The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max crisis
qz.com
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I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers. Compare the union workers for the Big Three during the 1970's to that of the gig economy workers now. Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions is what is best in the long term? Or maybe, we need to alternate periods of disruption and highly competitive markets with periods of stability and oligopolies? I suspect we as a society will have to try to figure that out, and that it is not a simple answer.
What choice do we have? Even if there is a choice, the majority of consumers don't have the luxury of choosing.
Dying once every 10 million flight hours instead of every 1000 million flight hours is a fair price to pay for 10 USD of savings.
The odds of buying a JetBlue ticket and ending up on a Boeing are fairly low compared to flying Southwest.
No information - They rarely have any information (you have to go through several menus to find out your plane on most sites). They don't know when / where the plane was last serviced [0].
No framework - Your average consumer of air travel is not equipped to accurately evaluate that information should they even have it. (c.f., 'if it's not Boeing I a'int going [1]). They cannot make rational and informed decisions without information and a rational decision making framework
No control - They have no control over whether that plane is changed for operational reasons even if they have the information and a framework to evaluate it. You may not even know until you are onboard with the door shut unless you are really well informed about airplanes that the plane model has changed (e.g., I avoid A321s because
No recourse - Even if they consciously choose a plane based on information and an informed framework and then it gets changed what can you do? Are you even going to know until you get on the plane at which point what do you do? Do you think you get a refund?
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
I'm not sure that is a universal positive.
And thus no one will actually know that Boeing's planes are of lower quality, until a couple hundred people die.
This presumes a perfect market where customers are rational actors with access to a variety of sellers whose product differs only on quality, which consumers have access to accurate information about and the time and expertise to precisely evaluate.
Of course the reality is we're just trying to book a flight to get home before Mom's chemo starts and all we know about each airline is the ticket price and how good the peanuts were the last time we flew on them.
Airlines are about the last industry on Earth where we should expect laissez-faire capitalism to produce optimal outcomes.
Regulation.
In any case, even if 10% of people totally stopped flying on Boeing, which would be a wildly optimistic outcome for any organized consumer action, the airlines would just discount those flights ever so slightly and the other 90% of price-conscious consumers would immediately take up the slack. Nobody's going out of business in that scenario. This is, of course, why we rely on regulation rather than consumer choice to ensure safety, and why this is a failure of regulation, not of the market.
I have also mostly changed my mind here. Largely because I've worked in a quality focused shop and seen the difference. But, I also appreciate that cheaper means more people can access goods and services, even if at a lower quality.
Even markets for more innocuous products/services require some minimum acceptable standard or else the race to the bottom will give us more affordable but more dangerous products: Thomas the Tank Engine ($3) vs Deluxe Thomas the Tank Engine with Lead-Free Paint ($5)
In this case, it’s easy to understand “pilots don’t need new training” and “we don’t have to recertify as much”, but it required more expertise to understand the increase in risk of dangerous situations occurring due to those changes, and the long-term impact of a loss of trust.
It also sounds like the changes in the company culture reduced the status of the people with that expertise who were responsible for measuring, understanding, and informing the physical risks of the product. It’s pretty logical in retrospect, then, that Boeing suffered a airline accident scandal rather than an overspending scandal. Because of the nature of the product, there wasn’t a gradual warning sign that the risks were getting untenable. Things crossed a threshold, air disasters happened, and permanent damage was done to the company’s reputation.
Even if Boeing did replace the 737 with a new plane, I’d now be wary of flying on it due to the de-escalation of engineering concerns I’ve read about. If the importance it places on engineering has dropped to the point where it can’t upgrade its own existing planes without causing them to crash, how can I trust them to design a completely new one?
But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc).
And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.
Except for the climate change part. Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives.
To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.
This is out of context. Same thing could be said with the advent of the internet and massive energy consumption that came with it. The debate here is about the effect the technology had on day to day human lives, not on the optimization of it afterwards.
The internet can be plausibly powered by low-carbon energy sources using present technology.
If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good.
I think we all understand that flying is not "green" or "sustainable".
> To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.
> If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good.
Reminds me of something really out of context: food. I was shocked when a gym trainer told me that if my goal is weight loss, I must focus on what I eat.
(I am not a vegetarian or a vegan btw) To keep our planet inhabitable, we must reduce the amount of meat we consume and alter our diet very significantly. I know this is a fact and yet I continue to stuff our faces like there's no tomorrow. I don't fly a lot but I eat a lot. I actually enjoy eating (to the point that it wasn't obvious to me that many people don't). It would be very hypocritical of me to suggest that there be a huge surcharge to discourage people from flying but no surcharge on meat products, leather, almonds, ...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-red...
Clearly as the denominator shrinks, and the numerator grows even slowly, percentage increases. That said, it's probably not the main issue in in climate change or even close to it. Other sectors such as ground transport, industrial heat (cement, steel etc.), agriculture (primarily fertilizer) and other fixed sources (buildings/homes) are a bigger deal.
If we end up with airlines as the last carbon source, that's probably OK if we deal with the rest. 25% or even 50% of remaining budget is fine if the rest of the (easier) problems get solved. Air travel is uniquely hard, let's get the easier stuff first.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissi...
As for the occasional personal trip (I assume by # of people though maybe not # of miles flown, the far more common use case, only 12% of passengers are business travel[1]), should we be telling people, "no you're not going to see grandma for christmas"?
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-much-rev...
The problem is that Christians have been telling people not to sin for 2000 years, and people have not stopped sinning..."
With modern video calling technology, how many business trips are really essential? Some sure, but a lot could be cut, or merged into fewer longer trips.
