Well, someone had to be thrown to the wolves, although by all accounts the current CEO did not have the skills to deal with a crisis of this magnitude, and even made things worse.
The NYT article relies mostly on named sources, not anonymous sources. So it doesn't seem to be intentionally leaked information.
And the board looks horrible, slow to act, behind the curve, reacting to external pressure instead of leading. So it would not be in the board's interest to do a "coordinated PR push" and fire Muilenburg after the stories were published.
The NYT story in particular was hard-hitting and well sourced. Gotta wonder if these stories influenced the board to act now.
It's a bad look, because Boeing is consistently way too late to recognize what is obvious to those of us watching from home.
I continue to be astounded that our most senior leaders will not act in the long-term best interest of the organizations they lead.
It's been 37 years since the Tylenol crisis, where seven people in Chicago died after someone tampered with the pain reliever and contaminated it with potassium cyanide.
Way back then, Johnson & Johnson did far more than they were required to do. They pulled all Tylenol from all store shelves everywhere, and kept it off the market until they completely redesigned the packaging. They took complete responsibility. They over-communicated with regulators and with the public. Their market share plunged from 35% to 8% and they took a huge financial hit.
But what was bad for J&J in the short term was fantastically positive in the long term. Their brand recovered, stronger than ever, and they regained their dominant market share.
But today, leaders across the public and private sectors rarely act with this kind of understanding and foresight. Muilenburg downplayed the catastrophes, blamed the pilots, pressured regulators, tried to find cheap shortcuts to fix the problem, and made promises to suppliers and customers he couldn't keep.
So often what's best in the immediate term is worst for the long term. Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost?
The writing was already on the wall in Europe when the US arrived. There is little chance the allies would have lost, just that all of Europe save probably for the UK, would have come under Soviet rule/influence.
They recovered while acting ethically - I think a better thing to ponder is whether the company would have gained more ground without the initial setback from pulling the product.
Though any speculation we have there is just that - pure speculation.
The Tylenol crisis is basically the case study for how to handle a corporate crisis. If you get an MBA without having come across it, you should ask for your money back.
> Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost?
I'm not sure it's so simple. At the head of the Boeing bureaucracy, Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs. He was ineffective because he accepted it and pushed it outward - to the board and the wider public - rather than challenging it and getting to the bottom of the crisis. Internally challenging the members of your organization during a crisis is incredibly politically difficult to pull off and has little to do with short-term vs. long-term perspectives. Of course, someone with his experience and compensation, working at his level, should be able to pull it off. He didn't.
No, it's not simple, and it's not easy. Doing the right thing when it involves immediate cost and disruption takes courage.
I'm sure in 1982, the Johnson & Johnson CEO was also "being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs".
That's how big organizations work.
But in 1982, J&J leadership could see beyond that, cut through the noise, push back on short-sighted recommendations, and do the right thing for the company in the long term.
My question is why we rarely see "enlightened self-interest" like this today.
From Boeing to Facebook, Wells Fargo to Uber, it's hard to think of companies that do the right thing in difficult situations, even when that would be in the company's own long-term best interest.
> I'm sure in 1982, the Johnson & Johnson CEO was also "being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs".
This is not necessarily a given. In the Tylenol case an external saboteur was to blame, so little or no internal CYA was necessary. Easy and correct for everyone to just blame it on the saboteur and then do the right thing to fix the problem.
In the Boeing case the culprit was internal, which likely resulted in a tangled web of CYA, leading to a diet of wrong and horrible information.
Not excusing Boeing, they acted wrongly. But it’s clear how and why the odds of bad corporate behavior were much higher in Boeing’s case than in J&J’s case.
Many argued at the time that J&J was at fault because their packaging wasn't sealed or tamper-evident.
If J&J had behaved like Boeing, they would have blamed the saboteur, blamed law enforcement, and blamed retailers while gradually and secretly fixing the packaging problem before regulators could force them to do it.
If Boeing had behaved like J&J, they would have taken immediate responsibility, voluntarily grounded the entire fleet even before all the causes were known, and put passenger safety first.
>Many argued at the time that J&J was at fault because their packaging wasn't sealed or tamper-evident.
Do you have a citation for that? I don't doubt it's possible but I've never heard it. As far as I know no major pain medications had tamper resistant seals at that point in history.
I've read a lot about this (being from Chicago myself) and do not believe you're representing it correctly. J&J took responsibility insomuch as they pioneered tamper resistant packaging, but they very clearly blamed a saboteur. The initial allegation was that Tylenol was unsafe. J&J successfully re-spun it, correctly, as an external terrorist poisoning their medication. And, to their credit, they did a great job making future Tylenol very safe.
But the bottom line is that these two incidents are very different. In J&J's case they were not at fault. In Boeing's case they were.
>Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs.
Your job as CEO, or any leader of a large organization civilian or military, is to ferret out when you're being fed loads of BS. It's frustrating because Muilenberg was a engineer and started there as an intern in the 80s, so he at least should have some domain expertise in what the problems were. Perhaps him being a "company man" in this case was a hindrance, or conflicted with the new culture at Boeing that is, apparently, run by MBAs concerned with quarterly profits. In either case, he needed to go as this failure happened on his watch.
>Your job as CEO, or any leader of a large organization civilian or military, is to ferret out when you're being fed loads of BS.
I get where you are coming from, but I would reframe it as "Your job as a CEO is to create a culture with integrity and transparency"
It is also pretty clear that a time of crisis is the time that your true corporate culture manifests, it seems that the culture at Boeing is not long on integrity or transparency.
Because today's leaders are judged only on this quarters returns for shareholders. Companies are seen only as investment vehicles for the most part. This is especially true in companies that have large minority stake holders that like to make noise. Leaders like Musk can still declare that they are going to run at a loss for the next few years as they ramp up but he is in a unique position where he controls the majority of the shares. If Musk was not the majority shareholder at Tesla there is a large chance he could have been asked to step down a while ago. Tesla is doing great now but for a while it was very touch and go. Large investment firms want year over year positive growth, they don't care about mission statements or the fact that the company owes pensions to lifelong employees. Its profits over people now.
The short-term view is the Normal throughout history, long term view is the rare, basically only when they just built a nation and were really motivated, rather than "inherited" the nation from their ancestors.
I think it may be too early to claim this. I think we can only judge these companies' well-being (especially with respect to their recent controversies) on a medium- to long-term scale.
I've banked at Wells Fargo since 2013, and I intend to close my 2 WF accounts and open up new ones at Chase soon. If I could remove my information from Equifax or another credit bureau, I would. By all standards, these companies are "doing just fine" at present. But what about 5 years from now, 15 years from now? The damage to a companies' reputation and the impact it has on consumer decision-making can be slow-moving and hard to notice/quantify.
> "I've banked at Wells Fargo since 2013, and I intend to close my 2 WF accounts and open up new ones at Chase soon."
you're just moving from one crappy, uncaring bank to another (i've banked at both in the past). a credit union or local/regional bank will treat you like a real human rather than a necessary inconvenience: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/reviews/
Frankly, I'm okay with an uncaring bank. I would give more weight to the bank's accessibility (i.e. locations, ATMs, international charge fees, etc) and consistency/quality of service (app usability/downtime, good 1800 customer service).
you really only need one branch somewhere near you to do the very occasional in-bank stuff. mobile apps can be used for deposits and any atm can be used for cash (use non-big-bank atms to withdraw without fee). the atm network for credit unions is comparable to a big bank.
you don't get good customer service (via phone or otherwise) at a big bank, as they see it as a cost center to be minimized. smaller banks use good service as a differentiator/product enhancement.
> "I continue to be astounded that our most senior leaders will not act in the long-term best interest of the organizations they lead."
it's disappointing and frustrating, but not all that surprising, given the decades of eroding honor, responsibility, and governance (both corporate and political) of large companies and their senior managers.
i'm more appalled that we tolerate obviously poor incentive structures that implicitly endorse such behavior.
compensation for senior managers should be better tied to long-term results, and punishments should more easily pierce the corporate veil.
(and whew, glad i covered that tylenol case in my mba program... would not have looked forward to asking for a refund! =)
They did act. Muilenburg was Chairman & CEO and they removed him as Chairman in October. It probably took the new Chairman a month or two to work out what shit Muilenburg was feeding the board prior to that.
The NYT didn’t have to be right, they only had to sell newspapers and clicks. The burden of evidence for publishing a hit piece is much lower than that for making an actual business decision.
I’m no fan of Boeing but the truth is, betting your entire business requires a much higher burden of proof than journalism does.
If they are wrong, their reputation won't suffer that much. They can just say, "We based our story on the best information available to us as outsiders."
Which, to me at least, is a perfectly legitimate thing for a newspaper to do. Yes, they should check facts and vet sources, but their primary responsibility is to do the best they can and get the information out there for the public.
When it comes to constructing narratives and interpreting the basic evidence, a newspaper is constrained only by the need to tell and sell a story, not by the need to choose a positive course of action in order to identify and solve the fundamental problems entailed. It's not about the basic facts, it's about what you do with them.
That certainly didn't play when Judith Miller [1] given the bull horn at the NYT allowed the Bush Administration to march us directly into a bullshit war. They are indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions.
> The burden of evidence for publishing a hit piece is much lower than that for making an actual business decision.
That's not reflecting reality at all. In a big enough company you don't really decide, you do both. Alternatively, you choose all three of the options. There's often no reason to fully go for one thing. This as in a big enough company there's enough resources that someone somewhere else does something else, likely the opposite of some other decision.
Eventually something will fail, or it'll succeed. The things which succeed will hopefully be implemented everywhere.
For the same reason the board of GE let the company spiral into near-bankruptcy before changing the CEO. The board and the CEO are part of the same clique, with one supporting another. They will only oust the CEO if they feel it is needed for their own survival.
"The Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders. " is quite brutal indeed, more something I'd expect from commentary.
Given that the normal standard is that 'x' has decided to spend more time with his family and is given a very nice golden parachute (pun definitely not intended nor applicable) this is indeed quite brutal. That doesn't rule out he will get lots of money for severance but it isn't going to come with a smile and a handshake.
Are you an IC? It’s different for us... we are measured by our ability to get a job done.
Management doesn’t get anything “done”. Their job is to faithfully represent the interests of the managers above them. Maintaining good terms with their superiors is their only actual job. Everything else can be going to shit and as long as their superior feels they are faithfully representing their will, then that lower level manager is in good standing. In fact being in an inferno of chaos and still continuing to represent the interests of your superior, over the cries of the ICs, that is truly star-level manager performance.
As a side note, this is why managers don’t have employment protections (right to organize, etc). Their job is not to work, but to represent the company. In an important way they are not producing labor.
For someone like that, it’s actually crucial to leave on good terms. Especially the closer you get to the billionaire class, the circles get smaller and smaller, and it’s your ability to maintain good feelings with other people in that class that determines your ability to get future work.
So, the company can be failing... that’s fine. It’s important to management personnel that they leave with a kind word, because otherwise it meant they stopped doing their one job.
Prior Boeing CEO’s severance package seemed like ~$12M plus over $3M/yr for life. With that level of severance, I don’t need a good recommendation for my next job as there won’t be one...
"Golden parachute" is just a pejorative for "severance pay." And, it shouldn't be surprising the person hired to be a company's chief negotiator tends to negotiate themselves a good deal.
That's only technically true. We don't usually think of "severance pay" as being enough to live in luxury, without working, for the rest of your life and provide enough inheritance for your offspring to be significantly privileged.
For most of us, severance pay is maybe enough to cover basic living expenses at a lower quality of life for a few months. A difference of that magnitude definitely deserves its own jargon.
Such press releases are usually much more subdued, with the ousted CEO absolutely not replaced by the board but "voluntarily deciding to quit in order to spend more time with his family".
It's pretty rare that the press release explicitely says the board ousted the CEO.
Compare with Equifax PR, after CEO Richard Smith was ousted because of the scandal:
Richard Smith said, "Serving as CEO of Equifax has been an honor, and I'm indebted to the 10,000 Equifax employees who have dedicated their lives to making this a better company.
"The cybersecurity incident has affected millions of consumers, and I have been completely dedicated to making this right. At this critical juncture, I believe it is in the best interests of the company to have new leadership to move the company forward," Smith added.
"On behalf of the Board, I express my appreciation to Rick for his 12 years of leadership," Feidler said. "Equifax is a substantially stronger company than it was 12 years ago. At this time, however, the Board and Rick agree that a change of leadership is in order."
An admission of responsibility in a CEO stepping down is incredibly rare. Usually it's phrased as if it is only tangentially related to the matter at hand. As if the CEO had already been planning to leave and this was just a convenient moment for it.
I agree. They should all excuse themselves from the position for dereliction of duty. I question the usefulness of BoD in general, not just that of Boeing.
Watched an aljazira documentary about falling standards at a Boeing factory a couple of years ago and been waiting to see if something like this would happen.
Now they're gonna sacrifice a lamb, keep same corporate struture and philosophy, keep on making billions, remember to appologise even more next time.
The rush to get these planes back in the air being stalled has allowed us to discover other safety issues. Seems management continued to be irresponsible even after calamity struck.
Documentaries are interesting to watch but by design they are one sided and are typically slanted toward a particular point of view in a big way. This doesn't make them wrong but it's not like they are some rigorous presentation of facts.
I'm not so sure about the "Making Billions" bit. They are going to have to either do a massive 11 figure write down or spread out their losses on the Max over the next 10+ years. Either one is a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
I'm betting we'll see a huge write down when the new CEO takes over, that way they can push as much blame as possible on the old regime and move forward with a clean-ish slate.
This is a pretty standard new CEO move. Big impairment, net income goes way down, next few years look a lot better. Meanwhile cash flow doesn’t change.
That's exactly why the new CEO will push for a big impairment immediately. That way the very-terrible-bad results are attributed to the former execs. The new CEO is essentially resetting the baseline and can post growth from there.
If the 787 recovers eventually, it's a windfall and the new CEO looks like a hero for implementing revolutionary change.
I meant the impairment itself does not impact cash flow (setting aside taxes, can’t comment there). See Verizon Oath write down. Of course this can happen to already distressed firms who are experiencing cash flow issues. It’s just a way of making things appear “even worse” in your books without materially impacting your day to day business.
Which is ironic given they chose a board member to be the new CEO. It's not new leadership, he was part of the original leadership team as a member of the board.
I have no idea how the Boeing board works, but most boards aren't involved in the day-to-day operations of the corporation and would be considered separate from the "leadership team".
Still the purpose of a board is to have oversight, which is mostly about signing of company structures and signing of processes for large processes the process for creating and approving a major new product line.
And well, if they'd pick some lower manager the critique would be the same. And if they pick an outsider the critique would be about them not understanding the business ... critique is always the easy part.
It's entirely possible that there was dissent on the board and some faction that was pushing for more responsible practices was overruled. If so, the changing circumstances may have empowered that faction and/or a specific person on the board.
I mean, that's just one possible situation where someone coming from the board won't necessarily be more of the same, but I don't know why we should assume the board acts of one mind. That seems really unlikely to me.
A hyper-corporation like Boeing must make billions merely to operate. They will not be allowed to fail. They will therefore make billions, one way or another.
Golden parachutes are primarily handed out to those who are hired from the open C-level circuit into a house already on fire. They have the bargaining position to demand the "heads I win tails you lose" contracts that are known as golden parachutes. Someone who internally rose through the ranks never enjoyed that much bargaining power. He surely won't fall into poverty, but landing might not be quite as soft soft as you imagine. (not ruling out the possibility though)
Being a public company CEO is a near-impossible job with so much out of your control, so I wouldn't say "down in flames". His legacy is tarnished, but the public has a short-term memory about these things.
Certainly having started from scratch at the company would help him as a leader as the rank and file knew that he had been in their shoes, at one time. But, yeah, being steeped in the culture may very well have been part of this problem as well.
Somehow I can’t find in myself one single bit of sympathy for him. As opposed to the people who, you know, literally went down with the planes. What’s the value of one rich man’s career in the face of that? Exactly zero.
Hmm. There's been a lot of talk here about the Boeing culture vs. the Lockheed culture, and how the Lockheed culture took over after the merger. Yet the CEO was a Boeing guy, not a Lockheed guy.
Boeing and Lockheed aren't merged as companies, they're only combined for building launch vehicles. They created ULA as a joint venture. It was a weird situation where it made sense for both companies— Lockheed basically lost all of their trade secrets to Boeing after they did a crazy amount of industrial espionage. After a few Boeing employees went to jail, Boeing lost all of their launch contracts and were banned from bidding on any for a few years. Even after the ban ended they were in rough shape financially.
Muilenberg became CEO 18 years after the merger. I wouldn't expect him to exemplify Boeing's old culture. It was also only 6 months before the first 737 MAX flight.
2. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements.
3. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights.
4. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all.
5. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data.
6. Give MCAS a ridiculous amount of control authority, operating cumulatively over repeated applications to exceed what the pilot can manually override.
7. Change how the trim stab switch has been wired since 1966 and not tell pilots.
It’s not the accounts or union stewards that should be facing criminal charges, it’s the engineers. At a minimum, any PEs should be yanked.
FTA “Boeing considered the mcas feature to be so minor that it removed mention of it from the 737 max’s pilot manual.“ The accountants don’t write the pilot manuals.
I’m pretty sure that’s the post-facto explanation, but in reality it was kept out of the manual because putting it in and trying to explain the way that it operates would have been a blaring alarm siren of how horribly fubar the system was designed.
>I can easily see how any of these items could be explained by "pressure to deliver" and "reduction of costs".
Can you point to where in the PE Code of Ethics it says that cutting corners due to "pressure to deliver" is okay? The whole purpose of the PE designation is to avoid circumstances like that.
“Many false theories persist about the cause of this fatal collapse. The failure was not due to poor workmanship, shoddy materials, a rushed schedule, swaying from dancing, “harmonic vibrations” from the music, poor contractor communication or design changes that did not receive proper review.
As documented in the official investigation report, two professional engineers issued sealed design drawings without performing critical calculations to determine whether sufficient load capacity existed.”
HackerNews, generally, has a hate on for "business people", who are seen as evil, ne'er-do-wells, while the "engineers" are innocent employees, merely following orders.
I think it's because most people here see themselves as the engineer type, and this mindset allows them to feel better about the work they're doing, be it emissions scandals, ad-tech, building the surveillance state apparatus or phony medical devices: "don't blame me, I'm just following orders!"
The story here was unfolded by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and perhaps more uncovering and analyzing the facts and events.
These are not the typical engineering biased organization if you ask me... but still they put very strong blame on the organizational and company culture changes created by 'accountants' allowing ineffective and in many cases oppressed situations, leading to repeated disasters!
Do not try to misdirect this very serious story into primitive occupation bias please!
The design of the plane was a financially motivated one and lead to the MCAS system being required in the first place. And your note on lack of redundancy and not providing additional training - surely the costs there are obvious?
Your #2 implies multiple sensors (see #1). My understanding is that one AOA is default, and you could purchase additional sensors (I read somewhere that Southwest did).
Sounds like the typical stupid idea suggested by a marketer or accountant that engineers beg and plead not to do.
Frankly, the whole thing reeks of profit at the expense of engineering, safety, and security.
So a Professional Engineer, who would understand the implications of a single AOA sensor much better than an accountant, signed off on the design anyway?
It sounds like we need to find out who that person was and arrest them.
Well, engineers and scientists are known for bowing to the wills and whims of management. They build the devices, and let the salespeople and management peddle the product as they see fit. Car manufacturers would make wheels optional if the could get away with it.
While your message has surface truth to it, if you've done any type of engineering before, you'd know that your designs #1 shaper is your time and financial constraints.
Engineers told to "make it happen" while all safety backdrops they have get undermined by from the top business mandates end up having to make bad decisions.
I'll accept that the engineers involved had the chance too say no. I won't, however, accept the assertion the business/sales people do not share some level of blame for not realizing that they were making impossible demands, and that the resistance from engineering was not just something to be worked around by busting the union, or misleading customers and regulators.
