forensic accounting meets administrative law.
I want more of that.
Further:
Winner-takes-all seems to be some kind of natural law. And by extension, regulatory capture. Civil society needs countervailing mechanisms that exist outside or separated somehow.
I most like ensuring pro-competition and anti-monopoly policies.
But monopolies will always exist, eg natural monopolies like utility districts and police, so we also need transparency and accountability hacks like you're suggesting.
How about, if you can proof your company engages in monopoly practices, you get as a reward, parts of the company to start your own?
Far for me to challenge the idea of a fund and bounties. But that’s a lot of money—more than I can personally fork and more than I’d be comfortable advocating to collect. Again, no criticism of your ambition; I’m just a regular guy trying to do his thing.
I do believe that good engineers like their work and drive a lot of self-esteem from it being valued—more than living off a stipend because they shot their career in the foot. It’s well-paid enough they rarely think they need to rely on the generosity of strangers, and that’s not a bad mindset to keep.
In circumstances like these, people talk about loyalty, notably to their employer; I don’t think loyalty is a bad value, but in that case, you want to advocate for loyalty to the craft and the corps, not the organization profiting from putting people in danger. Engineering values, like the brass ring some get in Canada, are things that you want to support not by saying “we’ll support you if that blows in your face” but “We want people like you to speak up during our meetings.”
Giving engineers a guarantee that their craft, their talent and their willingness to ask tough questions is what you value, as a team lead, is something I occasionally can do (not now, though: changing team) and something I’m happy to compensate at fair market value, because it’s objectively a good thing for me too — not because that would put me at odds with my organization, but I’m willing to sacrifice that for some ideal misaligned with profit.
We need to work on getting eggheads at Boeing understand that their cost-cutting was a bad idea (SkyScanner letting you filter-out plane time is beautifully aggressive that way), but in the meantime, we need to tell people facing tough decisions that engineering is full of hard trade-offs but that security is not one of them, and not one that should need charity.
Or require the government to give a proportion of the fine to the whistleblower, like the SEC has. We find out about a lot of shady finance through that program.
Should call them what they are, behavioural hacking to introduce compliant, seddated behaviour, without a longterm grasp of the damage the hacks inflict. Obvious solution? More law-ducttape on the imperfect ape.
This is what I'm hoping for the future, so many will be so poor we won't have mortgages or kids, nothing to lose. But I doubt it.
what has to be done
Add story points to your JIRA tickets and make sure they're either 1, 2, 3 or 5 points, but if they're more than 5 points, they have to be split into multiple 5-point stories, and points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them.
Oh, yeah, and meet your commitments! We'll tell you what your commitments were.
I'm seeing that same pattern now. How did that weirdo version of scrumbut become so popular?
that weirdo version
It's actually exactly the same as they way they "managed" projects before Scrum (and before XP, which Scrum itself is a bastardized version of): "tell me everything you're going to do, and then tell me how long it's going to take, and I'll provide value by asking you every day if you're done with it yet. See, I'm justifying why I make more money than you do!"
points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them
Work in defense, can confirm. Add "increment planning" where we plan the sprints out 3 months. Also, voting on points? Naw, someone yell out a number and that's that.
plan the sprints out 3 months
In an "agile" way, of course. You can be agile, you just have to say weeks in advance when you're going to be agile so we can plan around it.
Can we just agree to not glorify and denigrate people based on title or role? It's a bit silly.
If you’re flying at 500 MPH and 30,000 feet, what department do you want the manufacturer to have paid attention to the most: engineering, or sales?
But it's that specific caste that ran Boeing into the ground. Let's call a spade a spade.
It's not like there haven't been tons of books and studying done on the topic. We have an _almost_ ideal production methodology that ensures absolute quality (the Toyota Production System). I take issue with its just-in-time supply chain, but the quality factor is worth emulating, and basically any company who has has guaranteed themselves best quality outcome.
So this is willfully producing a less than superior product, which, when it comes to airplanes, is basically criminally negligent since it will result in a crashing plane that kills people.
Not sure how execs are so capable of dodging culpability, but I'd say the real issue is our justice system holds no one rich to account.
Much as I'd like to see Boeing investigated for what look like systemic failures in their construction processes, I don't think a totally anonymous comment on some blog article on the internet really qualifies anyone as "a Boeing whistleblower".
That’s understandable caution, but would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous?
This is why we still need serious journalism by the way - a reporter would personally contact and verify the credentials of the whistleblower while protecting their identity, with their career on the line. Random news blogs or independent reporters will never replace this.
would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous?