Still even with that, I'd like to better understand the economics. If only 12% of trips are business vs pleasure, killing all business trips won't move the needle in the long run. There's some question of how long business trips are, you can be 12% of trips but if they're longer it's worse.
My overall point is that there are a lot of factors in how people chose to travel. It's far from clear that increasing the already quite high price is what's going to deter people unless you tax it massively. In which case we'll effectively return to a situation like the pre-deregulation days where only the rich flew, which may be fine, but should be directly considered.
Taxing air travel to reduce frivolous trips would be a great policy. Add fast trains between major US cities.
Which is to say, the world-wide policy priorities need to be on transportation (other than flying), electricity production and industrial emissions [0]. Giving up coal and petrol cars has potentially much greater impact than giving up flying.
That said, when you consider the CO2 emissions that you cause yourself directly, a good rule of thumb is that as soon as you fly at all, CO2 from flying dwarfs all your other CO2 emissions. On the individual level, not flying, flying less, or offsetting carbon emissions from flying has the biggest impact.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Take for example shipping, which uses 4.5% of global co2 emissions, yet most people haven't stepped on a ship in their lifetime, and never will!
Quote: "annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO2, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatec...
Also, note that aircraft are not limited to carrying passengers... They also carry cargo.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that this is not a problem that should be solved individually. I don't hold my breath for what the higher ups are coming up with though, their measures seem misguided at best, deliberately loop-holed at worst.
[0] http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-20...
All arguments that we shouldn't fix X climate problem because it's less important than Y are just arguments that we shouldn't fix climate problems because the arguer doesn't want them fixed.
No individual actions have any effect at all, and people who argue about them are, again, just distracting from the important work of creating collective solutions.
In Europe I usually take the train places. If it's 2-3h away by train it's usually faster to take the train, and it's often (though not always) comparable or cheaper on price. In the US, I virtually never take the train, there simply aren't adequate options. The distances tend to be much larger, and we simply haven't built the infrastructure. We could build it, but that's proven quite hard (see CA high speed rail and efforts to modernize northeast corridor) for both political and practical reasons. NY<->DC I often take the bus, it's cheaper and only a slight time penalty vs. the train.
4/5 people sounds like a big number but those people are much more likely to start eating meat or buy a car at first than to fly. That's a way bigger problem environmentally.
A train with 500 seats running London to Manchester costs about £4/mile in electricity, of which 20p will be VAT (which I think is reclaimed) - so tax would be about £35, or 7p per passenger.
A flight of a 150 seat plane from London to Manchester attracts £3900 in tax.
Not in most of the USA (well, it is electric generated from a diesel hybrid). Electrification over large distances is expensive, the only country to have done that so far are the Chinese (and even then they don’t bother with way out Tibet...yet).
All of Sweden's rail is electric and most of Europe's too.
> In europe, jet fuel isn't taxed at all (but train/car fuel is) which often makes flying the cheaper option. From london, I can fly to several european cities cheaper than I can get a 2 hour train within the UK. Which is pretty ridiculous.
Australia and America are irellevent. Almost all long distance trips in Europe is electricity
"Among the reasons for this focus is that these emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level." [0]
So you can look at 2-3% of co2, or you can look at impact and if we use the co2 proportion as a proxy of overall emissions, ~8% in terms of impact - and growing fast.
It does not.
Climate change is real and will cause serious problems. It will emphatically NOT threaten billions of lives. The people who tell you that are either misinformed or lying.
https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Southw...
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Routes-Southwest-Alask...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/03/jetblue-is-canceli...
Reportedly a lot of this is because deregulation eliminated many requirements that previously forced airlines to service less-profitable areas, in a similar fashion to how the USPS is required to provide service to Anyone instead of just people in profitable areas.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...
Since I'm unlikely to fly my 20 mile commute to work, logging those miles under the "drive car" category isn't comparable, but is likely how I'd be in a car accident since that's something like 75% of my driving life. It seems you should only compare flights of 3 hrs vs car trips of 3 hours, or similar.
Comparing flying for an hour vs driving for an hour isn’t a comparison between two substitute goods, unless the purpose of my trip was “to kill an hour”, making those valid substitutes.
You'd need to set some minimum trip distance for which flying is a viable alternative, like say 300 or 500 miles. Then throw out all the driving data for under that. Now, how would you expect this to shift the deaths/mile of driving?
In order to reduce it, driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true. Long trips often take place on highways at higher speeds and thus accidents have higher consequences. Drivers are more likely to be fatigued on longer trips. Drivers are less likely to be familiar with the roads on longer trips.
You've probably also got to throw out all flights for which driving is not a possibility. Like transcontinental trips. That may make flying appear safer since flights over oceans are more dangerous since there arent as many emergency landing opportunities.
High speed delta to predominant flow is the more accurate metric.
Your fatigue comment is well received, but not a given either. A person may feel driving in a fatigued state is more acceptable for a short trip, but enforce more rigid limits on behavior for a long trip from home.
I would be shocked to find that short trips were safer (per-mile) than long trips, as my intuition is that interstate highways are likely to be by far the safest type of roadway on a per-mile basis.
So I did some digging. It was surprisingly hard to find data that broke it down by roadway type, but I eventually found an article[1] that also linked to data[2].
Taking the most recent year available [2004], and converting to the typical airline standard (deaths per 10 billion miles travelled), urban interstates have a death rate of 57 deaths/10Bmi, urban collector roads 85 deaths/10Bmi, urban local roads 128 d/10Bmi, and rural local roads 315 d/10Bmi.
Airline figures for comparison are about 0.2 deaths per 10Bmi for scheduled commercial airline travel (Delta, United, Southwest, American, etc; not charter, not corporate, not general aviation), yet people are much more fearful of airplanes than automobiles on average.
