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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

I love flying on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It is the most comfortable plane I've flown on in terms of how the air quality feels, and it has had 0 hull losses & 0 fatalities; almost as good a safety record as you could hope for as a passenger. I think there are many who agree with me about Dreamliners being the most comfortable planes to fly on.

I hope never to fly on another Boeing 737, because of all the accidents and safety drama that has been happening & is ongoing. It's become vogue to hate Boeing as a result, but I still prefer the 787 over any other plane.

I am guessing that entirely different teams were responsible for what's been happening with each model, but I'm surprised that Boeing's culture has led to two quite different results with these two types of planes. Can anyone explain that?

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> I love flying on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Then you really shouldn't watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os

TLDW: Critical Dreamliner fuselage parts didn't fit together because workers at the subcontractor (Ducommun) traced a template with magic marker onto the material and cut and drilled the part by hand. Officially, the parts were manufactured by high precision CNC machinery with extremely small tolerances. At Boeing, if drill holes didn't match up in parts A and B, workers were told to just put the parts together and re-drill the hole in part B through the hole in part A, or hammer the parts into place. Internal Boeing investigators who found out and documented the issues were threatened to be sued if they spoke up. They were later fired, after the US government allegedly leaked their identities to Boeing.

Here, a Boeing employee speaks about the work culture in the manufacturing plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os&t=1466s

Currently reading "Flying Blind", which was recommended on another recent Boeing thread. Not done yet, but I think it boils down to

- Boeing had a pretty strong engineering driven culture for a long time

- In the 90s, McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money and McDD management took over, which was a mostly Jack Welch inspired bunch of value extraction types

- Engineering culture started decaying, drastic cost cutting, outsourcing and value extraction started taking place, with Boeing spending up to 80% of free cash on stock buybacks instead of investments

- Dreamliner program started in the early 2000s, 737 MAX several years later

I think it boils down to the erosion of the company not having progressed as far when the Dreamliner was being designed

Interesting. I didn't realize that 737 MAX started after Dreamliner. That would seem to be a possible explanation.

Also, maybe to add to that, the Dreamliner was a new design, of which apparently even considering some setbacks along the way Boeing was still capable of at that point in time.

For the 737 Max, they were very late and had to react to Airbus much better neo offering, and didn't have the time and/or money and/or capabilities to develop a new airplane, so a lot of in the end deadly compromises had to be made to somehow bypass training and security certification as much as possible using the old airframe at low cost.

You should try a flight on an A350 with seats over the wing or as forward as you can get them. It is so much quieter than the 787. So far it is the quietest plane I've flown on.

Boeing 787 was a NEW design from scratch. 737 MAX serials were just CHANGES OVER CHANGES over a once mature design. Boeing claimed those CHANGES as UPGRADES. Picking only one of those, it can probably be called an UPGRADE. But putting all together, I can only see whole bunches of UNVERIFIED CHANGES to original design.

> I think there are many who agree with me about Dreamliners being the most comfortable planes to fly on

I’ve read a lot of complaints across many airlines about economy being very cramped as airlines chose to pack people in like sardines

Though business class generally gets good reviews

I've found it to be the opposite of that. More legroom on economy. Perhaps narrower, though?

Yes was the shoulder space as I recall

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