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Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

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Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#61

Post by dmix »

jm4 wrote: post #26
bavent wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah firing someone who was on the engineering side is not a good look when the problems are on the MBA side.

Engineers designed and built that plane. The plane is fundamentally flawed. The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there. The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibilit…

> The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there.

This engineer guy was the one that took over after they fired the last one after the 2 crashes...

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#62

Post by itishappy »

legitster wrote: post #48
gumby wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was actually a QA problem — a set of design issues starting at the front of the process. All QC can do is identify problems after they have occurred. As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”

I guess I am a bit confused. Someone was supposed to be checking the bolts before the plane left the facility and they didn't. That seems to be a QC process issue more than a QA issue. But that also seems like splitting hairs. The problem is not one of engineering design, to OP's post.

I disagree somewhat. It should not be possible for a plane to leave the factory without completing all QC checks. People are fallible, so a robust process is critical, and designing/confirming a robust QC process is a QA responsibility.

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#63

Post by eastbound »

ics wrote: post #34
tr_user wrote: post #6

Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs. > However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary. > Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance a…

While many here won't disagree in general, be wary of holding this sentiment as dogma. There can be bad apples in engineering, and MBAs who can see that whether or not they have the knowledge or experience to make it better themselves. Whether or not they can (or want to) make the next step of hiring better or more honest engineers is what matters then. (I'm not optimistic about Boeing here, but hey.)

Yes but Boeing needs to send a message. A message that they understood how they failed, a message that they apologize, a message that they can be redeemed.

Sometimes, it’s about PR.

And culture, they haven’t changed. Boeing is still firing engineers, appointing MBAs, getting paid by politicians, and hiring on the revolving doors of local prisons. I wouldn’t even trust a burger flipped by this bunch. Boeing factories also need to move to other states before we trust them again.

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#64

Post by ivan_gammel »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #21
bobthepanda wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really hard. China, Russia and Japan have tried state sponsored schemes without success. Bombardier of Canada had to throw in the towel, and Embraer of Brazil almost did. Part of the problem is also that airlines have been very good at squeezing the duopoly while demanding ever more. The competition, if it manages to get a plane in the air, usually isn’t as fuel efficient and so the airlines have mostly not bee…

Russia and Japan failed, but it's far too early to call COMAC from China a failure.

Russia just got a considerable motivation boost due to sanctions so the local order book for SSJ and MC families will be likely on the scale of hundreds of aircrafts. They are no longer a prestige project and Russia has the track record of building the necessary industrial capacity quickly (they ramped up military production to support war in Ukraine far beyond of what the West thought was possible in that time frame).

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#65

Post by class3shock »

jm4 wrote: post #26
bavent wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah firing someone who was on the engineering side is not a good look when the problems are on the MBA side.

Engineers designed and built that plane. The plane is fundamentally flawed. The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there. The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibilit…

This is not how companies work. Engineers at Boeing didn't have a design labeled "not-good-enough-but-cheap" and another labelled "more-skookum-but-is-expensive" and because they were bad engineers decided to go with the cheap one. It's a systemic issue due to cost cutting by, you guessed it, people MBA's.

No engineer, if given the choice, would have re-used the old plane design instead of designing a fully new, modern plane, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.

No engineer, if given the choice, would have put the plane through as little testing as they did or sold it as not requiring much training for pilots, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.

No engineer, if given the choice, would have separated the manufacturing facility out of Boeing, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.

These are decisions that were pushed by higher ups (with MBAs) that engineers have to live with. They aren't "wrong" decisions, there is nothing in them an engineer could look at and say "this will, 100% cause a failure down the road and I demand we not do this". What they are is steps in the wrong direction, steps away from the "best" decision that could have made from a safety and quality standpoint. Take enough and eventually they add up into what happened.

I think the best way I can put it is if, as an engineering org that deals with real world things, you aren't pushing towards best practices, higher standards, and technical excellence than you are either stagnating or declining. In either case your quality will decline without anyone doing anything "wrong" as you end up with people with increasingly less experience and resources being asked to do more work. And the worst part is you can get away with that and often companies do. But if you go to far eventually you cross a threshold where cumulative effects push you over the boundary of failure.

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#66

Post by cryptonector »

nocsi wrote: post #37
mikece wrote: post #3

A friend of mine who used to work for Boeing said the downward trend started when they acquired McDonnell Douglas and the MD bean counters took over a lot of top positions at Boeing, displacing engineers. After that cost-cutting became more of an obsession than building awesome aircraft. Makes me wonder how Boeing can avoid descending into bankruptcy at this point with multiple major projects having significant issue…

The details of the MD acquisition is pretty crazy. It was like an unintentional SPAC whereby the company you’re buying owns you

It's pretty common. Company A is doing well, company B is much smaller than company A, A acquires B, A's executives get wonderful retirement parachutes and promote B's executives. Thus A gets to be run by B as if B had acquired A rather than the inverse.

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#67

Post by MilStdJunkie »

mc32 wrote: post #28
tr_user wrote: post #6

Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs. > However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary. > Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance a…

Looks like MBAs doing a CYA and throwing the Engs under the bus. Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over. I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.

I know that there was a Boeing sub with a doc repository whose internal address was "TheBlameThrower". It had the explicit purpose of nailing specific people for saying specific things. So throwing people under transmissions is something of a company sport, with points awarded for distance and style.

Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.

Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from who knows where - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.

In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.

Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.

[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#68

Post by bloopernova »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #44

Ablative management: Layered heat shield of dispensable people that burn off to protect the capsule with the execs.

Completely off topic, but I always wondered what was so special about Deep Space 9's USS Defiant and its "ablative armour". Sure, it was a plot device, but everyone who encountered it seemed astounded by it.

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#69

Post by nickff »

SleepilyLimping wrote: post #41
legitster wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the MD acquisition didn't happen in a vacuum. At the time Airbus was becoming a government-backed behemoth, and the US government was allocating all of their political capital and military procurement at MD. So the whole point of acquiring MD was to get more favorable government treatment. What followed was not necessarily even about cost-cutting - they wanted to spread out the production of their aircraft from…

Isn't it wondrous what lobbying can do?

In this instance, it seems like the government was actually pressuring the government to do its bidding, rather than the other way around. There have been many articles written about the ways the Clinton administration pressured Boeing to purchase McDonnell Douglas (which was suffering from the cancellation of many military programs).

Re: Boeing ousts 737 MAX chief

#70

Post by [deleted] »

jm4 wrote: post #26
bavent wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah firing someone who was on the engineering side is not a good look when the problems are on the MBA side.

Engineers designed and built that plane. The plane is fundamentally flawed. The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there. The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibilit…

[deleted]
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