Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"
viewfromthewing.com
viewfromthewing.com
That’s what is keeping so many of them silent: a mortgage, school fees, maybe a H1B.
They’re the ones that aren’t afraid whatsoever to rock the boat or do what they think is right, and are actually able to drive change.
Lazy people tend to self sort into irrelevance.
Those issues already surface in any situation, but it's safe to assume that many hold their tongues because they're afraid of losing their income stream.
I think a great deal of their ability to drive change is because they know the right things to say to the right people. I.e. they have some diplomatic skills.
Because while they might be able to afford to lose their job, they certainly won't drive any change if they actually do lose their job.
Diplomacy helps, but mostly it is about being open about problems and about pushing that info up the chain of responsibility. If you need diplomacy for this point, you already have a severe problem here.
Otherwise the head will also fumble. I have been in expensive meetings talking a lot about parking space organization. This always happens if there is nothing interesting related to the business to talk about. Stuff gets off-topic quickly.
That said, change and disruption has a positive connotation in the business of today. But it isn't always positive.
Then, in my eyes at least, you're talking about either relatively minor things, or things which already fall in the bailiwick of the leader. I'm just a line person with no one under me who could last a max two months without a job but I have no problem communicating problems up the chain. I'm probably naive, but I'd think most other people wouldn't have such problems either. If they do have problems this seems like an organizational issue that even the leaders SteveNuts mentions in the GP wouldn't be able to change.
If a billionaire slams his toe on the leg of a chair, it still hurts, and being sorry for his real pain isn’t denying his otherwise staggering privilege. It’s an excellent example to use to have him empathize with others. If you want to make them act in society’s interest, you can point out that paying taxes or enforcing environmental regulations won’t prevent them from being rich beyond words.
An engineer worried about being fired experiences genuine distress: you can empathize with that there and then because it’s real. Once they have a job, ask them to be more considerate when designing processes or buildings so that everyone can work comfortably in the shade or without having to fear how they are going to feed their family by the end of the week.
This. Or crowdfund a mega million dollar bounty for evidence of certain types of malfeasance.
The market seems to generally punish whistleblowers, and understandably so. I have never worked for a company that wasn't violating some contract, regulation, or law. In my first job we were forging stuff for PCI compliance. The next job stored medical records in a Git repo.
So most people have something to lose if there is a whistleblower personality around, as much as we might admire them when they reveal the secrets of others.
I wouldn't want to work with one. I am not a manager and even as a low level individual contributor I cut regulatory and security corners to keep bosses happy.
You would get far more whistleblowers if it didn't essentially mean wrecking your livelihood, even if you are willing to sacrifice your career.
Yes and:
Make whistleblowing-for-hire official.
IIRC, there's a law practice whose sole activity is suing prescription management practices. Basically forensic accounting meets administrative law.
I want more of that.
Further:
Winner-takes-all seems to be some kind of natural law. And by extension, regulatory capture. Civil society needs countervailing mechanisms that exist outside or separated somehow.
I most like ensuring pro-competition and anti-monopoly policies.
But monopolies will always exist, eg natural monopolies like utility districts and police, so we also need transparency and accountability hacks like you're suggesting.
I do believe that good engineers like their work and drive a lot of self-esteem from it being valued—more than living off a stipend because they shot their career in the foot. It’s well-paid enough they rarely think they need to rely on the generosity of strangers, and that’s not a bad mindset to keep.
In circumstances like these, people talk about loyalty, notably to their employer; I don’t think loyalty is a bad value, but in that case, you want to advocate for loyalty to the craft and the corps, not the organization profiting from putting people in danger. Engineering values, like the brass ring some get in Canada, are things that you want to support not by saying “we’ll support you if that blows in your face” but “We want people like you to speak up during our meetings.”
Giving engineers a guarantee that their craft, their talent and their willingness to ask tough questions is what you value, as a team lead, is something I occasionally can do (not now, though: changing team) and something I’m happy to compensate at fair market value, because it’s objectively a good thing for me too — not because that would put me at odds with my organization, but I’m willing to sacrifice that for some ideal misaligned with profit.
We need to work on getting eggheads at Boeing understand that their cost-cutting was a bad idea (SkyScanner letting you filter-out plane time is beautifully aggressive that way), but in the meantime, we need to tell people facing tough decisions that engineering is full of hard trade-offs but that security is not one of them, and not one that should need charity.
