He now adopted the "admit the problem and fix it" attitude because he was "caught", before that was business as usual for Boeing. It was/is more a "don't ask, don't tell", dump the risk on other separate entities/companies and cross your fingers because we need to get those planes out of the assembly line as fast and cheaply as possible no matter what.
Boeing is and has been under pressure, but it's their own fault. They have been fucking around for DECADES now and when there were "difficulties" they always called the US government to "facilitate" sales or their buddies inside the regulatory bodies to put the green check on their garbage.
Nothing about this is news, it has been known for years and years.
Unfortunately Boeing always has a sweet defense contract waiting to compensate any "rough year", so they keep fucking around..
And because once airlines have their fleets locked into a specific airplane brand, swapping it for the competition is almost impossible without crazy expense, so they coasted on this vendor lock in for decades knowing their existing customers have no choice but to keep buying their planes.
And also probably because "nobody ever got fired for buying Boeing".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_certificate
Having to mix and match pilots across the fleet is less efficient, what if you have a 737 pilot but the only aircraft available is an airbus? So, many airlines (eg southwest) will indeed only use one type, or only a handful of types. This also extends to things like parts availability etc.
The economics for switching away work exactly the same now as they did a decade ago when orders were placed: there is a very real cost to operating a mixed fleet and Boeing gets to extract a lot of that value themselves.
And yet many airlines fly a very high amount of planes of many types, of multiple brands. Southwest is a consumer darling and punches above its weight but it is an outlier.
There are still 20 smaller regional airlines in the U.S. and hundreds around the world. The vast majority of those fly just one or two types of planes.
That's simply untrue. Most airlines use 2, 3 types of planes at most. I'm not referring to the niche 5 percent of plane types but the overwhelming majority.
The original Boeing 737 design only took 4 years so that would give them plenty of time to work through any necessary design changes. And if pilots need to obtain a new type rating then so be it.
I mean the whole reason for the 737 max was to avoid re training
> Robison, however, finds little reason for optimism. While Boeing has now accepted responsibility for one of the crashes as part of a settlement, no one at the company besides Forkner has been charged with a crime. Muilenburg was ousted as C.E.O., but still collected a $60 million golden parachute. After being grounded for more than a year, the 737 Max is back in service. And today, Boeing is led by Dave Calhoun, another Jack Welch protégé who was on the Boeing board for years, and was intimately involved in the company’s botched response to the crashes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/books/review/peter-robiso...
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
At this point pre-emptively firing any Jack Welch associated executive would probably be a good idea
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.
The shareholders would be better off if they promised a $800m incentives-based / performance-based package (e.g. stock options etc.) than promising $80m if the CEO performance sucks.
And any CEO rejecting this offer, is a huge red flag.
A bad CEO can destroy a company in a few years. A good one can set up years of profits. But the "can" there does some heavy lifting - sometimes a CEO will walk in to a company and there just won't be any opportunities. Eg, you take over a restaurant chain then the COVID overreaction happens. Not much the CEO can do.
Long and short, I can see why a good CEO might go for guaranteed compensation rather than big payoffs for good results. They can't guarantee good results. Nobody can make that sort of promise.
This would reach crypto-scales pumping.
I don’t know about the relative ratios between the two but i believe you need both.
From a perspective of a succesfull CEO candidate with a proven track record joining your company is risky. There might be something structurally wrong with your industry, or there might be some “ticking bomb” with your business (like some hidden technological flaw, or personality conflict, or regulatory/compliance risk, or the risk of some catastrophy hitting your factories/offices) Many of these are already present before the CEO candidate joins and there is nothing they can do about them.
Basically your business might stink and “explode” in the face of the new CEO. On the other hand the CEO candidate presumably have some other options. You are usually not recruiting CEOs from the literal bread line.
Let’s think through a concrete example. You tomp is a succesfull business person and you estimate you will conservatively earn $200m in the next 5 years. You have unique skills and they offer you a chance to become the CEO of Boeing today. You have what you belive is a good plan to restore Boeing to its former glory and the pay package will net you if everything goes well $800m in the same time frame. Sounds good, isn’t it? But you are worried that some gizmo in the airplanes already out of the factory might have some flaw. Maybe costs were cut and maybe some part you have never even heard about fails, kills a few thousand people a year after you joined and tanks the whole company. You don’t know what is the chance of that happening, nobody knows. What you know is that if that happens you will earn in your estimate $0. If that happens you might need to sell off your yacth, and tell your daughter she has to drop out of that lovely swiss private school she loves so much.
