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More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

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Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#311

Post by rossdavidh »

strangattractor wrote: post #246
BoxFour wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like this guy? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg

More like this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk Someone with an engineering background and a pinch of Vlad the Impaler;)

While you seem to be getting downvoted a lot, I think it's not unlikely. If Boeing appears to be in serious trouble financially (and I think it does), then you will see the gov't try to rescue them somehow. How many people would be willing to take over Boeing at this point? Of those, how many have experience at getting gov't contracts and running a company in the aero/space industry? It's a short list.

If it's not Elon, it will probably be Airbus, and there is a chance that the US feds will want someone more America-based instead.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#313

Post by rossdavidh »

abtinf wrote: post #105

I happen to have quite a bit of first-hand knowledge about aerospace rivets. AMA.

Your best guess: if we checked closely for this sort of thing on Airbus planes, would it be found? I'm guessing not, but then I'm wondering if I'm naive.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#314

Post by bee_rider »

rpmisms wrote: post #267
BoxFour wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever your opinion of Elon is, it’s extremely generous to say he comes from an engineering background and just flat-out wrong to say he comes from the type of traditional engineering background relevant to companies like Boeing (the PE type of engineering). If you approve of Elon as a leader, he is basically the embodiment of “you do not need to be an engineer to run a highly technical company”

I think describing Elon as a small-e engineer (not designing powertrains, but at least understanding them) is accurate, and saying that an an engineering-first mindset is important for companies like Boeing and SpaceX would ring true. Engineering background is different than engineering mindset.

What do you mean by the engineering mindset?

To me, it is the way of looking at the world that attempts to transform intractable real-world problems into tractable ones by translating them into the battle-tested model(s) of your field. For example, the RLC model of circuits is certainly not able to express all of EM physics but it sure is easy to solve problems in (although, I only did the degree, maybe working engineers dip back down into physics more often).

Anyway it isn’t obvious how Musk has that mindset, he seems obsessed with innovation rather than tradition, and he seems to have styled himself as some kind of polymath tech guy rather than an expert in any particular field.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#315

Post by Syonyk »

sandworm101 wrote: post #282
AdrianB1 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read again. I said you don't need ATPL to be the CEO of Boeing. If you don't agree, state that, don't pick on the 50 hours because you are wrong there. And don't be pedantic about ATPL requirements, I am a pilot and I know how this works. I do support my original comment.

No, read the post to which I actually responded. It didn't say "pilot, any pilot, anyone with a ticket". >> also be a pilot with the suitable type ratings to fly the stuff they build. Boeing builds airliners. The "pilot" in the context of this threat a pilot rated to fly the "stuff they build".

If you're not flying it in passenger revenue service, I believe the requirements get a lot fuzzier - I would expect you'd need at a minimum a commercial multiengine cert to get rated for airliners, but I don't know that you actually need the ATP, unless you're going to fly in revenue service.

And, tbh, I don't care if the CEO of Boeing can take one around the pattern on their own. If they need a rated instructor with them to go fly one legally, so be it. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.

But I stand by my statement that the CEO should be able to understand airplanes and fly them reasonably competently, if they're the CEO of a company that builds airplanes. I don't mean "press release of them flying it straight and level on autopilot" - but to actually be able to get it competently around the sky in manual flight modes.

I consider the financialization (turning into loan servicers and financial service providers as their main stream of income) of "every company who used to build things" to be one of the worst things that's happened to American industry as a whole.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#316

Post by dv_dt »

AaronM wrote: post #248
Syonyk wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? The CEO of a company this big, no matter their background, has no business building an intimate understanding of the tech. This is certainly a point of contention in modern schools of business thought, but the concept of a CEO who doesn't understand what the company builds is bizarre to me. The CEO of Boeing, IMO, should probably have aircraft engineering experience, and, ideally, also be a pilot with the suit…

Does the CEO need to know these things? I would argue no. What needs to happen is the CEO needs to listen and trust the technical people that report to him. There is a misalignment of priorities that will never be fixed as long as the primary incentive for the CEO is to maximize shareholder value. If you remove that, and force the primary incentiven to be safety over profits, the rest of the business will follow.

For products/services tied to real engineering, that idea that you can maximize profits without leadership that understands it at a deep level is wrong. If you want to maximize profits in that kind of company, you'd better be able to build and sustain a culture to systematically knock out catastrophic risks stemming from real world physical constraints.

