Boeing gearing up for 787 move to South Carolina | Hacker News Reader

Boeing gearing up for 787 move to South Carolina

reuters.com

70 pointslatchkey113 comments

Isn't the North Charleston plant the one riddled with serious QC issues, and the one Qatar airways refused to take deliveries from?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

Yes, but Boeing (aka McDonald-Douglas) really wants to get rid of the unions in the Seattle area plants.

Prior to the 1997 purchase of MD by Boeing, Boeing’s culture was very engineering focused. When MD came on, a large chunk of MD management were retained and soon after Boeing moved it’s official headquarters from Seattle to Chicago (where the MD headquarters were). Since then, a lot of the business decisions seem to have been more driven by management than engineering.

>"...Boeing (aka McDonald-Douglas)..."

Boeing subsumed McDonnell Douglas, not a McDonald's franchise, and did so under pressure from members of the Clinton administration.

I think the mistake qualifies as an insult of McDonald's.

McDonnell Aircraft was a company with a proud history, responsible for remarkable engineering, including the F-4 Phantom II and Gemini spacecraft. Douglas also has a stellar history including the World Cruisers, DC-3, and A-4 Skyhawk. I see it as tragic that they merged and slowly failed.

I donno, you're leaving out the DC-10, which was a pretty n notoriously bad airplane.

DC-10 was from after the McDonnell-Douglas merger.

according to wikipedia the dc-10 went out of production the year -after- the merger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10

>"according to wikipedia the dc-10 went out of production the year -after- the merger."

First Flight in 1970, produced until 1988; McDonnell and Douglas merged in 1967.

ah sorry, misunderstood, thought you meant the boeing!

If you're judging the quality of the companies and their iterations solely by the airplanes they produced for some reason, leaving out McDonnell Douglas's F-15 is a strange omission.

I have mixed feelings on the F-15, and think it might have turned out better if it'd been a lighter fighter, as per Col. John Boyd's specification. I think the F-4 Phantom II was a more impressive engineering achievement.

The F-15 to this day has a nearly unrivaled kill-to-loss ratio (100+:0), and with the upcoming F-15EX variant will be a backbone of US air combat power for decades. I'd rate it as a superlative engineering program and aviation platform.

No F-15 has been lost in air-to-air combat, but there have been losses. I am not denying that the F-15 is a successful weapons platform, but it didn't fulfill Boyd's outline, and the A through C models were produced in relatively small numbers due to their high cost. The small fleet of F-15A-C also necessitated the lightweight fighter competition, which didn't produce an all-out dogfighter either.

I see the F-4 Phantom II as much more impressive for a number of reasons, including the facts that it was the first airplane with the capability to perform a self-directed intercept, as well as being extremely versatile (serving with the Navy, Air Force, and Marines), and served much longer than most of its contemporaries.

> I am not denying that the F-15 is a successful weapons platform, but it didn't fulfill Boyd's outline, and the A through C models were produced in relatively small numbers due to their high cost.

I'm a big fan of Boyd, but ... the fact that it's a successful weapons platform -maybe the most successful US fighter of all time, seems good enough for me. Sure the Eagle cost a lot; many successful US aircraft were gold plated -the P-38 Lightning, the SR-71, the F-14. The F-15 is not beloved of Boyd acolytes for its gold plated nature, but it certainly fulfilled the energy and maneuverability criteria.

The F-4 was a successful plane in terms of M-D sales, but I'm not sure it was a good plane. It appeared to be, "hook a bunch of decent turbojets up to a shitty 50s airframe (aka the F3H) and stick a big radar in the nose and a guy in the back seat to guide missiles with the radar." Its success seemed due to lack of better US made alternatives more than anything else; though both Vaught and North American had offerings which could have beat it had they been funded (who knows what skulduggery was involved in killing off those programs). American 2nd and 3rd gen fighters were mostly shit, and F-4's were routinely shot down by 1st gen jet fighters and primitive SAMs in Vietnam. Seemed like the Saab and Dassault 3rd gen offerings were nicer in most ways, and IMO the XF-108 or even a souped up F-106 would have beat the pants off it.