Will you join?
But instead of a $80m golden parachute (failure reward), I'd offer $800m options (success reward).
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.
Plus everything op said about capitalism and market.
I strongly disagree. It's a matter of surrounding yourself with capable people and there's a huge factor of financial inertia. I guarantee you most HN-ers could run Google or Apple for 5 years without causing their value to plummet.
I still don't necessarily disagree, but you left out the second part of my sentence which is rather significant:
"and will be acceptable candidates in the eyes of the board/shareholders."
That doesn't mean they are going to be remotely acceptable as a candidate in the eyes of the board + shareholders. Nobody is going to stick their neck out for Random HN User #587942. They are going to pick somebody with a positive track record of leading big companies.
This isn't ideal! I'm not defending it. I'm just saying why it happens. It's the C-suite equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
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".
That's why I hate the MBA types and the whole executive caste with a passion
An engineering company run by a longtime manager with a background in accounting is in large part how Boeing got here. Fire the guy and get someone with a technical background in there.
This would likely result in a CEO with no pull and a CFO that had all the hard power to call the shots.
The reality seems to be, for some reason, building profitable and safe planes in America is becoming increasingly difficult.
A company most be able to do both: build a quality and safe product and make a margin. It can’t exist without revenue.
I’m guessing the real problem is somewhere between low quality or overworked and poorly trained line workers, complex systems, and a revenue strategy that obscures what the company is selling.
It takes more than a random ic manager to fix that — but I agree they should come from that past maybe.
Is there another data point or are you just basing this off Boeing's issues?
Gulfstream doesn't really count I think, because it isn't in competition with either Boeing or Airbus.
Other people with a similar perspective about rockets tried to convince Musk that as well. Thankfully he didn’t listen. You’re never going to realize gains that surpass the return on the S&P if you don’t take risks in business.
Think what you will about Musk, but SpaceX has completely revolutionized space travel and will be in the history books a hundred years from now.
Throw an unlimited supply of darts and you're going to get a few bulleyes. Doesn't make you the worlds greatest dart's player.
You say dozens and name two, one of which (X) is still up and running with active user engagement. Many people have thrown darts, none have developed self-landing reusable rockets and outcompeted ULA or developed a satellite based global internet provider. Not even Google at its peak was able to come up with anything better than Project Loon. I’ll concede there’s a little luck in every venture, but what Musk and SpaceX have accomplished is well beyond luck and quite remarkable.
But aside from that, and the two examples above, 1. x.com (the original) 2. tesla has been killing way more people since he retroactively became a founder (there was a delay while existing products moved through the pipeline) 3. solarcity 4. optimus 5. neuralink (well, ok, it hasn't failed yet. But _I'm_ not betting on it...) 6. the Tham Luang cave rescue 7. crypto 8. his relationships with his kids / exes
TBF, spacex appears to be his baby, and it has done _much_ better than I ever thought it would. There are rumors about the existence of a whole team there preventing him from breaking things, and personally, I believe them. But I have nothing _remotely_ like proof. And even if those rumors are true, spacex appears to have been his idea, he hired the first batch of people, etc. He can definitely take loads of credit for it, even if I don't think he deserves as much of said credit as he clearly thinks he deserves.
Surely there are better examples of failures than these? Personally, I would have focused on "FSD". That one has been a huge debacle with a lot of potential to get worse.
And I don't think the usual "throw shit at the wall until something sticks" thing applies to Musk. Certainly he's had some things that slid to the floor, but he hardly has an "unlimited" supply of darts. And even if his finances were infinite, he still only has 24 hours in a day, and can only focus on a certain number of things. By and large, the things with a lot of his focus do seem to be doing pretty well.
