> With the dawn of the 1980s, however, Boeing’s traditional way of doing things seemed increasingly out of touch. Deregulation under US presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had changed the economics of the industry, Greenberg said. “The idea was that if you had more competition, it would drop prices for consumers. Suddenly, airlines are looking at this and saying, ‘Oh my God, we can’t pass on the cost by continuously raising ticket prices.’ That put pressure back on Boeing, and on Airbus eventually, to become cost-conscious.”
I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers. Compare the union workers for the Big Three during the 1970's to that of the gig economy workers now. Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions is what is best in the long term? Or maybe, we need to alternate periods of disruption and highly competitive markets with periods of stability and oligopolies? I suspect we as a society will have to try to figure that out, and that it is not a simple answer.
Living in first world country it's easy to be biased against race to the bottom - it hurts previously very well paid jobs and breaks established status quo.
But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc).
And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.
> I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure.
The market for air travel is highly competitive, the market for airplanes is not. In the market that the 737 serves, there's options from Boeing, Airbus, Tupolev and maybe Comac. Comac and Tupolev are deeply connected with the governments of China and Russia respectively; Airbus and Boeing are heavily subsidized by European and US government too, although more independent. There's a few more manufacturers if you include slightly smaller jets.
Building high capacity passenger jets has large inherent barriers to market, but then you also see things like Bombardier being forced into partnership with Airbus when it tried to develop a new jet around the market of the 737.
Long manufacturing queues and logistical difficulties of mixed fleets also make it hard for airlines to switch models or manufacturers, especially for smaller airlines.
The 737MAX was still safer than air travel in the 1970s. Boeing definitely screwed up, but it's a mistake to overstate how dangerous it really is. It's still far safer than driving. Air safety has advanced to a point where we're capable of having almost zero fatal accidents, which IMO leads us to overemphasize each one that still happens.
Ultimately, the airlines wanted a common TC and type rating for very good reasons -- it saves money, i.e. human effort in pilot training, the number of pilots that need to be on reserve, maintenance training and staffing, spare parts inventory, etc. These are all laudable goals, and to simply say that Boeing should have designed a new plane is too simplistic. The real problem IMO was the contracts Boeing signed with very high penalties for delivering late or having any additional training whatsoever.
This didn't give the engineers enough flexibility or time to design a safe augmentation system, especially after the discovery during test flights that the pitch instability was worse than expected. That led to a quick patch-up job that totally compromised the redundancy of MCAS.
It's also clear in hindsight that the FAA handed too much authority to Boeing on the certification side, and that they should have been scrutinizing their safety analyses more. That is clearly happening now, to Boeing's consternation.
The civil air transport airframe business environment was brutal long before Carter and Reagan. Look at the history of Lockheed, Convair, Dehavilland, etc. in the development of passenger jets during the 50's, 60's, and early 70's. There has always been a lot of technical and economic pressure in this business.
> I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
Can't you also plausibly in a similar spirit argue for the point that the regulations about retraining pilots were responsible for the 737 MAX disaster? Otherwise Boeing would not have made such crazy engineering decisions about its design.
> I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best
They probably are.. but it's probably not wise to consider a market dominated by three players as "competitive."
> Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions
I also don't think "more monopoly" is the sensible conclusion.
> and that it is not a simple answer.
Why is "more government regulation" not even a part of your consideration? The article itself even hints at this, before deregulation a company like Boeing could exist and be profitable, but after deregulation it becomes beholdant to Wall Street. It seems pretty clear what the solution is.
> I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers.
I have also mostly changed my mind here. Largely because I've worked in a quality focused shop and seen the difference. But, I also appreciate that cheaper means more people can access goods and services, even if at a lower quality.
>The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
If you ask me this is a problem in every highly regulated industry. You often find that the regulations have exceptions for smaller changes. What then happens is that you have many tiny changes that are made to fly under the radar, because it's unduly expensive to recertify after a big change. This makes it impossible to do big changes that are necessary to get rid of technical debt. Since it's impossible to get management approval for these. And technical debt keeps on building up.
If the incentives were more continuous (not sure how this is possible), instead of abruptly changing (no training <-> full training dichotomy), then we would see fewer of these cases.