In my view, a "whistleblower" is someone who gives their information confidentially (not anonymously) to a responsible investigating authority.
Not someone who writes a comment on the internet that you or I could write ourselves, with a little research sprinkled with credible-sounding 'insider chit-chat'.
Ordinarily I would agree with you, but the case of Boeing includes some extraordinary context.
This company's incompetence killed 346 people in 2018-2019, and the postmortem revealed an unethically cozy relationship with their regulator, the FAA. Now, five years later, we are seeing more catastrophic failures that will eventually claim more lives, and once again the FAA is coming under scrutiny for being too lax in its oversight of Boeing.
It seems to me that the FAA lacks some kind of either technical or organizational competence to regulate Boeing. Screws must be turned publicly until Boeing's financier-led culture is replaced with the original engineering-led culture. Anonymous insider comments are one reasonable way to do this, although it might be better to work as an anonymous source to a well-known journalistic outlet.
It is very in-vogue to hate on Boeing on the internet. Deservedly, I might add, but it does mean that it wouldn’t be at all surprising for some random non-employee to make up some detailed post as a whistleblower.
Right it's "in vogue" "to hate" rather than being concrete facts
See the second part of the comment. The anonymity is not the problem.
For now it seems credible and can be at least kept in mind.
Or maybe we could wait another 20 years: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075
would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous? [...] This is why we still need serious journalism
Exactly. I'd expect a whistleblower wanting to be taken seriously to be talking to a real journalist with editors and a publication with a history of getting things right, not a single-author mid-tier aviation blog.
The temptation to spin things "just a little" and to fail to verify identity and authority, for a site like this, is just too high.
This is how it can go: https://www.kansas.com/news/business/aviation/article2620683...
Exactly. The problem is that whistleblower protections come from the government. The courts cannot be trusted to always have your back. Hell, I would go further and outright assume that they will blatantly favor corporate interests.
I do not blame someone for not wanting to risk the exposure.
In this case I'd stress that the FAA itself cannot be assumed to "have your back", given their coziness with Boeing (although I can't know if the whistleblowers were truthful)
To be clear: mainstream major media publications use anonymous sources all the time. The point here is that the whistleblower be talking to the Times or the Post[1] and not "View from the Wing". No one is demanding they come out in public to tell us who they are.
[1] And let's also be clear: journalists from both those organizations are surely on the phones full time right now trying to find dirt on Boeing quality processes. That would be a huge story if they could land it.
That’s understandable caution, but would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous?
On the other hand, wouldn't that also sound like something someone completely unqualified could easily make up and it would just fit our own bias enough to avoid thinking about it too critically?
Complaining about Boeings quality, especially in the 737 Max department, is just an easy and cheap shot.
Hence the rest of the comment. Journalistic integrity includes verifying your sources.
It is "easy" because it fits perfectly with all the publicly accessible information that we have about the relationship between Boeing and Spirit Aerosystems. We know it was spun off out of Boeing in order to cut costs. We're also a forum full of engineers who have been inside companies that have done those kinds of things before in other industries and seen how it turns into a shit show. Yeah, this article is filling in the details that we fully expect to see around how the sausage is actually being made, to that extent it fits our preconceived biases.
Biases can be entirely accurate.
And even if this is a work of fiction around this particular incident, the reality may not be far enough off to matter.
There's enough smoke that all the biased people rushing to assume there's a fire are likely more correct than the skeptics demanding to see the flames enveloping the building before rushing to any judgement.
Isn’t speculating wildly on the internet that an internet comment is fake just about the cheapest shot there is? The comment does include many verifiable details…
While I agree, Blancolirio over at YouTube went through a recent lawsuit[1] which had some non-anonymous sources claiming quite serious incidents at Spirit.
Because recently there's news that aircrafts from boeing has loose bolts, the claim isn't too far fetched off.
While I agree in principle, as a society we don't have a great track record of supporting or protecting whistle-blower, so hard to verify shit like this is what we have to put up with in response.
Boeing outsources a lot of the production of components for its aircraft because it’s cheaper as part of an overall shift in strategy that dates to CEO Harry Stonecipher who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas
Ah yes, there it is.
Outsourcing is not the problem; It is Boeing Management's mindset which seems to have completely given up on Design/QC/QA as it was strictly practiced earlier during its heydays.
I think generally vertical integration produces higher quality products. Outsourcing to other firms trying to save money comes with its own hidden cost not part of the price tag.