Twitter is clearly a huge blind spot for Musk; while I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand, it does seem like an outlier. Regardless, it's still running, somehow, when I expected it to have been shut down by the middle of last year. While I know people who have stopped using it, I know more people who still use it and get value out of it, regardless of the negatives since Musk bought it.
SpaceX achieved impressive things, the over glorification so rubs me the wrong way. And equalizing SpaceX successes with Musk a person does way more than just rub me the wrong way.
It got us to a place where the cost of a rocket launch is 10 times less than it was before, and soon it will get us to 100 times less. It's just a matter of time that this is leveraged to bring us to new physical places.
> And equalizing SpaceX successes with Musk a person does way more than just rub me the wrong way.
He is the person that single-handedly made the decision to start a rocket company, decided on the initial architecture, hired the key people and finance the whole operation.
As will Theranos. That's not really a great indicator of how good or useful something is.
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.
The myth that engineers make better leaders may have originated with Andy Grove.
In truth, there is no evidence for the claim. Jack Welch was as much an engineer as an asshole.
Quite possible, and what's really ironic is that Grove's successor, Craig Barrett (who helped start the company with Grove), also an engineer, was a terrible CEO. He was the one who made a bunch of bad moves: P4/Netburst + RAMBUS, Itanic, refusing to adopt amd64 or make their own x64-64 ISA before AMD, etc. The company did poorly under his leadership and only turned around when his successor, Paul Otellini (an accountant IIRC) took over and moved to the "Core" CPU architecture.
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;)
If you approve of Elon as a leader, he is basically the embodiment of “you do not need to be an engineer to run a highly technical company”
A look at Tesla build quality, or that ridiculous demo where the Cybertruck window smashed are just two things that immediately come to mind to cast doubt on Musk’s commitment to engineering. I think he’s a big picture guy, I absolutely think issues like those we're seeing with Boeing could happen under his watch.
Edit: airlines don't build planes
To me, it is the way of looking at the world that attempts to transform intractable real-world problems into tractable ones by translating them into the battle-tested model(s) of your field. For example, the RLC model of circuits is certainly not able to express all of EM physics but it sure is easy to solve problems in (although, I only did the degree, maybe working engineers dip back down into physics more often).
Anyway it isn’t obvious how Musk has that mindset, he seems obsessed with innovation rather than tradition, and he seems to have styled himself as some kind of polymath tech guy rather than an expert in any particular field.
Your point about transforming intractability is cogent and I think we agree. To your last point about polymath tactics, you're right to a degree, but you can also watch Everyday Astronaut's SpaceX factory tour and realize that it's far more than a basic understanding, which is probably a big part of SpaceX's wild success.
If the anecdotes are accurate, and based on your own description, it seems Elon Musk is a CEO who makes an effort to thoroughly grasp the products his company develops. That's commendable. This doesn't necessarily make him even a small-e engineer, even in the context of the broader definitions used today. It certainly doesn't make him "someone of engineering lineage," as the original comment implied was essential for Boeing's success, or even "someone with an engineering background" like the comment I replied to.
It's also certainly not clear that Elon has an engineering-first mindset, nor that that would even be helpful for many of the businesses he runs. I can think of plenty of examples of Elon putting business above all else plenty of times, and I don't mean that as a dig: It's often the smart move for the monetary gain of all involved.
And just to be clear, this not a commentary at all on about whether Elon would be effective in running Boeing. To be blunt: I don't care about that conversation.
> It's also certainly not clear that Elon has an engineering-first mindset
If A, then B.
Struggle with definitions all we want, Boeing needs a dose of Musk's attitude towards engineering and manufacturing. It is the most important thing they do, and I don't think the C-suite understands that. That's the most distilled version of what I'm saying. Musk is the best recent example of this attitude, but Henry Ford is an excellent older example.
If Elon's thoroughly understands the products his companies develop, he has an engineering-first mindset? That logic would also apply to many CEOs we wouldn't consider "engineering-first" CEOs.
> Struggle with definitions all we want,
For me, this is the only discussion. My focus is not at all on whether Elon would be a good fit for Boeing. I don't give a shit about that conversation.
That's a personal attack. Talking about failures of planning in mass manufacturing, backlash due to public statements, and casual behavior about publicly traded companies and information related to them, those would be material criticisms that we can discuss civilly.
