from Hacker News

What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

by kqr2 on 1/15/24, 5:34 PM with 86 comments

  • by kqr2 on 1/15/24, 5:35 PM

  • by PreInternet01 on 1/15/24, 6:04 PM

    So, I think this article, like many others, does not really answer the question? Everyone can agree that "well, this airplane almost dropped from the sky because we apparently forgot to tighten some bolts" is a really really bad thing, but the cause seems less than clear?

    1. Yeah sure, outsourcing bad, union-busting worse, but the fact remains that Spirit AeroSystems (the contractor that Boeing outsourced to, possibly for union-busting reasons) also assembles lots and lots of airframes for Airbus. Apparently without major issues?

    2. The MCAS disaster was also really, really bad, but seems mostly unrelated, at least from a process point of view, from what has happened here (since it was fixed by updating the documentation, pretty much, and ultimately possibly not that different from initial Airbus struggles with flight automation)?

    3. The 737-MAX (and 787, which is assembled using pretty much the same supply chain) seem, statistically speaking, much safer than older aircraft generations. It surely does not feel that way, but incidents-per-flight, not to mention incidents-per-flight-hour and incidents-per-flight-mile, strongly disagree.

    The only facts that I can gather from amidst the wreckage of speculation, are that, yes, Boeing does seem to have an issue with basic tooling, which should definitely be corrected ASAP, but they're in the process of doing so, and then will be be pretty much as good and/or bad as their competition for the foreseeable future?

    I would like to see the deep-dive on the cause of this (which we definitely will get, some months or years from now) before judging. And, for the record: I'm a huge Embraer 19x-E2 fan, love the A22x as well (engine issues notwithstanding), and will fly any version of the 737 as required.

  • by nabla9 on 1/15/24, 6:18 PM

    > “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.”

    Both Boeing and Intel did this.

    They reduced the number of people in C-suite who had STEM background until they didn't know how to make big technical decisions, or allocate money for R&D and production.

    Scientists and engineers learn how to do business all the time, but you rarely see a lawyer or sales person getting STEM degree.

  • by chmod600 on 1/15/24, 5:56 PM

    This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “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.”

    What's wrong with a great engineering firm? And is it possible to somehow reflect that greatness in the stock price better so that people don't feel a need to come in and change it?

  • by macintux on 1/15/24, 6:11 PM

  • by wolverine876 on 1/15/24, 7:14 PM

    Beware a major bias in these Boeing analyses:

    They bring to light long-term problems, flaws, critics who warned about the problems, etc. But those things are not correlated with the outcome.

    Remember that correlation requires both if A then B and if not A then not B. In this case, every enterprise of the scale and complexity of Boeing has problems, critics, flaws, etc. - there is no 'not A' condition, there is no correlation.

    Airbus has those issues too - they are in the 'A' state - but they didn't lose a door plug. What we're seeing is that when something goes wrong, a sufficiently well-examined enterprise (even sports teams) will have someone to say 'I told you so'.

    Their analysis may be no more worthwhile than a stopped clock. And even to the extent flaws are true, that's not at all conclusive. Anyone who has had to manage anything of a certain scale - not even a very large scale - knows that such flaws are inevitable; there is not enough time, labor, or money in the world to fix them all (and imagine doing that on the scale of commercial airliners!). The art to expert, technological management is to deliver results despite the flaws, to know how to make sausage.

    The question is not, why was Boeing in the 'A' state; that's inescapable. The question is, why did Boeing management fail to do their job, which is to deliver results while in the A state? If it was an IT business, I might have some perspective. Making airplanes - I have no clue how the sausage is made. We need an industry expert.

    (I'll also add that one failed door plug on one plane, out of all the planes Boeing flies, is questionable data for this analysis. It's not ok, it's a failure, but it may not be data. I'd guess that more planes will be struck by lightning this year.)

  • by SV_BubbleTime on 1/15/24, 6:49 PM

    Today it’s Boeing.

    What if we’re approaching a complexity crisis and practically no one sees it happening?

    I make things. I think I can see it.

    But what would it look like if we are making systems so complex that it is exceeding the gasp of any one human to understand it, and at the same time exceeding the ability of humans to even explain parts of it effectively to other humans? What would that look like?

    I can give you a clue. The headlines would look like “What’s gone wrong at xxxx”.

    It’s not The Issue (tm) of course. It’s complexity, it’s the MBA-ification, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, it’s all the things that aren’t going to get better.

  • by anonymousiam on 1/15/24, 6:59 PM

  • by jackhack on 1/15/24, 5:55 PM

    How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"?

    What's gone wrong, is what goes wrong at most major corporations -- a focus more on "business" (which itself falls victim to fashion/fad such as image and perception of "fairness", KPIs, "mission statements", and other easy-to-measure-yet-made-up BS) rather than the main purpose : execution of engineering and ABSOLUTE INSISTENCE on quality. Boeing used to have an engineering-driven culture, but that has been destroyed. The CEO has deliberately driven the pendulum away from quality as #1 task to more concern over costs. Why is anyone surprised that they are now getting less quality?

    It's not just Boeing, it's the buyers (the airlines). They are customers too. They want Good, Fast AND Cheap. But they can't get it. They're forgetting what the final consumers (the flying public, and the private airlines such as UPS & FedEx that fly packages) want -- a reliable aircraft that doesn't fall out of the sky. That decision to buy a crappier aircraft to save a few bucks is being made. By whom? Board of Directors? C-class decision makers whose bonuses are based on saving millions of dollars. Accountants? Middle management?

    But the "savings" are a temporary sugar-high. Once the reputation is damaged, it will costs many times any savings to restore confidence, if ever.

    No-one ever falls out of the sky in a shoddily designed/built aircraft coming apart mid-air and thinks "well at least they saved a few bucks on manufacturing." I just hope enough of the old-guard engineers are still around to try to restore the old culture and save this company from itself.

  • by goodSteveramos on 1/15/24, 5:59 PM

    In free market/bean counter ideology, nothing a private company does can be wrong because competition will correct all mistakes in the long run. This meshes perfectly with the ultimate bean counter goal of having all companies in an industry owned by the same 4 bean counter-run hedge funds and run by the same bean counter executives. That way the bean counters can squeeze the public dry and have maximum leverage when society has no choice but to start handing out bailouts.

  • by kolbe on 1/15/24, 6:26 PM

    They presume something is wrong when I don't think that's at all been established fact. Airline travel has been steadily safer by the year[1]. Accidents and engineering snags have been a part of every single mode of transit since the Industrial Revolution, and it's low-sample-size populist fodder like a door blowing off that fear mongers people, but has no statistical significance in the grand scheme of safety.

    Is there room for improvement? Sure. But some of y'all are acting like this is a fundamental failure of capitalism when the small handful of accidents over the past few months is actually evidence of how good planes are--not how bad.

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

  • by 6R1M0R4CL3 on 1/15/24, 6:42 PM

    seems they were more interesting in making money before making good planes. that's short term : sure, you make more money by lowering standards, putting pressure on workers and sending their jobs to smaller off-site companies. you do make more money.

    but now that planes have issues, crash, kill people and companies have customers telling them there is no way they are going to buy tickets if the flight goes on a boeing plane....

    reputation is gained by tea-spoon. lost by the liter.

    the damage to boeing's reputation is gonna take DECADES. if boeing does not die from it.

    so.. how does that short-term stupid money before safety view feels now ?