Interesting article.
“For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeing’s core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it,” says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone.
Yes, a very interesting article. And awful to think annout all those top management people that caused this will probably not see any punishment at all. They have actual people’s lives on their conscience after those crashes, but I doubt they care.
It’s frustrating because instead of consequences, all they see are benefits. They got or are getting their paydays so it really worked out for the villains.
on their conscience
🤣
Thanks for the laugh, I needed that. 🙂
I’d say it’s on the conscience of people with actual conscience who decided that others have it too, and thus allowed such cockroaches to ruin wonderful systems.
There’s a wonderfully complex system of deferred responsibilities making sure that the people who actually caused this can have all the plausible deniability in the world, see themselves as having nothing to do with it, and enjoy a very relaxed life with riches we can only imagine.
In my opinion Hassan ibn Sabbah was the most perceptive libertarian in the history of this planet.
In other words, how good can be all the bodyguards these people can hire to protect themselves from retribution, in case the small part of logically connecting them to an event is fulfilled by peaceful means?
That’s the point of the plausible deniability. You can go after them with a personal conviction, but you can’t go after them with proof. There’s nothing left to “logically connect”.
Because they controlled the mechanisms that were designed to hold them accountable, and made sure not to be accounted for.
Kinda like how attackers who intrude on a system delete the logs and other traces of their presence.
But that is a logical connection.
In many countries politicians intentionally try to keep the environment such that nobody would be to blame, but bad things would still happen. In many social structures - influential people.
That fact is enough of a crime itself.
Try approaching this like you would approach electrical engineering.
It’s a problem, not a dead end.
“Good boundaries” are a helluva thing.
Ergo: the person or team at fault are the ones who didn’t do the specific thing that was needed.
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Hadn’t the case been going around for years before that? It started in 2017.
It seems odd that it would happen now, when there is a bunch of press around it. Especially when someone conveniently dying would just make people assume foul play.
It was the right time to ensure the right stock price at the right time.
An enormous company like Boeing always has myriad legal things going on. There’s always a little litigious jitter in their stock price.
Everything Swampy knew, the big cheeses did too and more. Statements entering the courts’ records makes them more difficult to casually dismiss. Evidence of top echelon mismanagement becomes a problem, a stock price problem.
Being a bit cynical, him dying at this moment exactly means they are going to such lengths to protect that stock price. It may actually affect it positively.
Agreed. His family attributed it to the stress of dealing with the court case and the idea that people could die in one of the planes he oversaw being built. That tells me there was an underlying mental health issue that could explain this as suicide.
That said, the mental health decline came directly from the disregarding of his safety reports, so Boeing is at least partially responsible here. I don’t think he was necessarily murdered in-person, but I do think he was essentially murdered by working in such a toxic workplace.
At least that’s my take by straining at the few details I have access to.
No, they straight up mafia style murdered him. It’s way too convenient.
Why wouldn’t they have done that years ago before he had the chance to testify? He testified the previous week, so it’s not like this prevented much…
Here’s another source with more info:
Barnett filed a whistleblower complaint against Boeing in early 2017; his case against the company was heading toward a trial this June, his family said.
“He was looking forward to having his day in court and hoped that it would force Boeing to change its culture,” the family said in a statement shared with NPR by his brother, Rodney Barnett.
The family says Barnett’s health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
“He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing,” they said, “which we believe led to his death.”
When John Barnett was interviewed by Ralph Nader in 2019, he said health issues had persisted after he retired from the plane-maker.
“It’s taken a serious mental and emotional toll on me,” Barnett said — but, he added, the safety of the airplanes rolling off the production line remained his main focus.
So he had been suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks since 2017, and at least as of 2019 that was still happening.
Also, this happened after the first round of testimony:
Barnett’s body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said. One day earlier, he testified in a deposition related to the string of problems he says he identified at Boeing’s plant where he once helped inspect the 787 Dreamliner aircraft before delivery to customers.
If someone was going to kill him, surely they would’ve done so before he testified, no? Or maybe back in 2019 when he talked to the NYT?
Barnett, 62, made international headlines in April of 2019 when he and other former Boeing employees spoke to The New York Times about what he called shoddy manufacturing problems at Boeing.
It should absolutely be investigated for foul play since he was involved in court proceedings, but I think there’s a simpler, more reasonable explanation that his history of PTSD and anxiety attacks pushed him over the end on the day we was supposed to go in for a second round of questioning. Questioning by lawyers can be very intense, especially if you’re already suffering from a mental condition.