[1] - http://freakonomics.com/2010/01/29/the-irony-of-road-fear/
[2] - https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/national_transporta...
This isn't actually true for recreational travelers. People roughly spend the same amount of time traveling as before commercial flight, they just go further.
To put it differently, people generally have the same vacation time available to them. They're also generally willing to burn roughly the same fraction of their vacation on the travel portion.
Commercial air travel has just enabled people to travel further in the same amount of time, while also burning more fuel doing so vs. the alternatives (road, rail...)
Short haul flights are right around 100 miles per gallon per passenger seat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Short...
For a couple considering an airline flight vs a car, they'd need to be driving a 50mpg car to achieve the same fuel efficiency as the airline.
This is obviously not the case.
Trying to compare the two "per pax mile" ignores the fact that the convenience of air travel created more travel than it ever saved in fuel efficiency as a bulk mover. It covers longer distances in generally less time and more comfort, it created a new class of travel in an additive fashion, it didn't strictly replace the alternatives.
If we're actually debating fuel and emissions on a large scale, this is a major part of the larger picture.
Furthermore, since the primary dimension which matters to individuals is time and cost not distance, when you'd compare a vacation by automobile to flight, the automobile vacation would likely be to a nearer destination. So one shouldn't even be comparing equal distances if attempting such a comparison, it's just not comfortable and/or worthwhile for most people to drive across the country for a weekend trip - many will do that flight without batting an eye.
Fortunately modern vehicles, especially the likes of Teslas and supercharger networks completely destroy even your disingenuous comparison.
If someone invents a plane which has the same probability of death flying between point A and point B, but gets there in half the time, it's not really less safe.
To these people multiculturalism is just a means to increase the size of the industrial reserve army.
> drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,
https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762
Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.
This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision.
We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is always possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).
I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.
Another example is family members overseas. Many have to choose between providing for their family vs. being with their family. Affordability of flights can have a huge impact on their quality of life and ability to take part in the moments that many of use take for-granted.
Anyway, I have this feeling that you could justify just about anything if you dig for nth-order effects, but it doesn't change the fundamental point: a race to the bottom sacrifices everything that can be sacrifices. Environment is usually the first victim, quality the second, but safety trade-offs are eventually made too. At some point in a product category's lifecycle, one starts to wonder whether it's so degraded that it would be better if it didn't exist anymore.
Which means we don't know how much these things actually cost in real terms. We also don't know how to quantify potential benefits.
(And if someone says 'Well, that's subjective' - so is nominal market value.)
There's conventional profit-loss accounting, and there's everything else. It seems the everything else can accumulate to ecosystem-threatening levels, and conventional accounting will continue to pretend this is financially irrelevant.
Example: I live in the Philippines. Its healthcare system is affected by two things: centralization and the fact that the country is an archipelago.
Most quality health care is happening in Metro Manila. What you find outside is generally very basic, and even in 2nd-tier cities like Cebu or Davao they may refer you to Manila for something you'd think they ought be able to do.
With travel by boat being … rather slow, with vacation time not exactly ample, and the average salary being low I'm quite certain that affordable flights ($25 Cebu - Manila) are making ample difference in terms of what kind of healthcare situations are being addressed.
My father has decent insurance as a retiree and still got billed for an ambulance ride after he had complications following a jaw surgery.
I've seen a bunch of anecdotal stories about how it's cheaper for someone on the west coast to fly to Korea, or down to Mexico, for non-critical surgeries, spend a week recovering, and then fly home.
(Oh yeah!) If the WTC was standing maybe oil would be cheaper.
(Oh no!) But, if oil were cheaper, we would be that much further away from adopting alternate energy sources like solar.
Reminds me of the quote (forget the source) -
Nothing is bad. Nothing is good. Everything just is.
But memories are short and greed is long, and those who “forget” that every safety reg was written in the blood of others can sleep easy beneath golden parachutes and very good lawyers.
Honestly, best thing Boeing could do now is rename it the “737 MAX Fight Club Pinto”, fill it with all the incels who didn’t get the joke, and fly the whole crapload off into the great unknown.
Risk tolerances are different, so why do we try to regulate to a given standard. It makes little sense to allow motorcycles yet have a regulation that requires the use of seatbelts in cars. Instead, I'd like to see regulations that enforce testing and information sharing. After that, let people decide which airline to take, which car to buy, and therefore where to draw that line.
Cost, who knows.
Air travel had gotten much better by pretty much all measures, including safety.
Drunk driving is low hanging fruit: it is really bad and easy to get rid of without great cost to society. It is incomparable to what is going on in the aviation industry.
Als: Planes add another dimension of things which can go wrong so maybe that is also involved.
Driver crashes a car, kills a few. Personal liability, local reporting. Rest of world rolls on.
Airliner crashes, kills hundreds. Global headlines. Massive corporate responsibility. Very bad for business; just ask PanAm.
This is a point that needs to be made more often.
I'm not sure more access to air travel has made people's lives better (different, sure)... but it's not like the flying experience has been getting worse in a vacuum. AFAIK, way more people have access to it today than did half a century ago.
Since travelling was slow, people had to adapt. From Paris, a bourgeois family could spend a day or two in the neighboring countryside, but if they wanted to visit Italy or Russia, you'd stay there for a few months. Nowadays, it's the same: from Paris, a middle class family can spend the week-end at Tunis, but they will take two weeks of holidays for Thailand. Yet our time-constrained lives have made months-long stays less frequents.
I think it's worth considering the effect that political and social narratives have on this. Reagan-style politics not only deregulates markets, it pushes a moral narrative that it is righteous to exploit the market as far as you possibly can, even when that means taking advantage of market flaws and externalities such that you are causing a net societal harm.
