Can Boeing’s Misguided Leaders Be Stopped?

Corporate GREED....stop worrying about the stockholders and the CEO's bonuses...and start worrying about the people flying on your planes

One of my coffee friends, a former inspector at Boeing's big helicopter plant here in Mesa, AZ, tells of "people from Seattle" pressuring him personally to sign off without actually performing the inspection in order to get the aircraft delivered. He refused. This happened multiple times. This is what happens when you remove aviation experts from management and replace them with bean counters.

IMHO, the company (Boeing) may have finally "snapped" with the Alaska Air 737-9 Max event. The corporate culture appears to be beyond repair with stock prices and executive incentives now far more dominant than quality and safety. Perhaps this may be a tipping point that will drive Boeing to focus solely on the military market. Perhaps a generation down the road they can re-invent themselves but they appear, for right or wrong, heading towards being radioactive to investors and yes, the flying public. Lockheed Martin comes to mind as an example.

My 2 cents. No more.

he may just stop himself !He is running the company into the ground. Any company that limits their choices down to two different types of aircraft are ridiculously stupid. yes they have a third but how many years of delay is that. It’s the new generation workforce that doesn’t give a damn like the other post say and it shows!! what’s the old saying in the past… if it ain’t Boeing, we are not going. Well they successfully changed it to if it’s Boeing hell no we’re not going. .

Businesses usually start knowing they have to please customers. At a certain size though, customers are nothing but a resource to be squeezed like a lemon for maximum profit. If I were Southwest, e.g., I'd be planning for fleet conversion to A320s now. Free enterprise works when customers refuse to be treated as suckers.

Once Boeing loses half its customers, then they'll wake up and start getting management that understands there's more to running a business than cutting costs.

The Boeing/MD merger should never have happened. Consolidation ALWAYS makes this worse.

It started with the airline CEO's and now has found its way to those who build the airplanes they fly. This is a terminal cancer which will need radical surgery from the top to bottom.

The old saying "if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going". Today, if it is Boeing, I ain't going. I have lost all faith in the airline system of which I was a member years ago. We had our problems, but not the sort of things we see today.

Years ago I worked at Boeing, and it appears that then it was an entirely different company. Not concerned with production, I was a mainframe computer programmer, on the 4th largest mainframe in the world. We all had great confidence in the products, and were proud to be working there. I have the feeling that eastern business school training is the culprit here. Bottom line - bottom line - bottom line! Maybe too many "old boys". Thank you Boeing for hiring me for a great, good paying job!

Just need more lawyers and bookkeepers.
Companies that produce tangible products need competent engineers running them.

MacDac Mindset.

Purge Boeing of ALL the MacDac employees especially the upper management and Executives.

Sure, remove the bean counters from airplane design, engineering and manufacturing and put the engineers back in charge. Never did see a bean counter that understood the difference engineering principles. Their motivation is maximize profits and cut costs. Safety and robust design come in poor seconds. When's the last time Boeing designed a new airplane. NO, it's cheaper to take a 50 year old frame and just tweak it a bit. How well is hat working out?

No, no they cannot, not without severe gov interference, like blocking/banning these craptastic airplanes from being flown/built.

You can look back on their last 15 years of both civilian and military programs and see severe quality issues stemming from their overwhelming desire to please their shareholders. You shouldn't need any more motivation than you know, literally not killing your customers, which def increases your chances of future sales, and yet, here we are.

What McDonnell did to Douglas, McDonnell Douglas did to Boeing. Congrats James McDonnell, you won.

Boeing originally were an OEM Of Aircraft. Then in an effort save money, they bought Jeppesen and other companies to lower their direct operating cost. IN doing that move, they changed the energy of the original Company and altered the companies energy resulting in the recent accidents-incidents. One sets a shop in an empty building to sell shoes. The last owner of the shop sold electrical components. The show seller will soon go out of business because the energy of building has been changed. If they sold electrical components, they would have some level of success. Boeing unless they change, will slowly go out of business.

You know the old saying "if it's Boeing I'm not going."

The whole country's workforce has gone to a "don't give a damn" work ethic. Not just Boeing and their suppliers. Look at the number of recalls in the auto and truck industries. I used to be a QC inspector in a major electric motor manufacturing plant. There was pride in turning out a quality product. Sadly doesn't seem that way anymore.

Stock holders decide what a company does.

lawyers will be knocking at the door.

If they let me take over, the first thing I would do is move the HQ back to SEA!