If you were following the articles then you'd know that various people did those on criteria set by management, independently in a non-communicating and problem oppressing organization structure created by the management.
So in short: all of those were caused by the accountants....
“One of the people familiar with MCAS’s evolution said the _system designers_ didn’t see any need to add an additional sensor or redundancy because the hazard assessment had determined that an MCAS failure in normal flight would only qualify in the “major” category for which the single sensor is the norm.
but that was when MCA's limit was 3 or something degree. its authority was increased after that statement. it's a huge mess and there isn't a single accountant Vs engineer root cause, it's cross sectional within the company culture
He graduated in 1982 from Sioux Center High School in Sioux Center, Iowa.[3] He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington.[1]
I think there's more to do it that just having an engineer or accountant as CEO.
Often the background is actually counterproductive, in the sense that somebody from the “wrong” background likely had to overcompensate to be accepted in the “right” circles, and now might be more monarchist than the monarch, so to speak.
> Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries.
> Less than a month after the crash of the second 737 Max jet, Boeing called North Charleston employees to an urgent meeting. The company had a problem: Customers were finding random objects in new planes.
Turns out trying to squash the unions by moving to a different state helps show why the unions existed...
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
On the other hand, recently Boeing has made major strides on diversity and inclusion.
>Boeing has made diversity and inclusion a strategic priority — and external validators have taken notice. On May 7, it was announced that Boeing ranked 32nd out of more than 1,800 companies that participated in DiversityInc’s 2019 Top 50 Companies for Diversity survey
It turns out that reforming hiring practices for D&I goals gets good PR and doesn't cost so much compared to providing decent work conditions and pay...
It doesn't follow that the latter was preventing the former.
I fail to see how "providing decent work conditions and pay" is a cause or solution to the problem of employees leaving "objects" around a plane after it was delivered to customers.
The original comment in this chain implied that it's a consequence of ditching their experienced workers (where they have to provide decent work conditions and pay) in favour of new workers.
I don't work for boeing and haven't looked enough into this to confirm if that is the case or not.
You're probably trolling but just in case - their planes not killing passengers is somewhat more important to society than the diversity of their hiring practices.
The point was moving their production out of an area controlled by corrupt whites allowed them to create a more inclusive workforce. The unfortunate tragedies due to poor pilot training in the developing world are orthogonal.
Please don't troll, and please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. None of that is cool here.
You've done it so much that we would normally ban an account like this, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852176 is a good comment. Please use HN for intellectual curiosity like that.
This is a bit offtopic but I'm sure Boeing has their hands tied in some ways (as SpaceX) since a lot of positions require either a security clearance and/or are exclusive for Americans due to government rules (especially for military projects)
It’s funny how people treats unions as panaceas to all problems.
It’s strange to present them as some sort of solution in this case, where there was widespread engineering and management cultural
issues, and would therefore somehow have prevented major air disasters.
Workers rights and forcing higher wages might be great for the working poor and it might actually make economic sense in certain niche industries where protectionism can prevent the companies entire business being eaten by Chinese/global ones without the myriad of rules and restrictions that unions being - rules that go well, well beyond wages. But it is not some grand solution to high level engineering problems caused by stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives and other weakness in quality down the line.
Further, non-union companies are more often the default these days, and tons of these companies are producing high quality American engineering and manufacturing products.
Even in the romanticized history of US labor only a minority of working Americans were ever in unions even during the hayday when it actually made sense to have unions (when America had tons of factories and manufacturing but little global competition and plenty of protectionism to artificially keep them alive).
Unions still make sense today. Without them labor conditions would likely go down quickly. There is plenty wrong with unions but to dispel the need for them without giving careful thought to their good sides is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
There are a lot of good unions can do but I think they went way too far in their demands over the decades of their existence (like making it super hard to fire delinquent workers and hyper specialization where one guy does one job, and refuses to wear multiple hats like any modern business requires, because his union requires him only to do that one job).
It’s not like unions are bad or evil, this sort of scope creep and beaurucratic self destruction is common in countless organizations.
If unions were reformed, or we could get some form of union-lite where it really was just about wages and sane working hours/conditions then I’d be much more in support of them.
It’s just the disconnect between what it sounds like on paper (great for the working poor!) and what they actually do in practice with the myriad of negative side effects which heavily contributed to massive inefficiencies and making America (and other countries) less competitive... it’s just difficult to square the two.
I've never worked with a union, but it seems a little bizarre to me how people seem to treat unions with the same sort of helplessness as the democratically elected lizards of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If a union really gets that bad, vote them out, or replace them with another union.
That these unions stick around suggests to me that people like them more than they're willing to admit.
That's not the reason why they continue to exist. They continue to exist because if they didn't the whole thing would slide backwards in a hurry and then we'd have to start all over again. I've seen a lot of union based excesses and there are tons of horror stories. With all those taken into account the situation is still far to be preferred over what you'd get without unions. Witness the kind of pushback IT companies give against unionization and you have to wonder what they're so afraid of, a level playing field definitely benefits the employees and collective bargaining rights is one of the greater goods to come out of the 20th century.
You will lose that at your peril. In a way the whole gig-economy is trying to do an end-run around any kind of social safety net, and looked at from that angle it will likely end bad to very bad for the participants, even if from their present day perspective it looks like a great deal.
Just curious how you'd explain Germany and the high levels of unions in the export industries there? You can hardly say that there is little global competition or high levels of protectionism for them.
If there was ever a work culture that wouldn’t give in to the various temptations of inefficiencies and stupidities which unions offer you without consequence it’s the Germans.
They’ll work their ass off regardless if some piece of paper says they don’t really have to and if they don’t their peers will look down on them.
I highly recommend this video to highlight the cultural differences between the UK vs Germany (particularly the bit about using Facebook at work), which I think do matter a lot in these conversations:
> It’s funny how people treats unions as panaceas to all problems.
> But it is not some grand solution to high level engineering problems caused by stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives and other weakness in quality down the line.
They're not a panacea to all problems, but they could be the solution or part of a solution to many of them. In this case the "stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives" were the major issue, and how do you deal with that? You increase the power of other, non-management stakeholders. Unions are the way you do that for labor.
Of course, in this case they're not the complete solution. Increased and more effective oversight by the FAA is probably more important, and there are other things as well. However, unions could be helpful by protecting employees who want to make a fuss over management decisions from management reprisal, for instance.
> In this case the "stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives" were the major issue, and how do you deal with that? You increase the power of other, non-management stakeholders. Unions are the way you do that for labor.
This to me sounds like that old regex joke, now you have two problems.
> Could you point out where you see a link between unions and the poor quality control that was observed in the plant?
Unions empower employees, and the quality control issues were getting raised by employees and getting ignored by management. Empowered employees could have more effectively pushed back.
Also, the union employees were more qualified to do this type of work. However management gave instructions not to hire any, so the Boeing hired less qualified non-union people to assemble the planes.
> A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, reveals a culture that often valued production speed over quality. Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees....
> Mr. Barnett, who filed a whistle-blower complaint with regulators, said he had repeatedly urged his bosses to remove the [dangerous metal] shavings [near wiring]. But they refused and moved him to another part of the plant....
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees. “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly. “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account....
> In the interest of meeting deadlines, managers sometimes played down or ignored problems, according to current and former workers. Mr. Barnett...learned in 2016 that a senior manager had pulled a dented hydraulic tube from a scrap bin, he said. He said the tube, part of the central system controlling the plane’s movement, was installed on a Dreamliner. Mr. Barnett said the senior manager had told him, “Don’t worry about it.” He filed a complaint with human resources, company documents show....
> But several former employees said high-level managers pushed internal quality inspectors to stop recording defects. Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager, said her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on the factory floor after she flagged wire bundles rife with metal shavings and defective metal parts that had been installed on planes.“It was intimidation,” she said. “Every time I started finding stuff, I was harassed.”...
> Mr. Barnett was reprimanded in 2014 for documenting errors. In a performance review seen by The Times, a senior manager downgraded him for “using email to express process violations,” instead of engaging “F2F,” or face to face. He took that to mean he shouldn’t put problems in writing. The manager said Mr. Barnett needed to get better at “working in the gray areas and help find a way while maintaining compliance.”
> Unions empower employees, and the quality control issues were getting raised by employees and getting ignored by management.
That assertion relies on a lot of hand waving and unrealistic claims. If the problem was that "objects" were being left everywhere in the planes that were being delivered, those objects weren't being left out by management while they were pushing paper in their office. Thus even if it's an operations problem caused by the lack of worker oversight then this means the problem is being created by the worker's lack of care and attention to detail.
Thim means its either a process problem, which unions have absolutely nothing to do with, or it's an incompetence problem which actually is addressed by the exact opposite of what a union does: increase worker scrutiny and quality control. I mean, when was the last time you heard a Union representative state "yes we are to blame for this... Better ramp up oversight and penalties for us screwing up our job."
> While Boeing has nurtured generations of aerospace professionals in the Seattle area, there was no comparable work force in South Carolina. Instead, managers had to recruit from technical colleges in Tulsa, Okla., and Atlanta.
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.
> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.
So how would a union have helped with that? Qualified workers don't magically come into existence just because there's a union.
The problem was the move. (True, the move was to get away from the union, but it's the move that was the problem, not the presence or absence of the union.)
They couldn't pull from their existing skilled labor pool because they didn't want the unions to get a beachhead. Having some experienced employees who already know how to make aircraft surely has some benefits when onboarding and training a new labor pool.
That shows the value of using existing skilled labor, not the value of the union. Your statement that this "helps show why the unions existed" remains completely unsupported.
> > Less than a month after the crash of the second 737 Max jet, Boeing called North Charleston employees to an urgent meeting. The company had a problem: Customers were finding random objects in new planes.
> Turns out trying to squash the unions by moving to a different state helps show why the unions existed...
You think that the existence of unions are the reason why they didn't have these problems in Seattle? Nothing to do with, say, a more experienced (and perhaps better trained) workforce?
Now, sure, the move was to avoid unions, and the move (to a less experienced workforce) probably has something to do with the problems. But you make it sound like these problems wouldn't happen if North Charleston was unionized. I am extremely skeptical of that position.
The only way I could see unions having anything to do with it is if the foreign objects were left as sabotage by those who wanted to organize unions in North Charleston.
"You can't move experienced employees in to train the new workforce because we want to avoid unionization in the new plant" is going to have major impacts on the ability to train up that new workforce.
Flip that around, what's unsound with such a design?
There are lots of things on planes where "if you don't do this" then "the plane crashes and burns". Having to adjust horizontal stabilizer trim as you gain speed is a minor addition.
MCAS was problematic because of how it went about doing so, and how pilots weren't properly trained on the change in how the trim needs to be adjusted. The idea of adjusting the trim doesn't seem fundamentally flawed to me.
(Not that I think the design is necessarily sound, see my direct reply to gp for why).
That's all fine provided the pilots are properly trained. The fundamental sales proposition of the 737 MAX was that your pilots would not need additional training.
If the end result is that a new type certification is required for the 737 MAX, it may still be a viable product but not the one customers were originally sold on.
My understanding is that the design is fundamentally flawed; the engines are too large to fit under the wings with the existing landing gear, so they were moved forward, thereby upsetting the balance between the center of thrust of the engines and the center of lift of the wings, thereby requiring a brittle MCAS system to attempt to compensate.
The MCAS system itself is flawed in a number of ways, but the core problem (in my opinion) is the attempt to fit large engines under a too-small airplane, in the name of saving regulatory / training costs.
Actually it's important to remember that MCAS was not fitted to make the plane safer. It was fited to make it behave the same way as a 737 so that pilots don't need to be retrained.
If you would retrain pilots then the 737 MAX can be safely flown without MCAS. Pilots just need to be familiar with the different aerodynamics.
A 737 Max without MCAS doesn't have linearly increasing stick forces as AOA increases. This is a FAA requirement, so the 737 MAX can't be approved without the MCAS system, regardless if it could be flown by a trained pilot.
Even if they somehow managed to make the MAX safe no person in their right mind's going to want to get onboard it. Muilenburg certainly didn't help the situation either with all his talk of pilot error at the beginning.
Because these changes are going to require a new type certification, which defeats the entire point of just making a better 737 in the first place. It will no longer be nearly as appealing to airlines. They might actually be better off just axing the MAX entirely and continuing to produce the 737 NG, and then work on a clean sheet 737 replacement that doesn't suffer from all the compromises inherent in the MAX.
What does that mean for all the Max units currently out there and grounded, though? Obviously there's going to be a huge and drawn-out lawsuit over this, but it seems like at the end of the day, the airlines involved will still end up having to train their pilots on those planes in order to get them back in the air, and at that point, they might as well have a bunch more of them anyway.
And if they're doing the new-plane certification and training anyway, the MCAS no longer has any point and could perhaps just be turned off?
I would assume a buyback as part of the write-down. I'm not sure any airline wants to be one of the handful of "lucky" ones that have the only MAX's in the air. Sounds like a great way to lose customers.
What a nightmare. Will the 387 delivered planes* be retrofitted somehow, or are they really just scrap at this point? Is there precedent for a recall of this magnitude in commercial aerospace?
I'm sure it's slightly more complicated, but is the MAX not essentially a 737 airframe with larger engines mounter further forward? Seems like there's a lot to work with there. A new type certification, at this point, sounds pretty good. Otherwise, there ought to be a lot of salvageable product there.
I doubt that doing a new type cert is tantamount to engineering an entirely new airframe. I think the thing that makes it less appealing to airlines now is the lack of faith in the integrity of Boeing engineering in general.
Even if you recertify it, it's still a shitty design. If you're gonna do a new type certification it may as well be a new better design, without the decades-long 737 legacy baggage.
It will no longer be nearly as appealing to airlines.
Airlines are in a tough spot as the only competitors to the 737 are made by Airbus. Airbus is, of course, up to its ears in orders and slowly scaling up the ex-Bombardier lines.
They might actually be better off just axing the MAX entirely and continuing to produce the 737 NG.
NG production ended (not without its own issues), it's not coming back. There is nearly zero chance of the supply chain attempting to retool for the NG. If Boeing can get the 737 MAX certified it will sell.
The issue is not that this plane kills people— although it is shocking that this plane does kill people.
The issue is that a culture of self-interested mismanagement from factory floors up to our highest political offices has led the global economy to depend on the success of this plane which kills people.
Even if somehow by chance they manage to make this plane kill fewer people in the future, there will be no reason to think the actual problem has been addressed.
Does the global economy really need passenger planes? Tourism economies, sure, but I would guess most of the economy is dependent on trains, trucks and ships?
Giving up things like modern medicine would not be reasonable. Giving up air travel, or at least reducing it vastly, would be merely an inconvenience. Well yeah, giving up air travel entirely would be somehow a mess, but even there it is completely sure we can make it work.
In France the train is ~50 x more carbon efficient. We will not be able to keep emitting like crazy forever (we actually should have stopped completely already :/ ) , especially when reasonable alternatives exist (the train if going not too far, teleconferences, ...). If we believe in the markets, the price of an air ticket should be maybe 50x higher than what it is today, in order to stop the insane emissions. Alternatively there could be an authority who decide if we have a good reason to take the plane.
Yes. Take the SF Bay Area. It would be a lot harder to convince smart engineers from around the world to move here if they had to take a ship whenever they wanted to go visit their parents and relatives back home.
People certainly immigrated before the airplane, but in general those were individuals without many options at home. Skilled immigration really took off during the Jet Age.
If that was all that's needed 737 Max's would all be back in the air by now. There is a fundamental problem in the design. The plane tends to pitch up when accelerating. Under certain circumstances this can cause the plane to stall and fall out of the sky. This was fixed using software.
Most planes have airframes that are aerodynamically stable in and of itself. The 737 Max requires software assistance to be at the same level of stability.
That, to me, is a fundamental flaw. In a multilayer system each layer needs to be safe in and of itself. The purpose of higher layers is to add functionality not to fix flaws in lower layers.
Given the fundamental flaws in design it was obvious there was a cultural problem at Boeing and the CEO needed to go. "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Einstein.
I agree with you, but would like one counterpoint. There are plenty of planes that are aerodynamically unstable and require fly by wire/computers for satisfactory flight characteristics.
Fighters like relaxed aerodynamic roll stability for roll rate. Now pitch stability issues are troubling. I don't think engineers would purposely relax pitch stability unless they had to.
I guess I'm saying you might want an airplane aerodynamically unstable in roll, but pretty much never in pitch so the fly by wire argument might not be valid here.
[Boeing] engineers observed a tendency for the plane’s nose to pitch upward during a specific extreme maneuver. After other efforts to fix the problem failed, the solution they arrived at was a piece of software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that would move a powerful control surface at the tail to push the airplane’s nose down.
That's because the pitch-up behavior isn't actually the problem.
The pitch-power coupling has been problematic on the 737 since Boeing went with GE engines. Thomsonfly almost got a classic to stall in Bournemouth ages ago and flyDubai managed to wreck an NG in Russia a couple years ago. It's possible, but unlikely, the 737 MAX is better behaved in this regard.
If there weren't significant aerodynamic problems with the 737 MAX it would be flying by now. This whole type cert / training thing is a red herring. The cost of slow and shuttering production both in financial and diplomatic terms far outstrips the cost of a separate type. Beyond that Boeing has a captive market. The only 737 MAX alternatives out there are made by Airbus, and Airbus has a healthy backlog for both the A220 and A320. While some airlines may be able to take the range / consumption hit with an NG other airlines, like Norwegian, were counting on the increased range of the MAX for certain routes.
Sure, the difference is that a 737 Classic, NG, or MAX with all of the nannies working can be flown into a stall with lots of throttle at low speed whereas the Airbus cannot. The pitch-power coupling on a 737 is far more problematic than on its competitors.
The problem with Boeing isn’t MCAS. The problem is that the company was capable of shipping such a flawed design and then pretending it was OK even in the face of hundreds of deaths. How could you ever trust the output of such a company, especially with your life?
Just firing the CEO isn’t enough, they need to root out everyone complicit in this crime.
Yes, fixing the MCAS software should solve the problem of the 737 MAX. But with all what happened, authorities are extra thorough before allowing the 737 MAX to fly again. Probably all what is needed is a few more months of patience.
On the grand scale of things, the bigger issues with Boeing are how they do business and all the problems with their facturies that have surfaced recently. Beyond getting the 737 MAX to flight status, they have to resolve all the issues and the management problems which lead to them.
> But with all what happened, authorities are extra thorough before allowing the 737 MAX to fly again.
I think this is entirely true, but it's an interesting commentary on the structure of regulation: it's some small part technical investigation, and a much larger part public relations. I can't even argue they're wrong to operate that way, since their mission is to build public trust in air travel, but it produces absurd results in other areas, e.g. airport security theater.
The fundamental promise made to customers (a more efficient 737 that doesn't require new pilot training) seems impossible to deliver at this point, and probably wasn't possible from the outset.
At this point they could probably still turn the 737 Max into a sellable product, but it will be different from the one promised if it requires a new type certification for pilots due to the different flight characteristics (which Boeing was trying to hide/minimize with MCAS).
I’d guess lack of trust at this point - they lied and denied responsibility for a while when the crashes happened.
They seem to have some serious cultural issues, I wouldn’t trust them to do the job correctly. I’d suspect in the end what your suggesting is probably what’ll happen.
They already rewarded him after the first crash, not to say they won’t again.
> On December 17th, less than two months after the Lion Air crash, Boeing’s board of directors approved a twenty-per-cent increase in the company dividend and a twenty-billion-dollar stock-repurchase program, allowing Muilenburg, who had replaced McNerney as C.E.O. in 2015, to carry out even larger buybacks than in previous years. The board also awarded Muilenburg a thirteen-million-dollar bonus.
People sometime reason that the big compensations (salary, bonus) are for recognizing the responsibility the position entails.
Then I try to remain calm: what responsibilities they really take?! The consequences hit those remain, they should be compensated instead. Plus the salary given in vain taken back. Then we still listen about the damages caused!
They take it because they can. If they cared they wouldn't feel right taking so big portion of the profit generated by the teamwork of so many.