Why wouldn’t they have done that years ago before he had the chance to testify? He testified the previous week, so it’s not like this prevented much…
Murder, and by extension getting away with it, costs money and even when it comes to covering up their mistakes corporations will not spend money until after it’s absolutely necessary.
You’re obviously entitled to your own interpretation of the limited data we have. I just think, given the three articles I’ve read, it’s much more likely to be suicide than murder. However, I do hope they do a thorough investigation. Things I’m interested in knowing are:
- who owned the gun and when was it purchased?
- does the gunpowder residue in the vehicle indicate that he was alone?
- where were the likely suspects at the time?
But at this point, I’m thinking ~80% suicide, 20% murder.
About the article itself:
Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
We-ell, ideologically what people usually call “neoliberal” doesn’t discard the latter. Just the former is considered assets and the latter human resources. Here’s where the problems arise, cause human resources here means both domain area knowledge\expertise and various kinds of sales\politics.
The kind of bosses they have simply think that their social\political\criminal skills are the core, fundamentally needed human resource, and the rest is not.
It’s a bit like all those normies dreaming of replacing engineers with chatbots, and becoming excited (almost to the degree of yelling out loud with triumph “finally we are going to get rid of them”). Their worldview puts human ingenuity in themselves and their social existence, and what engineers do is in their opinion like tooling, a less high-level job, something that machines can do.
The customers sales and engineers can’t even figure out what they want after talking with a human engineer for hours. It we lets sales talk to chatgpt about projects, you can kiss the entire power grid goodbye in a year.
The early studies of chat bot code indicate too that using them results in more c&p style crap code with worse fundamentals which makes 100% of the sense when you think about it for a minute.
We’ve all worked with that guy who thought that loops were too heady, that it was a great idea to put everything into one method, or that it was better to have a giant hashmap of garbage in your code and maintain it manually rather than adding better infrastructure.
Welp, ChatGPT is their equivalent of a machine gun. Enjoy!
Well, historically in the course of industrialization something a bit similar worked. Skilled artisans could make better things with their hands, but workers with machines would win with sheer amount.
The nuance which should be clear (but isn’t) to every MBA, salesman and the kind is that the things engineers do make commercial sense only because of some baseline of quality, and also that the sheer amount doesn’t matter that much there. A bit like with a leader making decisions, the role is one they surely often think about, - fewer good decisions are better than lots of bad decisions.
I’m not sure if Boeing is going the same route we are, but blue collar people - the ones building and assembling airplanes - are treated like replaceable cogs. They aren’t taught the actual meaning or point of quality/quality management systems. It’s mostly warm bodies. When I ask people if they’ve read the specs that cover the processes they’re doing, they stare at me. It’s maddening. You’re performing a complex process solely on OJT? Fucking lunacy.
Gotta say, I’m a blue collar who also builds sensitive machinery, have been doing so for six years now.
There is a VERY sharp divide in how well I consider myself to have mastered certain aspects of the job.
Someone fucking kill me: I’m doing this job for the first time and I’m having to spend ages sifting through our processes that may not be documented in enough detail to do the job perfectly. The job is legally safe because I’m following the rules but god I don’t like it. Takes about three times as long as a ‘normal’ task.
This is fine: I’ve done the job enough to know how everything goes together, what torque to use where, and if there’s anything I should really be doing that isn’t in the instructions, or if there’s an instruction mismatch.
Mastery: I can not only do the job, I actually understand the explicit purpose and function of everything I’m putting together on an intimate level, and can use my knowledge of that purpose and function to make god damn sure that what I’m putting out is top quality. As probably the least sensitive example of this, this is stuff like knowing that the particular brand of no-mixing-needed paint we use can sometimes develop a sediment layer of its’ pigments on the bottom that requires you to mix it with a stick for the paint to perform properly, and that you can tell when the paint is experiencing this issue because it’ll be off-colour due to the lack of pigment; and if you don’t resolve this issue the paint won’t adhere to surfaces correctly and is liable to flake off.
I’ve been doing this for six years and there are only a handful of aspects of my job I consider myself to have complete mastery over. I don’t think I’m the best worker out there, not by a long shot, but to me the idea that you can just lose and replace your workforce when dealing with complicated machinery is about as stupid as the notion that AI can replicate the human mind (It can’t unless you abandon the von-neumann computer design).
