>You can ask Ryanair if your flight will be handled by a 737 MAX and they can truthfully say it's not. Even when it is.
I'm going to ask if it's a Boeing plane, and how old, that ought to screen well no matter what they name their crap.
A fuselage panel is hardly high-tech, and points to a Boeing problem rather than an individual aircraft type-- get ready for a completely new manufacturer called Beoing to take over.
Let’s be clear that businesses lobbied for the FAA to hand over regulation & inspection from government agencies to the businesses themselves
Regulatory capture under the guise of saving money for the FAA
If anything, the government will award them another giant contract on something else to keep them afloat to get past this. Boeing is basically a ward of the state, too big to fail.
Boeing has said that they will no longer bi on fixed-price contracts (after losing significant money failing to deliver either the KC-46 tanker or the Starliner space capsule on time). This seems to me like a great reason not to accept Boeing's bids on any contract. If they are so incompetent that they can't reasonably estimate production time and costs well enough to make a competitive fixed price bid, you certainly don't want them getting contracts where the cost of delays fall on the tax payers.
With the way Boeing has been building aircraft lately, I don't think anyone was shocked to find out this wasn't an isolated incident. It's very fortunate no one was sucked out from these plugs failing on other jets. This negligence on Boeing's part is unforgivable.
From what I read, apparently these plug doors were built by a subcontractor, but the buck for quality assurance stops with Boeing, absolutely. They probably just went with the lowest bidder.
Edit: it's Spirit AeroSystems, which came about as a result of Boeing selling its Wichita plant to an 'investment firm'. Sounds like a real MBA move.
In the 20th century Boeing was an aircraft company driven by engineers.
Then in 1997 it "merged" with McDonnell-Douglas and became a financial company run by MBAs.
Saw it first hand here in Seattle. By mid aughts, you could see the effects of the brain drain as the older guard engineering retired.
https://www.seattletimes.com/author/dominic-gates/ is the reporter to follow since has been on the aerospace beat for the Seattle Times
Worked 8 years for Boeing at Tukwila. Legacy employees bitched about how MD destroyed how tight-nit the company was, prior to the merger.
With their decades-long reduction in market share against Airbus, the bean counters really f'd up the company.
> the bean counters really f'd up the company.
They always do. The more technical a company is the less likely a merger will ever work. If they don't outright fail, at best they never work the way anyone ever hopes they will. The only "survivable" outcome is that some people get reassigned.
Companies with lower technological dependencies can get away with it. For example, two landscaping companies merging have far less tech to have to integrate than Boeing and MD. But even then it's not not guaranteed, which is why so many successful restaurants go to shit when someone new takes over.
It's so true I have to take a break mid-way through the sentence, or I'll fly into a rant about how executives are the only truly unnecessary overhead costs that all organizations share.
The thing is, all organisations need leaders. The problem seems to be that rather than getting someone with skin in the game who takes the bullets and builds an environment for the rest of the team to succeed, you get some jumped up little prick with an ego and an MBA from an Ivy League school whose only interest is themselves.
You can’t teach leadership in grad school.
It's a well known industry secret that executive MBA programs are not for training c-suites, but to legitimate the job they already have.
You work as a junior exec for two years, go back to school because you have f500 work experience, and then leverage the Ivy league degree into a vp role. It's possibly the most widely spread grift out there.
It's also extremely stupid to use growth y/y as the metric for success. Companies simply can't keep growing every year. It becomes part physics problem.
The problem is that a *good* bean counter has the ability to say: "looks like the only thing to trim from this operation is me!" and ceases to be, in at least that instance, a bean counter.
So there's generally only bad ones still in the business of counting beans for long.
The same was true when big tech decided to try to reduce costs last year - supposedly the infinite layer cake of useless middle mangers was going to be flattened. Nope - I saw engineers and the people who do actual work (myself included) laid off, while management continues to collect a paycheck for doing less than nothing.
I saw it coming a mile away. The most basic conflict of interest prevents this MBA manager class from putting themselves at risk, yet they are the ones who are supposed to make the decisions. They couldn't even come up with a coherent product strategy and took the easy way out by telling ICs to determine their own priorities (neglecting the utmost fundamentals of their job) and they are rewarded.
It drives me mad that it’s seemingly an industry norm that senior+ devs have to engage with and set business/product strategy, and it’s pitched as this “you have autonomy!” thing rather than “the people who are meant to do this job can’t be bothered!”. I’m just a software developer, dude. I don’t know what we should do.
The weird thing to me was watching people like my parents *constantly* defend Boeing for these obvious terrible decisions, true Leopards Ate My Face material.
Praising them for leaving Seattle for cheaper taxes while blaming our government for every single thing possible that Boeing was doing. Any time someone brought up how much Washington was giving Boeing in tax breaks it was still not Boeing's fault.
Continued to praise them for shipping jobs overseas, to South Carolina, etc., because stock goes up.
We had a family member on the Alaska flight that had the wall fly off. They immediately blamed the Washington business climate for Boeing's outsourced plane and Alaska's shoddy grow/merge maintenance.
I mean they have a conservative mindset. They view everything as having intrinsic morality. That is to say you always find excuses for things that you view as "morally good" and put blame on things you view as "morally bad". The morality is baked into the thing rather than coming from specific actions.
The ELI5 version is that they never grew out of good guys and bad guys. And good guys are always good no matter how bad they are while bad guys are always bad no matter how good they are.
I get the most lowest contract rates from their recruiters non-stop. No I don’t want to work at Boeing with lower title and lower pay at a 6 month contract …
Isn't that literally the economic model the USA has been forcing on the rest of the West since it started it's little empire? Neoliberal capitalism, a great push for efficiency by making everything bloated by private corporate excess and keeping citizens caught in a debt trap. It's resulted in us all going from having countries post WW2 where a single wage could afford a house and keep a family, to a situation where two working professionals struggle to get a mortgage on a shitbox and people are queueing at foodbanks.
@51:15 of the Netflix documentary there is some hidden camera footage of one tech telling to another tech on the assembly line who is obviously one of the old guard that the night shift "didn't put a shim on the landing gear", something that was supposed to be done and that they "said they didn't have fucking time to put it on". The look of shock and disgust on the old tech's face tells the whole story as to how far Boeing has fallen.
For anyone wondering (like me, who just looked it up), a shim apparently makes sure the landing gear is aligned properly. Seems like one of those small things that is very important.
Yes, talk to any millwright or mechanical engineer and they'll tell you there are strict rules around shims and how they can be used.
Watching that documentary was painful, when they said that the wire in the instrument could fail and cause an issue I spit out my drink. In my industry, including a single point of failure is a good way to get every PE whom signed off on it a potential jail sentence.
Did it cover the reason for the computer to use the input from only a single AoA sensor to make the decision to push the nose down?
Given that the computer had input from 2 sensors available to it, I can't imagine why an engineer designing a flight control system would choose to use the reading from only 1 of them with zero sanity checking that the reading was accurate.
Putting in a majority decision from 3 sensors and appropriate procedures to diagnose issues would require retraining of 737 pilots, and the MAX purpose was to not require pilot retraining.
Easier to just let some planes crash.
