Boeing engineer breaks silence on MAX 737
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- He's not a Boeing engineer, he's 'a senior member of the union'. Apparently he was an engineer sometime in the past, now his job is to push anything that will benefit members of the union, which is what he is doing here. He has no specific information about the MAX to offer.
- Cost savings is always the root cause of every engineering failure, so long as you have the benefit of hindsight. I mean once you know what the problem is you can spend money to fix it, and they should have spent that money right off the bat, right? I mean, if they knew there was a problem, which they must have or else there is nobody to blame. We need someone to blame! Of course projects that don't try to limit costs can't fail since they are canceled and never built. Except for the Space Shuttle, which went massively over budget again and again and still had a terrible safety record, which absurdly was blamed on cost cutting. https://www.wired.com/2016/01/to-cut-costs-and-save-time-nas... So no matter how much money you spend, when something fails you are going to be blamed for not spending more. If you budget $1 Billion and then decide to spend $10 Billion to improve safety, whenever something goes wrong they'll say you should have spent $11 Billion.
- Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety. The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety. This has been fabulously successful. Trying to place blame and attack people for past decisions will only lead to a closing of the culture and an attempt to hide information in the future. Compare aviation to the auto industry in how they adapt and improve safety, it's night and day for exactly this reason. Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future.
346 dead passengers is definitely not successful or acceptable. You think the rating/MCAS problem doesn't merit further investigation?
Investigating, understanding, and changing regulations and future policies and behavior is what we need. A witch hunt with a bunch of vested interests trying to benefit financially and find a scapegoat is not what we need.
He takes pride in the quality of his work and adherence to the rules, but Boeing's managers let him know that reporting unwired bolts & incorrectly installed hardware per policy was something they did not do. Very sketchy, not something anyone wants to be signing off on as personally liable!
The management loves to circlejerk about the "Boeing process", but lots of shit is slipping through these days that would have been unacceptable (and firable) only 2 decades ago.
Edit: Here is a piece New York Times did on exactly what I'm talking about: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
I once heard it said that any reasonably smart person can build a bridge that doesn't collapse. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't collapse, by an acceptable safety margin that still provides economy. So yes; any unforeseen failure exists because of that tradeoff.
The counterexample you name, the Space Shuttle, is just a series of fundamental mistakes compounded together--a boondoggle machine designed for a dozen different mission profiles, most of which never happened, and introduced serious regressions in survivability and launch escape compared to Apollo.
It turns out that if you take some task that is incredibly hard and inherently complex and performed by a very large number of extremely qualified and smart people near the limits of human experience, and you want to do that task in a better way it isn't going to boil down to something simple or obvious.
In fact, if the US political process is so broken, why is it the only process that ends up with space shuttles sitting in hangers? It's certainly not perfect, but since nobody can point to a political process that results in better space shuttles I don't see any evidence that humans have so far developed a better political process if you are measuring it in units of 'space shuttle reliability'.
TL;DR version:
The original design of the space shuttle was vastly smaller and simpler, but during the cold war the only way you could get something funded was to have a military dual use. So the Department of Defense offered NASA funding so long as they redesign the entire space shuttle to be able to capture and return Soviet satellites to the US -- a task that it never performed -- which required the design to be massively compromised.
The design of those shuttles lacked the flaw that contributed to the Challenger tragedy.
So, what was the engineering reason for implementing a US design requiring o-rings?
I’m pretty sure there were plenty of flaws that would have shown up if Buran had flown 100+ real orbital missions.
Doing things that are “incredibly hard and inherently complex” and also unnecessary and dangerous is idiotic. Things like building and flying a space shuttle rather than a normal space capsule. Especially when human lives are at stake.
Holy crap, that truck in oncoming traffic just barely avoided hitting us head on!
If that driver hadn't adjusted their speed appropriately for the road conditions and planned on switching lanes a quarter mile back we'd all be goners, bro.
Cute saying, but an aircraft doesn't really share this property. You can make a bridge or building stronger by just adding more stuff. Many pyramids and stone bridges have held up admirably even after thousands of years.
You can't make a better aircraft by just adding more stuff. Very soon, it becomes incapable of its primary purpose.