An MBA designed the door plug installation process?
Maybe it’s the Boeing engineers that need some scrutiny?
or, what can engineers possibly know about engineering: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075
Cost
Quality
Time
MBA push for cost, then time (to market), above quality.
Heck, they fired the last CEO over the 737 crashes but he was literally only on the job for 3 years and had no involvement with the 737 design. The problem? He was an engineer and he was already stirring up shit inside. So they threw him under the bus and replaced with him another useless goon that spouts PR bullshit and has no technical experience other than milking companies dry.
If you believe it should be engineers, we're fully in agreement, but then why do we have managers...
Hiding MCAS to avoid recertification was well above the paygrade of an engineer at a bench poking a circuit.
Also, if you want a short version of how this stuff goes very wrong even when engineers do say something, the challenger disaster[1] movie is great. Chase it with the NASA documents[2] for the long version.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvv2-7iOD_8
[2]: https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/genindex.htm
Edit: typo
"We need to replicate the pitch performance of the 737-800. These engines pitch the plane up when accelerating and it messes up go-arounds."
"What if we have the computer just pitch down to compensate? We know the angle of attack and the engine thrust output."
<implements>
Meanwhile in another conference room:
"United is telling us that Airbus is giving them an A321 for 10% less than us. What can we cut?"
"No regulation requires us to have 3 angle of attack sensors. We could get by with 1 and stick it on the Minimum Equipment List if it fails."
"That sounds great."
Then the 1 angle of attack sensor fails the system that was designed for 3. Was it the engineer who agreed to hack 737-800 handling emulation onto the 737 MAX that failed here? Was it the engineer that agreed that the AoA sensors didn't need to be redundant, perhaps before MCAS was even invented?
These complex failures are rarely the result of one individual failing. Everyone did their job; the business saved United 10% (I actually have no idea who their launch customer was), the engineer saved thousands of pilots from being pulled off the line for re-training. But combined, it was a tragedy. Ultimately, it's the organization and its processes that failed, not an individual. As a manager, you own the organization and the processes.
It absolutely was the fault of the engineers who failed to realize what would happen with an AOA fault. I'd love to be corrected, I don't believe a single email from the engineers to management telling them would would happen was ever dug up. And, there's never been an engineer whistleblower saying "I warned them."
Has a single PE lost their license over the Max?
This is false. At the time of the incident (>1month) The FFA and NTSB found 23 reports of uncommanded pitch down attitudes during takeoff.
Quick Google gave me this.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/it-pitched-nose-down-us-...
Turns out the Max8 does have two angle of attack (AoA) sensors.
But the MCAS system only read from AoA1, and never validated it against AoA2. It was recieving info from AoA2, but never used it!
You can do something with 3 or more, but 2 are completely useless.
If there is a mismatch, the system outputs an error and MCAS will disable itself.
In fact, that is literally one of the requirements set by the FAA to begin flying the Max8 again
> FAA Airworthiness Directive approved design changes for each MAX aircraft, requiring input from two AoA sensors for MCAS activation, elimination of the system's ability to repeatedly activate, and allowing pilots to override the system if necessary.
Can they all be fired and the wealth they leach redistributed then please? :)
Add story points to your JIRA tickets and make sure they're either 1, 2, 3 or 5 points, but if they're more than 5 points, they have to be split into multiple 5-point stories, and points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them.
Oh, yeah, and meet your commitments! We'll tell you what your commitments were.
It's actually exactly the same as they way they "managed" projects before Scrum (and before XP, which Scrum itself is a bastardized version of): "tell me everything you're going to do, and then tell me how long it's going to take, and I'll provide value by asking you every day if you're done with it yet. See, I'm justifying why I make more money than you do!"
Don't forget your tps reports.
You see, this is how scrum really works as without this, how would we be able to control development timelines? Also mumbling compliance means it just has to be this way for unspecified reasons!
The leadership team came back and said upon further review, the project would take 3 months.
I was so relieved to hear we could get 8 months of work done in just 3!
That’s why executives get paid the big bucks!
It’s unbelievable how useless some of these planning and estimating sessions are.