So cases like this become a question of certain cost vs. risky reward (cheating or other hacky solutions). And if you've already invested in a few hacky solutions and not been caught, then the incremental risk seems to go lower, while the abrupt cost change stays the same.
I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
No! That's shifting the blame away from those that engineered and built that death trap. Which is the Boeing Corporation.
If airlines demand features, which are just not feasible to provide at the price range they're willing to pay then it's the plane makers responsibility not to provide such planes. Period!
The core issue (apart from what happened much earlier, after McDonnel's reverse take over) was not the fact that airlines were trying to drive the price down, but that Boeing didn't have a competing product in the most critical market and wouldn't have one for a decade if they engineered a modern plane.
So they hacked an ancient 60th design to modern standards and shunned, demoted or simply fired engineers, which dared to raise concerns. Having the FAA in their pockets and spending tons of cash on lobbying instead of investing it into the construction of good reliable planes also didn't help.
This one's on Boeing. Not on airlines and certainly not on pilots. It's on The Boeing Comnpany; period!
And what galls me most is that the only entity, which was in a position to know what was wrong after the first crash did everything in it's power to blame, befuddle, obstruct and deflect from the real cause. MCAS, which wasn't even documented in the manuals at that time.
In that sense the second crash is corporate mass murder for profit and I really hope that C level people go to jail for that one (alas, I doubt it).
I know this is Hacker News and we like to blame politicians or rich non-engineers, but isn't the 737-Max case a case of very bad engineering that they could have done better? Maybe management had a hand in that, but the final outcome is the engineering was terrible and it's not simply the fault of deregulation in the 80s.
A competitive market should improve the quality of planes: no one should buy a Boeing if there is a viable alternative. Allowing the merger reduced competition.
We really shouldn't blame deregulation (in the sense of reducing the barrier of entry to airline markets). Lower airline ticket prices (Europe is a case in point) is better for everyone. And if quality were indeed lower, then another company should be able to swoop in and capture a higher tier quality market if there are people willing to pay for it (like first class, or business class)
Lack of anti-trust enforcement in the aerospace manufacturing industry is entirely orthogonal and hurts plane safety.
The market is just an optimizing function. Perhaps the problem is not competitive markets but rather the structure of the market, e.g. the optimization parameters & feedback loops.. For example, a common criticism of the medical market is that without accurate quotes, you cannot price compare- thus it's not a properly functioning free market with the appropriate feedback cycles, and the free market approach to fixing it would be to improve price information.
I don't think this has anything to do with airline deregulation. The FAA has really done an excellent job of managing the various airlines and it's an example I'd point to of how regulation can work correctly in that context. Mostly that's because airlines are even more interested in preventing their competitors form cutting corners that put airline crashes in the news than they are in cutting corners themselves leading to a good sort of regulatory capture.
But Boeing itself isn't one of the many airlines and is the singular US plane exporter champion. Wheras Delta, Southwest, et al want to see that the FAA isn't giving Jet Blue a pass there's mostly only Boeing to check whether Boeing is given too much of a pass and political pressure from up high is targeted at making Boeing better positioned to compete with Airbus which the FAA doesn't have jurisdiction or input from.
Free, deregulated markets work well when the market participants have high information about what's in the market. If you're interested in buying, say, books, there's not much need to regulate what's in the books - customers have a pretty good idea, they can page through the book at the bookstore, and they can read what reviewers say.
Customers don't have any idea about which airline is safer. Airlines rarely have an idea of which airline is safer - shortcuts taken in manufacturing might lead to problems 20 years down the line when no human who was involved in the engineering or purchasing work is still at either company.
Free markets push everything to the level of just bearable. Bad, but not quite bad enough not to use a service you rely on. Seats are tight, just not tight enough to make people in general seriously consider to not fly because of that. Food is bad, just not bad enough for people not to eat it.
Air travel is so much safer than traveling by car that anything you can do to bring down its price is probably a big safety win -- including corner-cutting on airplane safety.
High competitive / low prices marketeering at best gives you Walmart: where none of the products are very good, false values products are vaunted (the one gallon pickle jar for $4.99) and nobody is especially enthused about what's on offer.
The free market can work - if certain safeguards are in place to ensure the race to the bottom doesn't negatively impact either the safety and suitability of the products and services produced, or the wages and benefits paid to workers. Remove those and you end up with misery.