"No F-15 has been lost in air-to-air combat, but there have been losses. "

What a ridiculous metric. All aircraft have non-combat losses; that's the nature of flying a high performance aircraft.

There were almost 1k F-15s built (excluding the Strike Eagle models) for the USAF. Not exactly "small numbers." And the F-15 didn't necessitate the LWFC, that was a budget decision to help protect other aircraft manufacturers.

The F-15 is arguably the second most important fighter the USAF has ever had (the P-51 or P-47 can fight over first). And Boyd has been wrong about many aircraft designs. His fan club hates the way the F-16 turned out, but it too has been incredibly successful by any metric applied.

>"All aircraft have non-combat losses; that's the nature of flying a high performance aircraft."

F-15 have been lost in combat but not air-to-air combat.

Only 2 F-15E Strike Eagles have been lost in combat. One shot down by gunfire during Desert Storm, and another to an SA-2 during the same conflict. No other F-15 models have been lost in combat, though there have been plenty of non-combat losses.

air combat power against whom exactly? poor bedouins riding their camels? that's indeed the achievement.

> I have mixed feelings on the F-15, and think it might have turned out better if it'd been a lighter fighter, as per Col. John Boyd's specification.

Can you go into who Boyd was, what was so important about the "specifications", and how the F-15 would have been better by following them (or is worse because didn't)?

Boyd had a veritable fetish for fighters that were cheaper, less performing but smaller and maneuverable. He also came up with the OODA stuff, if you're really into that kind of thing.

Better for what missions? Maybe had the air force had a single fighter plane, a lighter version of the F-15 would be ideal. But given that the lighter fighter role was to be filled by the YF-16 and YF-17 (today the F-16 and F-18), the F-15 was very well equipped and powered for the missions it would fill.

The F-4 was an impressive engineering achievement only in the sense that it was far overpowered to make up for it being under-winged. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the F-4 and "Happy Phantom" is my daughter's Stack Exchange handle. It is an amazing airplane. But it was as much dumb luck as it was engineering. And none of that is relevant to the role of the F-15 in the United States Air Force, and other air forces around the world.

The F-15 is not the F-35, which is meant to take the light-fighter and air superiority and ground attack and even recon roles. I do not think that a single plane can effectively take on all those roles. Even if the F-4 did!

I never said the F-4 was "better" in any way or for any mission; I said that I think the F-4 was a more impressive engineering achievement.

> I have mixed feelings on the F-15, and think it might have turned out better if it'd been a lighter fighter, as per Col. John Boyd's specification. I think the F-4 Phantom II was a more impressive engineering achievement.

So it's curious that someone who takes Boyd's fighter prescriptions seriously is a Phantom enthusiast, but perhaps there's a reason for that. The part about the Phantom being a more impressive engineering achievement strikes me as somewhat crazy, to be honest, and I don't know what to say about it.

Story as I recall had SecDef William Perry call both CEOs to Washington and tell them their companies "needed" to merge.

According to a 1997 Washington Post article it happened in 1993, he didn't speak with just those two CEOs but executives from across the industry, and no company was singled out, rather he suggested for the industry generally to pursue mergers to survive large cuts to defense spending:

> The frenzy of defense industry mergers can be traced to 1993, when then-Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry invited executives to dinner. At an event now referred to as "the last supper," Perry urged them to combine into a few, larger companies because Pentagon budget cuts would endanger at least half the combat jet firms, missile makers, satellite builders and other contractors represented at the dinner that night.

> Perry's warnings helped set off one of the fastest transformations of any modern U.S. industry, as about a dozen leading American military contractors folded into only four. And soon it's likely only three will remain, with Lockheed Martin Corp.'s announcement yesterday that it plans to buy Northrop Grumman Corp. for $11.6 billion.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1997/07/04/h...