Work in defense, can confirm. Add "increment planning" where we plan the sprints out 3 months. Also, voting on points? Naw, someone yell out a number and that's that.
In an "agile" way, of course. You can be agile, you just have to say weeks in advance when you're going to be agile so we can plan around it.
Who can sprint forever? It doesn’t make any sense! When do we rest? When do we train? What is this metaphor!?
Oh, right, because you're supposed to sprint it because that's maximally profitable (in the short-term, anyway).
Any lowly Boeing engineers reading this - my condolences... Truly.
But, of course. The productivity of the team they hired last month was just horrible, they didn't manage to finish anything! Of course they were fired.
Someone kill me, please.
When the actual engineers were blank about how much something costs, they had to sit through a 90 minute meeting of group-costing.
Naturally the team delivered very little despite being quite skilled. But luckily the blame fell on the lead and not on the ICs as it usually does.
So this is willfully producing a less than superior product, which, when it comes to airplanes, is basically criminally negligent since it will result in a crashing plane that kills people.
Not sure how execs are so capable of dodging culpability, but I'd say the real issue is our justice system holds no one rich to account.
>>Boeing outsources a lot of the production of components for its aircraft because it’s cheaper as part of an overall shift in strategy that dates to CEO Harry Stonecipher who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas,
>>>> "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm."
IOW, the McDonnel Douglas, now Boeing, CEO deliberately wrecked the engineering firm to make finance primary. In my book, that merits being tarred, feathered, drawn, and quartered. He's putting millions of lives at risk, risking the defense capabilities of the US, and already killed hundreds. All to line the pockets of himself and his cronies.
The only question is whether the engineering organization is too far lost to reconstitute.
The second element is that this particular junior engineer has seen enough to know not to share his name. Naivety goes both ways, and the rhetorical engineer tends to leave identifiable information if they don’t think getting caught is a problem. This one does. He’s asked internally, and the answer wasn’t reassuring. I’ve been on the receiving end of “What do you think we should do about this?” and hard trade-offs; if the manager knows what they are doing and they are not pushing bad stories, the junior engineer learns something.
The last element is that this is not new: very senior engineers complaining about penny-pushing MBAs ruining the company and “that won’t stop until someone gets hurt” are as old as the merger with McDonnel-Douglas.
Would I trust the technical details and the recommendation of that particular engineer? Lord No: I know nothing about airplanes. But I know what a dysfunctional operation sounds like, and that sounds like the bassoon—but there’s the strings, the brass, and the percussions playing the same tune.
;)
No real whistleblower is going to publish their name, rank, and serial number etc. The corporate PR department sure isn't ever going to tell you such things. Investigative journalism and reporters who can be trusted to verify sources and preserve their anonymity is all but dead these days. The Government might publish something that isn't a total white-wash in 5 years. Or they might not. Who can tell?
It's academic anyway, though, because the FAA will have those records and then the information will be either verified or debunked.
This is why we still need serious journalism by the way - a reporter would personally contact and verify the credentials of the whistleblower while protecting their identity, with their career on the line. Random news blogs or independent reporters will never replace this.
In my view, a "whistleblower" is someone who gives their information confidentially (not anonymously) to a responsible investigating authority.
Not someone who writes a comment on the internet that you or I could write ourselves, with a little research sprinkled with credible-sounding 'insider chit-chat'.
This company's incompetence killed 346 people in 2018-2019, and the postmortem revealed an unethically cozy relationship with their regulator, the FAA. Now, five years later, we are seeing more catastrophic failures that will eventually claim more lives, and once again the FAA is coming under scrutiny for being too lax in its oversight of Boeing.
It seems to me that the FAA lacks some kind of either technical or organizational competence to regulate Boeing. Screws must be turned publicly until Boeing's financier-led culture is replaced with the original engineering-led culture. Anonymous insider comments are one reasonable way to do this, although it might be better to work as an anonymous source to a well-known journalistic outlet.
It wasn't incompetence, it was greed. They said "no new training for pilots" in order to keep sales volume up and to ensure no new training they kept the MCAS system a secret from pilots.
Or maybe we could wait another 20 years: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075
On the other hand, wouldn't that also sound like something someone completely unqualified could easily make up and it would just fit our own bias enough to avoid thinking about it too critically?