The claims of racism and inheriting some amount of money from a debunked emerald mine conspiracy aren't helpful on their own.
> debunked
Kind of? His dad was originally making the claim but is now saying something different.
> conspiracy
You have a weird definition of conspiracy.
There is zero evidence that Elon profited off the emerald mine his dad bought shares in, and the allegation is that he conspired to hide that money somehow. It's a normal definition of conspiracy.
They both have obvious consequences in a leadership position. Obvious consequences are enough.
> There is zero evidence that Elon profited off the emerald mine his dad bought shares in, and the allegation is that he conspired to hide that money somehow. It's a normal definition of conspiracy.
1. I have never heard this "hiding money" part of it so I don't think that's the crux of it.
2. "Some guy hid his own money" is not a conspiracy. This is baffling.
Obvious potential consequences are not enough. This is the richest man in the world, surely you have an example.
It's hard for someone outside a company to point to a direct consequence of racism in the company leadership. That doesn't make it not-bad for the leadership to be racist.
Surely you're not saying it's okay to discriminate as CEO if you make enough money.
And if you want a consequence of being thin-skinned, uh, anything to do with twitter? Half his interactions with the SEC?
What is PE?
If it's not Elon, it will probably be Airbus, and there is a chance that the US feds will want someone more America-based instead.
And that’s the crux of the problem. They actually need one another but the egos on both sides refuse to acknowledge that.
Trying to figure out what to do in any given business situation is usually challenging because the devil is in the details. It happens that in this particular case, Boeing should be checking that their supplier installs bolts and drills holes correctly because their supplier has screwed it up so many times. But in a lot of industries, cheaping out on materials is a reasonable thing to do if your customers agree it's a reasonable thing to do and it's not going to kill anyone.
It sounds like Boeing has mastered the art of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing ... at 30,000 feet.
Accounts ask how much things cost and go from there. MBA's figure out how much things need to cost to make their spreadsheet work and tell you that's what you get.
Which is what happened at Boeing. They told the engineers they were going to develop the 787 for half the cost of previous models (we are very very smart). And it took twice as long and cost twice as much. Given that they couldn't afford a clean slate redesign of the 737 even if they wanted to. The result is the 737 Max which will cost them more than a clean redesign would have.
A 7B7 greenfield narrow body plane would probably have been faster to design and a better plane in lots of "don't lie to the pilot and fly into the ground when a sensor is busted" ways, but would have required all airlines to re-certify their pilots, which is both expensive and would have caused the airlines to consider airbus and boeing on the merits...
So the MBA's cost the stockholders money there too.
corp accountants don't care about cutting costs, we just care about making sure things are presented/tracked in accordance with gaap
we may help identify/track costs but we aren't usually tasked with cutting costs
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.
TBF, from my experience with VPs, technical background might be a hindrance to executives. The guy who used to work on databases worries about persistence, even though nobody raised that issue. Networking background? Oh well, good that I know why we put this many bits into this field, despite it only needs a couple bytes and we can afford megabytes. Sure, they know their job enough to leave enough time for the actual question. I even understand why they first interrogate the room about some arbitrary cog in the machine. Still makes me wonder if there aren’t better ways to do this.
This is certainly a point of contention in modern schools of business thought, but the concept of a CEO who doesn't understand what the company builds is bizarre to me.
The CEO of Boeing, IMO, should probably have aircraft engineering experience, and, ideally, also be a pilot with the suitable type ratings to fly the stuff they build.
And they should be open to "Hey, if you have engineering concerns about the airplanes we're building for the traveling public, you come to me!" style office visits. Someone with concerns about the "single sensor fault runaway trim" style system should have been able to bring it up, and have him understand it.
I know this isn't what Boeing has. And they've lost a lot. This is now increasingly clear to people outside aviation circles.
Why the pilot? When it comes to handling these machines, the pilots are one small corner. I would think that someone with experience keeping them safe and functional would be more on point these days. How about someone with the ratings for maintaining the machines? No pilot has ever inspected let alone installed a door plug.
Guess we run in different circles!
