An engineering company run into the ground by accountants is going to be run by another accountant. Yeah Boeing is fucked.
As much as I sympathize with the notion that engineers make better CEOs, they're not immune to the same influences as everyone else.
I think they key point is: you can't competently make a tradeoff between two domains if you don't understand both of those domains.
Engineers want to make the best engineered thing, and have a harder time prioritizing costs. Accountants/business types want to make some money number go up this quarter, and will reject good engineering ideas to penny-pinch. Someone needs to be able to (competently) keep both groups aligned.
Another problem is the shortsightedness of "this quarter" can actually work for a long time, until it doesn't. People who kick the can down the road don't always realize what they're doing, because they never stuck around to pay the piper for that decision they made. Then problems are easy to excuse as the incompetence of the last guy(s), and the can-kicker can imagine themselves as some great business leader.
The only distinguishing feature of an accountant is that they care deeply that left column = right column. They care that you can track where your money goes, not that every budget is squeezed for profit. In truth, the right accountant might be a boon because she will listen to the engineers rather than think she knows better because she was an engineer decades ago.
She may end up being a terrible CEO, but let's consider our biases here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
Capitalism before the late 20th century had as its mantra "Build a quality product. Keep the customers and workers happy and the share price will take care of itself."
Around 1980 that changed to "Bump the share price and to hell with everything else."
For civilian aircraft manufacturing... Boeing (US), Airbus (EU), and Comac (China).
All of which have varying degrees of state capture.
Maybe that's the nature of highly-compled and -refined products? You only have meaningful competition at the internal level?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Cathay+Pacific+stock&oq=Cath...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/cathay-pa...
> Full year 2023 operating revenues were a record $26.1 billion, a 9.6 percent increase, year-over-year
> Full year net income of $498 million, or $0.81 per diluted share
I'll say again... They have _plenty_ of money (record-breaking, even!) to train their pilots on the differences between two aircraft models. It's not that they can't afford it, they'd just rather not spend the money unless absolutely forced to, because a better stock price is their primary goal/motivation.
[1] https://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/news-and-...
https://www.google.com/search?q=southwest+airline+profit&oq=...
Look at March 2023, they are way up until you hit the bottom : operating income is really down and they are bleeding cash like crazy.
I would guess Southwest's goal is more of a staff flexibility thing: if all their pilots are certified to fly all their planes, scheduling could be much easier and more effective. I don't know anything about airline management or pilot certification, but my guess is pilots are typically certified to only fly one kind of aircraft at a time, and don't typically maintain multiple certifications.
However, as much efficiency that strategy may have gained them over the last several decades, it's not one that's reasonable to maintain anymore.
I'd expect any incoming CEO to make some changes anyway.
If an F-15 has a wing disintegrate in flight, we might hear a blurb about it on the news and maybe a pilot and a few people on the ground die. Tragic, but it's not a blow to the confidence in air travel. If something happens with a 737, there's hundreds of deaths, the public won't get on that plane, the FAA and NTSB release extensive reports, and the backlog for aircraft gets even longer for airlines.
Another company sucked dry by business school vampires.
Is that really the case? I've never been given the ability to pick the aircraft when flying.
I traveled last month for a wedding and made it a point to book a flight scheduled for Airbus planes. Turns out the return trip was changed and I flew Boeing on the way back.
Delta didn't do anything wrong there, I just have no say in what plane I book a ticket for.
In extremis, yes. In practice, no–shave a nickel off the ticket price and you’ll replace those people.
The purchaser with power is the airline. And even they mostly lean into safety due to the financial cost of cancellations and grounding. Regulators, not markets, make flying safe.
While it's possible that's true, doing that is also gifting those customers to your competitors. So there's another dynamic there to consider as well. ;)
To zero practical extent, particularly when you weight for frequent fliers. Most consumers pick the cheapest ticket. Those who don’t go first on loyalty. Frequent fliers who fly based on non-standard factors are well studied and highly in-numerous in any single aspect.
If the concern of Boeing vs Airbus safety is really that low on the list for passengers we really shouldn't have anything else to talk about or regulate. The accidents and issues are well publicized, if people just don't care do we really need further investigations and/or regulation?