What evidence do you have for that besides "I think?"
Boeing?
An engineer at Boeing wrote a detailed internal document about the problems it caused that's available at various places on the internet.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/BOEING-PROPRIETARY-BOE...
If the article is accurate, it seems like it's a specific type of outsourcing causing problems here. Namely, that the thing they outsourced wasn't a commodity. Spirit is selling them shit but they have to suck it up and try to patch the things together, because there is no one else to buy from.
Exactly: Spinning off Spirit makes no sense in terms of outsourcing: It was Boeing's own factory that formed the basis of Spirit, which made Spirit a sole-supplier of critical components with exactly zero technical advantage, and exactly zero capacity advantage over doing it in house.
So why do it? It makes return on net assets look better? It makes unions fragmented and weaker? It provides a third party to blame when they shortchange quality? It takes soon-to-be obsolete production capital off the books? But nothing that actually makes anything about making planes better.
So why do it? It makes return on net assets look better?
Precisely that, as with most of Boeing's outsourcing.
Milk the cow, run and live happily ever after.
Spirit was spun off Boeing and sold to a private equity firm (look it up if you don't know what they do).
They make the core of the planes and have been run by a private equity firm for 9 years, it's surprising if we find "quality" problems?
About sucking up: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/boeing-rules-out-buying-t... (2023-06-01)
I thought the McDonnell Douglas management taking over control (and thus destroying Boeing engineering culture) was the interesting part to point out, not the outsourcing.
I'm pretty sure it began with Phil Condit
That depends. if you look at the history of the 787 project, Boeing way overestimated their suppliers' ability to take on major engineering and manufacturing tasks. But they all signed contracts that said they could. Everyone who has let a contract for outsourced software knows an outsourcing shop would never blow smoke up your ass, right?
For the 787 bad outsourcing cost Boeing literally $10s of billions in overruns and a plane that was initially sold at a loss of tens of millions per unit and is unlikely to ever make development costs back.
That's Harry Stonecipher's legacy. He was going to show those arrogant 777 engineers how it's done when a tough manager takes over.
Outsourcing makes QA harder, more expensive, less reliable.
The merger was a takeover with the incompetent people left in control.
Having been through a number of mergers and subsequent layoffs, I can confirm the surviving talent is typically less... Talented.
It’s is called Boeing but this failure is really McDonnell Douglas.
Being back engineering leadership supremacy.
What are you talking about?
The last CEO was an engineer.
MCAS was designed by engineers.
The clearly over complicated door plug system was designed by engineers.
It looks like the engineers are the problem and the MBAs get to clean it up.
[1] might explain it, if it were so. But the fault would be of the MBAs...
Anyhow it was a management decision to not tell about the MCAS changes (not to mention what led to requiring it), management kind of does affect the engineering choices, and is it really over complicated to require 4 rivets?
The central thesis from your link:
American engineers and technical designers are being laid off by the hundreds while Russian engineers are quietly hired at the Boeing Design Center in Moscow.
There's a reason people don't let the inmates run the asylum.
If they consider engineers inmates of an asylum, the reason is they're (bad, or with second aims) managers
The clearly over complicated door plug system was designed by engineers.
It may be a little early for armchair engineering; we should probably wait for a failure analysis report. But the door plug doesn't seem overly complicated. Put the plug in, bolt it on, tada. Where's the complication? The bolts are supposed to have safety wire to keep them from loosening by vibration.
MCAS was designed by engineers in response to a design problem.
The MBAs elected to cover it up from the manual because that would hurt their sales goals of not needing pilot training.
Yes, sales/marketing and management leeches have a lot of control over documentation that leaves the company.
The best part is, it was the leeches that decided to make a fucking indicator light that told you the sensors for MCAS were unhappy, a PAID FUCKING ADDON.
The last CEO was an engineer who got thrown under the bus for the 737 crashes while not being the CEO when it was designed. He was pissing too many leeches off internally so they threw him under the bus.
I know two long time employees of Boeing that left after the last CEO was removed because roughly paraphrasing "Wow, this company is fucked, he was actually trying to fix the company"
Meritocracy?
Merit makes sense when you want to promote hard work, talent, and creativity—and we need all that. Engineering meritocracy is how we build bridges, go to space, and dig under mountains.
Engineering supremacy in that context means that if engineering says no, it’s definite.