I spent 45 years in this industry and the following describes exactly what happened in the mid 90's throughout the entire industry. As subcontractors, we were told that we needed to get on board with the new way of thinking, or we would lose our contracts.
>Inside the company, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction. A formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned employees they needed to “quit behaving like a family and become more like a team. If you don’t perform, you don’t stay on the team.”
I have a different view of the situation. I believe that the 737 Max disaster was directly caused by the idea that management is a valuable skill on its own, that management is somehow separable from the domain-specific knowledge required in order to make an honest buck.
There are plenty of examples of engineers that make terrible managers, to be sure. But there are also plenty of examples of managers with business backgrounds that have absolutely no idea about the consequences of their decisions. An optimal result requires skill in both domains.
By this point, you might be thinking, "Hey wait, isn't it true that cost-cutting also had a role in the crisis? Wasn't there at least one engineer that sounded the alarm in a memo?" And my answer to that is a resounding yes. But the question remains, where the hell did that idea come from? At no point did anyone think, "I'd love to spike my profits this quarter here and have huge disaster that will tank us in the next quarter." Therefore the problem isn't one of simple pursuit of the profit motive, because it is quite clear that Boeing hasn't profited from this situation long-term. And that's why I have focused explicitly on this foolish, self-defeating management fashion at the top of my mini essay here.
This brings us to the topic of Boeing's future. I could be wrong about him, but the fact that they have selected a person who majored in accounting to be their new CEO does not bode well for them. At the very least he has a major gap in his background to overcome, and at best I can only see them just managing to hang on instead of growing.
How does this relate to the merger issue? This management fashion I am speaking would have likely infected both McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing had they remained separate. That's because companies hire people out of the same pool of people that learn this stuff in their universities! Maybe there is a case to be made that having separate companies would make it slightly harder for them to both fail, but I believe that this isn't a very strong argument.
I dunno. At first this article almost felt like damage control: it wasn't Boeing, it was those McDonnell Douglas peeps. But then it seemed to focus more on the engineers themselves and try to make them seem like a cozy family shop .. even before the big merger; Boeing was hardly that. It was (and is) a massive employer that has tactically distributed manufacturing to as many different states as possible (to help with lobbying efforts under the banner of job creation; distributed with a very wide net of employees).
Even without the Douglas acquisition, would we still be here with the 737-Max8 failure as bad as it is? I think all industry over the past two decades have gone down the route of maximizing profits and cutting costs. Hell, there are startups build around the idea of just ignoring or lobbying against legislation (Uber, AirBnB) and marking that arrogance as being "disruptive," as if they were some kind of civil rights pioneers.
It's really impossible to tell what would have happened without Boeing buying MCD, but I there is a good chance we would have ended up here eventually anyway. Focusing on MCD in this article feels more of a narrative tool than an objective critique and analysis.
“We thought that we’d kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the ropes,” he said. “I still believe that Harry outsmarted Phil and his gang bought Boeing with Boeing’s money. We were all just disgusted.” More than that, he added, the company had “paid way, way too much money [for McDonnell Douglas] and we’re still paying for it. We wrote off so many tens of billions of dollars for that whole mess.”
A good lesson to not play games with hustlers. McDonnell Douglas was famous for being slimy, financial rent-seekers. They got hustled.
One great company after another destroyed by financial shenanigans. Avaya & Silver Lake Partners is another that comes to mind, but there have been many.
> Stonecipher seems to have agreed with this assessment. “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.”
Wow. In retrospect, this is an amoral path. Basically it's money over lives. Furthermore, this "intent" has cost them more financially.
And yet for Stonecipher it was a personally financially successful personal decision and none of the consequences will hurt him personally. When the rewards always go to the top (aka shareholders) and consequences always fall elsewhere, this is the predictable consequence.
We need some system such that shareholders and executives become personally responsible for these tragic yet predictable consequences.
Then Boeing tried to deliver them just days before the end of the year but Qatar Airlines had them fly back. My guess is it really was that Boeing had not met the schedule for fitting the Qsuite and QA was having none of it.
From the article: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm,” [Harry Stonecipher, the new CEO from McDonnell-Douglas] told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.”
I lay the blame at the feet of each person at the company who acted selfishly.