With executive compensation packages as big as they are today, and the likelihood that even if some gets clawed back you'll still be ahead to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the incentives towards short-termism and malfeasance will remain overwhelming.
The idea that the next CEO will be incentivized to do anything other than pump and dump is laughable.
The big question for Boeing is how they will transition to a post-737 world.
Until now, Boeing's business plan is that they will be building a starship for NASA in 2060, but you will still be stuck with a 737 on Southwest Airlines, a A320 on Jetblue, and never know that aviation could be better.
The 737 throws off a lot of cash, but the single-aisle monoculture makes flying miserable.
A 737 replacement will be expensive, take time to develop, and involve risk, but the end product could be the resurrection of the Boeing brand. Since there are so many 737-class airplanes flying, anyone who wants to see a better flying experience or is concerned about environmental impacts of aviation such as airport noise or carbon emissions would realize that a 737 replacement could have a greater impact than the widebody planes where competitive developments are happening.
You shouldn't have to fly international to benefit from 50 years of aviation improvements.
There's no way they're going to develop a completely new plane. It may have new branding, but it's going to be a 737 at the bones. Since when has the airline industry ever considered passenger misery?
Boeing will eventually have to build a clean sheet replacement for the 737 in response to airline demands for greater fuel efficiency. The long term trend is toward higher fuel prices, especially once some countries start taxing carbon emissions from commercial aviation. But it could be another 20 years until that "797" enters service.
That's waaaay too late. They can't just not have a plane to sell in the small plane segment (which does the most sales volume) for the entire next decade!
First of all, smaller planes such as the A320 and E195 feel bigger inside than the 737 does. It's like the difference between the "boat of car" from American manufacturers to the Japanese cars that were small on the outside but big on the inside.
If you just want a low-cost plane at the A320 level of technology, China is coming online with
It will put up great production numbers by selling to Chinese airlines first, they will have all the protectionism and subsidies they need to grow to an economy of scale where at 2030 the C919 will beat the pants off the 737.
If Boeing doesn't take advantage of it's comparative advantage and develop a much better aircraft, they are doomed.
I was going to go all "what do you mean, smaller??? ... surely you mean the A220", but had to good sense to look it up and you are right, the A320 Neo is actually a tad smaller than, for example, the 737-800. Also lighter.
Just carries more passengers a longer distance faster with slightly wider seats.
It's hard to realise how bloody old the 737 is, this thing dates back to the 60s, back when computers were a roomfull of people and assemblers were considered high-level programming languages.
Not that the A320 is any spring chicken (dates back to the 80s), however that's still a quantum leap in technology (e.g. universal fly-by-wire) and I'm guessing more modular as it was intended as a family of planes sharing a type (from the 318 to the 321, though the 318 was dropped for neo).
The A320 family actually includes the A319 (smaller) and the A321 (bigger), and the A321 (or A321neo) is quite similar to the 737 you selected: 737-800. Even the 320 is only slightly smaller than the 800; and it is quite bigger than the 700.
195 for the A320 vs 189 for the 737-800 are the exit limits. It is what the plane is certified for, and is mostly a function of the size and number of doors. It has little to do with typical or comparable seating configurations. At similar density/comfort level a 737-800 seats more than an A320.
The 737 MAX 200 is a modified 737 MAX 8 with an extra pair of exit doors so that it can seat up to 200 passengers. It will be used by Ryanair. Assuming the 737 MAX does fly again of course.
Jules Dupuit, describing rail carriages, though the same logic applies:
It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity.
Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich.
Or you can do what many other airlines do, which is to make business class so much better that even if econony is nice, business class is so much above that that it's worth the money.
The inconsistency of business class does make it unappealing though. Sometimes, it's almost first class (Singapore Airlines). Many times, it's barely a step up from economy though, and just feels like a rip off.
I've flown a lot of long-haul business and first class over the years (Qatar, Thai, Austrian, Scandinavian, Delta, United, Qantas) and Qatar is the only airline I've ever blacklisted for business class.
While the QSuites and the cabin crew are nice, you rarely get QSuites in reality. But you always get a stopover in Doha, and those stopovers generally include business lounges so busy you can rarely get a shower with a < 3 hour stopover, rarely get use of an airway for boarding (even at destination airports with numerous available, eg Stockholm), and you sit in the premium bus for 30+ minutes after "boarding" commenced waiting for other passengers (with dusty, fuel fume filled, unairconditioned Doha airport air).
Interesting how your experience is different from mine. I've traveled to Stockholm via Doha several times, and never had to take a bus.
The business class lounge at Doha is the best I've ever been to. You do need to go to the premium lounge though. They have a separate lounge for people with gold cards, and that one was a huge disappointment.
They won't until political winds shift and you get some regulatory intervention. I would project around 2030, when the major carriers are all ground away and the financial shenanigans of low cost airlines (example: Norwegian Airlines with NY->Europe trips that cost less than the parking) run out of gas.
Without that, there's no motivation to do anything but shave every marginal dollar. Competitive forces are limited and will get more so over time. My uncle drives freight trains for living, and they pay extra to remove seat cushions on the locomotives because they don't want to spend opex on replacing torn cushions down the road.
Low cost airlines have thrived in Europe for the last 30 years. The only thing that was protecting the trans Atlantic airlines was that there were designated airlines allowed to fly those routes.
I missed where RyanAir or EasyJet was flying short-haul widebody jets!
My point is, when you optimize exclusively for cost, you will only get cheap and will not get any kind of improvement in customer experience. The only reason that Spirit Airways doesn't dangle you from a net hanging from the ceiling is that safety regulations don't allow for it.
Train driver is one of the best jobs in the train business, one that takes 10+ years to step into (more demand than jobs.. goes up the union ladder). Complaints at that level will be rare and replacements can be found easily.
> ...single-aisle monoculture makes flying miserable.
What is it that people expect when they say flying is miserable? I expect safety, which is why I'll never get on a 737 MAX. Other than that, I just put sandwiches and snacks in my pocket, fill my water bottle, and in X hours I'm thousands of miles away. Air travel is actually pretty amazing.
Tall person here. Flights longer than 90 minutes really, really suck unless I've saved up enough miles to upgrade my seat something with more leg room.
It’s an interesting topic. Should everyone be able to travel for the same price or should different people pay different prices for whatever reason. Eg if someone is very over weight and can’t fit in a single economy seat, should the person get 2 seats for the price of 1 or should the person have to pay for 2 seats?
Consider yourself lucky. I'm sure it's highly subjective, whatever the case. If I can't stretch or have enough room to adjust my legs, my knees hurt, my lower back hurts, and it makes me miserable.
Ah, yes, it is definitely reasonable to draw that conclusion based on people's disinclination to spend 100% the fare for a 10% larger, somewhat less uncomfortable seat, and/or 1000% the fare for 50% more space and an actually comfortable seat.
You seem to have left out Premium Economy class that’s available on many (most?) airlines. Personally, I tend to opt for that fare class as I find the seat more tolerable at a reasonable price point.
Premium economy is still usually at least 2x the economy ticket price; on a long haul that will cost many hundreds to up to thousands extra.
What you’re probably thinking of is the US airline specific “comfort/extra/plus” add-on that is priced 10%-20% extra. There is a few more inches legroom but the seats are the same small economy seats.
Premium economy / economy plus seem to scale pretty well. Most of the times I’ve booked it’s been about 10% extra in cost for about 10% space on the plane. E.g 34 inches instead of 31 inches of pitch.
To be clear, premium economy and economy+ are different things.
The former uses larger seats and is typically available on long-hauls. The seat is somewhat similar to old-style business class seats, or modern domestic first class seats. It is not priced at 10% extra, it is usually close to double.
The latter is priced at around 10% extra, but is the same old economy seat just with a couple of inches more legroom.
It would be nice to have to pay only 10% extra to get 10% more space, but the lack of scaling is by design on the airlines part, and textbook market segmentation.
I once got an economy plus seat at a bulkhead and had to stow my laptop bag somewhere behind me. I'd rather squeeze into economy than pay extra for having no way to kill time but wonder whether it'll be stolen.
One option is to not fly american airlines (with a lower case a). The highest rated US airline is 3 out of 5 stars on Skytrax.
As far as I understand, the reason for this is that foreign airlines are not allowed to fly US domestic routes, and most US people don't fly international which means they don't know that things could be better.
It also seems like people in the US to a greater extent than other countries only cares about ticket price, which means that even if an airline wants to improve their quality they can't use it to compete because customers will simply not see them, since they sort by price on the travel site and pick the first one on the list.
> most people in the US only cares about ticket price, which means that even if an airline wants to improve their quality they can't use it to compete
With regards to quality, do airlines in other places generally provide more bang for the buck or are they just generally more expensive than US flights to provide for the higher quality?
To be honest, I don't know. It's hard to compare for the US domestic flights, since you have to decide on comparable routes.
That said, flights throughout Asia at distances similar to US domestic flights tend to be reasonably cheap.
I decided to make a comparison:
Fly Singapore Airlines from Singapore to Hong Kong. This will cost you 225 USD in economy.
A domestic US flight of the same distance would be San Francisco to Albuquerque on United Airlines. This flight will cost you 468 USD.
So it seems to me that Singapore Airlines is able to provide better quality at much lower cost. Perhaps the US airlines simply don't have to be better because there is no one that shows it can be done?
Albuquerque isn't a major destination though. Flying to provincial cities is always expensive.
A better comparison with about the same distance in the US is New York to Miami, which can be done nonstop for under $200 on Delta, or $135 on whatever "Frontier" is.
EDIT: In fact you can go from New York to Las Vegas for under $200, round-trip, which is considerably farther.
The routes and dates really matter. I can fly from MSP to TPA (about 2.1k, about the same) for $28 USD. Now I wont argue Frontier airline is the same quality as Delta or some of the other majors... but airfare prices are really fungible.
Sure. With a budget airline I can get cheaper flights in Asia too. The aforementioned flight from Singapore to Hong Kong (1-8 March) is 87 USD on Jetstar.
My point was that even though the regular flights are similarly priced in the US and Asia, the quality in the US is so much worse. I now see that my attempt at explaining this discrepancy had some flaws, but what other explanations do you suggest?
The fact seems to be that even the best US Airlines are significantly worse than the ones in other places. When the best rated ones are hovering around average, there is something wrong.
I fly Frontier very regularly by quality choice and not by price. The fares are great, but the only other people flying the routes are United (awful awful) and Southwest (great but also pricey). More generally, I am not impressed by any U.S. major, discounting Southwest if they are considered. United, AA, and Delta (least) are pretty abysmal in their quality.
It's probably important to be specific when I say "quality." By that I'm referring to ease of purchase, fair baggage prices, web/app UX, on/off-flight customer service including pilot communication with passengers, and even landings (as a pilot, I am absolutely judging beyond "did we get to the ground safely or not"). Price and seating are secondary for me, although I certainly understand why they are list-toppers for others.
I fly Delta a fair amount and (with status), Delta seems quite good to me. With even the lowest level of status, there are no bag fees for anything approaching typical luggage load. Their app is fine. Web ticketing seems good to me. Domestically, I can almost always buy an economy ticket and get upgraded to first. Even where I have to pay for it, the upgrades are reasonably priced. During irregular ops (weather typically), they’ve always gotten me there within 18 hours of scheduled. I agree SWA is also good and my only experience recently on United was also good (but in business class Mumbai->Newark, so atypical to say the least).
I suspect flying up front on any of the majors is fine. Economy experience is driven by a race to the bottom price-wise, but if you want cheap travel, it’s readily available. If you want comfortable travel, that’s also on offer.
I was Delta diamond for about a decade, so same deal...domestically, they really treated you nicely.
I flew Frontier the first time this Spring - was helping ferry an open cockpit biplane from Colorado to Illinois - and it was a stupid cheap one way fair. I really can't think of a single perk Frontier did not try and up charge a fee for. Boarding, luggage, carry on, seat assignment... I'm sure there were others. Funny enough, the guy I was ferrying with also picked the cheapest seats in the plane, so we ended up next to each other on the flight out. I was fully prepared too wear the kevlar helmet on the flight rather than pay the $60 carry on fee.
I like Frontier but I was stunned to learn that even after paying for all of their upgrades to get seated in the front row, I would still have to pay extra for water.
The Economist had an article in 2017 that argued that US airlines are worse, more expensive, and more profitable due to less competition than European (and I'd add Asian) airlines.
That is true. And these airlines never show up in the top half of the airline rankings. However, when flying these airlines you don't expect good service, and no one is going to proclaim that “flying is always a bad experience” because these airlines exist.
Personally, I have good experience with those airlines. As long as you are aware of the rules (print your boarding pass at home or use mobile boarding pass, limited carry-on luggage, usually doesn't go to the main airport) it's a good experience. Airplanes are relatively new, they are clean inside and the staff is friendly.
> It also seems like people in the US to a greater extent than other countries only cares about ticket price, which means that even if an airline wants to improve their quality they can't use it to compete
I'm not so sure people do it any different elsewhere. I mostly fly in Europe and have definitely never considered anything else than price and suitable flight times. I consider all airlines to provide the same standardized service. Yes I'd pick BA over Ryanair, but wouldn't pay extra for it.
I always assumed that this disconnect was because most domestic u.s. air travel is business related, so that in general, the traveler is not the customer.
I’m 6ft and have normal length legs. I don’t have any issue doing a 5h flight on a 737 with minimum pitch. I wouldn’t pay extra for legroom, but people who are taller than me would, I imagine.
I'm 6'2" and my knees used to be painfully squeezed into seats and everything was incredibly uncomfortable on flights. At the time I weighed 275lb. I've since lost weight and I was surprised how much more comfortable flying is.
You wouldn't think being obese would impact knees not having enough space, but my ass shrank in multiple directions and I have about four to five inches of free space now between the seat in front of me and my knees. Unless you're much taller than I am, it's likely that losing weight will not just help with your health, but make flying more comfortable.
If you are taller, well, life sucks for us tall people in many ways and we can't expect airlines to build comfortable seats for people two or three standard deviations beyond the normal height.
Statistically or mathematically average height does not equal normal height, it has no relevance in this discussion. If you read the article, the average does not fit most people even if you take a single dimension, height.
Within one standard deviation of the mean does, by definition, fit most people for a normally distributed factor like height. (64% > 50%, thus most). "Within 1 standard deviation of the mean" is a decent (if possibly overly strict) definition for "normal" in this context.
I'm 6ft, 190lbs so not substantially overweight. Airlines like Air Canada Rouge have a 29" seat pitch in standard economy. I find that very uncomfortable. Even their upgraded seats are very tight for me with my knees pressed up against the seat infront of me unless I sit bolt upright.
On many leisure routes from Toronto there is very little choice in flights either, so pay more means pay their business class rate which is quite expensive, or well go some very complex non-direct routing.
You could always buy a business class seat then. Economy is supposed to be uncomfortable because all the things that would make it comfortable have been removed to make it cheaper.
Flying you essentially pay by the inch at a price that's remarkable low historically speaking. The service has no more romance than what a Greyhound bus ride once offered (and don't ask what that's like now).
This is either a triumph of choice, markets, and abundance or grim, barbaric end to flight as uplifting experience.
I have arthritis and literally cannot fly anymore because I can't afford tickets with enough leg room to not be in crippling pain for the entire flight. I've had to miss important family events because of this.
I'm very enthusiastic about traveling by rail, yes! I have a relative near the end of her life who has been enjoying its comfort and accessibility to make final visits to our dispersed family, all while enjoying the natural beauty of the US as a free bonus.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If we forced airlines to provide more legroom they would charge everybody more, and you might not be able to afford the new tickets either.
Even if you personally could, some people that can currently fly would not be able to afford the higher prices. Why are your consumer preferences more important than theirs?
Anything that does not feel like a can of sardines packed together. Train offers huge room, by comparison, for taller people like me economy is torture.
I can relate to your point about a new aircraft design to replace 737, but can you explain why single-aisle is so bad? I mean, are you saying the seating to be 2-1-2 instead of 3-3? Or wider short-range aircraft with 2-2-2 or 2-3-2 ? Elaboration please...
Maybe the next CEO will actually try to fix things, seeing as how his job will likely depend on it. Fuck up like Muilenburg did and you're out too. It seems like the incentives may be correct now to focus on the right things rather than just cut costs as much as possible. Hopefully!
I hope you're right but this reminds me of the very sad saying, "Bike lanes are painted in blood". Why can't we properly value safety over convenience and profits before there is a huge accident?
I never knew about that link, thank you for posting this. It's sad that it took that many lives to solve something so simple, it likely wasn't the first such explosion either but the others may not have been serious enough to warrant countermeasures.
I knew natural gas had an additive so we could smell it, but I didn't realize it came on the heals of this disaster. I guess that makes sense though.
We have culturally evolved to care more about physical safety today; a good sign that our State worked by being held accountable to people. The stuff that is happening with Boeing is a total regression, and it will be interesting to see how regressions like this can be prevented in the future.
This is why people are so outraged. We were supposedly past the days where something like this can happen in a century old industry like commercial aviation.
I understand that ensuring the safety of new airplane designs is more complicated than adding odor to natural gas. But this is not a product where society wants producers to "move fast and break things". We expect a minimum level of safety i.e the plane not falling out of the sky.
I've been clipping similar stories, under a set of themes which I find related:
- Risk
- Accidents
- Technological Debt
- Techology as Debt
- Manifestation -- this is the notion of manifest vs. latent phenomena, perceptibility, and awareness. See Robert K. Merton among others.
- Denial. Itself one of the stages of grief, which seems more generally a response to a change in worldview and/or an invalidation of previously reliable models.
- Motivated asset inflation. The desire to sustain high levels of valuation of extant assets (real property, IP, technological mechansism, rents), often through activities which decrease net social welfare. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937, is fascinating reading in this regard. Stern doesn't quite fully make the case, but he sets the board for the final mate. NIMBYism, Merchants of Doubt, "fake news", and numerous other phenomena can be tied to this.
In whole, the narrative, if it is valid and holds, undermines many of the sacred cows of technological optimism and property-based market economics.
My learning of this, if you're interested, probably traces to about 19 December 2016. Researching the Texas Railroad Commission. Whose name is ... somewhat deceptive.
Briefly mentioned, I believe (I need to re-watch it) this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X5bWrlA04Q&app=desktop
I'd mentioned it on G+ on the date, in comments (I've a full archive on my own systems, but at least the post survives at the Internet Archive):
>Why can't we properly value safety over convenience and profits before there is a huge accident?
Because consumers will choose the cheaper product. If a politician tries to "value" safety over convenience for a potential problem, voters will vote for the other politician that promises lower taxes and claims there is no safety issue.
Of course, there is a balance that needs to be met, taking all of the risk out of life is also excessive and may impede progress or waste resources.
Why on earth would the next CEO be incentivized to do anything other than wring all the money out of the company that they can? The punishments for failure are insignificant. They get to keep millions and millions of dollars even if they wreck the company.
> Some people do get a sense of pride and fulfillment out of doing a good job.
But a good job for a CEO is building shareholder value, which is now understood as "[wringing] all the money out of the company that they can [for the shareholders]." That's a different job than building an organization that consistently chooses safety over schedule and cost.
It does not seem this sort of general behavior is punished much even in the long term. It's very hard to compete with Boeing so they can do pretty much anything they want if they would want to.
We're talking about incentives. Sky-high executive compensation packages don't encourage people to do a better job — they insulate them from failure, thereby disincentivizing them and encouraging them to go down the path of short-termism.
Incentives and punishments only matter for little people. With the rich and powerful, of course they'll do a good job because they simply like doing a good job.
... is apparently the argument.
I mean, see also: drug tests for the minimum wage workers, but the CEO? Of course not. Mere employees better not be moonlighting or doing anything else, but the CEO? On two other boards, "advising" a startup on the side, working on another part-time (also as CEO—their "executive assistant" at their 20-person startup actually runs the company)
Insulating CEOs and executive from failure is a good way to push them to take more risks, if that's what the board/shareholders want.
