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Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

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Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#161

Post by shiroiuma »

jewayne wrote: post #43
moose_man wrote: post #2

Jack Welch style management and shareholder capitalism are some of the most destructive forces in the US economy.

Wow, a whole lot of people in this thread don't know about Jack Welch and his outsized influence on the current state of US business. No, US businesses did not always focus exclusively on current quarter's earnings, nor did they lay people off every year to juice the share price. In fact, before Jack Welch, many US corporations openly said that their mission was to "build/provide X", and that dividends to shareholder…

I wonder what things would be like now if someone went back in time and assassinated Jack Welch as a child....

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#162

Post by yukkuri »

rtpg wrote: post #73
solarkraft wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Airbus and Boeing are commercially viable, and they have customers all around the world. Comac is more of a political project I thought Airbus was heavily subsidized

So is Boeing! Companies without this massive amount of government support either barely survive on a tiny niche or fall over before actually shipping products. It's fine that governments have decided to prop up these industries in their own ways, of course. Just hard to expect "free market" participants to show up and take on such a capital intensive industry

We should get these welfare queens off the dole!

Wait these are big corporations instead of struggling single mothers? Nevermind...

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#163

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

lovecg wrote: post #95
mastercheif wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The system was visible if the airline paid for the AOA disagree lights to be installed. Why such a basic feature was even an option is the WTF.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#164

Post by yukkuri »

truculent wrote: post #128
rgmerk wrote: post #118

Ruined or not, Boeing is too big to fail. No way in the world will airlines, or the US government, accept a world where Airbus is the only company able to sell you a passenger airliner. Nor would they accept a word where the alternative to Airbus was Comac.

In which case, isn’t it in our collective interest to stop the rot? Doesn’t this imply that government (or some other representative body) should act to stop the decline in whichever manner seems most appropriate?

But that's communism! How dare you suggest it!

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#165

Post by inferiorhuman »

cratermoon wrote: post #124
inamberclad wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder how that will work out for Southwest after this.

Sometime in 2023 Alaska Airlines completed their efforts to sell off all their Airbus and Bombardier Q400 aircraft. Alaska acquired Virgin America and its all-Airbus fleet in 2016, and the Q400s were from their Horizon Air operations. The company sold the Airbus aircraft to American and retired the Bombardiers. The reason given at the time was the desire to simplify maintenance and parts logistics. Now Alaska's fleet…

What's missing from that explanation is that Virgin got horrific lease terms on their fleet because they were a fledgling airline. Had Alaska been the one to lease them the terms would've been much better and the financial benefit to dumping them would've bee much smaller.

As Alaska is based in Seattle, they've been pushing this ridiculous all-Boeing nonsense for a while. Horizon still exists as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska. Their fleet is all Embraer. In fact I'd be hard pressed to think of a time when Alaska was ever all Boeing.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#166

Post by RVuRnvbM2e »

aslatter wrote: post #150
GeekyBear wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when B…

I keep this clip open in a browser tab so I can go back to it from time-to-time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3NASGb5m8s It's the same basic message from Jobs, but this time about Xerox.

Wow. I had not seen this clip before. What an insightful couple of minutes.

Thanks for sharing!

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#167

Post by AniseAbyss »

stg22 wrote: post #140

The role of McDonnell-Douglas is exaggerated. Boeing had achieved pretty close to a monopoly in the mid-1970s, but things had changed by the mid-1990s. 1. Domestic airlines protected by regulation had been effective monopolies and Boeing's engineer-led culture thrived in an environment where airlines didn't care about costs. But that environment died with airline deregulation in 1978 and an engineer-led culture made…

What's happening to Boeing isn't really remarkable lots of dinosaur conglomerates rise and fall.

I'm just a casual follower but it seems their glory days are from the 60s and 70s and they've been coasting along since then.

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#169

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #163
lovecg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The system was visible if the airline paid for the AOA disagree lights to be installed. Why such a basic feature was even an option is the WTF.

would that light be sufficient in the 1:30 minutes you have to make a difference, in between the cacophony of alerts and data feeds ?

Re: Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

#170

Post by akira2501 »

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…

> and it became clear that the 737 MAX had some serious design problems that they had tried to fix in software.

It could be argued it was an appropriate design.

The critical error was in that 737 MAX has two angle of attack sensors that feed data into the cockpit; however, the MCAS software only used input from one of them. In the Lion air case the one considered sensor had been improperly calibrated after being flagged for maintenance by the crew.

The fix is fairly comprehensive. If an angle of attack disagree occurs between the two sensors the system is inhibited from activation.

> Why are airlines so eager to buy such a compromised model from a company that destroyed its reputation?

They don't see it as compromised. The purchase price was set based on the fact that airlines would _not_ need to retrain existing 737 pilots for the new model, that it was type equivalent.

With the software changes and with additional training there are cost implications but not necessarily safety considerations with the model.

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