More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

Is there another data point or are you just basing this off Boeing's issues?

Boeing profits and sales had been on a steady upwards trajectory for 20 years until 2019:

https://www.helgilibrary.com/charts/boeing-profits-sales-qua...

Cultural change goes much deeper than changing the CEO. Boeing might not be salvageable on the cheap side. Decapitating the company at levels 1-4 may not even be enough. It may require acknowledging that changing the flight envelope and software-patching it was a mistake.

This is a major can of worms on itself. This means a plane redesign, 6-8 years delay, and probably another round of WTO-unfriendly subsidy.

Turned down for the Boeing CEO position, went to Ford and carried them through the Great recession as one of the big 3 auto makers that did not need a govt bailout.

I'd say call him back, but he's probably enjoying retirement by now.

Someone with an engineering background and a pinch of Vlad the Impaler;)

There are incompetent engineers, unethical engineers and there are engineers who are bad leaders.

But an accountant as CEO is not going to restore a culture of engineering excellence.

Plausibly, yes.

> ... and short term traders.

Nope. Not even on the radar. Stockholders, maybe. Not short term traders. Short term traders have no say on the makeup of the board, nor on executive compensation. They therefore have zero input into the direction of the company.

Take a simpler thing: if a new CEO sets an example of taking a decent amount of time off and promoting that as what people should be doing, because they value mental health, then that will gradually trickle down into upper and middle management, and down to the rank-and-file.

Management types who resist that will be replaced or marginalized, because this aspect of culture matters to the CEO and this is something they want to promote. It won't happen overnight, but ultimately management will be filled with people who are taking solid amounts of vacation and push their reports to do the same.

A CEO that wants to push an engineering-first/safety-first culture will be firing executives and management types that try to hide problems or push through things that don't meet the quality bar that the CEO is looking for. This sort of shift will not happen overnight. It can take years. Whether or not a company like Boeing can survive this sort of change, and if they even have years left to make that change, is another question, of course.

But I argue the opposite: the CEO (critically, with the unwavering support of the board, which requires the support of shareholders) is the only person who can make this sort of shift.

I mean, to be fair this plays right into Ryanair's strategy. Want a door plug? Pay extra.

Ed Pierson, a Boeing whistleblower on quality, has also commented on similar efforts by the company a couple of months later. https://www.edpierson.com/removal-of-quality-control-inspect...

My understanding is that this is seen as a cost of acquiring the right expertise. “Pay peanuts, get monkeys” kinda thing. They want the best of the best, and according to their perception these people can do a number of things with their time. Why would they work on this thing instead of their own thing, or a number of other people’s things? By choosing to work with you they close other doors in their life, so you need to both sweeten the deal and make the risk of things not working out between you reasonably low. Not so low that the expert is not incentivised to work hard for you, but low enough that you can convince someone to risk it getting in business with you.

In short they agree to it because if they don’t they can’t get the right caliber of person through the door.

Same as when normal people quit a job they don't like it's better to go quietly and be glad you are out rather than burn bridges.

The world is not overflowing with people who can even theoretically lead a $77bn company and will be acceptable candidates in the eyes of the board/shareholders. So you will need to pay accordingly if you want one.

It's like wondering why pro sports teams give megabucks guaranteed contracts to superstars. There aren't a lot of them and there is a lot of money at stake when it comes to running a successful pro sports team. So they cost a lot of money to acquire.

I am by no means defending this. Whether or not one thinks there are better alternatives to capitalism, it's hard to deny that capitalism produces some pretty crap outcomes.

So they have golden parachutes which say "for any reason, except fraud or other criminal actions, we guarantee you'll get $X millions when you leave".

When you're booking a plane ticket, you don't have much information about the legroom amount. Maybe you can tell somewhat from the airline, but most airlines have a variety of different planes, and I don't know how to use that information to determine legroom.

For many trips, there are no reasonable alternatives to air travel. If you live in New York and really want to treat your kids to a trip to Disney World in Florida, you can drive, and can take a train/bus, but you'll be burning a significant amount of your precious time off work on travel.

The interesting thing is that I don't believe air travel is all that much cheaper now than it was in, say, 2010, when things were quite a bit more comfortable. Maybe not as comfortable as pre-deregulation, but certainly better than today, with more comfortable seats and more leg room.

Has it become much more costly to run an airline over the past decade? Maybe? I don't know. But if not, this doesn't seem to be "the market", at least not in the way a healthy market, with ample competition, would behave.

Wikipedia says Southwest has the fourth-largest fleet in the world (today, dunno about in 2011); while that's a lot, that's still only 800-some planes; did Boeing really let an airline with a 7%-or-so share of their business hold them over the barrel? I guess that's not entirely unreasonable, but... it's not great.

And if you look at the breakdown, more than 70% of Southwest's fleet still consists of 737-700 and -800. Boeing in 2011 was "taking too long" with their next-gen plane, and yet, 13 years later, Southwest is still largely on the previous generation. Maybe their blackmail was more a bluff. Hell, maybe at this point they regret their blackmail; it possibly would have been better for them to just wait for a new plane, or not bother and just go with Airbus.

But really, the problem didn't start in 2011. They'd already rode on the coattails of the 737/737NG design for too long. They should have started on a new narrowbody design even earlier. Sure, hindsight, and all that.

