Boeing's largest plant in 'panic mode' amid safety crisis, say workers and union | Hacker News Reader

Boeing's largest plant in 'panic mode' amid safety crisis, say workers and union

theguardian.com

75 pointsswores88 comments

> Boeing’s largest factory is in “panic mode”, according to workers and union officials, with managers accused of hounding staff to keep quiet over quality concerns.

They're fixing the glitch!

Was that an Office Space reference?

He means that the problem should work itself out.

Good things all these worker and union officials are choosing to retain their anonymity. They would perish suddenly from suicide or emergency health issues otherwise.

‘If it’s Boeing, I ain’t going,’ was the decision and last line my friend said when he was planning his travel the other day, and I was playing devil’s advocate with him. But deep down, I would not recommend to anyone I know to fly on Boeing anymore, including myself. So now, in addition to the cost, bags, and stops, I will be checking if the plane is Boeing and trying to find an alternative.

Is that possible? Don't the airlines swap planes at the last minute?

Obviously it's not possible to guarantee but it's definitely possible to reduce your chances of being on a Boeing aircraft.

It is not perfect, but most airlines will try not to swap plane models as it breaks all the seating assignments.

I think the older Boeing planes through 737-900 are as safe as ever. 737-MAX+ and 787 seem to be where the design process went awry. Even then, there seem to be known workarounds to the bugs.

For what it's worth, I still fly on them all, I just remember to tell my family I love them before takeoff when the safety card has MAX on the label.

> For what it's worth, I still fly on them all, I just remember to tell my family I love them before takeoff when the safety card has MAX on the label.

That’s Boeing’s new business. Bringing families together by threatening them with death by giant fireball!

If you go to the airline website (or even other booking sites) and click on details you can see the flight, operator, and the aircraft. In fact, some websites (I think kayak) can even filter by including or excluding aircraft specific models. In worst cases, you might need to know the aircraft from the seat map. From my experience they rarely change what’s the aircraft, if they had it written, most likely it is the aircraft that you will fly with.

> some websites (I think kayak) can even filter by including or excluding aircraft specific models.

This feature was added for people who wanted to avoid newer Boeing models, for context. Nobody cared what model they flew before the 737 max.

It's unlikely that BA will put a Boeing on a London-Rome flight as they don't operate short-haul Boeing planes. Yes they could put a long haul on there, yes they could wet-lease another one, but those are very unlikely situations.

If you choose to fly Ryanair on the route instead, you are almost certain to get a Boeing 737.

If you care enough then you have to vote with your wallet, it's the only say you have.

You can fly an all airbus carrier to avoid this scenario. JetBlue for instance in the US.

It is not even worth the brain time to think about this when, if you take the past decade of domestic commercial aviation, you're 150,000x more likely to die on your drive to the airport.

Will you also avoid ever getting in a car? Because statistically speaking, you're far more likely to die in a car crash than in a Boeing plane.

Edit: In the last decade, in the US, about 2 people have been killed from aviation, and 365,000 people from car crashes.

You also have some control over the car whereas your life is entirely in the hands of some random people you don’t know and some Boeing equipment in the plane.

As if people don’t get hit by other drivers.

I never said other people don't get hit by other drivers. Take a step back, you are having an emotional reaction and not thinking clearly.

What I mean is: people in general feel more comfortable having some form of control. Autopilot is fine until autopilot stops working, and then you want to have a method of taking over as pilot. In a plane where you have a hurt sense of confidence in the plane's integrity, it would be easy to imagine increased anxiety for people because they have no control; all they can do is sit in their seat and try not to panic. That's hard for some people, if not everyone. Especially in a situation where the plane is actively malfunctioning.

If it was anywhere close to feasible, I would absolutely prefer a pair of professional pilots up front driving my car. Their training, systems knowledge, checklists, emergency procedures, etc. are far better than anything I can do when I exercise "some control over the car".

How costly is it to one's quality of life to avoid being in a car versus having a different departure time and sitting on an Airbus instead?

The likelihood of dying in a car crash is so dramatically higher that even thinking about changing your flight is a classic case of bikeshedding.