What I do is similar, and our customers are in house so we have some latitude. We’ve got fairly loose standards about how we build most things, and usually more than one option - but the finished product has rigid requirements. We get to “equivalent or better” some things, but even knowing that is kind of fucky. Grade 8 hardware is better than grade 5, right? Except for safety critical shit. Then you need stress disposition to go to grade 8.
We’ve lost a lot of old peeps to golden handshakes and being mad at the company/union. In a few years my org lost an absurd number of years of experience. Think thousands.
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I will say that the union at the St. Louis side was pretty decent from what I could tell when I was there, granted I was an engineer on the outside looking in. Still, agree with you that just replacing these couple of leaders isn’t going to change anything overall, the entire executive leadership are full of MBA’s that only care about EVM and I had a few arguments about doing the right thing vs the cheap thing.
CEOs have cliques now. When we replace one a new fleet of fucking VPs come with them. They don’t fire all of the old ones, either.
It’s maddening. You still in aerospace?
Yup, they’re all still run by freaking bean counters, even if they were previously engineers. Despite all of the issues, yeah, I’m still in the industry, I really do love the puzzle that is aerospace and hardware.
Bruh. On the blue side, I wish we’d met one another at work.
It’s fucking drastic. Low cost and cheap aren’t the fucking same.
Yeah, I fought the good fight, even yelled at an executive when I was there, but eventually I left after they got rid of the pension and took the advice I offered the college grads I trained and jumped ship.
Fuck yeah. It’s not worth it. I love our engineers/designers but they’ve picked up so much. Why stay?
I mean I’m a union member and it isn’t much better. There’s a lot of talk but nobody seems to actually care.
You have to explicitly pay people to care. And incentivise(not work them to death ie) them not to get complacent
Edit. This is meant as commentary not a disagreement or an argument
Lmao. I’m talking about management and union officials.
I get paid insanely well for my area. Our insurance is fucking top tier. Doctor? 20. Hospital? 150. 10k infusion? 15. Deductible? Haven’t touched it in twelve years. We do well, and people don’t care. Management is shit, which helps none.
Corporate incentives are just not set up for quality. They treat employees like they’re unimportant and replaceable. Pay isn’t everything.
Im trying to say that money needs to be spent with strings attatched to the outcome you want, and you have to make the job worth doing to get those results you are explicitly paying for or you wont get it. It also means that if someone is not caring they need to be gone.
It makes sense to me, but im not sure im explaining it right
I get you. Proper management is a game of incentives.
If you offer a manager 15% over his highest paid employee, are you promoting good employees or inflating costs?
Or if you base it on number of employees? Same thing.
The reality seems to be that incentives are fucking hard and large corps can eat it because [government regs|capitalism] make it profitable.
It’s all about metrics. MBA metrics are taught. Same as HR. When ford tried to overpay his workers and offer better hours he got fucking sued.
Thats a curious anecdote about ford.
Now if only there was a technology that could make me about a 1minute long movie about it…
Well, there’s another side to this, of industrial ergonomics. The system assembled\built is supposed to be easily divisible with clear documents into simple non-ambiguous tasks which can be given to those blue-collar people. If the engineers designing it failed at that stage, you can’t blame blue-collar people for not being able to grasp something above their pay grade. They should be shown a few pages with “screw that with this, grease with such amount of that” and that should be enough.
Ergonomics seems to be having its own dark ages as an area these days. Both in consumer and in industrial stuff.
I don’t know about that, we have the same problem in civil engineering. At some point you just have to say that if someone can’t read a drawing and do what it says they are not doing their job properly. If that means you need an engineer on site to read and interpret the drawing for people who can’t or won’t read then so be it.
As an engineer who documents things compulsively and spends a large amount of time ensuring my documentation is clear, nothing pisses me off more than when people refuse to read documentation. I am hired to perform technical tasks, not to read documents I already wrote for others. It’s like people are illiterate or unwilling to spend any amount of time parsing data to find what is needed.
Yeah that’s exactly how I feel about it as well. Concrete spec is the classic one, you write a spec saying what you want and ALWAYS get a TQ back saying “hey can we use this completely different type of concrete from the supplier?”. Complete waste of time.
How close do you work with your users?
Very. I’m on the floor with them every day.
I’m so, so sorry. There should be buffer peeps that understand both sides at least a bit. What works in CAD doesn’t always work in the shop, what the shop wants isn’t always something that meets reqs. I’ve seen both fuck shit horribly.
If you ask for an intermediate you get a manager favorite that isn’t useful. Corps are inherently inefficient. It’s a shitty life.
