What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

There are many industries where this is not the case: aerospace, medical device engineering, and live TV production all come to mind.

When did I say this?

This is the terrible rot of modern business culture - all driven by short-term profit making at the cost of long-term sustainability.

Also, in my experience, "tribal knowledge" is an essential ingredient in classical Maximum Quality engineering. I'm not saying that it's the only way, but I have seen many, many other ways fail.

It's something that -no exaggeration- humans have been doing for thousands of years.

It's just that we have a crew at the top that sincerely believe they know better. Every now and then, one hits it out of the park.

The rest ... not so much.

"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.

I get that statistically DIY'ing your portfolio will almost always lead to worse returns but I really do wish I could exclude certain stocks from my index funds.

Well at a first order, the answer is that the stock market as a system for promoting value creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator, and more and more we are beginning to see the myriad of ways this concept produces antisocial results. (See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and college debt.)

More directly there has been some criticism of the stock market for rewarding short term gain over long term value, which among other things has led to the creation of the Long Term Stock Exchange:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Stock_Exchange

Goodhart’s law, unfortunately. Whatever metric the stock market rewards gets gamed like there is no tomorrow (or next quarter, here.)

Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop flying because of it? Not many. Throw in the lucrative military connections and you’ve got yourself a sure bet.

Because as someone buying stock, I have no idea whether these kinds of things are right and necessary to reduce bloat and redundancies in the firm, or idiotic and self-destructive.

All I know is that I probably want to be buying stock in firms that are more profitable, as opposed to less profitable. Or, at least, firms that other people think are going to be more profitable.

They're exploiting the uninformed, which in this case are retail investors.

Wall St geniuses are not engineers.

That said, I bought Boeing stock and held over that time frame. I did so because I could see that humans were going to need more planes over the long term, and there are only two vendors. Also I visited the Everett plant with my family on vacation. It didn't occur to me that it would be worthwhile introducing KPI BS and McDonald's management style when constructing things worth 100 million and safety-critical.

It is a very old story. People build a company with deep knowledge and caring about what actually makes great products. Financial managers get involved to manage the money aspects of the business. Financial types want a lot more control to make the company more profitable.

The financial management has no actual clue what makes the company valuable. They only know what makes more or less cash flow in this or that direction. But, credit where due, they DO know how to make that work.

They start financially 'engineering' the company for near-term profits and higher stock prices. This works. This works fantastically well. Everything looks leaner, teams of younger workers are sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than the highly experienced teams, and no one can tell the difference from outside. Profits are higher, stock prices hit record high after record high. Cash is spent on stock buybacks and not R&D or retaining institutional knowledge. Warning flags start showing up in product and service quality indicators, but are ignored and even suppressed. The problems start multiplying at increasing rates, then exponentially increasing rates.

Eventually, it starts to get serious. But by then, the "financial geniuses" have long since cashed out and the core of the company's workforce, ethos, and institutional knowledge has been so gutted that there is no recovery. The death spiral starts in earnest.

The only questions are whether for Boeing, being a critical keystone in the US aerospace and defense industry can or will be allowed to fail, and, if not, if there will be an actual engineering-based turnaround, or if it will be a Soviet-like zombie company for how many years?

Forkin' MBAs, they'll kill it every time.

Because Boeing boosted revenue from $60 to 101 billion during the time frame. And had just a single competitor.

The current stock price is less than half of its 2019 peak.

Because Boeing is in an absolutely unique position where they are part of a duopoly in a market where demand for airplanes massively outstrips supply. Boeing's customers have no alternative and Boeing will be selling them planes and the market knows that.

Additionally the stock market can only look a tangible results. There is no measure of "engineering competency" which you could track year over year, which makes these mistakes hard to realize unless you are inside the system.

Additionally, not all investors are savvy on what's going on with companies, so they decide to invest in ETFs (which mind you, is now the lion's share of investment activity). Now not all ETFs are the same basket of stocks. Some may have 15 stocks, whereas others may consist of 50. This is done so people can "choose their risk tolerance", which is calculated based on various things such as how diversified the fund is (50 stocks is more diversified than 15), what the market caps of the companies are, etc. Anyhow, the point is, choosing to invest in said investment vehicles, has little to do with investing based upon fundamentals, or rewarding productive companies, and more to do with managing a person's personal investment risk. The result? Companies are detached from fundamentals because, quite literally, the majority of investors are not investing based on fundamentals, but based on risk.