The issue with the 737MAX is that Boeing was too risk-averse: they should have made a brand new plane, but went with what they thought was the low-risk route with the 737 re-engine. The 787 disastrous development ($36B of deferred production costs I think) was certainly a huge cause of this.
it is unbelievable that the was MAX considered a low-risk in terms of selling planes, but ended up huge risk in technical perspective.
if they just stuck to evaluating technical risk first, and only then the risk of selling the plane - perhaps that route would have led them to developing a new completely plane.
Microsoft's board sure pulled off a winning strike with Nadella. From "almost IBM-dinosaur" to biggest market cap on Earth pretty much tied with Apple, and massively reversing public image from hated to just about liked by many. Huge win for Nadella. He sure loves what he does, money is besides the point.
But then again it's so obvious in his case, I mean I and probably many saw it coming — the man just does not operate at the same level, he's stellar you know, like the Jobs and Musks and Waltons of this world).
I have no hope for Boeing to recruit such a great man, I don't think that kind of business actually wants that. Imagine a Dorsey / Musk disruptor, pushing open standards, thinking of direct B2C, whatever... That just wouldn't fly with Boeing's board and mindset (oh pun so very much unintended yet so apt).
Why are you assuming that money is their only incentive?
It seems to me that if the promise of a golden parachute led to CEOs simply not caring if they do well or not, then there'd be no point in paying them well or trying to hire the best. Heck, there'd be no measure of "best", because all the candidates would just have a string of disasters behind them.
There's an S curve to the utility of money. Anyone who works at the kind of level that could become the CEO of a company like Boeing is already quite rich. So money alone isn't the incentive. But thinking of money as sole incentive is kind of characteristic for those of us who actually have to work for a living.
> Why are you assuming that money is their only incentive?
Why are you assuming that I think money is their only incentive?
I was replying to a comment contemplating that "the incentives may be correct now". The amount of money guaranteed to executives chasing short-termism provides a perverse incentive working against any desire to do their job well. There are multiple incentives, but they are not aligned.
> There's an S curve to the utility of money.
Seems to me that it's more like a bell curve, with the optimal center waaaay to the left of where it is today. Pay too much money and the temptation for CEOs to max out their own gains at the expense of the company's long term health rises.
> Chairman David Calhoun will take over as CEO and president, effective Jan. 13, the company said, adding that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the company.
If they wanted to restore my confidence, they’d have picked an engineer, not an accountant.
Yes, but a different one (they tend to be different despite of having the same degree).
Whatever made this one to deviate from the engineering focus the apparent story is still the suffering of engineering focus against business management focus.
For restoring confidence in engineering the act is not to fire engineers but to use good ones....
I mean, I wasn’t particularly down on Muilenburg, I’m aware of his credentials, but haven’t followed this Boeing story closely enough to have an opinion on his culpability with respect to the 737 MAX.
So yes, if they were going to replace the CEO for the optics, “someone like Dennis Muilenburg” would have been the best-case scenario for me, rather than someone with non-engineering background/specialty.
For a sports analogy, CEO shuffling is kinda like coach/GM shuffling of pro sports teams - they’re there to take the blame when things go wrong, but picking a CEO without a related background is like picking a new coach from a different sport.
I think Boeing's problems are related to leadership and having the courage to do the right thing. Good leaders can come from accountancy or engineering or wherever. We shouldn't be snobby about it and insist on an engineer when the issue at that level is not an engineering problem.
Yes, I agree! My problem is with the juxtaposition of the new CEO's background and the statement from Boeing that states only that the CEO change is to "restore confidence" rather than something like "ensure a rigorous, confidence-inspiring culture and processes from top to bottom". PR can't have its cake and eat it too.
You have to be an engineer to understand safety. We're talking about world-leading aerospace engineering, not producing some SaaS product. You need someone that understand the technology involved better than anyone else in the industry.
> You have to be an engineer to understand safety.
You're just restating the same thing without any actual arguments. Why do you need to be an engineer to understand safety? I don't know what magic training or experience do you think engineers get that nobody else does? And as I've already said, it looks to me that Boeing's chronic problems are leadership not technical. Get a leader in.
You have to be an engineer to understand safety. It should be abundantly clear what is meant by this. They're building aircraft. What do accountants know about building aircraft? Nothing, nothing at all. How can the buck stop with them? It can't. It has to stop somewhere lower, with an engineer, that understands safety. Unfortunately, a non-engineer won't know if their engineer underlings are A) Qualified or B) Competent.
You don’t need to be able to do your subordinates’ jobs in order to be able to lead or manage them or to take responsibility. In a big company like Boeing you can’t possibly know the job of all your subordinates so your elitism is never going to work.
How do you think for example the President of the United States effectively line manages people as diverse as defence and national parks without simultaneously being a soldier and a geographer? How do you think he judges qualification and competence of these people in globally significant safety jobs and how does he manage the buck stopping with him?
> If the last one was an engineer, why would another engineer restore your confidence any more?
He's probably talking more about mindset than educational and professional background.
You can have a leader with the mindset of an ornery engineering-first engineer. You can also have a leader who's an ex-engineer with the mindset of a business executive. There's a big difference between the two.
I personally do not know which of those categories Dennis Muilenburg fell into, though.
Good accountants know not only about the bottom line of the yearly budget, but also about how long-term risks work, too. As an software engineer, it's very seductive to bad-mouth other professions, especially the suits (MBAs, accountants and other "dirty money people"), but objectively speaking, there's nothing inherently bad or inferior about them.
Bean counters don't have any ability to understand if their reports are lying to them. If all their reports are saying "all systems go" and there isn't anyone doing any fact-checking, how can the organization be successful?
As others noted, Dennis Muilenburg is an aeronautical engineer who has been with the company since internship.
His predecessor, James McNerney, was a cost-cutting business leader who had no background in aviation. And it was his decision to do this program instead of creating an upgraded model.[1]
Which kind of makes this choice even more bizarre.
Because it will take on the order of 10 years. What are the 737 customers going to fly in the mean time? Keeping old airplanes flying longer isn't exactly increasing security either. And there is no indication so far, that a 737 MAX with a fixed MCAS isn't safe.
Don't get me wrong: I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP. But until it is done, there is a need for a current 737. And certainly, you don't want them to cut corners when developing the 737 successor...
> And there is no indication so far, that a 737 MAX with a fixed MCAS isn't safe.
At this point, that plane has no goodwill whatsoever left to it. The onus is on it proving that it's safe, not on its critics proving it's unsafe, because the only sensible assumption is that it's not safe and that Boeing does not and ill not self-regulate (big duh).
> I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP
They announced that back in 2014, and probably several times beforehand.
Issue is demand has seen Boeing push the 737 into 757 territory (years after the 757 got cancelled), it's not that they haven't created a 737 successor it's that their customers don't want a 737 successor, they want 737s so they can just buy the frames and put existing crew on the new plane without retraining.
That's what the 737 MAX is about, and why it's broken. It's the 4th generation of 737 (original, Classic, Next Generation) and the frame can't take it anymore, but 737s is what e.g. Southwest want, because that's literally the only thing they fly.
The 737 Max cost $3bn to develop and it's an iteration of an existing design. There's no "just" about developing an entirely new plane design from scratch.
The issue is it doesn't change the problem: the MAX programs exists for political and (lack of) ethical reasons: companies wedded to 737s (like Southwest) which want larger and more efficient planes without type change (without having to re-train crew). And rather than refuse to work on this, Boeing's management asserted they could do it, then left engineering to square the circle.
When Airbus released the A320neo , Boeing needed to get a comparable plane out ASAP or else cede several (tens of even) thousands of plane sales to Airbus over the next decade. There wasn't the time to design a whole new plane, so they pushed the design of the 1960s era 373 as far as they could go. The details of the "risky" changes to accommodate the larger engines (that significantly changed the planes aerodynamic profile) and attempts to compensate for that with MCAS are already documented elsewhere.
Keep in mind, there is a gold rush for new airlines right now. Africa/India/Asia are developing and are requiring thousands of planes to fill the demand (it's no coincidence Africa and Asia is where these new planes ended up crashing). If Airbus gobbled them up, they'd likely be airbus customers forever, as mixing plane types is more expensive for airlines.
I'm really glad to see that there is at least some type of corporate accountability going on for so many people dying. This probably should have happened sooner.
Quoting from the Code of Hammurabi (Ancient Babylon):
> If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
There's real accountability for you. Corporate accountability these days is a sick joke.
Specially since the actual people that was ultimately responsible for the things that happened is the Board of Directors.
Everybody here in Hacker News who has had some relation with a company board knows that the real decisions are done at the board level. The board is the one that ultimately decides the strategy to follow, whether to be pure profit seeking, quality seeking, etc.
The CEO can bring his humanity-responsible strategy to the quarterly meetings, but if the board does not agree, he is SOL. If this happens a lot with "cofounder CEOs" who have big chunks of company ownership, of course it also happens with a hired CEO, who has extremely little leverage with the board.
The Code of Hammurabi also had different punishments for the same crime depending on the wealth/social status of the victim. Some things don't really change.
Corporate accountability would mean finding the people who value profit above quality and removing them from positions of power. I doubt the engineer with a 34 year career at Boeing falls into that camp. He's a fall guy for the board who put him into an impossible position.
The problems with Boeing are systemic problems with the way corporations work and the economy is structured.
Mullenberg has been strongly criticized in part because he never accepted the buck stopping with him, didn't clean house, and acted as a mouthpiece, while saying nothing.
What people expect from Boeing is a gesture of humanity; an acceptance of culpability. An admission that something went wrong, and a genuine gesture of contrition and change.
The company culture needs a wholesale change, which means a hell of a lot more than the CEO need to be on their way out. Until you can rid Boeing of the taint of financial commoditization as a first order objective, Boeing is still going to suffer from a crisis of faith.
No one , or at least I don't, want to fly on a product of the "Boeing Corporation, stock ticker whatever". I want to fly on an aircraft made by the most committed people in the world to the challenge of designing and manufacturing the absolute best, most pilotable, most safe to be on, and most efficient/performant aerospace hardware in the world, all working under one group (if we take the over consolidation as a necessity in this day and age; I'm not personally sold on it). An engineering marvel built on human aspiration, commitment to good and safe work, and with profitability as an objective, but not an overriding principle. There needs to be a commitment to the nature of the endeavor as a physical struggle against the forces of Nature first and foremost, and an implicit understanding that the economic affairs of men must come secondary to the fulfillment of the requisite solution to the physical problems of aircraft making.
I know it's probably just a fiction in all likelyhood to expect all that. Some naive fantasy that I'm sure anyone whose run a business is shaking their head at. I'm not even sure I can wholeheartedly accept my own prioritization given the endless nature of the daily struggle with the balance sheet that is life, and the expectations placed on a publically traded company.
Alas, we have to accept that Boeing, and I think to a greater extent, any corporation should not be treated as primarily financial abstractions. We don't (or shouldn't be) running businesses just to make money. We should be out to solve physical problems first, with profitability keeping us from going overboard on the expenditure.
Sorry if this seems ranty. I always thought these ideas were a given; but the last few years have been real eye openers in terms of making clear that they are by no means universal, or at least universally applied.
Is the CEO being replaced with a competent aerospace engineer who has spent a career focused on safety and excellent design and testing?
> David Calhoun will take over as CEO and president
Ah this is the penny pinching accountant who was involved in the decision to try to avoid recertification to avoid training costs, and with a history of pulling similar stunts at GE which also lead to their troubles.
So, the worst possible man for the job was selected.
Wonder how many hundreds of millions he'll get as a "safety parachute". Lord only knows he was probably barely making ends meet and his kids wouldn't have Christmas without it!
> He opted out of his bonuses for 2019 and 2020 a few months ago. Looking at the Boeing 2019 shareholder voting information [2], he had a base pay of $1.7 million in 2018, and his retirement package seems to have totaled about $32.4 million. Tack another $6.6 million on if the board treats this as a layoff instead of a retirement. He may also be eligible for another $807,018 per year in retirement pay. See pp. 46-48 for details.
Boeing was still promising end of year FAA certification for 737 Max as recently as early December. Around that time, they had a spokesperson on CNBC who was asked directly how the outstanding steps (which indicated February at the earliest) aligned with their end of year statements and the position was essentially, 'we've been saying end of year and end of year could still happen.'
When your brand is suffering a crisis of confidence, you don't rebuild it by missing deadlines and dodging reality. The amount of hubris it takes to be so flippant in these circumstances is indicative of a deeply flawed corporate culture, and that falls at the feet of the CEO.
Also, how do you allow Starliner mission to occur without 100% confidence in ability of mission to be executed flawlessly? There are certainly complexities, but it almost seems like they passed the point when they could have quietly bumped the launch, and ended up in a literal PR gamble.
I am still a bit puzzled how cheerful some people seem about a product that was unable to fulfill its purpose: Starliner getting to its intended destination.
Seems like they cheer that it stayed in one piece at least. Not too promising.
>I am still a bit puzzled how cheerful some people seem about a product that was unable to fulfill its purpose: Starliner getting to its intended destination.
Calling a space capsule a product and treating it like some kind of tech product launch and framing it's success that way is weird. It's a spacecraft and the mission was meant to test its capabilities and get data about it during an actual orbital flight, then go from there.
The reason everyone is trying to be so cheerful and optimistic is because it was a partial success - the capsule stayed together and landed, which were part of its mission parameters. But (clearly) the public perception of this mission is that it failed because it didn't get to the ISS, so I imagine people are trying to be cheerful to remind people that they're not upset cause they didn't fail, they just didn't fully succeed.
I'm no fan of Boeing or how they've handled 787 MAX or ULA or Starliner or their relationship with NASA, but calling this not too promising is a bit unfair.
It failed for essentially trivial reasons. Which suggests there are issues with the procedures that should eliminate those failures, and that similar failure modes are possible.
That's why it's not encouraging - and why it's not at all unfair to be scathing.
We launched the ISS over 20 years ago. If you look 20 years down the road from Kitty Hawk, we had already built tens of thousands of manned aircraft and fought a world war with them at that point in time.
Apparently, 20 years of progress and "promise" ain't what it used to be.
I think it's because it's a lot easier to go fast when there are huge potential rewards (winning a World War) and you're willing to accept fatalities (war). The rewards here are much more nebulous, and we're not willing to accept fatalities. So we go slow and careful.
I’m not at all puzzled that a bunch of people commenting in a hacker forum don’t understand very much about engineering like this. Astronautical and aeronautical engineering are difficult. The fact that we’ve been in space 50-odd years doesn’t mean we’ve perfected anything to the point where we should expect a flawless mission on the first go even for something like this.
Maybe not even in software, but procedures. Still, this is common. A big share of space failures are, on some level, failures of software and procedures.
The Starliner mission was a test. You wouldn't have 100% confidence that a test would be executed flawlessly. The purpose of the test is to find flaws in the system, and that's exactly what they did.
Doing the tests is fine, but Boeing is acting as though the tests were successful when they were not. Between this and the parachute issues from the pad abort test, I think actually approving Starliner for crewed use would constitute normalization of deviance. This is historically how astronauts die.
They were partially successful, which is a realistic goal. Few things work flawlessly the first or second go, even rocket science. I'm not sure why you're being so binary here. It's also why it wasn't manned, they have to test to work out the kinks. Overall Starliner was a bigger success than not.
Reminds me of the news coverage of SpaceX’s first landing attempts, where they crashed into the barge and exploded and everyone was like “it’s a failure, it will never work”. Yeah but so much went right.
I think it’s just the (well deserved) media narrative Boeing is in now. When you kill hundreds of people and then pretend it wasn’t your fault, you get what’s coming to you.
The obvious difference is that SpaceX's landings were secondary objectives and something that nobody had ever done before. Getting in the proper orbit to the ISS was a primary objective for Starliner and something we've been doing for 20 years.
These are known engineering problems with known engineering solutions. The explanation from Boeing was that a timer was set incorrectly. This sounds like a trivial error to me (though I'm not a "rocket scientist" just a "kerbal scientist", I guess, but we've been using timers for a long time afaik to properly manage burns to orbit).
The procedures and how software systems handle changes to launch time are members of the set of hundreds of thousands of choices made during design and implementation that need to be validated. Yes, they feel like a "silly mistake" but ultimately most things that lead to failure will be in that category.
Or, in other words, getting to space is hard because it requires millions of opportunities for silly mistakes.
Most complex engineering projects are hard not because of one thing, but because of the mind-bogglingly large number of things that must all be done correctly.
(1 - x) ^ y, where x is the chance of each small mistake and y is the total number of opportunities, doesn't need a very large x, if y is large enough, for things to start looking dicey.
Yeah, this is a key insight, and something I didn't learn as a software developer with many years of experience until I studied probability formally. Maybe these days this is better known. This is also known as the inclusion-exclusion principal and can be used to model failure probability.
Thanks for the term! That's combinatorics, so I probably should have remembered it. :/
There are a lot of things I'd love to know the accepted name for, as I came into understanding through the backdoor. I regret that my college CS track didn't include more borrow-courses from physical engineering on reliability (and control theory). So many valuable, applicable lessons.
Let's take a moment to consider the fact that apparently the MCAS uses input from only one of the two AoA sensors on a 737 MAX and swaps which one it takes the data from after each flight. I can't grasp how everyone involved could fail to realize that this statistically makes it less safe than only having one sensor.
I don't know how much the systemic issues that clearly compromised the design of the plane extend to the design of the capsule, but trivals errors seem to be very possible.
Of course they realize it makes it statistically less reliable. I think the gap is it becomes much more difficult to assess the probability of failure between different systems. In the case of MCAS, they already had the ability to override it. In complex systems one domain may think a simple mitigation is sufficient (e.g., the pilot can override MCAS) without understanding the layering of other issues (e.g., human factors like complex controls, lack of training etc.) Meaning from the standpoint of a single domain, that simple mitigation maybe incorrectly be assumed to bring the risk probability into a reasonable range.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the process failures like lack of communication between domains rather than acquiesce to simple conclusions that are more clear only in hindsight.
> I can't grasp how everyone involved could fail to realize that this statistically makes it less safe than only having one sensor.
This design is bad, but it makes sense as a update of the 737. The flight computer setup is each pilot gets a computer under their chair, each computer gets its own set of sensors and the computers take turns each flight. The flight computer is generally safe (i don't think it's been implicated in any crashes?), but that's because in case of issues in flight, the system usually will disengage and alert the pilot, or if the system takes poor actions, it will disengage when the pilot opposes it, or the pilot will disengage it.
Adding MCAS to the flight computer makes sense, the flight computer needs to be aware of it. It's understandable, but negligent, to add a new feature to the computer without considering the original design. The problem comes in when MCAS was not disclosed to pilots, doesn't disengage on errors, doesn't disengage when pilot input opposes it (partially by design), and can't be disabled except by disabling electric trim, which is more or less needed to recover from the error condition MCAS puts the plane into.
I think this is fixable, but the public information on the current fix doesn't include being able to turn MCAS off, so it doesn't seem like they've really done enough.
After SpaceX's failures, lots of people were saying things like "This is why they test— if you're not occassionally failing, you're not pushing the limits enough".
I would guess that at least in part the difference in attitudes is because SpaceX is considered more startup-y and Boeing is more associated with the "failure is not an option" ethos.
SpaceX still put satellites in orbit. From what I understood, SpaceX tests the entire software where they simulate launches. Something such as different timers should've been caught already.
Anyway, I do not care too much about pointing fingers elsewhere. The parachute thing was quite embarrassing and IMO this problem should have been prevented as well.
Boeing still put a capsule in orbit too. And I actually saw those excuses I'm referring to when the BFR prototype blew its lid, which didn't involved even a partially successful mission. Similar things were also said when the Crew Dragon blew up on the ground.
Regardless, testing all of the flight software is certainly not exclusive to SpaceX. I would bet any amount of money that Boeing also tested their software and performed simulated launches, moreover that testing is probably mandated by their contract with NASA. My uninformed guess is that one of two things happened:
1. Their tests were incomplete. e.g. they didn't find some edge case that would cause problems when the T-0 changed.
2. Someone goofed the procedures on the day of launch and didn't update their configuration properly.
That negative messaging was driven by ULA in a desperate bid to close the door on their new competitor. If they could kill off enough contracts, SpaceX might have run out of runway before they established their business model.