Selfishness gets an easy pass here on Hacker News --- well, just about everywhere these days, I guess. Take this recent thread, where the submitter confesses that he has been slacking off for 6 years at work. A lot of people egged him on. I remember one comment that advised him to double down and go Full Sociopath (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964204).
I could not think of a good rebuttal. I mean, I work hard even when no one is watching, because I am religious, but I did not imagine it going well if I just laid out the idea of a transcendental world. But the only solution I see is reformation of the individual, one by one, not revolution of the social structure --- change from the inside out, instead of the outside in.
The enemy is not the rich or the poor, the executive or the engineer. Any of these people can be dangerous, if their philosophy is maximum selfishness. Furthermore, no set of laws is clever enough to keep the peace if the majority of citizens are sociopaths. They will always find the legal loopholes. On the other hand, a country with the dumbest regulatory set-up would still run fine if peopled by saints, people who are the opposite of selfish, who are always asking, am I treating others how I wish to be treated?
I’ve got to agree with you. Selfishness in your job at Boeing, perhaps, means you care less about the safety of the plane and more about doing the minimum you can. Maybe that means you don’t report something you may have if you were more invested. At my job as a software engineer working on tools for making websites, it may just mean that a user can not accomplish X or that a bug goes unfixed for a while. But compounded over time, those little things done by a lot of people can mean a plane crashes — or in my case, that the company looses users and I may be out of a job.
Of course, you should be selfish in that you should take care of yourself and not seriously stress yourself over work. But sometimes not doing an uncomfortable thing (for me, reaching out to an unfamiliar person) can seriously hinder the quality of my work. That quality definitely manifests itself in the product in big and small ways.
I have the same feeling you do, but I really wonder: is it the same as it's ever been and I am growing older, or are we really more selfish than we used to be? It sure seems like everyone is out to make a buck, morality be damned.
I just always imagine the shame that I would feel if I was in charge of making these short-sighted decisions. Sacrificing the quality/safety of the product to make a bonus. I would feel intensely ashamed about doing such a thing, but I guess that disqualifies me from ever being in charge.
This is absolutely on target. I am hearing from friends in Wichita that the Textron Aviation merger with Beechcraft is creating the same situation as the Douglas-Boeing merger. I have friends that have been with Textron for a long time that are getting new bosses from Beechcraft and the term that is getting used is "well that was Beeched."
I dispute that McDonnell Douglas was 'on the ropes' before the merger - the MD-80/90/95 family was selling well, and while the MD-11 was not, the market at that time for wide-body jets was fairly soft. In addition the C-17 was still being made as fast as it could be at that time. I'd also point to the success of the Delta II heavy lift vehicle too.
Whats interesting to me, is the merger between McDonnell Aircraft and Douglas Aircraft was effectively a shotgun marriage. DAC was capital starved in the late 60's and merged for an infusion of capital.
I am not an aeronautical engineer. A year or two ago I read a comment here that certainly seemed legitimate that talked about airplane design and it went something like this (paraphrased because I can't find it now):
> As soon as you move the engines, you probably need to move the wings. As soon as you move the wings, you need to redesign the airframe. As soon as you do that you're designing a whole new plane.
I can't even remember if this was talking about the Max at all.
So it seems to me the core problem here is Boeing had reached the limit of what they could do with a 50 year old airframe while maintaining the common type rating and aircraft and engine design have simply changed. Airbus may eventually have that problem with the A320 family. I really don't know. But they don't have it yet.
Part of controlling costs at a budget airline is maintaining a single fleet (in type rating terms). The two choices here seem to be the 737 or the A320.
The Max came about because there was a huge captured demand for it from the likes of Southwest. Would this have happened without the MD merger? I can't say but I'd be surprised if it couldn't given the demand from budget airlines.
Of course people like to take an issue like this and tie it to whatever axe they want to grind too.
political corruption brought the 737 max to the ground. once a manufacturer has power to do their own QA instead of the FAA or any other independent authority, you're doing stuff on a 3rd world status level. no oversight. investor driven.
Recently the highly controversial bill S.386(https://antis386.org/) that mentioned Boeing used $9/hr India engineers to write some level of the software used on its airlines, is this true if there are any insiders who know something about it?