I don’t think the market rewards it, at least not by itself.

The problem is that the real money isn’t in the market, the institutional investors make most of their money on commissions. So while short term gains are a nice bonus, it’s only secondary to driving volatility and with it trade volume. So the incentive is to just stir shit up, because that’s what makes them money, both as stock prices go up and down.

Also institutional investors have disproportionate voting power that lets them put their own shit stirrers on the board and subsequently in the C-suite.

Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life.

Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that killed people."

Former CEO: "So what?"

The worst part is that this is a real problem. So many formerly strong companies have been brought down by this behavior that it is becoming notable when it doesn't happen. We are allowing these guys to destroy the American economy slowly just because it makes them and their close buddies ridiculous money. And of course the government is largely captured by these same people, so Washington isn't going to help. Just so frustrating.

It should be certainly possible (I'm not sure how) to replicate this process in a speedier way.

However, I think the thing being missed by the start-up guy is that, like Louis Vitton crap and genuine De Beers diamonds, most people aren't looking for something that replicates the "genuine" product, they want "the real thing" because there's some kind of emotional factor in owning some massively overpriced shirt made by sweatshop workers and sold in a fancy store by appointment, or a rock that was really dug out of the ground by an enslaved child in Africa. I suspect barrel-aged bourbon is similar.

That's where he killed himself. Inside his truck, in the parking lot.

NO: Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said.

Or you know this

The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.

"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."

FROM: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...

The man was found dead, with a sucide note (hand written) and his own gun in his hand.

You know what happens when gun owners get the urge to kill themselves. They kill themselves. Guns make suicide less of a cry for help and more or less "effective".

Any article that doesn't mention what his family had to say about the matter is not only creating a narrative, but they are openly disrespecting the family of a dead man to grab attention and headlines.

How about todays interview with his OWN FAMILY:

FROM HIS MOTHER: If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing.

OR THIS: Stokes and her son Rodney Barnett said they do not want to comment on whether they believe he died by suicide until the investigation by the Charleston police department concludes.

source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...

Please do not casually spread conspiracy theories. They poison democratic debate, make us all stupider, and distract attention from important, evidenced realities, like the others mentioned in the article.

The second of two, because he lost the first one.

People act like this was a criminal proceeding. It was not. He'd already been testifying and speaking publicly about Boeing for more than 5 years. He sued them because of Boeing's attempts to defame his character to downplay the allegations which have been public for a long time.

The man had already been on film. He already has written statements everywhere. The FAA already agreed that what he said had happened.

He was in court for AIR21 case... to get money out of boeing for himself, for 10 years of early retirement. Candidly Boeing was probably paying more for the lawyers they were using to fight him than they would have paid just settling.

There weren't billons on the line with this.

Thats whistleblowing as in past tense. He complained to the FAA and the FAA said 'yes John you're right'.

Not to diminish your mental heath but the whole argument here is that what Boeing around "stress", "pressure" and "anxiety" was far worse.

Its not like is anti whistleblower retaliation case (AIR21) was going to be some massive blemish for Boeing. It's not like it was going to be a 100 million dollar write down. It is basically "wrongful termination" that they are fighting. And it would be round 2 on this case (the first was "dismissed").

https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-995.134-995.139 does a bit better job of surfacing more of the details. Ones that paint boeing in a far worse light without the sensationalism of a tv script murder plot.

It sounds like you have some unrealistic overestimate of your safety against a determined criminal. This just an older gentleman, far away from home, alone, with no security.

One method is to hire a junky, or a homeless person, or some other desperate person to commit a crime. Affordable to the middle class! And even if they are caught, they would not know your identity.