What Boeing needs is QA supremacy: nobody wants them to be particularly creative, original, or unusually hard-working when doing audits; they need to be thorough and systematic. We need to make sure that their voice isn’t challenged.
I'm pushing back a bit on that? QA needs to be challenged, like any part of a company. They also need to have the last word on any decision on stuff that has a potential to ruin lives.
That’s part of them being thorough.
Maybe your view of merit is too narrow, or mine is too broad.
QA supremacy makes sense, but it relies on the merits of QA (that QA are competing to be the best) to avoid false positives/negatives rather than rubber stamping, no?
Different groups define the goals different.
Sales/financial: make as much money as possible
Engineering: make the best product possible
Old Boeing was successful with the later group in charge, new Boeing (post MD merger) is the former.
"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." - CEO Harry Stonecipher
Amazing how that one worked out.
I hope Boeing's stock tanking will be a strong indicator to the bean counters at Boeing and other engineering firms that you engineering chops do bring value to the business.
we're watching stock prices soaring after employee cuts.
So, you know, expect cuts to resolve that one.
The stock market is so fucking fake. What a dumb system we have created.
McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money and IMHO ruined it.
If it were up to me I'd just put the engineers that made amazing flying machines back in charge and phase out McDonnell Douglas's culture.
( naïve comment )
Is that possible ? Tribal knowledge is probably lost, and those great employees have probably moved on or retired.
From a 2004 profile:
"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," he said. "It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money."
* https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0402290256feb29-story.htm...
The Boeing headquarters was moved from Seattle to Chicago around 2001:
* https://hbr.org/2001/10/inside-boeings-big-move
In a 2019 article, Jerry Useem criticized Boeing's move to Chicago, suggesting that by "isolating" the Boeing management from its engineering and manufacturing staff, the company discounted its former engineering-led corporate culture in favor of a management style run by MBAs instead of engineers.[7]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Building#Criticism
In 2022 it moved again, from Chicago to the DC-area (Virginia):
* https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/05/boeing-to-move-headquarters-...
Both moves seem quite symbolic to me.
Love the missing "great" in front of "business".
It was a great engineering firm, and he turned it into a bad engineering firm.
I wonder what's the difference in Airbus.
Have worked at both, Airbus pays worse but has a much better engineering culture. Also arguably, because of the location(s) the quality of the engineers is quite high despite the pay as they can afford a pretty good lifestyle.
Airbus also functions very much like a quasi governmental institution in many parts, so there's less interest in squeezing everything to death to save money.
Finally, Airbus generally has a KISS mindset, and are very conservative w.r.t change in engineering practice and tooling. When I was there we spent way, way, way, way, way more time testing than writing software - and the software was written in a way that any software engineer could walk off the street and understand it.
Oh, and quite low levels of outsourcing in critical software - they save that for things that don't have people's lives on the line.
Doesn’t Boeing use infosys? Yea I’d take airbus
HCL was mentioned as a Boeing software outsourcing shop. Not the only India software shop used by Boeing. I recall reading a news story about outsourcing being linked to Boeing sales in India, but there's a pile of news stories about Boeing outsourcing to India, so it's hard to find where and how it started. More recently, Boeing laid off 2000 people in the US and moved those function largely to Tata's BPO. This follows the pattern of how IBM was hollowed-out.
the software was written in a way that any software engineer could walk off the street and understand it
Amazing if true. One of the highest achievements in software.
What are some of the differences in engineering culture? It’s kind of an opaque term that can mean a lot of different things.
Airbus are trying to compete in the US market, while Boeing rely on protectionism?
Aircraft Certification: Comparison of U.S. and European Processes for Approving New Designs of Commercial Transport Airplanes
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104480
See also this comment and answers:
If the cited level of incompetence checks out as true then that borders on criminally negligent and some Boeing exec probably needs to go to jail.
How many went to jail for killing hundreds of people with the max before and covering it up?
What, specifically, are you referring to when you say "covering it up"?
One example:
David Calhoun told the newspaper that pilots from Indonesia and Ethiopia “don’t have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the US”. He added the planemaker made a “fatal mistake” by assuming those flying the aircraft would immediately counteract software failures, which played a role in both accidents.
That doesn't sound like "covering up," that sounds like saying "the flight crews should have been skilled enough to compensate for our awful software." Still terrible, mind you, but I'm not seeing a "cover up."
They already knew what was the problem before and during those crashes.
But never admitted anything and deflected any problem until the very last second when it was already so obvious.
Corporations tend to structure themselves so that those at the very top are never culpable beyond losing their job.