Bikeshedding -- that thing where large teams spend a long time discussing an insignificant but concrete and highly intuitive detail?

I don't think model of airliner fits that definition.

Bikeshedding, when you waste brainpower on discussing something irrelevant when there are far more pressing problems to consider.

Like worrying about your Boeing flight while you drive to the airport, over 150,000x more likely to die on said drive :)

Oh the irony

No no no, that isn't bikeshedding, what you're describing is being dismissive.

>The likelihood of dying in a car crash is so dramatically higher that even thinking about changing your flight is a classic case of bikeshedding.

If you enter a car, your chance of dying on that trip is lower vs. when you enter a plane.

> If you enter a car, your chance of dying on that trip is lower vs. when you enter a plane.

This is not true, you are still tens of thousands of times more likely to die.

Setting aside the frequentist probability premises, the argument that "Cars are way, way, way more dangerous than airplanes" -- while true, and reasonable, and would not be as dismissive a point if it were recognized that car culture is so normalized and widely internalized by individuals and less so the fault or ridiculous irrationality of said individuals -- is not really relevant to the argument that "Airbus is a safer airplane than Boeing given how each company is run nowadays."

Like, based on your simple frequentist argument, should Boeing be above FAA scrutiny? Let's just tell the FAA to spend more time on reforming car culture, too? People shouldn't bother voting with their feet?

Yes, that is true. https://trid.trb.org/View/348068

Correct, but now examine the survival rate statistics for each category. A person might experience numerous car accidents in their lifetime, yet it only takes one aircraft accident to be fatal.

The statistics I reference are not likelihood of accidents but likelihood of death. You are tens of thousands of times more likely to die when you get in a car versus a plane.

I’m going to wager you haven’t actually looked at these, because they don’t remotely support your case. Aircraft accidents are quite survivable.

See figures 3 and 4:

https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/Part121AccidentSurviv...

Any recent report that includes the models in question?

You think you’re being clever (Oh ho! I’ll include the two MAX 8 crashes and show him!) but surely if you actually cared about the actual safety of flying today you’d want to exclude issues with a system that’s been fixed. If we were having this discussion in 2018 or 2019 you’d have a point. We aren’t. You don’t.

Instead you’re being driven by your gut and what you want to feel is true. No, sorry, air travel is wildly safer than essentially every other form of transportation available to you by essentially every single metric. The majority of even serious aircraft accidents are survived by the majority of occupants.

Hell, a Boeing crashed at SFO a few years back. It landed short of the runway and cartwheeled. Two people died from the crash because they hadn’t been wearing seat belts. A landing Airbus in Tokyo sliced through a coast guard plane just the other month. The coast guard plane was fucked, but zero people died aboard the passenger jet. This is the norm for commercial aviation accidents.

These aren’t the incidents that come to mind for you and that’s understandable. But it is wrong.

I share this sentiment.

"Survival rates are averages taken in the past" was a reassuring refrain in the context of terminal illness and risky surgery, with the assumption that survival rates improve over time.

But the same words also apply to air travel, without the same assumption.

I'm pretty shocked at how many here seem to agree with you. Your chances of dying in a Boeing aircraft went from something like 1 in 10 billion to 1 in 9.999999 billion. Why bother thinking about this at all? Even if risk reduction is your #1 priority in life, there's a near-infinite list of better ways to reduce your risk than trying to pick Airbus aircraft over Boeing.

What am I missing?

>What am I missing?

Statistics collected over decades don't apply when circumstances change.

If Boeing safety reached critical tipping point recently, we are can talk only in 1 in tens of millions safety at best. There are less than 20 million commercial Boeing flights per year. 737 MAX flies only fraction of those.

> “There is no way in God’s green earth I would want to be a pilot in South Carolina flying those from South Carolina to here,” the mechanic, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, told the Guardian. “Because when they get in here, we’re stripping them apart.”

And of course, it's the Washington plant that's worried.

Company culture is more important than the MBAs would have you believe

Company culture externalities take too long to catch up to quarterly numbers. Have to tighten the consequence loop.

This is called a "union" where I come from.

True story.

Not to mention expertise and experience

The chickens are coming home to roost. Unfortunately those that sent the chickens on their way have made bank and bailed out already.