Kadyrov regularly assassinates his critics in EU for example, and that's not even his 'territory' so to speak, https://warsawinstitute.org/kadyrovs-hitmen/

the reason that large airline safety in the US is so overwhelmingly good is the preceding 20, 30, 40, 50? years of continuous improvements. until the last 5-10 years that is. we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. when these 2010's and 2020 planes are 15-30 years old, it's going to be a shit-show.

so if you believe that the airlines are too safe, that there is too much margin, they are over-engineered, over-regulated, etc. then that wouldn't be at all irrational. you could trade some gold-plated engineering for profit. you could trade bureaucracy for faster production, maintenance, etc. you could reduce the cost of travel (by how much? it's already cheap). this would be an interesting argument to make. but these decisions should be made in the light of day by the NTSB/FAA, congress, the public, and the shareholders, etc. even then, it's likely that theory would have negative consequences (remember the better-faster-cheaper NASA theory of operation).

the problem is that, instead of an honest choice made in public by the appropriate stakeholders and the flying public, these choices and short-cuts were made in secret, illegally, with extreme dishonestly, repeatedly, for at least a decade, for extremely selfish gains, by FAA and boeing executives.

that's what's not ok. we're told and we expect the nearly perfect safety to continue. what we got was back to the 1950's-1970's era shit-show.

Boeing acted like there was nothing different about the new aeroplanes and therefore did not train the pilots in how to react to the new system. Indeed, that was the original point of MCAS - to avoid pilot re-training. The pilots were not trained in doing the "right thing" and so had no chance of recovering the aircraft. I don't think it's right to blame them. Regardless of whether their overall training was of higher standard, I don't think American pilots would have fared any better since they, too, would have been in the dark.

You can't really blame the software engineers. This was all thought out and tightly specified by Boeing to their avionics subcontractor (Collins, IIRC). This is how it was designed and engineered to work at a systems level - it is a design hack. As far as I know there weren't any software bugs or 'hacks' involved, and the avionics operated as designed (aside from the AoA DISAGREE alert, which was due to a requirements miscommunication, not a bug). It was broken by design, which happened long before implementation, at Boeing.

> When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.

The Elevator Feel Computer is a part of the 737NG as well, and would behave the same way in those airplanes when receiving such erroneous AoA data; it's nothing new in the MAX. It certainly did not help the crews during the fatal MAX incidents, and is clearly not an ideal design, but it's also barely a footnote in the root cause analysis, along with the stick shaker and stall warnings blaring at them constantly. The pilots would easily be able to overcome it long enough to get safely on the ground. What was a bigger problem for those crews was that the MCAS has enough trim authority to make it impossible, with any amount of elevator input, to restore level flight - limiting its trim authority was part of the 'fixes' required to get them airborne again.

I don't think it's reasonable to blame the implementation of MCAS for the accidents, its existence is to blame, and really highlights how nothing about the 737 platform has been designed holistically - it is a patchwork of hacks on hacks dating from the 1970s, which is difficult to reason about as a whole, and has dark corners. To truly 'fix' MCAS, you need to consider AoA as critical air data (which the 737 does not), and you need to integrate it holistically with the rest of the flight controls (which the 737 cannot, since it is not fly-by-wire), and you need to consider it critical equipment (it's an 'augmentation' and not considered critical on the 737, 'justifying' the lack of redundancy). Once you've done those things, you've basically got the bones of a proper envelope protection system in place, and you've obviated the need for MCAS in the first place. Of course the 737 team couldn't do this, because the business decided that it was more important to avoid (and hide) any differences than to bring the aircraft in line with modern standards.

Realistically, this should have been trapped by the safety analysis of the flawed design, which should have considered its effect on the whole flight control system when evaluating it, but Boeing again only considered MCAS to be an 'augmentation' and it got an abbreviated safety review as a result. Some engineers did express concern about some of these factors, but given the environment outlined in TFA, those concerns did not go anywhere, because they would have basically scuttled the idea and sent everyone back to the drawing board, which Boeing was desperate to avoid having already been caught flat-footed with the launch of the A320neo.

The 737 airframe needs to be put to rest, it is simply not safe or sane to keep stacking more hacks onto it. But there's no indication Boeing's working on a successor so it's probably going to be on the market for another 20+ years. Hard to imagine folks will probably be flying on an airframe with a 100 year old design (2024 + 20 years before a new revision + 20 years life span = 2064, around 100 years from the 737 launch before they start retiring)!