It's easy to be indirectly involved in something like that. Your PR finds outside experts that agree with your world view, because journalists often ask you where they can find independent validation of your claims.
Then when something like this happens, you can have your PR call up journalists they know and suggest a name or two that is likely to say what you'd hope for.
A significant share of the blame for the crashes accrues to the pilots who did not remember/follow emergency procedures for runaway trim. There was also the LA problem of putting an airplane back into service despite the critical malfunction on the earlier flight.
To reiterate, the procedure is:
1. restore trim to normal with the electric thumb switches
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
The problem with this standpoint is that procedural fixes are the least preferable way of managing a hazardous condition. Engineering the hazard away is almost always the better option with procedural mitigation’s being a last resort. If engineering fixes were available and unused its indicative of poor safety engineering practices
I don’t disagree but there are clear hierarchical criteria on how these hazards should be addressed. The reason behind engineering mitigation being favored is because they make the less reliable procedural mitigations moot (I.e., they improve the overall reliability by removing one of the points of failure, in this case the pilot). Forgoing engineering mitigations in favor of procedural fixes goes against good engineering practice at best and is a cheap, lazy fix at worst.
I can understand if the AD was intended as a short term fix but I would question the rationale if it were considered a long term solution
> I can understand if the AD was intended as a short term fix but I would question the rationale if it were considered a long term solution
It was not, Boeing at the time was working on a solution.
Regardless, however, the pilots MUST know how to deal with runaway trim. This was true before MCAS, and is true after. It was true on the 757 (I spend 3 years working on the design of the 757 stab trim system). The cutoff switches are prominently within easy reach on the center console for very good reason, 40 years before MCAS.
It is not acceptable that pilots were unaware of the cutoff switches. It is unacceptable that MAX pilots did not read, understand, and remember the Airworthiness Directive sent to all MAX crews.
Similarly, airplane engineers work hard to keep the airplane from catching fire. But pilots also MUST learn to properly use the airplane's fire suppression systems. Most of pilot training consists of learning emergency procedures.
It's why airplanes still have pilots, instead of using automation instead.
Boeing still deserves blame for the flawed MCAS implementation. But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with.
But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with
I don’t necessarily disagree with this either, but it does come across as if we’re being distracted by proximate causes rather than focusing on the root cause. To someone on the outside, it sure seems like there are deeper engineering and cultural problems that deserve a greater priority at this point. Not to belabor the point, but simply issuing a procedural AD doesn’t appear to address the root causes and should just be a stop gap measure
Put another way, would you want to board an airplane where the pilot did not take EMERGENCY instructions seriously? I wouldn't.
> distracted
Pretty much 100% of the popular media (and its repeated appearances on HN) has been on the MCAS design shortcomings. Which distract from dealing with the other causes of the accidents.
As I mentioned previously, the AD was issued as a stopgap measure while Boeing worked on an MCAS fix.
I think we're miscommunicating what is meant by "procedural" vs. "engineering" mitigation.
Procedural is meant as an administrative action as opposed to a designed engineering action.
Think of a hazardous system that has software involved with controlling a pressure hazard. A procedural mitigation may be to have an operator monitor system pressure and push a non-software shut-off emergency button if the system overpressurizes. Even though it's an emergency, it's still a procedural mitigation. An engineering mitigation, on the other hand, may have mechanical pressure relief devices in place to mitigate the hazard. Whether or not it's an "emergency" just relates to the severity and time criticality of the hazard, not the mechanism of mitigation.
In safety design the hierarchy of hazard control preference is generally engineering controls, followed by procedural controls, followed by PPE as the least desirable control scheme.
Which distract from dealing with the other causes of the accidents.
One of the common flaws in mishap investigation is jumping to “solving” proximate causes at the expense of finding the root cause. This is applicable to MCAS as well if that isn’t the root cause (although my hunch is MCAS will be closer to the root issue than pilot actions). As long as people aren’t pointing to the AD as the “fix” I think there’s not a problem with it being an interim measure
It is not acceptable that pilots were unaware of the cutoff switches. It is unacceptable that MAX pilots did not read, understand, and remember the Airworthiness Directive sent to all MAX crews.
The Ethiopian crew tried the cutout switches and found they couldn't trim the airplane with the hand cranks because Boeing lied. How is that a pilot training issue?
But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with.
A Boeing employee concern trolling over pilot training is pretty rich considering that Boeing knowingly hid crucial details from pilots.
> The Ethiopian crew tried the cutout switches and found they couldn't trim the airplane with the hand cranks because Boeing lied. How is that a pilot training issue?
The Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX crews says:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT.
If the graphs are to be believed neither the electric commands nor hand crank were able to move the stabilizer. Again, how is that a pilot training issue?
Graphs of the FDR data from the (preliminary) accident reports. The Ethiopian authorities even annotated theirs with things like "automatic trim command with no change in pitch trim". You can see quite plainly the stabilizer was not moving as intended.
2. try to use the hand cranks to trim to normal
Per Boeing's documentation this should've worked. Unfortunately Boeing's documentation is mostly wishful thinking. Boeing's also suggested that a pilot try unloading the stabilizer with a roller coaster type maneuver. Unfortunately Boeing removed detailed instructions on this maneuver decades ago and the FAA's already demonstrated that with the altitude that the Ethiopian crew had, unloading the stabilizer would've just flown the plane into the ground.
There's a reason Boeing's largely backed off of the whole pilot error nonsense: the 737 MAX crashed due to shitty design not pilot error.
The way to make things safe is to address ALL points in the zipper that led to the accident. That includes the pilot error aspects.
So how do you propose training against an unfinished product? Boeing still hasn't given the FAA a completed software package to evaluate. At the time of the 737 MAX crashes there were, what? two? 737 MAX simulators, and none of them emulated MCAS or even the forces required to crank the stabilizer manually.
One Lion Air flight got lucky because they had a third set of eyes that could spend time going through reams of documentation.
To even begin discussing pilot "error" is disingenuous when the pilots weren't informed or trained on new 737 MAX behavior. MCAS activation is not, and was not, a runaway stabilizer situation.
> MCAS activation is not, and was not, a runaway stabilizer situation.
It presented as a runaway stab trim. Repeatedly coming on and driving the nose down is runaway trim. No two ways about it. And the usual, standard, runaway trim procedure would stop it.
> they had a third set of eyes that could spend time going through reams of documentation
From my reading of that incident, nothing of the sort happened. The 3rd pilot simply reached forward and flipped off the cutoff switches. The crew landed safely and went on with their day. Nobody bothered to inform the next crew flying that same airplane.
It presented as a runaway stab trim. Repeatedly coming on and driving the nose down is runaway trim. No two ways about it.
No, it didn't. From the latest QRH:
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
Well that's not met as MCAS doesn't run continuously. By design it stops periodically. Put it another way. You're arguing semantics while the 737 MAX remains a smoldering pile of aluminum and hubris.
2.) Control airplane pitch attitude manually with control column and main electric trim as required.
4.) If the runaway stops after the autopilot is disengaged ....
MCAS also stops after the trim switches are hit. So, again MCAS activation is not a runaway trim condition.
From my reading of that incident, nothing of the sort happened. The 3rd pilot simply reached forward and flipped off the cutoff switches.
Reread the report. The third pilot went back into the cabin to fetch reading material.
Trying to argue that the trim system erratically coming on and driving the nose down is not "runaway trim" is arguing semantics. Runaway trim is when the trim is doing something dangerous without command from the pilot.
If the cockpit voice recorder reveals them discussing the definition of "runaway trim" and deciding that the instructions Boeing provided didn't apply, I'd be surprised and interested.
> MCAS also stops after the trim switches are hit.
Exactly, the trim switches override the MCAS. That's why you use the trim switches to set it back to normal, then hit the cutoff switches. That's what the Emergency Airworthiness Directive says to do.
> Reread the report.
I haven't read that anywhere. I don't know what report that is. Reference, please.
So here's some context. Boeing installed known not-to-spec structural components on the NG. Boeing installed known to fail prematurely slat tracks on the NG and 737 MAX. Boeing installed (probably known) not-to-spec pickle forks in the NG and 737 MAX. Boeing falsified repair documentation for an Air Canada 787. Oh, and of course, Boeing hid any mention of MCAS. Point being Boeing doesn't have a lot of credibility left.
With that in mind:
Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT.
As the Ethiopian crew found out: it can't. The larger instruments of the NG required the hand cranks to shrink while the stabilizer itself grew. With the resulting lower mechanical advantage and increase in force required to move the stab itself the wheels became unusable. Sure, the Ethiopian crew went over the "maximum" speed but they were still under the max diving speed (Vd). That means the cranks were supposed to work.
It works because the first incident of MCAS failure (Lion Air) was safely dealt with by doing just this.
It worked because the first crew got lucky and had a third set of eyes that was free to dig through everything in search of a best guess.
Whatever you read about that is simply wrong. (I've seen a LOT of misinformation in popular print about this.) You're correct that the hand cranks were unusable. But the electric thumb switches WERE usable and were pointed out in the AD.
Note that the crews of BOTH the LA and EA crashes had already used the thumb switches to restore normal trim, the LA crew did so 25 times.
> best guess
No guessing required. Follow the training, which is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning they weren't supposed to need to consult a checklist nor dig through anything nor guess.
I am not a pilot, but I would not consider myself fit to fly unless I knew by memory what every single switch in the cockpit does, ESPECIALLY the ones prominently located within easy reach. You can bet it's not the infotainment system.
For damn sure I would read every Emergency Airworthiness Directive for the airplane I'm the pilot of, most especially one issued in response to a crash.
Whatever you read about that is simply wrong. (I've seen a LOT of misinformation in popular print about this.) You're correct that the hand cranks were unusable. But the electric thumb switches WERE usable and were pointed out in the AD.
And if you enable the electric trim switches on a 737 MAX you get MCAS activation. MCAS, of course, trims faster than the switches. Using the electric switches is fighting a losing battle (look at the graphs of trim input vs output). How are you supposed to fly the plane when you can't trim the stabilizer?
Look at the graphs from the Indonesian report. The pilots were countering with trim up button presses and MCAS still managed to take the trim to a severe AND position.
Look at the graphs from the Ethiopian report. You'll see a long gap where the electric trim was disabled (leaving the pilots with no way to trim the stabilizer). Outside that gap you'll see an automatic (MCAS) AND command with no change in trim and a couple ANU clicks from the pilots with no resulting change in trim.
No guessing required. Follow the training, which is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning they weren't supposed to need to consult a checklist nor dig through anything nor guess.
And what memory items were they supposed to have in mind? Keeping in mind MCAS presented counter to how Boeing defines runaway trim.
They pause MCAS but do not disable or override it it. The trim switches move the stabilizer slower than MCAS activation thus as seen by the Ethiopian and Lion Air crews using the electric trim switches is tantamount to fighting a losing batle.
1. use the electric trim switches to set the trim to normal
What happens when the electric trim switches don't work? They didn't in the Ethiopian crash.
runaway trim does not need definition, Boeing does not define it.
Sure they do, it's in the QRH plain as day.
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
MCAS activation isn't continuous, especially not if you're pausing it with the trim switches.
I"m not completely sure that's the case (and to be fair, I've not been following Starliner closely, so could well be wrong).
There are tests to prove out ideas during the course of development, but then there are tests which would perhaps be more accurately called "demonstrations"; where you're not trying to find flaws and refine your designs, but rather prove that you're [insert thing-name you're proving here] actually works the way you are representing it to work.
I understood this test to be more in the demonstration category, where Boeing would/should have had very high confidence, but they needed to prove to NASA that their spacecraft worked as advertised. If that's true, it was almost more a test on how much NASA should trust the confidence of the Boeing team than it was a test engineering and manufacture.
If that wasn't the character of the test, then I apologize for the distraction.
You're thinking of test, as in pilot. Everyone else is thinking of test, as in drive. I mean there are dramatically different expectations of what you, Boeing, and the public is supposed to believe what happened.
The article in the Washington Post hinted that NASA might not require them to pass this particular test (automated approach to the ISS and docking).
"It was unclear whether NASA would require Boeing to fly another test mission without crews onboard before allowing its astronauts to fly in the Starliner. Bridenstine said he wouldn’t rule out a mission with crews onboard, pointing out that the space shuttle had been piloted by astronauts, not computers."[0]
While Boeing makes noises about how there's no systemic problem with their ability to write software in general, earlier in the same article NASA comes to their defense by pointing out that if the craft was manned then the test would have been... saved? That seems strong to me but that is word used in the quote.
"NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a news conference Friday that the failure would not have been life-threatening had astronauts been onboard. He said that had the spacecraft been crewed, the mission might have been saved. “They are trained to deal with a situation where the automation is not working according to plan,” he said."
During the post-event interview it was asked if testing docking was a hard requirement for NASA (with the implication the test would have to be redone before acceptance). The answer was no. If NASA wants this to be a new requirement they would likely have to pay extra for it
This is akin to saying the US Vanguard TV3 launch was a test. Yeah, it was, but it was also a response to their competitor having launched first and better, and a catastrophic failure blows up confidence in your programme.
At this point, management probably cannot get good information about the state of projects.
When a company creates a culture of sweeping problems under the rug, and then tries to go back and change that, it creates an impossible situation for people at all levels of the hierarchy. Where management once told people it was OK to hide things from them, now they've changed the rules and are telling them, hey, show us all the things we told you we didn't want to know about.
First of all, when you're told this, you have no way of knowing if they really mean it. Are they saying, hey, actually show us the dirt so we can deal with it? Or are they saying, hey, show us the dirt WINK WINK, but we want the answer to be that nothing too bad happened because that's the easy way out? (In other words, you have to judge whether they've had a sincere change of heart or you're playing a new phase of the same game as before.)
But even if you really believe them, now you have a difficult calculation to make. Maybe you will reveal some dirt and they will say, wait a second, we meant for you to hide dirt, but not dirt that was that bad, and that's your fault, and you were supposed to know that. And now you're in trouble for telling the truth. Unless management offers you complete immunity (if that's even possible), you still have a reason to keep hiding stuff to protect yourself.
TLDR, if your organization made sure everybody's closets are full of skeletons, then you're going to have a hard time getting people to open those closet doors.
This is why whistleblower protections are so important. Without a radical re-org, there will still be enough management within the company that prefers to cover things up. They might well have been hired for that skill.
The other side of this coin is it not good enough to just identify problems.
There is also the need for an organisation wide culture built on processes, procedures and channels that then enables the company to quickly and efficiently find solutions to these kind of problems.
When a company for a long time has being building a culture of ignoring problems, the effort required to rebuild that problem solving culture is massive.
It is not helped by the fact that the individuals holding the power at the different levels within the organisation tend to be the ones who oversaw the demise of that engineering culture in the first place.
It really is a shame that it takes the deaths of hundreds to even budge the needle on getting back to being an engineering company rather than profit is #1 company and quality a distant 3rd. They should be ashamed to not have started from scratch on a new optimized plane design because they literally sell their planes for DECADES and almost have a captive market. Quarterly earnings focused governance killed those people as surely as faulty design.
Yup, every pilot I know, even if they will never fly one, now knows what to do. None of them express any reservation other than the way flight control software is headed.
The FAA just did a simulator test and more than half of the pilots failed to follow the intended procedures in case of failure. These pilots were specifically trained on the 737, and know they're participating in a trial. I think I'll stay clear!
You realise that the Ethiopian pilot also 'knew what to do' and was still vapourised? Knowing what to do is insufficient if the computer is trying its hardest to kill you.
I'm sure they have neutered the software enough that it is much harder for it to kill you when it comes back, but the fact that MCAS still exists and is operational should put at least half a twist in your stomach when you get on one of these things. Any less is bravado.
I doesn't matter. Aircraft is a dualopily right now, and I don't see anything changing that (Airbus/Boeing).
If I recall Boeing asks the US to tariff Bombardiers aircraft (300%?)[1] that pushed a potential competitor (Bombardier) to work with Airbus (The Airbus 220 is a Bombardier design).
I worked in defense as a boeing sub. Boeing was the prime on radars and all manner of defense contracts that will keep them afloat (defense industry is another not very competetive one..).
Afloat, yes. But I don't think Boeing is at all guaranteed at getting international business, at least not on the scale they did before, if they don't do some brutal but effective restructuring of their corporate culture. They could easily end up shut out of international airliner business indefinitely, if they keep screwing up in the way they have been so far.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 382 ms ] threadNo question at this point that he needed to be replaced. The question is - why didn't the board act sooner?
[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/18/boeings-misplac...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/business/boeing-dennis-mu...
They sure look being a 'reliable' and 'competent' gang now.
Most likely some PR firm working for Boeing fed some hints to the the Times.
Boeing then waited until it was released to have a coordinated PR push and put as much blame as possible on Muilenburg.
And the board looks horrible, slow to act, behind the curve, reacting to external pressure instead of leading. So it would not be in the board's interest to do a "coordinated PR push" and fire Muilenburg after the stories were published.
It's a bad look, because Boeing is consistently way too late to recognize what is obvious to those of us watching from home.
I continue to be astounded that our most senior leaders will not act in the long-term best interest of the organizations they lead.
It's been 37 years since the Tylenol crisis, where seven people in Chicago died after someone tampered with the pain reliever and contaminated it with potassium cyanide.
Way back then, Johnson & Johnson did far more than they were required to do. They pulled all Tylenol from all store shelves everywhere, and kept it off the market until they completely redesigned the packaging. They took complete responsibility. They over-communicated with regulators and with the public. Their market share plunged from 35% to 8% and they took a huge financial hit.
But what was bad for J&J in the short term was fantastically positive in the long term. Their brand recovered, stronger than ever, and they regained their dominant market share.
But today, leaders across the public and private sectors rarely act with this kind of understanding and foresight. Muilenburg downplayed the catastrophes, blamed the pilots, pressured regulators, tried to find cheap shortcuts to fix the problem, and made promises to suppliers and customers he couldn't keep.
So often what's best in the immediate term is worst for the long term. Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost?
If America stayed home in World War 2, how do you know the Allies wouldn't have won anyway?
Though any speculation we have there is just that - pure speculation.
> Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost?
I'm not sure it's so simple. At the head of the Boeing bureaucracy, Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs. He was ineffective because he accepted it and pushed it outward - to the board and the wider public - rather than challenging it and getting to the bottom of the crisis. Internally challenging the members of your organization during a crisis is incredibly politically difficult to pull off and has little to do with short-term vs. long-term perspectives. Of course, someone with his experience and compensation, working at his level, should be able to pull it off. He didn't.
I'm sure in 1982, the Johnson & Johnson CEO was also "being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs".
That's how big organizations work.
But in 1982, J&J leadership could see beyond that, cut through the noise, push back on short-sighted recommendations, and do the right thing for the company in the long term.
My question is why we rarely see "enlightened self-interest" like this today.
From Boeing to Facebook, Wells Fargo to Uber, it's hard to think of companies that do the right thing in difficult situations, even when that would be in the company's own long-term best interest.
This is not necessarily a given. In the Tylenol case an external saboteur was to blame, so little or no internal CYA was necessary. Easy and correct for everyone to just blame it on the saboteur and then do the right thing to fix the problem.
In the Boeing case the culprit was internal, which likely resulted in a tangled web of CYA, leading to a diet of wrong and horrible information.
Not excusing Boeing, they acted wrongly. But it’s clear how and why the odds of bad corporate behavior were much higher in Boeing’s case than in J&J’s case.
If J&J had behaved like Boeing, they would have blamed the saboteur, blamed law enforcement, and blamed retailers while gradually and secretly fixing the packaging problem before regulators could force them to do it.
If Boeing had behaved like J&J, they would have taken immediate responsibility, voluntarily grounded the entire fleet even before all the causes were known, and put passenger safety first.
Do you have a citation for that? I don't doubt it's possible but I've never heard it. As far as I know no major pain medications had tamper resistant seals at that point in history.