The executives of Boeing have pushed anything to benefit the company throughout this story, changing their narrative multiple times. Boeing has handled this entire saga so poorly that I truly don't understand the POV that the union is somehow responsible.
The cost savings hindsight argument doesn't address that this was an entirely preventable failure that was caused purely by miscommunication, disorganization, and greed. It's not like the aircraft experienced some unforeseen phenomenon that engineers have never recorded, they introduced a haphazardly flawed feature, they failed to clearly communicate the feature to clients, they failed to properly train the pilots, and people died.
which is kind of my point - he's just doing his job and making a completely predictable and expected statement. I'm not trying to say he shouldn't, but it isn't interesting or newsworthy.
I have no idea if this applies to Boeing. But a "cost cutting culture" can be due to the internal market within the company. The widget department wants to make enough money to meet its budget. So it unilaterally makes changes to the process that affect the quality of the overall product.
I found his "3 Business Cultures" quite informative:
https://kuow-prod.imgix.net/store/77d64a0b1331588db82efa7812...
> Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future.
'Feelings' ("afraid") are not operative here. A company in a highly regulated industry has a societal and legal duty to be forthright regarding their product. The sort of "fear" that companies need to feel is "being afraid of getting caught lying or covering up their mistakes".
I always thought that when Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago that that was the end of something special. They went from being legendary Boeing to just another hyper-corporation who happens to make money doing X or Y or Z.
In my opinion.
In my opinion, that made the whole company abstract to the executives.
I know investors must see a profit and business must keep moving but honoring the careful balance of these two ideas is a must or what are you really left with?
747 was exceedingly safe despite 3,000 deaths. Half of that was due to bombing, hijacking, missile. Seriously.
What you might be thinking of is the guidance against using "takeoff", which is "Avoid using the term “takeoff” except to actually clear an aircraft for takeoff or to cancel a takeoff clearance. Use such terms as “depart,” “departure,” or “fly” in clearances when necessary"
[0] - https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/7110.65X_w_C...
#2 deadliest is another 747 - JAL123 loaded with 520 passengers.
A mid air collision killing 300+ in 90s, and air india bombing killing 350 in 80s.
These crashes + lockerbie bombing add up to 2000 people.
Crazy.
> However, worldwide demand for airplanes is riding a high. And Boeing has diverted cash flow into dividends and share buybacks that have helped boost the company’s stock.
I started my career in IBM in the early 2000s, and this sounds incredibly familiar. As the years passed, company messaging and all-hands meetings increasingly celebrated the stock price, stock buy-backs, and later earnings per share. Meanwhile, the engineering teams and products around me felt more creaky and short-staffed, and the quality of many products (and, gradually, the technical leadership) seemed to be declining. Also, layoffs appeared to be picking up steam, and my salary was stagnant. I eventually left in 2010, giving myself a big raise in the process.
Right after the time I left, IBM rocketed to all-time highs and became the darling of the Dow, while everything else all around was still in shambles from the recession. I had a hard time reconciling the macro performance of the company with the facts on the ground as I experienced them. It was only much later that I think I understood what was happening, after reading a Sam Palmisano interview (having a hard time finding it).
The way I rationalize what I experienced at IBM is that the company leadership decided to raid the coffers and cash out on value the company had built up over the decades. It's like cashing in your chips at the casino after deciding you've played enough. The way they did this was to cut costs relentlessly and employ "financial engineering" to inflate the stock price. It was basically a transfer of wealth from the investment in the products and the people to the owners/shareholders in the form of higher share values and dividends.
I suppose one can interpret this sort of company decision as a bet against future growth, and an admission that the investment to some degree had run its course. Also, a company like IBM (and Boeing) has built so much value over the decades, that even after raiding the coffers and cutting costs, the embers still burn hot and the business is still huge, though perhaps now hamstrung and unable to grow. Of course, this creates a pretty dismal situation for us grunts on the ground, and the work product undoubtedly suffers, while the brain drain picks up its pace.
The difference of course between IBM and Boeing is that the cost cutting in Boeing has ended up costing many human lives, and the consequences are much much sharper in blood and reputation, and maybe in regulation as well.