Their ideology is such that this is "capitalistic" and therefore good, and so we should not attempt to curb, regulate or otherwise discourage such behaviour. This has no basis in economic theory, and it's causing huge harms to our society (and economy).
USA innovated and created POTS, land line phones - and then again with wireless phones/radio phones that ultimately became cell phones.
Emerging countries skipped all that, landline, pots, regulation of monopolies and ultimately in the end just were able to put in some towers and voila, cell phones all w/ imported technology that majority of people in that emerging country do not understand to the equilivent of magic.
If there is no profit, it won't be built. Many countries didn't get cell phones until late 00's. Where now it's not really a cell phone, but "facebook."
Your points about cost reduction spreading wealth and access don't preclude the idea that a race to the bottom incentive might pass a stress tolerance threshold somewhere.
That wholly depends on how often you fly those damn death traps. I highly doubt accounting for just the MAX alone would still give you the same result (safest form of travel). My car sure feels safer than a MAX, but I didn't run the numbers.
But Boeing itself isn't one of the many airlines and is the singular US plane exporter champion. Wheras Delta, Southwest, et al want to see that the FAA isn't giving Jet Blue a pass there's mostly only Boeing to check whether Boeing is given too much of a pass and political pressure from up high is targeted at making Boeing better positioned to compete with Airbus which the FAA doesn't have jurisdiction or input from.
So I think it's really a different situation.
The market for air travel is highly competitive, the market for airplanes is not. In the market that the 737 serves, there's options from Boeing, Airbus, Tupolev and maybe Comac. Comac and Tupolev are deeply connected with the governments of China and Russia respectively; Airbus and Boeing are heavily subsidized by European and US government too, although more independent. There's a few more manufacturers if you include slightly smaller jets.
Building high capacity passenger jets has large inherent barriers to market, but then you also see things like Bombardier being forced into partnership with Airbus when it tried to develop a new jet around the market of the 737.
Long manufacturing queues and logistical difficulties of mixed fleets also make it hard for airlines to switch models or manufacturers, especially for smaller airlines.
Can't you also plausibly in a similar spirit argue for the point that the regulations about retraining pilots were responsible for the 737 MAX disaster? Otherwise Boeing would not have made such crazy engineering decisions about its design.
Boeing tried to game the regulations, and because of cuts the regulator didn't have the manpower to catch them.
Classic "starve the beast" - cut funding to government so it fucks up, then claim government is incompetent and so should be smaller.
The regulations lead to the situation that Boeing had an incentive to do that. Nearly every economist will confirm you that economy is all about incentives.
The inherent flight characteristics of the 737MAX are very similar to the 737NG. The difference is only in abnormal, high AoA maneuvers, when the aircraft is being mishandled. MCAS was supposed to correct for this situation. Unfortunately the final MCAS design was highly failure prone and instead of protecting from an abnormal situation, it caused the plane to become uncontrollable.
I don't think that's a great argument, pilots needing to be trained/certified for a significantly different plane is a pretty sane regulation. Would you feel comfortable flying in a plane that the pilot was never trained on?
Also, I would argue that the ultimate cause of this disaster is that the Pilots were not adequately trained on how the MCAS system works. This only further supports this kind of regulation being important.
They probably are.. but it's probably not wise to consider a market dominated by three players as "competitive."
> Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions
I also don't think "more monopoly" is the sensible conclusion.
> and that it is not a simple answer.
Why is "more government regulation" not even a part of your consideration? The article itself even hints at this, before deregulation a company like Boeing could exist and be profitable, but after deregulation it becomes beholdant to Wall Street. It seems pretty clear what the solution is.
(The terminology is a bit unfortunate, but we're stuck with it for now.)
Ultimately, the airlines wanted a common TC and type rating for very good reasons -- it saves money, i.e. human effort in pilot training, the number of pilots that need to be on reserve, maintenance training and staffing, spare parts inventory, etc. These are all laudable goals, and to simply say that Boeing should have designed a new plane is too simplistic. The real problem IMO was the contracts Boeing signed with very high penalties for delivering late or having any additional training whatsoever.
This didn't give the engineers enough flexibility or time to design a safe augmentation system, especially after the discovery during test flights that the pitch instability was worse than expected. That led to a quick patch-up job that totally compromised the redundancy of MCAS.
It's also clear in hindsight that the FAA handed too much authority to Boeing on the certification side, and that they should have been scrutinizing their safety analyses more. That is clearly happening now, to Boeing's consternation.
And still, even if that is the case, the anger stems from the fact that corners seemed to have been cut and warnings ignored. In other words this was not some unforeseen event that was unavoidable. It was in fact avoidable
Here's the best data I could find from the U.S.: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229020495_Aviation_...
It looks like the U.S. in the 1970s had about 1 fatality per billion passenger miles. To get to 3 per billion, you have to go back to the early-mid 60s. I wasn't able to get worldwide data, but generally the rest of the world has lagged behind the U.S. by a factor of at least 3x.
Cars are about 7 per billion passenger miles (https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/bw0msc/passe...)
Was the MCAS a lone example of rushed, poorly tested work done by people without enough knowledge of the industry they were working for? Or is it just the first one to come to light, because the MCAS caused the plane to be grounded before any others did?
We don't know, but my guess is, based on the other news coming out about the 737MAX since it was grounded, that there are other issues like this lurking. This tends to suggest that the problem is cultural, and the corporate culture is one of the primary responsibilities of the people in command.
Looking at it through a software lens - even if you do have the best people, if your project structure squeezes development time, rather than producing solid code and catching all the bugs early, you'll produce flaky code that will produce surprises down the line.
Then on top of that, such will lose some of its best engineers (because they get frustrated) and probably won't attract new good ones because they don't value them sufficiently to pay them enough.
