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Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

reuters.com

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Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#121

Post by gonehome »

devit wrote: post #11

Why isn't it enough to retrofit all past and future models with enough hardware redundancy and create a properly written MCAS software? Wasn't the design sound, except for the lack of hardware sensor redundancy and naively written software? Why do they need to stop production and so on?

I’d guess lack of trust at this point - they lied and denied responsibility for a while when the crashes happened.

They seem to have some serious cultural issues, I wouldn’t trust them to do the job correctly. I’d suspect in the end what your suggesting is probably what’ll happen.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#122

Post by xtracto »

oska wrote: post #94
JetBen wrote: post #62

I'm really glad to see that there is at least some type of corporate accountability going on for so many people dying. This probably should have happened sooner.

Quoting from the Code of Hammurabi (Ancient Babylon): > If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. There's real accountability for you. Corporate accountability these days is a sick joke.

Specially since the actual people that was ultimately responsible for the things that happened is the Board of Directors.

Everybody here in Hacker News who has had some relation with a company board knows that the real decisions are done at the board level. The board is the one that ultimately decides the strategy to follow, whether to be pure profit seeking, quality seeking, etc.

The CEO can bring his humanity-responsible strategy to the quarterly meetings, but if the board does not agree, he is SOL. If this happens a lot with "cofounder CEOs" who have big chunks of company ownership, of course it also happens with a hired CEO, who has extremely little leverage with the board.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#123

Post by masklinn »

_ph_ wrote: post #78
CodeSheikh wrote: post #54

Why don't they just kill the 737 MAX program and start on another aircraft? As a consumer it will build confidence and trust in me.

Because it will take on the order of 10 years. What are the 737 customers going to fly in the mean time? Keeping old airplanes flying longer isn't exactly increasing security either. And there is no indication so far, that a 737 MAX with a fixed MCAS isn't safe. Don't get me wrong: I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP. But until it is done, there is a need for a current…

> And there is no indication so far, that a 737 MAX with a fixed MCAS isn't safe.

At this point, that plane has no goodwill whatsoever left to it. The onus is on it proving that it's safe, not on its critics proving it's unsafe, because the only sensible assumption is that it's not safe and that Boeing does not and ill not self-regulate (big duh).

> I think Boeing should have created a true 737 successor long ago and should do ASAP

They announced that back in 2014, and probably several times beforehand.

Issue is demand has seen Boeing push the 737 into 757 territory (years after the 757 got cancelled), it's not that they haven't created a 737 successor it's that their customers don't want a 737 successor, they want 737s so they can just buy the frames and put existing crew on the new plane without retraining.

That's what the 737 MAX is about, and why it's broken. It's the 4th generation of 737 (original, Classic, Next Generation) and the frame can't take it anymore, but 737s is what e.g. Southwest want, because that's literally the only thing they fly.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#124

Post by panarky »

the_duke wrote: post #116
v77 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Times article was the last straw, you know the board members all read that. Plus the space launch failure.

That's rarely how these things work. Most likely some PR firm working for Boeing fed some hints to the the Times. Boeing then waited until it was released to have a coordinated PR push and put as much blame as possible on Muilenburg.

The NYT article relies mostly on named sources, not anonymous sources. So it doesn't seem to be intentionally leaked information.

And the board looks horrible, slow to act, behind the curve, reacting to external pressure instead of leading. So it would not be in the board's interest to do a "coordinated PR push" and fire Muilenburg after the stories were published.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#125

Post by gist »

jonnypotty wrote: post #6

Watched an aljazira documentary about falling standards at a Boeing factory a couple of years ago and been waiting to see if something like this would happen. Now they're gonna sacrifice a lamb, keep same corporate struture and philosophy, keep on making billions, remember to appologise even more next time.

Documentaries are interesting to watch but by design they are one sided and are typically slanted toward a particular point of view in a big way. This doesn't make them wrong but it's not like they are some rigorous presentation of facts.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#126

Post by dopylitty »

JetBen wrote: post #62

I'm really glad to see that there is at least some type of corporate accountability going on for so many people dying. This probably should have happened sooner.

Corporate accountability would mean finding the people who value profit above quality and removing them from positions of power. I doubt the engineer with a 34 year career at Boeing falls into that camp. He's a fall guy for the board who put him into an impossible position.

The problems with Boeing are systemic problems with the way corporations work and the economy is structured.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#127

Post by solatic »

panarky wrote: post #95
solatic wrote: post #4

After both The Economist[1] and The New York Times [2] publicly undermined faith in Dennis Muilenberg. No question at this point that he needed to be replaced. The question is - why didn't the board act sooner? [1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/18/boeings-misplac... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/business/boeing-dennis-mu...

The NYT story in particular was hard-hitting and well sourced. Gotta wonder if these stories influenced the board to act now. It's a bad look, because Boeing is consistently way too late to recognize what is obvious to those of us watching from home. I continue to be astounded that our most senior leaders will not act in the long-term best interest of the organizations they lead. It's been 37 years since the Tylenol…

The Tylenol crisis is basically the case study for how to handle a corporate crisis. If you get an MBA without having come across it, you should ask for your money back.

> Why can't today's leaders think a little bigger, and optimize for the long term even if that has an immediate cost?

I'm not sure it's so simple. At the head of the Boeing bureaucracy, Dennis Muilenberg likely was being fed a diet of wrong and horrible information from lower executives keen on deflecting blame so that they could keep their jobs. He was ineffective because he accepted it and pushed it outward - to the board and the wider public - rather than challenging it and getting to the bottom of the crisis. Internally challenging the members of your organization during a crisis is incredibly politically difficult to pull off and has little to do with short-term vs. long-term perspectives. Of course, someone with his experience and compensation, working at his level, should be able to pull it off. He didn't.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#128

Post by throwno »

doteka wrote: post #117
throwno wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, recently Boeing has made major strides on diversity and inclusion. >Boeing has made diversity and inclusion a strategic priority — and external validators have taken notice. On May 7, it was announced that Boeing ranked 32nd out of more than 1,800 companies that participated in DiversityInc’s 2019 Top 50 Companies for Diversity survey > https://www.boeing.com/features/2019/05/diversityinc-top-50-..…

You're probably trolling but just in case - their planes not killing passengers is somewhat more important to society than the diversity of their hiring practices.

The point was moving their production out of an area controlled by corrupt whites allowed them to create a more inclusive workforce. The unfortunate tragedies due to poor pilot training in the developing world are orthogonal.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#129

Post by mpweiher »

PaulHoule wrote: post #77
dclowd9901 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way they're going to develop a completely new plane. It may have new branding, but it's going to be a 737 at the bones. Since when has the airline industry ever considered passenger misery?

The 737 faces competition from a few directions. First of all, smaller planes such as the A320 and E195 feel bigger inside than the 737 does. It's like the difference between the "boat of car" from American manufacturers to the Japanese cars that were small on the outside but big on the inside. If you just want a low-cost plane at the A320 level of technology, China is coming online with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

> First of all, smaller planes such as the A320

I was going to go all "what do you mean, smaller??? ... surely you mean the A220", but had to good sense to look it up and you are right, the A320 Neo is actually a tad smaller than, for example, the 737-800. Also lighter.

Just carries more passengers a longer distance faster with slightly wider seats.

Hmm..

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#130

Post by rumanator »

ceejayoz wrote: post #10

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline... > Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries. > Less than a month after the crash of the second 737 Max jet, Boeing called North Charleston employees to an urgent meeting. The company…

> Turns out trying to squash the unions by moving to a different state helps show why the unions existed...

Could you point out where you see a link between unions and the poor quality control that was observed in the plant?

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