Boeing cuts flight training pilots, will outsource jobs overseas
thestand.org
thestand.org
Doesn't make this a great move, I still question it, but the original article didn't include any response from Boeing, and they are claiming something quite different.
[1] https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2020-0...
If that's the industry your in wouldn't it make sense to target you, even if you're not involved directly in purchasing decisions.
As you allude to, you’d think the ads need to land in front of the business and management types in warehouse and industrial spaces.
It feels like they can’t target precisely enough so they just kind of target certain keywords that is a very widely cast net.
It happened at my last company too. They were so proud of being a real company with an ad campaign and then I immediately saw their ads all the time. I was really expecting some level of precision.
Sounds like super normal? The track interest, not exact profession. So they know you're highly interested in the industry and its products, but not that you're building them yourself...
Not all ads use smart history / tracking.
Catastrophic failures are a cost of doing business.
... book on an airline that flies Airbus only. There may be a few of those, but it severely limits choice in airline.
... try to determine which Boeing model is used, and be willing to walk away at the gate if the plane is changed out (losing the ticket, or at best incurring a typically large change fee).
For example, American Airlines has tons of both 737 and A320 aircraft, but AA858 seemingly always uses a 737-800 (B738):
https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/aa858
* e.g. flightaware.com and flightradar24.com
How long for? Where will contractors learn their trade in the future?
With travel restrictions, people afraid of catching covid, economy crashing, and plenty of good competitor planes with better reputation, why would airlines need (or want) to buy these planes?
Then COVID arrived and now suddenly everything is easy over zoom, email & chat. Even now that travel is allowed again in a lot of places I was supposed to jump to inside EU, no-one asks for it anymore. Saves everyone bucketloads of money (I wasn't sitting in economy), much better for the environment, and, for most purposes that the travel was thought to be vital for, it's actually more efficient this way. People are well rested and progress is made faster as people are less likely to fall into the bullshit of lengthy business lunches/dinners and late night drinks (basically getting hammered which in some circles was mandatory otherwise they wouldn't play) etc. Most of the people I work with (and have worked with for years) don't assume they or I will have to fly, when it's allowed again, more than once a year. And I don't miss it; it was really tiring.
Now seems like the ideal time to invest in these planes. Most people won’t care what metal they ride if it’s cheaper.
In short if you want the ~15% improvement in fuel efficiency of modern engines with the 737 airframe you need a MAX. It is bordering on impossible for Boeing to take the 737 airframe any further after the MAX.
Also, it's not just the 15% decrease on fuel burn (which obviously doesn't equate to a 15% cheaper flight) but Southwest was the launch customer for the 737 NG series which means their initial 737-700 planes are now 24 years old, which means increased maintenance costs; a 24 year old plane is probably coming up on its second (or third for planes that have a higher duty cycle) D check which would be approx USD1.1~1.8M depending on the amount of remedial work / engine replacement etc. So avoiding a D check can save a lot of money. Multiply that by the 495 737-NGs that Southwest has and it is a very big number.
Here's a link[0] that gives an idea of how modern commercial aircraft checks work.
[0] www.aircraftmonitor.com/uploads/1/5/9/9/15993320/basics_of_aircraft_maintenance_programs_for_financiers___v1.pdf
FAA Administrator Steve Dixon & Deputy Administrator Daniel Elswell will personally crew a 737 MAX next week:
The EASA is aiming for November recert. FAA was last aiming for a no earlier than October for a final published AD to bring it back.
I would discount anything Boeing says or does at this point. Their financial outlook is tied to the airlines but worse. The upside is the assumption of federal bailouts for Boeing are morning likely than those for airlines. Whether or not that outlook retains Boeing's current equity holders is another issue.
I guess it's too late by then.
im also not american, the patriotism of flying boeing is lacking from me.
For people who actually do fly, there is not really a good reason to avoid it after it is cleared by several national regulators (several in case you don't trust the FAA) to fly again. When that thing gets back in the air the systems that were involved in the two crashes are going to be among the most scrutinized and independently reviewed systems on any plane designed in the last 20 years.
You may still die on one, but it will be due to something other than anything related to MCAS.
What it does demonstrate, however, is Management's ruthless devotion to chasing the bottom dollar. What further probing may have been done by someone more deeply invested and dedicated to the task? I don't at all blame someone only getting $9 dollars an hour for "Yes-manning" it. I do, however, blame the exec woefully ignorant of the environment and effect on overall culture that has. When you start engineering for the sake of financials like that, you intentionally invite writing checks your work culture can't cash down the road.
My two cents.
Are they just extremely valued? Clearly not to boeing execs, I guess.
We should nationalize Boeing.
It's in our strategic interest to be able to manufacture planes, Boeing provides lots of decent wage jobs, it has wildly overpaid executives, and it had shown that when given the choice it will choose profit over safety. Nationalization removes the profit motive, ends the bizarre tax subsidies that get pushed around.
Competent, cheap and limited power. Pick two.
The executive of Boeing, public or private, will control vast resources. If you underpay, you will get an idiot who follows the rules or someone who makes up the difference in undesirable ways. (Someone competent motivated by a sense of duty has better options in terms of executive staffing.)
Lucratively high exec pay is a recent phenomenon. There were plenty of successful companies before the last 40 years.
See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
Place your bets.
Seriously. Boeing is so far into ineptitude territory at this point that there really is open uncertainty as to which of these would happen.
That is the Washington solution for Huawei, TikTok, and Tecent after all.
Its not accidental that we have two global giants in aviation. Deliberate policy on both sides of the Atlantic.
In other words, The New Deal. Forging national security thru appeasing both the war hawks and labor.