We really shouldn't blame deregulation (in the sense of reducing the barrier of entry to airline markets). Lower airline ticket prices (Europe is a case in point) is better for everyone. And if quality were indeed lower, then another company should be able to swoop in and capture a higher tier quality market if there are people willing to pay for it (like first class, or business class)
Lack of anti-trust enforcement in the aerospace manufacturing industry is entirely orthogonal and hurts plane safety.
I thought it was to avoid FAA airworthiness recertification.
If you ask me this is a problem in every highly regulated industry. You often find that the regulations have exceptions for smaller changes. What then happens is that you have many tiny changes that are made to fly under the radar, because it's unduly expensive to recertify after a big change. This makes it impossible to do big changes that are necessary to get rid of technical debt. Since it's impossible to get management approval for these. And technical debt keeps on building up.
If the incentives were more continuous (not sure how this is possible), instead of abruptly changing (no training <-> full training dichotomy), then we would see fewer of these cases.
So cases like this become a question of certain cost vs. risky reward (cheating or other hacky solutions). And if you've already invested in a few hacky solutions and not been caught, then the incremental risk seems to go lower, while the abrupt cost change stays the same.
It also goes hand in hand with the normalization of deviance (https://danluu.com/wat/).
If everything you've done for the last 60 years is incrementally adding hacks to the 737, then the one on the 737 MAX doesn't seem crazy anymore.
Another example of this is getting planning permission to build a house. Renovations are generally easier to get approved than new construction and keep any variances that have already been granted, so you’ll occasionally see someone “renovate” a house by tearing down everyrhing except for a single wall and building completely new otherwise.
Instead it seems the goal was to get a moderately viable product to market as fast as possible, and the fastest and cheapest way was force some changes and fly under the regulators' radar.
That's at least one alternative perspective worth considering.
No! That's shifting the blame away from those that engineered and built that death trap. Which is the Boeing Corporation.
If airlines demand features, which are just not feasible to provide at the price range they're willing to pay then it's the plane makers responsibility not to provide such planes. Period!
The core issue (apart from what happened much earlier, after McDonnel's reverse take over) was not the fact that airlines were trying to drive the price down, but that Boeing didn't have a competing product in the most critical market and wouldn't have one for a decade if they engineered a modern plane.
So they hacked an ancient 60th design to modern standards and shunned, demoted or simply fired engineers, which dared to raise concerns. Having the FAA in their pockets and spending tons of cash on lobbying instead of investing it into the construction of good reliable planes also didn't help.
This one's on Boeing. Not on airlines and certainly not on pilots. It's on The Boeing Comnpany; period!
And what galls me most is that the only entity, which was in a position to know what was wrong after the first crash did everything in it's power to blame, befuddle, obstruct and deflect from the real cause. MCAS, which wasn't even documented in the manuals at that time.
In that sense the second crash is corporate mass murder for profit and I really hope that C level people go to jail for that one (alas, I doubt it).
in some cases yes, in others no. use the right tool for the job
At worst you get things like the gig economy.
Customers don't have any idea about which airline is safer. Airlines rarely have an idea of which airline is safer - shortcuts taken in manufacturing might lead to problems 20 years down the line when no human who was involved in the engineering or purchasing work is still at either company.
>Inside the company, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction. A formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned employees they needed to “quit behaving like a family and become more like a team. If you don’t perform, you don’t stay on the team.”
Always have an eye on the exit if your new exec sounds like he belongs in the next Bond movie.
There are plenty of examples of engineers that make terrible managers, to be sure. But there are also plenty of examples of managers with business backgrounds that have absolutely no idea about the consequences of their decisions. An optimal result requires skill in both domains.
By this point, you might be thinking, "Hey wait, isn't it true that cost-cutting also had a role in the crisis? Wasn't there at least one engineer that sounded the alarm in a memo?" And my answer to that is a resounding yes. But the question remains, where the hell did that idea come from? At no point did anyone think, "I'd love to spike my profits this quarter here and have huge disaster that will tank us in the next quarter." Therefore the problem isn't one of simple pursuit of the profit motive, because it is quite clear that Boeing hasn't profited from this situation long-term. And that's why I have focused explicitly on this foolish, self-defeating management fashion at the top of my mini essay here.
This brings us to the topic of Boeing's future. I could be wrong about him, but the fact that they have selected a person who majored in accounting to be their new CEO does not bode well for them. At the very least he has a major gap in his background to overcome, and at best I can only see them just managing to hang on instead of growing.
How does this relate to the merger issue? This management fashion I am speaking would have likely infected both McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing had they remained separate. That's because companies hire people out of the same pool of people that learn this stuff in their universities! Maybe there is a case to be made that having separate companies would make it slightly harder for them to both fail, but I believe that this isn't a very strong argument.
I'm disappointed that you're being downvoted, I wish someone who downvoted you wrote a reply.
That could be hard data to gather systematically. It's not like businesses fail immediately when you put a "generic manager" in change. A company can coast for decades before problems become obvious, and generic management confusing things even further by focusing on manipulating the most visible metrics (e.g. stock price) while taking actions that damage long term prospects.
Arguably an issue back in the heyday of hereditary nobility too, come to think of it. I wonder how much of modern executive culture echoes some of those older patterns.
You can do very complex things without even involving software - including non linear things - or by involving it but not necessarily in a primary characterizing way. What happened here was in no way a software failure except if you generalize the meaning of "software" to include the whole lifecycle of the domain it's applied to, and the comprehensive corresponding engineering. And that's what tons of "purely" software people (by that I mean people working in a field where the non-software components are only ancillary to making the software run, in huge contrast with what happens in avionics) are doing too often in that case. Except what failed here was good old boring engineering, risk analysis, and properly conforming to regulations. The software "worked", in the sense that it did precisely what it was designed to do. But what it was designed to do was stupid. And deciding what it should do was not a "software" thing. It was an avionics one. It is not possible to conflate the tech and the domain in this area, in contrast with what you can do for e.g. some websites or some smartphone apps.