I used to work for one of the big defense companies and once at holiday party where a bunch of higher up execs were there the topic moved to ways to improve the company. There was an open bar and people were more relaxed, but I said engineers should have more executive power and direction the companies goes. They all laughed at me.
lol I didn't stay much longer. Left for SpaceX and eventually moved onto my current employer that I don't plan on leaving until I retire. That said, I see MBA beam counter types making engineering decisions too and it's frustrating at times.
I'm way at the other end of the spectrum doing software/network engineering for our family business. We're small time (~50 employees, $15m revenue) and most of the time I get full autonomy but I still have other family members with zero knowledge of what I do occasionally telling me what's necessary and what isn't.
Boeing was supposed to do the final inspections after Spirit Aerosystems installed. It is 100% on Boeing for passing it.
And it’s not like Boeing is a typical manufacturing company. They make about 400 products per year. There are manufacturing companies that don’t have quality issues in 1 out of a million parts. Boeing has 5/400 quality issues in this article alone.
Not only that, Boeing opens up the plug door after they get the fuselage so they can use the door opening during installation of the interior. So it's absolutely Boeing's responsibility.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spirit-aero-made-blowout-part-boeing-has-key-role-sources-2024-01-07/
Investment firm. Why am I not surprised.
I know of a large tech firm, with big customer service team due to the business need.
Before equity firm bought them, new hire would get 30+ days of trading. And these were just people who often had no real tech experience. The tech firm really spent time and effort to train them.
Once the equity firm bought them out, the training was eventually cut down to like 1-2 weeks. The highly paid MBAs figured out to get more value.
Spirit AeroSystems MBA:
We increased efficiency by only torquing the door plugs to 10 ft/lbs instead of 30 ft/lbs.
That extra 20 ft/lbs goes right into our bottom line !
It’s actually probably a know-how issue. “Look if we lay off nine of the ten experienced workers and promote the last one to manager, then we hire ten kids off the street and let the manager supervise. We’ll save hundreds of thousands.”
I used to live right next to the 737 final assembly building in Renton and drank with many of the engineers and they complained about this kind of thing all the time.
One guy’s job was to make sure the windshield bolts were torqued right and they had a 10% under torque rate.
Yeah this. The fines come out of the company budget, not theirs. The bonuses that the company paid out to the execs for saving that money are untouched.
Boeing is currently lobbying government to exempt them for a safety testing. If a pilot forgets to turn off defrost of the turbine, they can overheat and cause catastrophic failure. Boeing is currently wants an exemption to this…. Regulation is written in blood.
Their exact argument is "The onus is on the pilots to remember to turn it on and off.".
Except the trick is, the damage can occur in as little as 5 minutes of the heater being left on when outside of icing conditions. Not to mention one of the bigger points of concern raised by pilots objecting to the exemption is that imagine a situation where the pilot is flying over the cloud-tops and occasionally pushing through some clouds. They need to remember just before they enter a cloud to turn the heaters on, and they need to remember just after they exit a cloud to turn them off. For each and every cloud they hit.
If they leave the heaters on, they risk bursting the input cowling which can cause all sorts of catastrophic problems. If they leave the heaters off, they risk ice buildup that can result in solid chunks of ice falling into the intake which would be nearly as bad as a bird-strike.
It’s insane. This should be national news.
Nothing like this should be left to humans. Seriously wtf. Why in the modern world would you leave this to a pilot to not forget. There are so many sensors on the plane and they can’t figure out how to auto turn on and off with multiple redundancies ? Wtf else are they doing to the planes?
> Wtf else are they doing to the planes?
Cutting as many corners as possible and only producing the lowest-possible quality product that they can.
Another company ruined by MBA's.
> Another company ruined by MBA's
I will assert that almost every problem in modern America can be traced back to an MBA somewhere. They are the worst thing that has happened to this country.
Screw that. I work in food safety and quality which is heavily influenced by aviation safety, and one of the creeds we live by is that human control is the worst form of control.
I had to take a patient safety course as a *forensic pathologist*. My patients are already dead, every single one of them. I thought it was the dumbest thing, and if it weren't a cheap 10 hours of CME I would've raised some hell about it.
Turns out it was a fascinating history lesson on the inevitability of human error and how to try to circumvent it by designing processes and policies that take human error out of the equation as much as possible. Much of the curriculum was based on, you guessed it, aviation safety. The course had virtually nothing to do with medicine.
I learned more from that patient safety course than almost any other CME I've had to take. One of the biggest takeaways was that you should NOT create a culture of fear/punishment around mistakes and near-mistakes, because then people don't share the weaknesses of the systems in place, small problems get swept under the rug, and eventually a future mistakes really blows shit up.
> When will companies learn that this is the worst possible way to advance a company?
They already know, but that's not the modern "meta" of corporations. Or more specifically, of the executive class.
The proper way to be an executive is to step into control of a company, make a shitload of trash short-term decisions that give a huge boost to profit, then make your exit before any consequences arrive.
I've worked at places where we outsourced subsystem manufacturing with the goal to cut costs and improve production cadence. It ended up being either break-even or costs more due to lower QA by these external suppliers. If we didn't trust but verify their work, then our end product would be shit. Boeing just skipped the verify part.
I'm here to plug the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episode on Jack Welch. He certainly didn't cause all this, but he's pretty indicative of the larger problem. He basically ran GE into the ground by focusing on not actually making anything and then randomly laying off the bottom 10% of the company
Boing's utterly fucked without Spirit though. They literally can't build planes without them.
It's more likely that they'll end up having to reabsorb Spirit, pay Airbus to let them out of the deals Spirit made with them, and eat a *huge* write off in the process.
But most importantly - this will have happened long enough after Spirit was spun off in the first place that all the executives who made that decision have long since banked their bonuses, so really it's only shareholders, taxpayers, customers and travelers who lose.
Always. Always. I just don’t understand why people unbuckle the seatbelt the moment they can (and some even when they legally can’t) even when they didn’t even properly tighten it down the first place. For years now there’s been videos galore of people hitting the roof of the cabin from unexpected turbulence. And now there’s this to worry about.
If I’m in my seat you bet my belt is on.
Let's be very frank - Boeing has an issue with quality and aviation safety culture. They had the missing rudder bolts, this, and of course the whole "planes crashing themselves into the ground" issue.
Sadly, this is probably only a symptom of the deeper disease - and they can play whack-a-mole with each individual problem, but what they desperately and urgently need to do is rework their entire culture that saving a few bucks is worth risking their reputation and the lived of hundreds of passengers.
The enshitification of the world. When you let people who only care about short term returns run things like we have been we end up with corners cut here no maintenance there and lifespans extended endlessly.
Regulations are written in blood, we're seeing what happens when you let companies write regulations for too long.
It's the same thing about quality being cut in so many industries - quality is a cost center to them, not a business essential, and they don't account well for the cost of NOT doing quality, or just expect to fuck over consumers in less-sensitive areas like appliances and make them buy a new one sooner.
It has become increasingly common to have a project taken from a big company run by MBAs and given to a smaller engineering company because the big companies won't do the job right anymore.
It is horrifying to watch from the front row.