Complaining about Boeings quality, especially in the 737 Max department, is just an easy and cheap shot.
Also note that I never claimed that the comment is wrong (I have no private knowledge about Boeings processes), just that the comment could easily be fake.
Biases can be entirely accurate.
And even if this is a work of fiction around this particular incident, the reality may not be far enough off to matter.
There's enough smoke that all the biased people rushing to assume there's a fire are likely more correct than the skeptics demanding to see the flames enveloping the building before rushing to any judgement.
There's solid evidence that there's a metaphorical fire; trusting an anonymous internet comment actually weakens/poisons the pile of evidence.
Exactly. I'd expect a whistleblower wanting to be taken seriously to be talking to a real journalist with editors and a publication with a history of getting things right, not a single-author mid-tier aviation blog.
The temptation to spin things "just a little" and to fail to verify identity and authority, for a site like this, is just too high.
I do not blame someone for not wanting to risk the exposure.
[1] And let's also be clear: journalists from both those organizations are surely on the phones full time right now trying to find dirt on Boeing quality processes. That would be a huge story if they could land it.
Of course no way to know the truth for now.
The page is absolutely filled with ads. Clearly it's a revenue source, not a labor of love.
Also your ideas about the media industry somehow being compliantly beholden to the interests of Boeing (a company less than a tenth the size of Google or Apple) seems a bit silly. This would be a huge scoop and a big win for any paper that got the story. That they don't have it speaks broadly to this blog's story being spun.
The linked page that the comment that is the source of all this is actually on is "Leeham News and Analysis", which looks like a professional-quality aerospace news site. I don't see any ads or tracker scripts on them at all. The author and the bulk of the commenters sound pretty professional and knowledgeable. It looks like they sell subscriptions at substantial cost, which explains a lot. That's enough for me to presume they're much more trustworthy about the aviation industry than any legacy media source.
When was the last time the legacy media did a real investigative report about something that wasn't super hip or somebody had a grudge against already? You may not necessarily agree, but I think it's at least reasonable that an actual whistleblower like this wouldn't bother with them. Or maybe they already did, and got ignored, because they thought the article would cost too much to put together and not get enough clicks to bother. On Leeham's site, the author did ask the commenter to contact them - perhaps something will come from that, or maybe not.
Accessing the SAT system to re-read all the tickets to the reporter sounds like the easiest possible way to get fired. Obviously someone is going to review every access and be very skeptical of anyone viewing that data after the news broke.
I guess there is always "use your coworker's computer when they go to the bathroom", though. Lock your screen!
If this (anonymous) quote is true, it may mean Boeing thinks production quality can be achieved via Quality Control alone. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Incidentally, this is lived reality for developers on the DB team at Oracle.
But getting failures when you need to test a clob for nullity, calculate the size or a raw binay, or get null when you were expecting an empty string (or the other way around) is usually not life-threatening.
Hopefully the MBAs get control over the mess the engineers have created.
""" Once they have finished, they send it back to a Boeing QA for final acceptance, but then Malicious Stupid Happens! The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating (with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they just painted over the defects. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”. """
Back to my "trying to buy a toaster" problem... I just found out all commercially available toasters, no matter what price, are made in China. I don't subscribe to the "everything from China is bad" philosophy, but I feel this is pretty absurd. You simply can't buy a toaster that is manufactured in Europe or America anymore. Even companies such as Bosch that still produce the majority of their products in Europe (as far as I know) seem to have thrown in the towel.
Maybe we need to have an engineer revolution instead of silently being part of this hollowing out by that top percentage of business and political "elite".
Dualit Classic toasters are still made in the UK: https://www.dualit.com/collections/classic-toasters
Other Dualit toasters are made in China.
(One notable exception: Scots-Irish guy from a very modest background - unsurprisingly, he worked harder than anyone else I’ve met and took care of the staff)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/alaska-airline...
This is ironic because Spirit also manufactures parts for Airbus, etc.
"As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances."
Plenty of room for differences between those factories and the former-Boeing one in the USA.
My understanding as well is that while Spirit makes the fuselage of the 737MAX, final assembly is at Boeing in Renton Washington, and the plug door would have been removed for final assembly and then reinstalled in Renton, so Boeing itself would be responsible, assuming, as appears likely, that the plane left the factory without the door bolts installed.