There was software involved, but it is not more interesting in this case than noting that there was electronics involved. And it could also have been done through a mainly mechanical apparatus, but the only reason it did not is that software is more convenient. But that's an implementation detail that played very little role in the tragedy (unless Boeing is waaaay more fucked up than we are even all discussing about, but I actually don't expect that).
You mean like making unflyable planes flyable as software does for the f16 and a host of other military aircraft?
I think you can still be an effective CEO of Boeing as long as you have right composition of senior leadership in place. Decades of major design-flow related crashes made everyone complacent.
Boeing lost the moment they didn't realize the aging 737 would be a dead-end and was imperative they'll take risks and say "no, but" to the airlines. Given how the corporate world works that was very difficult or almost impossible to someone actually do this.
Among other things it's the classic example of short term obsession demolishing the future.
This was my comment too on the last MCAS story I read here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037572
I don't think that's a fundamentally different idea, though. I think that's exactly the idea that drives any leveraged buyout or any cost cutting measure - that "good management" can make up for jettisoning whatever previously enabled a company or division to succeed.
Even without the Douglas acquisition, would we still be here with the 737-Max8 failure as bad as it is? I think all industry over the past two decades have gone down the route of maximizing profits and cutting costs. Hell, there are startups build around the idea of just ignoring or lobbying against legislation (Uber, AirBnB) and marking that arrogance as being "disruptive," as if they were some kind of civil rights pioneers.
It's really impossible to tell what would have happened without Boeing buying MCD, but I there is a good chance we would have ended up here eventually anyway. Focusing on MCD in this article feels more of a narrative tool than an objective critique and analysis.
This was specifically out of the MCD playbook. Boeing was pretty consolidated geographically before that.
I'm not saying remove capitalism but some modifications of our current state of capitalism are certainly in order. Perhaps this is tighter or different regulatory constraints, changes to some core principles (e.g. Citizen's United, business rights as "people", etc.). I'm not saying I have the answers or the quick examples mentionrd are the core issues, just that the future doesn't look great if current trends continue. We need to start a productive conversation and elect representatives willing to be a voice in that conversation to explore and try improvement options.
Personally, I don't see the rest of the world as willing to indulge in that type of regulation havening. Besides which, where else are you going to find the combination of hypermodern physical infrastructure, relatively stable political/judicial systems, and the fiscal infrastructure to support these types of businesses all bundled together?
It seems to end up being a puck-two sort of thing otherwise, and if they did move out, they'd likely have to instantly write off the American market, as such a drastic measure would not go unnoticed. It starts to reek of nationalistic pride as the insurance policy, but history didn't build itself up without such a thing in the first place; so I see it as foolish to discount the mechanism moving forward.
One can only hope the cost in blood to maintain such security won't have to be repeated however.
If you try to bottle the genie back up, you'll have to work all those levers simultaneously or you'll have the problems you describe. The new set of regulations would also need to curtail the ability of corporations to move to avoid regulations and limit the kinds of political pressure they can apply, for instance. Otherwise it'll be like closing one barn door while leaving the other wide open.
We've gone so far down the road in one direction that we may have to turn around with a shock. It it's probably too late for some kinds of small, incrementalist course corrections to be effective.
Yet every year our economy grows and our quality of life improves.
If businesses leave, they're the type of business you wouldn't want around anyway.
Lot of these old engineers stay in touch, godfathers to each others kids, go on fishing trips, go to church together. Still have Thanksgivings together. At one late family member's remembrance I think more than half the attendees were retired Boeing engineers, or their families. I really do think that, rose-colored-glasses aside, it sounds like a few decades ago it really was the kind of place where aerogeeks ran the show and obsessed together over making great products like the article suggests.
I know two people who work for Boeing today, as well, and I don't think either of them really like it very much.
Boeing's MCD buyout doesn't happen, industry keeps going where it was going, Boeing didn't adapt, their market share and market cap drop, MCD's on the other hand, rises, and MCD buys Boeing, variation of the MAX8 still happens.
Boeng's MCD buyout doesn't happen, industry keeps going where it was going, Boeing adapts, tightens margins, still builds MAX8, same deal, except we still have MCD floating around as another minor player in the market (or MCD just goes out of business).
It's weird to blame it all on MCD's executives taking over Boeing and turning it into a margin-driven company, when that's just where the market was going in the first place, and it's likely that any airplane manufacturer would have to make the same choices in order to stay relevant. Perhaps the root cause was deregulation, or something else.
MCD's on the other hand, rises
That was never in the cards. Pretty much everything past the DC-9 was done on a shoestring budget and it showed. The military side of MD was doing OK but the commercial side was as good as dead by the time MD and Boeing merged.
Boeng's MCD buyout doesn't happen, industry keeps going where it was going, Boeing adapts, tightens margins, still builds MAX8
Without MD management the 737 MAX never would've happened as there would be no 737 NG to base it on.
Sure, but we're talking hypotheticals here.
> Without MD management the 737 MAX never would've happened as there would be no 737 NG to base it on.
I was referring to a non-MCD Boeing eventually committing a MAX-style failure, not specifically that plane. Obviously if Boeing+MCD had never happened, the timeline since then would look very different.
A good lesson to not play games with hustlers. McDonnell Douglas was famous for being slimy, financial rent-seekers. They got hustled.
Wow. In retrospect, this is an amoral path. Basically it's money over lives. Furthermore, this "intent" has cost them more financially.
