Alaska CEO: We found many loose bolts on our Max planes
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
"We’re sending our audit people to audit their quality control systems and processes to make sure that every aircraft that comes off that production line, that comes to Alaska has the highest levels of excellence and quality," he said.
Though safety inspections were initially estimated to take between four and eight hours per plane, Whitaker said they’ve “been longer than that.”
“We’ve required a lot of measurements,” he said. “Once the area’s exposed, we want to understand bolt tensions and gaps and things of that nature. So we’ve required more data than would normally be the case because we really wanted to understand the issue.”
And if an Airline doesn't send a team to check on their plane, does that mean quality control is worse?
Boeing might be willing to let airlines do things they won't normally consider, to try and save these orders.
Part of it is to be able to challenge QC reports submitted by the company. If you have a good you receive with QC paperwork which Boeing no doubt generates, you may want to go see how legitimate the process the paperwork is certifying.
The power of this paperwork extends into lawsuit ammo if a need ever arises.
The job of QC in commercial/industrial is legal ass-covering for both sides of a contract.
In any event, having their own people monitoring seems like a win-win overall.
They don't trust Boeing enough or their customers don't trust Boeing enough and it's a PR measure to calm the passengers' nerves. Could also be a bit of both.
But most of us know driving isn't safe, and still do it daily.
https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
It is less clear if the choice is driving to a beach two hours away or flying to a different beach two hours away by air.
* there's a piece of news about Southwest, i think, saying they'll start considering alternatives to Boeing.
Much easier to get everyone in a room and say, "We're going to starve Boeing of revenue until it walks into Chapter 11, at which point we'll be ready to recapitalize and install new folks." Absolutely not my preferred thoughts on fixing a rotting enterprise, but you go to work with the tools you have.
And then there's, y'know, the whole DEI angle. Being acquired by the US Government isn't going to make them more likely to promote white male engineers to sort things out.
What an attitude. That's their attitude during working hours too? I just don't want to use code written by those HNers.
the code i write at work is open.
A corporation is a legal fiction. It doesn't actually do anything, it doesn't make decisions. The people who work for the corporation do. Liability should not stop with the corporation but with the actual human beings making the decisions.
There is also a corporate greed, which is leaking into tech with commoditization, problem in America where fewer and fewer companies treat their employees as assets and rather treat them as cogs. People are loosing their tolerance.
Things are just as bad in big tech. Ever tried to get support from Google? Many modern companies cut customer support to the bare minimum.
Then there's stuff like the 23andMe saga (also on the front page of HN right now), where the company actively blames their customers for their fuck up.
Sure if you fly to some very small destinations you will have very limited choices, but almost definitionally that's a small fraction of the total trips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiant_Air
which works on a fundamentally different model from other airlines (limited network, fewer flights per week.) It is getting harder and harder to see the difference between traditional airliners like Delta and "low cost" airlines like Southwest.
People do compare prices on competitive routes. Airlines, in the US at least, try pretty hard not to compete on quality and the mediocrity of the 737 is part of that. Every other commercial airliner built today has a modern fly by wire system which can accomplish what MCAS was supposed to do in a safe way. The 737 is noisy for its size
https://www.aviationfile.com/noise-pollution-levels-by-aircr...
not just in the passenger cabin and on the ground but particularly in the cockpit (years back I wrote a comment on an av blog about the noisy 737 and pilots joined in.) The 737 struggles to take off under good conditions and has to be grounded under conditions that other airliners handle easily. The 737 also lacks the anti-turbulence feature of the A320 which uses the fly-by-wire system to smooth out the ride.
People are so used to the dismal 737 and only somewhat better A320 that they have a hard time believing that modern airliners like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family
can be much smaller but much more comfortable than the 737 but people who fly it become believers, the more people who get to experience them the more people will demand them. They cost less to operate too and being a little smaller could support a more efficient network just as 2-engine widebodies replaced 4-engine widebodies.
I've seen many products and services clearly making their products worse in order to make more money. Airlines have done similar things with passenger space and various fees, it's not so hard to imagine them cutting corners only to be surprised that they've gone too far and inadvertently impacted airplane safety.
Sure they care about customer wellbeing but isn't making money higher on their list of priorities?
Boeing in general seems to have a serious culture problem that we should condemn, but it’s not like the “they” that set cultural norms is the same “they” that’s out there on a supplier’s factory floor with a torque wrench.
Being reductive can be a good rhetorical tool, but in this case I think it’s better to view the problem as culture and system rather than a single personality with ill intent.
Or, Veritrust which sounds like it needs a ™
not saying they’re completely guilty, but they do have some part of the fault in that incident.
I'm finding these type of apologists comments placing fault towards the airline really hard to sympathize with.
Airplanes fly around ALL THE TIME with equipment that isn’t working. They have a procedure for determining what is and isn’t necessary for a given flight both legally and by the airlines own standards. In this case it very much looks like the pressurization controller was a red herring.
What I have not heard is if the problems with the door plug are connected to the warnings.
Edit: If that warning was, in fact, an indication of the door plug problem then perhaps the reaction to that warning should be reviewed.
It would be nice to get the black box data, but Alaska mishandled the box and allowed it to write over data from the flight in question. Oops.
I don't think PR is an added bonus, I think it's the entire point.
If I were a PR person, thinking only about PR (not caring about anything else), the #1 thing that seems obvious is "what do we need to do to have these incidents stop occurring ASAP".
Or they could be just putting on a show like you're suggesting, but that would do a huge disservice from a PR perspective if that results in the underlying issues not being fixed.
"Door fell off airplane during flight" headlines a couple times a month would be some of the worst PR you could possibly have (with the exception of planes crashing, obviously even worse)
they've been through serious air disasters before and have scar tissue from it.
and if it is strictly a pr thing, the auditors go to boeing, take some pr photos, have a beer, and go home, then they deserve to fail.