You are describing your general distaste for two entities and attempting to rationalize it.

My only guess that steelmans that is you think Boeing would cease to exist without its defense business.

Sure, me too.

Not the GP but I think in this case, "real" transparency refers to a culture in which there is no attempt to hide issues like this (internally at least); they should be caught and should be immediately handled without positive or negative impacts to one's career.

As such, this would not be "real" transparency. The issues being raised appear to be only being done under duress (perhaps as an attempt to show that something is being done) and may easily vanish when media attention passes.

The issues themselves seem relatively simple and should have been discovered a long time ago. As such, the implication made by the fact that /they weren't/ is that Boeing and Spirit have informal internal policies that discourage the discovery of these problems.

I realize it's not a viable business idea, but I'd feel such Schadenfreude if Boeing had to deal with the optics of that.

Put simply, pilots are required to undergo more training, observe best practices in CRM, and have strict requirements on how much rest is required between flights. Planes are better maintained and inspected.

I’m sure there are other countries that do a good job here, but in general America is significantly more strict about these things than much of the rest of the world.

737 MAXs are not identical worldwide. There's a number of optional add-ons, which even discount US airlines will pay for, but emerging market discount airlines will not.

Specifically for the 737 MAX crashes, it was from a faulty AoA sensor. Neither of the crashed planes had the AoA disagree alert option, but all US airlines paid extra for it. It's not something you're supposed to need, hence being an optional extra, but for obvious reasons budgets aren't as tight at North American airlines as discount airlines in emerging markets.

This isn't to say we're guaranteed that an AoA disagree alert would have avoided the problem, it was undeniably a faulty design, but it probably provides an additional layer of safety. There's a reason that when the MAX returned to service it became standard equipment for all MAXs sold.

So, it's not entirely correct to totally exclude planes from other countries. But there is a fair point in putting more weight on similarly configured planes.

By hours, flying is substantially safer than car or foot, on par with trains. By quantity of trips, substantially less safe than walking.

(For instance, when there was the scandal over card skimmers, Canadian gas stations upgraded their pumps to use chip cards about two years before US gas stations.)

Airlines in third world countries are a major buyer of the latest planes whereas American airlines (particularly Delta) are famous for having excellent maintenance operations to keep 20 year old planes in the air.

So, the word "major" means that the GP was at least technically correct. (You can argue that it doesn't matter, because if Delta relabeled it, they should own the results...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_airlines_of_the_United_S...

Note that this was a Bombardier plane, not a Boeing, and it was the pilot taking the wrong runway, not a plane issue.

(Whether to count it as "aboard a major airline" is a semantic question that isn't very interesting.)

By the time there were c380 Max's built, two of them had already fallen out of the sky (despite operating for only a year). That's c0.5% of the fleet falling out of the sky every 12 months!

Still not too risky on an individual flight, but if you were a pilot across a 40 year flying career those odds start to stack up across your cohort!

Plus it's a bizzare safety stance to try and sell "So what their planes fall out the sky much more than our competitors... It's still safer than driving!"

1) Do we believe that the issues that caused those two crashes were not sufficiently dealt with, such that they might recur?

2) Do we believe that there are other issues that could cause catastrophic failures that could result in further deaths?

I feel pretty safe in saying "no" for #1. #2 is harder to answer. So far the new issues found are unlikely to cause further deaths, but maybe there are other problems lurking.

But even with the uncertainty around #2, I'm still safer (for example) flying from SFO to LAX on a Boeing plane than driving that route. But maybe that's not the best comparison: am I measurably safer on an Airbus plane than on a Boeing? Probably? But is that amount enough to be worth worrying about, logically, if I can get my irrational fears to shut up for a minute? Not sure I've looked at the data (assuming there is enough of it) to decide that.

> Boing and the FAA initially cast the blame on supposedly lower standards at the Indonesian and Ethiopian airlines operating the planes, but this was completely unsupported and incorrect speculation.

This bit feels like it doesn't tell the full story. IIRC there was a report about a third plane that (after at least the first crash, not sure if it was before or after the second) ran into the same issue with MCAS, but correctly followed the recovery procedure and was fine. Now, it could be that the recovery procedure is unreliable, and that third cockpit crew got lucky. But I don't recall what came of all that.

And on top of that, the two planes that crashed didn't have optional equipment (a disagree indicator, IIRC) that would have likely given the pilots extra and sufficient information to understand what was wrong and avoid a crash. My understanding is that all US airlines had already opted for that piece of equipment, and at this point presumably everyone has now opted for that piece of equipment. Given the issues, it should have never been optional (and maybe it no longer is). But GP is specifically pointing out the safety record of US-based carriers, so it should be notable that they seem to be better at identifying what bits of optional equipment are important enough to splurge on.

Chalk one death up to a Boeing design in the last 21 years.

I make no claims regarding the safety of airlines operating in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. I don't think the safety records of those airlines are particularly relevant to the majority of those on HN nor to the manufacturers of the airplanes they operate (and which are frequently barely maintained).

Why link to a source that says directly opposite of what is being claimed? It doesn't make sense to me.

Am I misunderstanding your point?

Also, Southwest does not assign seats and Alaska does not have a difference in seats between their -900 and MAX 9 aircraft. Although with Alaska I have had my seat reassigned because they changed from a -900/MAX 9 to a -800 before.