Without a competitor Boeing has no intention to make the safest product anymore, however, Airline unlike others, must make sure safety/quality remains to be the No.1 priority. Any outsourcing should be carefully thought out before running towards the cheapest offer offshore.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago|reply
I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de-regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.
I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers. Compare the union workers for the Big Three during the 1970's to that of the gig economy workers now. Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions is what is best in the long term? Or maybe, we need to alternate periods of disruption and highly competitive markets with periods of stability and oligopolies? I suspect we as a society will have to try to figure that out, and that it is not a simple answer.
[+] [-] justapassenger|6 years ago|reply
But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc).
And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.
[+] [-] toast0|6 years ago|reply
The market for air travel is highly competitive, the market for airplanes is not. In the market that the 737 serves, there's options from Boeing, Airbus, Tupolev and maybe Comac. Comac and Tupolev are deeply connected with the governments of China and Russia respectively; Airbus and Boeing are heavily subsidized by European and US government too, although more independent. There's a few more manufacturers if you include slightly smaller jets.
Building high capacity passenger jets has large inherent barriers to market, but then you also see things like Bombardier being forced into partnership with Airbus when it tried to develop a new jet around the market of the 737.
Long manufacturing queues and logistical difficulties of mixed fleets also make it hard for airlines to switch models or manufacturers, especially for smaller airlines.
[+] [-] cameldrv|6 years ago|reply
Ultimately, the airlines wanted a common TC and type rating for very good reasons -- it saves money, i.e. human effort in pilot training, the number of pilots that need to be on reserve, maintenance training and staffing, spare parts inventory, etc. These are all laudable goals, and to simply say that Boeing should have designed a new plane is too simplistic. The real problem IMO was the contracts Boeing signed with very high penalties for delivering late or having any additional training whatsoever.
This didn't give the engineers enough flexibility or time to design a safe augmentation system, especially after the discovery during test flights that the pitch instability was worse than expected. That led to a quick patch-up job that totally compromised the redundancy of MCAS.
It's also clear in hindsight that the FAA handed too much authority to Boeing on the certification side, and that they should have been scrutinizing their safety analyses more. That is clearly happening now, to Boeing's consternation.
[+] [-] vibrolax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolfgke|6 years ago|reply
Can't you also plausibly in a similar spirit argue for the point that the regulations about retraining pilots were responsible for the 737 MAX disaster? Otherwise Boeing would not have made such crazy engineering decisions about its design.
[+] [-] akira2501|6 years ago|reply
They probably are.. but it's probably not wise to consider a market dominated by three players as "competitive."
> Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions
I also don't think "more monopoly" is the sensible conclusion.
> and that it is not a simple answer.
Why is "more government regulation" not even a part of your consideration? The article itself even hints at this, before deregulation a company like Boeing could exist and be profitable, but after deregulation it becomes beholdant to Wall Street. It seems pretty clear what the solution is.
[+] [-] pnathan|6 years ago|reply
I have also mostly changed my mind here. Largely because I've worked in a quality focused shop and seen the difference. But, I also appreciate that cheaper means more people can access goods and services, even if at a lower quality.
[+] [-] carlmr|6 years ago|reply
If you ask me this is a problem in every highly regulated industry. You often find that the regulations have exceptions for smaller changes. What then happens is that you have many tiny changes that are made to fly under the radar, because it's unduly expensive to recertify after a big change. This makes it impossible to do big changes that are necessary to get rid of technical debt. Since it's impossible to get management approval for these. And technical debt keeps on building up.
If the incentives were more continuous (not sure how this is possible), instead of abruptly changing (no training <-> full training dichotomy), then we would see fewer of these cases.
So cases like this become a question of certain cost vs. risky reward (cheating or other hacky solutions). And if you've already invested in a few hacky solutions and not been caught, then the incremental risk seems to go lower, while the abrupt cost change stays the same.
It also goes hand in hand with the normalization of deviance (https://danluu.com/wat/).
If everything you've done for the last 60 years is incrementally adding hacks to the 737, then the one on the 737 MAX doesn't seem crazy anymore.
[+] [-] CaptainZapp|6 years ago|reply
No! That's shifting the blame away from those that engineered and built that death trap. Which is the Boeing Corporation.
If airlines demand features, which are just not feasible to provide at the price range they're willing to pay then it's the plane makers responsibility not to provide such planes. Period!