I've read a lot about this (being from Chicago myself) and do not believe you're representing it correctly. J&J took responsibility insomuch as they pioneered tamper resistant packaging, but they very clearly blamed a saboteur. The initial allegation was that Tylenol was unsafe. J&J successfully re-spun it, correctly, as an external terrorist poisoning their medication. And, to their credit, they did a great job making future Tylenol very safe.
But the bottom line is that these two incidents are very different. In J&J's case they were not at fault. In Boeing's case they were.
Info taken from https://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/dodjcc/groups/02C2/Johnson%20&%2...
Your job as CEO, or any leader of a large organization civilian or military, is to ferret out when you're being fed loads of BS. It's frustrating because Muilenberg was a engineer and started there as an intern in the 80s, so he at least should have some domain expertise in what the problems were. Perhaps him being a "company man" in this case was a hindrance, or conflicted with the new culture at Boeing that is, apparently, run by MBAs concerned with quarterly profits. In either case, he needed to go as this failure happened on his watch.
I get where you are coming from, but I would reframe it as "Your job as a CEO is to create a culture with integrity and transparency"
It is also pretty clear that a time of crisis is the time that your true corporate culture manifests, it seems that the culture at Boeing is not long on integrity or transparency.
I think it may be too early to claim this. I think we can only judge these companies' well-being (especially with respect to their recent controversies) on a medium- to long-term scale.
I've banked at Wells Fargo since 2013, and I intend to close my 2 WF accounts and open up new ones at Chase soon. If I could remove my information from Equifax or another credit bureau, I would. By all standards, these companies are "doing just fine" at present. But what about 5 years from now, 15 years from now? The damage to a companies' reputation and the impact it has on consumer decision-making can be slow-moving and hard to notice/quantify.
you're just moving from one crappy, uncaring bank to another (i've banked at both in the past). a credit union or local/regional bank will treat you like a real human rather than a necessary inconvenience: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/reviews/
you don't get good customer service (via phone or otherwise) at a big bank, as they see it as a cost center to be minimized. smaller banks use good service as a differentiator/product enhancement.
but yes, international charges can vary a bit.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/johnson-johnson-baby-powder...
it's disappointing and frustrating, but not all that surprising, given the decades of eroding honor, responsibility, and governance (both corporate and political) of large companies and their senior managers.
i'm more appalled that we tolerate obviously poor incentive structures that implicitly endorse such behavior.
compensation for senior managers should be better tied to long-term results, and punishments should more easily pierce the corporate veil.
(and whew, glad i covered that tylenol case in my mba program... would not have looked forward to asking for a refund! =)
I’m no fan of Boeing but the truth is, betting your entire business requires a much higher burden of proof than journalism does.
This is totally wrong. The New York Times depends on its reputation for accuracy.
Which, to me at least, is a perfectly legitimate thing for a newspaper to do. Yes, they should check facts and vet sources, but their primary responsibility is to do the best they can and get the information out there for the public.
Their record of accuracy has suffered quite a bit in the past few years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
That's not reflecting reality at all. In a big enough company you don't really decide, you do both. Alternatively, you choose all three of the options. There's often no reason to fully go for one thing. This as in a big enough company there's enough resources that someone somewhere else does something else, likely the opposite of some other decision.
Eventually something will fail, or it'll succeed. The things which succeed will hopefully be implemented everywhere.
Anyone have a link to this statement?
"The Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders. " is quite brutal indeed, more something I'd expect from commentary.
Management doesn’t get anything “done”. Their job is to faithfully represent the interests of the managers above them. Maintaining good terms with their superiors is their only actual job. Everything else can be going to shit and as long as their superior feels they are faithfully representing their will, then that lower level manager is in good standing. In fact being in an inferno of chaos and still continuing to represent the interests of your superior, over the cries of the ICs, that is truly star-level manager performance.
As a side note, this is why managers don’t have employment protections (right to organize, etc). Their job is not to work, but to represent the company. In an important way they are not producing labor.
For someone like that, it’s actually crucial to leave on good terms. Especially the closer you get to the billionaire class, the circles get smaller and smaller, and it’s your ability to maintain good feelings with other people in that class that determines your ability to get future work.
So, the company can be failing... that’s fine. It’s important to management personnel that they leave with a kind word, because otherwise it meant they stopped doing their one job.
Prior Boeing CEO’s severance package seemed like ~$12M plus over $3M/yr for life. With that level of severance, I don’t need a good recommendation for my next job as there won’t be one...
When its top-down only, something's unhealthy.
For most of us, severance pay is maybe enough to cover basic living expenses at a lower quality of life for a few months. A difference of that magnitude definitely deserves its own jargon.
> A difference of that magnitude...
This neatly highlights the problem with claiming this is somehow objective: what magnitude, and why? And how is your judgement here objective?
It's pretty rare that the press release explicitely says the board ousted the CEO.
Richard Smith said, "Serving as CEO of Equifax has been an honor, and I'm indebted to the 10,000 Equifax employees who have dedicated their lives to making this a better company.
"The cybersecurity incident has affected millions of consumers, and I have been completely dedicated to making this right. At this critical juncture, I believe it is in the best interests of the company to have new leadership to move the company forward," Smith added.
"On behalf of the Board, I express my appreciation to Rick for his 12 years of leadership," Feidler said. "Equifax is a substantially stronger company than it was 12 years ago. At this time, however, the Board and Rick agree that a change of leadership is in order."
https://investor.equifax.com/news-and-events/news/2017/09-26...
- Equifax PR - sentiment score: +25.7
- Boeing PR - sentiment score: -100 (!!):
"The Board of Directors decided ... to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders"
https://www.danielsoper.com/sentimentanalysis/default.aspx
https://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/corporate-govern....
These are their background.
Biotech
Private equity
Medical device
Former chief of staff
Energy
US ambassador
Former airline ceo
Us ambassador
Insurance head
Chief of navy
Former us trade rep
Health insurance head
Advisor to blackstone, GE head
I suppose, but if more people die because of the now well-known management failures at Boeing continue, their deaths will be even more unnecessary.
I'm betting we'll see a huge write down when the new CEO takes over, that way they can push as much blame as possible on the old regime and move forward with a clean-ish slate.
If the 787 recovers eventually, it's a windfall and the new CEO looks like a hero for implementing revolutionary change.
And well, if they'd pick some lower manager the critique would be the same. And if they pick an outsider the critique would be about them not understanding the business ... critique is always the easy part.
I mean, that's just one possible situation where someone coming from the board won't necessarily be more of the same, but I don't know why we should assume the board acts of one mind. That seems really unlikely to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os
https://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/boeing787/2014/09/i...
Reminds me of the HBO show Succession. I'm sure they had very similar discussions.
Being a public company CEO is a near-impossible job with so much out of your control, so I wouldn't say "down in flames". His legacy is tarnished, but the public has a short-term memory about these things.
Muilenberg became CEO 18 years after the merger. I wouldn't expect him to exemplify Boeing's old culture. It was also only 6 months before the first 737 MAX flight.
His lineage is in the Boeing culture, not the McDonnell Douglas culture.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again...
tl;dr engineers vs. accountants
Not convinced Boeing have learnt their lesson.
1. Drive MCAS with only one AOA sensor.
2. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements.
3. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights.
4. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all.
5. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data.
6. Give MCAS a ridiculous amount of control authority, operating cumulatively over repeated applications to exceed what the pilot can manually override.
7. Change how the trim stab switch has been wired since 1966 and not tell pilots.
It’s not the accounts or union stewards that should be facing criminal charges, it’s the engineers. At a minimum, any PEs should be yanked.
Can you point to where in the PE Code of Ethics it says that cutting corners due to "pressure to deliver" is okay? The whole purpose of the PE designation is to avoid circumstances like that.
https://www.enr.com/articles/38400-why-engineers-must-rememb...
“Many false theories persist about the cause of this fatal collapse. The failure was not due to poor workmanship, shoddy materials, a rushed schedule, swaying from dancing, “harmonic vibrations” from the music, poor contractor communication or design changes that did not receive proper review.
As documented in the official investigation report, two professional engineers issued sealed design drawings without performing critical calculations to determine whether sufficient load capacity existed.”
HackerNews, generally, has a hate on for "business people", who are seen as evil, ne'er-do-wells, while the "engineers" are innocent employees, merely following orders.
I think it's because most people here see themselves as the engineer type, and this mindset allows them to feel better about the work they're doing, be it emissions scandals, ad-tech, building the surveillance state apparatus or phony medical devices: "don't blame me, I'm just following orders!"
These are not the typical engineering biased organization if you ask me... but still they put very strong blame on the organizational and company culture changes created by 'accountants' allowing ineffective and in many cases oppressed situations, leading to repeated disasters!
Do not try to misdirect this very serious story into primitive occupation bias please!
The fact that MCAS was required was not a failure to design a safe plane. Rather it was a failure to make the plane behave like the 737.
Sounds like the typical stupid idea suggested by a marketer or accountant that engineers beg and plead not to do.
Frankly, the whole thing reeks of profit at the expense of engineering, safety, and security.
It sounds like we need to find out who that person was and arrest them.
Engineers told to "make it happen" while all safety backdrops they have get undermined by from the top business mandates end up having to make bad decisions.
I'll accept that the engineers involved had the chance too say no. I won't, however, accept the assertion the business/sales people do not share some level of blame for not realizing that they were making impossible demands, and that the resistance from engineering was not just something to be worked around by busting the union, or misleading customers and regulators.
So in short: all of those were caused by the accountants....
“One of the people familiar with MCAS’s evolution said the _system designers_ didn’t see any need to add an additional sensor or redundancy because the hazard assessment had determined that an MCAS failure in normal flight would only qualify in the “major” category for which the single sensor is the norm.
From his Wiki:
He graduated in 1982 from Sioux Center High School in Sioux Center, Iowa.[3] He received a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Iowa State University, followed by a master's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington.[1]
I think there's more to do it that just having an engineer or accountant as CEO.
> Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries.
> Less than a month after the crash of the second 737 Max jet, Boeing called North Charleston employees to an urgent meeting. The company had a problem: Customers were finding random objects in new planes.
Turns out trying to squash the unions by moving to a different state helps show why the unions existed...
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
>Boeing has made diversity and inclusion a strategic priority — and external validators have taken notice. On May 7, it was announced that Boeing ranked 32nd out of more than 1,800 companies that participated in DiversityInc’s 2019 Top 50 Companies for Diversity survey
>https://www.boeing.com/features/2019/05/diversityinc-top-50-...
#unionssowhite
It doesn't follow that the latter was preventing the former.
I don't work for boeing and haven't looked enough into this to confirm if that is the case or not.
You've done it so much that we would normally ban an account like this, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852176 is a good comment. Please use HN for intellectual curiosity like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s strange to present them as some sort of solution in this case, where there was widespread engineering and management cultural issues, and would therefore somehow have prevented major air disasters.
Workers rights and forcing higher wages might be great for the working poor and it might actually make economic sense in certain niche industries where protectionism can prevent the companies entire business being eaten by Chinese/global ones without the myriad of rules and restrictions that unions being - rules that go well, well beyond wages. But it is not some grand solution to high level engineering problems caused by stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives and other weakness in quality down the line.
Further, non-union companies are more often the default these days, and tons of these companies are producing high quality American engineering and manufacturing products.
Even in the romanticized history of US labor only a minority of working Americans were ever in unions even during the hayday when it actually made sense to have unions (when America had tons of factories and manufacturing but little global competition and plenty of protectionism to artificially keep them alive).
It’s not like unions are bad or evil, this sort of scope creep and beaurucratic self destruction is common in countless organizations.
If unions were reformed, or we could get some form of union-lite where it really was just about wages and sane working hours/conditions then I’d be much more in support of them.
It’s just the disconnect between what it sounds like on paper (great for the working poor!) and what they actually do in practice with the myriad of negative side effects which heavily contributed to massive inefficiencies and making America (and other countries) less competitive... it’s just difficult to square the two.
That these unions stick around suggests to me that people like them more than they're willing to admit.
You will lose that at your peril. In a way the whole gig-economy is trying to do an end-run around any kind of social safety net, and looked at from that angle it will likely end bad to very bad for the participants, even if from their present day perspective it looks like a great deal.
They’ll work their ass off regardless if some piece of paper says they don’t really have to and if they don’t their peers will look down on them.
I highly recommend this video to highlight the cultural differences between the UK vs Germany (particularly the bit about using Facebook at work), which I think do matter a lot in these conversations:
https://youtu.be/mSQKtxJ-Uvk
I also think Americans are worse for challenging authority than the UK culture highlighted in that show clip.
> But it is not some grand solution to high level engineering problems caused by stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives and other weakness in quality down the line.
They're not a panacea to all problems, but they could be the solution or part of a solution to many of them. In this case the "stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives" were the major issue, and how do you deal with that? You increase the power of other, non-management stakeholders. Unions are the way you do that for labor.
Of course, in this case they're not the complete solution. Increased and more effective oversight by the FAA is probably more important, and there are other things as well. However, unions could be helpful by protecting employees who want to make a fuss over management decisions from management reprisal, for instance.
This to me sounds like that old regex joke, now you have two problems.
Could you point out where you see a link between unions and the poor quality control that was observed in the plant?
Unions empower employees, and the quality control issues were getting raised by employees and getting ignored by management. Empowered employees could have more effectively pushed back.
Also, the union employees were more qualified to do this type of work. However management gave instructions not to hire any, so the Boeing hired less qualified non-union people to assemble the planes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
> A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, reveals a culture that often valued production speed over quality. Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees....
> Mr. Barnett, who filed a whistle-blower complaint with regulators, said he had repeatedly urged his bosses to remove the [dangerous metal] shavings [near wiring]. But they refused and moved him to another part of the plant....
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees. “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly. “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account....
> In the interest of meeting deadlines, managers sometimes played down or ignored problems, according to current and former workers. Mr. Barnett...learned in 2016 that a senior manager had pulled a dented hydraulic tube from a scrap bin, he said. He said the tube, part of the central system controlling the plane’s movement, was installed on a Dreamliner. Mr. Barnett said the senior manager had told him, “Don’t worry about it.” He filed a complaint with human resources, company documents show....
> But several former employees said high-level managers pushed internal quality inspectors to stop recording defects. Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager, said her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on the factory floor after she flagged wire bundles rife with metal shavings and defective metal parts that had been installed on planes.“It was intimidation,” she said. “Every time I started finding stuff, I was harassed.”...
> Mr. Barnett was reprimanded in 2014 for documenting errors. In a performance review seen by The Times, a senior manager downgraded him for “using email to express process violations,” instead of engaging “F2F,” or face to face. He took that to mean he shouldn’t put problems in writing. The manager said Mr. Barnett needed to get better at “working in the gray areas and help find a way while maintaining compliance.”
That assertion relies on a lot of hand waving and unrealistic claims. If the problem was that "objects" were being left everywhere in the planes that were being delivered, those objects weren't being left out by management while they were pushing paper in their office. Thus even if it's an operations problem caused by the lack of worker oversight then this means the problem is being created by the worker's lack of care and attention to detail.
Thim means its either a process problem, which unions have absolutely nothing to do with, or it's an incompetence problem which actually is addressed by the exact opposite of what a union does: increase worker scrutiny and quality control. I mean, when was the last time you heard a Union representative state "yes we are to blame for this... Better ramp up oversight and penalties for us screwing up our job."
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.
> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.
The problem was the move. (True, the move was to get away from the union, but it's the move that was the problem, not the presence or absence of the union.)
> Turns out trying to squash the unions by moving to a different state helps show why the unions existed...
You think that the existence of unions are the reason why they didn't have these problems in Seattle? Nothing to do with, say, a more experienced (and perhaps better trained) workforce?
Now, sure, the move was to avoid unions, and the move (to a less experienced workforce) probably has something to do with the problems. But you make it sound like these problems wouldn't happen if North Charleston was unionized. I am extremely skeptical of that position.
The only way I could see unions having anything to do with it is if the foreign objects were left as sabotage by those who wanted to organize unions in North Charleston.
Wasn't the design sound, except for the lack of hardware sensor redundancy and naively written software?
Why do they need to stop production and so on?
How would you possibly know that? If they missed two serious issues what makes you think they didn't miss more?
Err, make that three serious issues: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/26/politics/boeing-737-max-flaw/...
Edit: 4 serious issues if you count "identifying problems and not fixing them": https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/us/boeing-737-max-disagree-al...
What's so sound about a plane that stalls by default?
There are lots of things on planes where "if you don't do this" then "the plane crashes and burns". Having to adjust horizontal stabilizer trim as you gain speed is a minor addition.
MCAS was problematic because of how it went about doing so, and how pilots weren't properly trained on the change in how the trim needs to be adjusted. The idea of adjusting the trim doesn't seem fundamentally flawed to me.
(Not that I think the design is necessarily sound, see my direct reply to gp for why).
If the end result is that a new type certification is required for the 737 MAX, it may still be a viable product but not the one customers were originally sold on.
The MCAS system itself is flawed in a number of ways, but the core problem (in my opinion) is the attempt to fit large engines under a too-small airplane, in the name of saving regulatory / training costs.
If you would retrain pilots then the 737 MAX can be safely flown without MCAS. Pilots just need to be familiar with the different aerodynamics.
And if they're doing the new-plane certification and training anyway, the MCAS no longer has any point and could perhaps just be turned off?
Edit: Perhaps not— this comment asserts that the handling of the airframe sans MCAS is non-compliant with FAA requirements: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21864584
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
I doubt that doing a new type cert is tantamount to engineering an entirely new airframe. I think the thing that makes it less appealing to airlines now is the lack of faith in the integrity of Boeing engineering in general.
Airlines are in a tough spot as the only competitors to the 737 are made by Airbus. Airbus is, of course, up to its ears in orders and slowly scaling up the ex-Bombardier lines.
They might actually be better off just axing the MAX entirely and continuing to produce the 737 NG.
NG production ended (not without its own issues), it's not coming back. There is nearly zero chance of the supply chain attempting to retool for the NG. If Boeing can get the 737 MAX certified it will sell.
The issue is that a culture of self-interested mismanagement from factory floors up to our highest political offices has led the global economy to depend on the success of this plane which kills people.
Even if somehow by chance they manage to make this plane kill fewer people in the future, there will be no reason to think the actual problem has been addressed.
In France the train is ~50 x more carbon efficient. We will not be able to keep emitting like crazy forever (we actually should have stopped completely already :/ ) , especially when reasonable alternatives exist (the train if going not too far, teleconferences, ...). If we believe in the markets, the price of an air ticket should be maybe 50x higher than what it is today, in order to stop the insane emissions. Alternatively there could be an authority who decide if we have a good reason to take the plane.
People certainly immigrated before the airplane, but in general those were individuals without many options at home. Skilled immigration really took off during the Jet Age.
Most planes have airframes that are aerodynamically stable in and of itself. The 737 Max requires software assistance to be at the same level of stability.
That, to me, is a fundamental flaw. In a multilayer system each layer needs to be safe in and of itself. The purpose of higher layers is to add functionality not to fix flaws in lower layers.
Given the fundamental flaws in design it was obvious there was a cultural problem at Boeing and the CEO needed to go. "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Einstein.
Fighters like relaxed aerodynamic roll stability for roll rate. Now pitch stability issues are troubling. I don't think engineers would purposely relax pitch stability unless they had to.
I guess I'm saying you might want an airplane aerodynamically unstable in roll, but pretty much never in pitch so the fly by wire argument might not be valid here.
Not passenger aircraft. Only military.
They all do this. You have giant engines on the underside of the wing; what else would you expect to happen when you throttle up at low airspeed?
Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...
Any standard-configuration airliner will pitch up when you throttle up at low speed.
The pitch-power coupling has been problematic on the 737 since Boeing went with GE engines. Thomsonfly almost got a classic to stall in Bournemouth ages ago and flyDubai managed to wreck an NG in Russia a couple years ago. It's possible, but unlikely, the 737 MAX is better behaved in this regard.