They also fired the mechanic that raised this issue before the accident. It could have been avoided if they had only listened to him.
It is indeed a bit ironic.
I don't think this is good PR for the airlines as it is.
I somewhat doubt it's going to happen quickly, and it is likely a combination of sincere anger and saber rattling.
I've been witness to some major product meltdowns, and executives threatening to migrate from a vendor is one of the big guns to pull out post mortem.
---
Edit: Another topic, NPR said "there is only one commercial plane competitor to Boeing, Airbus". What about Embraer?
I recently did a public tour of one of Airbus' major assembly lines. I remember the tour guide telling us, that their customers (the airlines) either have their own QA people on the line when their planes get assembled, or pay another company to do it for them.
I would like to phrase this as “trust and verify”, because the state of trust arises from being open to verifiability, contrary to common misconception that they are against each other.
They are naturally against each other, which is why the "but" statement is meaningful.
"Slow and steady" vs "fast but steady".
"Move fast and break things" vs "move fast but don't break things".
Plus the fact that these machines have a 30 year working life.
Probably talking to their mechanics, they might quickly identify other problematic components which might have been noticed during maintenance but not strongly enough reported and tracked. Basically everything that needed repairs which shouldn't have been needed.
Granted they are different divisions, but after the CST-100 debacle [1], NASA also sent a team to audit them [2]. Some of the off-channel remarks by NASA were striking.
[1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/boeing-starliner-error-wou...
[2] https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/02/07/nasa-shares...
I can't believe I've read that. There's no saving this company.
Maybe fine for an e-commerce site or game, where the stakes are measured mainly in lost revenue/customers and a team of engineers burning the midnight oil to sort the problem. Not so fine for spaceflight.
Boeing et al seem to be following the "move slow and hide problems so we don't fix anything" mantra.
Counterpoint: SpaceX had to re-learn well-known practices that are so commonplace in aerospace it's shocking they weren't being conducted [1]. One example is more complete material testing on critical components as part of supplier quality control. When they lost a rocket due to this process gap, their solution was to layer on those common QC practices. IMO these are risks that, over time, may turn SpaceX into the dinosaurs they are competing with. (reference to Chesterson's fence is probably apt.)
"Moving fast and breaking things" may be fine, but to the GP's point, it has to be a risk-based decision. We probably shouldn't be aiming to move fast when lives are at risk.
[1] https://spacenews.com/falcon-9-failure-linked-to-upper-stage...
I had a safety critical embedded engineer who had worked on everything from weapons systems to automobiles first not have any idea what property-based testing was and then proceed to tell me at length how it was pointless because unit testing is all you need as long as you keep making your units smaller and smaller.
At the time I worked in FinTech and was aghast at what I was hearing as they worked on self-driving. If I had to pin down what made me shift my career path into "cyber-physical systems", it was probably that conversation.
Since making the transition and later founding a company dedicated to testing in that domain, I've heard dozens and dozens of sentiments even more concerning.
I've encountered devs that think this nonsense before, but always assumed that this attitude couldn't be held with systems that are actually critical. I'm a bit less naive now.
Despite how obvious it is with a little outside observer perspective, the "perfect bricks" way of thinking is pervasive because that's how the builders and supply chains are organized.
To leave the analogy behind, any non-trivial component has a testable surface area, but typically has additional modes of behavior associated with internal state, environmental conditions, or other areas that well-meaning unit test writers didn't think about.
I have often found issues in simple caller/callee pairs of two components, both of which are tested, but the caller contains subtle expectations of the callee that the unit tests don't match up with.
Given the amount of money and lives at risk, this level of process short-cutting is mind boggling.
https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installa...
So this is like when I would take apart and re-assemble everything when I was a little kid. Sometimes I would have several screws left over. It's a good thing I wasn't making airplanes!
Although it appears you would have been immensely qualified to do so.
After that, I just assumed all airplane manufactures used something like this.
If what that commenter says is true, the whole company ought to be shut down.
It’d also be an easy sell for either of the two presidential candidates - one can say he’s clamping down on incompetent elites who aren’t that elite after all; the other can talk about a profit-seeking company killing Americans.
I agree the profit-seeking company killing Americans is an easy sell with democrats and possibly even a good chunk of independents.
Obviously, Boeing and Airbus represent a duopoly. When you factor in one of them is US-based and is relied upon to deliver on certain national security projects, defense etc no politician is going to let the commercial arm fail and risk the national security arm failing too.
Also there is a lag in the system around failure. The market could decide that Boeing planes are poorly constructed, but how many accidents and deaths would have to happen in order for customer (airlines) to decide to no longer put in orders. That's not really feasible.
"Too big to fail"
No it won't. Boeing has reached too big to fail status.
They employ many millions of people directly and indirectly between commercial and military aerospace.
Boeing has reached PEAK too big to fail recently too when they announced that due to their too big to fail status, they are unable to estimate or control costs anymore and will no longer bid for any US military contracts that are fixed-price.
What you will see is billions in bailout funds given to Boeing shareholders.
It mildly more interesting to learn that Spirit was not granted access to Boeing's MES, which leads me to believe that Boeing's stance toward Spirit is more like "they're our customer and they insist on on-site inspection & repair so we'll begrudingly allow it" than "they're our customer and we have a shared interest in quality manufacturing so we'll partner with them to ensure that happens." This is a failure of leadership and extremely short-sighted, and is virtually guaranteed to result in the sort of process failures and outcomes the throwaway describes.
