Boeing's New Problems Reach Beyond The 737 MAX

Author: 

Walter,  psychohistorianb , Jen, marxist,  bjd, Lochearn, VietnamVet

Date: 
Sunday, October 20, 2019 - 23:30
Article link: 
 

 

About cracks and the nonlinear nature of some failure modes some may wish to read. Eberhart's Why Things Break - it is useful.

I am very sorry to see Boeing doing this stuff, especially over, it seems, years. Another icon in flames, alas...

Posted by: Walter | Oct 12 2019 18:56 utc | 1

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Thanks for the ongoing coverage of the human life lost because profit b

I read on Reuters this past week that Boeing is in negotiation to purchase Embraer from Brazil who makes smaller airplanes. I con only conjecture that Boeing's ongoing financialization intentions would be to drive that company into the ground like they are doing with Boeing.

How come none of the leadership of Boeing is in jail facing murder charges?

Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 12 2019 18:58 utc | 2

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I read on Reuters this past week that Boeing is in negotiation to purchase Embraer from Brazil who makes smaller airplanes.

Boeing needs to do that because it tried to screw Bombardier and was outmaneuvered by Airbus. A failure that should have cost Muilenburg's head.

How Boeing Tried to Kill a Great Airplane—and Got Outplayed

As soon as Boeing’s top management understood what they were looking at they didn’t like it.

 

Another company had produced a paragon of an airplane and they had nothing to match it. And so Boeing decided they had to do as much harm to that airplane’s chances as they could—most of all, to stop any American airline from buying it.

The company was Bombardier, based in Canada. The airplane was the Bombardier C Series, a single-aisle jet that, in several versions, could seat between 100 and 150 passengers.
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Boeing’s formidable Washington lobbying machine swung into action. Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO, had already cozied-up to Trump by agreeing to cut the costs of the future Air Force One jets. In September 2017, the Commerce Department announced a killing blow to Bombardier, imposing a 300 percent duty on every C Series sold in the US.
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But on Oct. 16, 2017, to the amazement of the whole aerospace industry, Airbus announced it was taking a 51 percent stake—not in Bombardier itself but in the C Series program. Without any down payment.

In one stroke Airbus had changed the future of the airline industry. And out-gamed Boeing.
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To ram home just how much Airbus was now able to out-game Boeing, they said they would build a final assembly line for the C Series in Alabama for those sold to American airlines, thereby removing the vulnerability to tariffs. (Many components of the jet were, in any case, made in America, in addition to the engines.)

 

 

 

Posted by: b | Oct 12 2019 19:08 utc | 3

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As the Clive Irving / The Daily Beast article that B linked to @ 3 illustrates, a culture that prizes short-term profits and cost-cutting, and which denigrates innovation, risk-taking and pride in providing a consistent standard of engineering excellence and safety, is dominant at Boeing. Sacking Dennis Muilenberg and a few other Board Directors will do very little to change that culture. The entire organisational structure needs examining and change. Even the shareholder ownership and how that is structured should be investigated and reformed.

Moving Boeing's headquarters back to Seattle to be close to where most engineers and technical support work, and where most of the manufacture of the planes is located, away from the influence of neoliberal ideology emanating from hired brainwashed University of Chicago graduates, would be a start.

Posted by: Jen | Oct 12 2019 19:36 utc | 5

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Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 12 2019 18:58 utc | 2

How come none of the leadership of Boeing is in jail facing murder charges?

It is state capitalism.

 

Posted by: marxist | Oct 12 2019 19:39 utc | 6

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Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing. There's a theme here.

 

Posted by: bjd | Oct 12 2019 20:00 utc | 7

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It's regulatory capture, one of the terrific by-products of naked capitalism. In essence: you count dollars, not bodies.

Posted by: bjd | Oct 12 2019 20:19 utc | 8

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b. you mention Southwest, which has been Boeing’s most loyal customer for almost five decades. It was the first airline to use one make and model of aircraft exclusively – the Boeing 737. Boeing used Southwest to carry out tests on new aircraft and the Southwest fleet was always serviced by Boeing. In some respects its history mirrors that of Boeing, in other ways it doesn’t.

From its origins in the early 1970s Southwest seemed to defy business logic. It was the only airline that constantly produced expected returns for Wall Street and at one point its market capitalization was higher than those of its far larger competitors, such as Delta. But it has a strong union and was always one of the companies in the US people most wanted to work for. It’s founder and CEO, Herb Kelleher, is a most remarkable fellow. He brought in a completely new ethic of employees first just when in the late 1970s neoliberalism began to do the exact opposite and Jack Welch began to slash jobs at GE, bringing in a top down, management consultant-run, macho culture. At Southwest decision-making was devolved down to the customer-facing employee and assigning blame was strictly forbidden. A sense of fun at work was explicitly encouraged including dressing up and acting plain daft. For a few days a year roles would be switched around, so pilots worked as cabin crew, cabin crew as gate staff, etc. Even Herb himself pitched in when a plane was late. So news began to spread about how this airline went out of its way for both its staff and passengers. And, of course, staff would reciprocate by going out of their way for the airline. And tickets were really cheap due to fast turnarounds.

Other companies came to study Southwest. Even the dreaded Irish company Ryanair went to Texas. But none of them could replicate what Herb called “the emotional intelligence.” And lets not forget the remarkable COO Coleen Brennan. When a cabin crew member was failing to perform to his usual standards she discovered he had just had a very costly divorce and owed $18,000 in lawyer’s fees. Coleen wrote him a check for that sum from her own bank account.

Then Herb retired in 2005 and Southwest appears to have followed all the rest, including Boeing. Just one small example but highly indicative. A few years after Herb left they forced a young woman off a plane because her skirt was too short. In Herb’s day this would have been inconceivable. Far more likely would have been someone announcing in a joking tone: “We have to warn you all. There’s a passenger with a very short skirt so whatever you do don’t look!”

Posted by: Lochearn | Oct 12 2019 20:21 utc | 9

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The slow-motion collapse of Boeing is due to the extraction of wealth from businesses and the middle class to financiers in the West. Boeing was the last American major manufacturing industry. No more. What is astonishing is the avoidance of looking at the reasons why except here at MofA. The collapse is visible from PG&E shutting off electricity to 2 million people in California to Boris Johnson’s Halloween. As far as I can tell, the desert approaches to Aramco’s oil facilities are still defenseless. If the Saudis don’t make peace with the Houthis, a global economic crash will result from the resumptions of missile attacks and the cutoff of oil from Saudi Arabia. But there has been no movement towards peace, re-instituting the rule of law, and jailing corporate criminals for manslaughter. Instead a Coup is underway to remove an elected President

 

Posted by: VietnamVet | Oct 12 2019 20:58 utc | 11

 

Own comment: 

In every field where the U.S. faces competition, the competition takes over. This was true in the car industry and it is most definitely true in electronics. It is true even of crony capitalism, where the Chinese model has proved far more effective than the American one.

Now Boeing is showing that the airplane business is about to go the same way. This is what happens when bankers run the economy - they will ruin everything they touch in the end.