In aircraft, with unions, that always falls on the company. Management is too busy sucking the next level’s dick or too fucking stupid to do anything but shuffle problems. It’s special.
I think unfortunately most people shy away from technical things including reading technical documentation. The answer to that problem is to have someone in the team on site who does read it and supervises all the people who can’t or won’t (i.e. an actual engineer). I can see how the profit motive drives companies to cut these people out but it should be seen as essential part of the process for safety reasons.
In civil / structural engineering, quite a lot of UK legislation and codes of practice has been developed following government reports into engineering failures, such as:
Loddon Bridge disaster --> Bragg report --> BS5975 code of practice for temporary works design
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loddon_Bridge_disaster
West Gate Yara bridge collapse --> Merrison Report --> system of independent design checking and competency requirements
https://www.istructe.org/resources/blog/learning-from-history-box-girder-bridges/
I’m not an aerospace engineer but I’d like to think that something similar will happen in this case, although to be honest I’d be surprised if the legislation doesn’t exist already.
In industrial engineering we do do that and we break it down into plain English. And sometimes they even make the operators actually fucking read what we wrote
Think about it this way. Nobody starts off knowing or having mastery of a task. Military aviation works on this principle. That a person should get an MOS out of boot, go to school to learn some basic background about the job (ideally), or to a training command to learn the hands on about the job and then school later. Taking an 18 year old who’s never turned a wrench in their life and turning them into something of a subject matter expert in approximately 4 years.
But that’s still 4 years to train that person with no prior experience. And experience is what keeps things running. The aviation industry as a whole is just hemorrhaging people. Experienced people are retiring every day and there’s not enough new people coming in.
Back in the day my father used to do piece work machining for Eton and McDonnell Douglas. He’s in 74 now. The median age of most of the guys I work with? 55. I’m on the maintainer side of things so I don’t know about the manufacturing side. But what I do know is that even having an engineer on site doesn’t always trump having experienced people to teach the job, supervise it, and fill in the disconnect between engineers and maintenance or builders.
So while I wholeheartedly agree that it is possibly and even expected that instructions should be made so that a novice can follow them, that’s not the whole picture.
And there is a disconnect. Working from engineering drawings can be a nightmare. Some engineers have never walked the space they are making the drawings for. They don’t know the problems that can crop up when they want someone to install wiring through a solid bulkhead or a wet sealed area like a lavatory. They ignore the fact that this wiring can’t interfere with the hydraulic lines running from this bulkhead to this frame. These are problems I’ve run into and only experience has told me that hey, this isn’t right, we shouldn’t do that.
Yeah I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, we don’t put fresh grads on jobs without adequate supervision on the design side either. On both sides of the “fence” you need the experience to produce a good product; the two jobs are different and should be complimentary.
The schemes I have worked on that have been the most successful have had the designer and contractor working together closely from an early stage to produce something that works well, drawing on the past experience of both to anticipate potential issues and design them out.
Personally it took me about 6 years before I felt I was good at design. Experience really does count.
I’m blue collar and deal with that sort of thing. In the last ten years it’s actually gotten worse. It’s like we’re giving them tooling that’s more “they can make it work” than something with an obvious interface. Things I think are pretty basic (give mechanics star knobs, not bolts) are just fucking ignored. Tooling should get out of the way of your job as much as possible, not require even more tools to manage it.
This isn’t just putting shit together, though. Most assembly tasks aren’t tight tolerance, but they always involve multiple specs that each person is supposed to at least know about. I haven’t been through production training, but the production people I interact with scare me sometimes, and it’s not their fault if the importance of quality isn’t adequately explained.
But I made it clear I wasn’t blaming them in the first post, so I’m not even sure where that came from.
Unskilled labor is a myth but Boeing leadership bought into it. You can codify a lot but eventually with too much churn even the knowledge of the docs, and automation gets lost. Let alone the knowledge to improve or maintain that code. In software the idea “code rots” is true for a reason.
MBAs ruin everything
The paradigm shift from an MBA becoming a degree for showing you are a connected, yet glorified project manager, to a Jack Welch disciple is astounding.
Why anyone would ever hire a pure MBA graduate is beyond me. Yes, please make my business a complete failure while extracting all the wealth for short term gains. This is amazing.
Oh I completely understand the why. Get a golden parachute in your contract, hire MBAs to cannibalise the company for short-term gains, then leave the company obscenely rich before the dumpster fire you created bites anyone in the ass. Rinse and repeat until you have all the money.
For Boeing’s execs, they just got caught before they could cut and run.