It's not uncommon for OEMs to take over contract manufacturer's sites, either because of a strategic decision to conduct manufacturing operations internally [again], or due to persist or pernicious quality issues arising from specific partners' operations or at specific plants. This is relatively feasible in the case of most electronics and smaller mechanical devices, and contract manufacturers operate in a state of existential fear most of the time, knowing their destiny is in the hands of a small handful of OEM customers (just look at the impact Apple's quarterly reports and projections have on partners like Foxconn, Jabil and Pegatron). It's not practical -- or even really possible due to capital expense -- to do this in aerospace. For that reason primarily, I see no alternative than for Boeing (and others) to be forced into 100% process compliance by presence of permanent external audit teams based in corporate offices and every manufacturing & assembly location. I wouldn't be surprised, too, if Boeing were forced (for political rather than anything to do with quality) to onshore more of their supply chain[1]).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235197892...
It sounds like someone under pressure came up with a "loophole" that was compliant with a motivated but literal reading of the CMES reporting requirement. In this case, I would wager dollars to donuts that the CMES reporting requirement only anticipated door separated/not separated.
Mental gymnastics is used to argue compliance with some technical requirement, like it is some legal proceeding where you can debate what the definition of "is" is.
No amount of formal quality process can defend against business pressure and incentives to hack the same system. Requirements dont and cant cover every corner case, like someone saying a door was never fully separated because you tied them together with a shoelace before dethatching it.
Asking if a justification passes the "red face test" is ultimately more valuable than asking if it passes a literal reading.
"Culture eats Strategy for breakfast" -- Peter Drucker (purportedly)
The overall quality is incredibly high.
".... We will follow the lead of the FAA and support our customers every step of the way.”
It should be: "we will lead the way in putting engineering first, and building in quality from before the first part is built"
But those financialists just cannot see anything but their short term profits. Executive earnings for the past decade+, when they goosed profits by cutting quality, should be clawed back.
It's the "genuine leather" of aeronautics.
It's the lowest possible standard that keeps the speaker out of jail.
> "This all changed in 2004, when a committee made up largely of industry backers passed a rule establishing the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) system. The ODA system transformed the way DERs worked. Now called Authorized Representatives (ARs), these employees reported not to the FAA, but to Boeing managers."
Regulatory Capture at the FAA, Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy Leo Kalb Bourke, November 12, 2021
We don't need to go through everything, at least not immediately.
We know the door/bolts have issues, so we can just scrutinise those really carefully. The crucial part is not looking at whether there are issues (we already know there are), but at the nature of those issues. Are they localised and contained, or are they systemic? The extent to which they're systemic tells us how worried we need to be about everything else in the planes
(Personally, given the MCAS situation, I don't believe for a moment these issues are not systemic, but a layperson's semi-educated guess isn't a valid basis for an airplane audit)
I wouldn't say it's crazy. When buying industrial equipment, it's commonplace to have a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) where engineers from the customer travel to the supplier factory to verify everything is built to spec and functions as expected. Upon passing FAT, equipment is shipped to site and installed where it then undergoes a site acceptance test (SAT). After SAT, the equipment is "handed over" to the client. The FAT-SAT process can be applied to anything from small individual pieces of equipment all the way up to huge skids/packages.
In shipbuilding, classification agencies like ABS or DNV have inspectors that monitor the construction of a ship.
aka share the costs of doing the QA (of the full aircraft themselves
"They got quality inspectors, quality managers, out of the picture," one former quality manager said, adding that the positions had been reduced from about 15 inspectors per building per shift, to one. [1]
0: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
1: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1224998393/boeing-737-max-9-d...
How clever, you can't get much more realistic of a mock-up than that. The undeniability is undeniably palpable.
Some people are just not quality people.
Thankfully there weren't any fatalities this time, it may be risky but hey you pays your money and you takes your chances.
You can't look at just the Sound to calculate their safety staff changes.
2. The 787 is an older airplane than the current hot topic.
>negligent union parasites
This perspective is so tired and it's quite frankly exhausting to deal with. Please reconsider your perspective and opinion on this matter, fairly new account.
3. Pretty much all of Airbus is unionized, vs. only 1/3rd at Boeing. If "unions bad", Airbus aircraft should have had dozens more major issues in the previous decades.
It's like you criticize one negligent union, the woodwork comes out to protect the bad apple.
ChatGPT: The phrase "negligent union parasites" is a derogatory and generalized statement that is not specific to any particular union. Instead, it seems to be a broad and negative characterization that could be directed towards members or aspects of various unions. It's important to note that such language is highly biased and does not reflect an objective or fair assessment of unions or their members. Unions can vary widely in their practices, effectiveness, and the satisfaction of their members, and like any large organization, they may have both strengths and weaknesses. It's always more constructive to address specific concerns or issues rather than using generalized negative labels.
To avoid being misunderstood, explain how those quality issues arose from something that is attributable to the union, instead of simply calling their workers negligent and parasites.
This provocative language severely undercuts your point, especially because the fatal problem with the MAX was the designed-in MCAS system and management decisions to hide it & hush up the problems they knew about years before it killed hundreds of people.
That is, the whole predication of GGP was quality inspection was a factor, which you baffling instead chose to only argue against here in selected predicated children (of course we probably know why).
I don’t know why you’re so confidently wrong about my position on quality control but it’s irrelevant to the simple fact that all of the failures we’ve seen are the responsibility of Boeing’s management: even if the unionized assembly workers are caricatures straight out of union-busting propaganda, aerospace safety is famously based on the principle of not relying on a single safety mechanism, but in these reports we’re seeing systemic failures where cost savings was prioritized over safety.
Also from what I've seen the Boeing union has been raising alarm bells about... Literally exactly all of these little things that caused the quality issues
You're saying "we know" like a single person has agreed with your line of reasoning in this thread
Touch grass bruh. No idea what's got you so frothed up, but it's not constructive.
Or are investors, who would use the term “parasites”?
Radical action is required or the company could be destroyed.
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2021/02/hicks-warns-agai...
