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FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

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Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#361

Post by mihaaly »

akira2501 wrote: post #145
AdrianB1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is correct. However MDD was manufacturing key military products (F-15, F-18) and it was doing bad financially, going bankrupt and jeopardizing the fighter plane production and maintenance was a "national security" problem that forced the Boeing acquisition of MDD.

Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned off and other investors given an opportunity to create new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into another company and then keeping the management that created the problem in the first place is astronomically dumb.

What is even weirder to me is how could you be key manufacturer, go bankrupt, cause forcing a merger, then being promoted to Boeing to 'carry on!' ...

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#362

Post by czl »

delusional wrote: post #255
ethbr1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with breaking up Boeing is Airbus. Nowadays, to realistically restore competiveness in an industry, you'd have to coordinate a worldwide breakup of similarly-integrated competitors.

Is the argument here that it's more economically viable to run a plane building company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky? Naively, it would seem to me to be a bad business decision to design aero planes that can't fly, but what do I know.

> it's more economically viable to run a plane building company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky?

Business school may say if your product never fails perhaps you are overspending on it and some known small failure rate is acceptable to control costs to have better profits. Boeing leadership may have took that logic and applied it to airplanes.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#363

Post by jnsaff2 »

mrandish wrote: post #35
intunderflow wrote: post #2

At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft. I would not be surprised though if Boeing's sales drop if the US government brings in tariffs or etc to try and force companies to buy their flying coffins.

> At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft. Prior to new models released in the last ~10yrs-ish, Boeing made the safest planes in the sky (as measured by passenger miles). Many of those planes are still flying and still doing great. For me the interesting question is what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes which is apparently resulting in worse safety performance…

787 program:

- designed to outsource most manufacturing to the lowest bidder, many program management problems, overruns and delays

- to bust unions new factory was created in South Carolina and this has very poor QC, there are rumors that a certain large middle eastern airline refuses to accept any planes assembled there

737 program:

- they decided that they are not going to do a clean sheet 737NG and use the existing platform to put on new engines and do other modernization. They did it the cheap way and tried to paper over problems in software to make sure that their biggest customers would not need to send their pilots through extra training. Killed hundreds already.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#364

Post by samtho »

23B1 wrote: post #284
samtho wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement pointing out that it’s a manufacturing error (I’m guessing) was not intended to be solution to the problem. It pointed out that those problems have less to do the certification of the design and more to do with a manufacturing defect. If the manufacturer created parts that were up to specifications, these things would have not been a problem. This is a very important distinction because a design flaw is…

Why exactly should we "exercise restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems"?

When we reduce complicated problems down to inaccurate trivial ones by stripping out important details and nuance, we end up with a caricature of the original - one that easily devolves into a to strawman argument to serve someone’s point. This new representation masquerading as the original can carry the same weight as the one it was based off of.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#365

Post by mattmaroon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #240
akira2501 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned off and other investors given an opportunity to create new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into another company and then keeping the management that created the problem in the first place is astronomically dumb.

> Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." We massively drew down defence spending at the end of the Cold War.

Umm, no we didn’t. We spent less as a percentage of GDP. But total spending barely shrank by the late 90’s. We hadn’t even started to shift spending away from piloted jets by then either.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#366

Post by hadrien01 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #186
whycome wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we had an updated remake of Airplane! that uses this line. THere's so much room for good political satire but it seems like it's not being made.

I believe the above is actually a paraphrase of Jim Jefferies’s bit about the difference between Australian and American airport security actually.

The sketch in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyqBZBC3RbY

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#368

Post by dclowd9901 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #240
akira2501 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned off and other investors given an opportunity to create new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into another company and then keeping the management that created the problem in the first place is astronomically dumb.

> Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." We massively drew down defence spending at the end of the Cold War.

I almost couldn’t believe this statement so I looked it up. Sure enough you’re correct. As a factor of GDP, it dropped by about half.

Incidentally, however, as a factor of gdp, it had gone down 50% since the Korean War before that too.

I think all this means is that military spending isn’t outpacing gdp growth (a good thing) rather than we’re actually cutting spending.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#369

Post by classichasclass »

thinkerswell wrote: post #321
classichasclass wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collabra, per jwz. See "groupware bad" (not direct linking in case he still has the referer block up).

Is Collabora not a good product?

Not Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator. It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future development of the browser suite.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#370

Post by JonChesterfield »

iancmceachern wrote: post #359
JonChesterfield wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so excited for the SV move fast and break things philosophy applied to commercial aircraft. Control software via javascript, make lots of it out of lithium for the ecological branding, don't bother with pilots. Going to be very exciting.

I'm actually saying the opposite. I'm saying instead of that (boom, etc) we should just make another commercial airplane company that makes regular planes, safely, in a normal way. You and I are agreeing...

Yeah, I'm poking fun at the modern US engineering model.

Actually fixing the problem is much harder. It probably goes something like aggressively fire everyone at Boeing who looks vaguely associated with management and reconstitute it as a division of some company that seems to know how to build things that work.

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