In context I don't see anything untoward here. 1993 was also the fourth round of closures under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Realignment_and_Closure BRAC was the systematic demilitarization of the U.S. after the Cold War, and apparently Perry was giving the industry fair warning that the process was finally and irreversibly going to bear down on their long-term sales prospects. I think it's fair to say that the Defense Department had a legitimate interest in the orderly realignment of the defense industry. It doesn't seem like he told them anything that wasn't already publicly known; rather more letting them know that there weren't going to be any 11th hour miracles.

If there's an issue here it's acting on the belief that defense contractors can only survive with enormous economies of scale given the long-term capital expenditures. But everybody believed that; and most still do. Most people still think Elon Musk and SpaceX are aberrations, and maybe they are. And nobody could have guessed 9/11 and subsequent wars, which inflated defense expenditures to well beyond Reagan's highs. (For that matter, nobody could have predicted the huge amount of assets and incredible liquidity of the modern investment world that make SpaceX possible.) If spending had remained at Clinton-era levels the reduced number of competitors may have worked out perfectly well, notwithstanding the demise of Boeing culture.

Space-X took years to become viable. The US defense industry is maintained under the experience of WW2 when ramp up time was measured in months.

Letting the US defense industry die off and lose capacity would but the US years behind in any total war.

For sure total war is unthinkable now in our globalized world. Yet the past thought so too, right before 2 world wars.

Is that true or did the Clinton administration just look the other way? Regardless, it should have been blocked on anti-trust grounds, and subject to approval from Congress. At least, Ralph Nader thought so:

https://nader.org/1997/01/02/boeing-mcdonnell-douglas-merger...

Nader is a lawyer and activist, and has no experience running any sort of organization or company, and has no engineering training.

His opinion is of little to no value here.

Deciding if two companies should be allowed to merge is a matter of law and public policy, not engineering.

And yet, those are two companies steeped in engineering. One cannot decide, or even understand, the consequences of merging two engineering firms if they know nothing of engineering.

Should the Ministery of Agriculture know nothing of agriculture?

Of course you can understand the consequences. I don’t need to know how to drill for oil to know that Standard Oil was a monopolistic trust.

From the [archived] contemporaneous articles I've read it was Boeing's CEO and Chairman, Condit, who pushed heavily for the merger. Condit engineered the exit of Boeing's CFO, a skeptic, as part of an unfolding strategy to replace much of Boeing's original executive staff with those from McDonnell Douglas.[1] And he had the board's support as the Boeing board was enamored of McDonnell Douglas executives' financial engineering strategies.

So while it may have nominally been McDonnell Douglas' culture that ruined Boeing, it was also very much an inside job. Boeing's leadership had already been fatally infected years prior and invited McDonnell Douglas in with the intention and purpose of adopting their culture.[2] The demise of Boeing culture was a fait accompli before the merger.

This notion that Boeing was a victim is revisionist. To the extent it was a victim, it was a victim of the wider business and finance culture. There's no need to spin conspiracy theories about how it happened; it happened in the normal course of things, unfortunately. While Condit was clearly the immediate driver, the choice of Condit as CEO years earlier wasn't accidental.

[1] "The exit by Givan, 62, who has held the post of Boeing finance chief and senior vice president since 1990, stems in part from disagreements with other executives over the conservative accounting methods used by Givan, say people close to the matter. For example, some officials believe he was too stringent in assessing how Boeing would accumulate charges for problems incurred in the course of its commercial-airplane order boom." https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug...

[2] "'When people say I [Condit] changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.'" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

From that simplified model, it sounds like the focus on functions than value, and constant negotiation with unions, helped Boeing survive.

I wonder what makes it possible for said management to continue union busting if literally the opposite is proven to work...

Investors speak financials. Not nuts n' bolts. As it turns out, there are many ways to make a company with a culture going down in flames look fantastic on the books apparently.

Pre-merger, MDD HQ was St. Louis, Missouri. The public theory behind the move was that the overall org needed a more central HQ (BCAG was primarily in Seattle, but there was still a significant presence in Texas and Wichita plus the legacy Rockwell sites).