That was the missing piece of the puzzle. I hate these people.
As an engineer I too hate MBAs
This is not a paywall Please register or sign in
I’ve never seen one of those full screen obnoxious windows actually going out of its way to declare itself as not being a paywall before. Interesting.
uBlock Origin has a nifty Zap feature that works well on idiot web developer fads.
Or just use reader mode in your browser
Or click the x icon on the popup
they have been subjected to groundbreaking management strategies
I didn’t read this.
But life isn’t what people think it is. Not many people are actually really living. And there’s a lot more evil in everyone’s daily lives than they could imagine. Right under their noses. It’s closer to a “worse case scenario” than it’s is freedom or living. Hell is real and we live there.
…sorry for sounding so angsty and poetic? But it’s true. And we can’t even fix or change this it’s all so far gone, built by generations of greed and “evil”. There are no sides… Just you, just me all individually stuck in hell. Killing ourselves fighting limitless devil’s our naiveness of generations helped build and thrive.
I didn’t read this, but did you guys know that Zerglings from the game StarCraft: Brood War have a unique upgrade called Adrenal Glands. After applying the upgrade they are colloquially referred to as “Cracklings” because they attack so quickly. This upgrade, only available after evolving a Hive, makes Zerglings extremely effective in the late game, and allows them to swarm enemy units and bases much more effectively. Despite their small size and low health, with this upgrade, Zerglings can become a critical component of the Zerg army, showcasing the game’s strategic depth and the importance of upgrades.
I did read this.
I didn’t read this, but did you know that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a free trial, and includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn AND the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime?
I think the free trial is now up to level 70/stormblood.
I did read this, and I never managed to rush effectively. But Brood War was so good. Still a beloved memory.
I’m just in this thread for info on zerglings now.
Banelings are created from zerglings following a brief chrysalis phase. In the new form, the zergling’s claws shrivel and become withered, and a swollen sac filled with volatile chemicals grows out of its back. The zergling’s skin is repurposed, stretching over newly formed growths while its bone plates soften to hold bulbous, pulsating acid sacs in place. Though the remains of the carapace offer no real protection, they allow for unhindered delivery of the baneling’s payload. The digestive and reproductory tracts are assimilated as nutrients to accelerate the process, and make room for the fleshy, mutated adrenal glands. These are re-purposed to produce and store large quantities of highly corrosive acid. Few materials can withstand this acid burst.
When a baneling gets close enough to an enemy, it triggers a reaction within its volatile chemical payload, causing the creature to explode with a shower of searing acid. The explosion destroys the baneling but also inflicts terrible damage to its enemies, highly effective against both structures and ground forces.
Man I really hate these you need effective crowd control at all times of against Zerg but as Protoss I’m always too slow to tech into robotics.
Interestingly Protos makes the best rusher. You can get 1 protos zealot out before anyone has effective defense. The 1 zealot can kill several drones before dying. As long as you kill more drones than the cost of the zealot, you’ll eventually win by attrition. By the time the zerg has defense to stop the harassment, the Protos is ahead in its economy.
Goddamn people I have things to do today, I cant SC but now I am SCing
I didn’t read this.
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这就是星战免费的后果
我没有读这个
Oh snap I don’t think I’ve ever used that upgrade. I just unearthed my battle chest from a storage box, know what I’ll be playing all weekend
I didn’t read this.
Then why are you commenting on it?
I think they might be a bot.
uh, that’s very unlikely
You post first, then RTFA after, as always 😉
Because I can, lol.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=r2Iw-fziYPw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Please step away from screens for a bit. There are bad things/people in the world. Always have been, always will be. Your comment history has me worried for your sake.
Linux is a lifestyle
Yeah this guy has issues
— a fellow Linux user
I got into Linux because it had cool 3d cube effects. Now I use Linux because people pay me to… And because it has cool stuff like 3d cube effects.
I actually don’t find that objectionable — a fellow Linux user and conscientious meatist
Ok doomer.
I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.
Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.
Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.
I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.
There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.
But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.
See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.
The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.
We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.
There are people in the world right now who really do wake up every day to hell on earth, like you or I can’t imagine
And people who have no ability at all (at least right now) to change things
I’m not saying things are easy for you or sit in judgement or anything like that. I hope things get better and I really do. But at the same time if you’re on Lemmy, you are not either one of those.
What does Terrence Howard think 1+1 = ?
2, actually. He thinks 1×1=2.
Ah yeah, that’s it!