We care in aggregate. At the individual level, airline ticket demand is notoriously elastic.
Is your point that we care in principle but don't functionally care when faced with an actual decision?
Yes this is basically why the only thing capitalism can do is lower prices through squeezing everything, because while large groups of people are principled and care a lot, individual humans are largely irrational (especially when it comes to risk, because the humans who accurately analyzed risk on a population scale were eaten by tigers) and fairly flexible in morals, ideology, and priorities.
It can’t. Where is can is where individuals care a little but don’t want to explicitly bear the cost if it if distributed only across those willing to pay for it.
Most people agree cars should have seatbelts. Were seatbelts optional, and only those willing and able to pay for it could have them, far fewer people would pay for it. Which, in turn, increases the cost to each of them individually.
I personally want seatbelts in case someone hits me and causes an accident. I don't actually think they should be required though, especially if many people would choose not to use them if given the option.
If everyone pays, the fixed costs are amortised across everyone. (Also, it’s hidden in the purchase price.) That lowers the aggregate barrier to entry.
Think: toll roads versus roads paid for with taxes.
Lowering the barrier to entry is only really a benefit to those who would opt in anyway, it forces those who wouldn't want it to pay the cost of that.
In the original topic, my main point was that if consumers are made aware of the current safety issues Boeing has had and ultimately don't factor that in at all when flying then we really should be done here. The FAA doesn't need to do anything to protect the public if the public has shown that it just doesn't care, and people/media should stop talking about it as though its a controversy when consumers are just as willing to fly Boeing as they are Airbus.
That doesn't mean I'll never be shuffled to a flight run by another airline but most of the time I won't be on a Max. That said they do fly Boeing, they just don't fly the Max (or the renamed 737-8).
I do appreciate that Delta doesn't fly Max, and I also don't fault them for swapping planes from Airbus to Boeing on a particular flight. If I really care enough I'll have to just drive.
Get me through the airport, cram me in the fly box as quickly as possible, burn like hell for the destination, then disgorge me there.
Let's not try and pretend air travel is still fun and luxurious.
No company want's that kind of headlines. And YES, that ist part of the buy decision of an airline.
The recent Boeing crisis does seem unusual in that it seems the media focus has bypassed the airlines entirely and gone straight for Boeing, but I've not heard anyone in the real world actually change their ticket directly based on the aircraft involved. Personally, as a passenger, I'm more concerned about maintenance and pilot training, as that's far more likely to lead to my untimely death than Boeing.
Even with the 737 MAX crashes... don't get me wrong here, Boeing were absolutely at fault for how they handled the MCAS system, they deserve the backlash, and caused one of the holes in the Swiss cheese that led to the crashes. However. The crash investigation reports back up that poor training and safety culture at the airlines were also major factors. Runaway trim is something they should have been able to handle, and problems had been reported on previous flights on those planes, but they didn't want to take them out of service for financial reasons. Ethiopian Air and Lion Air already had terrible safety ratings before those incidents.
All this is to say, I think the bigger risk for Boeing is that good airlines will worry how their reputation would be affected by an incident, and ground or stop buying their planes. Any airline is probably two major fatal accidents in a short space of time away from bankruptcy.
Interesting that you went absolute here when my GP comment actually called out that I picked a flight specifically to avoid Boeing planes. I wasn't aware of the change after I booked so I didn't change my flight, but I did pay slightly more when to book on Airbus.
What I meant was that places like HN/Reddit don't tend to be very representative of the offline meatspace, and my experience in the latter is that few people would ever check which airliner they're flying on, let alone change a flight because of it.
Ethiopian Air actually has a great safety record, believe it or not, and Lion Air pushed Boeing for a MAX simulator, which Boeing pushed back on to wave attention away from the existence of MCAS by regulators. That's in spite of, yes, some serious quality related concerns with the airmanship culture that was loudly echoed by Langscheiss who should be ashamed of himself for such a display of Americanist chauvinism in the face of what was so clearly a fouled up attempt at rollout of a design by Boeing without the due care and communication involved with putting such machines under into the hands of unsuspecting pilots.
>Runaway trim is something they should have been able to handle...