The cynical explanations are/were that Boeing had to call Washington states’s bluff for negotiating leverage (The MDD commercial stuff in California was a dead end). My pet theory is that more states == more Congressional representation.

When I was working at Boeing, my boss who was around during those times gave this anecdote.

Apparently in return for being allowed to build the 777, the city of Everett (maybe it was Renton or the state of Washington) demanded large amounts of public works/benefits. Boeing was not pleased with this but in order to make the 777 happen they did all the stuff required. However, they vowed to never have to deal with such nonsense again. To make that happen, they moved their HQ (it was eventually decided to be Chicago) and began to consider relocating their plants to another state. Eventually, that became South Carolina. Or so the anecdote goes.

I don't think my boss was very high up back then, so I can't speak to how factual it is, but it sounds plausible.

The move to Chicago was more about Condit escaping his wife.

Yes. That's on the civil side. On the defense & space side, BDS is working hard to shut down the storied ex-McDonnell Douglas Huntington Beach, CA facility and move to FL, Huntsville AL, and other LCOL sites. It's now as if certain iconic HB buildings never existed - they've already been razed.

Acronym expansions for those not-in-the-know:

∙ BDS = "Boeing Defense Systems"

∙ LCOL = "low cost of living"

(I'd hate to have to maintain your code, V_Terranova_Jr.)

LCOL could also mean Low Cuality of Labor

The salient aspect of the destination sites isn't low cost of living, it's "right to work" laws and other anti-union policies.

That sound you hear is corks popping in Airbus’s A350 sales office

Which is too bad since arguably 787 is a more advanced aircraft, while A350 is more conservative. Too bad Boeing management is bent on screwing Boeing engineers and their achievements.

I'm not disagreeing with this, but can you give some examples? As a passenger -- other than the windows -- there's very little difference I've noticed over the course of ~40 flights on each.

From the top of my head, Boeing 787 fuselage sections are formed as a single tube (more advanced, more expensive) while a350 sections are formed from 4 separate parts (older, cheaper technology, easier to repair though). 787 Cockpit is made from carbon fiber reinforced with titanium, while A350 cockpit is a traditional aluminium one. So yes, these things are invisible to a passenger the same way as a software architecture is invisible to a user, but to airlines and to industry as a whole these things are important.

What advantages does the single tube fuselage give?

I would imagine that without skin splices it weights less, has less drag in flight and generally one less thing to worry about for mechanics.

Not only Qatar, the US Navy was not accepting those either since a while back. Don't know if that ever changed.

> Not only Qatar, the US Navy was not accepting those either since a while back.

The whole KC-46 tanker program is quite the mess as well:

* https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/03/31/the-air-forces-kc...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-46_Pegasus

At what point do you start to wonder if this level of mismanagement is purposeful? The number of flaws across multiple different programs. (Serious flaws no less.) The number of management missteps. It just feels almost like either a purposeful tanking, or the sort of slow motion, but accelerating, collapse that happens when you've filled every level of an organization with less than able people.

To what end?

Upper management whose KPI are solely on base of profit make a couple of big fat paychecks over the year as ever more and more is gutted. Now that the dung pile has grown so big that it touches the ceiling fan, that guard of beancounter managers has long moved on to other companies to raze...

So 787s are assembled at both Seattle, WA, and North Charleston, SC, plants, but it is the South Carolina-produced planes that seem to be drawing complaints:

> Some of the airlines buying 787 Dreamliners built at Boeing Co.’s North Charleston campus are complaining about “unacceptable” production mistakes and poor quality, and analysts say the criticism points to issues deep within the aerospace giant’s culture.

* https://www.postandcourier.com/business/airline-surveys-poin...

Supposedly some airlines refuse to take delivery of airplanes assembled in SC:

> 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.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

* https://leehamnews.com/2020/09/14/pontifications-boeing-sc-m...

At this point, given how much Boeing seems to have turned its own reputation to ash, why would one buy an aircraft from them?

Presumably because you can buy a Boeing today where you would have to wait 5+ years for an Airbus.