I've just reread this article and it's very good in parts. All the essence about what's gone wrong at Boeing is there but you have to read between the lines a little to extract it all (but it's all there).

But here I don't want to dwell on the broader issues of why Boeing's in trouble. Instead I've copied a section from the article that quotes a Boeing mechanic who clearly knows what he's talking about. What he says hits the nail exactly on the head. He hones in what I believe is wrong with the management of many Western companies today and it's not just Boeing, unfortunately.

Simply, there are too many middle and upper managers—usually Harvard/uni types—who don't have a fucking clue—who don't know one end of a screwdriver from another and they're the ones running companies nowadays. These useless bastards only get in the way.

Now I'm not decrying all uni types for the sake of it (as I'm one), but you'll find many of the best engineers and other professionals often have good trade skills or hands-on experience and they know how to get their hands dirty just like everyone else in the skilled workforce.

What Boeing's mechanic says in the last paragraph is just so fucking correct that it ought to be etched in stone and put up on a public monument:

"…Some veteran union employees at Boeing draw a link between its current issues and a move by the company more than two decades ago to introduce “team leader” managers, replacing a previous system whereby the most senior, experienced factory workers were in charge.

“The team leader isn’t picked by his skill on the airplane – he is picked by his relationship with another manager or another person,” said the mechanic. “Now we don’t have team leads who know what’s up.”

Today, the managers “doing the thinking have never done physical labor before”, they added.

“There’s no way you can learn how to build an airplane in a school on the third floor. There are a lot of things you can learn in the classroom, but building an airplane is not one of them.””

I’m surprised the stock isn’t doing worse than it is doing currently TBH.

They're a major defense contractor, that's why.

Many of their defense projects haven’t been going well (notably space launch, refueling tanker, and jet trainer).

Does it matter? Where else is the US military gonna go to instead? Airbus?

Lockheed Martin made and still supports the C-5 Galaxy, and Northrop Grumman is making the B-21, so both of those manufacturers (at least) are quite capable of manufacturing large aircraft.

It's still a blue chip with either monopoly or cartel control over their relevant markets.

Until the government acts in a direction that would break up that scenario, you can expect the stock to continue its good performance

Good performance is a stretch. It's down 15% on the 1yr and 50% in the 5yr. Arguably it's a safe buy right now, but that's because, given what you say, it is unlikely to fall further. At least under the current administration.

US won't let its main player in the airliner space go down no matter how many people they kill with their negligence.

The stock market knows this.

While this is certainly true right now, the clients will eventually revolt and go elsewhere.

Where? The only other option is Airbus. I would never board a Comac aircraft.

And Airbus has quite a long backlog…

Both of them have ridiculous backlogs. The A320 family has yet to deliver ~7,000 jets out of ~18,000 ordered, and the 737 Max family has only delivered 1,500 jets out of 6,270 orders.

At this point if you're an airline that has to put in a new order, you're not going to see the new jets for close to a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320_orders_and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...

IIRC this is the real reason why JetBlue is trying to buy Spirit. They have wildly incompatible business models, but they both operate the same single aircraft type.

Until they actually get new planes, they still need to pay Boeing to maintain their existing ones

Just means they'll get bigger discounts. Nobody seriously en-mass is avoiding Boeing, despite the popularity of the "If it's Boeing I ain't going" rhyme (which itself is a sendup of the "If it ain't Boeing I ain't going" from the 707 days, back when Boeing was an engineering company)

The company can continue to operate and wipe out all common shareholders at the same time.

Airbus is their only competitor in the civilian market. The US Government has actively destroyed companies that attempt to compete with Boeing [0].

They’re also one of the top 5 prime contractors in the defense industry.

There is no possible way the US lets its sole domestic airplane manufacturer go bust. I would speculate that the government wouldn’t even want to chance a Boeing bankruptcy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_...

I’m just a dumb guy who works in construction, if I know the above, then the market definitely knows it.

Boeing is not the only US airplane manufacturer, it is the only commercial airplane (airliner) manufacturer.

If someone refers to Boeing as the sole domestic airplane manufacturer, I would assume they also know that Cessna exists but are referring to the Boeing/Airbus duopoly.

