Flight Tj610 Crashed In The Sea.

[DB]

I believe that it highlights a problem that the FAA and the NTSB for that matter have been complaining about for years.

 

Government will not fund the FAA to provide the level of support it needs to exercise its mandate correctly. They even suggested that until there was a pile of US bodies, it would never be properly funded.

 

the other problem is that the FAA's mandate isn't just regulation - it's promotion. The two thing are not obviously compatible, except of course a total failure in the first one leads to the inability to do the other.

[Nobu]

Look at how much leeway Boeing got over the rudder hardover incidents involving the 737 back in the early 90's.

 

It was not that long ago, but PR damage control is an order of magnitude more difficult now than it was then. Rest assured that whoever was running Boeing's version of it was rewarded, as the taint did not linger into the 2000s.

 

Over 400 dead in all of the incidents cited.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Yeah thats very true. Today you can have live video of a crash uploaded to facebook, from the passengers in the aircraft. Its only a matter of time before that happens, so the damage social media can do is an order of magnitude greater than the damage the rudder problems created, or going further back, Douglas's problems with the DC10 which were just as bad.

 

 

I believe that it highlights a problem that the FAA and the NTSB for that matter have been complaining about for years.

 

Government will not fund the FAA to provide the level of support it needs to exercise its mandate correctly. They even suggested that until there was a pile of US bodies, it would never be properly funded.

 

the other problem is that the FAA's mandate isn't just regulation - it's promotion. The two thing are not obviously compatible, except of course a total failure in the first one leads to the inability to do the other.

 

I believe that it highlights a problem that the FAA and the NTSB for that matter have been complaining about for years.

 

Government will not fund the FAA to provide the level of support it needs to exercise its mandate correctly. They even suggested that until there was a pile of US bodies, it would never be properly funded.

 

the other problem is that the FAA's mandate isn't just regulation - it's promotion. The two thing are not obviously compatible, except of course a total failure in the first one leads to the inability to do the other.

 

Yeah, its too close a relationship. They were actually trusting Boeing to do all the test work, and just signing off on it. Which strikes me as complete lunacy. Nobody trusts other industries to do things like that.

 

That said, the Max would probably have been going through testing around the same time as Budget sequestration was causing dire problems across Government services. I have to wonder if there is some connection.

[Nobu]

The relationship between the FAA and Boeing may also represent an indirect method by which a government can help a critical domestic corporation compete against international competition without facing WTO direct subsidy scrutiny.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Well the French seemingly thought so when the GAS came down on the ATR over icing problems. I thought it was sour grapes, but seeing how the rails were clearly greased for Boeing, perhaps not.

[Panzermann]

In the plane’s trailing vortices was greater Seattle, where the company’s famed engineering culture had taken root; where the bulk of its 40,000-plus engineers lived and worked; indeed, where the jet itself had been assembled. But it was May 2001. And Boeing’s leaders, CEO Phil Condit and President Harry Stonecipher, had decided it was time to put some distance between themselves and the people actually making the company’s planes. How much distance? This flight—a PR stunt to end the two-month contest for Boeing’s new headquarters—would reveal the answer. Once the plane was airborne, Boeing announced it would be landing at Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

 

(...)

 

The isolation was deliberate. “When the headquarters is located in proximity to a principal business—as ours was in Seattle—the corporate center is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations,” Condit explained at the time. And that statement, more than anything, captures a cardinal truth about the aerospace giant. The present 737 Max disaster can be traced back two decades—to the moment Boeing’s leadership decided to divorce itself from the firm’s own culture.

 

interesting article to what changed with Boeing the last few decades: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/

 

 

The high lords did not want to be bothered by profane daily business and engineering anymore. What could possibly go wrong?

 

 

 

(personally I think Seattle is a city I'd prefer to Chicago to live in)

Edited December 24, 2019 by Panzermann

[sunday]

Same happened to HP under Fiorina.

[Corinthian]

Finance people only know how to make money. And usually by making money they mean making cuts etc to improve profits. They don't concern themselves with making a better product. They only think of where to make cuts to make a larger profit. Add earnings reports that would increase share value in the stock market, and you get manufacturing companies run by finance peeps to be really empty suits with the manufacturing already out sourced, and gawddamn about quality control and such.

 

It should be apparent nowadays that when a manufacturing company is sold to finance institutions, the manufacturing company dies.

 

The only ones benefitting are the finance people.

[RETAC21]

Finance people only know how to make money. And usually by making money they mean making cuts etc to improve profits. They don't concern themselves with making a better product. They only think of where to make cuts to make a larger profit. Add earnings reports that would increase share value in the stock market, and you get manufacturing companies run by finance peeps to be really empty suits with the manufacturing already out sourced, and gawddamn about quality control and such.

 

It should be apparent nowadays that when a manufacturing company is sold to finance institutions, the manufacturing company dies.

 

The only ones benefitting are the finance people.

 

Finance gets the blame usually, but normally it's not the driver (disclaimer: yes, I am finance...).