They will rattle sabers until their grandson gets a no show job.
Billions were lost just in the humvees that were gifted to the Taliban recently.
Either way, still not trillions to my original point
Charging a single person in boeing is not the same as bringing down the whole company
If you want cultural change you need a CEO that wants that and knows how to get there - which is not an engineering problem.
Similarly, I assume it’s harder to find an engineer who went into the field purely for money.
I do think on average engineers will prioritize safety (since they likely understand failure modes and production and long tail statistics better. We literally have to take engineering ethics classes), at the cost of doing a worse job at running the business. But when the business requires this level of safety, that IS doing a good job.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/more-top-...
Except top executives are engineering degree holders. They are, and that’s a fact. The majority of top performing companies are headed by engineering degree holding CEOs.
But you keep making the same wrong points and trying to play devils advocate on positions that you don’t back up.
If you want to claim an intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a top performing CEO, you need to show something different anyway. For example, that the proportion of engineers that are great CEOs is higher than the proportion of MBAs or lawyers or chemist or ... that are great CEOs. Maybe that is true, but I haven't seen it. Edit: we could also look at a narrower problem, for example: is the performance of engineer CEOs in "engineering companies" better on average than that of non-engineer CEOs in that sector?
I am not saying engineers cannot be good CEOs, just that the link between being an engineer and a good CEO is (probably) not intrinsic.
I’ve already established higher performance in the many replies I have given to your many comments.
Have a great day!
"If you have a great executive ticking all the boxes - splendid. But there is no intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a good CEO (same holds for other disciplines, btw.). You could have engineers that qualify, lawyers, MBAs, mathematicians, physicists, ...
reply
happytiger 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]
There is. You’re flat out incorrect."
You never established higher performance.
Have a great day
As you point out lots of other choices.
There is plenty of evidence that engineers in the CEO seat are effective drivers of companies and shareholder value. This is false equivalence reasoning presented over and over in this thread and I dare say this opinion is quite antiquated and precisely the thinking that has put Boeing on its current destructive course.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insead/2014/05/29/why-engineers...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/more-top-...
The CEO being an engineer is not sufficient for success.
Your core arguments are ever changing throughout this thread, and on every reply.
Who do you want, a good director, a good actor, or a director who's a good director and a good actor? Which do you want, a quality culture, an engineering culture, or a quality and engineering culture? Of course one is "in charge" but pretty clearly "engineering" and "quality" aren't even in the room....
But there is no intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a good CEO (same holds for other disciplines, btw.). You could have engineers that qualify, lawyers, MBAs, mathematicians, physicists, ...
> Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity, and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.
This is what you keep doing and it’s rather exhausting.
I wish you well. I hope you have a great day.
Have a great day.
Engineering is one of the few fields that understands value. Most other functions, within a corporation, are more process oriented and have a more transactional world view as a consequence of dealing with costs for most of their activities.
In other words, if you want to slash budgets, lay off staff, and deliver value to shareholders, your faithful MBA is your go to. If you want to build cultures that create products that strive to satisfy arrays of non-functional requires, like efficiency, reliability, and safety, engineering managers have spent their careers building these departments.
The old school management theory is that engineering leaders are accountable to shipping quality products on time and within budget. That’s it.
But a CEO's historical understanding of engineering operations has been pretty opaque: ships on time, or doesn't. Of course this is lacking everything meaningful about software.
So the same visionary management theory has come up with a concept of DORA metrics. This provides the competency with quality management metrics that allow for decision-making around whether engineering is delivering or not and a whole new level of understanding and abstraction.
But understand that most of the companies that are getting themselves in deep shit right now are doing so because they have removed power from their engineering organizations to the point where, and the service of relentless extraction of shareholder value, they have destroyed their companies and crippled their products. It is happened to quite a few companies and manufacturers in the United States, from GE to Boeing, and from IBM to GM.
The current profit comes from revenue not reputation culture thinks that you can build some level of abstraction to engineering management, and then layer on traditional management theory in order to extract value from a chain of command.
The truth is that engineering lead organizations deliver a great deal, more value to shareholders in the long-term, as they are more focused on building the platforms that create competitive long-term foundations. Companies like Netflix, Google, Apple, and other “tech companies” occupy the top value of the stock market in equities positions around the world, because of the fact that they are able to use software to amplify the value of their innovations at profound levels. But America’s Legacy companies continue to operate as if this lesson is not true they continue to prioritize optimization over platform.
The old system continues to persist with the idea that there must be a professional manager at the top of the organization, rather than someone who is focused on creating value with platforms, and the culture tends to produce these situations of crisis in exploitation, because they do not understand how important it is to create a culture of platform value creation.
So of course, I make the comment that we should have an “engineering experience CEO,” or even an actual engineer in the CEO seat, and predictably it ends up being criticized for the fact that we could have a professional manager in that seat, and don’t actually need an engineer to be a CEO. That’s fine, and I can understand the point you’re raising.
But, it’s been my experience that CEOs that have been in involved in platform, engineering and large scale systems management do a much better job of preserving the culture that creates lasting and durable platform value for companies like Boeing, and this is the value which has been destroyed and the culture which must be resurrected before the company crashes.
So, rather than bringing another abstraction specialist, who will find another metric values system to manage things, which isn’t working, I was suggesting that we should bring in an actual engineer to sleep on the factory floor and make sure that this culture stops before someone dies and the share price drops to unrecoverable levels (where it’s going!).
To expound I’ll say this.
The current culture at Boeing is very much a culture where the engineers don’t speak up. Many of the most passionate people who worked there have been fired or let go because they spoke up so, I think it’s time for a change before one of the most storied and important companies in American history becomes yet another casualty of the MBA-lead, value extracting management theory.
