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Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

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Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#41

Post by nabdab »

briandear wrote: post #6
platz wrote: post #2

> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we…

It’s a hyperbolic statement. Boeing employees and engineers also fly on those planes with their families. It isn’t like they are making decisions with the intent of compromising safety.

> It isn’t like they are making decisions with the intent of compromising safety.

That really is actually exactly what they did and are doing. When you don’t do tests because you are confident something will pass, that doesn’t change that you aren’t testing, and you are compromising quality on the basis of productivity. Here Boeing decided to go against the safe practice because that would have classified the plane as a different plane and incurred huge costs, but it would have increased safety and likely avoided the accidents.

They did compromise safety, they did so thinking that it wouldn’t matter because the overall safety would be good enough for no one to notice, but that gamble failed and others paid their lives to cover the bet.

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#42

Post by brojonat »

platz wrote: post #2

> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we…

> Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives

To play devil's advocate, this isn't a moral statement. The author is saying this is true based on actual events.

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#43

Post by j1vms »

pavlov wrote: post #23

> To this day, industry insiders still joke, “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.” That's commonly said about the Apple-NeXT acquisition too — NeXT paid a negative $429 million to take over Apple. Obviously the results were much different there...

> > To this day, industry insiders still joke, “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.”

> That's commonly said about the Apple-NeXT acquisition too — NeXT paid a negative $429 million to take over Apple. (...)

I guess that is why it is considered a joke. It sounds like the management teams of NeXT / McDonnell Douglas benefited much more (in the long term) than the investors of their defunct, purchased companies. Benefiting through greater compensation and clout without really taking over (i.e. owning) the purchasor's company.

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#44

Post by jl2718 »

Note two contradictory popular trends: 1. AI is going to replace cheap labor 2. Engineering companies are outsourcing because of cheap labor

The reality is that trend #2 is orders of magnitude larger. Any reversal of that by ‘AI’ would be the biggest jobs boom in decades for western nations, and according to this article, would increase quality and therefore trade balance as well.

The other reality is that manufacturing automation with ‘AI’ is hard, takes a lot of human effort, and is a huge part of a company’s value (e.g. Tesla). Outsourcing is often selling off this value at a negative price. It is done because Wall St analysts don’t know how to price this asset.

Like it or love it, it is investment analysts that determine company culture. The good thing is that they are greedy; they may be misinformed, but they are predictable. Everything above liquidation value is held in the heads of the employees of the company. Its actually not that hard to compute, and if business schools taught this, corporate behavior would change.

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#45

Post by hannasanarion »

jquery wrote: post #37
hannasanarion wrote: post #8

Silly corporations, pursuing profit instead of the good of everyone. Why would we expect any corporation to cut corners to improve profits, which is definitely not what private for-profit corporations are explicitly organized to accomplish? What a weird thing that nobody could have predicted. Really tickles my nose. Makes me want to sneeze actually. aaaa AAAA AAAAAACHSEIZETHEMEANSOFPRODUCTION that was a weird one, so…

Are there any nationalized airplane manufacturers with a better safety record than Boeing?

Nationalization isn't the only type of worker control.

What if Boeing's CEO was elected by people who work for the company, instead of by rich board members with profit interest and no expertise? (making this kind of worker-democracy corporate governance the norm is a long-term goal of the Sanders plan)

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#46

Post by platz »

brojonat wrote: post #42
platz wrote: post #2

> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we…

> Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives To play devil's advocate, this isn't a moral statement. The author is saying this is true based on actual events.

It's retroactively true with knowledge current events, but does not answer the question 'Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas?' at that point in history with respect to "at the expense of human lives"

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#47

Post by briandear »

briandear wrote: post #6
platz wrote: post #2

> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we…

It’s a hyperbolic statement. Boeing employees and engineers also fly on those planes with their families. It isn’t like they are making decisions with the intent of compromising safety.

My comment is being misread — I said they don’t make decisions with the intent to compromise safety. I am not defending the decisions, but they aren’t actively trying to make unsafe planes in order to save money. It isn’t like they are doing what some car makers did where they judged the expense of a recall as cheaper than the litigation from deaths.

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#48

Post by Enginerrrd »

TylerE wrote: post #19
nyolfen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have quite the video for you (timestamped, but the whole thing is worth watching): https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?t=2499

Seems like a totally unbiased source. /s I mean, do you really not understand how that sort of thing is done? They ask 100 people and then edit it down to the 5 most extreme responses.

While I always remain skeptical, they said that they asked 15 and 10/15 wouldn't fly on it.

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#49

Post by jl2718 »

solatic wrote: post #30

> In the case of information technology-related manufacturing, research, development, and marketing are the most profitable areas to specialize. Fabricating the units and linking critical components is a low-margin race to the bottom. Inspired by this theory, companies like Boeing aim to specialize in high-margin activities and outsource the rest. This is the core point which the author seems to be trying to make, th…

There are different kinds of outsourcing. One is where a subcontractor has an existing and superior product, which incurs integration cost, but results in a superior product. The other is exporting a core competence to an inexperienced subcontractor for less cost, which incurs training costs, integration costs, loss of intellectual capital, logistics loss, and results in an inferior product.

Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company

#50

Post by angry_octet »

sqldba wrote: post #13
dmix wrote: post #3

Has anyone considered that the MCAS bug was just simply nasty and difficult to detect in their simulator? It’s easy to look back with retrospect and make sweeping judgements about the entire company and the FAA. But fundamentally this was all over, as the author mentions, a single software bug and a lack of backup sensors to offset the risk. In addition it was the technical pilots who asked for the stick to be harder…

The article is not a complete overview of the situation. For that we go to Wiki. "Boeing considered MCAS part of the flight control system, and elected to not describe it in the flight manual or in training materials." It... "could not be overridden by pilot resistance against the control wheel as on previous versions of the 737." "Following the Lion Air accident, Boeing issued an Operations Manual Bulletin (OMB)[13]…

Agreed. There is a key part of the regulatory system which has not happened yet, which is deterrence. People need to suffer serious personal consequences for dereliction and cover-up, including criminal liability. In fact, the post Lion crash cover-up should perhaps be punished more severely than the decision to leave known risks (AoA sensor failure, inability to override) untreated.
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