And when you've made millions of dollars over the years, losing your job is at most an inconvenience.
I'd happily bet that that will not happen.
All the focus is on Boeing (as it is a household name) and they have final signoff... but Spirit Aerosystems (the fuselage manufacturer, not the airline) is also a big, public company that doesn't seem to be sharing any of the blame here.
This is ironic because Spirit also manufactures parts for Airbus, etc.
Yeah, assuming this article is true, I wonder if Airbus is finding similar quality issues with Spirit as a supplier.
Airbus is, supposedly, very much "boots on the ground" in cooperation with suppliers. Somehow nobody hears of issues they have with Spirit, but at the same time nobody hears of Spirit being squeezed dry by Airbus - only by Boeing.
Also Airbus mostly use the Spirit factories in the UK (from the link above), which Spirit acquired from a British company.
Plenty of room for differences between those factories and the former-Boeing one in the USA.
Including in terms of financial stability!
It's Boeing's job to stop the line but they didn't as the whistleblower mentioned:
"As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances."
I've heard Spirit has had a lot of problems, but likewise Boeing itself is not immune to this. A few years back the Boeing South Carolina plant was having a very consistent problem with foreign objects (wrenches, parts, etc) being left behind in assembled planes, to rattle around and damage who knows what.
My understanding as well is that while Spirit makes the fuselage of the 737MAX, final assembly is at Boeing in Renton Washington, and the plug door would have been removed for final assembly and then reinstalled in Renton, so Boeing itself would be responsible, assuming, as appears likely, that the plane left the factory without the door bolts installed.
Minor, minor point: why would an employee of an american company write the dates using the DD/MM/YYYY format instead of the american MM/DD/YYYY?
Again, I know this is a very minor point, put it was distracting.
Important correction, it’s not DD/MM/YYYY, but DD Month YYYY. (At least what I saw in the article)
This format is common in heavily regulated industries and frequently a regulatory requirement since it’s fully unambiguous. I (American) worked in clinical research/pharma for a bit and still write my dates like 23Jan2024.
DD Month YYYY
Is also the standard international format for aeronautical publications.
Not using a mixed endian date encoding when noone forces you to, is suspicious?
Like the scene in that Tarantino movie with nazis, where the British spy give himself away by ordering three whiskey with the wrong fingers ...
Aviation, with the annoying exception of feet as unit, largely eradicates such problematic "local standards" from professional usage. At some point you find yourself simply using the "standard" ways even when you don't have to.
Yours sincerely, guilty of using ICAO phonetic alphabet with poor random office workers over the phone.
US customary units and formats are often used in US homes, but other units and formats are frequently used, particularly in industries that do business internationally. Even the US military actually uses DD/month/YY
Maybe because engineers don't like nonsense standards?
Airplane QA should be done by governments after the manufacturer's own QA.
Significant findings at this stage should cause HEAVY fines. These fines should pay for the additional QA.
This would not even increase the overall cost - as the minor increase in COGS is offset by 1 accident prevented per decade.
I'm not sure that approach to regulation would entail a minor increase in costs. Thorough design review and testing of a complex system is far from cheap and would require a lot of in house expertise and facilities. It would massively increase the scope of agencies like the FDA and FAA.
Why shouldn’t regulatory agencies have expertise in the industries they are intended to regulate? Government by corporation or consultant is not democratic. Without internal knowledge, government will always play the fool because it won’t know any better.
Didn't they use to do it?
the minor increase in COGS is offset by 1 accident prevented per decade.
How do you know? What’s the math on this?
It would require the manufacturer not owning the government...
I don't understand why the plug doesn't use pressure as a failsafe. You have high pressure one side, low the other side, and just like normal airline doors the interior pressure makes it impossible to open the door.
That is exactly how it works actually. There are a series of ears around the door, and the pressurization of the cabin forces the door out and against the airplane frame mating ears.
The more it pressurizes, the greater the force jamming the door shut.
However, since it's a door, it has to be able to open. The door is constructed such that if you slide it upwards, the ears clear each other and the door can come out.
There are bolts to physically block the door plug from ever sliding upwards. If the bolts were correctly installed, or ever installed at all, the door would be perfectly safe.
I understand the vulnerability of the slide up thing, but I guess what I didn't explain properly is why doesn't it open by swinging inside instead of upwards? I don't know if I've ever seen a passenger door that slides up, but I haven't flown on all aircraft types.
You'd probably still need bolt somewhere... (rivets actually?)