All we have here is an article written on the basis of a single comment on a single website by a anonymous user.
- Even works at Boeing
- Works in that department
- Is truthful about anything they claim
- Doesn't have an agenda
It's just an anonymous internet comment.
Surely some scepticism is warranted.
To then comment on it anonymously in public is not in itself blowing the whistle, but it might make sense to do both at the same time.
Contrast this few-week stint with what happened with NASA after Challenger and Columbia. Everything came to a grinding halt while questions were asked about culture and entire operating principles. And then here, we just have an airworthiness directive followed by business as usual. This is pathetic.
Yeah. Wtf.
In all seriousness though, what can be done? It appears that Boeing has to much power in their relationship with the FAA.
In contrast, grounding hundreds of planes for an indeterminate amount of time has severe implications for many companies. As far as I know, there are no claimed underlying engineering faults to the design. Ask the uncomfortable questions, but if all of the planes can be reviewed to confirm basic airworthiness, at some point you have to let them fly again.
Doesn’t this review and confirmation take place before they even go into service? So if they missed these bolts on the last review, what’s to say they won’t miss them or something equally as important on the next review?
“Oh think of the economy” is the worst excuse I can imagine to let these back into service.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/jul/07/space-shuttl...
[2] https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts135/110706preview/inde...
If NASA was a private enterprise, it would've simply gone out of business. Instead, it stopped being an exciting organization willing to push the boundaries of space travel, which is inherently risky, and became a risk-averse bureaucracy mostly wasting taxpayer money until they eventually got/get the fire lit under their ass by organizations like SpaceX showing that it is still possible to progress in space exploration in ways other than launching robots
Also, Boeing is not a fully private enterprise and receives significant federal funding.
David Calhoun told the newspaper that pilots from Indonesia and Ethiopia “don’t have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the US”. He added the planemaker made a “fatal mistake” by assuming those flying the aircraft would immediately counteract software failures, which played a role in both accidents.
But never admitted anything and deflected any problem until the very last second when it was already so obvious.
Also first blaming bad maintenance then poor training, when they knew they fucked up?
And when you've made millions of dollars over the years, losing your job is at most an inconvenience.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104480
See also this comment and answers:
Airbus also functions very much like a quasi governmental institution in many parts, so there's less interest in squeezing everything to death to save money.
Finally, Airbus generally has a KISS mindset, and are very conservative w.r.t change in engineering practice and tooling. When I was there we spent way, way, way, way, way more time testing than writing software - and the software was written in a way that any software engineer could walk off the street and understand it.
Oh, and quite low levels of outsourcing in critical software - they save that for things that don't have people's lives on the line.
Amazing if true. One of the highest achievements in software.
>The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating (with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they just painted over the defects. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”.
Holy Shit. Whoever is directly and indirectly responsible needs to go to jail. Thats a level of malice which I don't remember eading very often in any kind of news.
Being back engineering leadership supremacy.
Engineering supremacy in that context means that if engineering says no, it’s definite.
What Boeing needs is QA supremacy: nobody wants them to be particularly creative, original, or unusually hard-working when doing audits; they need to be thorough and systematic. We need to make sure that their voice isn’t challenged.
QA supremacy makes sense, but it relies on the merits of QA (that QA are competing to be the best) to avoid false positives/negatives rather than rubber stamping, no?
Sales/financial: make as much money as possible
Engineering: make the best product possible
Old Boeing was successful with the later group in charge, new Boeing (post MD merger) is the former.
The last CEO was an engineer.
MCAS was designed by engineers.
The clearly over complicated door plug system was designed by engineers.
It looks like the engineers are the problem and the MBAs get to clean it up.
The MBAs elected to cover it up from the manual because that would hurt their sales goals of not needing pilot training.
Yes, sales/marketing and management leeches have a lot of control over documentation that leaves the company.
The best part is, it was the leeches that decided to make a fucking indicator light that told you the sensors for MCAS were unhappy, a PAID FUCKING ADDON.
The last CEO was an engineer who got thrown under the bus for the 737 crashes while not being the CEO when it was designed. He was pissing too many leeches off internally so they threw him under the bus.