Of course if they keep sliding then you might as well buy a Chinese or Russian aircraft instead of Boeing if you want something now and don't care about quality.

Is it really true that you can buy a Boeing instantly? I have read that both manufacturers have order queues for years ahead, but I can be mistaken.

Brb, buying a 787

There are certainly a lot of 737s sitting on the dealer's lot: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=737+max+carpark

But they're probably already sold.

Well, if Airbus would be willing to build a few more plants they'd probably unleash a large amount of pent up demand and get more orders on the books.

I guess they're "successful enough" and don't feel tempted to potentially over-extend themselves.

Thanks for the links! One would have thought that after the 737 Max debacle, Boeing would do anything possible to at least retain the trust of their customers for the 787. Instead, they seem to be eager to set up another debacle with the 787...

The 737 has succumbed to the same disease as software. What originally was a successful well engineered product gets loaded with extra bells and whistles until it collapses under its own weight. This process is accelerated with MBA manager.

Mother Nature is judge, jury and executioner when it comes to abuse of aerodynamics. MBAs don't get the message until there's smoking wrecks.

Passengers may decide to refuse flights on 737s. There's lots of parked aircraft at the moment and will be until the pandemic is well past. It might be a couple years.

Passengers may vote with their feet for Airbus.

That's a broad brush you get there. There have been detailed investigations that show that specific actions by specific people in Boeing and the FAA led to a single point of failure, from which it is nearly impossible to recover, being permitted to get into production, in a passenger aircraft. On top of that, after one of those planes crashed in a way that is attributable to this gross defect, the pilots were blamed by Boeing, to deflect from having to fix this defect.

So, while it may come down to that you can't run an airplane maker like a soft drink company, there is a lot of detailed information about why. No need to generalize.

In fact there are confounding details that suggest that "MBA manager" is the wrong generalization. Dennis Mullenberg, who was the CEO fired due to the 737 fiasco, came up through Boeing engineering, after joining as an intern in the 1980s.

He was replaced by David Calhoun, a director at Boeing, who came up through GE and Blackstone and was the co-author of a generic seeming self-congratulatory business book called "How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You're In" That sure makes it seem like he could sell Coke on Tuesday and airliners on Thursday.

Maybe the real answer is that the FAA was lulled into complacency, and an engineer who should have been minding the shop wasn't.

related article from local Seattle newspaper: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/09/44441906/the-dea...

"So, Seattle finds itself where Pittsburgh was in the 1970s and Detroit in the 1960s. The city is about to lose a central part of its industrial base. Today, Pittsburgh, the "Steel City," has no steel plants at all." ... "Seattle will finally become fully post-industrial in the third decade of the third millennium."

Seattle is still in a better position than those cities due to Microsoft and Amazon, which will soften the blow, but it will still be quite painful.

Yeah the Everett plant only employees 30k according to the Boeing site which is 1% of Seattle's population even if the whole plant went away. It'd hurt to lose for sure but I doubt it will be disastrous the same way it was when steel and cars left other cities.

30k Boeing employees, but I'd like to know how many local contractors, shops and restaurants ultimately depend on this workforce.

Local shops can ship parts to Boeing's other plants and there are other aircraft that will still be made there. For things more tangentially related like restaurants the most threat would be to the ones right there that depend on work lunches, outside of that very local area are at much lower risk because as big as the factory is (and again it's not leaving just losing one plane) it's a small percentage of the local population.

Everett is an hour's drive from Seattle, and afaik its population is not included in the "greater Seattle area." While many commute, that 30k is nearly a third of the population of Everett.

And Boeing contracts a lot of components that feed that plant. Many of them local, small businesses, spread throughout the region, with that one customer.

Those contractors don't have to be colocated though and only 1 plane is leaving. On top of that it's the 787 which isn't exactly in a good spot. Last I heard there was still an open question of how much work would be involved in getting them flying again.

787 != 737-MAX. The 787’s teething problems were ~8 years ago.

