271–280 of 285 posts
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The original move was also related to lobbying potential. But the CEO who started the moves etc. was a Boeing lifer.
yep but then the jack welch acolytes moved in and exponentially worsened it
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I (person who blamed the pilots union above) actually like unions. I could probably even say good things about pilot unions; I would say that part of the reason US airlines have fewer accidents than some other wealthy countries is the effect the unions have had on resisting attempts to work pilots through dangerous levels of fatigue, and on ensuring pilots can report dangerous situations and have them comprehensively…
Has anyone tried, oh IDK, compromising? Maybe instead of 24 hours, we do 6? Or up to 24 hours but only of the "current" flight that matters to the current event? It's a negotiation. The Pilot's union doesn't have veto authority on safety. Sure they can threaten to unanimously strike if it's passed and that might be a big threat to airlines since they have basically stopped investing in the funnel of new pilots, preferring instead to pay everyone food stamp wages and drag themselves through the obvious """Pilot Shortage""" that results when a job that costs $40k to get only pays $25k a year.
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In an emergency you can do anything you think is necessary to address it. Source: I’m a private pilot.
You're conflating the right to do something with whether it is advisable to do something. Sure, you are ~allowed~ to begin an immediate descent in an emergency, but it is not a good idea considering from the pilot's perspective, the bang is most likely an engine going out and altitude is always your friend in this condition.
In an emergency, caring about ATC is literally your lowest priority, in every case. It is ATC's job to notice a plane no longer under their control and route other aircraft safely around it. Your entire job is to do everything you can to prevent the death of anyone onboard, and playing ham radio is rarely the best way to do that.
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I’m trying to convince a group of devs that catching (and ignoring) every exception is not actually a solution to their crash bugs.
Ya know.. you can also just do that and then change the requirements: > In a revision to the Flight Crew Operations Manual, issued on January 15, 2024, Boeing confirmed that the door functioned as designed. Problem solved for the current level in the hierarchy.
Literally turning a blind eye, but officially, so that’s okay!
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You’re making great points about the software/engineering industry and I don’t disagree about any of those specifics — engineering culture is paramount. I was just trying to point to (what I see as) the root cause: the engineering culture at Boeing didn’t fall apart because it’s run by lazy millennials or because the managers hadn’t read Mythical Man Month, it’s because they spent their money on stock buybacks and ex…
Stock buybacks are tax efficient dividends. Boeing has been paying dividends fairly regularly since 1937, so paying stockholders can't really be the problem. Executive compensation is kind of a red herring too. If you don't like what the executives did, it probably reflects more on the choice of executives rather than the compensation of them, but you could maybe make an argument about how compensation incentives wer…
You can have a company culture that encourages skirting regulations and cutting corners in production regardless of dividends/buybacks and executive compensation.
In other words: imagine I bought Airbus (lucky crypto run, ofc) and immediately transferred 10-20% of their liquid(izable) assets as cash into my bank account. And otherwise left the company running as is. Wouldn’t you think that’s the most relevant fact when discussing changes to their engineering culture in the preceding years?
Re: “it’s always been this way so if can’t be that”, I don’t think that’s a solid enough premise to support that conclusion. A) context changes, and b) I think it really is crazy out there these days. From Jacobin:
In a 2017 article for The American Prospect that he coauthored with Sakinç, Lazonick identified one especially distressing instance in which Boeing neglected to follow through on its planned redesign of the 737 Max airplane, a project that was estimated to cost $7 billion at the time. That amount, he wrote, was what “on average, Boeing has been spending on stock buybacks annually since 2013.”
In another analysis, Marie Christine Duggan, an economic historian at Keene State, concluded the amount that Boeing spent on buybacks in recent decades has generally outweighed spending on capital expenditures like upgrades and maintenance. Duggan found that in 2017, at the height of its buyback frenzy, “Boeing’s spending on dividends and stock buybacks was 66 percent of total spending, while only 9 percent of Boeing’s cash went into new equipment to manufacture planes.”
Many of Boeing’s mass stock buybacks came after President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, despite the fact that Boeing and other major companies promised to invest their resulting tax savings on capital expenditure and innovation.Lol, they said the door plug "departed" instead of "blew the f** off"
A very thorough preliminary report. I've worked for a long time in quality systems, and this is a perfect example of a systemic failure. They've got work being handed off between Boeing employees and 3rd party contractors with insufficient controls in place to verify that very basic tasks are being performed. I'd be curious to know how many non-conformances they typically see during assembly of a plane and whether ma…
Lol, they said the door plug "departed" instead of "blew the f* off"
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Considering all those scary scenarios, what happened was probably the most favourable outcome. It could have been a major disaster hundred different ways..
It sure could have -- the plane was still climbing which puts that plug door almost directly in line with the horizontal stabilizers; https://i.cbc.ca/1.7077373.1704733027!/fileImage/httpImage/g...
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You’re making great points about the software/engineering industry and I don’t disagree about any of those specifics — engineering culture is paramount. I was just trying to point to (what I see as) the root cause: the engineering culture at Boeing didn’t fall apart because it’s run by lazy millennials or because the managers hadn’t read Mythical Man Month, it’s because they spent their money on stock buybacks and ex…
Stock buybacks are tax efficient dividends. Boeing has been paying dividends fairly regularly since 1937, so paying stockholders can't really be the problem. Executive compensation is kind of a red herring too. If you don't like what the executives did, it probably reflects more on the choice of executives rather than the compensation of them, but you could maybe make an argument about how compensation incentives wer…
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Why not? Do you think other engineers are better suited for such work? I’m just curious, because I personally work on things that could kill people directly or indirectly.
LOL: I like the fact that I can say "People may have acted like someone was going to die, but my code never killed any one"... its a preference, I want to know I can have a bad day, fuck up, and not have to carry the weight for my whole life.
> its a preference
Thanks.