So in sun, it really doesn’t matter if the CEO is an engineer, but it matters that the CEO is not working with abstractions, and therefore I was making the suggestion that the CEO should be an engineer, or at least come from engineering as a background, so that we do not continue the pattern of incompetent management that has gotten this company to the brink of failure.
Forgive my typos, I had to dictate this as I’m traveling.
I disagree that quality is specific to engineering. Lots of other fields understand quality, too.
Let’s use your argument: Would you hire a lawyer to captain a ship? Why not? It’s not like the captain actually steers the ship or oils the engine.
You see? It’s not that hard to think a tiny tiny little bit.
Edit: aircraft engineering organizations require an executive that understands the airline market and how to build airplanes. This company in particular needs a fixer to address quality problems and reassure the market that substantive changes to the quality of manufacturing will be made.
An expert in toy manufacturing who ran Mattel shouldn’t be overseeing jet aircraft production and this idea that they can do so effectively is a big part of the reason companies continually fall down on manufacturing quality and flame out like GE, HP, and now Boeing are doing. Sorry. This idea that a CEO without a background in aerospace can just fly in and fix everything because of transferrable skills sounds good but it’s just simply not true and in fact is the exact and very specific management theory and corporate ideology that is the root cause of the problems at the core issues this company is experiencing*.
I'd say there are number of industries and backgrounds a "quality in production" CEO could come from.
Edit: I even agree with need to understand the market and manufacturing, but it could come from being an engineer, a physicist, a mathematician etc.
What it comes down to is that someone with decades of experience in pharma can be useful in the fuel lab and vice versa, but it still takes years to get up to speed before the wisest decisions can be made since either way this type of thing is not soft about quality. That much it shares with aircraft reliability.
It takes a certain type of leadership to prevail in a situation like Boeing (and many others) did during World War II, and this has been so sorely lost by now that there is very little remaining linkage back to the real thing.
And while I'm here don't ask me how I know the airline companies' fuel is tested as reliably as their fuselages, and by a bureau with management hierarchy having a degree of dedication that's noticeably more modern than what was once expected in the past.
Same questions, but with Satya. There's a reason Apple strongly prefers to hire from within. Actually, you could ask the same questions about jobs and cook.
You need to live and breathe the company. Further, the executive's background WILL play a role in the company's direction.
The traditional culture of CEOs in the western world isn’t healthy: it’s top down focus and focus on pushing down responsibility and departmental compartmentalization tends to create a lot of the problems the very same management theory fancies itself to solve.
Having an actual “buck stops with me” CEO who has experience in the trenches and not managing other people to get the results that would reassure the market and has been shown to work very well in company after company.
First principles and the culture of questioning need to be nurtured by competent leaders, and not MBA lead presentations and check in meetings for progress. Sleeping in the factory until this situation is fixed is what needs to happen and it is not this board and management team.
Also, this is a board issue first, a CEO issue second.
Of course: I’m biased.
I have worked with great, bad, and middling CEOs and I would not say that it comes down to their degree background where they place in the spectrum of quality. Not having experience in managing other people but only some sort of trench experience will likely fail at a place of the size and complexity.
A lot what you describe is more like poor management.
And, yes, there is a big role for the board to play.
Yes, that's what we are all saying.
Also, performance measures play a role.
I found this, for example, which says there is no relationship: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2011/06/18/does-ceo-educatio...
> 32 have an MBA, up from 29 last year. 34 have an engineering degree, up from 32 last year.
It has shifted further in this direction since, especially with 2020.
https://hbr.org/2018/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-worl...
Edit: the point has been made. Please do some of your own research rather than constantly sea lioning.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-called-when-someone-keeps-a...
Edit: How is it sea lioning if your link is not establishing what you claim? An intrinsic link between being an engineer and being a high performance CEO would, for example, be that proportionate more engineers than MBAs, etc. are good CEOs.
You need a CEO who actually understands the business. If your business is building planes and your CEO has never built a plane, then your business will inevitably have problems because the CEO fundamentally doesn't understand the business.
It won't happen immediately but a slow rot will set in. The CEO won't pay attention to the details because he never understood the details in the first place.
Optus recently had a major network outage. Part of the reason why that happened is they picked a CEO with no telecommunications background. She fundamentally didn't understand the business she was in:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/07/tech/australia-optus-netw...
She's since quit as Optus CEO in an "I don't want to fix my own mess" move. She doesn't seem to have paid that much attention to Optus anyway:
https://www.afr.com/rear-window/optus-a-part-time-gig-for-ce...
What if CEO build other things than planes?
Putting inexpert people in positions of authority is guaranteed to damage a business, as Boeing is now finding out.
Should experts always be in control everywhere or are there limits?
There are downsides to that, which is why we don't do it. You can judge for yourself if those same downsides apply to Boeing.
In the same way, I couldn't say if Boing would need something more closer to a priest or a technocrat.
And the military doesn't run the government. That's also a good thing.
The only way your analogy works is if you think it's a good idea to appoint generals and admirals who have no military experience. I hope you don't.
Anyway, why not under certain circumstances? Already now there are differences between countries what is run by the military and what isn't.
Because someone with no military experience is inexpert. They don't know what they're doing.
In the military a lack of expertise is very likely to result in people dying unnecessarily.
The US army corps of engineers being in charge of levees isn't the only way, for example. A lot of generals don't fight wars. And those who do, are under civilian supervision.
The equivalent here would be the customers.
You need the deep experience of having worked inside the beaurocracy of a huge effort on some tiny piece of the project.
You need the abstract experience of having built a smaller, less complicated version of an entire plane yourself. Think RC model plane here. And yes you should be at least an RC pilot.
With both of those experiences you will be able to extrapolate very closely everything you need to know to be succesful in establishing an engineering culture.
Isn't that the reason why they earn so much money because they "take" the risks?
Leaders need be held accountable, not to fix the past, but so that other leaders will make better decisions in the future.