We need some system such that shareholders and executives become personally responsible for these tragic yet predictable consequences.
1. The Citizens United ruling allows unbounded money to flow into campaigns.
2. Campaign funding determines election results.
3. Elected officials determine what America does in terms of law and regulation.
4. Billionaires pour tons of money into campaigns.
When you allow dollars to effectively determine elections instead of votes, the end result is oligarchy and the rule of the rich.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
Also, it's a completely different ball game talking about which laws get passed vs which candidate gets elected.
Is your claim that above a certain dollar threshold money no longer has an impact?
A relatively smaller amount of money will influence state elections, and state-level politicians determine things like district boundaries (i.e. gerrymandering), vote roll purges, polling stations, etc. All of those have a very large impact on elections too.
2. Trump still raised about a billion dollars. That is an insanely large amount of money.
3. Campaign financing for elections and financing for lobbying for policy are different things. For the latter, it is all but proven that financing is all that matters: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Serious research with data, but also approachable for noneconomist.
Here's an excerpt that starts to answer your question:
> The 1970s was a turning point in the other direction. In the decades leading up to the '70s, the government had grown increasingly aggressive—intervening in the free market to defend competition in more and more ways over time. Then a lawyer named Robert Bork completely transformed the way courts would interpret antitrust law. The approach to enforcement reversed direction away from protecting firms and toward a consumer focus, paving the way for today's tech giants.
I don't know if I buy it, but it was an interesting take on the political and tax changes that began in the late 70s and early 80s.
This story just obfuscates the fact that this tension between capital and labor existed long before this generation and pretends like the entire generation was in on it, when it was really just the boomer capitalist class, not all boomers.
Thankfully the pendulum has been swinging back in the other direction for various reasons like the fall of the USSR, realization of the dangers of regulatory capture, etc. But then we've been allowing all these horizontal mergers recently which just doesn't make any sense to me.
The blame is scattered all over the place, but the main idea is that government has become increasingly technocratic; trusting industry leaders to tell us that their industries are too complicated for politicians to interfere in. This is not just a question of "regulation" -- the problem is bigger than regulation since anti-trust is generally not a regulatory issue so much as a law enforcement issue. Regulation is actually part of the problem to a degree, as regulating fewer larger entities is "easier" than regulating a diverse healthy industry.
In the 1970s, a combination of things -- Bork and the Chicago school's notion that "consumer protection" was the main objective of anti-trust action, Ralph Nader and the burgeoning consumer rights movement that joined forces with this (because of the regulatory pressure above), and the switch of the Democratic party from a populist party to principally a social justice party. All three of these had positive effects as well (prosecuting abusive monopolies, increasing customer safety and dropping consumer prices for goods, and advancing the civil rights movement), but between them they ended up dismantling the New Deal era protections against big businesses that led to the massive consolidations of the 80s and 90s across almost every sector.
There are many things that Stoller points to as positive things that I was dubious about but he makes a compelling case -- specifically pricing controls (where the manufacturer can set retail price ceilings and prevent discounting). Some of it has been things that I have had trouble specifically elucidating -- why it's bad that Disney controls both content production and distribution, and how Congress can wield (and has wielded, in the past) power directly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
https://simpleflying.com/qatar-airways-flies-brand-new-boein...
Must be quite a somber experience piloting an aircraft just deemed unreliable by your employer...
I lay the blame at the feet of each person at the company who acted selfishly.
Selfishness gets an easy pass here on Hacker News --- well, just about everywhere these days, I guess. Take this recent thread, where the submitter confesses that he has been slacking off for 6 years at work. A lot of people egged him on. I remember one comment that advised him to double down and go Full Sociopath (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964204).
I could not think of a good rebuttal. I mean, I work hard even when no one is watching, because I am religious, but I did not imagine it going well if I just laid out the idea of a transcendental world. But the only solution I see is reformation of the individual, one by one, not revolution of the social structure --- change from the inside out, instead of the outside in.
The enemy is not the rich or the poor, the executive or the engineer. Any of these people can be dangerous, if their philosophy is maximum selfishness. Furthermore, no set of laws is clever enough to keep the peace if the majority of citizens are sociopaths. They will always find the legal loopholes. On the other hand, a country with the dumbest regulatory set-up would still run fine if peopled by saints, people who are the opposite of selfish, who are always asking, am I treating others how I wish to be treated?
Of course, you should be selfish in that you should take care of yourself and not seriously stress yourself over work. But sometimes not doing an uncomfortable thing (for me, reaching out to an unfamiliar person) can seriously hinder the quality of my work. That quality definitely manifests itself in the product in big and small ways.
I just always imagine the shame that I would feel if I was in charge of making these short-sighted decisions. Sacrificing the quality/safety of the product to make a bonus. I would feel intensely ashamed about doing such a thing, but I guess that disqualifies me from ever being in charge.
Interestingly, I work hard even when no one is watching because I'm not religious.
If you are religious, then by definition you believe somebody is always watching.
Whats interesting to me, is the merger between McDonnell Aircraft and Douglas Aircraft was effectively a shotgun marriage. DAC was capital starved in the late 60's and merged for an infusion of capital.
And falling fast. New military contracts had dried up too, with no meaningful wins coming in the foreseeable future.
Agreed, the parallels with the Douglas merger are interesting. Even including the military branch, not just DC.
The MD-11 had the same issues the 767 had at that time, meaning the market for wide body aircraft was slow, very slow.
I suspect that had the merger with Boeing not happened, the MD-11, MD-90 and MD-95 would have continued on in sales for a while. I'm lead to believe Boeing didn't try as hard to sell the MD-95 (Boeing discontinued the MD-90 entirely because it competed in the same space as the 737) as McDonnell Douglas would have. I also suspect Boeing would rather have cancelled the ship as soon as the merger happened, but it would have cost them more to cancel it then, than it did by waiting 8-odd years.