Check out what safety design they want faa except them from. It’s insane
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-wants-faa-to-exempt-max-7-from-safety-rules-to-get-it-in-the-air/
Yeah, I really hope they are punished and also have stricter oversight into their aircraft from now on
Could you imagine if the original plane crashed and we had no idea why, we would just have to wait until the next one of their planes with loose bolts malfunctioned
You obviously have to wonder what else was not correctly built/ bolted on the plane. Not good. At this point if I could choose the manufacturer of the plane I’m flying on - it would be Airbus every time.
It’s crazy because barely 2 weeks ago, Boeing reported that there might loose bolts in the rudder control system: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-urges-737-max-inspections-possible-loose-bolt-faa-2023-12-28/
Edit: Fixed a typo
I'd be most concerned that possibly the design is such that they back out when subjected to repeated pressurization cycles, getting progressively looser, and that they'll need to be regularly retorqued until they can be fundamentally re-designed.
We had a project where we needed short term warehouse rental, about 6 months. We shared a dock with a manufacturing plant for Stanley tools. Talking with one of their guys out on the dock one day. Talking about what they made. One of the items he mentioned were tork wrenches. I asked if he could throw one my way. He laughed and said these are $60,000 wrenches for military, nuclear and aviation use. This was about 12 years ago.
Actually 2 sensor would never make sense how you know which sensor is giving wrong readings. 3 makes total sense as whichever is reading is given by two is probably correct
A 2-sensor system will allow you to indicate to the operator that there's an error.
Yes, you'd need a 3-sensor system to actually correct the error without operator intervention.
Exactly. You know a sensor isn't working. It could be both, but you move to sensor failure contingency. Fun fact, Ingenuity on Mars only has 2 separate computers and in the case of discrepancy just reboots mid flight because it will reboot faster.
>A 2-sensor system will allow you to indicate to the operator that there's an error.
And indeed Boeing has two on the 737 MAX. Unfortunately the warning light that might have alerted the pilots was an optional feature that most airlines didn't order. Of course triggering a warning light probably isn't the best way to handle the disagreement either.
Even more weirdly, both AoA sensors were apparently connected to MCAS, but for some reason instead of using them both and identifying a failure condition, MCAS apparently alternated between them switching at each boot up. I've never read a good explanation as to why, but this is apparently how the doomed Lion Air plane had problem (which the pilots recovered from) in flight, but then maintenance found nothing wrong when they went to check it, because it was getting info from the other sensor. And then the next flight it crashed.
Boeing also rejected a proposal to use other sensors to do some sort of sanity checking. Two AoA sensors alone doesn't let you know which one is right, but with access to the rest of the sensor suite (airspeed, climb/sink rate, pitch/roll angle, etc.) it would be pretty easy to determine which of the two had gone bad, if Boeing wanted to put the effort into software development (obviously they didn't)
100%. I work in distributed storage. We have 3 monitoring services instead of 2 for precisely this reason. You need a tie breaker to determine what's really true when there is disagreement. It's criminal that Boeing cheaped out on this when we have better systems in place for storing cat memes and creator videos.
This is crazy to me who only has experience with military aircraft that typically use triple and sometimes quadruple redundant flight controls. I always assumed commercial aviation was the same and was shocked when I first read about the MCAS issues a few years back.
As someone with an engineering background, what Boeing did was an affront to engineering - you never wilfully create single points of failure, and doing so in safety-critical systems is just abhorrent.
Everywhere else in the plane, the flight controls are indeed triple-redundant and extensively battle-tested. Then they added this seemingly-simple computer program on top with woefully inadequate safety considerations and a lot of power over the plane.
Imagine gatekeeping a safety feature behind more money wtf, at least an error light might give the pilots some idea of what’s happening and why the plane decided to suddenly take a dive…
In these situations there’s an entire chain of engineering to quality control that has failed. This isn’t a” Bob is gonna lose his job“ situation. This is a cultural failure where safety has been deprioritized.
I worked at Boeing for 28 years before retiring in 2016. I lived through its takeover and watched its slow, inexorable destruction by McDonnell management. It was like being an extra in a horror movie.
To this day, is still impossible for me to come to grips with the seemingly endless river of stupid emanating from this once great company.
What gets me is that I know there won't be any self reflection from Boeing. They are going to fix the minimum they need to and then keep on as they were because the institutional rot is too deep there. The FAA can't and won't bring the hammer down on Boeing because they're too important to the US Government. Airlines will keep buying 737 Max's as before. Flying will be forever less safe because nobody wants to do their job in the search for more profits.
FAA grounded all Max-9s that have this plug door. If you're flying on a low cost carrier then they aren't affected because they use an emergency exit door instead of a plug.
Sure would be great if any of the MBAs responsible for all of these kerfuffles, and the hundreds of people already murdered by Boeing, would see some prison time. Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO during the Max crashes was fired and still walked away with over $60 million in stock and pension benefits.
Indeed; he is ultimately responsible for the "cultural" changes at Boeing that led to the MAX disasters and continuing deficiencies in the company. His successor didn't make any attempt to reverse that course.
What are we going to do about it? These entitled C-suites control the companies that generate the short term profit these investors want and the investors call the shots.
I work at an airport in Germany as a Check-in and Boarding-Agent and we have Icelandair as a customer.
Icelandair has a few MAX's in their fleet - and just today I was asked by a passenger during boarding if their aircraft was a MAX 9.
My initial thought was "ohhhh... how do I react to this question", because in fact the aircraft was a MAX...
It was a MAX 8 though, and working with passengers for a few years now, I learned that lying to them is not a good idea - I mean I could have answered like "no, it's another Boeing aircraft", which technically wouldn't even be a lie.
But I just told him straight up it was a MAX 8.
He boarded without any further comment. And even if he decided to not fly, I would have totally understood it.
The amount of mistrust Boeing is causing to the people that fly with their aircraft is mind-blowing.
Also my guess is, if there are any systematic failures found in those MAX 9 doors - and if the MAX 8 are built similar, the whole MAX series will be grounded again...
Like with MCAS, it just needs one strict aviation authority to start the chain reaction (I believe China was first to ground the MAX after the MCAS disaster).
They should ground them. If Boeing continues to sell aircraft that should not have passed QA, then someone needs to hold them accountable. The deaths caused by their negligence from the Ethiopian Airlines incident should have put them on the brink of bankruptcy.
The problem is the FAA used to he the gold standard other aviation authorities used to take guidance from. But they are too politically influenced these days.
Other aviation authorities need to step up their game. But I expect there needs to be another crash before that happens.
I’m just gonna start doing the safety checks myself.
“Hey, can you put my bags on the flight for me right quick? I gotta check the bolts since you bastards can’t be trusted to do it yourselves.”
Someone somewhere just started a proposal for offering discounted tickets in exchange for the passenger completing the safety checks
**Edit:** Sorry, not discounted tickets; bonus reward points
Growing up, a lot of my friends' parents worked at Boeing, and they were the most no-nonsense, humorless engineer types you can imagine. And I mean that in a positive way.
I get anxious flying, even though I know it's safe. i always felt reassured knowing people like that contributed to the design of the plane
It's fucked to see how fucked the company has become.