Well, Modern neural networks and LLMs aren't constructed using any requirements, specifications or hard constraint at all - they just heuristically give a context-aware approximation of their massive input data set.

So getting to X being part of "requirements" is a bigger step than the layman imagines. Especially, 'cause an LLM outputs approximated recipes for action when asked, LLMs struggle to consistently achieve goals since goal-seeking requires constant little adjustments.

But even more, if an AI somehow reached the level where you could inject goals into it, it seems very likely it's goal would be maximize investor profits and this wouldn't solve the problem of the system discarding human experts but rather compound it.

Tesla accepts that there will be some accidents at the cost of progress.

SpaceX does not. (Or specifically lines up launches so that accidents have negligible consequences)

If Xitter returns 404s for 5 minutes, it's not the end of the world. Its users will come back after going to the bathroom. If Xitter spews garbage "news" stories, it doesn't really matter: its users will stick around anyway, and the people who think the stuff on Xitter is garbage are already gone anyway, or not paying attention to those channels anyway.

(If you built the brand yourself and did this all intentionally, I think it could also simply be called "the long con".)

This is the part that bothers me. Why isn't it an option?

Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000.

If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.

Then aim to deliver one per month for the next two years. Get FedEx and UPS and Amazon to fund you for the next 15 years. By then you could have two dozen aircraft flying real miles, building up experience and trust. Then you ramp to up to 25 aircraft per year for the next two years.

Sure, this means that after 20 years you still haven't replaced Boeing.

But Tesla didn't have to replace GM to revolutionize the industry.

When you become a real threat to take away 50 orders per year you cause visible activity among your competition. Just ask Bombardier.

(I wish I hadn't used Elon as an example twice in the same post, but it is what it is. Like him or hate him, his history is relevant when you talk about what is possible in giant established industries.)

When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier.

Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way

There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team.

Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer.

You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else.

So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.

Current brokenthink of the management class is that their job is to wage war on their own workforce and labour rights. In the process destroying human capital. This isn't just my conclusion based on the fact that FANG was fined for having anti-poaching agreement - country-wide, corporate spending on workforce training and upskilling has been falling for the past 20 years.

Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their complaints are swept under the rug -- after all, the company hasn't collapsed yet, so the worries must be unfounded!

This is exactly why strong government regulations and oversight is necessary. Strictly profit driven companies don't care about externalities like pollution or human lives. Literally, they only care about making one number go up, everything else (including the long term value of the number) means nothing at all.

The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.

The work is building a database of filing locations and feeds (eg: public document feeds of each and every stock exchange, corporate filing register, etc) and builder parses to extract new names, boards of directors, name changes, major stock holdings, etc.

It takes some doing (*) - but with LLM's and advances in open software it gets easier every day.

( * Myself and a small team did this for the global mineral sector some years (15+) ago )

https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-foo...

I used to write code for financial traders. I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101. And based on infinite news reports, we can all see there are plenty of CEOs who will do pretty much anything that will boost the stock price in the short term so that they get to keep their jobs longer.

Amazon is particularly notable for how long and how energetically they resisted investor pushes to take short-term gains. They were famous for it, or perhaps notorious. So although it's a counterexample to my point, it's also great proof of it.

Opinions differ on Uber, but personally I think of it (and WeWork) as pump and dumps. After Facebook and Google ended up with quasi-monopolies, investors were hungry for another "to the moon" technology stock. I should say that was true of both VCs and retail investors. The VCs saw an opportunity to make things that looked vaguely Google-shaped, which they did, trying to sell them off to the general public before anybody caught on. They succeeded with Uber and failed with WeWork. But in both cases, it's still VCs favoring short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.

The truly non-technical folks don't understand what corners they're cutting.

Training can help but it is not sufficient for many tasks. You also need aptitude and desire.

Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a society, and I think the primary driver of the desire component.

What I meant about framing was that our economies, governments and businesses are framed in a cultural context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this case. African-american/black communities have a challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons. Certain immigrant populations can integrate or interoperate more effectively than others. I think the key to achieving better results as a society and a planet is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I was referring to.