Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 231 posts

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#101

Post by bobthepanda »

WanderPanda wrote: post #29
eitally wrote: post #5

Actions have consequences. Boeing decided they wanted to focus on maximizing profits rather than allowing organic growth to follow on continued high quality engineering and services. In regulated industries, especially where safety is of utmost importance, this is exceptionally risky. They F'd around and found out, and imho the only solution is leadership and strategy changes to shrink their business and refocus on b…

They didn‘t maximize profits at all. Why do people operate on the principle „if it is bad it had to be because of maximizing profits“? This seems to be much more about corruption and misaligned incentives as well as bigcorp bullshit-job rot. There is really only one thing that can cure this and that is more fierce competition

Competition in the airline manufacturing industry is difficult and not for lack of trying; Bombardier and Embraer have found it tough, to say nothing of the poor results of state-sponsored competition like in Japan, Russia and China.

Aircraft development is hideously expensive. 787 development cost Boeing $32B, and is part of the reason why airlines pushed Boeing not to replace the 737 wholesale.

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#103

Post by potatolicious »

WanderPanda wrote: post #29
eitally wrote: post #5

Actions have consequences. Boeing decided they wanted to focus on maximizing profits rather than allowing organic growth to follow on continued high quality engineering and services. In regulated industries, especially where safety is of utmost importance, this is exceptionally risky. They F'd around and found out, and imho the only solution is leadership and strategy changes to shrink their business and refocus on b…

They didn‘t maximize profits at all. Why do people operate on the principle „if it is bad it had to be because of maximizing profits“? This seems to be much more about corruption and misaligned incentives as well as bigcorp bullshit-job rot. There is really only one thing that can cure this and that is more fierce competition

Wait what. I'm sympathetic to the notion that not every Bad Thing is because of "maximizing profits", but in this case you can point to incredibly specific things, done to maximize profits, that directly caused this crisis.

After acquiring McDonnell, Boeing went on a spree of divestments where parts plants that supplied them were spun off into independent vendors. One of the biggest of these is Spirit Aerosystems, which provides the fuselage assembly for the 737.

The divestments were specifically motivated by improving short-term profitability of the company, in the classic "sell it and rent it back" mode that's particularly in mode with private equity.

By all accounts quality control at Spirit Aerosystems has suffered since, with Boeing having relatively little leverage in improving this state of affairs (one may argue that it's not terribly interested in improving the state of affairs).

As far as we know the aircraft that kicked off this crisis was delivered from Spirit with an incorrectly installed plug door (more specifically, the bolts that secured it from opening were not installed at all)

Sure, not everything is corporate greed, but there's a really bright and direct line here between the financialization of Boeing in the mid-00s and this specific crisis.

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#104

Post by madaxe_again »

albert180 wrote: post #36
madaxe_again wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to be extremely careful what they say. Boeing is considered a strategically important business to the U.S. - they supply everything from airliners to bombers to spacecraft to cruise missiles. They also create jobs all over the place - taxpayer dollars are funnelled via the pork barrel to jobs programs. The government cannot allow it to fail, and if Boeing looks bad, the government looks bad. Therefore anyon…

This will never happen as this would be a slamdunk case for Airbus/European Countries at the WTO against the US government

The U.S. simply Does Not Comply with WTO judgments against them, just like how they don’t follow UNCLOS, or the ICC.

The U.S. makes international law - it does not follow it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-12-12/supply...

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#105

Post by inferiorhuman »

drstewart wrote: post #88
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes these are clearly identical situations with no difference at all! /s

You're right, in one situation you have people rejecting a product with years of research vetted by regulators around the world because they don't like the business practices and politics of the organizations behind it. On the other, you have... the same exact thing. Whoops. They are the same.

Assuming you're not being intentionally obtuse: the FDA makes some decisions purely out of politics (e.g. many schedule 1 drugs) and they make other decisions based on higher tolerance of risk in certain situations. Perhaps the FAA should slap a black box warning on the 737 to regain credibility.