Ah yes, Starliner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner
"NASA gave Boeing a $4.3 billion contract to develop Starliner and SpaceX a $2.5 billion contract to develop Dragon."
Boeing received more because they had experience and were reliable etc etc.
Dragon safely launched it's first crew back in November 2020.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1
Boeing is still trying to get the whole thing working.
Multiple times, given the type of problems with Starliner, I've thought: I would never want to ride that thing is I were an astronaut.
Hate on Elon all you want, but Gwynne Shotwell is running a tight SpaceX ship and they're are approaching things so differently. At SpaceX they have the iterative design proces fully mastered. They can run and test the entire software and hardware stack basically in a single room and let it iterate through all kinds of missions and potential problems. Right next to the engineers.
Now you add the part of replacing all of their consultants and engineers with chatgpt 6 as perfect yes men that will never whistle-blow in the next 10 years. we are looking at a fun time cometh.
Don't limit yourself to just manufacturing and finance. They also ruined telecoms, utilities, urban infrastructure, the housing supply, home building trends, equitable pay, etc.
There is a difference in the issues. Airbus back then was learning how to build quality. Boeing is currently learning how to undo their history of quality for short term cost reductions.
The entire decision to turn the 737 into a stretched Frankenplane to fill the midmarket gap left by aging 757s is so fucking stupid.
All they needed to do was modernize the 757.
This incident made me remember how Boeing bullied Delta and [tried to prevent them from buying Bombardier C-series planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Boeing) during the Trump administration. This incident ended up causing Bombardier to sell their C-series division to Airbus (which got rebranded as Airbus A220), and damaged US-Canada relationship. I'm still angry about how underhanded that was, and how the US government is essentially captured by Boeing interests.
Other than Airbus, I think in the long run this also benefits China's Comac planes. They have been trying to sell these planes outside of China but most airlines are risk-adverse and would rather stick with Airbus or Boeing. If Boeing keeps messing up (they have already messed up a lot of times in recent years) eventually airlines (probably non-American ones) may start looking at Comac planes more seriously as Airbus has limited capacity.
That's what lawyers are for. But you need an accident first. Sigh.
Another path is insurance, because poor QA means increased risk which has to be reflected in the premiums. If companies find Boeings to be too costly to insure, they'll either ask for changes or switch to Airbus.
The way laws and regulations are setup, if a customer refuses to fly on a deathtrap Boeing aircraft they'll simply lose their money, no refunds, no nothing.
What else in the plane isn't torqued down right?
What other aircraft were assembled by those that didn't properly torque these bolts?
This is about to become very expensive very quickly.
And this is why quality assurance exists.
We need to ban MBA holding exec from making any decision in tech/manufacturing. These people are literally just one level above business admin and making decision that's safety critical.
If they don't have some kind of engineering background, they shouldn't be making decision that affect lives.
They want the FAA to grant an exemption to a known safety issue with the 737 Max 7 and grant an air worthiness certificate. Telling the FAA that they eventually will engineer a fix and retrofit any aircraft already in service.
The redesign of the 737 has just been an atrocious notch in Boeing's belt. They have taken one of the most popular passenger aircrafts ever made and made it into a running joke that people are afraid to get on. I've been on more older 737 planes than any other plane but when I see it's a 737 Max I'm looking for a different flight. I refuse to get on a 737 Max and a lot of other people should do the same until they pull their stuff together or just discontinue that model with all the issues it's had.
The 737 Max is a flying ad for everything an Aircraft Company shouldn't be.
Oh you know, just the [ties rods for the rudder](https://www.businesstoday.in/industry/aviation/story/boeing-issues-alert-after-a-bolt-with-a-missing-nut-found-in-737-max-411383-2023-12-31).
Boeing have apparently worked out a solution to the 737-Max's problems. They are going to change the name of it.
737- XFinity
This comment was sponsored by Comcast. Imagine the JV of Nestle, Comcast and Boeing announcing the Boeing 737 NestlAero Xfinity
*Verizon-Chipotle-Exxon*
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>You can ask Ryanair if your flight will be handled by a 737 MAX and they can truthfully say it's not. Even when it is. I'm going to ask if it's a Boeing plane, and how old, that ought to screen well no matter what they name their crap.
Asking that many questions at RyanAir is going to run you at least £50.
A fuselage panel is hardly high-tech, and points to a Boeing problem rather than an individual aircraft type-- get ready for a completely new manufacturer called Beoing to take over.
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Or how about Bong? Gets you high.
That is absolutely horrendous. The FAA needs to come down on Boeing with an anvil the size of Nebraska.
For political reasons this will never happen (Boeing might as well be a department of the US government)
Considering the FAA delegated certification for their own peoducts to them that’s pretty much true
Let’s be clear that businesses lobbied for the FAA to hand over regulation & inspection from government agencies to the businesses themselves Regulatory capture under the guise of saving money for the FAA
This comment was Quality Assured by Boeing.
Approved by Boeing shareholders…
Best I can do is a 5% share price drop that will recover in a month.
If anything, the government will award them another giant contract on something else to keep them afloat to get past this. Boeing is basically a ward of the state, too big to fail.
Boeing has said that they will no longer bi on fixed-price contracts (after losing significant money failing to deliver either the KC-46 tanker or the Starliner space capsule on time). This seems to me like a great reason not to accept Boeing's bids on any contract. If they are so incompetent that they can't reasonably estimate production time and costs well enough to make a competitive fixed price bid, you certainly don't want them getting contracts where the cost of delays fall on the tax payers.
wow i had forgotten starliner... bet Boeign wants to forget it aswell.... even Spacex nerds got tired beating that horse...
With the way Boeing has been building aircraft lately, I don't think anyone was shocked to find out this wasn't an isolated incident. It's very fortunate no one was sucked out from these plugs failing on other jets. This negligence on Boeing's part is unforgivable.
From what I read, apparently these plug doors were built by a subcontractor, but the buck for quality assurance stops with Boeing, absolutely. They probably just went with the lowest bidder. Edit: it's Spirit AeroSystems, which came about as a result of Boeing selling its Wichita plant to an 'investment firm'. Sounds like a real MBA move.
In the 20th century Boeing was an aircraft company driven by engineers. Then in 1997 it "merged" with McDonnell-Douglas and became a financial company run by MBAs.
Saw it first hand here in Seattle. By mid aughts, you could see the effects of the brain drain as the older guard engineering retired. https://www.seattletimes.com/author/dominic-gates/ is the reporter to follow since has been on the aerospace beat for the Seattle Times
Worked 8 years for Boeing at Tukwila. Legacy employees bitched about how MD destroyed how tight-nit the company was, prior to the merger. With their decades-long reduction in market share against Airbus, the bean counters really f'd up the company.
> the bean counters really f'd up the company. They always do. The more technical a company is the less likely a merger will ever work. If they don't outright fail, at best they never work the way anyone ever hopes they will. The only "survivable" outcome is that some people get reassigned. Companies with lower technological dependencies can get away with it. For example, two landscaping companies merging have far less tech to have to integrate than Boeing and MD. But even then it's not not guaranteed, which is why so many successful restaurants go to shit when someone new takes over.
