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> Boeing is a company that is expected to do something about 10x more difficult than other companies: they build and sell massively complex machines that have to work safely and reliably 100% of the time

Lots of companies produce complex machines where safety is critical. Arguably making something that won't accidentally kill people is the lowest standard of quality a company is expected to meet. Yes planes are big, and flying is hard, so there are more things that can potentially fail, but it's a matter of scale, it isn't a fundamentally different problem. Boeing knew what it was getting into, and took on the responsibility of allocating sufficient resources to make proper aircraft.

> I think failures like we've seen are nearly inevitable.

Failures in general are inevitable, but the failures we've seen are most certainly not. The particular quality issues in the spotlight are solved problems, and in fact Boeing specifically already solved those problems when they crafted their quality procedures. The were multiple deliberate decisions made to not follow procedures, and these failures are only inevitable as a consequence of those decisions.

Sure, the task is incredibly difficult. But aviation engineering is exacting and rule-based and slow and expensive (no "move fast and break things") for just that reason, and Boeing (and Airbus) basically got it right for decades. But clearly Boeing dropped the ball somewhere in the past two decades, while Airbus (so far) hasn't.

So, no, the failures were not inevitable, but contingent, and what's needed now is to analyse how/why they were allowed to develop.

I assume that, for a variety of reasons (political, economic, cultural), Airbus is under somewhat less pressure to maximize shareholder returns than Boeing has been subject to for last couple decades. Theres probably a pretty interesting case study to be written about the outcome of stakeholder capitalism and something more focused on short-term shareholder value.

In other words, Airbus isn’t doing too bad for a European jobs program.

>People point to mismanagement at Boeing, including lately labor outsourcing / labor arbitrage (building plants in SC instead of WA to avoid unions, Spirit Aerosystems, etc) but I see that as part of how Boeing tried to meet the growing demands of air travel.

People also point to management pressuring employees to shut up about manufacturing defects. From the referenced article:

>In 2019, Barnett told a journalist at Corporate Crime Reporter that his managers “started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. . . . They just wanted to push planes out the door and make the cash register ring.”

So no, if you believe Barnett, failures like Boeing's are not inevitable. They are criminal.

> if you believe Barnett

I believe Barnett's claims should be treated seriously and scrutinized by experts in the industry (which is exactly what was happening when he died, by the way - it's not like people were ignoring what he had to say). I don't believe that he or anyone else is entitled to our faith just because he's saying things that confirm our worldview.

> That's not to let everybody off the hook

But you are.

The only flaw in your argument is that the entire aerospace industry has managed to pull off what you claim is a miracle we shouldn't expect to be the standard... for decades. Only when Boeing lost their engineering culture that they and only they have been failing to this extent. Whatever Airbus is doing is working.

> the entire aerospace industry

2 companies?

> a miracle we shouldn't expect to be the standard... for decades

In the past few decades, the number of scheduled flights has grown tremendously, the number of aircraft has grown, traffic has increased substantially at many major airports, fuel economy demands have become increasingly important... (which means those old aircraft aren't as viable anymore) A lot has changed, which requires new aircraft to compensate. I think all of this should be considered. Remember that the incident rate per million miles or per thousand flight hours is _down_ today compared to the imagined golden period in the past.

> 2 companies?

The industry is obviously more than 2 companies. Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Bombardier, and likely in the future, Comac, Mitsubishi, and UAC. This is ignoring the (primarily) civil aviation companies, military manufacturers (who sometimes venture into commercial, e.g., Lockheed's Tristar), and the entire supply chain that feed into those manufacturers.

It's true that other jets exist, especially regional jets, but remember that these serve overall a fairly small percentage of the seat-miles (aka miles flown * number of seats) overall since they are smaller and fly shorter routes.

In some ways this doesn't matter that much (since these planes might actually do many more takeoffs and landings per day/week/lifetime and have to be engineered for that), but in other ways it does matter a lot.

As for the other companies you name, I will admit I am not familiar with them. Is there something relevant to add to the discussion from those companies? I would be curious to learn more

How does seat-miles matter here at all? That's not a normal metric used in this field.

Using seat-miles leads to some very strange conclusions. Consider cargo aircraft with zero seats, or a helicopter that mostly hovers in place all day.

Aviation safety primarily looks at airframe hours and pressurization cycles. At least on the mechanical side.

Oh, you're right. I was thinking about it from the perspective of a passenger, like if you're just a regular non-crew person who travels, then you're probably on Boeing or Airbus, so I picked a metric that I thought would capture that angle, but it's a weird one to choose.

Like, you take up a seat, so if you were to randomly select a mile that you've traveled in your life, what are the odds that it was on a Boeing / Airbus or a regional jet? But, I think this wasn't really clear from what I wrote

> 2 companies?

That's not fair. There are lots of Bombardier and Embraer planes flying commercial flights in the US.

I disagree about expectations. Boeing is expected to meet a reasonable standard of effort to build safe planes that can be competitive. Failures can and will happen, and in the same way we accept the risk of death by car accident every time we drive, no one is shouting "we must stop all air travel!!!" every time a plane fails and people die.

A really common sense standard of effort would be "people feel comfortable internally reporting problems". The opposite was true to the point that Boeing's management seemingly did everything possible to prevent people reporting issues. And now, potentially, someone with an interest in Boeing felt this strongly enough that someone was literally murdered over reporting a problem.

> no one is shouting "we must stop all air travel!!!" every time a plane fails and people die.

I know this isn't quite what you meant, but that's exactly what we do when a plane fails and people die, as happened in this case, as I'm sure you know! But only the plane that has the issue is grounded, not all planes.

As to the merits of John Barnett's complaints, I leave that to other people to decide. That he was murdered over reporting this is a claim I'm highly skeptical of, and to my knowledge there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was.

> they build and sell massively complex machines that have to work safely and reliably 100% of the time

Bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, dams, submarines, elevators, (some) medicine/medical equipment, ...

> Professional class people have gotten used to cheap/affordable jet travel anywhere, anytime, that is safe all the time - but I don't think many have internalized how difficult this is to do and maintain.

The price of an airplane should increase if needed to keep up with growing demand, not the quality decrease.

Sorry, but your suffering from the tech mindset, traditional engineering and manufacturing is a different skill set and many of your assumptions are off.

I encourage people to tinker with modern electronics and software, it's usually harmless and you can learn easily. That's not the case with air crafts and air travel. You need to learn BEFORE doing. Getting interested in flying and airplanes is probably the most dangerous thing for modern dilettantes, maybe tinkering with explosives is more dangerous.

What is wrong about my assumptions? I'm not advocating for "move fast and break things" in aviation, I'm saying that actually the issues at Boeing are not as dire as some people believe when considered in their broader context. I struggle to see how that is a tech mindset, really I think what I can be accused of credibly is carrying water for a defense-industrial complex, and that's the part of my argument that I struggle with.

None of the problems we've seen lately are things that someone just didnt forsee happening over the course of years. It was simply a failure to properly install or inspect fairly simple parts of the plane. While I agree that these are complex machines with many moving parts, these were not complex failures. They should have Never happened and are completely unacceptable.

It’s not a problem that capitalism is well-suited to solving.

Not in short time windows, but Airbus stock is up 45% over past 5 years, and Boeing is down 50%.

Ok. Are you saying it’s cool and fine for there to be a bottom-shelf aircraft manufacturer that passengers accept more risk to life and limb by using, as long as it’s cheaper so it makes up for it?