Uh uh. No, bad MCAS does not present in the same manner as runaway trim. It is not a slow, steady, comtinuous, adjustment of trim, but a rapid, intermittent, escalating, and intensifying application thereof, with a 5 second reset every time you touch one of the electronic trim switches. Further, it was impossible to isolate the Flight Computer's trim circuit (which would solve the MCAS problem entirely) leaving the pilot's the electric switches they'd need to retrim fast enough because of a specific design choice to maintain type certification.
While Ethiopian's safety record isn't terrible, Lion Air's was/is, despite attempts to change matters. Ethiopian do have a number of ongoing issues though, and Ethopian Airlines, the ECAA, and the EAIB have some troubling tendencies to avoid introspection - perhaps since Ethiopian Airlines is a government-owned flag carrier. Consider their response [0] to the LCAA/NTSB/BEA's investigation of the Flight 409 crash: "biased, lacking evidence, incomplete and did not present the full account of the accident [..] Any characterization of our pilots contrary to the foregoing is pure fabrication that cannot stand any scrutiny". That being said, I would personally fly on Ethiopian, but I definitely have reservations about them.
With regard to both crashes, the NTSB/BEA/EAIB reports all identify crew performance as inadequate. The counter-argument is that since they hadn't seen this specific situation before, their inappropriate responses were due to a loss of situational awareness and task saturation, especially with the AOA causing an erroneous stick shaker and various confusing instrument readings. That said, in both cases, the weather was good and it was daytime, so the pilot responses are nevertheless surprising even given the erroneous instrumentation.
While it's true that MCAS doesn't resemble the most common causes of runaway trim, runaway trim can happen for lots of reasons, and not all present the same way. For example, intermittent shorts can cause rapid intermittent uncommanded trimming. In any case, the response is the same, which (paraphrased) are the memory items: disengage and do not re-engage the autopilot, disengage and do not re-engage the autothrottle, hit the trim cutout switches, hold the trim wheel, and trim manually, then follow the more detailed written procedures. Indeed, in previous flights on the Lion Air aircraft, MCAS issues had occurred and the pilots in those flights recovered using the runaway stabilizer procedure.
The reason they are memory items is because trim runaway can happen FAST and recovering a severely out-of-trim aircraft using the trim wheel is somewhere between difficult and impossible, even with light aircraft, so if the trim is ever doing something unexpected, the first instinct should be to disable AP and then stab trim cutout. The responses from the pilots in both crashes were not to do this, and indeed what they did do was strange and suggests poor CRM and insufficient training. Additionally, with Ethiopian, they hadn't properly disseminated Boeing's updated MCAS training to their pilots following the Lion Air crash.
I'm not trying to defend Boeing, as they massively fucked up, but my point is really that airline training and safety practices are very important, and for me personally, far outweigh the aircraft I'd be flying in (unless BA were trying to get me on a Tupolev). I'm also not American and have long preferred Airbus to Boeing, so I'm not saying any of this because I'm biased in favour of the US. The FAA also clearly hold some of the bag here for not properly regulating Boeing.
[0] https://corporate.ethiopianairlines.com/Press-release-open-p...
If you want to be guaranteed the plane you signed up for, we need new regulation. That is not a right anyone has currently.
Booking a ticket is just a commitment for them to get you to/from specific destinations on time, if possible. Showing the plane scheduled for the flight is helpful for picking seats but its definitely no guarantee.
My wife actually got stuck in DC over night once when they decided they wanted to use a smaller plane. No mechanical issues, I assume they just needed to move the plane for the first flight the next morning and they decided to bump a few passengers off the flight.
There's still quite a few brass in the US military who came of age in the immediate post-Vietnam era and remember the BUFFs being the core of the US bomber fleet, and will subconsciously favor Boeing over anything else. That means a better (though not guaranteed) likelihood of winning a contract.
The issue is, a lot of their offerings for things like tankers, AWACS, general transport, VIP transit, etc. are based on airliners.
>Guillaume's love of flying and aviation dates back to his childhood. He is a qualified light-aircraft pilot and helicopter flight-test engineer with 1,300 hours of flying experience.
What a contrast.
Oh, I doubt that. Their bribes to congress are paid in full and they have some of the juiciest government contracts with which to pad their profits with egregious cost overruns.