Growing up in Long Beach, it was clear to all the people who worked at DAC, that Boeing bought them for their Military side, not for the commercial aircraft though.
In the end, 9/11 made the whole new aircraft market go squishy, and it lead to several project ends across the industry - most notably the 757.
The MD-90 was also non-competitive with the A321 and the 757. You can take a look at the sales numbers. By the mid nineties, Douglas was producing something like 20 a year, Boeing was doing about 50 a year, and Airbus was producing about 25 a year.
Douglas badly needed a cash infusion to get a competitive product flying. Their whole product line was derivatives of 1960s aircraft that weren't even winners in the 60s. Meanwhile, Boeing had introduced the 757, 767, and 777, which were all great aircraft.
> As soon as you move the engines, you probably need to move the wings. As soon as you move the wings, you need to redesign the airframe. As soon as you do that you're designing a whole new plane.
I can't even remember if this was talking about the Max at all.
So it seems to me the core problem here is Boeing had reached the limit of what they could do with a 50 year old airframe while maintaining the common type rating and aircraft and engine design have simply changed. Airbus may eventually have that problem with the A320 family. I really don't know. But they don't have it yet.
Part of controlling costs at a budget airline is maintaining a single fleet (in type rating terms). The two choices here seem to be the 737 or the A320.
The Max came about because there was a huge captured demand for it from the likes of Southwest. Would this have happened without the MD merger? I can't say but I'd be surprised if it couldn't given the demand from budget airlines.
Of course people like to take an issue like this and tie it to whatever axe they want to grind too.
Airbus is already fly-by-wire on the A320, and they know how to do it not too stupidly. They can provide the same control laws and feedbacks to new models without introducing ugly hacks on top of mechanical commands. That helps.
I believe other Airbus families already use controls that are very similar to the ones used in the A320, and even if that's not of the same type rating that probably also ease training a lot.
The 737 will eventually have to go; even the somehow modernized versions are a quite outdated way to make big commercial airplanes nowadays. (And the whole idea of grandfathering regulation is utterly stupid, btw.)
Meaning failure to develop the 787 on time an on budget left them with no time to develop a proper replacement for the 737 without losing customers to the Airbus 320. Seriously it took Boeing about 9 years to develop and deliver the 787.
Without a competitor Boeing has no intention to make the safest product anymore, however, Airline unlike others, must make sure safety/quality remains to be the No.1 priority. Any outsourcing should be carefully thought out before running towards the cheapest offer offshore.
It's what they do, and there's nothing inherently dysfunctional about that. By themselves, these actions don't cause mines to collapse, plans to fall from the sky and highly polluting vehicles to be put on the road with full knowledge of the company's senior leadership. If there is a systemic cause for these things -- it's yawning gaps regulatory oversight (and enforcement).
But these gaps aren't accidents, and don't arise in a vacuum, either. Nor are they mere byproducts of what should otherwise by a working system.
In effect, they're there by design. They are exactly the desired outcomes of a system -- and the governing ideology behind it -- that enshrines the "right of capital" as a fundamental right. And which (not coincidentally) seeks to protect the exercises of this "right" from the inevitable consequences of their actions, as much as it can get away with doing so. With carnage and tragedy being the inevitable results.
Because that's what it was designed to do.
Yes Boeing has issues; especially in their senior management. That's why they are struggling to keep up with competitors in the cheaper/faster/more efficient/less noisy category (aka. the market). But also, the 737 is still one of the safest and most successful planes ever and last year was one of the safest years in aviation history with many thousands of them flying around every day. Once patched up, the max will be part of that fleet for decades to come and is unlikely to bend the excellent safety record in any statistically meaningful way regardless of the current sentiments or the recent accidents.
IMHO, Boeing has some corporate culture issues to sort out and it definitely does not help that they operate as a state protected monopoly that mostly acts to shovel defense money around and enrich contractors, share holders, politicians, lobbyists, etc. involved with cutting up that pie. But lets be real, every other big aviation manufacturer works exactly the same way and it seems to work fine in terms of safety.
Fundamentally there are no good technical reasons for the hundreds of 737 maxes to be permanently retired over real, perceived or imagined risks. Yes, there are some technical issues that are addressable, are being addressed, and require lengthy inspections & certification to verify that they have indeed been addressed. That's basically what's happening because they are fixable issues. There are no known un-fixable issues here, no known show stopping design flaws that can't be worked around, no known unacceptable (i.e. uncertifiable) hacks, etc. Some of the fixes may indeed lead to some retraining effort, which I'm sure is annoying but not fatal for Boeing. And yes, there's brand damage and Boeing is probably going to have to do some pro-forma rebranding (737 maxi-cosi, anyone?) and symbolic modifications.
When their choice is to go out of business or attempt to fix entirely fixable technical issues they'd be complete idiots to get sucked down the first hole. Permanently retiring many hundreds of planes that once fixed are perfectly good for decades to come is just not going to be a thing. Boeing going bankrupt over this under the current political climate is also not a thing. To big to fail means rules can be bended, changed, abused, or otherwise ignored. That's how this happened to begin with. One way or another the FAA will ultimately rubber stamp whatever needs rubber stamping.
Some time this year, the thing will resume flying and Boeing goes back to licking its wounds and planning the next iteration of its products. I imaging they'd be tempted to unshelve some projects they had for future products as well and dust off what lingering R&D capability they have to come up with something new. That'd be a smart investment.
So if that's "capitalism" working that it needed a second one, I actually don't like "capitalism" very much.