 

The usual driver is the CEO and the motivator is the market - year after year he will be under pressure to deliver profits that surpass previous year's performance or The Market will take a poor view and the bears will make their appearance - so what happens when you are reaching a plateau? well, it's cost cutting time - first the CEO will cut the "fat" - the older, more expensive employees will be retired (and with them goes "experience"), then comes "divestment" (let's sell a division or two and then we will sing a deal with them to buy the same stuff cheaper - there goes quality...), then "deployment" (those guys in India also have U degrees - fire the locals and "outsource").

 

At some point all of the above won't be enough, and no CEO is going to undercut his powerbase by firing the top management yes-people, so it's time to become more "efficient" - let's take out a step or two that occasionally may be needed (for safety, for example) and fire a few more people, let's put more pressure on the teams that design/build to do more hours rather than hire new people, etc.

 

Finance just tells the story to the CEO and The Market, about how great he is, until planes start falling off the skies...

[Jeff]

Finally, WTF took so long?

 

Boeing fires CEO Dennis Muilenburg, as the company struggles with 737 Max crisis

 

The KC-46 disaster shouldn't be forgotten either. You can't blame outsider incompetence for this, he spent his entire career at Boeing as did the also ousted head of the commercial airplane unit.

[Nobu]

Plenty of blame to go around in this case, from finance, to upper corporate, to engineering. Not surprised at the delay in firing Dennis, as doing so earlier would create loss of face for those remaining.

 

Doing so the day before Christmas was intentional as well, as part of a damage control plan implemented long before today.

[RETAC21]

Finally, WTF took so long?

 

Boeing fires CEO Dennis Muilenburg, as the company struggles with 737 Max crisis

 

The KC-46 disaster shouldn't be forgotten either. You can't blame outsider incompetence for this, he spent his entire career at Boeing as did the also ousted head of the commercial airplane unit.

 

For Boeing KC-46 is not necessarily bad as Uncle Sugar is going to pick up the tab, but loss of MAX sales is disastrous.

[lucklucky]

Finally, WTF took so long?

 

Boeing fires CEO Dennis Muilenburg, as the company struggles with 737 Max crisis

 

The KC-46 disaster shouldn't be forgotten either. You can't blame outsider incompetence for this, he spent his entire career at Boeing as did the also ousted head of the commercial airplane unit.

I don't know how can outsiders be blamed for MAX disaster.

[Panzermann]

 

Finally, WTF took so long?

 

Boeing fires CEO Dennis Muilenburg, as the company struggles with 737 Max crisis

 

The KC-46 disaster shouldn't be forgotten either. You can't blame outsider incompetence for this, he spent his entire career at Boeing as did the also ousted head of the commercial airplane unit.

I don't know how can outsiders be blamed for MAX disaster.

 

 

Mulenberg is if anything only to blame how he handled the MAX issue so far, but the decision to go forth with the project and avoid the new type rating at any cost was his predecessor's doing. At least how understand the story so far.

[DB]

Well, the incremental approach to certification would have worked fine with an MCAS system that had received proper adequate safety engineering oversight.

 

The fundamental problem seems to have been that a non-safety critical system was made into one by requirements creep, without any sort of safety assessment. This might have been because the team that introduced the dangerous change did not have adequate understanding of analysis conducted when the initial MCAS design was signed off.

[Jeff]

 

 

Finally, WTF took so long?

 

Boeing fires CEO Dennis Muilenburg, as the company struggles with 737 Max crisis

 

The KC-46 disaster shouldn't be forgotten either. You can't blame outsider incompetence for this, he spent his entire career at Boeing as did the also ousted head of the commercial airplane unit.

I don't know how can outsiders be blamed for MAX disaster.

 

 

Mulenberg is if anything only to blame how he handled the MAX issue so far, but the decision to go forth with the project and avoid the new type rating at any cost was his predecessor's doing. At least how understand the story so far.

 

 

He didn't just fall off the turnip truck and become CEO, he was in upper management for years beforehand and then did nothing to identify and solve the problem and then screwed the response.

 

As for Lucky's response, often corporations will bring in "new blood" from outside the company and when things go TU they blame the fact that the new guy didn't understand how things worked in the company. Muilenburg has been there for 30 years climbing up the corporate ladder all the while Boeing has been forgetting how to build safe, reliable airplanes. He was a symbol of a culture that had taken Boeing off track. A good CEO would have noticed that and made changes before the thing crashed into the ground, so to speak.

[DB]

 

He didn't just fall off the turnip truck and become CEO, he was in upper management for years beforehand and then did nothing to identify and solve the problem and then screwed the response.

 

As for Lucky's response, often corporations will bring in "new blood" from outside the company and when things go TU they blame the fact that the new guy didn't understand how things worked in the company. Muilenburg has been there for 30 years climbing up the corporate ladder all the while Boeing has been forgetting how to build safe, reliable airplanes. He was a symbol of a culture that had taken Boeing off track. A good CEO would have noticed that and made changes before the thing crashed into the ground, so to speak.

 

A look at Muilenburg's project history on wikipedia, although incomplete, shows the following projects

 

X-32 - the ugliest aircraft that wasn't built by Blackburn, lost the competition with the F-35

YAL-1A - cancelled programme, never really needed to demonstrate that it met its requirements.