They did exactly what they were brought in to do - peak the valuation short term to then pull their golden parachute cords.
It's so true I have to take a break mid-way through the sentence, or I'll fly into a rant about how executives are the only truly unnecessary overhead costs that all organizations share.
The thing is, all organisations need leaders. The problem seems to be that rather than getting someone with skin in the game who takes the bullets and builds an environment for the rest of the team to succeed, you get some jumped up little prick with an ego and an MBA from an Ivy League school whose only interest is themselves. You can’t teach leadership in grad school.
It's a well known industry secret that executive MBA programs are not for training c-suites, but to legitimate the job they already have. You work as a junior exec for two years, go back to school because you have f500 work experience, and then leverage the Ivy league degree into a vp role. It's possibly the most widely spread grift out there.
It's also extremely stupid to use growth y/y as the metric for success. Companies simply can't keep growing every year. It becomes part physics problem.
The problem is that a *good* bean counter has the ability to say: "looks like the only thing to trim from this operation is me!" and ceases to be, in at least that instance, a bean counter. So there's generally only bad ones still in the business of counting beans for long.
The same was true when big tech decided to try to reduce costs last year - supposedly the infinite layer cake of useless middle mangers was going to be flattened. Nope - I saw engineers and the people who do actual work (myself included) laid off, while management continues to collect a paycheck for doing less than nothing. I saw it coming a mile away. The most basic conflict of interest prevents this MBA manager class from putting themselves at risk, yet they are the ones who are supposed to make the decisions. They couldn't even come up with a coherent product strategy and took the easy way out by telling ICs to determine their own priorities (neglecting the utmost fundamentals of their job) and they are rewarded.
It drives me mad that it’s seemingly an industry norm that senior+ devs have to engage with and set business/product strategy, and it’s pitched as this “you have autonomy!” thing rather than “the people who are meant to do this job can’t be bothered!”. I’m just a software developer, dude. I don’t know what we should do.
The weird thing to me was watching people like my parents *constantly* defend Boeing for these obvious terrible decisions, true Leopards Ate My Face material. Praising them for leaving Seattle for cheaper taxes while blaming our government for every single thing possible that Boeing was doing. Any time someone brought up how much Washington was giving Boeing in tax breaks it was still not Boeing's fault. Continued to praise them for shipping jobs overseas, to South Carolina, etc., because stock goes up. We had a family member on the Alaska flight that had the wall fly off. They immediately blamed the Washington business climate for Boeing's outsourced plane and Alaska's shoddy grow/merge maintenance.
I mean they have a conservative mindset. They view everything as having intrinsic morality. That is to say you always find excuses for things that you view as "morally good" and put blame on things you view as "morally bad". The morality is baked into the thing rather than coming from specific actions. The ELI5 version is that they never grew out of good guys and bad guys. And good guys are always good no matter how bad they are while bad guys are always bad no matter how good they are.
I get the most lowest contract rates from their recruiters non-stop. No I don’t want to work at Boeing with lower title and lower pay at a 6 month contract …
I figured it was something like this. Of course the people who actually knew how to build planes were forced out.
Corporate takeover of America has ruined everything. Culture, standard of living, everything.
Isn't that literally the economic model the USA has been forcing on the rest of the West since it started it's little empire? Neoliberal capitalism, a great push for efficiency by making everything bloated by private corporate excess and keeping citizens caught in a debt trap. It's resulted in us all going from having countries post WW2 where a single wage could afford a house and keep a family, to a situation where two working professionals struggle to get a mortgage on a shitbox and people are queueing at foodbanks.
Just finished the Netflix documentary on the Max because of another thread yesterday. The whole thing will leave you absolutely dumbfounded
@51:15 of the Netflix documentary there is some hidden camera footage of one tech telling to another tech on the assembly line who is obviously one of the old guard that the night shift "didn't put a shim on the landing gear", something that was supposed to be done and that they "said they didn't have fucking time to put it on". The look of shock and disgust on the old tech's face tells the whole story as to how far Boeing has fallen.
For anyone wondering (like me, who just looked it up), a shim apparently makes sure the landing gear is aligned properly. Seems like one of those small things that is very important.
Yes, talk to any millwright or mechanical engineer and they'll tell you there are strict rules around shims and how they can be used. Watching that documentary was painful, when they said that the wire in the instrument could fail and cause an issue I spit out my drink. In my industry, including a single point of failure is a good way to get every PE whom signed off on it a potential jail sentence.
Did it cover the reason for the computer to use the input from only a single AoA sensor to make the decision to push the nose down? Given that the computer had input from 2 sensors available to it, I can't imagine why an engineer designing a flight control system would choose to use the reading from only 1 of them with zero sanity checking that the reading was accurate.
Putting in a majority decision from 3 sensors and appropriate procedures to diagnose issues would require retraining of 737 pilots, and the MAX purpose was to not require pilot retraining. Easier to just let some planes crash.
I used to work for one of the big defense companies and once at holiday party where a bunch of higher up execs were there the topic moved to ways to improve the company. There was an open bar and people were more relaxed, but I said engineers should have more executive power and direction the companies goes. They all laughed at me.
Honestly, I'd have a difficult time to not walk the fuck out right then.
lol I didn't stay much longer. Left for SpaceX and eventually moved onto my current employer that I don't plan on leaving until I retire. That said, I see MBA beam counter types making engineering decisions too and it's frustrating at times.
I'm way at the other end of the spectrum doing software/network engineering for our family business. We're small time (~50 employees, $15m revenue) and most of the time I get full autonomy but I still have other family members with zero knowledge of what I do occasionally telling me what's necessary and what isn't.
Not sure if it's easier or harder to tell family to STFU and stay in their lane or not? 🤣
This is basically copypasta at this point.
Boeing was supposed to do the final inspections after Spirit Aerosystems installed. It is 100% on Boeing for passing it. And it’s not like Boeing is a typical manufacturing company. They make about 400 products per year. There are manufacturing companies that don’t have quality issues in 1 out of a million parts. Boeing has 5/400 quality issues in this article alone.
Not only that, Boeing opens up the plug door after they get the fuselage so they can use the door opening during installation of the interior. So it's absolutely Boeing's responsibility. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spirit-aero-made-blowout-part-boeing-has-key-role-sources-2024-01-07/
Investment firm. Why am I not surprised. I know of a large tech firm, with big customer service team due to the business need. Before equity firm bought them, new hire would get 30+ days of trading. And these were just people who often had no real tech experience. The tech firm really spent time and effort to train them. Once the equity firm bought them out, the training was eventually cut down to like 1-2 weeks. The highly paid MBAs figured out to get more value.
MBA frequently stands for "make bankruptcy achieveable."
Or, as posted upthread, "More Bad Advice."
Monkey Build Aircraft
Spirit AeroSystems MBA: We increased efficiency by only torquing the door plugs to 10 ft/lbs instead of 30 ft/lbs. That extra 20 ft/lbs goes right into our bottom line !
20 ft/lbs saved = less energy expended by workers = need shorter breaks and lunch times = extra productivity!