A management accounting guy is great at hedging financial risks, but that is what they'll always focus on, not the real world. What we are seeing with Boeing now is what happens if leadership is adrift without a good intuition about real world physical risks and what it takes to address them. You can't maximize profits while regularly causing catastrophic events.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#317

Post by nsguy »

altairprime wrote: post #210
stouset wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One needs to look at the data to believe these planes are very safe. Even if one or two people had died on the Alaska incident (which—to be clear—would have been an avoidable tragedy for which Boeing would be responsible), flying on a major airline in the U.S. is still safer than any other form of transportation. You don’t think twice about hopping into a passenger vehicle. You don’t follow the latest NHTSA crash tes…

> You don’t think twice about hopping into a passenger vehicle. I think twice quite regularly about hopping into a Tesla, and after years of avoiding them solely for aesthetic dislike, I found that they also have been burying quality control issues rather than repairing them — just like Boeing! — and so I intend to continue avoiding riding in them whenever possible. > You don’t […] refuse to hop in an Uber driving th…

Isn't there independent data about accidents or deaths per driven mile per vehicle brand/type? I don't think Tesla is over-represented there? Even in that data there can be confounders... I would look at those vs. rumours about quality control.

But hey, I rode a motorcycle for ~25 years which is definitely riskier than a Tesla.

Being careful as a pedestrian makes perfect sense. I got these things drilled into me as a kid, because when we were kids we walked everywhere.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#318

Post by avar »

stouset wrote: post #142
epcoa wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, the goals were in a stupid place to begin with. I see no honest reason in the scope of this discussion to make this distinction. The regionals expand the network of the majors, it’s not like they overlap. People buy and use these services just like the major airlines. The distinction is interesting in the context of comparing the relative safety of the regionals but in a discussion about general airline…

My lack of including that flight was a mistake. I was unaware that Comair was operating as a subsidiary of Delta. Still, it doesn’t really change the upshot. No manufacturer was at fault here. And even if you include this flight in the data, flying in the U.S. is safer than any other form of travel. I chose to limit it to airlines operating in the U.S. due to our generally higher expectations around maintenance, pilo…

> I chose to limit it to airlines operating in the U.S. due to our generally higher expectations around maintenance, pilot training, and workload, amongst other things.

The high-quality training that resulted in a pilot being unable to discern the correct runway to use?

Your line of argument here and elsewhere in this thread is nonsense, especially because the very US authorities you're lauding disagree with you.

If the foreign operations of Boeing aircraft weren't relevant to their safety everywhere, then the FAA wouldn't have grounded the MAX worldwide due to crashes that happened in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#319

Post by kelnos »

AaronM wrote: post #249
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Boeing needs to dump the CEO and install someone from an engineering lineage if they want to build their reputation back. I'd argue they need an effective engineering culture , and leadership that enables and values and fights for it, not a former-engineer figurehead. Good engineers within Boeing need to be enabled to do their job properly, within normal business constraints, and bad engineers need to be removed. T…

I think the MD merge gets the blame by many, however, it seems as though the shift in the market that started around the same time to optimize shareholder value at all costs is really to blame.

I think it's both in a sort of chicken and egg sort of situation. The MD execs taking over Boeing had a terrible effect on safety culture, but the reason the MD execs took over in the first place was because of this shift in the market that you describe.

If the pre-MD Boeing management had managed to retain control of the company things may have been ok from a quality and safety perspective... but the stock would have declined because they would have refused to chase short-term quarterly success at the expense of the long term.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#320

Post by sonicanatidae »

AaronM wrote: post #248
Syonyk wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? The CEO of a company this big, no matter their background, has no business building an intimate understanding of the tech. This is certainly a point of contention in modern schools of business thought, but the concept of a CEO who doesn't understand what the company builds is bizarre to me. The CEO of Boeing, IMO, should probably have aircraft engineering experience, and, ideally, also be a pilot with the suit…

Does the CEO need to know these things? I would argue no. What needs to happen is the CEO needs to listen and trust the technical people that report to him. There is a misalignment of priorities that will never be fixed as long as the primary incentive for the CEO is to maximize shareholder value. If you remove that, and force the primary incentiven to be safety over profits, the rest of the business will follow.

Meaningful penalties would address this nicely, but since CU legalized clear, over-the-table bribery, I suspect it'll never happen.
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