It’s funny that in this country it’s almost unthinkable, but I would imagine that in other countries the solution would be to nationalize the company.
Much of the issues Boeing has are as a result of government involvement.
Just look at the entire starliner debacle, in any truly free market Boeing would have been fired as a vendor years ago. They were (and are) way behind schedule, their unmanned demo flight was a failure, they still went forward with a manned flight which has been an abject failure -- the crew is on month three of what was supposed to be a 3 hour^W^W9 day tour. They might not be coming home till February. I hope they have someone watering their plants.
The government approved the merger.
The government allowed Boeing to run with minimal FAA oversight.
I'm speaking of their commercial aviation side, not the military/space stuff.
I agree with both of your points, the government should never have allowed the McDonnell Douglas merger (I assume that's what you mean) and I can't possibly agree more that the FAA's "self certification" regime was a hilariously bad concept which was made worse by their implementation.
The government hasn't been involved, that's the problem. We elected people who want to deregulate everything and this is what we get.
This is also a problem of incentives:If you can roll your dice and the only possible outcomes are:
A) you save your corporation some money while lowering reliability and fucking up safety, but you get a bonus and IF something happens you are either long gone or never held accountable
B) you do nothing, you gain nothing
Then it is clear why more people choose A. If you want management to feel what they are doing is "taking a risk", then make it really, actually risky for them. Especially if it has the potential to kill people. I am talking about significant jail time on top of losing all benefits made during the act. I am an electrical engineer. If something I am not giving my work due diligence and it ends up killing people, I go to jail. If management makes me use flammable materials to safe money and they burn down an orphanage it is a tragic accident that nobody can change, even when you have whistleblowers warning about it internally and publicly.
I constantly heard the phrase that management has to earn a lot because of the huge responsibilities they carry. If the most dire consequence to breaking those responsibilities is that you leave your job with a golden parachute, then that does not sound like it comes at a huge risk. Sure you need to be able to act like a amoral psychopath, but that is a price they are willing to pay.
This is just never going to happen. I agree with you but it's not how power structures work.
Even if there was some type of governance structure setup to do this, those CEOs would workout how to make someone else the fall guy.
The best hope we have is healthy competition, even now, I search for flight that offer AirBus.