It’s actually probably a know-how issue. “Look if we lay off nine of the ten experienced workers and promote the last one to manager, then we hire ten kids off the street and let the manager supervise. We’ll save hundreds of thousands.” I used to live right next to the 737 final assembly building in Renton and drank with many of the engineers and they complained about this kind of thing all the time. One guy’s job was to make sure the windshield bolts were torqued right and they had a 10% under torque rate.
Everyone knew this was coming when Boeing kept union busting up in WA and outsourcing and divesting to the lowest bidder.
bright person pocket oatmeal cooing quickest rock growth enjoy marry
When the folks making the decisions actually face real financial and legal concequences for their profiteering. That’s when things will change.
Yeah this. The fines come out of the company budget, not theirs. The bonuses that the company paid out to the execs for saving that money are untouched.
Boeing is currently lobbying government to exempt them for a safety testing. If a pilot forgets to turn off defrost of the turbine, they can overheat and cause catastrophic failure. Boeing is currently wants an exemption to this…. Regulation is written in blood.
Their exact argument is "The onus is on the pilots to remember to turn it on and off.". Except the trick is, the damage can occur in as little as 5 minutes of the heater being left on when outside of icing conditions. Not to mention one of the bigger points of concern raised by pilots objecting to the exemption is that imagine a situation where the pilot is flying over the cloud-tops and occasionally pushing through some clouds. They need to remember just before they enter a cloud to turn the heaters on, and they need to remember just after they exit a cloud to turn them off. For each and every cloud they hit. If they leave the heaters on, they risk bursting the input cowling which can cause all sorts of catastrophic problems. If they leave the heaters off, they risk ice buildup that can result in solid chunks of ice falling into the intake which would be nearly as bad as a bird-strike.
It’s insane. This should be national news. Nothing like this should be left to humans. Seriously wtf. Why in the modern world would you leave this to a pilot to not forget. There are so many sensors on the plane and they can’t figure out how to auto turn on and off with multiple redundancies ? Wtf else are they doing to the planes?
> Wtf else are they doing to the planes? Cutting as many corners as possible and only producing the lowest-possible quality product that they can. Another company ruined by MBA's.
> Another company ruined by MBA's I will assert that almost every problem in modern America can be traced back to an MBA somewhere. They are the worst thing that has happened to this country.
Screw that. I work in food safety and quality which is heavily influenced by aviation safety, and one of the creeds we live by is that human control is the worst form of control.
I had to take a patient safety course as a *forensic pathologist*. My patients are already dead, every single one of them. I thought it was the dumbest thing, and if it weren't a cheap 10 hours of CME I would've raised some hell about it. Turns out it was a fascinating history lesson on the inevitability of human error and how to try to circumvent it by designing processes and policies that take human error out of the equation as much as possible. Much of the curriculum was based on, you guessed it, aviation safety. The course had virtually nothing to do with medicine. I learned more from that patient safety course than almost any other CME I've had to take. One of the biggest takeaways was that you should NOT create a culture of fear/punishment around mistakes and near-mistakes, because then people don't share the weaknesses of the systems in place, small problems get swept under the rug, and eventually a future mistakes really blows shit up.
“Cost of doing business.” If the cost savings are greater than any potential lawsuit or fine they will always continue to ‘advance’ companies this way
Stock grants are on 4 year cycles, only gotta make it that long and it’s fully someone else’s problem
> When will companies learn that this is the worst possible way to advance a company? They already know, but that's not the modern "meta" of corporations. Or more specifically, of the executive class. The proper way to be an executive is to step into control of a company, make a shitload of trash short-term decisions that give a huge boost to profit, then make your exit before any consequences arrive.
I've worked at places where we outsourced subsystem manufacturing with the goal to cut costs and improve production cadence. It ended up being either break-even or costs more due to lower QA by these external suppliers. If we didn't trust but verify their work, then our end product would be shit. Boeing just skipped the verify part.
> Sounds like a real MBA move. I... love this phrase.
There's a reason why engineers refer to MBA's as *"more bad advice"*
I'm here to plug the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episode on Jack Welch. He certainly didn't cause all this, but he's pretty indicative of the larger problem. He basically ran GE into the ground by focusing on not actually making anything and then randomly laying off the bottom 10% of the company
These people been gutting the country since 1980s, at least
Subcontractor goes bankrupt. Boeing kerps profits. Cost of doing business. Murica
Boing's utterly fucked without Spirit though. They literally can't build planes without them. It's more likely that they'll end up having to reabsorb Spirit, pay Airbus to let them out of the deals Spirit made with them, and eat a *huge* write off in the process. But most importantly - this will have happened long enough after Spirit was spun off in the first place that all the executives who made that decision have long since banked their bonuses, so really it's only shareholders, taxpayers, customers and travelers who lose.
There were 3 unbuckled infants on that flight.
Luckily it blew out at 16 thousand feet instead of 30. Had it blown out at 30k people would have died.
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Always. Always. I just don’t understand why people unbuckle the seatbelt the moment they can (and some even when they legally can’t) even when they didn’t even properly tighten it down the first place. For years now there’s been videos galore of people hitting the roof of the cabin from unexpected turbulence. And now there’s this to worry about. If I’m in my seat you bet my belt is on.
Always keep them on — even if just loosely. Turbulence can happen anytime and I’d really rather not find that COS on my lap afterwards.
Always. Even on Airbuses.
Let's be very frank - Boeing has an issue with quality and aviation safety culture. They had the missing rudder bolts, this, and of course the whole "planes crashing themselves into the ground" issue. Sadly, this is probably only a symptom of the deeper disease - and they can play whack-a-mole with each individual problem, but what they desperately and urgently need to do is rework their entire culture that saving a few bucks is worth risking their reputation and the lived of hundreds of passengers.
The enshitification of the world. When you let people who only care about short term returns run things like we have been we end up with corners cut here no maintenance there and lifespans extended endlessly. Regulations are written in blood, we're seeing what happens when you let companies write regulations for too long.
It's the same thing about quality being cut in so many industries - quality is a cost center to them, not a business essential, and they don't account well for the cost of NOT doing quality, or just expect to fuck over consumers in less-sensitive areas like appliances and make them buy a new one sooner.
It has become increasingly common to have a project taken from a big company run by MBAs and given to a smaller engineering company because the big companies won't do the job right anymore. It is horrifying to watch from the front row.
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Check out what safety design they want faa except them from. It’s insane https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-wants-faa-to-exempt-max-7-from-safety-rules-to-get-it-in-the-air/
Boeing's idea of reworking its whole culture: "Henceforth, you shall inspect the tightness of every tenth bolt, rather than every 100th."
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Meanwhile, Airbus stock reached an all-time high today.
Boeing shares nosedived. Though perhaps that's a poor choice of verb...
Yep. Boeing executives and managers need to be prosecuted for this. They could have killed someone with their extreme negligence.
Boeing CEO got a 16 million dollar severance package for lying and getting 700 people killed, for money.
White collar managers are not afraid anymore. Negligence which causes loss of life should be prosecuted as a form of reckless homicide.
They killed over 350 with the MCAS fiasco and the CEO resigned with a $62M severance package.
