The US plane giant is under pressure from regulators and airlines, and its reputation is badly damaged.
"It's as if I'm watching a troubled child" is how Captain Dennis Tajer describes flying a Boeing 737 Max.
"The culture at Boeing has been toxic to trust for over a decade now," (Adam Dickson, a former senior manager at Boeing) says.
Five years ago Boeing faced one of the biggest scandals in its history, after two brand new 737 Max planes were lost in almost identical accidents that cost 346 lives.
The cause was flawed flight control software, details of which it was accused of deliberately concealing from regulators.
Meanwhile, further evidence of how production problems could endanger safety emerged this week.
The FAA warned that improperly installed wiring bundles on 737 Max planes could become damaged, leading to controls on the wings deploying unexpectedly, and making the aircraft start to roll.
If not addressed, it said, this "could result in loss of control of the airplane". Hundreds of planes already in service will have to be checked as a result.
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.
Reputational damage is almost negligible in the modern market. Market capture in most hard-good industries, especially specialized industries like aerospace, is complete enough that you have very few options - sure, you could just not buy a Boeing airliner for your airline, but you have exactly two choices in large aircraft, and it's not like production is easily-scalable.
Objectively? In a lot of trouble. Real world, though? They are one of the largest companies that feeds/works for the American Military Weapons Complex plus they are also among the largest lobbying/donors of the Federal Government. Just behind pharma.
I'd say no trouble at all. They should be sweating drops but they are not. Like you said, huge company with a "handle shit" budget. Am fully expecting nothing will happen and if they get sued they will settle outside of court, like they did with 737MAX issue. And problem solved.
The real world has a habit of catching up even to the biggest budgets.
My suspicion of what is currently going inside the company is that an army of consultants are going through every inch trying to produce reports of how to improve the "processes" to avoid such future incidents. However the percentage of change that will be implemented is only as big as management's willingness to upset current stakeholders including itself. So unlikely to be very big.
I would expect a continuous decline with ever-decreasing new orders from airlines - fire sales to attract new customers, reduced investment because of declining revenues etc.
The government titty will keep them operating for a while though - or at least until their incompetence embarrasses the government/army sufficiently.
That is where this will fuck Boeing, you can buy regulators for having the side of your plane fall off in flight, or an Auto piolet that loves to use the lithobreak, but don't fuck with the US military contracting system. The DOD contracts for things with very specific and some times stupid standards, but they get exactly what you paid for or else.
Likely not a all... The only chance these behemoth companies get punished is by the public turning on them but they have already insulated themselves from that (most people would not know how to avoid their planes when booking the next vacation on Expedia)
In a properly working environment, even a Capitalist one, the government should intervene, jail the board, and either nationalize it or auction it off for parts... The most important part is really the jailing of the board
Boeing and the american government are too deep in bed. Nothing significant will happen. Maybe a few executives get fired just to satisfy the demands for action.
In fact the american government will likely bail the company out when things take a dive (their stock as well as their aircraft).
Even if Boeing doesn't face any real consequences, I hope airlines take this time to just go full Airbus even if it's out of fear from future litigation and not inherent customer safety. Airbus should also jump on this opportunity and offer some good deals for actual functioning and safety tested aircraft.
The main issue is that Airbus has a huge backlog for their aircraft which continues to grow. They're slowly adding more capacity, but not nearly fast enough to satisfy their current demand, let alone what additional customers would bring.
By what measure is it a much smaller company? By planes sold it appears negligible: between 2007 and 2016 Airbus delivered 5,644 and Boeing delivered 5,718, for a difference of 74. In terms of market share they're roughly equivalent in twin-aisle jets and Airbus has a significant lead in single-aisle jets (for obvious reasons).
Also, put an end to their union busting garbage. Then quality that they were known for was established when all of their labor was done by well-compensated union labor, instead of outsourcing to get around union contracts.
The founder, William Boeing, was a a white segregationist, active against mixed racial marriages, believed in the pure white blood and shit. His parents were Austrian/ German, Böing. America, the land of opportunity.
Sure, and Henry Ford was an out-and-out antisemite who published a newspaper where he serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Hitler kept a photo of him on his desk.
That doesn't mean we should expect Ford cars to fall apart on the road.
It's way too late to be pissed off about William Boeing or Henry Ford. Or Hugo Boss or Ferdinand Porsche, who directly worked with the Nazis.
Henry Ford is also the reason kids learn square dancing in school. I actually had to learn how to dance like a hillbilly in gym class because some long-dead antisemite was once convinced that jazz music and the Charleston (read: black people and anything cultural that they contribute) would corrupt the youth, who could only be saved by the purity of barnyard dancing.
I don't know how this contributes to the conversation at hand, but I think about it a lot.
Be that as it may, Boeing himself was a stickler for quality and set a vision of quality and excellence that made Boeing aircraft some of the safest in the fleet, up until their merger with McDonnell Douglas. It was said he'd rather go out of business than ship a shoddy product.
The corporation isn't the person. That's sort of the point.
That has little to nothing to do with the current state of affairs at Boeing. The current situation was brought about by the merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, with the MDD executives joining Boeing's board of directors and continuing the same shitty behaviour. Eg, with the MD-10 and its cargo door, the issue was raised at design stage, denied until after 2 massive fatal accidents occurred, and then they tried to get around it with "gentleman's agreements" with the FAA - just like with the MCAS issue on the 737 MAX.
The problems can be pinned down to a very small number of executives, who belong in prison.
Are you asserting 737 Max issues and the latency to mechanically resolve them is caused by a family legacy of white supremacy haunting the board rooms of present day Boeing HQ?
Because I otherwise don't see your point in the context of this article and news.
I had the pleasure of interviewing several engineers from Boeing with PhDs and almost the worst interviews ever. Very awkward interviews and possibly the worst in person interview ever.
How can a PhD engineer fail an interview among barely junior engineers? And fail it so badly that it officially became our worse interview ever?
This person also had the audacity to call back and several times to demand to be interviewed again. During the interview I would ask simple engineering questions like "can you elaborate on F=ma" and the guy, instead of giving a straight answer "it's the relationship between the force applied to a mass and the acceleration achieved" he would go in these crazy ass rants about stuff I can't repeat and can't remember. You know the stuff very well...like when your wife, husband or life partner starts talking to you about your mom and you love your mom so you shut down the listening port on your brain. Just ehem and uhumed the rest of the interview. It was bad. It was so bad that the junior engineers told me it was bad. Usually they hold judgment out of respect.
Be careful what you wish for. Some of the most likely contenders are Lockheed, Raytheon, and a few other military contractors that haven't broken into the civilian market yet.
Not really. The most likely contenders I could see now are Embraer and Comac (Chinese aircraft manufacturer). A few years ago Bombardier could have been a very likely contender, but not today.
I could see Lockheed and Raytheon entering the civilian market only if the demand on the military side starts drying up, which in this climate I find doubtful.