If there weren't significant aerodynamic problems with the 737 MAX it would be flying by now. This whole type cert / training thing is a red herring. The cost of slow and shuttering production both in financial and diplomatic terms far outstrips the cost of a separate type. Beyond that Boeing has a captive market. The only 737 MAX alternatives out there are made by Airbus, and Airbus has a healthy backlog for both the A220 and A320. While some airlines may be able to take the range / consumption hit with an NG other airlines, like Norwegian, were counting on the increased range of the MAX for certain routes.
You have two massive sources of thrust below the centre of gravity. If you advance the throttle it will create a nose-up pitching moment.
Correct. An A320 won't pitch up as dramatically as a 737, mostly due to FBW magic.
Ok, glad we agree it'll still pitch up.
Sure, the difference is that a 737 Classic, NG, or MAX with all of the nannies working can be flown into a stall with lots of throttle at low speed whereas the Airbus cannot. The pitch-power coupling on a 737 is far more problematic than on its competitors.
Just firing the CEO isn’t enough, they need to root out everyone complicit in this crime.
On the grand scale of things, the bigger issues with Boeing are how they do business and all the problems with their facturies that have surfaced recently. Beyond getting the 737 MAX to flight status, they have to resolve all the issues and the management problems which lead to them.
I think this is entirely true, but it's an interesting commentary on the structure of regulation: it's some small part technical investigation, and a much larger part public relations. I can't even argue they're wrong to operate that way, since their mission is to build public trust in air travel, but it produces absurd results in other areas, e.g. airport security theater.
At this point they could probably still turn the 737 Max into a sellable product, but it will be different from the one promised if it requires a new type certification for pilots due to the different flight characteristics (which Boeing was trying to hide/minimize with MCAS).
They seem to have some serious cultural issues, I wouldn’t trust them to do the job correctly. I’d suspect in the end what your suggesting is probably what’ll happen.
> On December 17th, less than two months after the Lion Air crash, Boeing’s board of directors approved a twenty-per-cent increase in the company dividend and a twenty-billion-dollar stock-repurchase program, allowing Muilenburg, who had replaced McNerney as C.E.O. in 2015, to carry out even larger buybacks than in previous years. The board also awarded Muilenburg a thirteen-million-dollar bonus.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again...
Then I try to remain calm: what responsibilities they really take?! The consequences hit those remain, they should be compensated instead. Plus the salary given in vain taken back. Then we still listen about the damages caused!
They take it because they can. If they cared they wouldn't feel right taking so big portion of the profit generated by the teamwork of so many.
The idea that the next CEO will be incentivized to do anything other than pump and dump is laughable.
Until now, Boeing's business plan is that they will be building a starship for NASA in 2060, but you will still be stuck with a 737 on Southwest Airlines, a A320 on Jetblue, and never know that aviation could be better.
The 737 throws off a lot of cash, but the single-aisle monoculture makes flying miserable.
A 737 replacement will be expensive, take time to develop, and involve risk, but the end product could be the resurrection of the Boeing brand. Since there are so many 737-class airplanes flying, anyone who wants to see a better flying experience or is concerned about environmental impacts of aviation such as airport noise or carbon emissions would realize that a 737 replacement could have a greater impact than the widebody planes where competitive developments are happening.
You shouldn't have to fly international to benefit from 50 years of aviation improvements.
First of all, smaller planes such as the A320 and E195 feel bigger inside than the 737 does. It's like the difference between the "boat of car" from American manufacturers to the Japanese cars that were small on the outside but big on the inside.
If you just want a low-cost plane at the A320 level of technology, China is coming online with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
It will put up great production numbers by selling to Chinese airlines first, they will have all the protectionism and subsidies they need to grow to an economy of scale where at 2030 the C919 will beat the pants off the 737.
If Boeing doesn't take advantage of it's comparative advantage and develop a much better aircraft, they are doomed.
I was going to go all "what do you mean, smaller??? ... surely you mean the A220", but had to good sense to look it up and you are right, the A320 Neo is actually a tad smaller than, for example, the 737-800. Also lighter.
Just carries more passengers a longer distance faster with slightly wider seats.
Hmm..
Not that the A320 is any spring chicken (dates back to the 80s), however that's still a quantum leap in technology (e.g. universal fly-by-wire) and I'm guessing more modular as it was intended as a family of planes sharing a type (from the 318 to the 321, though the 318 was dropped for neo).
The 321neo carries up to 240, even the 737-900 ER is left behind (220), though the 321 is longer than the -900 by quite a bit 44.5m to 42).
A 737-800 is 39.6m long to the 320neo’s 38.6, they have the same wingspan, the 320neo seats up to 195 versus 189 for the 737.
The 320 also has significantly more range (6500km to 5500) and needs a bit less runway (1950m to 2300).
The 737 MAX 200 is a modified 737 MAX 8 with an extra pair of exit doors so that it can seat up to 200 passengers. It will be used by Ryanair. Assuming the 737 MAX does fly again of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530964
Jules Dupuit, describing rail carriages, though the same logic applies:
It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity.
Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich.
https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...
I tend to try to travel on Qatar, and their new business class cabins are amazing: https://www.qatarairways.com/en/onboard/qsuite.html
It's also cheaper than the (worse) business class on many other airlines.
While the QSuites and the cabin crew are nice, you rarely get QSuites in reality. But you always get a stopover in Doha, and those stopovers generally include business lounges so busy you can rarely get a shower with a < 3 hour stopover, rarely get use of an airway for boarding (even at destination airports with numerous available, eg Stockholm), and you sit in the premium bus for 30+ minutes after "boarding" commenced waiting for other passengers (with dusty, fuel fume filled, unairconditioned Doha airport air).
The business class lounge at Doha is the best I've ever been to. You do need to go to the premium lounge though. They have a separate lounge for people with gold cards, and that one was a huge disappointment.
Without that, there's no motivation to do anything but shave every marginal dollar. Competitive forces are limited and will get more so over time. My uncle drives freight trains for living, and they pay extra to remove seat cushions on the locomotives because they don't want to spend opex on replacing torn cushions down the road.
My point is, when you optimize exclusively for cost, you will only get cheap and will not get any kind of improvement in customer experience. The only reason that Spirit Airways doesn't dangle you from a net hanging from the ceiling is that safety regulations don't allow for it.
A very short-sighted action. Driver seats are not like passenger seats, the drivers will strike if they are discomforted by the seat.
What is it that people expect when they say flying is miserable? I expect safety, which is why I'll never get on a 737 MAX. Other than that, I just put sandwiches and snacks in my pocket, fill my water bottle, and in X hours I'm thousands of miles away. Air travel is actually pretty amazing.
What you’re probably thinking of is the US airline specific “comfort/extra/plus” add-on that is priced 10%-20% extra. There is a few more inches legroom but the seats are the same small economy seats.
The former uses larger seats and is typically available on long-hauls. The seat is somewhat similar to old-style business class seats, or modern domestic first class seats. It is not priced at 10% extra, it is usually close to double.
The latter is priced at around 10% extra, but is the same old economy seat just with a couple of inches more legroom.
It would be nice to have to pay only 10% extra to get 10% more space, but the lack of scaling is by design on the airlines part, and textbook market segmentation.
Edit: this article has pictures showing the difference: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...
As far as I understand, the reason for this is that foreign airlines are not allowed to fly US domestic routes, and most US people don't fly international which means they don't know that things could be better.
It also seems like people in the US to a greater extent than other countries only cares about ticket price, which means that even if an airline wants to improve their quality they can't use it to compete because customers will simply not see them, since they sort by price on the travel site and pick the first one on the list.
With regards to quality, do airlines in other places generally provide more bang for the buck or are they just generally more expensive than US flights to provide for the higher quality?
That said, flights throughout Asia at distances similar to US domestic flights tend to be reasonably cheap.
I decided to make a comparison:
Fly Singapore Airlines from Singapore to Hong Kong. This will cost you 225 USD in economy.
A domestic US flight of the same distance would be San Francisco to Albuquerque on United Airlines. This flight will cost you 468 USD.
So it seems to me that Singapore Airlines is able to provide better quality at much lower cost. Perhaps the US airlines simply don't have to be better because there is no one that shows it can be done?
A better comparison with about the same distance in the US is New York to Miami, which can be done nonstop for under $200 on Delta, or $135 on whatever "Frontier" is.
EDIT: In fact you can go from New York to Las Vegas for under $200, round-trip, which is considerably farther.
My point was that even though the regular flights are similarly priced in the US and Asia, the quality in the US is so much worse. I now see that my attempt at explaining this discrepancy had some flaws, but what other explanations do you suggest?
The fact seems to be that even the best US Airlines are significantly worse than the ones in other places. When the best rated ones are hovering around average, there is something wrong.
It's probably important to be specific when I say "quality." By that I'm referring to ease of purchase, fair baggage prices, web/app UX, on/off-flight customer service including pilot communication with passengers, and even landings (as a pilot, I am absolutely judging beyond "did we get to the ground safely or not"). Price and seating are secondary for me, although I certainly understand why they are list-toppers for others.
I suspect flying up front on any of the majors is fine. Economy experience is driven by a race to the bottom price-wise, but if you want cheap travel, it’s readily available. If you want comfortable travel, that’s also on offer.
I flew Frontier the first time this Spring - was helping ferry an open cockpit biplane from Colorado to Illinois - and it was a stupid cheap one way fair. I really can't think of a single perk Frontier did not try and up charge a fee for. Boarding, luggage, carry on, seat assignment... I'm sure there were others. Funny enough, the guy I was ferrying with also picked the cheapest seats in the plane, so we ended up next to each other on the flight out. I was fully prepared too wear the kevlar helmet on the flight rather than pay the $60 carry on fee.
What's so awful about United?
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/04/22/a-lack-of-compe...
Ryan Air, EasyJet, and other discount airlines suggest that Europe cares significantly more about price.
I'm not so sure people do it any different elsewhere. I mostly fly in Europe and have definitely never considered anything else than price and suitable flight times. I consider all airlines to provide the same standardized service. Yes I'd pick BA over Ryanair, but wouldn't pay extra for it.
A lot of people I know and myself choose to pay more for a better experience.
It's not always about the race to the bottom in my opinion.
You wouldn't think being obese would impact knees not having enough space, but my ass shrank in multiple directions and I have about four to five inches of free space now between the seat in front of me and my knees. Unless you're much taller than I am, it's likely that losing weight will not just help with your health, but make flying more comfortable.
If you are taller, well, life sucks for us tall people in many ways and we can't expect airlines to build comfortable seats for people two or three standard deviations beyond the normal height.
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
There more certainly is a statistically average height.
> Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions.
This article is comparing 10 dimensions of variability and we're talking about just one here, the one you yourself mentioned, height.
On many leisure routes from Toronto there is very little choice in flights either, so pay more means pay their business class rate which is quite expensive, or well go some very complex non-direct routing.
All of these options are horrible.
This is either a triumph of choice, markets, and abundance or grim, barbaric end to flight as uplifting experience.
It's also safer than it's ever been.
We can each decide, I suppose.
I have arthritis and literally cannot fly anymore because I can't afford tickets with enough leg room to not be in crippling pain for the entire flight. I've had to miss important family events because of this.
Even if you personally could, some people that can currently fly would not be able to afford the higher prices. Why are your consumer preferences more important than theirs?
That's the smell of 300 souls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion
Pretty much all safety measures are written in blood.
We have culturally evolved to care more about physical safety today; a good sign that our State worked by being held accountable to people. The stuff that is happening with Boeing is a total regression, and it will be interesting to see how regressions like this can be prevented in the future.
I understand that ensuring the safety of new airplane designs is more complicated than adding odor to natural gas. But this is not a product where society wants producers to "move fast and break things". We expect a minimum level of safety i.e the plane not falling out of the sky.
I very highly recommend Charles Perrow's work, particulary Normal Accidents and The Next Disaster. Perrow himself died just this past November.
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3APerrow%2C+Charles%2C&...
I've been clipping similar stories, under a set of themes which I find related:
- Risk
- Accidents
- Technological Debt
- Techology as Debt
- Manifestation -- this is the notion of manifest vs. latent phenomena, perceptibility, and awareness. See Robert K. Merton among others.
- Denial. Itself one of the stages of grief, which seems more generally a response to a change in worldview and/or an invalidation of previously reliable models.
- Motivated asset inflation. The desire to sustain high levels of valuation of extant assets (real property, IP, technological mechansism, rents), often through activities which decrease net social welfare. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937, is fascinating reading in this regard. Stern doesn't quite fully make the case, but he sets the board for the final mate. NIMBYism, Merchants of Doubt, "fake news", and numerous other phenomena can be tied to this.
In whole, the narrative, if it is valid and holds, undermines many of the sacred cows of technological optimism and property-based market economics.
I'd mentioned it on G+ on the date, in comments (I've a full archive on my own systems, but at least the post survives at the Internet Archive):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115030822/https://plus.goog...
Brought up as well on this post (also not in a captured comment):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115024757/https://plus.goog...
Because consumers will choose the cheaper product. If a politician tries to "value" safety over convenience for a potential problem, voters will vote for the other politician that promises lower taxes and claims there is no safety issue.
Of course, there is a balance that needs to be met, taking all of the risk out of life is also excessive and may impede progress or waste resources.
But a good job for a CEO is building shareholder value, which is now understood as "[wringing] all the money out of the company that they can [for the shareholders]." That's a different job than building an organization that consistently chooses safety over schedule and cost.
... is apparently the argument.
I mean, see also: drug tests for the minimum wage workers, but the CEO? Of course not. Mere employees better not be moonlighting or doing anything else, but the CEO? On two other boards, "advising" a startup on the side, working on another part-time (also as CEO—their "executive assistant" at their 20-person startup actually runs the company)
The issue with the 737MAX is that Boeing was too risk-averse: they should have made a brand new plane, but went with what they thought was the low-risk route with the 737 re-engine. The 787 disastrous development ($36B of deferred production costs I think) was certainly a huge cause of this.
if they just stuck to evaluating technical risk first, and only then the risk of selling the plane - perhaps that route would have led them to developing a new completely plane.
But then again it's so obvious in his case, I mean I and probably many saw it coming — the man just does not operate at the same level, he's stellar you know, like the Jobs and Musks and Waltons of this world).
I have no hope for Boeing to recruit such a great man, I don't think that kind of business actually wants that. Imagine a Dorsey / Musk disruptor, pushing open standards, thinking of direct B2C, whatever... That just wouldn't fly with Boeing's board and mindset (oh pun so very much unintended yet so apt).
It seems to me that if the promise of a golden parachute led to CEOs simply not caring if they do well or not, then there'd be no point in paying them well or trying to hire the best. Heck, there'd be no measure of "best", because all the candidates would just have a string of disasters behind them.
There's an S curve to the utility of money. Anyone who works at the kind of level that could become the CEO of a company like Boeing is already quite rich. So money alone isn't the incentive. But thinking of money as sole incentive is kind of characteristic for those of us who actually have to work for a living.
Why are you assuming that I think money is their only incentive?
I was replying to a comment contemplating that "the incentives may be correct now". The amount of money guaranteed to executives chasing short-termism provides a perverse incentive working against any desire to do their job well. There are multiple incentives, but they are not aligned.
> There's an S curve to the utility of money.
Seems to me that it's more like a bell curve, with the optimal center waaaay to the left of where it is today. Pay too much money and the temptation for CEOs to max out their own gains at the expense of the company's long term health rises.
If they wanted to restore my confidence, they’d have picked an engineer, not an accountant.
Whatever made this one to deviate from the engineering focus the apparent story is still the suffering of engineering focus against business management focus.
For restoring confidence in engineering the act is not to fire engineers but to use good ones....
If the last one was an engineer, why would another engineer restore your confidence any more?
So yes, if they were going to replace the CEO for the optics, “someone like Dennis Muilenburg” would have been the best-case scenario for me, rather than someone with non-engineering background/specialty.
For a sports analogy, CEO shuffling is kinda like coach/GM shuffling of pro sports teams - they’re there to take the blame when things go wrong, but picking a CEO without a related background is like picking a new coach from a different sport.
But why?
Is their problem an engineering one?
Or a culture, leadership and values ones?
Everyone's saying that they put profit before safety. That's a financial decision that they need to address not an engineering one!
You're just restating the same thing without any actual arguments. Why do you need to be an engineer to understand safety? I don't know what magic training or experience do you think engineers get that nobody else does? And as I've already said, it looks to me that Boeing's chronic problems are leadership not technical. Get a leader in.
How do you think for example the President of the United States effectively line manages people as diverse as defence and national parks without simultaneously being a soldier and a geographer? How do you think he judges qualification and competence of these people in globally significant safety jobs and how does he manage the buck stopping with him?
He's probably talking more about mindset than educational and professional background.
You can have a leader with the mindset of an ornery engineering-first engineer. You can also have a leader who's an ex-engineer with the mindset of a business executive. There's a big difference between the two.
I personally do not know which of those categories Dennis Muilenburg fell into, though.
His predecessor, James McNerney, was a cost-cutting business leader who had no background in aviation. And it was his decision to do this program instead of creating an upgraded model.[1]
Which kind of makes this choice even more bizarre.
[1] - https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-bean-counters-court...
Don't get me wrong: I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP. But until it is done, there is a need for a current 737. And certainly, you don't want them to cut corners when developing the 737 successor...
I don't think that's quite true. There's been a large swathe of other problems [0] involved in the production.
Broken or damaged parts, engine shutdowns and faulty hydraulics are just some of the concerns that Boeing seemed to have glossed over.
There has to be a reason that Boeing was willing to go so far as halt production [1] to reassess the plane, and that won't be just one flaw.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-w...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-weighs-cutting-or-haltin...
They don't have any internal controls to halt production for safety reasons, that much should be evident by now.
The 737 NG remains in production.
At this point, that plane has no goodwill whatsoever left to it. The onus is on it proving that it's safe, not on its critics proving it's unsafe, because the only sensible assumption is that it's not safe and that Boeing does not and ill not self-regulate (big duh).
> I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP
They announced that back in 2014, and probably several times beforehand.
Issue is demand has seen Boeing push the 737 into 757 territory (years after the 757 got cancelled), it's not that they haven't created a 737 successor it's that their customers don't want a 737 successor, they want 737s so they can just buy the frames and put existing crew on the new plane without retraining.
That's what the 737 MAX is about, and why it's broken. It's the 4th generation of 737 (original, Classic, Next Generation) and the frame can't take it anymore, but 737s is what e.g. Southwest want, because that's literally the only thing they fly.
Boeing should have bitten the bullet on new designs long ago. They failed in this.
Some actions have consequences which don't materialise for years, or decades, or centuries.
Which is a principle weakness of the notion of market economics. The booked profits of the past 20+ years of the firm deserve restating.
Keep in mind, there is a gold rush for new airlines right now. Africa/India/Asia are developing and are requiring thousands of planes to fill the demand (it's no coincidence Africa and Asia is where these new planes ended up crashing). If Airbus gobbled them up, they'd likely be airbus customers forever, as mixing plane types is more expensive for airlines.
> If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
There's real accountability for you. Corporate accountability these days is a sick joke.
Everybody here in Hacker News who has had some relation with a company board knows that the real decisions are done at the board level. The board is the one that ultimately decides the strategy to follow, whether to be pure profit seeking, quality seeking, etc.
The CEO can bring his humanity-responsible strategy to the quarterly meetings, but if the board does not agree, he is SOL. If this happens a lot with "cofounder CEOs" who have big chunks of company ownership, of course it also happens with a hired CEO, who has extremely little leverage with the board.
What is that?
Is that something like the unicorn?
The problems with Boeing are systemic problems with the way corporations work and the economy is structured.
Mullenberg has been strongly criticized in part because he never accepted the buck stopping with him, didn't clean house, and acted as a mouthpiece, while saying nothing.
What people expect from Boeing is a gesture of humanity; an acceptance of culpability. An admission that something went wrong, and a genuine gesture of contrition and change.
The company culture needs a wholesale change, which means a hell of a lot more than the CEO need to be on their way out. Until you can rid Boeing of the taint of financial commoditization as a first order objective, Boeing is still going to suffer from a crisis of faith.