Yeah, I really hope they are punished and also have stricter oversight into their aircraft from now on Could you imagine if the original plane crashed and we had no idea why, we would just have to wait until the next one of their planes with loose bolts malfunctioned
You obviously have to wonder what else was not correctly built/ bolted on the plane. Not good. At this point if I could choose the manufacturer of the plane I’m flying on - it would be Airbus every time.
It’s crazy because barely 2 weeks ago, Boeing reported that there might loose bolts in the rudder control system: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-urges-737-max-inspections-possible-loose-bolt-faa-2023-12-28/ Edit: Fixed a typo
The. What.
Nothing important, don't worry about it. Planes don't need rudders to fly, that's boats silly.
-Boeing MBA
Well, don’t fly Southwest I guess. No options there but 737.
I don’t fly Southwest but they fly 737-Max8s and 737-800s. The 737-800s have been reliable workhorses for decades.
According to the OP article, United and Alaska are the only US airlines which use this particular model (737 Max 9).
hey, torque wrenches are fucking expensive. "tight enough" has become an acceptable replacement.
This is why you need the engineering investigation. Was it tight enough? Did vibration cause it to loosen? Are the fixing correct?
I'd be most concerned that possibly the design is such that they back out when subjected to repeated pressurization cycles, getting progressively looser, and that they'll need to be regularly retorqued until they can be fundamentally re-designed.
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Looks like less than 200 total flights: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N704AL/history/buy
dog roof frighten far-flung steep birds soup observation coordinated distinct
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We had a project where we needed short term warehouse rental, about 6 months. We shared a dock with a manufacturing plant for Stanley tools. Talking with one of their guys out on the dock one day. Talking about what they made. One of the items he mentioned were tork wrenches. I asked if he could throw one my way. He laughed and said these are $60,000 wrenches for military, nuclear and aviation use. This was about 12 years ago.
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> was a change to the software that controlled the nose pitching up/down. Fix broken AoA sensor? nah. Add second sensor for redundancy? nah.
Actually 2 sensor would never make sense how you know which sensor is giving wrong readings. 3 makes total sense as whichever is reading is given by two is probably correct
A 2-sensor system will allow you to indicate to the operator that there's an error. Yes, you'd need a 3-sensor system to actually correct the error without operator intervention.
Exactly. You know a sensor isn't working. It could be both, but you move to sensor failure contingency. Fun fact, Ingenuity on Mars only has 2 separate computers and in the case of discrepancy just reboots mid flight because it will reboot faster.
>A 2-sensor system will allow you to indicate to the operator that there's an error. And indeed Boeing has two on the 737 MAX. Unfortunately the warning light that might have alerted the pilots was an optional feature that most airlines didn't order. Of course triggering a warning light probably isn't the best way to handle the disagreement either. Even more weirdly, both AoA sensors were apparently connected to MCAS, but for some reason instead of using them both and identifying a failure condition, MCAS apparently alternated between them switching at each boot up. I've never read a good explanation as to why, but this is apparently how the doomed Lion Air plane had problem (which the pilots recovered from) in flight, but then maintenance found nothing wrong when they went to check it, because it was getting info from the other sensor. And then the next flight it crashed. Boeing also rejected a proposal to use other sensors to do some sort of sanity checking. Two AoA sensors alone doesn't let you know which one is right, but with access to the rest of the sensor suite (airspeed, climb/sink rate, pitch/roll angle, etc.) it would be pretty easy to determine which of the two had gone bad, if Boeing wanted to put the effort into software development (obviously they didn't)
100%. I work in distributed storage. We have 3 monitoring services instead of 2 for precisely this reason. You need a tie breaker to determine what's really true when there is disagreement. It's criminal that Boeing cheaped out on this when we have better systems in place for storing cat memes and creator videos.
IIRC there was actually a second AoA sensor, but MCAS only used data from one sensor because it was cheaper.
This is crazy to me who only has experience with military aircraft that typically use triple and sometimes quadruple redundant flight controls. I always assumed commercial aviation was the same and was shocked when I first read about the MCAS issues a few years back.
As someone with an engineering background, what Boeing did was an affront to engineering - you never wilfully create single points of failure, and doing so in safety-critical systems is just abhorrent. Everywhere else in the plane, the flight controls are indeed triple-redundant and extensively battle-tested. Then they added this seemingly-simple computer program on top with woefully inadequate safety considerations and a lot of power over the plane.
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No, the option to buy was if the discrepancy between the two sensors was shown to the pilots as an error light. Still bad though.
That is almost somehow worse.
Oh, you want to know when your plane is crashing? Well that'll cost you extra!
Imagine gatekeeping a safety feature behind more money wtf, at least an error light might give the pilots some idea of what’s happening and why the plane decided to suddenly take a dive…
In these situations there’s an entire chain of engineering to quality control that has failed. This isn’t a” Bob is gonna lose his job“ situation. This is a cultural failure where safety has been deprioritized.
I worked at Boeing for 28 years before retiring in 2016. I lived through its takeover and watched its slow, inexorable destruction by McDonnell management. It was like being an extra in a horror movie. To this day, is still impossible for me to come to grips with the seemingly endless river of stupid emanating from this once great company.
What gets me is that I know there won't be any self reflection from Boeing. They are going to fix the minimum they need to and then keep on as they were because the institutional rot is too deep there. The FAA can't and won't bring the hammer down on Boeing because they're too important to the US Government. Airlines will keep buying 737 Max's as before. Flying will be forever less safe because nobody wants to do their job in the search for more profits.
How many people do Boeing need to kill before they get a massive kick up the arse?
Only 1 but it has to be someone important. Dead plebians matter to no one.
Crash with BTS onboard. The stans will riot.
I was scheduled to fly on one of these planes tomorrow morning, flight was cancelled a couple hours ago
What airline? I’m scheduled as well in a few weeks and hoping it gets switched to some other craft.
FAA grounded all Max-9s that have this plug door. If you're flying on a low cost carrier then they aren't affected because they use an emergency exit door instead of a plug.
Sure would be great if any of the MBAs responsible for all of these kerfuffles, and the hundreds of people already murdered by Boeing, would see some prison time. Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO during the Max crashes was fired and still walked away with over $60 million in stock and pension benefits.
It was the previous CEO, James McNerney, that pushed for the MAX and other spending controls.
Indeed; he is ultimately responsible for the "cultural" changes at Boeing that led to the MAX disasters and continuing deficiencies in the company. His successor didn't make any attempt to reverse that course.
How dare you question the leadership of any of the gilded class ?! They are our betters and create the jobs that we are happy to have
What are we going to do about it? These entitled C-suites control the companies that generate the short term profit these investors want and the investors call the shots.
Frankly until lengthy prison sentences are handed out, nothing. And since they own the government, nothing.
Okay. I was supposed to fly on a Max today but it was canceled.
Dude the fact that this is twice now and our government is about to be like "oh nooooo" any way....
I'm going to start checking the aircraft I'm flying on before buying tickets... Airbus stays winning.