Well it seems that the South Carolina assembly plant didn't get the memo and is still experiencing issues:

* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

1% of population is substantial. Cumulative US COVID-19 cases are like 2% and deaths are 0.062%.

Most of the disruption has been the containment efforts not the dead or sick themselves though. The damage has come from the 12 percentage points of growth in the unemployment rate. It was attenuated a lot when there was the additional unemployment money.

FWIW, the # of actual COVID cases in the US population is better estimated at ~15% [1]. Only counting verified cases drastically undercounts, because testing has always been very constrained, and many people don't have severe symptoms and therefore don't get tested.

1: https://covid19-projections.com/us

You have to call bullshit in those numbers.

Take a country with good surveillance and reliable death statistics. NZ and/or Australia will fit the bill.

The case fatality rate there is a touch above 3%, mostly in aged care deaths, but with enough in the lower age groups to give anyone who has a comorbidity and is above 40 a quickening of the pulse (854 deaths, 26,942 cases, positive test % has never breached 1% and generally been under half a % so incidence is likely to be close to reported cases).

US CFR at reported numbers isn’t far off 3% and if you take the Excess deaths figures that suggest there has already been more like 250,000 deaths, along with the missed cases, you’re probably closer to the mark. Even if spread is confined tightly to younger age groups with lower death rates, there can be no serious person who believes close to 60m Americans have either previously or Are currently Infected.

What do you think the numbers are?

Why do the CDC's seroprevalence studies [1] consistently show the estimated case counts are much higher than the reported cases (6x in NYC area, 5x in Philly, 9x higher in South Florida)?

Do you not think there is a strong correlation, everywhere around the world, in which people who have minor symptoms or people who have no symptoms do not get tested?

If the case fatality rate is actually 3%, how does a place like Singapore have >50k cases with fewer than 50 deaths? That seems impossible.

1: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/?#serology-surveill...

I think that if we were to be able to bring up a magical data box and interrogate the world's actual data, the US incidence numbers will be an extrapolation of the CFR of nations that have done a reasonable job of keeping their infections under control (ie health systems not overwhelmed) and have consistently had low positive rates. I see no evidence that the US has been successful in quarantining aged care facilities and think that probably an accurate IFR is 2.5% if infections are normally distributed in the population. I therefore think it's possible 10m americans have been infected (using data from the CDC's excess mortality that suggests 250,000 excess deaths so far this year, and attributing the mismatch between COVID reported deaths and CDC excess mortaliity as missed cases)

I remain sceptical of seroprevalence data at this point in time given multiple other possible explanations such as lack of specificity & cross-reactivity to other CoVs and evidence of moderate seroprevalance in absolutely unexposed populations (0). There are even suggestions that, even should a reasonable proportion of the seroprevalance data be correct it may not be protective, and therefore might as well be ignored. I remain open to better data on this (My scepticism arises largely from my major in biochemistry and the time I spent understanding what and how these things are being tested)

>Do you not think there is a strong correlation, everywhere around the world, in which people who have minor symptoms or people who have no symptoms do not get tested?

No I don't. I think that there are strong political and financial reasons not to get tested in some places which can contribute to smouldering outbreaks, but I don't think it's possible to have an aggressive testing regime and have test positives in the <1% range, consistently. I've been tested once, for free and had my results back in under 24 hours which is pretty standard here in Australia. I think there this argument misses the corollary that should a signifiant percentage of asymptomatic people remain infected and circulating they will eventually lead to an outbreak that will be detected. We have evidence for this sort of outbreak in Melbourne and is the cause of 20+k of infections in Australia, and the corresponding high (3%ish) death rate, as I mentioned earlier largely attributable to aged care deaths.

With regard to the singapore data, I am unable to find good case demographics but in principle agree with the SCMP article (1) that suggests the outbreaks being confined to young and otherwise healthy migrant populations whilst missing the elderly and at-risk. Singapore is a high social contract nation and rates of mask-wearing are high anyway; therefore in Singapore you get a CFR that is reflective of infections isolated to young people. This article is also interesting (2).