In this case, it is a lesson that if you destroy your engineering culture and sacrifice quality, you will lose your job.
Experienced, knowledgeable employees costing too much? Get rid of them. Q2 profits fell short of expectations? Hike the prices. Supplier too expensive? Find another one.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/12/business/boeing-ceo-chairman-...
I emphatically agree with you about it being a board first, CEO also situation, but when the CEO is also in charge of the board it’s difficult to see how effective second guessing of a CEO’s decision can reliably happen.
Obviously this is legacy, and ironically the CEO at the time was a qualified engineer, so perhaps my statement was rash.
But I do think a CEO and board who will put some teeth back into engineering is required right now, however that is accomplished.
Because that's not what a CEO does in any case. At this level of management, especially in those huge company, you are so far removed from the craft that it is really irrelevant if you have any experience in it.
I think, it is way more important to look at the actual owner of Boeing and its general environment. Boeing is now mostly owned by big institutional investment firm [0], and they are the one who choose the CEO.
Boeing is also one of the most insanely protected company in the U.S. Whatever Boeing does, the U.S government will always be here to make sure Boeing stays dominant and make life very difficult for any competitor.
The situation with the 737 Max was actually a good example where the FAA and the U.S Govt was again very lenient with Boeing, and just gave them a slap on the wrist. So if you were the owner of such company, why not abuse this amount of protection ? Why not push for the maximum profitability at the cost of quality ?
If Boeing received more than just a slap in the wrist for the previous 737 Max fuck-up, they would be way more inclined to reevaluate their whole quality process and make sure no incident every happen.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052116/top-3-...
It's not a guarantee, but I'd trust an engineering organization with an engineer at the helm a lot more than someone with a sales background.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/opinion/boeing-737max-ala...
But that wouldn't be true, in reality almost nobody is good enough to run an engineering company.
Having an engineer type sure improves your odds compared to general business practitioners, though.
It may be like unobtainium but if you had your choice of engineers at an aircraft company you can't do better than one whose mathematical ability puts general business leaders to shame, and who started out building planes at an early age and hasn't forgotten how for their entire career. In fact only gotten better by focusing so strongly on the finances that directly contribute to the most reliable aircraft that can be produced. Even then some will still crash. As we have seen, it's lots better without the temptation to be distracted by the general business trends that come and go, which encourage little manipulations of large resources in ways that any negative outcomes, unforseen or not, will be pushed far enough into the future for decision-makers to have fully cashed out before that time.
The worst you could do is have somebody who has never participated in aircraft design, assembly, and maintenance allowed into the chain of command anywhere between the entry-level engineers and the top decision makers.
It should go without saying that natural leadership ability has got to be there for it to be sensible for someone to move up the chain of command, but also it needs to be fully rewarding for highly skilled engineers to prosper progressively without having to be very near the ladder that has to be climbed leading to executive duties.
As each decade goes by and people overall settle more and more for having non-leaders in leadership positions, you can't expect things to ever be the same in any way unless this pervasive defect can be reversed.
It didn't get this way overnight and it can't be fixed overnight.
At least other companies that get cushy treatment from the US government often have more competition, like GM.
An engineer CEO is going to value different things than a non-engineer CEO.
If your anecdote says anything it's more about where is the pressure coming from that caused an engineer CEO to behave like a non-engineer?
And why exactly ?
The thing is, most everyone understood what I meant, this other person is just trying to play ignorant.
People just want to continue to create this weird tension between engineer and business people, both trying to act as if they are much better than the other at handling a company, when in actuality, it is the collaboration of both which is successful, and some of the best company manage to harness exactly this.
because there _is_ tension between business and technical people.
a business person can walk into a room and through charm and sheer force of will get what they want. No amount of charm will ever find and fix that bug.
It's a fundamentally different approach to the world, hence why they clash so often and why an engineer turned CEO is going to act vastly different than business person turned CEO.
and just as clearly, what a CEO values matters or they wouldn't be paid so much because they could be replaced by anyone otherwise.
Here's a list of all the incidents with the 737 over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
If anything, this decade is looking pretty good so far.
I'm not saying there's nothing going on at Boeing in terms of management and quality control. But hadn't it been for the issues a few years ago, this would barely register in the news as anything else than the minor incident this was. But because that was in the news, now any Boeing related news is causing world + dog to panic. And that apparently includes FAA leadership and management at major airlines. They are apparently more worried about how it reflects on them than about the actual facts.
I think the grounding of the aircraft has much more to do with politics and appearances than with actual safety. It was premature and probably overkill. People insisting on expensive audits and other draconian measures have basically persuaded the FAA to do what they otherwise wouldn't dream of doing: ground loads of planes over an issue that can probably be excluded with a simple, straightforward inspection. There hasn't been a lot of detail about what exactly went wrong. Nobody waited for that to be revealed even. But I bet it's something straight forward like a missing bolt or something similarly easy to check and verify.
If you are an airline and you own anything even mildly resembling a 737 and you haven't at this point checked if the bloody doors are fine, you should not be operating planes at all. At least, claiming ignorance after all the attention in the news is not a thing. You shouldn't be waiting for the FAA to tell you to do this as it's both obvious and you are responsible for your fleet.
>But hadn't it been for the issues a few years ago
By "issues" you mean hundreds of people being killed by a known manufacturing/training issue? Where does your faith in these people come from?
The unchanged safety record. Yes, it's tragic when planes crash. Thankfully it's not happening a lot. And as I've argued, it actually seems safer than ever.
People seem to insist there are all sorts of issues with Boeing. Except that doesn't seem to be translating into a major increase in accidents or incidents. So, the attention and paranoia seems a bit over the top. People who know nothing whatsoever about any of this calling for CEOs and boards to be fired and the FAA to do this or that.