Can you be a successful CEO of a car manufacturer if you cannot drive a car?
https://atpflightschool.com/become-a-pilot/airline-career/ho...
>> also be a pilot with the suitable type ratings to fly the stuff they build.
Boeing builds airliners. The "pilot" in the context of this threat a pilot rated to fly the "stuff they build".
And, tbh, I don't care if the CEO of Boeing can take one around the pattern on their own. If they need a rated instructor with them to go fly one legally, so be it. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
But I stand by my statement that the CEO should be able to understand airplanes and fly them reasonably competently, if they're the CEO of a company that builds airplanes. I don't mean "press release of them flying it straight and level on autopilot" - but to actually be able to get it competently around the sky in manual flight modes.
I consider the financialization (turning into loan servicers and financial service providers as their main stream of income) of "every company who used to build things" to be one of the worst things that's happened to American industry as a whole.
There is a misalignment of priorities that will never be fixed as long as the primary incentive for the CEO is to maximize shareholder value. If you remove that, and force the primary incentiven to be safety over profits, the rest of the business will follow.
If the CEO has no clue what the company does, those people could be blowing smoke up his/her ass
There has to be assurance of technical competency somewhere, and someone that has ultimate authority to get rid of the incompetent.
This doesn't disagree with your second sentence. The pursuit of profit seems to turn everything into a bank or gacha machine. Both safety and competency fall by the wayside.
He has to trust his CTO (whatever that title is at boeing for their top engineer manager) to be the judge of that. The incentives have to align wrt quality engineering for there to be trust all the way down to the junior most engineer.
A management accounting guy is great at hedging financial risks, but that is what they'll always focus on, not the real world. What we are seeing with Boeing now is what happens if leadership is adrift without a good intuition about real world physical risks and what it takes to address them. You can't maximize profits while regularly causing catastrophic events.
He should probably know enough to sense if the people who report to him are talking nonsense or not, and to properly weigh what they say.
I mean, what's going to happen if two technical leaders have a disagreement, and all he knows is how to count beans? How could someone with that background make an effective decision in that context?
People also tend to fall back on what they know in unfamiliar circumstances, and I don't think you want an aircraft-manufacturer CEO falling back on picking the "cheapest option" and accepting am unappreciated safety risk in the process.
In every case? No. Not every business, not every industry needs that.
In cases where the company builds machines that millions of people every day depend on to not die, yeah, the leadership should probably know some of this, if only to be able to realize when someone is trying to blow smoke up their ass.
Yeah, he should probably trust the people below him, but the cost of having that trust be violated is way too high. The consequences aren't just a bunch of people losing their jobs, maybe local business being depressed because the nearby widget factory closed. The consequences are airplanes falling out of the sky and lots of people dying. So he needs to be able to verify that the information being given to him, that he's trusting, is actually trustworthy.
And nevermind the economic effects here. If people stop trusting certain aircraft as being safe, they're not going to care whose name is painted on the fuselage.
The best bosses I've worked for are the minority who took the time to understand at least some of the technical side of things.
I'm always struck by the fact that I, as a lowly dev, am expected to understand the business yet the suits floating far above me think they don't need to know what actually happens down below. Bad mistake. Lack of knowledge is never a good thing.
But it seems just as likely that an accountant as CEO would be unable to detach from irrelevant details about accounting systems, cost savings, tax classifications, or whatever it is that low-level accountants worry about.
Frank Borman, chosen for Gemini and Apollo missions, "earned a Master of Science degree at Caltech in 1957, and then became an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point." [Wikipedia]
"After retiring from NASA and the Air Force in 1970, Borman became senior vice president for operations at Eastern Air Lines. He became chief executive officer of Eastern in 1975, and chairman of the board in 1976. Under his leadership, Eastern went through the four most profitable years in its history...." [Wikipedia]
The CEO may set the culture, as much as that is set from the top down, but by the time a company actually starts having problems visible to the outside, its entire suite of executives, VPs, etc, have optimized their career for the sort of problematic attitude the previous CEOs demanded.
I'd argue they need an effective engineering culture, and leadership that enables and values and fights for it, not a former-engineer figurehead. Good engineers within Boeing need to be enabled to do their job properly, within normal business constraints, and bad engineers need to be removed. The business needs to understand that good engineering is a necessity and a profit centre in aerospace.