High Speed Civil Transport - No metal cut.

Condor unmanned reconnaissance aircraft - never used except to fail to properly win a world altitude record.

 

I omitted the F-22 involvement, because that was Lockheed's programme.

 

So, which successful Boeing programmes did he have a direct involvement with?

[LT Ducky]

Just a random comment on the 737 MAX - a friend of mine upgraded from the 737 to the 767 a little over a year ago so she could fly international - last 737 variant she flew was the MAX and said it was a great airplane.

[RETAC21]

Just a random comment on the 737 MAX - a friend of mine upgraded from the 737 to the 767 a little over a year ago so she could fly international - last 737 variant she flew was the MAX and said it was a great airplane.

 

Until MCAS takes control away at low altitude... :/

[Jeff]

 

 

He didn't just fall off the turnip truck and become CEO, he was in upper management for years beforehand and then did nothing to identify and solve the problem and then screwed the response.

 

As for Lucky's response, often corporations will bring in "new blood" from outside the company and when things go TU they blame the fact that the new guy didn't understand how things worked in the company. Muilenburg has been there for 30 years climbing up the corporate ladder all the while Boeing has been forgetting how to build safe, reliable airplanes. He was a symbol of a culture that had taken Boeing off track. A good CEO would have noticed that and made changes before the thing crashed into the ground, so to speak.

 

A look at Muilenburg's project history on wikipedia, although incomplete, shows the following projects

 

X-32 - the ugliest aircraft that wasn't built by Blackburn, lost the competition with the F-35

YAL-1A - cancelled programme, never really needed to demonstrate that it met its requirements.

High Speed Civil Transport - No metal cut.

Condor unmanned reconnaissance aircraft - never used except to fail to properly win a world altitude record.

 

I omitted the F-22 involvement, because that was Lockheed's programme.

 

So, which successful Boeing programmes did he have a direct involvement with?

 

 

Looks like none. Being CEO means more than managing the decline, well, it used to.

[Nobu]

In his favor, I believe Dennis may have overseen the successful damage control effort regarding battery issues with Dreamliners supplied to Boeing primary customers ANA and JAL a few years ago.

 

Other than that, his corporate rise may have had much less to do with engineering genius and more to do with how to win friends and influence people in various zaibatsu-like ways.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Just think of Boeing as competition in the US to keep them honest. Convair, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, all bust, bought out, or left the airliner market.

Boeing got too big to fail, but that clearly isn't stopping it.

Edited December 26, 2019 by Stuart Galbraith

[lucklucky]

 

 

 

Finally, WTF took so long?

 

Boeing fires CEO Dennis Muilenburg, as the company struggles with 737 Max crisis

 

The KC-46 disaster shouldn't be forgotten either. You can't blame outsider incompetence for this, he spent his entire career at Boeing as did the also ousted head of the commercial airplane unit.

I don't know how can outsiders be blamed for MAX disaster.

 

 

Mulenberg is if anything only to blame how he handled the MAX issue so far, but the decision to go forth with the project and avoid the new type rating at any cost was his predecessor's doing. At least how understand the story so far.

 

 

He didn't just fall off the turnip truck and become CEO, he was in upper management for years beforehand and then did nothing to identify and solve the problem and then screwed the response.

 

As for Lucky's response, often corporations will bring in "new blood" from outside the company and when things go TU they blame the fact that the new guy didn't understand how things worked in the company. Muilenburg has been there for 30 years climbing up the corporate ladder all the while Boeing has been forgetting how to build safe, reliable airplanes. He was a symbol of a culture that had taken Boeing off track. A good CEO would have noticed that and made changes before the thing crashed into the ground, so to speak.

 

Got it, I had read your post as if the KC-46 was an house problem and MAX was an outside source problem. Yes Muilenburg is small in a culture that has significant problems. But is ineptitude is how he could not predict the future: he keep the model production on high level and now it had to stop. That tells me he was just convinced it wasn't a big deal.

 

We also should keep in mind that 50 years ago Boeing was one of the top companies in US, today there are several times bigger competition for talent.

 

[Panzermann]

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-documents-sent-to-house-committee-called-very-disturbing/

 

 

“Boeing contacted the House Transportation Committee December 23rd in the late evening to transmit previously undisclosed documents related to the 737 MAX,” committee spokeswoman Kerry Arndt said in an email Tuesday.

(...)

 

Boeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe, in an email, said, “Boeing proactively brought these communications to the FAA and Congress as part of our commitment to transparency with our regulators and the oversight committees.

 

As with prior documents referenced by the committee, the tone and content of some of these communications does not reflect the company we are and need to be.”

 

Johndroe added, “We have made significant changes as a company in the past nine months to enhance our safety processes, organizations, and culture.”(...)

on the evening of the 23rd. Must be really bad if they sneak them in on this date.

Edited December 26, 2019 by Panzermann

[Nobu]

I would not be surprised if the release was timed to coincide with the House Transportation Committee's holiday party. Such details are where promotions to lower management grow.