41–50 of 121 posts
1. Build product people like
2. Build competitive moat
3. Extract maximum value by raising prices or spending less.
4. When the value proposition becomes negative for the end user, then legislate your business' continued profits and existence.
Moving their HQ from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia (next to Washington DC) to prioritize lobbying and access sounds like it helped! https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096961418/boeing-moving-head... > Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders. According to the book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison the entire decline of Boein…
I remember when they moved to Chicago the argument was to be closer to their Airline customers. They wanted to shift from a focus on building planes to a focus on selling planes. Now they can't even sell planes so their new focus is corruption I guess. The good news for them is that business is booming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every industry is federally regulated.
Only in the sense that there are federal regulations that apply to all industries. But, for an extreme example, there is absolutely no federal regulation of marijuana dispensaries. Whose existence is entirely enabled by state laws, and federal reluctance to enforce federal law in a case where both state law and public opinion are against it.
LOL. What this tells me is I should never fly on a Boeing aircraft ever again. I wonder how much Boeing had to pay Trump to get the FAA to say this.
This article seems a bit light on details, but a little more at the FAA website: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-boeing-airworthin... https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_... It is typical for aerospace companies to have in-house "FAA delegates" who function in the stead of direct FAA reviewers, and it looks like all that is going on here is the FAA is allowing Boeing to go back to u…
Which defeats the purpose of adversarial review by a regulator. When your paycheck is signed by who you are regulating, you absolutely cannot force handling of what your employer doesn't want to handle. And seeing as FAA has had reciprocity in terms of certification with other countries (which if other countries were smart, they'd cease recognizing until the U.S. gets their shit straight), it's really an egregious ab…
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
Why? Copying from another comment I made on this thread:
(Caution, my thoughts are a bit rambly and scattered. It's been a while since I studied this in detail for a class where I had deep divided into the max 8 crash and FAA's lapse, so the details are a bit foggy.)
The short answer is that unfortunately it's practically almost impossible to do this any other way, short of massively increasing funding for the FAA (which is presumably politically not going to be done.)
The long answer is, anyone with expertise ends up going to work at an aerospace company where they are properly compensated. You end up with the engineers at Boeing et al, and the regulatory folk at FAA etc. (This isn't unique to just aviation btw but most industries where you need a high level of technical expertise.) And if you think it should be easily doable... here's a thought experiment. Say 20 people in boeing know about MCAS (pre crashes and their publicity). If even only 2 FAA employees need to be technically sound in their knowledge of such a niche system, that's about 10% of how many boeing employees know about it.
Now if you extrapolate that to all systems and all employees across multiple companies... you see why it's an issue for one agencies to have such deep knowledge about everything. (And this isn't even considering what happens when people quit etc.)
Because of this, the most obvious answer to "how does the FAA, without much engineers, decide what's safe or not", is to ask the experts and just have them certify stuff, well, not under oath, but as close to that as possible.
This article seems a bit light on details, but a little more at the FAA website: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-boeing-airworthin... https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_... It is typical for aerospace companies to have in-house "FAA delegates" who function in the stead of direct FAA reviewers, and it looks like all that is going on here is the FAA is allowing Boeing to go back to u…
And, FWIW, the type of person who ends up self-selecting into this kind of work are serious people who deeply care about airline safety. It is a rather thankless job with a lot of onerous, tedious paperwork that is not very sexy.
many Engineer concern is ignore by management because it cost them something, greed to max