So, let's actually think about things - not a popular idea, clearly.
1. The author of this piece offers no way to improve. It is not a critique so much as gratuitous insult. Take it that way.
2. DEI initiatives are not the problem. If you believe otherwise, turn off the right-wing media and alert your county clerk that you should not be allowed to vote due to your feeblemindedness.
3. No engineer would sign-off on "cutting corners" to "increase profits" if it meant knowingly jeopardizing lives. If you can prove otherwise, you should contact the FBI and provide them with this evidence. If you cannot, you probably should stop saying this.
4. The problems are not Boeing's alone and that is why this is a huge problem:
a) Boeing has to keep its customers happy, which means building planes they want. Southwest was a huge reason that Boeing's MAX cockpit updates were kept minimal and one factor behind the use of MCAS.
b) The same reason applies to pilot training. If Boeing pushes airlines too hard to have rigorous training for their pilots, they may stop buying Boeing aircraft.
c) Ditto maintenance and repair standards. By the way, these were contributing factors to the Lion Air (b) and (c) and Ethiopian (b) crashes.
d) The FAA does not have the capacity to carry-out its missions. Where Air Traffic Control is concerned, it is a major issue that everyone sees. Where development, testing, and enforcement of airworthiness directives and inspections and data review are concerned, it is hidden. This extends to oversight of manufacturing and quality control.
Seriously, the level of technical expertise required of the FAA bureaucrat is such that, if the person possessed such expertise, they would be making far more money working in the private sector instead of overseeing the manufacturers. There is the suggestion here that maybe the FAA people with such qualifications are either paper tigers or that they are not that good at their jobs or both.

I am not absolving Boeing of blame or even minimizing their role in their mess. But it is worth nothing that the primary reason it is their mess is that few others can actually be held to account. That needs to change.

Recommendations:
1. Require all manufacturers of aircraft in the United States and of aircraft likely to fly to the US to provide engineers and design professionals to an oversight board. They will develop testing regimes for the certification of aircraft, oversee the implementation of such testing, and review all data produced in the process to determine whether the aircraft will be certified. They can also recommend/require changes be implemented in the airworthiness process. The FAA will be relegated to enforcement activities based on the panel's recommendations. Participants from the company whose plane is being reviewed will not be allowed to participate as reviewers.
2. Re-orient the FAA toward oversight of production. If there is something that the FAA can do, it is to monitor production activities to ensure that approved SOPs are implemented.
3. Set-out training standards and compel airlines to follow them or forsake delivery of aircraft from compliant manufacturers.
4. #3, but for maintenance and repair standards.
5. Lean on other regulatory bodies to help enforce these new requirements.

Remember: While so many people are dumping on Boeing for MCAS and door plug failures, the reality is grim that had those things not shown-up (but the problems remained hidden), we might well be cheering Boeing for their success.

1 Timothy 6:10 says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." This sure applies to Boeing. The love of money for the shareholders has resulted in the 737 Max crashes in Ethiopia and Thailand, the slovenly assembly of the 787s, and now the near disaster of the 737Max9, and who know what else may come down the road. As we have seen, Boeing has "wandered from the faith," i.e. making the best airliners in the world! People used to say, "If it's not Boeing, I'm not going!" Now they are saying, "If it's Boeing, book me on a different flight!" The result is, or will be, that they share holders and directors of the company, and subsequently all their employees, have "pierced themselves with many griefs." We'll see this when the company folds, and it will affect the whole country as well. It will be a classic case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Boeing should stop trying to be politically correct in their workforce instead of focusing in racial and cultural diversity. Hire by job qualifications and psychological profiling. Missing bolts, loose bolts and missing washers are unacceptable in aircraft manufacturing. The rule applies everywhere, get woke and go broke.

Boeing is owned by Wall Street that is controlled by the Federal Reserve. The swamp they're not American.

Bob Denny's comment says it all

The company started going down hill when they moved their corporate HQ to Chicago, away from were the real work was going on in the factories in the NW. A bunch of corporate bean counters and other drones wound up deciding the technical questions that previously engineers were responsible for. But I don't blame them for the delays in the KC-46 program. It seems that the air force has problems with almost every new acquisition over the past few years. Politics has injected nonsense into almost every new program.

Yes they can, with the right caliber.

Calhoun must be fired. He is another Jack Welch disciple and we've all seen the aftermath at GE from these types.

Get to it Vangaurd and Blackrock before there is nothing left. Reassess the whole BOD while your at it.

Sadly, I believe the short answer is no, they cannot be stopped, not yet! As bad as this may sound, it's a matter of the number of people dying before any seroius attention is given to initiate change. And I don't expect it soon, even as deaths are certain to increase in the coming days. History will repeat itself. It's as if TSA and Border Security have forgotten 9/11 already! When was the last time you were told you had an option of being photographed or not before boarding a plane? I really do fear America's NEXT catastrophic event has already crossed the border, who's stopping them?

Diversity Diversity Diversity Operate like the government. Don"t mind if they are qualified or not.Just hire them anyway.

Time to change back to pre-merger management.

W. Edwards Deming:

1. Do not use the logical fallacy of going from the specific to the general (e.g. A panel was installed incorrectly, therefore nothing is done correctly).

2. Adherence to statistical process control requires a well educated and well trained workforce.

My own opinion: You cannot fly with eagles when you work with turkeys. While this one incident is not a valid indicator of an overall lack of quality at Boeing, the company's slide into affirmative action hiring over MERIT based hiring and promotion is a trend that certainly casts doubt on the once great company.

A solution: If Boeing made a commitment to MERIT based hiring and promotion, as well as training their workforce to return to the correct use of Statistical Process Controls at every step of the building and repair processes, the company's reputation can be salvaged