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What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

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Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#391

Post by seb1204 »

necheffa wrote: post #277
proc0 wrote: post #5

> Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to do much more than engineering, including testing their own software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks and need…

> however with software nobody dies Well...no actually. This may be the case for _some_ software. I happen to work on (software) products where public safety is a concern.

Well in the story is the point of an software error leading to the plane crash right...

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#392

Post by shiroiushi »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #123
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, large companies take a lot longer to fail than I ever imagined. A lot of time can pass riding on past excellence before the cracks start showing.

It's not about the size of the company, it's about the barrier to entry of the market they're in, how much competition they have and the amount of vendor lock-in. And civil aviation in general scores top marks in all those fields. It's a duopoly with an insane barrier to entry both technical, legal and financial with very long and complex vendor lock-in.

Exactly: look how fast the values of companies like MySpace and Yahoo tanked when they became irrelevant. They were highly valuable at some point, but they had serious competition and not much keeping their users locked-in.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#393

Post by bobthepanda »

FredPret wrote: post #301
dgoldstein0 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there's the FAA oversight... Which has also hollowed out. NTSB is still an amazing accident investigator but better to prevent these things than wait for NTSB to step in

Maybe the FAA should hire three engineering firms to go over the designs and manufacturing and have them compete to see who can find the worst flaws. Just having one big entity (FAA) check up on one other big entity (Boeing) leads to problems.

That would require another Boeing sized entity in the US, or a few of them.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#394

Post by GCA10 »

masklinn wrote: post #141
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #70

The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.

> It just took 25 years to finally happen. "Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off, as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it falls off a cliff. It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to c…

Ironically, Boeing's stock price was at about $140 at the start of 2014 -- and rose pretty steadily to a peak of $422 in March 2019.

So in addition to pushing out whatever sorts of financial results that Wall Street wanted, Boeing's perhaps questionable approach to quality was not registering with its financial overlords. This happened in spite of the Al-Jazeera investigative piece of 2014, a $2.5 billion penalty paid in 2021 in connection with the 787 crashes, etc. Not to mention steady coverage of problems in the Seattle Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.

Boeing's stock is still above $100 now, which suggests that it's got a strong enough monopoly/duopoly position that investors do not regard quality issues as being all that detrimental to the "investment thesis."

Brrr!

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#395

Post by chasil »

raiyu wrote: post #386
masklinn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just took 25 years to finally happen. "Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off, as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it falls off a cliff. It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to c…

That description you have of quality inertia certainly seems applicable to other areas of life as well. I’m certainly seeing a few troubling issues brewing but don’t see as many people as myself taking them as serious warning signs. But when the collapse happens it’s rapid because the entire foundation has rotted away. It keeps happening because that’s what the system rewards, short sightedness, and is also why found…

For day to day concerns, Boeing does not appear to be an outlier.

My coworker loves the Boeing legacy, and in her staunch advocacy, she showed me this.

https://avherald.com/

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#396

Post by wavemode »

benced wrote: post #132
throwaway458864 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A public hearing isn't going to change anything. Look at...well, literally any powerful organization or individual brought before Congress for excoriation. The pound of flesh they want is press and votes, and you don't have to change anything to get that. It's not like they're going to break up Boeing. They can't actually do anything to improve Boeing. All they can do is wag their finger. It's not like there's an alt…

I think culture is underrated. Acting like he did should not be considered a dignified behavior and I think that will meaningfully constrict behavior even in the absence of new laws. Think about how business culture varies across jurisdictions: there's more than just profit-maximization at work. Also, to be clear, Boeing's safety record is still good. The only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in…

> Boeing's safety record is still good. The only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in the earlier days of the 737 MAX.

This argument makes no sense. A repeatedly faulty plane that has crashed multiple times does not have a "good" safety record just because recoving from that fault is part of pilot training. In fact that's the definition of what I'd call a bad safety record.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#397

Post by [deleted] »

FredPret wrote: post #301
dgoldstein0 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there's the FAA oversight... Which has also hollowed out. NTSB is still an amazing accident investigator but better to prevent these things than wait for NTSB to step in

Maybe the FAA should hire three engineering firms to go over the designs and manufacturing and have them compete to see who can find the worst flaws. Just having one big entity (FAA) check up on one other big entity (Boeing) leads to problems.

[deleted]

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#398

Post by dotnet00 »

pdonis wrote: post #242
baggy_trough wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing, and the United States as a whole, have been very richly endowed with capital. When you decide to stop adding to your seed corn and start to eat it down, but you began with an enormous mountain of it, you can eat well for a very long period of time.

I'm not asking why Boeing continued to make money. I'm asking why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed, and some kind of intervention wasn't made before two fatal airline accidents and other near misses happened. The point of the oversight we have is supposed to be to spot problems before they reach that level. If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole syst…

Think about all the different things Boeing works on, all the details involved in the design of a modern airplane or spacecraft. How is a third party supposed to audit all that, when the designs are so complex and in such a relatively niche field? The most they can do is look for obvious things and make sure the data makes sense.

The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#399

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

I am more convinced that Boeing has exceeded their and human ability to cooperate and explain everything that goes into a modern plane - more than I am willing to say Boeing just sucks now.

It’s not just them. It’s everyone and everything.

We are in a complexity crisis and no one sees it happening.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#400

Post by WalterBright »

wpietri wrote: post #321
pdonis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just took 25 years to finally happen. To me the big question is, why did it take 25 years for this to become common knowledge? Why is our system of evaluating public corporations so messed up that a public company, and one with huge government contracts to boot, could get away with this for that long?

Our major system for evaluating companies is market-driven pricing of the company. That in turn is based mostly on the views of investors and traders, that is people who want to turn money into more money and generally aren't fussy about how it happens. So the market price for a company tends to favor short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation. That is to say, this is basically what our "system of evalu…

> So the market price for a company tends to favor short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.

Would you buy stock in a company that does this? Why do you think others would?

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