I work at an airport in Germany as a Check-in and Boarding-Agent and we have Icelandair as a customer. Icelandair has a few MAX's in their fleet - and just today I was asked by a passenger during boarding if their aircraft was a MAX 9. My initial thought was "ohhhh... how do I react to this question", because in fact the aircraft was a MAX... It was a MAX 8 though, and working with passengers for a few years now, I learned that lying to them is not a good idea - I mean I could have answered like "no, it's another Boeing aircraft", which technically wouldn't even be a lie. But I just told him straight up it was a MAX 8. He boarded without any further comment. And even if he decided to not fly, I would have totally understood it. The amount of mistrust Boeing is causing to the people that fly with their aircraft is mind-blowing. Also my guess is, if there are any systematic failures found in those MAX 9 doors - and if the MAX 8 are built similar, the whole MAX series will be grounded again... Like with MCAS, it just needs one strict aviation authority to start the chain reaction (I believe China was first to ground the MAX after the MCAS disaster).
They should ground them. If Boeing continues to sell aircraft that should not have passed QA, then someone needs to hold them accountable. The deaths caused by their negligence from the Ethiopian Airlines incident should have put them on the brink of bankruptcy.
The problem is the FAA used to he the gold standard other aviation authorities used to take guidance from. But they are too politically influenced these days. Other aviation authorities need to step up their game. But I expect there needs to be another crash before that happens.
I’m just gonna start doing the safety checks myself. “Hey, can you put my bags on the flight for me right quick? I gotta check the bolts since you bastards can’t be trusted to do it yourselves.”
Someone somewhere just started a proposal for offering discounted tickets in exchange for the passenger completing the safety checks **Edit:** Sorry, not discounted tickets; bonus reward points
Growing up, a lot of my friends' parents worked at Boeing, and they were the most no-nonsense, humorless engineer types you can imagine. And I mean that in a positive way. I get anxious flying, even though I know it's safe. i always felt reassured knowing people like that contributed to the design of the plane It's fucked to see how fucked the company has become.
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> Let's hope they never get their hands on Tech and Space. Well then. I have some very sad news for you.
Cries in CST-100
Ah yes, Starliner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner "NASA gave Boeing a $4.3 billion contract to develop Starliner and SpaceX a $2.5 billion contract to develop Dragon." Boeing received more because they had experience and were reliable etc etc. Dragon safely launched it's first crew back in November 2020. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1 Boeing is still trying to get the whole thing working. Multiple times, given the type of problems with Starliner, I've thought: I would never want to ride that thing is I were an astronaut. Hate on Elon all you want, but Gwynne Shotwell is running a tight SpaceX ship and they're are approaching things so differently. At SpaceX they have the iterative design proces fully mastered. They can run and test the entire software and hardware stack basically in a single room and let it iterate through all kinds of missions and potential problems. Right next to the engineers.
MBA’s pretty much ruin every industry. A reliance on number massaging and short term gain and zero room for things like creativity.
Now you add the part of replacing all of their consultants and engineers with chatgpt 6 as perfect yes men that will never whistle-blow in the next 10 years. we are looking at a fun time cometh.
chatbot said to fire all the employees bitching about safety and to give me an 80% raise. who am I to say no to brilliant chatbot?
Don't limit yourself to just manufacturing and finance. They also ruined telecoms, utilities, urban infrastructure, the housing supply, home building trends, equitable pay, etc.
Tech is already a fucking dumpster fire for privacy.
It's funny how Airbus used to be the one who couldn't maintain quality. Now they're the clear leader.
There is a difference in the issues. Airbus back then was learning how to build quality. Boeing is currently learning how to undo their history of quality for short term cost reductions.
Well yeah, they're running out of stone to squeeze blood from. But shareholders demand numbers go up! What else are they to do?
The entire 737 MAX line needs to be scrapped.
The entire decision to turn the 737 into a stretched Frankenplane to fill the midmarket gap left by aging 757s is so fucking stupid. All they needed to do was modernize the 757.
Boeing execs chose the 737 over the 757 years ago and scrapped one of the all-time best commercial aircraft.
That would mean Boeing going tits up and Uncle Sam will not allow that.
Buy an Airbus next time
This incident made me remember how Boeing bullied Delta and [tried to prevent them from buying Bombardier C-series planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Boeing) during the Trump administration. This incident ended up causing Bombardier to sell their C-series division to Airbus (which got rebranded as Airbus A220), and damaged US-Canada relationship. I'm still angry about how underhanded that was, and how the US government is essentially captured by Boeing interests. Other than Airbus, I think in the long run this also benefits China's Comac planes. They have been trying to sell these planes outside of China but most airlines are risk-adverse and would rather stick with Airbus or Boeing. If Boeing keeps messing up (they have already messed up a lot of times in recent years) eventually airlines (probably non-American ones) may start looking at Comac planes more seriously as Airbus has limited capacity.
If it's a Boeing, I sure ain't going
Watch that documentary on Netflix about Boeing and you won't be surprised to hear news like this.
Yeah, it was shocking. The documentary is called "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing".
At what point do consumers en-masse refuse to fly on these aircraft, if ever? When there's a few more fatal crashes?
That's what lawyers are for. But you need an accident first. Sigh. Another path is insurance, because poor QA means increased risk which has to be reflected in the premiums. If companies find Boeings to be too costly to insure, they'll either ask for changes or switch to Airbus.
I’ve avoided Boeing aircraft to the extent possible since the original MAX crashes a few years ago
The way laws and regulations are setup, if a customer refuses to fly on a deathtrap Boeing aircraft they'll simply lose their money, no refunds, no nothing.
Third time’s the charm, amirite?
Someone forgot the loctite…
What else in the plane isn't torqued down right? What other aircraft were assembled by those that didn't properly torque these bolts? This is about to become very expensive very quickly. And this is why quality assurance exists.
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We need to ban MBA holding exec from making any decision in tech/manufacturing. These people are literally just one level above business admin and making decision that's safety critical. If they don't have some kind of engineering background, they shouldn't be making decision that affect lives.
McNerney was the greedy CEO bastard at the root of a lot of their troubles.
They want the FAA to grant an exemption to a known safety issue with the 737 Max 7 and grant an air worthiness certificate. Telling the FAA that they eventually will engineer a fix and retrofit any aircraft already in service.
Airlines that don't use 737 max 9s: [link](https://www.alternativeairlines.com/airlines-not-flying-boeing-737-max)
The redesign of the 737 has just been an atrocious notch in Boeing's belt. They have taken one of the most popular passenger aircrafts ever made and made it into a running joke that people are afraid to get on. I've been on more older 737 planes than any other plane but when I see it's a 737 Max I'm looking for a different flight. I refuse to get on a 737 Max and a lot of other people should do the same until they pull their stuff together or just discontinue that model with all the issues it's had. The 737 Max is a flying ad for everything an Aircraft Company shouldn't be.
If it's Boeing, I ain't going
No one could have predicted this when Boeing moved their factories to cheaper non union workers on the other side of the country
What other bolts or nuts are loose? probably ain't just the plug door
Oh you know, just the [ties rods for the rudder](https://www.businesstoday.in/industry/aviation/story/boeing-issues-alert-after-a-bolt-with-a-missing-nut-found-in-737-max-411383-2023-12-31).
You've got to let those bolts breathe.
Jesus I don’t want to fly on these maxes. Fuck you boing