The core issue (apart from what happened much earlier, after McDonnel's reverse take over) was not the fact that airlines were trying to drive the price down, but that Boeing didn't have a competing product in the most critical market and wouldn't have one for a decade if they engineered a modern plane.
So they hacked an ancient 60th design to modern standards and shunned, demoted or simply fired engineers, which dared to raise concerns. Having the FAA in their pockets and spending tons of cash on lobbying instead of investing it into the construction of good reliable planes also didn't help.
This one's on Boeing. Not on airlines and certainly not on pilots. It's on The Boeing Comnpany; period!
And what galls me most is that the only entity, which was in a position to know what was wrong after the first crash did everything in it's power to blame, befuddle, obstruct and deflect from the real cause. MCAS, which wasn't even documented in the manuals at that time.
In that sense the second crash is corporate mass murder for profit and I really hope that C level people go to jail for that one (alas, I doubt it).
[+] [-] narrator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vervious|6 years ago|reply
We really shouldn't blame deregulation (in the sense of reducing the barrier of entry to airline markets). Lower airline ticket prices (Europe is a case in point) is better for everyone. And if quality were indeed lower, then another company should be able to swoop in and capture a higher tier quality market if there are people willing to pay for it (like first class, or business class)
Lack of anti-trust enforcement in the aerospace manufacturing industry is entirely orthogonal and hurts plane safety.
[+] [-] ip26|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|6 years ago|reply
But Boeing itself isn't one of the many airlines and is the singular US plane exporter champion. Wheras Delta, Southwest, et al want to see that the FAA isn't giving Jet Blue a pass there's mostly only Boeing to check whether Boeing is given too much of a pass and political pressure from up high is targeted at making Boeing better positioned to compete with Airbus which the FAA doesn't have jurisdiction or input from.
So I think it's really a different situation.
[+] [-] geofft|6 years ago|reply
Customers don't have any idea about which airline is safer. Airlines rarely have an idea of which airline is safer - shortcuts taken in manufacturing might lead to problems 20 years down the line when no human who was involved in the engineering or purchasing work is still at either company.
[+] [-] gdubs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgoetzke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjscott|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|6 years ago|reply
I thought it was to avoid FAA airworthiness recertification.
[+] [-] nickbauman|6 years ago|reply
At worst you get things like the gig economy.
[+] [-] whermans|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptah|6 years ago|reply
in some cases yes, in others no. use the right tool for the job
[+] [-] jessant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ratsmack|6 years ago|reply
>Inside the company, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction. A formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned employees they needed to “quit behaving like a family and become more like a team. If you don’t perform, you don’t stay on the team.”
[+] [-] maxharris|6 years ago|reply
There are plenty of examples of engineers that make terrible managers, to be sure. But there are also plenty of examples of managers with business backgrounds that have absolutely no idea about the consequences of their decisions. An optimal result requires skill in both domains.
By this point, you might be thinking, "Hey wait, isn't it true that cost-cutting also had a role in the crisis? Wasn't there at least one engineer that sounded the alarm in a memo?" And my answer to that is a resounding yes. But the question remains, where the hell did that idea come from? At no point did anyone think, "I'd love to spike my profits this quarter here and have huge disaster that will tank us in the next quarter." Therefore the problem isn't one of simple pursuit of the profit motive, because it is quite clear that Boeing hasn't profited from this situation long-term. And that's why I have focused explicitly on this foolish, self-defeating management fashion at the top of my mini essay here.
This brings us to the topic of Boeing's future. I could be wrong about him, but the fact that they have selected a person who majored in accounting to be their new CEO does not bode well for them. At the very least he has a major gap in his background to overcome, and at best I can only see them just managing to hang on instead of growing.
How does this relate to the merger issue? This management fashion I am speaking would have likely infected both McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing had they remained separate. That's because companies hire people out of the same pool of people that learn this stuff in their universities! Maybe there is a case to be made that having separate companies would make it slightly harder for them to both fail, but I believe that this isn't a very strong argument.
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
Even without the Douglas acquisition, would we still be here with the 737-Max8 failure as bad as it is? I think all industry over the past two decades have gone down the route of maximizing profits and cutting costs. Hell, there are startups build around the idea of just ignoring or lobbying against legislation (Uber, AirBnB) and marking that arrogance as being "disruptive," as if they were some kind of civil rights pioneers.