I know two long time employees of Boeing that left after the last CEO was removed because roughly paraphrasing "Wow, this company is fucked, he was actually trying to fix the company"
1) to keep the new engines that change how the plane flies
2) a convincing lie that passes minimal scrutiny that the plane flies the same - to avoid training pilots to a perfectly good new plane
3) after engineering came with the MCAS solution MBAs drove the cost down and removed redundancy - after all the whole feature was a secret so no one would demand redundancy
Anyhow it was a management decision to not tell about the MCAS changes (not to mention what led to requiring it), management kind of does affect the engineering choices, and is it really over complicated to require 4 rivets?
American engineers and technical designers are being laid off by the hundreds while Russian engineers are quietly hired at the Boeing Design Center in Moscow.
There's a reason people don't let the inmates run the asylum.
It may be a little early for armchair engineering; we should probably wait for a failure analysis report. But the door plug doesn't seem overly complicated. Put the plug in, bolt it on, tada. Where's the complication? The bolts are supposed to have safety wire to keep them from loosening by vibration.
Ah yes, there it is.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/BOEING-PROPRIETARY-BOE...
So why do it? It makes return on net assets look better? It makes unions fragmented and weaker? It provides a third party to blame when they shortchange quality? It takes soon-to-be obsolete production capital off the books? But nothing that actually makes anything about making planes better.
Precisely that, as with most of Boeing's outsourcing.
Milk the cow, run and live happily ever after.
They make the core of the planes and have been run by a private equity firm for 9 years, it's surprising if we find "quality" problems?
About sucking up: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/boeing-rules-out-buying-t... (2023-06-01)
For the 787 bad outsourcing cost Boeing literally $10s of billions in overruns and a plane that was initially sold at a loss of tens of millions per unit and is unlikely to ever make development costs back.
That's Harry Stonecipher's legacy. He was going to show those arrogant 777 engineers how it's done when a tough manager takes over.
Significant findings at this stage should cause HEAVY fines. These fines should pay for the additional QA.
This would not even increase the overall cost - as the minor increase in COGS is offset by 1 accident prevented per decade.
How do you know? What’s the math on this?
The more it pressurizes, the greater the force jamming the door shut.
However, since it's a door, it has to be able to open. The door is constructed such that if you slide it upwards, the ears clear each other and the door can come out.
There are bolts to physically block the door plug from ever sliding upwards. If the bolts were correctly installed, or ever installed at all, the door would be perfectly safe.
Ultimately it's extremely difficult to make a plane where you can just not install a bunch of bolts and everything still keeps working fine. You have to have a high quality manufacturing operation to make a reliable plane.
The NTSB stated that the door did slide upward and also stated they could not find the bolts and were unsure if the bolts were there at all.
I only want to fly on Airbus and possibly Embraer planes from now on.
Boeing has crippled themselves in this two-horse race, and both airlines and consumers don't want to fly Boeing aircraft over Airbus. (Airlines because groundings are extraordinarily expensive, Consumers because they care about their safety).
The only saving grace is that the A320 order book is backed up until almost 2030, but I would not be surprised if Airbus try to permanently ramp up production now.
Again, I know this is a very minor point, put it was distracting.
This format is common in heavily regulated industries and frequently a regulatory requirement since it’s fully unambiguous. I (American) worked in clinical research/pharma for a bit and still write my dates like 23Jan2024.
Is also the standard international format for aeronautical publications.
I know that by using dd MMM YYYY you avoid the ambiguity of dd/MM vs MM/dd, and avoiding the ambiguity is important, but I think most folks know that when the year comes first, then what follows is the month. If someone sees 2024-03-05, I don't think most people wonder Is that March 5th, of May 3rd of 2024? And I like YYYY-MM-dd because it's (a) In alignment with ISO 8601 and (b) sorts so much easier as plaintext.
In documentation, I'll use dd MMM YYYY for signatures and document dates, but for things like big tabular data in the body of a document or in spreadsheets, or logging, or CSV exports, I'll default to YYYY-MM-dd
Like the scene in that Tarantino movie with nazis, where the British spy give himself away by ordering three whiskey with the wrong fingers ...
Yours sincerely, guilty of using ICAO phonetic alphabet with poor random office workers over the phone.