(0) https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/ne...

(1) https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/30...

(2) https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/why-singapores-covid-1...

Your link (0) doesn't rebut the seroprevalence studies at all. It is talking about T-cells, which is not what the CDC seroprevalence studies are measuring. The CDC is testing for SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies in blood. And look, if the CDC's seroprevalence studies can't convince you, then I'm not going to. They have data on the specificity and sensitivity of their antibody tests, which gives high confidence ranges for the data. They talk about their methods in detail [1]. And these tests are not about calculating herd immunity, not about calculating who might have prior immunity from a related disease, not about saying who can or cannot get COVID again. They are merely tests for very specific antibodies that are formed in a high percentage of people who had COVID. Thus they should be very accurate at determining how many people have had COVID if the proper statistical care is taken in interpreting the results (which it is!).

With ~7M confirmed cases in the US, and your estimate of 10M cases, that would be a multiplier of less than 1.5x from confirmed cases to estimated cases. That is well below any of the seroprevalence estimates, and remember many of these cases happened months ago when there was almost no testing. The positive test percentage in NY was at or above 20% until May! It was over 40% for the first half of April! Also the current positive test rate in the US is ~5%. There still is a lack of testing in many places.

Also using the death rate alone in trying to figure out the number of cases is highly prone to error, since the virus has death rates that can vary by over 10,000x based on age (85+ vs <18) [2]. And this is especially true if many of the people who don't die, also don't even get seriously ill and thus don't get tested. Combining seroprevalence studies, hospitalizations and deaths by age group is a much more accurate method, and there is no way you could reasonably look at the data points and come up with 10M total estimated cases.

1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a4.htm

2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

Those avionics assembly people can go to work in the tech companies....doing what?

They’re not going to be working at Amazon but likely smaller companies building parts for the aircraft industry supply chain. I think what the parent poster meant was that the lay-offs won’t wipe Seattle’s tax base out because they’re a proportionally smaller part of Seattle’s workforce than steel workers would have been in Pittsburg in the 70s.

Those companies now are largely in low cost of labor areas not near Seattle.

The 777x and 767 will still be here at least.

yeah and 737 assuming nothing changes

737 is the Renton plant. But even that is just final assembly as the fuselage is assembled in Wichita and shipped via train.

The plan is if the 787 ramp up in SC goes well the 777x will be the next to get moved, and 767 will end its run in Everett and then the lights turned off.

That feels like a scare piece. It’s a big leap to go from moving production of one type of plane to the other facility where that plane is produced...all the way to assuming they are shutting down everything.

I live in SC and worked for a company in Seattle when the Charleston plant opened. From day one this type of scare tactic talk has been circulated. My cab driver from the airport told me “they are moving everything to South Carolina! Can you believe that!?”

It’s a narrative to rile people up. That’s it.

Strikes are expensive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_machinists_strike_of_...

The fact that this is even a maybe says that they expect billions in quality control issues from South Carolina a decade.

It's hard to believe that the current Boeing leadership will turn things around with even less focus on quality and talented workers. Feels like they should be moving back towards engineering driven approaches.

Are you implying South Carolina workers are less talented than those in Seattle?

Less qualified and less trained.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

> 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.

To be clear, this doesn't mean there aren't intelligent people in South Carolina. What this does mean is there is a presence in this PNW area, specifically centralized in Puget Sound, where talented aerospace engineers tend to congregate.

No matter where you move that is new, you are not going to have that _local_ talent pool necessarily available to you. This isn't to slight South Carolina at all, but it is reality.

You're no wrong, but the folks in South Carolina were (supposedly) specifically told not to try to get people from the PNW area to transfer because management didn't want union-leaning individuals coming into the new plant.

They seem to be explicitly preferring to sacrifice quality control to keep (higher-paid?) experienced union folks out. Presumably to help their bottom line.

If I was a Boeing customer I'm not sure I'd like seeing quality control being a secondary consideration of hundred of millions of dollars of my money.