I don't know how they'd achieve this change. The company seems to have rotted from the head down since it merged with McDonnel Douglas, and its possible that the senior leadership lack the self awareness to comprehend the problem.
If the pre-MD Boeing management had managed to retain control of the company things may have been ok from a quality and safety perspective... but the stock would have declined because they would have refused to chase short-term quarterly success at the expense of the long term.
And was still in charge of 7E7 (today's Dreamliner) when the excessive outsourcing and cost targets began.
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.
Moving the deckchairs in the boardroom isn't going to solve systemic problems in a company.
Well, that really means tearing the company up completely. I can't see how a new board could effect reform. And replacing all the middle management would destroy the company.
And as you say, it takes time for a new culture to move through the layers; but the PO doesn't have time. Does Boeing? I realize the companies are very different, but both have marinated in an unhealthy culture for a long time.
Because that's how the CEO makes big change happen: management -- from the C-suite down to line managers -- needs to get on board with that change. If they refuse, they get fired and are replaced by people who will carry out the change. If this process will take too long to save the company, then... again, maybe the company needs to fail.
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.
If you think "flying sucks" it's probably because you've flown in a 737 and similar (A320) aircraft.
Many people find it highly stressful to fly in a 737-class airplane because the curve of the fuselage is circular. My neck starts to lock up just thinking about it, but you don't have the same problem riding in a car, bus, or train because those vehicles have straight sides. Modern aircraft like the A220 and E2-Jet have a shape compatible with the human body such that today's "regional jets" feel more like riding in a widebody airliner than a 737. It's the kind of thing that's hard to believe until you experience it for yourself.
The 737 is exceptionally loud, particularly for the flight crew, but also for the passengers and innocent people on the ground. If you think flying sucks it could be because you remember walking out of a 737 with your ears ringing -- and nobody told you it doesn't have to be that way.
The A320 has a reliable fly-by-wire system with numerous benefits, not least the plane being able to automatically cancel out some turbulence, another small thing that leaves you feeling better when you reach your destination.
The 737 struggles to take off under good conditions, requiring much more runway than many much larger planes. Next summer you'll see headlines that "airplanes" are grounded at some airports in the US Southwest, you should replace "airplanes" with "737s".
Airplane manufacturers have wasted enough resources on widebody airliners that nobody wants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380
and the industry needs to get real to the fact that narrowbody airliners are responsible for most of the flights and most of the social and environmental impact of aviation: domestic flyers in the U.S. deserve something better than a 1967 design.
The #1 issue for me is leg room, being unusually tall. Headroom was never a problem :-)
Or maybe the market has spoken. Similar to how people complain about lack of legroom but proceed to book with airlines that have less legroom because it's cheaper, they're happy to fly on 1967 design planes to save a buck.
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.
Google flights shows it eg. "Below average legroom (29 in)"
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.
Actually according to the BLS since Jan 2010, the CPI has went up 42% whereas airline fares have dropped 7.5%. That means adjusted for inflation airline fares have actually dropped 35%. I would say that arguably counts as "that much cheaper". Whether that's worth the decrease in legroom (unknown amount of inches) is another matter.
> 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.
I think there's just a lot more competition among airliners post airline deregulation. The costs for most airliners is fixed (pilots, crew, aircraft, fuel, airport fees, A&Ps, etc) and so you're competing on small things like aircraft seat configuration, trim, routes, and prices.
10 years ago I would fly a lot of out of the airport in Ithaca which had good connections to hubs at PHL, DTW and IAD which could get you anywhere.
Today the ITH airport looks close to dead, the only flights are to NYC, one to EWR where I've had to exit and then re-enter security every time I've made a connection there. It's almost unthinkable that I'd take the plane to NYC if I was actually going to NYC because bus service is highly competitive to to the city. Although there are no longer national carriers like Greyhound and Shortline (going to Detroit is hard now) but for the point-to-point route there are numerous buses at different price points some of which are budget like the Chinatown bus and others are premium like the bus that stops at the Cornell Club.