You know what's not happening? A lot of pilots, mechanics, airlines, etc. reporting doors with the same issue. Just not a thing. And all of them are aware and looking. That's 100% guaranteed. Nobody needs to be told to start looking. These doors are probably safer than they've ever been because world+dog has been looking at them for the last few weeks.
This article is about an airline finding loose bolts. That's a serious issue of course. Exactly the kind of thing an inspector should notice on countless inspections that happen to planes throughout their life. There are of course many bolts in airplanes and torquing them correctly kind of is a big deal to the point where companies are keeping detailed records about who torqued them, when, and how strongly.
Airlines are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing: inspecting their airplanes on the off chance there might be something wrong. I expect most pilots would also care to look at the door panel in question when they do their routine inspection of the plane before taking off. I know I would; and I'm not even a pilot. Maybe not in depth and just a cursory glance. But they'd be aware and on the lookout for trouble. After all, it's their job to make sure the plane is safe before taking off. This mentality is ingrained in the aviation industry. Which is why safety records are so good. It's rare for something this bad to go unnoticed.
What do you specifically mean by this?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-lo...
The CEO was his own chairman from 2016-2019, so there’s that too…
Getting back to basics around following procedure and having a single process sure would have helped in this situation. Just read what the leaker actually wrote. It’s a comical parody of a company that’s off track and not empowering engineering to set boundaries on procedure.
So if you don’t address the executives in charge and bring in someone who will change the situation, which this board and CEO have utterly failed to do and in fact have made worse since 2019, who is going to change that?
If you told shareholders you’ll fix the crisis shown in the plummeting profit graphs above, I’m sure they’d vote for it.
There are several engineers on the board of Boeing already. The non engineers had long careers at Boeing or other aerospace companies.
They threw him under the bus for the 737 Max because 3 years in on the job and he was starting to ruffle the feathers of McDonnell Douglas.
Boeing absolutely deserve every single bit of the criticism they get for the Max, but it's worth keeping in mind that in this instance Alaska possibly share some of the responsibility for flying an aircraft with known issues.
The problem can be Boeing, Alaska Airlines and the regulatory system under which they operate since an intervention at any level here would've prevented the incident: Boeing should be doing their job properly, but Alaska Airlines could've done more then the minimum with a plane displaying persistent pressurization problems, and the regulations shouldn't have allowed them to get an exemption to fly with a persistent issue like this on their records since the mitigation wasn't remotely safe.
Maybe the actions of Alaska Airlines were absolutely fine, but the CEO passing all the blame to Boeing before the incident report is understandable, but a little off to me.
Looking on Google the closest I can find to your claim is the NTSB chair saying it might not be related after she gave out the details of the previous warning lights (as you'd expect in her position before the investigation has completed).
> On Sunday, the NTSB reported that Alaska Airlines had previously restricted this particular plane from long flights over water, specifically to Hawaii, because an auto pressurization alert light that had illuminated during three prior flights, twice in the days leading up to Friday.
> But aviation experts told NBC News on Monday that based on the information provided thus far by federal authorities the light was going off as the result of a computer glitch of some kind and not indicating there was a mechanical problem on the plane.
> "It’s not unusual in the aviation world for there to be issues with warning lights and most of the time the issue is with the warning light itself," Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB investigator. "It’s not like Alaska Airlines ignored it. The fact that it restricted this plane from making flights over water while they were looking into this warning lights issue points to a robust safety culture."
> John Cox, who weighs-in regularly on aviation issues for NBC News, agreed.
> "The pressurization system, from what I’ve read, was acting normally," said Cox, who said he flew Boeing 737's for 15 years. "This appears to be more a sensor problem. But Alaska Airlines, being a conservative airline, said this has happened a couple times now and we need to look into, but let’s not do that over the Pacific Ocean."
> Homendy said at Monday night's news conference that it does appear the auto pressurization system and its alerts were not involved in Friday night's accident, although she cautioned that the investigation was ongoing.
I imagine there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of bolts on an airliner. How is it that the industry has confidence in the rest of them, and that the investigations are limited to the plug door bolts?
Secondly, other bolts will be checked far more frequently as part of standard maintenance. Door plug fitments typically are only checked during heavy checks (which occur every few years depending on type and interval) unless there’s a specific incident that demands an immediate assessment.
A miscommunication probably happened where the plug doors were not tightened to specs same as every other doors, but Boeing didn't touch them (or checked) for their usual interior setup.
Since then, we have the whistleblower's account.
TLDR: A bureaucratic snafu where the record keeping didn't match the actual work. The repair of the plug's air seal was miscategorized ("reopen" vs "removal") in the system, so did not trigger the required post-repair inspection, which would have (most likely) spotted the missing nuts.
My neighbor said he'll look into the whistleblower's account, though he admitted it was plausible.
Also:
IIRC, castle nuts, which use cotter pins, are used for the plug's bolts. Meaning no tightening or torquing. The pressure differential keeps the plugs sealed. The bolts just keep the plug in place.
If I'm wrong on that, please correct me.
If the whistleblower's information is true, then it's an even bigger fuckup than expected. But I'm worried it could lead to the management throwing a random worker under the bus to cover their dangerous practices.
With that of course comes things like firing Quality Assurance staff, and thinning out the need for safety and quality on the very long run.
There also seems to be some sort of a feeling in these companies that might have maxed out of what they can do with passenger airline segment of products. So they have to pinch dollars to make more money.
Once you arrive there, I do expect a long term slump in quality and trust.
You don't arrive here in a day. Nor do you recover quickly from here, that is if you can recover at all.
It is very normal for airlines to mention the manufacturers, because that is how they do price negotiation.
Extra market barriers to entry, a hobbled competitor, a now (relatively) outstanding brand, eyes diverted from them, 10 years head start / catch-up, lessons to be learnt from Boeing, solid backing from shareholders, etc.