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It’s actually a process between design engineers, manufacturing engineers and their interaction with the builders. Somehow the right instructions evolve from that. And somehow the skills are gained and up kept by making parts. There’s no easy way around it or short cut. It will take a long time to fix.
They retired. Boeing hasn’t built a new plane in a very long time. Part of it is management, and part is regulatory issues. Yes management has consistently forced out people with knowledge, and replaced them with less experienced people. That happens in every industry, it’s not always catastrophic.
The real problem is due to the regulatory environment. Yes those rules are important, but they’ve also effectively banned new aircraft from being built. There are now generations of engineers that are experienced in making a new aircraft look like a small tweak to an existing one. The perverse incentives created by the regulations changed Boeing from a company that built aircraft, to a company that just games regulation. A similar thing happened to the auto industry to a lesser extent.
I assume this is all some elaborate joke based on an alternate universe, since in our reality, the golden age of safe aviation and good engineering on the planes corresponded to strong safety regulations, and deregulation is exactly what cleared the way for Boeing management to cut corners in the exact negligent-homicidal way they are doing and have done. I can’t find the punch line though, can you help me?
Ah yes. Blame the regulations for busting up the union, moving production to South Carolina, then firing all the expensive workers that care about quality control.
Right, those pesky regulations that require things like bolts on door panels. DAMN THEM. DAMN THEM ALL.
It’s those damn lazy bolts, I set up a perfect environment for them and none of them stepped up and held the door closed, no one wants to work anymore, see this is why I hate immigrants and young people
If they used Self-sealing Stembolts this wouldn’t have been an issue. I know some guys that can get them a good deal on them…
Boeing hasn’t built a new plane in a very long time.
Wait, what? They have created the 787 in the 2000s and the 777X and 737 MAX in the 2010s.
The issues are not because they didn’t have projects, but because those projects were done primarily thinking about costs, time and profits. Do it fast and do it cheap always means do it bad, and this applies to any industry
The real problem is due to the regulatory environment. Yes those rules are important, but they’ve also effectively banned new aircraft from being built.
Should we laugh at this? Lolz? If anything regulations should encourage better safety innovations! Government wants safety and efficacy from corporations that directly affect people’s lives. Just look at Volvo and tell me their reputation isn’t known for safety.
Regulations are pain in the hole, I get it, but without it we are back to the days of selling snake oils and monopolies of the Gilded Age. As they say in my field: “Do you think compliance is expensive? Think non-compliance.” The only people discouraging regulations are the ones who stand to benefit from ridding it in the name of short term profit. STOCKS ARE UP!
The 787 entered service in 2011. I would not call that a very long time.
They absolutely should have produced a clean sheet 737 replacement. But cost overruns from the 787 program, competition from the much faster to develop A320neo, and worries about existing operators going A320 if they developed a new type rating stupidity scared them off.
The real problem is due to the regulatory environment. Yes those rules are important, but they’ve also effectively banned new aircraft from being built. There are now generations of engineers that are experienced in making a new aircraft look like a small tweak to an existing one.
That has very little to do with regulation and everything to do with airlines being cheap bastards and not wanting to retrain employees and reconfigure ramps.
It takes a long time to design new planes, and other than the benefits of the larger engines, there’s not much reason to. Airbus benefited from the newer design of the A320 with its longer landing gear and thus was able to just slap the new engines under the wings, whereas Boeing needed to redesign the 737’s engine configuration. But beyond that, Boeing and Airbus already have planes that meet the various market segments or have no reason to try to compete, like how they buy into the regional jet market. No reason to design from the ground up, instead they just improve the same model.
Great read
This story, like most corporate stories these days, frustrates me.
This is a tale as old as time…the time when American corporations went to shit as our elected officials ensured there was no liability and realistic legal consequences to executes or MBA decision making.
I’m not a business scholar obviously. I’ve always been led to believe that in order for the world to turn and air to be breathable, corporations and businesses need liability protection for those who run it. Why?
If I kill someone with my car, even if it was completely an accident, I’m still liable right? Should I account for the death of that person, child, etc?
How would things not be better if, instead of the bottom line and stock price being the ultimate concern of CEOs, it was them not going to court to face charges because they allowed their company to kill people with its negligence? I know there’s some nuance here, but ultimately, I feel like everything sucks because there’s no incentive to care about anything but investors and greed.
If industry, aerospace or other, was run by people who cared about not killing people and going to jail, would they in turn ensure their design and production met the quality and ambition of the type of people here, discussing their accounts of cutting corners or experienced personnel just to save money?
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