And some idioms involved in it don't translate easily if you're not conversing in English, for example X-Ray or Yankee.
Still most of it works out so less confusing than if I tried to jury rig something (traditional polish way was to use First Names that use given letter as the first letter, but that doesn't cover X or Y well, either)
Amazing how that one worked out.
If it were up to me I'd just put the engineers that made amazing flying machines back in charge and phase out McDonnell Douglas's culture.
Is that possible ? Tribal knowledge is probably lost, and those great employees have probably moved on or retired.
> "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm," he said. "It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money."
* https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0402290256feb29-story.htm...
The Boeing headquarters was moved from Seattle to Chicago around 2001:
* https://hbr.org/2001/10/inside-boeings-big-move
> In a 2019 article, Jerry Useem criticized Boeing's move to Chicago, suggesting that by "isolating" the Boeing management from its engineering and manufacturing staff, the company discounted its former engineering-led corporate culture in favor of a management style run by MBAs instead of engineers.[7]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Building#Criticism
In 2022 it moved again, from Chicago to the DC-area (Virginia):
* https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/05/boeing-to-move-headquarters-...
Both moves seem quite symbolic to me.
So, you know, expect cuts to resolve that one.
The executive don't care. They earned enough to live rich until the end of their lives. Like locusts, they ate through Boeing's real value (its engineering, its reputation) and can now fly away their bellies full, leaving behind a devastated company.
Exactly. They care to the extent that they are liable and face the risk of being held accountable, which in corporate America is minimal.
If they're smart, on an Airbus.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/032715/how-boe...
Expect problems to crop up in Boeing's weapons too sooner or later. I hope the US air force didn't let Boeing self-certify its products as much as the FAA did.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
I think you're referring to the weakening/dismantling of regulatory requirements and enforcement favored by libertarians.
Please correct me if I've misunderstood.
Edit: Personally I think valid and helpful regulatory frameworks can easily drift into capture territory, so they must be vigilantly maintained. Also to keep incentives in alignment, the regulators shouldn't be able to jump back and forth between industry and regulation. Dismantling them, however, is worse. Like a long standing code base there's a lot of useful but misunderstood parts.
The only meaning I know for the phrase “Regulatory Capture” refers to the corruption of regulatory oversight by special interests.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp
https://study.com/academy/lesson/regulatory-capture-definiti...
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...
> ...occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group.
My description was just more succinct and didn't identify every single entity that could be coopted and every single group that could benefit. Regulatory capture is unnecessary and onerous checks and balances, not the removal of regulatory checks and balances that you implied.
Your descriptions both here and above seem incorrect to me. Regulatory capture does not mean onerous or unnecessary regulations, that is wrong. It also does not necessarily mean less strict regulations either, however Boeing v FAA in 2019 is a well known case of Boeing actively preventing oversight.
Regulatory capture means that the entities being regulated have control over the regulatory process, despite a conflict of interest.
> not the removal of regulatory checks and balances that you implied.
Regulatory Capture is when the checks and balances are biased in favor of special interests. You may have misunderstood what I said.
It’s hard to imagine and hard to find evidence of special interests making their own regulations more onerous, but I invite you to try. There probably are lots of cases of companies making regulations easier on themselves and harder on competitors.
And how exactly do you think this is accomplished from the perspective of people outside the captured regulatory system? Ie from the perspective of those not already on the inside of the corrupt regulatory scheme?
I’m not sure what your point is. Are you still stuck on the incorrect notion that “regulatory capture” can be summarized as onerous regulation? That simply does not work, but I’m happy to keep trying to explain why, if it’s not clear yet. There are also plenty of cases of regulatory capture dismantling regulations for everyone. Again, the single most relevant case in this thread, of Boeing circa the Lion Air crashes, is one of removing regulation. No regulations were made onerous or unnecessary in that case, it was the opposite of that, the regulation was bypassed for Boeing’s benefit, effectively removing it, and it remained unchanged for other carriers.
When regulatory capture occurs, sometimes regulations get harder, and sometimes they get easier. Whether it’s one or the other depends on the case, and depends on whose perspective it is. Trying to summarize “regulatory capture” as making regulations harder is just false, because that’s not what always happens, and not even what usually happens, and it completely fails to mention the primary relevant point: the special interest getting prioritized over the public interest.