Its worth noting that this article is based entirely on an anonymous comment made below another article. They also link a Tweet alleging that "[..] other usually credible, usually careful folks positing same idea.", but no links are provided to that.
Albeit a long comment which seems to have correct insider jargon, plausible numbers and scenarios, etc. Agreed it's getting more credence than I would expect, but it wasn't a lazy offhand comment.
I will never believe such until Boeing management announce it in an international press conference at their HQ!
;)
Came here to upvote this idea. Many of you probably relate to the under-informed or less experienced junior engineer who gets dramatic at times. Did this person see something they thought was a non-conformance but actually standard operating?
…As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations
The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating (with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they just painted over the defects. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”.
Holy Shit. Whoever is directly and indirectly responsible needs to go to jail. Thats a level of malice which I don't remember eading very often in any kind of news.
Painting over the defects was just a figure of speech right ?
No, structural paint.
If I understand the quote correctly, no. It's literally what they did.
This is a bad title. There's no whistleblower at all, at least not someone official who has come forward and asked for whistleblower protection.
All we have here is an article written on the basis of a single comment on a single website by a anonymous user.
You don't need to ask whistleblower protection to be a whistleblower
At this point we have no clue if the person who wrote the comments:
- Even works at Boeing
- Works in that department
- Is truthful about anything they claim
- Doesn't have an agenda
It's just an anonymous internet comment.
Surely some scepticism is warranted.
Surely you can't assume it's true, but the same things could be said of Hacker News commenters, if it weren't forbidden
A good friend of mine was in QA at Boeing. He turned things away constantly, to a point where he was let go for being too much of a pain in the ass. They’ve been a dumpster fire for a long time.
Wow. Getting fired for actually doing your job. That's a great case of 'shooting the messenger'.
In theory this is not supposed to happen because the QA organization reports directly to the top of the org chart. This structure was developed after some high profile quality failure episodes in the 1960s (Minuteman?).
Im depressed to know several areospace family members who have joked the commercial airline industry can be an open door soon
What do you mean by open door? In the sense of the "revolving door" through which people move between politics and industry?
Probably a double entendre of that and the newly surfaced issues about the door blowing off[0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/alaska-airline...
this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations. That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances.
If this (anonymous) quote is true, it may mean Boeing thinks production quality can be achieved via Quality Control alone. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Sounds like a defective design. Just like MCAS.
Hopefully the MBAs get control over the mess the engineers have created.
This is the same thing as developing software against a huge test suite and not thinking about code quality / coupling / sane architecture anymore.
Incidentally, this is lived reality for developers on the DB team at Oracle.
I wonder what's happening at Airbus right now? If they're doubling down and empowering on their engineering divisions or if they too focused on cost cutting from engineering and QA and thanking their lucky stars it's not them.
The best thing they could possibly do is just keep their heads down and crank out planes and they'll crush Boeing in all categories smaller than the 787. The 220, the 321 neo, etc are great, just keep on making them.
They're popping the champagne at becoming the world's undisputed number one aircraft supplier.
Boeing has crippled themselves in this two-horse race, and both airlines and consumers don't want to fly Boeing aircraft over Airbus. (Airlines because groundings are extraordinarily expensive, Consumers because they care about their safety).
The only saving grace is that the A320 order book is backed up until almost 2030, but I would not be surprised if Airbus try to permanently ramp up production now.
If this happens at Boeing, should we double-check other aviation companies? Is this part of a systemic trend to hollow out engineering industries for maximum profit extraction?
Back to my "trying to buy a toaster" problem... I just found out all commercially available toasters, no matter what price, are made in China. I don't subscribe to the "everything from China is bad" philosophy, but I feel this is pretty absurd. You simply can't buy a toaster that is manufactured in Europe or America anymore. Even companies such as Bosch that still produce the majority of their products in Europe (as far as I know) seem to have thrown in the towel.
Maybe we need to have an engineer revolution instead of silently being part of this hollowing out by that top percentage of business and political "elite".
You simply can't buy a toaster that is manufactured in Europe or America anymore.
Dualit Classic toasters are still made in the UK: https://www.dualit.com/collections/classic-toasters
Other Dualit toasters are made in China.
At which point did the MBAs convince us they are suited for more than bookkeeping? Medicine, engineering, architecture and many other things have been slaved to economics and this is presented as the natural order of things. Why?