A nuclear power engineer I know, told me with pride about his grandfather being the head machinist at a locomotive factory many decades ago. His father was also an engineering oriented person.

That certainly helped him in his own career... I assume that this sort of inter-generation knowledge transfer was present in WA but not present in SC.

On one hand, it must be a nightmare right now for anyone in the airline industry (from suppliers to operators etc). On the other hand, it's the perfect time to relocate factories and make changes to processes and try new technologies.

I am not so sure. What about funding? Any move like that is going to cost a huge amount and this is risky proposition at a time when it is not exactly known what the future of the industry is going to be.

There is definately that. I wonder if it helps though: if you're raising/borrowing/getting given 10bn to stay open, how hard is it to get another 1bn for plant re-arrangement or new software? It's all part of your efficiency savings, return to profitability plan right?

This could also be seen as Boeing pursuing union and gov't concessions so I wouldn't rule out a last minute change-of-heart.

Labor costs.

If it ain't Airbus, Bombardier, or Embraer, I ain't going.

To each their own, but the 737 NG (aka the models before the Max), the 747-400 / 747-8, and the 787 all have a lower number of fatal crashes per million flights than the Airbus A320 family and the A330.

These are all true statistics. I’d be curious to see an academic analysis on QC, flight hours, maintenance routines/quality of maintenance, and other factors that might play into why those aircraft have better safety ratings than competitors. It might be interesting to see if Boeing QC issues off the assembly line lead to better maintenance routines, which in turn results in safer overall operation. A result like that doesn’t imply that the manufacturer, Boeing, is the most influential component to safety.

That’s not correct. For a long time, Boeing and Airbus had wildly different philosophies about how aircraft should be flown. I’m not going to pick a side as there are trade offs to both approaches, but there were a LOT of teething problems with the Airbus approach. I think we’ve settled down now and have a better handle on how to train for either approach. Of course, Boeing has also picked up (or been forced to adopt) pieces of the strategy used by Airbus.

Could you explain these differences to someone with no experience in flying?

Airbus approach: the flight computer should place limits on the control authority of the pilots to prevent them from making unsafe inputs

Boeing: The pilots should be the final authority in the cockpit; automation will warn against unsafe control inputs but not prevent them

https://www.aerotime.aero/rytis.beresnevicius/23039-if-it-ai...

Yep, I’m aware of the old saying that GP modified to fit their POV.

That's certainly true, but the overall stats are all over the shop (http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm). And many of the more modern models have never had fatal crashes, making this kind of comparison impossible.

> And many of the more modern models have never had fatal crashes, making this kind of comparison impossible.

They haven’t had any fatal crashes, but also haven’t flown tens of millions or more of flights either, so I agree, kinda apples and oranges for the Airbus neo models (their “equivalent”, using that term very loosely, to the 737 Max).

The A380 is the best example though of a zero fatal crash, but hardly any flights by modern standards (I think it’s flown under a million commercial passenger flights total in history, but can’t find a conclusive source). It also had two “uncontained engine failures” causing emergency landings, but thankfully no deaths in either case.

I’d argue personally that the 777 is a very very safe plane too, despite the numbers not fully supporting it. Of the fatality incidents involving the plane, one was shot down by a missile, one mysteriously disappeared from the earth with no plausible technical failure, and the final one was a clearly incompetent flight crew missing the runway at SFO.

The A340 has had no fatal accidents and has flown plenty of hours.

Sure, it’s had no fatal accidents (but six hull losses), but few were built (377 total) and only a third are still in service.

Even assuming all of those were in service the entire 27 years since launch (they weren’t, as most weren’t built till part way into the production lifetime) and assuming they were flying 24x7 over that duration (which they weren’t), it would still be less than 10% of the flight hours of the 737NG alone. Even by wide body, four engine standards, it just wasn’t a highly flown bird.

“If it’s Boeing, I ain’t going” rhymes better

Well yes, clearly.

As a pilot, I saw "gear up" and thought a 787 had landed gear up. What a terrible headline.

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