Many of the trade offs that Boeing has made - outsourcing, devaluing internal expertise, focusing on shareholder returns over risky long-term bets, and aggressively fighting unions - mirror US culture more generally. There’s little evidence that nationalising Boeing would change this - as an example related to this news story, the DoD is outsourcing more and more of its training and aggressor flying to private corporations.
It is worth pointing out that many of the points about Boeing being a public/private enterprise also apply to Airbus.
I'm confused, why don't you think it exists?
What people use and want is the most effective signal. If regulation by government worked why hasn’t FAA succeeded? Largely many would argue they have statistically.
I prefer something closer to an emergent regulatory body that convenes on conferences and protocols.
Nationalism would be a nightmare. There’s so much to unpack there on mechanics and rights.
No way.
Fixed that for you
That's the joke
(Or not, for some MBA types that think brand name is somehow magical...)
I could wager my $1000 against your $100 per trial and we could do the tests until you were broke.
Thats said, I have caught when something was not Dr Pepper, though I couldn't tell you what it was.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-coca-cola-wars-can-anybody-reall...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-brazil-insight-idU...
Disclaimer: Have been there for a holiday trip. Nice place if you disregard the moral aspect of the British Crown "owning" the place.
>Isle of Mann
* Man
But that doesn't work when you're in aerospace and have no regard for engineering tradition or skill.
You can see that in the implosion of GE, and now Boeing.
The US government needs to come up with a requirement that private contractors mandate high-quality training and oversight embedded into their internal processes.
Ironically, flight training materials and evaluation is very high-quality in the US, but it's a single manufacturer, Boeing, that's struggling to meet quality standards across all of their airliner models.
Especially "amazing": even if every one of these pilots earns a million dollars a year and the "contractors" half of that, they'd still only save about 3.5 million dollars a year. Just... what the fuck? On the scale of Boeing, that's a drop in the bucket.
"According to union officials, CCL’s ownership structure is a company within a nest of shell companies"
Yep ... it must be the scenery.
Company outside the US? Likely a dodgy company.
Pilots potentially not American? Likely dodgy pilots.
What do you think the US does so differently to everyone else that means outsourcing the work will be worse quality?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...
I emphasize I only offer it as a source of examples of bad airmanship recognized abroad. I still patently reject his conclusions of ultimate fault for the 737 MAX crashes.
Given the choice between having the internal Boeing trainers mentioned in the article, or potentially delegating it to a contracted pilot with said deficient airmanship, without the context I personally have into the industry from extensive hobbyist research, I couldn't fault someone for being wary. Especially given experiences with outsourcing in other verticals.
It's just not a move that makes sense in the current business world either unless I'm woefully out of date. Training pilots on proper aircraft operating technique should be part of Boeing's core competency. Since you really can't separate a highly technical product like an airliner from the dissemination of the skills and knowledge to use it.
To be frank I think Boeing management is trying to pilot the company into a smoking crater. If I had voting rights capable of moving anything, I'd be looking at votes of no confidence across the management echelon.
But ask yourself how many times quality has gone up after outsourcing critical operations to a group of shell companies based in a low regulation polity.
Also ask yourself why a safety and reputation critical company seems to have a corporate structure indistinguishable from one used to dodge legal liability in tax evasion cases.
How many leading aerospace companies do you think are based out of the Isle of Man? It does not even have a major airport.
I don't think they're doing the work on the Isle of Mann - that's just where the company happens to be registered.
When handing over the responsibility of training pilots to some entity inside another entity, like layers of an onion, it means you outsourced it into a black hole of regulation and competence. That structure is made to specifically obscure what these "cost saving" measures actually imply.
When we're talking about this kind of critical activities you want them happening somewhere where you can actually hold people accountable. Somewhere with visibility, transparency, and working judicial and legislature.
And where would that be?
If the USA's (or wherever) justice system can be bamboozled by off shoring liability, that's indicative the system is broken and / or the necessary treaties are intentionally absent / weak.
Did the article say Boeing is outsourcing pilot training to Pakistan?
Because that's how the incentives align. The goal is to cut costs, the cost of outsourced training pilots + the margin of the outsourced contractor will need to be lower than the cost of in-house training pilots.
Also because that's how pretty much all of outsourcing goes, it doesn't take a seer to realise that what's happened essentially every time is going to happen again. Even less so considering Boeing's recent history of cutting costs at the expense of safety and reliability.
Hiring me in the UK is cheaper than hiring someone else in Silicon Valley. I don't think that necessarily means I'm any worse a programmer, does it?
I've explained that there are no incentives for the quality being the same, only for costs to be lower. Which has essentially always resulted in quality dropping. Including in Boeing's own recent history.
> It's possible costs will be lower due to better efficiency and hiring in different markets, not due to worse pilots.
It's also possible that you start shooting solid gold out your ass.
> Hiring me in the UK is cheaper than hiring someone else in Silicon Valley. I don't think that necessarily means I'm any worse a programmer, does it?
If the goal is solely to hire a cheaper developer, it's not you they'll be going to.
If you’re just speculating that it’s technically still possible, then how is that valuable discussion? As OP said, it’s also technically possible to crap gold. So what?
Perhaps the pilots union wanted $400k a year for each pilot, but their market value was only $200K a year?
The firm has every incentive to do this (including hiring cheap programmers who would have difficulty remaining employed directly on their abilities) and I’ve seen this happen more than rarely. There are good and terrible programmers everywhere in the world, yet I can’t ever recall the “new programmer on your account” being excellent; I don’t think that’s by chance.
The “outsourcing” of critical functions concerns me way more than the “off-shoring” does.
Whether or not this new outsourcing will go the same way is unknown. But based upon their demonstrated results from the last decade... it's not hopeful.