I’ve never heard anyone else mention Boeing as “the sole domestic airplane manufacturer”, given that Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are still around. I follow aviation quite closely, and the trade magazines are always quite clear on this sort of thing.

I would say it’s the international repercussions that put pressure:

- Boeing’s home customers don’t really have a choice,

- European customers really have an incentive to switch, even possibly Ryanair, since Boeing is a laughing stock and planes-that-are-losing-doors are a meme for internet-oriented people in Europe,

- But it also has an impact on diplomacy and on american hegemony when everyone turns away from them for industrial competence. And it’s rather the loss of the leadership of the role of the world’s safety organization of the FAA, when it was only the European safety organization who halted this nonsense.

> Airbus is their only competitor in the civilian market.

I feel that I’ve started seeing Embraer planes a lot more often over the years. If you’ve flown some regional routes, you most likely flew in one of them at some point

Embraer competes at the smaller end of the market. E.g. they compete with the A220, but they don't really compete with things like the A320 or the even larger planes from Boeing and Airbus.

Mitsubishi also tried to build a plane to compete at the smaller end, the MRJ was cancelled though.

Also, yes I flew on an Embraer. It also was the worst plane I was ever on. Everything was cramped and it was notably loud. But not sure that this is true in general.

The one thing I like is that I've seen them in 1-2 and 2-2 seating configurations for the entire cabin. It's quite nice. The overhead space is almost negligible though, it doesn't fit a standard carry on.

It will be a slow death.

That it is just now “in panic mode” is indicative of the root issue.

Still the wrong place. Not the plant should be in panic mode, management in Chicago should be. It's their fault at least. Hope the law suite will be coming

Another story which lays the enshitification culture at the feet of McDonnell Douglas.

I have no idea what's going on but it feels to me like this somewhat recent popular media anti-Boeing campaign isn't strictly organic.

Feels pretty organic to me. Things falling off planes and whistleblowers alleging coverup generate organic interest

Maybe it is to some extent but I'm seeing a more general pattern wrt commercial air travel coverage. There's the turbulence stories and the "near collision" stories. It's possible every aspect of the air travel system is breaking down in real-time I suppose. But it's also possible there is some sort of agenda at work and its promoters are leveraging anything they can find.

The only ones I can see who would stand to win in such a conspiracy would be Airbus, but they were already winning with or without Boeing.

I don't know that a canonical conspiracy is required. I could imagine an emergent symbiosis of different parties. Eg. The media likes clicks and some NGOs don't like air travel. I'm not saying this is the case just that it might be slightly more complex than what it appears on face.

> it's also possible there is some sort of agenda at work

Please tell us more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547368

Things falling off planes just as we’re starting to forget the terror rollercoasters to which they subjected hundreds of people before their death. Organic indeed.

They had a door blow off an airplane mid flight - that'll get the press's attention. Whether or not they're a worse goat rodeo than the average modern American multinational is up for debate, but they're certainly enough of one to sustain this kind of press naturally, and especially for a company that builds half the commercial airliners in the US. Plane crashes get clicks.

when whistleblowers start dying in not strictly organic ways the media tends to come down pretty hard on behavior like that

Is there evidence any of these deaths were the result of foul play?

So you’re willing to entertain a conspiracy theory for why the media would be fixated on Boeing, a storied company once one of the prides of American engineering that’s now fallen into transparent disrepair that’s led to airplanes, the things 2 million of us entrust our lives to every day, failing dramatically, but when a whistleblower commits suicide while testifying to congress about said company, that’s just a normal Saturday to you?

I don't think discussion will be productive if we're not capable of temporarily setting aside emotion.

I'll ask more plainly for them then - why is negative news about a company with high publicity safety failures more suspicious to you than the death of a whistleblower testifying against said company, especially since they evidently recently told a friend 'if I die it wasn't suicide'?

If you’re looking for a productive discussion, then your approach is the problem.

Demanding proof, while handwaving away calls for evidence for your own position rightly results in an incredulous reaction.

I'd guess no. Boeing has a poor reputation in some circles, hell I changed the type of engineering I pursued in school because Boeing was a major employer

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