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Comment by psynister | Hacker News Reader

Boeing's relationship with government agencies is beyond alarming. There needs to be better oversight and accountability for the sake of both passengers as well as workers in the aviation industry. People's lives are more important than profit. I can't believe this is a controversial position in our society.

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Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, RTX (Raytheon), etc are essentially subsidiaries of the DoD, with privatized returns. They are too vital to the US military to be allowed to fail. Many countries like Russia and China have more overtly state-owned weapons manufacturers, whereas the U.S. pretends that theirs are legitimate free-market suppliers. When your business is deemed essentially to national security, and when the government signs trillion-dollar multi-decade contracts for equipment and maintenance, market forces no longer apply.

There is no guarantee that a country has to have a leading-edge aircraft manufacturer. On either the civilian or military side.

If companies lose too much money and don't receive bailouts, they simply cease to exist.

And you can't magic a new one on demand, given the specialized expertise and subcontractor requirements for something this complex.

So the reality is the government is stuck with a multi-variable optimization problem -- what combination of price, competition, and sustained R&D/production capability is best?

There is no easy answer. The modern, less-competitive, merged market is a deliberate consequence of the US refusing the spend Cold War levels of money to keep a larger number of manufacturers afloat.

Effectively all of the aerospace and defense industries are like this. I’m not even sure it’s controversial, it’s just so normalized

"New Spin on a Revolving Door: Pentagon Officials Turned Venture Capitalists" - https://dnyuz.com/2023/12/30/new-spin-on-a-revolving-door-pe...

I don’t think it is controversial, but rather overlooked whenever it’s convenient. Yes, that would speak ill of the people involved.

Beoings relationship with the U.S. only barely starts at commercial planes. They support the U.S. mission militarily. It is and should be alarming but also not surprising. The gov cozies up with any corporation that can further its interest

If that's how they cut corners in civilian aviation, which is used by the public all the time, how can they cut corners when they deliver obscure military hardware that just sits in the warehouse waiting for WW3?

The KC-46 saga gives the complexities of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-46_Pegasus#Flight_...

On the one hand, Boeing fucked up the project badly. On the other hand, the contract was written so Boeing ate the $5B+(?) in rework / deficiency remediation.

Reading more around it, Northrop Grumman won the initial contract with an Airbus model and Boeing complained, got the proposal rewritten in their favour. They had an official who passed them info and got a highly inflated contract written, who was then jailed for corruption, Boeing was fined and the CEO was fired. Yet the US is still going with them for the tankers despite the ongoing problems that still aren't resolved. The Airbus version has now been in service in other countries for 10+ years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC-X

From memory, without looking back through Wikipedia, the original contract award was killed. Then Boeing won the new bid.

Acquisition at that level is extremely cutthroat, so who knows what happened.

The broader perspective is that the current major aircraft contracts are:

   - F-35 Lockheed-Martin
   - B-21 Northrop Grumman
   - KC-46 Boeing
   - X-37 (Space) Boeing
   - MQ-25 (Naval Refueling) Boeing

That seems like a pretty fair spreading of contracts among the remaining majors, especially if you had less faith in Boeing to produce combat equipment, but still wanted to maintain it as a company.

We do know what happened though. Boeing used an insider to pass information about their competitors bids and then gave them a high paying job with a large sign on bonus.

They got the contract killed because they knew they could work up a furor about a European design being used by the US. Of course it's fine in the other direction.

There's legitimate reasons to not want to depend on an ally for equipment but in this case it seems that Boeing haven't been able to deliver on it at all. Losing might have been a good kick up the ass to improve for the next time this type of contract comes around.

I mean, the billions of dollars hole in their books in doing a decent job of that.

They've already made noise about 'being more selective about their bids in the future' or some such.

Which is honestly the way it should work. Because the US govt can't reform Boeing. Only Boeing can choose to do that internally.

> There needs to be better oversight and accountability for the sake of both passengers as well as workers in the aviation industry

The people providing oversight were the problem. Any progress here needs to avoid an "another hull on the Titanic" sort of proposal.

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