No one , or at least I don't, want to fly on a product of the "Boeing Corporation, stock ticker whatever". I want to fly on an aircraft made by the most committed people in the world to the challenge of designing and manufacturing the absolute best, most pilotable, most safe to be on, and most efficient/performant aerospace hardware in the world, all working under one group (if we take the over consolidation as a necessity in this day and age; I'm not personally sold on it). An engineering marvel built on human aspiration, commitment to good and safe work, and with profitability as an objective, but not an overriding principle. There needs to be a commitment to the nature of the endeavor as a physical struggle against the forces of Nature first and foremost, and an implicit understanding that the economic affairs of men must come secondary to the fulfillment of the requisite solution to the physical problems of aircraft making.
I know it's probably just a fiction in all likelyhood to expect all that. Some naive fantasy that I'm sure anyone whose run a business is shaking their head at. I'm not even sure I can wholeheartedly accept my own prioritization given the endless nature of the daily struggle with the balance sheet that is life, and the expectations placed on a publically traded company.
Alas, we have to accept that Boeing, and I think to a greater extent, any corporation should not be treated as primarily financial abstractions. We don't (or shouldn't be) running businesses just to make money. We should be out to solve physical problems first, with profitability keeping us from going overboard on the expenditure.
Sorry if this seems ranty. I always thought these ideas were a given; but the last few years have been real eye openers in terms of making clear that they are by no means universal, or at least universally applied.
> David Calhoun will take over as CEO and president
Ah this is the penny pinching accountant who was involved in the decision to try to avoid recertification to avoid training costs, and with a history of pulling similar stunts at GE which also lead to their troubles.
So, the worst possible man for the job was selected.
> He opted out of his bonuses for 2019 and 2020 a few months ago. Looking at the Boeing 2019 shareholder voting information [2], he had a base pay of $1.7 million in 2018, and his retirement package seems to have totaled about $32.4 million. Tack another $6.6 million on if the board treats this as a layoff instead of a retirement. He may also be eligible for another $807,018 per year in retirement pay. See pp. 46-48 for details.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/eelg8h/breaking_boei... [2] https://s2.q4cdn.com/661678649/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
When your brand is suffering a crisis of confidence, you don't rebuild it by missing deadlines and dodging reality. The amount of hubris it takes to be so flippant in these circumstances is indicative of a deeply flawed corporate culture, and that falls at the feet of the CEO.
Also, how do you allow Starliner mission to occur without 100% confidence in ability of mission to be executed flawlessly? There are certainly complexities, but it almost seems like they passed the point when they could have quietly bumped the launch, and ended up in a literal PR gamble.
Calling a space capsule a product and treating it like some kind of tech product launch and framing it's success that way is weird. It's a spacecraft and the mission was meant to test its capabilities and get data about it during an actual orbital flight, then go from there.
The reason everyone is trying to be so cheerful and optimistic is because it was a partial success - the capsule stayed together and landed, which were part of its mission parameters. But (clearly) the public perception of this mission is that it failed because it didn't get to the ISS, so I imagine people are trying to be cheerful to remind people that they're not upset cause they didn't fail, they just didn't fully succeed.
I'm no fan of Boeing or how they've handled 787 MAX or ULA or Starliner or their relationship with NASA, but calling this not too promising is a bit unfair.
That's why it's not encouraging - and why it's not at all unfair to be scathing.
Apparently, 20 years of progress and "promise" ain't what it used to be.
That is, the amount of project surface that it increased confidence in is as great or greater than the amount it called into question.
Deliberately false and misleading statements that should be prosecuted by the SEC.
I think it’s just the (well deserved) media narrative Boeing is in now. When you kill hundreds of people and then pretend it wasn’t your fault, you get what’s coming to you.
These are known engineering problems with known engineering solutions. The explanation from Boeing was that a timer was set incorrectly. This sounds like a trivial error to me (though I'm not a "rocket scientist" just a "kerbal scientist", I guess, but we've been using timers for a long time afaik to properly manage burns to orbit).
Most complex engineering projects are hard not because of one thing, but because of the mind-bogglingly large number of things that must all be done correctly.
(1 - x) ^ y, where x is the chance of each small mistake and y is the total number of opportunities, doesn't need a very large x, if y is large enough, for things to start looking dicey.
There are a lot of things I'd love to know the accepted name for, as I came into understanding through the backdoor. I regret that my college CS track didn't include more borrow-courses from physical engineering on reliability (and control theory). So many valuable, applicable lessons.
I don't know how much the systemic issues that clearly compromised the design of the plane extend to the design of the capsule, but trivals errors seem to be very possible.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the process failures like lack of communication between domains rather than acquiesce to simple conclusions that are more clear only in hindsight.
This design is bad, but it makes sense as a update of the 737. The flight computer setup is each pilot gets a computer under their chair, each computer gets its own set of sensors and the computers take turns each flight. The flight computer is generally safe (i don't think it's been implicated in any crashes?), but that's because in case of issues in flight, the system usually will disengage and alert the pilot, or if the system takes poor actions, it will disengage when the pilot opposes it, or the pilot will disengage it.
Adding MCAS to the flight computer makes sense, the flight computer needs to be aware of it. It's understandable, but negligent, to add a new feature to the computer without considering the original design. The problem comes in when MCAS was not disclosed to pilots, doesn't disengage on errors, doesn't disengage when pilot input opposes it (partially by design), and can't be disabled except by disabling electric trim, which is more or less needed to recover from the error condition MCAS puts the plane into.
I think this is fixable, but the public information on the current fix doesn't include being able to turn MCAS off, so it doesn't seem like they've really done enough.
I would guess that at least in part the difference in attitudes is because SpaceX is considered more startup-y and Boeing is more associated with the "failure is not an option" ethos.
Anyway, I do not care too much about pointing fingers elsewhere. The parachute thing was quite embarrassing and IMO this problem should have been prevented as well.
Regardless, testing all of the flight software is certainly not exclusive to SpaceX. I would bet any amount of money that Boeing also tested their software and performed simulated launches, moreover that testing is probably mandated by their contract with NASA. My uninformed guess is that one of two things happened:
1. Their tests were incomplete. e.g. they didn't find some edge case that would cause problems when the T-0 changed.
2. Someone goofed the procedures on the day of launch and didn't update their configuration properly.
Then when something like this happens, you can have your PR call up journalists they know and suggest a name or two that is likely to say what you'd hope for.
To reiterate, the procedure is:
1. restore trim to normal with the electric thumb switches
2. throw the stab trim cutoff switches
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
This AD was sent to all MAX flight crews. It works because the first incident of MCAS failure (Lion Air) was safely dealt with by doing just this.
The way to make things safe is to address ALL points in the zipper that led to the accident. That includes the pilot error aspects.
I can understand if the AD was intended as a short term fix but I would question the rationale if it were considered a long term solution
It was not, Boeing at the time was working on a solution.
Regardless, however, the pilots MUST know how to deal with runaway trim. This was true before MCAS, and is true after. It was true on the 757 (I spend 3 years working on the design of the 757 stab trim system). The cutoff switches are prominently within easy reach on the center console for very good reason, 40 years before MCAS.
It is not acceptable that pilots were unaware of the cutoff switches. It is unacceptable that MAX pilots did not read, understand, and remember the Airworthiness Directive sent to all MAX crews.
Similarly, airplane engineers work hard to keep the airplane from catching fire. But pilots also MUST learn to properly use the airplane's fire suppression systems. Most of pilot training consists of learning emergency procedures.
It's why airplanes still have pilots, instead of using automation instead.
Boeing still deserves blame for the flawed MCAS implementation. But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with.
But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with
I don’t necessarily disagree with this either, but it does come across as if we’re being distracted by proximate causes rather than focusing on the root cause. To someone on the outside, it sure seems like there are deeper engineering and cultural problems that deserve a greater priority at this point. Not to belabor the point, but simply issuing a procedural AD doesn’t appear to address the root causes and should just be a stop gap measure
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
Put another way, would you want to board an airplane where the pilot did not take EMERGENCY instructions seriously? I wouldn't.
> distracted
Pretty much 100% of the popular media (and its repeated appearances on HN) has been on the MCAS design shortcomings. Which distract from dealing with the other causes of the accidents.
As I mentioned previously, the AD was issued as a stopgap measure while Boeing worked on an MCAS fix.
Procedural is meant as an administrative action as opposed to a designed engineering action.
Think of a hazardous system that has software involved with controlling a pressure hazard. A procedural mitigation may be to have an operator monitor system pressure and push a non-software shut-off emergency button if the system overpressurizes. Even though it's an emergency, it's still a procedural mitigation. An engineering mitigation, on the other hand, may have mechanical pressure relief devices in place to mitigate the hazard. Whether or not it's an "emergency" just relates to the severity and time criticality of the hazard, not the mechanism of mitigation.
In safety design the hierarchy of hazard control preference is generally engineering controls, followed by procedural controls, followed by PPE as the least desirable control scheme.
Which distract from dealing with the other causes of the accidents.
One of the common flaws in mishap investigation is jumping to “solving” proximate causes at the expense of finding the root cause. This is applicable to MCAS as well if that isn’t the root cause (although my hunch is MCAS will be closer to the root issue than pilot actions). As long as people aren’t pointing to the AD as the “fix” I think there’s not a problem with it being an interim measure
The Ethiopian crew tried the cutout switches and found they couldn't trim the airplane with the hand cranks because Boeing lied. How is that a pilot training issue?
But there were other contributing factors in the crashes that must be dealt with.
A Boeing employee concern trolling over pilot training is pretty rich considering that Boeing knowingly hid crucial details from pilots.
The Emergency Airworthiness Directive to all MAX crews says:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
> A Boeing employee
I left Boeing about 40 years ago.
If the graphs are to be believed neither the electric commands nor hand crank were able to move the stabilizer. Again, how is that a pilot training issue?
1. trim to normal with the electric trim switches
2. cut off the stabilizer trim
What the EA pilots did was:
1. cut off the stabilizer trim
2. try to use the hand cranks to trim to normal
Graphs of the FDR data from the (preliminary) accident reports. The Ethiopian authorities even annotated theirs with things like "automatic trim command with no change in pitch trim". You can see quite plainly the stabilizer was not moving as intended.
2. try to use the hand cranks to trim to normal
Per Boeing's documentation this should've worked. Unfortunately Boeing's documentation is mostly wishful thinking. Boeing's also suggested that a pilot try unloading the stabilizer with a roller coaster type maneuver. Unfortunately Boeing removed detailed instructions on this maneuver decades ago and the FAA's already demonstrated that with the altitude that the Ethiopian crew had, unloading the stabilizer would've just flown the plane into the ground.
There's a reason Boeing's largely backed off of the whole pilot error nonsense: the 737 MAX crashed due to shitty design not pilot error.
So how do you propose training against an unfinished product? Boeing still hasn't given the FAA a completed software package to evaluate. At the time of the 737 MAX crashes there were, what? two? 737 MAX simulators, and none of them emulated MCAS or even the forces required to crank the stabilizer manually.
One Lion Air flight got lucky because they had a third set of eyes that could spend time going through reams of documentation.
To even begin discussing pilot "error" is disingenuous when the pilots weren't informed or trained on new 737 MAX behavior. MCAS activation is not, and was not, a runaway stabilizer situation.
It presented as a runaway stab trim. Repeatedly coming on and driving the nose down is runaway trim. No two ways about it. And the usual, standard, runaway trim procedure would stop it.
> they had a third set of eyes that could spend time going through reams of documentation
From my reading of that incident, nothing of the sort happened. The 3rd pilot simply reached forward and flipped off the cutoff switches. The crew landed safely and went on with their day. Nobody bothered to inform the next crew flying that same airplane.
No, it didn't. From the latest QRH:
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
Well that's not met as MCAS doesn't run continuously. By design it stops periodically. Put it another way. You're arguing semantics while the 737 MAX remains a smoldering pile of aluminum and hubris.
2.) Control airplane pitch attitude manually with control column and main electric trim as required.
4.) If the runaway stops after the autopilot is disengaged ....
MCAS also stops after the trim switches are hit. So, again MCAS activation is not a runaway trim condition.
From my reading of that incident, nothing of the sort happened. The 3rd pilot simply reached forward and flipped off the cutoff switches.
Reread the report. The third pilot went back into the cabin to fetch reading material.
Trying to argue that the trim system erratically coming on and driving the nose down is not "runaway trim" is arguing semantics. Runaway trim is when the trim is doing something dangerous without command from the pilot.
If the cockpit voice recorder reveals them discussing the definition of "runaway trim" and deciding that the instructions Boeing provided didn't apply, I'd be surprised and interested.
> MCAS also stops after the trim switches are hit.
Exactly, the trim switches override the MCAS. That's why you use the trim switches to set it back to normal, then hit the cutoff switches. That's what the Emergency Airworthiness Directive says to do.
> Reread the report.
I haven't read that anywhere. I don't know what report that is. Reference, please.
On the 737 Max there is no way to disable the MCAS without also disabling the electric trim.
1. trim to normal with the electric trim switches
2. cut off the stabilizer trim
Do it in that order. Doing step 2 before step 1 won't work.
No, it's not.
So here's some context. Boeing installed known not-to-spec structural components on the NG. Boeing installed known to fail prematurely slat tracks on the NG and 737 MAX. Boeing installed (probably known) not-to-spec pickle forks in the NG and 737 MAX. Boeing falsified repair documentation for an Air Canada 787. Oh, and of course, Boeing hid any mention of MCAS. Point being Boeing doesn't have a lot of credibility left.
With that in mind:
Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT.
As the Ethiopian crew found out: it can't. The larger instruments of the NG required the hand cranks to shrink while the stabilizer itself grew. With the resulting lower mechanical advantage and increase in force required to move the stab itself the wheels became unusable. Sure, the Ethiopian crew went over the "maximum" speed but they were still under the max diving speed (Vd). That means the cranks were supposed to work.
It works because the first incident of MCAS failure (Lion Air) was safely dealt with by doing just this.
It worked because the first crew got lucky and had a third set of eyes that was free to dig through everything in search of a best guess.
Whatever you read about that is simply wrong. (I've seen a LOT of misinformation in popular print about this.) You're correct that the hand cranks were unusable. But the electric thumb switches WERE usable and were pointed out in the AD.
Note that the crews of BOTH the LA and EA crashes had already used the thumb switches to restore normal trim, the LA crew did so 25 times.
> best guess
No guessing required. Follow the training, which is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning they weren't supposed to need to consult a checklist nor dig through anything nor guess.
I am not a pilot, but I would not consider myself fit to fly unless I knew by memory what every single switch in the cockpit does, ESPECIALLY the ones prominently located within easy reach. You can bet it's not the infotainment system.
For damn sure I would read every Emergency Airworthiness Directive for the airplane I'm the pilot of, most especially one issued in response to a crash.
And if you enable the electric trim switches on a 737 MAX you get MCAS activation. MCAS, of course, trims faster than the switches. Using the electric switches is fighting a losing battle (look at the graphs of trim input vs output). How are you supposed to fly the plane when you can't trim the stabilizer?
Look at the graphs from the Indonesian report. The pilots were countering with trim up button presses and MCAS still managed to take the trim to a severe AND position.
Look at the graphs from the Ethiopian report. You'll see a long gap where the electric trim was disabled (leaving the pilots with no way to trim the stabilizer). Outside that gap you'll see an automatic (MCAS) AND command with no change in trim and a couple ANU clicks from the pilots with no resulting change in trim.
No guessing required. Follow the training, which is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning they weren't supposed to need to consult a checklist nor dig through anything nor guess.
And what memory items were they supposed to have in mind? Keeping in mind MCAS presented counter to how Boeing defines runaway trim.
The electric trim switches override MCAS. That is why the steps are:
1. use the electric trim switches to set the trim to normal
2. cut off the electric trim
That's all there is to it.
> MCAS presented counter to how Boeing defines runaway trim.
That's simply false. (And runaway trim does not need definition, Boeing does not define it.)
They pause MCAS but do not disable or override it it. The trim switches move the stabilizer slower than MCAS activation thus as seen by the Ethiopian and Lion Air crews using the electric trim switches is tantamount to fighting a losing batle.
1. use the electric trim switches to set the trim to normal
What happens when the electric trim switches don't work? They didn't in the Ethiopian crash.
runaway trim does not need definition, Boeing does not define it.
Sure they do, it's in the QRH plain as day.
Condition: Uncommanded stabilizer trim movement occurs continuously.
MCAS activation isn't continuous, especially not if you're pausing it with the trim switches.
There are tests to prove out ideas during the course of development, but then there are tests which would perhaps be more accurately called "demonstrations"; where you're not trying to find flaws and refine your designs, but rather prove that you're [insert thing-name you're proving here] actually works the way you are representing it to work.
I understood this test to be more in the demonstration category, where Boeing would/should have had very high confidence, but they needed to prove to NASA that their spacecraft worked as advertised. If that's true, it was almost more a test on how much NASA should trust the confidence of the Boeing team than it was a test engineering and manufacture.
If that wasn't the character of the test, then I apologize for the distraction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Orbital_Flight_Test
"It was unclear whether NASA would require Boeing to fly another test mission without crews onboard before allowing its astronauts to fly in the Starliner. Bridenstine said he wouldn’t rule out a mission with crews onboard, pointing out that the space shuttle had been piloted by astronauts, not computers."[0]
While Boeing makes noises about how there's no systemic problem with their ability to write software in general, earlier in the same article NASA comes to their defense by pointing out that if the craft was manned then the test would have been... saved? That seems strong to me but that is word used in the quote.
"NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a news conference Friday that the failure would not have been life-threatening had astronauts been onboard. He said that had the spacecraft been crewed, the mission might have been saved. “They are trained to deal with a situation where the automation is not working according to plan,” he said."
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/20/boeing-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_TV-3
has worked for Elon, and now his stock is trading at an all time high. $420
Haven't you heard?
When a company creates a culture of sweeping problems under the rug, and then tries to go back and change that, it creates an impossible situation for people at all levels of the hierarchy. Where management once told people it was OK to hide things from them, now they've changed the rules and are telling them, hey, show us all the things we told you we didn't want to know about.
First of all, when you're told this, you have no way of knowing if they really mean it. Are they saying, hey, actually show us the dirt so we can deal with it? Or are they saying, hey, show us the dirt WINK WINK, but we want the answer to be that nothing too bad happened because that's the easy way out? (In other words, you have to judge whether they've had a sincere change of heart or you're playing a new phase of the same game as before.)
But even if you really believe them, now you have a difficult calculation to make. Maybe you will reveal some dirt and they will say, wait a second, we meant for you to hide dirt, but not dirt that was that bad, and that's your fault, and you were supposed to know that. And now you're in trouble for telling the truth. Unless management offers you complete immunity (if that's even possible), you still have a reason to keep hiding stuff to protect yourself.
TLDR, if your organization made sure everybody's closets are full of skeletons, then you're going to have a hard time getting people to open those closet doors.
There is also the need for an organisation wide culture built on processes, procedures and channels that then enables the company to quickly and efficiently find solutions to these kind of problems.
When a company for a long time has being building a culture of ignoring problems, the effort required to rebuild that problem solving culture is massive.
It is not helped by the fact that the individuals holding the power at the different levels within the organisation tend to be the ones who oversaw the demise of that engineering culture in the first place.
What space program with new hardware has ever executed 100% flawlessly?
https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/pilot-procedure-co...
I'm sure they have neutered the software enough that it is much harder for it to kill you when it comes back, but the fact that MCAS still exists and is operational should put at least half a twist in your stomach when you get on one of these things. Any less is bravado.
If I recall Boeing asks the US to tariff Bombardiers aircraft (300%?)[1] that pushed a potential competitor (Bombardier) to work with Airbus (The Airbus 220 is a Bombardier design).
edit: Added: [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/boeings-trade-dispute-canada...
[1]https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/analy...
I worked in defense as a boeing sub. Boeing was the prime on radars and all manner of defense contracts that will keep them afloat (defense industry is another not very competetive one..).
Wasn't it Boeing's supposed MBA-led culture that got it into this mess?