I can find something positive in losing our local airport in that SYR has greatly expanded and now has numerous low-cost and ultra-low cost carriers. For once I can get on a plane and know absolutely it won't be a 737. I can fly Jetblue to LA for less than it ever cost on Delta.
Yet I can point to many signs that the industry has not been thinking clearly or that the choices it has been offering people are not real. I'd point as exhibit #1 the experience you'll have boarding a plane on American Airlines at their hub at PHL where they'll spend 20 minutes reading from a very long and complicated list of who is allowed to board in the plane under what order under whatever circumstances. Turns out there is a definite hierarchy for all the credit cards you might have with American Airlines or with some airline that got bought by American Airliners not to mention many different levels you can be in the frequent flier program, many kinds of tickets, etc.
We know if they just boarded the plane outside in we would all be on our way a few minutes earlier and it would not demand so much of the staff boarding us and they might have fewer cases of staff rage quitting because they are being abused like this, etc. But instead it's an important opportunity to rub the average traveller's nose in shit, prove how little worth they have compared to other people's in the airline's eyes, etc.
Before 2008, airlines offered just economy and first class on domestic routes, refusing to sell you anything a little bit more expensive that would be just a little bit better because they didn't want to create competition for first class. The proliferation of Economy+ and other service tiers after the financial crisis was actually a sign of sanity, of the industry getting more flexible. Still the major airlines form a cartel where they won't compete for better service in economy because they couldn't afford to give up a single first class flyer to a more humane coach.
When I'm in business class, I simply don't care what's going on outside. Let me know when we land.
Now, bear with me, because this might sound obvious, but I don't think it is. You can have in-flight-entertainment in Economy. You can have videos playing on your tablet or whatever. We have far more distractions than ever before. You can read your book, listen to your music. The seats are comfortable enough in the first hour of your delay. At 5'10" I have sufficient legroom.
I think the difference is the seat pitch. I don't consider myself claustrophobic, but staring at a seatback 2 feet in front of my face just makes me want to see what the hell is going on to get me off the ground and to my destination. I think this is far more of an issue than the curvature of the fuselage.
And Boeing was working on a replacement for the entire 737-757 line, a brand new airplane using many of the same concepts as the 787 "Dreamliner" but it took a long time and in 2011 Southwest blackmailed them if they need to retrain their pilots then they might as well buy Airbus.
Sources. First for the replacement airplane.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2011/02/11/boei...
> Feb 11, 2011
> Boeing chairman and CEO Jim McNerney told a conference Thursday that Boeing probably will offer an all-new aircraft to replace its current generation of Boeing 737s.
> McNerney says Boeing prefers the new-airplane option to a second option -- re-engineering its current 737 lineup to accept a more fuel efficient engine.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/civ...
> Boeing has begun work on the 737-RS, a research program to build a new aircraft to replace the 737, which carries roughly 170 passengers. By mid-2009 Boeing expected to arrive at a design template for the 737 replacement, with "notional entry into service" around the year 2015.
> Boeing's long term plan as of 2005 seemed to involve three aircraft, designated Y1, Y3 and Y3. The Y1 is the 737RS.
Page last modified: 07-07-2011
Second, the blackmail.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/legal...
> Not only did Southwest management not want their pilots who flew the earlier model 737 NG to have to train in a flight simulator for the MAX, they insisted to Boeing that even classroom training be off the table, the filing shows. Southwest insisted on a clause in the sales contract stipulating a penalty of $1 million per airplane delivered if that standard wasn’t met.
> As the MAX’s most influential customer, Southwest’s insistence on this “infected every aspect of the birth and development of the new 737,” the legal filing asserts.
This is, of course, the legalese version of the blackmail mentioned above.
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.
It's tempting to say that some of the worst airports in the US (say Newark) are "third-world" but the truth is that a bad airport in the third world is often a lot better than any airport in the U.S.
This prof was talking about defects in the last generation 737
https://www.ithaca.com/news/cornell-expert-boeing-737-plane-...
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2011-12-13-Boeing-737-MAX-Logs-...