Collis Potter Huntington. (Newport Shipyards, contractors to US Navy)
What would be his "political" point here?
It could very well be the truth that the cost-cutting culture is to blame. But it's always worth noting incentives of parties in cases like this.
Serious questions, I'm not quite understanding that corporate culture.
That being the case, the motivation to ensure that the former are not blamed for the 737-Max issue and to call into question the quality of work of the latter is probably clear.
[0] - http://www.speea.org/Join_Our_Union!/FAQ.html ("Where do SPEEA members work?")
But, as far as I can tell this isn't a fight, but it's more like marketing to the public in a way that might be beneficial for future negotiations.
I guess a union's purpose is to protect and benefit it's members.
A example scenario I could imagine (complete fiction) might be Boeing tries to look good to shareholders by laying off several teams, blaming engineers and management of them for the safety issues. This could benefit the company financially.
By preemptively making sure the public is aware that corporate culture is to blame it'd likely make a move like that far harder to enact.
Making it clear that this is the fault of the corporation, not the individuals, keeps the union members safe in this case.
This scenario is likely unrealistic. But maybe someone has a better explanation/historical example?
I don't know how it is in other places, but in the U.S. every unionized employee has to pay a fee to the union for the benefits it provides them. These benefits may include protection from corporate leaders if they try to fire you (see also: police officers, tenured teachers).
> Does it benefit financially from it?
Not directly, but there are a lot of employees who would be upset at the union if they paid their dues and still got fired anyways. Other employees would see this and be more hesitant at supporting the union in the future.
Alternatively, if there's a possibility that a lot of employees (>100) can be fired as a result of the fallout from this mess, that's >100 union fees that can no longer be collected.
> Do their members somehow benefit from it?
See protection described above. Note that, for some reason, some American unions believe in protecting their employees even if they deserve to be fired. I think this is where the politicization claims come in. By supporting this union leader you are supporting no accountability for engineers or managers who maybe should be fired. Or so the argument goes, I don't really agree with that line of thinking but it's understandable why people would see it this way, especially given the line between police unions and police brutality.
> Are you saying that Boeing wants to blame their Engineers and this is now a fight between Boeing and it's employees?
Honestly? Kind of. I mean, I'm not Boeing, but they certainly seem to be trying to paint this situation as a technical issue rather than a political/financial one. They sold a separate upgrade to the plane that provided two sensors instead of one, which could have fixed the MCAS problems. Why didn't the original plane just come with two sensors? Etc...
I'm actually interested in your perspective now. How are unions seen in your culture? Are these problems of unions protecting bad employees present in your country, or is it an American thing?
They are likely going to speak negatively of even the greatest off-shoring/out-sourcing or other labor cost-savings effort.
More or less. Unions are viewed as anti-corporate (rather than an balancing factor), anti-job, and anti-right wing by the Republican party. Even someone who believes in unions in the US would see unions as political.
Some of this comes from machine poltics of the early 1900s, but that being a real factor in American democracy has passed from living memory for the most part. It is much more rooted in the corporate supremacy of the 1980s with strikebreaking and what not.
In the end, it's probably at least partially true and very biased at the same time. I think the biggest arguments about unions are if they provide value, and if you are required to be part of a union in order to work in a given position/company. There've also been weird reverse-unions where the union is actually on the employer network's side. I've seen this happen locally with regards to nursing workers, the collective is member operated under the various hospitals and providers for fixed, down-ward driven rates.
A union allows workers to speak out without fear of losing their jobs. The implicit approval gives more credibility to the author.
So many punchlines, but this one is is just sad. 92%.
Like most things, a happy medium is good. Too few buybacks, you might be wasteful in your R&D spending. Too much, you get a Boeing situation. A middle ground optimizes for continuing to produce innovations, while maintaining (and hopefully growing) revenues.
Many little cost-cutting decisions are made, and many are probably likely to be inconsequential. It's easy for us to say, "obviously cutting 2 sensors to 1" was the wrong choice. But you could make the same argument for any other cost-cutting measure they employed, that had no safety impact. The difference here, is unfortunately this one brought a huge public eye on Boeing.