I'd imagine this will extend the saturation of demand for Airbus if nothing else
https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/2019/01/15/airbus-and-...
>> We are taking action on a comprehensive plan to bring these airplanes safely back to service and to improve our quality and delivery performance. We will follow the lead of the FAA and support our customers every step of the way.”
I though "follow the lead of the FAA" because you are lost when it come to such things. Not the image I want in my head of a company that should be a leader in that area...
They’ve made it clear they have their own auditors stepping in to assess Boeing’s processes, which doesn’t signal “lost”, and most of the public would see that comment about the FAA as a good thing I’d think.
The responsibility here is clearly still on Boeing. But when it comes to public communication, no one trusts Boeing right now, so it makes sense to highlight the involvement of a governing body that is not Boeing.
I realize there are major issues with the FAA/Boeing dynamic right now, but if the Alaska Airlines CEO instead said “We’re following Boeing’s lead in this matter”, I don’t think that would be an improvement.
After the autopilot crashes, the FAA grounded the 737 until they all had safety upgrades. Boing threw a pile of money at congress, and the FAA was overruled.
This is textbook regulatory capture. They will bribe their way out of this like last time. Boing is /too big to fail/, which is the penultimate pathology before /too big to keep alive/.
Their reputation (and by proxy, United States’ manufacturing since Boeing planes are one of the most publicly known American products) will not recover for decades I think.
So if there's an airplane manufacturer, delivering hundreds of planes to airlines, where processes allow for something like this to happen to a plane, and it's confirmed that it wasn't a single exception, it really brings to question how many out of tens of thousands of parts/aspects of those planes do not meet the expected parameters/standards and how many disasters are waiting to happen.
So in general there's simply no replacement for the 737 Max. People will be flying on them for the foreseeable future unless something causes a massive drop in air travel.
More expensive than not selling any of them?
Also rushing a new plane is more likely to be a safety risk. The 737 fundamentally is a safe plane - there is plenty knowledge on how to operate it safely. A completely new design would start that from scratch.
Which 737? Have you forgotten the 350 people killed by trying to make the 737 MAX pretend it flies like an earlier model?
But that is exactly the point: a new plane would mean a new learning phase how to operate it safely. It can and should be done, but it isn't a silver bullet, especially none which would arrive withing the next 10 years.
Boeing has spent enough on stock buybacks for three or four clean-sheet 737 redesigns:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/boeing-safety-stock-buy...
> Boeing is a world leader in stock buybacks. Between 1998 and 2018, the plane manufacturer also manufactured a whopping $61.0 billion in stock buybacks, amounting to 81.8 percent of its profits.
As the production probably cannot be easily moved, a replacement just isn't available and the market just needs a ton of 737-sized airplanes, the only solution is to up the game along the production line quickly and massively.
The standout example was giving students a bunch of torque wrenches & telling them to fasten a bolt, & then measuring the applied tension. And folks getting absurdly different numbers. The lubrication is there to allow the torque to consistently get applied.
There could be all kinds of issues here, but this lesson on the difficult of bolting things consistently was interesting on its own & perhaps apropos. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38921339 https://reliabilitysolutions.net/articles/why-do-we-lubricat...
While Boeing has to change a lot about how they manufacture airplanes, the airlines themselves should install a much more aggressive process to look out for these kind of manufacturing defects. There needs to be processes in place where e.g. any loose bolt found during maintenance gets reported and tracked to spot these kind of things early on. On top of that, there should be random probing of the components of the plane.
It reminds me of the kind of corporate malfeasance that happened with Sears - sell of the buildings they own (to a company controlled by the CEO on the side) and make the individual stores rent them back and hope they can't pay so you can rent the space to more profitable tenants.
And I don’t see how lighting a fire under the wrong entity’s ass helps anyone other than Boeing.
Alaska has been lax in maintenance before (critically so, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261). If this pressure flows through to Boeing than so be it.
I do agree that it would have been better to skewer Boeing directly but I can see why they chose the path they did.
Yeah the fault is at Boeing but not like they do this kind of videos, or if they do most people wouldn't have seen them.
The plane in the green screen backdrop at the terminal isn't even a 737. The side windows on the cockpit of a 737 are lower than the front, on an A320 they're in a straight line like in the skit. I'm pretty sure that's an A320.
Maybe the SNL lawyers were scared of getting sued and vetoed earlier scripts, or maybe they got paid off, or maybe my wife is right and I'm just a skeptic, but that seems suspicious.
Presumably they assumed no one would be paying all that much attention to stuff like an aircraft out a terminal window in the background, which looks nothing much like Boeing or Airbus and would not much surprise me to learn was produced by a diffusion model.
Priceless.
There are passengers that don't want to fly on a Max plane, never heard of anyone that doesn't want to fly on Airbus. This might just be one more tiny reason for airlines to buy Airbus.
Pretty much most except the MAX...
https://www.airlineratings.com/news/boeing-publishes-its-ann...
Even if a smaller manufacturer decided to build a full size jet like the 737, it would take many years to construct a manufacturing facility capable of handling that.
Embraer is probably the closest competitor, but they’ve only made 82 of their largest jet family according to Wikipedia. Only regional airlines use them.
But this might be the time they decide to work towards that goal.
There are plenty of ways to ensure bolts stay tight that work, and these plug doors have been in service on other planes for a long time with no issues.
The entire rotor assembly (literally what holds it up) on some helicopters is held on by a single nut, for example. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut]
This doesn’t appear to be a case of the engineers not designing it safely - but it not being installed correctly and no one catching it before it rolled out the door.
Safety wiring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_wire
This is actually required for some bolts per aviation regulations. I safety wired nearly every suspension/chassis bolt on my race car when I built it.