It's gotten so bad that Boeing announced they will no longer accept fixed price contracts from the military because they are that broken as a company and no longer able to manage anything.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/04/02...
I don't think this is an honest assessment. From your own source, Boeing's "Defense, Space, and Security" segment draw 39% of the company's revenue, while it's "Commercial Airplanes" segment accounted for 32% of its revenue.
I don't think that there is a single company on earth that would describe the source of a third of its whole revenue as something they do "on the side". Moreso when the top segment is barely over 5% larger, and is comprised of a coarse agglomeration of activities that may or may not be all related.
I don't fully understand the breakdown, looks like they're doing some finance BS to push costs into the commercial and military segments (which report losses) and list global services as pure profit for some MBA reason. How else does the segment grow 180% year-over-year?
As Boeing's 737 MAX problems started in 2018 and all 737 MAX were grounded in 2019, I'd be surprised if these figures are already reflecting a considerable drop in Boeing's revenue from commercial planes.
That's when potential customers start to say "hell no, get me Airbus' number" and Boeing's revenue from commercial planes starts to tank.
I’m no fan of Boeing, but they’ve been focusing on the military for a very long time.
But it feels like they aren't succeeding. Didn't Boeing lose out on all the advanced fighter competitions to Lockheed, so all their fighters are last generation and headed for obsolescence? I'm also under the impression that the ULA is losing to SpaceX pretty badly (but maybe the government is pumping money into it for reasons, I don't really follow too closely).
You _can_ make money hand over fist working with the US military, but winning giant money printing contracts is easier said than done. It’s a super volatile industry that Boeing unsurprisingly limits their exposure to.
Discussing anything related to the US military on HN can be frustrating, and the recent surge of “Boeing only really cares about their cash cow, defense” comments is no different.
Usually the negative consequences of these decisions happen too far down the line for these managers to be held accountable.
They are in effect an incentive for execs to take bigger and bigger risks to deliver profits.
If their gamble pays off, they profit, if their gamble doesn't pay off they profit.
When the MBA and Private Equity craze kicked in, we had golden parachutes and other instruments which pushed companies into growth mode.
It is not immediately clear to me that incentivizing short term growth is a wise business strategy for the long term.
On average, executive priorities are different from non-executives.
If one hires a plane engineer, one’s filter will be: person who is capable and motivated to engineer a plane.
If one hires an executive, return on investment is the metric in focus.
So it is safe to say that, on average, non-executives will care slightly more about the safety of the plane. (please notice words “on average” and “slightly”).
But I won't take that position since making up hypothetical arguments isn't a good use of anybody's time.
Said another way, vampires sucking out the blood and leaving an exsanguinated corpse behind.
> the underpaid (and presumably empty bellied) engineer has little motivation
Usually, salary budget is controlled by executives..
In case Boeing accidentally left a wrench inside a plane, the last person touching it was technician (and firing possibly is in order), but responsibility for deaths falls on organisation and those who control and shape it.
Hilarious! Well played!
Maybe venting a bit.
And since your reading… :-)
I honestly think (and am annoyed somewhat) that asking for statistics/study (popular on HN), or citation (even more popular on wikipedia), became convenient way to shut down discussion or dismiss opposing viewpoint.
Hypothetical example with a bit of exaggeration that illustrates what I observe frequently: personA:“people go to work in the morning”, personB: “study/citation needed”
Using phrases such as "I honestly think" are to engage in discourse as it invites discussion rather than presenting opinion as fact and leading to a request to back it up. The whole thread created a straw man caricature like out of the 1920's adding no value to the discussion.
Yes, because I'd rather fly in a plane made by a "business" rather than "a great engineering firm." Why in the f*ck isn't this scumbag in prison? When you take a firm that produces a product that must ensure the safety of its users because the consequences are dire and you purposely subvert that, and then people die, you need a long stint of FPMIA prison. Also, cheated on his wife in their Golden Anniversary year. Lowest of the low.
Also while I have some reservations about the expectation of rape as something we joke about, I do love Office Space.
We want curious conversation here. That certainly means not fulminating, as well as not repeating things.
You're far from the only one, of course; but this comment was heavily upvoted. In fact it was sitting at the top of the thread, emitting fumes. That's not what HN is for.