-- Southwest orders 150 737 MAX airplanes and 58 Next-Generation 737s
-- Southwest becomes launch customer; scheduled to take first 737 MAX delivery
-- Largest firm order in Boeing history
Since then, they operate 223 of the 737 MAX (16% of deliveries) and have 495 on order, which is about 10% of total orders. At a single airline. United has 159 and has 388 on order. Then comes Ryanair with 136 delivered and 374 ordered. These are not third world airlines.
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/25906-why-can-t-boeing-ju...
> In the early 2000s, the plan was to roll out the production model of Y1 by 2015. In 2010, Boeing’s patent became public, revealing a glimpse of the new project: a dream of all low-cost airlines and a bold new step for the industry. The aircraft was supposed to have T-tail and nearly elliptical fuselage cross section with twin-aisle 2-3-2 configuration, but retain drag-per-seat and weight-per-seat ratio comparable to single-aisle competitors. A variety of weight-optimization techniques, utilizing the newest composite structures, was explored. According to Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Jim Albaugh, the company was already looking into converting their plants from metal to all-composite manufacturing.
> But come 2011, the project was shelved.
I mean, to be fair this plays right into Ryanair's strategy. Want a door plug? Pay extra.
I thought I read they were planning to cut back on quality control staff this year. Was that true? Did it change?
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...
There are two real questions here, can Boeing strictly follow their QA/QC regime and remain profitable. Second, can they get through their current period where FAA inspectors have set up shop on their premises and are now effectively another layer of supervisors. They’re in the stage now where the FAA are on the shop floor basically as cops to ensure Boeing actually does what they said they would do via the documentation in their Quality suite. They either have the war chest or the financial backing to pull that off without an immediate price increase or they’re toast.
Current QA/SOP's are onerous and very expensive to follow. But are based on having someone 'monitor' and 'check' everything. So two people, someone doing the work, and someone checking the work.
But seems like the old Boeing culture, was each employee cared about quality, so would check themselves. So needed less QA people, because everyone would 'do the right thing'.
So now that the culture is broken. Enforcing current QA/SOP's with additional QA people is un-profitable.
it's great to have those protocols, but when employees are retaliated against for bringing issues with no corrective changes made, what's the point in having the protocols?
I've quit jobs on principle twice. No safety net, no savings. Just a belief I would be better off without that job. Turns out, I was right.
You should grow up and realize not everyone is the same. So you've rage quit twice out of "principles". Great. What changed at the company you left? Some would rightfully call you a quitter for not seeing through with the changes.
We can all have views on either end of this, but it doesn't make any of us RIGHT.
Boeing has gotten Too Big To Fail, way too much military/space contracts. The US government can't let them fail because then the only remaining space capability would be SpaceX who can't fulfil everything (and is under control of an increasingly erratic billionaire).
What should happen is that the government should do it just like with the banks in the late '00s: assume control over Boeing+Spirit Aerosystems if not outright nationalize it (without compensation to shareholders, to incentivize other shareholders of other companies to make sure their leadership doesn't prioritize profits over safety), enact sweeping changes, and then after a few years either sell the remains off again or keep it under government control.
Additionally, after 2001 airlines were bailed out, and in the wake of 2008ff car makers and more banks [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/list-of-failed-banks/
[2] https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-the-...
Anytime a corporation had 'culture of silence'.
Then turns it around to be 'speak up'.
There is a backlog of issues that comes out before the situation improves.
Of course he is going to say whatever is needed to save his job, but in my eyes Boeing should move on and choose someone else. Time is running out.
Meanwhile, Airbus had an engineer CEO who nearly bankrupted the firm with the A380 project.
I think trying to put management into buckets doesn't work very well. Some engineer CEOs have bad product sense and some sales CEOs have great product sense. I mean, Steve Jobs for crying out loud.
The airlines that have lots of 787 max have a vested interest in being able to use them.
The whole max mcas debacle happened because of the high cost of pilot re-certification. So what are they going to do, re-certify all their boeing pilots to fly airbus?
Airbus won't even have the capacity to take over all of boeing's market share. And the US can't let that happen anyway from a strategic point of view.
It's not like customers picking a brand of detergent on a shelf.
They breached the trust of their customers. I want to see new leadership, not someone who suddenly turns a new leaf.