A lot of people here are blaming 'management culture' and saying 'this wouldn't have happened if Boeing was still ran by engineers' and 'it's the merger that killed them' but Boeing has had a long history of quality control issues, see forex https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/02/19/b... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-02-26-mn-824-st...
The questionable engineering of the 737 Max
Boeing's a weapons company that makes airplanes on the side. Commercial airplane revenue is now down to 32% of their total. [1] They've just honed in a bit too much on their primary money maker - killing people.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/032715/how-boe...
This kind of degeneracy (normalisation of deviance[0]) is systemic.
Expect problems to crop up in Boeing's weapons too sooner or later. I hope the US air force didn't let Boeing self-certify its products as much as the FAA did.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
By law, Boeing must pay the USG for the USG to test and certify equipment produced for the government at one of many test ranges throughout the country. Exactly because companies can't be trusted to meet their contractual obligations. See https://www.test-evaluation.osd.mil for more info.
Same is true of their non-government products; planes have to be inspected and certified by the FAA for the same reason. Unfortunately, regulatory capture is preventing some of the proper checks and balances.
Regulatory capture generally refers to putting up onerous and unnecessary regulations as a moat around a product or service.
I think you're referring to the weakening/dismantling of regulatory requirements and enforcement favored by libertarians.
Please correct me if I've misunderstood.
Edit: Personally I think valid and helpful regulatory frameworks can easily drift into capture territory, so they must be vigilantly maintained. Also to keep incentives in alignment, the regulators shouldn't be able to jump back and forth between industry and regulation. Dismantling them, however, is worse. Like a long standing code base there's a lot of useful but misunderstood parts.
I’m not familiar with the meaning you’ve suggested. Can you provide supporting evidence for that definition?
The only meaning I know for the phrase “Regulatory Capture” refers to the corruption of regulatory oversight by special interests.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp
https://study.com/academy/lesson/regulatory-capture-definiti...
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...
Eh Boeing has been having issues delivering Air Force contracts already. They fucked up QC on KC-46s so bad that the air force was basically getting free planes after fines were levied. The Air Force is different than airlines in the fact they basically tear down the plane after receiving it to inspect it. They found all kinds of shit like fucking wrenches left in the wall.
It's gotten so bad that Boeing announced they will no longer accept fixed price contracts from the military because they are that broken as a company and no longer able to manage anything.
Thought you were joking about the wrenches part but apparently it's true?
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/04/02...
“B company” ;) Similar story: Bombardier trains in Switzerland. The defects required Bombardier to not only fix, but deliver several extra trains for free.
Luckily for them (military) dying of their own is more of a common thing than in passenger traffic. As well as secrecy of troublesome matters (e.g. weaknesses and vulnerability). Business as usual may carry on.
... observing the few downvotes I have the feeling that I offended the sensitive patriotic hearts believing I had negative words on the beloved military. While in fact I had negative words on Boeing management, that they can abuse the inherent nature of military customers further and can carry on building crappy products blaming faults on the risky profession of home protecting soldiers. I felt like I had to clarify this before causing too much damage with my carelessly phrased sentences...
Enshitification
McDonaldification rather. After their management took over Boeing, it went downhill.
Obligatory youtube video on the normalization of deviance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o
I don't think this is an honest assessment. From your own source, Boeing's "Defense, Space, and Security" segment draw 39% of the company's revenue, while it's "Commercial Airplanes" segment accounted for 32% of its revenue.
I don't think that there is a single company on earth that would describe the source of a third of its whole revenue as something they do "on the side". Moreso when the top segment is barely over 5% larger, and is comprised of a coarse agglomeration of activities that may or may not be all related.
Which direction are those figures trending though?
In 2008, commercial airplanes were 40.6% and defense was 52.5% of revenues.
I’m no fan of Boeing, but they’ve been focusing on the military for a very long time.
But it feels like they aren't succeeding. Didn't Boeing lose out on all the advanced fighter competitions to Lockheed, so all their fighters are last generation and headed for obsolescence? I'm also under the impression that the ULA is losing to SpaceX pretty badly (but maybe the government is pumping money into it for reasons, I don't really follow too closely).
I also don’t follow that stuff too closely, but yeah, those examples are exactly why Boeing doesn’t stop making commercial airplanes and completely pivot to defense contracting.
You _can_ make money hand over fist working with the US military, but winning giant money printing contracts is easier said than done. It’s a super volatile industry that Boeing unsurprisingly limits their exposure to.
Discussing anything related to the US military on HN can be frustrating, and the recent surge of “Boeing only really cares about their cash cow, defense” comments is no different.
