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Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

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Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#91

Post by kerouac999 »

I grew up in the Seattle area, and Boeing's move of all the executives to Chicago always seemed crazy.

You have these massive manufacturing plants, including the worlds largest building, and tons of aircraft engineering talent built over 100 years in Everett. On the other hand, all of the executives are 2000 miles away? How on earth do they keep an eye on what's going on? The answer apparently is that they don't!

Also, they have been trying to move more manufacturing to South Carolina to avoid paying union wages... but again, there's over a century of experience building aircraft in the Puget Sound, and you can't easily replicate that elsewhere. There were constant stories of aircraft assembled in South Carolina being shipped to Everett where all of the work had to be redone, because everything was done wrong the first time.

Would you feel safe flying in a plane like that? You just have to hope the Everett workers caught everything the South Carolina workers screwed up.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#92

Post by bobthepanda »

ta8645 wrote: post #84
dylan604 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also looking over the fact that the purchasers really Really REALLY wanted this plane, and Boeing knew this. The fact that it was being sold as an in kind upgrade so no new training was required was a H. U. G. E. part of the decision to purchase. There was a helluva sales pitch with that fact on top of the fuel savings. I'm guessing there's a lot of bar lowering that the airlines would have been willing to acc…

Regardless, it would seem prudent to give yourself flexibility to react to such a compromised safety record. You can always still go through with the purchase if it makes sense. It just seems to me the airline lawyers failed to protect their interests, when agreeing to these purchase contracts.

Neither Boeing nor Airbus would actually sign such a thing, and above all else the reason the airlines are buying planes is because they need one.

The older models are also now out of production.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#93

Post by bobthepanda »

joe_the_user wrote: post #68
mcv wrote: post #34

Here's what I don't understand: the 737 MAX was introduced in 2017. In 2018, two of them dropped out of the sky, the grounded for a while, it turned out Boeing had lost its engineering culture and its priority for safety, and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software. And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever. Why? Why…

Basically, the MAX has sold well for the reason that Microsoft Office has sold well. It had a set of features that airlines needed even if it was kind of junk overall; it was "backward compatible" with earlier 737 models and it saved a lot of gas compared to them. The backward compatibility was key since it save a lot of further money that would otherwise be needed for retraining and retesting (Airbus had a gas savin…

a320neo does not need retraining if you already fly the a320, it just needs retraining if your pilots only know how to fly the older 737s

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#94

Post by Swenrekcah »

fsckboy wrote: post #71
mcv wrote: post #34

Here's what I don't understand: the 737 MAX was introduced in 2017. In 2018, two of them dropped out of the sky, the grounded for a while, it turned out Boeing had lost its engineering culture and its priority for safety, and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software. And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever. Why? Why…

> the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever... WHY? in most industries, the fat part of the market is the lower end, so your smallest cheapest product is your biggest seller. McDonalds sells more regular hamburgers than they do Big Macs. BMW sells more 3 series than they do 7 series. There are many other factors that go into selecting the brand of the next plane you buy than simply "zomg they made a mistake". B…

The door plug falling out is a mistake. The MCAS crashes were caused by criminal negligence and outright fraud driven by money concerns.

The plane may be OK after the fixes and now when the pilots are no longer (?) being actively misled by Boeing, so perhaps no need to scrap the whole fleet.

But MCAS was not a “software problem”.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#95

Post by lovecg »

mastercheif wrote: post #65
breadwinner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really that cheap? 737 MAX uses 20% less fuel. Incidentally, this fuel-efficient design is what lead to the design defect. The fuel efficiency is thanks to larger engine (larger engines burn hotter and use less fuel). To make the larger engine fit under the wing without raising the fuselage, they had to reposition the engine forward. This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when acce…

> This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when accelerating quickly (and this can cause stall) and they fixed this defect using software to push the nose down. MCAS was not intended to be an anti-stall system. The only purpose of MCAS was to have the 737 MAX exactly mimick the 737 NG's (previous gen) pitch dynamics so that airlines wouldn't have to retrain their pilots on the 737 MAX. Comme…

The biggest WTF to me is hiding the existence of this system from the pilots, even after the first crash. All in service of pretending that it’s exactly the same airplane as 737 NG.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#96

Post by tomoyoirl »

breadwinner wrote: post #57
mcv wrote: post #34

Here's what I don't understand: the 737 MAX was introduced in 2017. In 2018, two of them dropped out of the sky, the grounded for a while, it turned out Boeing had lost its engineering culture and its priority for safety, and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software. And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever. Why? Why…

> Is it really that cheap? 737 MAX uses 20% less fuel. Incidentally, this fuel-efficient design is what lead to the design defect. The fuel efficiency is thanks to larger engine (larger engines burn hotter and use less fuel). To make the larger engine fit under the wing without raising the fuselage, they had to reposition the engine forward. This forward-positioning of the engine causes the nose to pitch up when acce…

20% fuel savings is massive. At that point your safety evaluations need to consider the safety tradeoffs that arise because people decided to drive cars instead of flying, and died on the highway.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#97

Post by Aeolun »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #75

I feel like this pattern occurs in too many companies across all sectors: 1. Company is product-quality focused 2. Beats competition and creates mini-monopoly 3. Sales becomes somewhat inelastic to changes in quality 4. This leads "cost-cutting" and marketing focused execs/decision making to beat out product quality execs/decision making 5. Company's product quality takes predictable linear path to the bottom

I feel like this is ameliorated somewhat by having the original founder at the helm?

Of course that’s not a guarantee either as they’re liable to take a few billion and run off into the sunset.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#98

Post by Aeolun »

dylan604 wrote: post #50
mcv wrote: post #34

Here's what I don't understand: the 737 MAX was introduced in 2017. In 2018, two of them dropped out of the sky, the grounded for a while, it turned out Boeing had lost its engineering culture and its priority for safety, and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software. And according to this article, the 737 MAX is Boeing's best selling plane ever. Why? Why…

I'm guessing a lot of the purchase orders were placed well before the MCAS incidents occurred. These purchases tend to be contract based, and not something you can just leave with the cashier when you suddenly decide not to purchase them. So you're contractually obligated to spend the money, so might as well get a plane out of it and hope for the best

I’d imagine the plane you are primed to buy dropping out of the sky due to engineering malpractice to be a reason to re-evaluate, if not automatically cancel those contracts.

Unless you are a sociopath and only care about your balance sheet I suppose.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#99

Post by midland_trucker »

yongjik wrote: post #81
kazen44 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

airbus was made as a very deliberate political project from various european countries to stay competitive in the airline bussiness. Mind you this happened around the same time many foundations of a lot of european institutions where formed, and airbus is the primary example of a intra-european company in both its bussiness form (being an S.E[0]) aswell as in the way its products get build across different member sta…

Which makes Airbus even more impressive, TBH. How many "deliberate political project from various countries to stay competitive in the X business" can you think of that actually became successful?

Arianespace of course a huge success for a brief period, until it wasn't.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#100

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #75

I feel like this pattern occurs in too many companies across all sectors: 1. Company is product-quality focused 2. Beats competition and creates mini-monopoly 3. Sales becomes somewhat inelastic to changes in quality 4. This leads "cost-cutting" and marketing focused execs/decision making to beat out product quality execs/decision making 5. Company's product quality takes predictable linear path to the bottom

Enshittification?
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