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#106

Post by cibyr »

drak0n1c wrote: post #67
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #6

At this point, it’s quite pertinent how many corners Boeing has cut over and over again—the company’s culture and management is obviously poisonous. I’m probably a minority of folks, but at this point I’m flying on airlines with the fewest Boeing Max generation planes in their fleet. I also don’t really trust the FAA to properly regulate Boeing after years of a close relationship—the recent groundings are the bare mi…

In contrast, the relatively recent Boeing 787 has an impeccable track record and has become the most comfortable long distance aircraft. Is it a matter of separate teams, managerial era, or something else? The models with issues appear to be the older ones with retrofits. Perhaps there are failure vulnerabilities when mixing today's computer-reliant design into past institutional-knowledge-reliant human design.

The 787's record is somewhat less than impeccable if you consider the multiple lithium-ion battery fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Boeing_787_Dreamliner_gro...

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#107

Post by lamontcg »

boeinggoneone wrote: post #91
eitally wrote: post #5

Actions have consequences. Boeing decided they wanted to focus on maximizing profits rather than allowing organic growth to follow on continued high quality engineering and services. In regulated industries, especially where safety is of utmost importance, this is exceptionally risky. They F'd around and found out, and imho the only solution is leadership and strategy changes to shrink their business and refocus on b…

Very likely everyone is dumbing down a complex issue by projecting their own biases on Boeing. Boeing is an incredible cash cow and is likely to be a duopoly (along with Airbus) for at least around 50 years or so. I don't see why anyone burn their house down for temporary warmth. Also, the kind of issues we are seeing do not point out to any short term profiteering.

> I don't see why anyone burn their house down for temporary warmth.

Muilenburg got $62.2 million for burning his house down:

https://www.manufacturing.net/aerospace/news/21109798/boeing...

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#108

Post by margalabargala »

drstewart wrote: post #90
earthling8118 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely not the same thing. If I don't fly on a plane, the worst thing that happens is the company doesn't get my money. If I don't take a vaccine the worst thing that could happen becomes a potential loss of vital senses or even death(s). Your ending statement could hardly be further from the truth. There's no evidence that these groups of people are related.

> If I don't fly on a plane, the worst thing that happens is the company doesn't get my money. There are people that state they'd rather drive than fly on a Max. The worst that can happen is a statistically much higher likelihood of dying. On the other hand, if you don't take the vaccine, the worst that happens is Pfizer doesn't get your money.

> On the other hand, if you don't take the vaccine, the worst that happens is Pfizer doesn't get your money.

Also, y'know, the whole increased risk of serious illness due to a lack of immune protection that would be granted by the vaccine.

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#109

Post by WalterBright »

potatolicious wrote: post #103
WanderPanda wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn‘t maximize profits at all. Why do people operate on the principle „if it is bad it had to be because of maximizing profits“? This seems to be much more about corruption and misaligned incentives as well as bigcorp bullshit-job rot. There is really only one thing that can cure this and that is more fierce competition

Wait what. I'm sympathetic to the notion that not every Bad Thing is because of "maximizing profits", but in this case you can point to incredibly specific things, done to maximize profits, that directly caused this crisis. After acquiring McDonnell, Boeing went on a spree of divestments where parts plants that supplied them were spun off into independent vendors. One of the biggest of these is Spirit Aerosystems, wh…

NASA subcontracted about everything for the space program.

Re: United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing

#110

Post by FredPret »

rightbyte wrote: post #68
WanderPanda wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn‘t maximize profits at all. Why do people operate on the principle „if it is bad it had to be because of maximizing profits“? This seems to be much more about corruption and misaligned incentives as well as bigcorp bullshit-job rot. There is really only one thing that can cure this and that is more fierce competition

> They didn‘t maximize profits at all [...] There is really only one thing that can cure this and that is more fierce competition Short term profits is what matter to the elite in these conglomerates. Their stock bonuses should just have a 10 year lag or something. That would align their incentives. And how could Airbus be more fierce?

> Short term profits is what matter to the elite in these conglomerates

That is not true. Long-term profits are by far the best thing for the owners in a corporation. See: Berkshire Hathaway.

What happened here is someone got to be in charge who did not have the brain to do the job.

When you see short-termism among CEO's, that's either due to

a) owners not aligning the CEO's incentives correctly due to the owners' negligence or stupidity, or

b) the CEO does indeed have the correct incentives, but is stupid.

Boeing profits have cratered since 2019: https://valustox.com/BA

If they focused on making great planes with reasonable R&D costs, everyone there would be vastly better off financially.

Post reply on HN