As Boeing's 737 MAX problems started in 2018 and all 737 MAX were grounded in 2019, I'd be surprised if these figures are already reflecting a considerable drop in Boeing's revenue from commercial planes.
I'm sorry, but the 737 MAX problems started well before 2018. The results of those problems were spectacularly made public in 2018.
Depends on what global services is
Article says it's comprised of "supply chain and logistics management, engineering, maintenance and modifications, upgrades and conversions, spare parts, pilot and maintenance training systems and services, data analytics, and digital services."
I don't fully understand the breakdown, looks like they're doing some finance BS to push costs into the commercial and military segments (which report losses) and list global services as pure profit for some MBA reason. How else does the segment grow 180% year-over-year?
BGS is a combination of relatively random acquisitions, such as Aviall (aircraft parts and consumables wholesale) and Jeppesen (charts and training materials). Some military contracts in there, but mostly commercial.
But in the top third of the business, you listed Space, and they are not doing well there either. When was Starliner scheduled to launch, and when did it actually? Oh, it hasn't? Hmm...
Seems their primary business is leaking into their secondary business
Do not doubt the quality of their secondary business has leaked into their primary business.
I think that was a joke.
If they're smart, on an Airbus.
What's that joke about Software Managers being told to imagine they're on a plane on the ground and then asked if they would remain knowing their teams developed the plane software...
I heard it as an engineering class is on a plane and the pilot announces that the plane they're flying is one designed by the class. All the students run in terror, but the professor stays on the plane. The flight attendant asks, "you have a lot of confidence in your students, don't you?" He says, "no, I know my students, this thing will never get off the ground."
They're rich. They fly on private jets.
So long as it's not a BBJ!
Probably on a private plane of some sort.
I’d wager it would be an Embraer or Bombardier, they make nice private machines
This comment was interesting until it's weirdly specific anti-executive rant at the end. Is there a specific executive you'd like to name? Do non-executives care more or do they also have full bellies?
On average, executive priorities are different from non-executives.
If one hires a plane engineer, one’s filter will be: person who is capable and motivated to engineer a plane.
If one hires an executive, return on investment is the metric in focus.
So it is safe to say that, on average, non-executives will care slightly more about the safety of the plane. (please notice words “on average” and “slightly”).
Since we are spitballing without any statistics, I could take the position that the underpaid (and presumably empty bellied) engineer has little motivation to do excellent work or, indeed, any work at all. The executive needs to focus on producing good products since they sell better.
But I won't take that position since making up hypothetical arguments isn't a good use of anybody's time.
Well if we're spitballing, I think a business savvy executive would see a great opportunity cashing in on the good name Boeing built when it was run by engineers. The product will continue to sell for years even as they cut costs, cut corners, and extract as much wealth out of the organization as they can.
Said another way, vampires sucking out the blood and leaving an exsanguinated corpse behind.
It’s not just Boeing. Their supplier Spirit is a private equity holding.
That Boeing created
Spirit is just their bad bank and now they will sacrifice it.
The McKinsey syndrome
One of my managers once said “No one ever got fired for following McKinsey advice” and I’m not sure that it has the positive implications he meant it with at the time.
It's a really easy way of justifying a bad decision. "These smart McKinsey people gave me that advice!"
Usually the negative consequences of these decisions happen too far down the line for these managers to be held accountable.
I was thinking about the golden parachutes as well.
They are in effect an incentive for execs to take bigger and bigger risks to deliver profits.
If their gamble pays off, they profit, if their gamble doesn't pay off they profit.
My understanding is that prior to the 70s most CEOs were effectively ceo for life. They were strongly incentivized to preserve the business, even if that meant keeping it at a low/no growth state.
When the MBA and Private Equity craze kicked in, we had golden parachutes and other instruments which pushed companies into growth mode.
It is not immediately clear to me that incentivizing short term growth is a wise business strategy for the long term.
Exactly. They care to the extent that they are liable and face the risk of being held accountable, which in corporate America is minimal.
"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."
Yes, because I'd rather fly in a plane made by a "business" rather than "a great engineering firm." Why in the f*ck isn't this scumbag in prison? When you take a firm that produces a product that must ensure the safety of its users because the consequences are dire and you purposely subvert that, and then people die, you need a long stint of FPMIA prison. Also, cheated on his wife in their Golden Anniversary year. Lowest of the low.
And no one is gonna dare to hurt Boeing in an election year.