It's good to cut costs (where reasonably possible), and it's good to return value to shareholders. Those are things expected of public companies. They probably compared themselves to their peers, realized that stock buybacks is the current metric to which public companies are being measured by, and over-optimized for it. A lot of people look at their peers to decide what to do themselves, even multi-national companies. This time, it didn't pan out.
I wonder if it would help for a new kind of union to arise - one that exists only to guarantee good wages for its members -- to force companies to direct more profits toward wages instead of towards stock buybacks.
Short term, it will probably lead to equity market tanking, especially if it is not coordinated with the rest of the world capital market.
I guess I'm more interested in long term impact on how companies operate, compensates executives, manages assets. Dividend will still be allowed.
To summarize his article: if you take issue with anything, take issue with the profitability and lack of reinvestment. Don't blame buybacks and dividends because in general, they're an outcome. As Levine says: "But in this story the buybacks are the residual, a result of a focus on profits rather than a cause."
The problem is lack of re-investment. 92% of Operating cash flow of being plowed into repurchase and dividend is high even more mature company like Boeing.
"Consumed" is kind of a loaded word. It's true that money spent that way can't be invested in capital improvements or R&D. But "consumed" kind of implies "wasted". That's hard to say without knowing what a normal number for an airplane manufacturer is.
And, of course, money spent on "handsome executive bonuses" would also have drawn ire...
The stock market is basically telling us that this is all just a bit of bad press that will pass.
This story is very similar to a story here on hn from just a few days ago:
Prior to the 1980s, Japan's economy functioned as a sort of War economy. Companies would spend and invest to gain market share at the cost of margins. share prices were rarely something a company worried about, it was always about product.
This was key to Japan's insane post WW2 success.
Then came the 80s, with it US style shareholder capitalism. and within 10 years Japan's economy collapsed - never to recover.
If you notice, China is following the same exact pattern, running a War economy with a razor focus on market share over profitability. It's what causes great fortunes to be made and lost in China.
Coming back to Boeing, because of the monopolist dynamic here, nothing is going to change. Especially since the people who died were mostly foreign nationals. I doubt even if some unfortunate event like that happens in the EU,NA Boeing would go bankrupt - there would be a lot of noise for a few years, maybe some board members get fired. Too many pension plans and retirement plans depend on Boeing's survival.
I do. Going bankrupt means the shareholders who benefited from this lose their shirt, the company goes into Chapter 11, and the market learns that airplane companies exist to make airplanes that don't fall out of the sky.
As one of the top comments stated, embracing a punitive culture toward engineering accidents has no long-term benefits. In my work (and this is probably true in any successful organization) even the most severe screw up is examined honestly and without emotion so that it can be prevented from happening again. If the immediate response is to fire a bunch of people or throw them in jail, people are going to do everything they can to avoid responsibility and ultimately fixing the problem.
If in the course of an investigation it comes out that Boeing execs were willfully negligent or malicious, then we can start discussing throwing people in jail and bankrupting companies, but that shouldn't be the first reflexive impulse.
Arguable the US should develop more in-house capabilities (as in government employees producing their own technologies) to compete with Boeing, etc if for no other reason.
There's clearly something unique about the US in that nearly half of the capital in the global stock market is US companies, and the gigantic, relatively young, public companies are very disproportionately American (FAANG, etc.) Is it obvious to you what it is, because I've never heard a convincing, succinct explanation.
Here's a illustration of how skewed the world stock markets are by country:
https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a627a158c32379008b4...
In the EU companies spend a lot more time optimising their tax situations (for the founder and employees) and cannot easily hire or sell products across borders due to language barriers. The EU needs to adopt English officially and individual EU countries need to adopt English as an additional official language and allow children to be instructed in it
They are humans and the airplanes from Boeing have been very very very reliable. It's not like every max 8 dropped from the air. A lot of them, most of them flew alright. I know the people who lost their lives paid a big price but, in hindsight everyone has an opinion.
Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/busi...
Except they didn't do that. They did many things wrong, and it sounds like what they tried hard to do was cut costs, rush to production, and get a favorable regulatory/certification outcome via the cheapest route possible.