It's really impossible to tell what would have happened without Boeing buying MCD, but I there is a good chance we would have ended up here eventually anyway. Focusing on MCD in this article feels more of a narrative tool than an objective critique and analysis.
[+] [-] legitster|6 years ago|reply
A good lesson to not play games with hustlers. McDonnell Douglas was famous for being slimy, financial rent-seekers. They got hustled.
[+] [-] dade_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bynkman|6 years ago|reply
Wow. In retrospect, this is an amoral path. Basically it's money over lives. Furthermore, this "intent" has cost them more financially.
[+] [-] jgeada|6 years ago|reply
We need some system such that shareholders and executives become personally responsible for these tragic yet predictable consequences.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metabagel|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
[+] [-] mzs|6 years ago|reply
https://simpleflying.com/qatar-airways-flies-brand-new-boein...
[+] [-] typon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] combatentropy|6 years ago|reply
I lay the blame at the feet of each person at the company who acted selfishly.
Selfishness gets an easy pass here on Hacker News --- well, just about everywhere these days, I guess. Take this recent thread, where the submitter confesses that he has been slacking off for 6 years at work. A lot of people egged him on. I remember one comment that advised him to double down and go Full Sociopath (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964204).
I could not think of a good rebuttal. I mean, I work hard even when no one is watching, because I am religious, but I did not imagine it going well if I just laid out the idea of a transcendental world. But the only solution I see is reformation of the individual, one by one, not revolution of the social structure --- change from the inside out, instead of the outside in.
The enemy is not the rich or the poor, the executive or the engineer. Any of these people can be dangerous, if their philosophy is maximum selfishness. Furthermore, no set of laws is clever enough to keep the peace if the majority of citizens are sociopaths. They will always find the legal loopholes. On the other hand, a country with the dumbest regulatory set-up would still run fine if peopled by saints, people who are the opposite of selfish, who are always asking, am I treating others how I wish to be treated?
[+] [-] jmkni|6 years ago|reply
Interestingly, I work hard even when no one is watching because I'm not religious.
If you are religious, then by definition you believe somebody is always watching.
[+] [-] noahtallen|6 years ago|reply
Of course, you should be selfish in that you should take care of yourself and not seriously stress yourself over work. But sometimes not doing an uncomfortable thing (for me, reaching out to an unfamiliar person) can seriously hinder the quality of my work. That quality definitely manifests itself in the product in big and small ways.
[+] [-] rland|6 years ago|reply
I just always imagine the shame that I would feel if I was in charge of making these short-sighted decisions. Sacrificing the quality/safety of the product to make a bonus. I would feel intensely ashamed about doing such a thing, but I guess that disqualifies me from ever being in charge.
[+] [-] soapboxrocket|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|6 years ago|reply
Whats interesting to me, is the merger between McDonnell Aircraft and Douglas Aircraft was effectively a shotgun marriage. DAC was capital starved in the late 60's and merged for an infusion of capital.
[+] [-] cletus|6 years ago|reply
> As soon as you move the engines, you probably need to move the wings. As soon as you move the wings, you need to redesign the airframe. As soon as you do that you're designing a whole new plane.
I can't even remember if this was talking about the Max at all.
So it seems to me the core problem here is Boeing had reached the limit of what they could do with a 50 year old airframe while maintaining the common type rating and aircraft and engine design have simply changed. Airbus may eventually have that problem with the A320 family. I really don't know. But they don't have it yet.
Part of controlling costs at a budget airline is maintaining a single fleet (in type rating terms). The two choices here seem to be the 737 or the A320.
The Max came about because there was a huge captured demand for it from the likes of Southwest. Would this have happened without the MD merger? I can't say but I'd be surprised if it couldn't given the demand from budget airlines.
Of course people like to take an issue like this and tie it to whatever axe they want to grind too.
[+] [-] dzonga|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iwan-Zotow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|6 years ago|reply
Without a competitor Boeing has no intention to make the safest product anymore, however, Airline unlike others, must make sure safety/quality remains to be the No.1 priority. Any outsourcing should be carefully thought out before running towards the cheapest offer offshore.
[+] [-] oefrha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fargle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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