If it's a Boeing I ain't going.

No fuss!

A sentiment being embraced by the airframe itself

Moving corporate away from production. Opening up new production to gain access to a lower cost, less trained workforce. Outsourcing previously in-house subassembly manufacturing to reduce costs. Remove in-house quality oversight.

Grant C suite bonuses.

After you "merge" with one of the most notoriously poor aerospace companies around.

Congratulations. Never mind your foot, you aimed for your head. And got a bullseye.

I was just thinking something similar when I read "Spirit AeroSystems, the fuselage supplier for the 737 Max" and my first reaction was, wait...what? Do Boeing actually make aircraft now or are they just assembling kits these days? Surely if you claim to build and aircraft, then at the very least you build the foundation around which everything else is built, ie the fuselage.

I wonder if Airfix (Hornby Hobbies Ltd) might light to take them over?

(They do seem to go into an awful depth of detail when designing their models and take great care in getting the rivets right!)

> Do Boeing actually make aircraft now or are they just assembling kits these days?

A charge which could be more accurately aimed at Airbus. There is nothing wrong with having subcontractors if you manage them properly.

Nobody is claiming Intel could make better phones than Apple because they have in-house fabs.

MBAs gonna MBA

> "He said the errors would were "not an immediate flight safety issue and all 737s can continue operating safely."

And this is what you said before, during, and after the 737 Max MCAS issue that took down two passenger flights, killing everyone on board.

des-ginned? Might explain a lot…

Oops - sorry, that comment title went through Boeing QA.

Exactly! We already know the risks of "holes" near windows. It killed the market for Comet. (ok, that was cracks around square windows, but still, holes in the wrong places near windows)

That’d work, right?

"Bit of white duct-tape? "

Absolutely not! This is the aero industry, we have standards!! No duct tape here, only speed tape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_tape

They called it the Screamliner for good reason... Should have bought Airbus.

On the upside, they are apparently actually trying to find quality issues now

On the downside, there's potentially a hell of a lot of hidden defects from the past decade of neglect waiting to be discovered

They are in damage limitation mode now. So they are saying what they need to while trying to find a way to make sure they get maximum bonus payments.

I would love a very simple, simple rule, if there’s a grounding in that calendar year no bonuses go out.

Sadly that would simply cause Boeing to hide even more.

How about simply firing the whole C-suite and starting over?

Yes, in a way we should be seeing more of these come up throughout the year. It should be expected and could be a sign that they are trying to turn things around.

As bad as the drip feed of bad news might feel, if it amounts to things that are caught early enough they must hope that the people that matter (FAA and EASA, aircraft customers) see this as a positive. Boeing is fortunate that airlines have high switching costs to go to the only real competitor and that passengers have limited say in which aircraft they fly with.

ie. they relied on a worker/whistleblower to report mistakes, their QA system didn't catch them in the fuselages already delivered.

That's the real issue - it's not finding faults, it's finding that you didn't find faults

... and still be in business at all?

McDonnell Douglas, the leaders in that field of expertise.

Enough said.

To be fair, even with these fuckups, the planes still have a great record. But the real problem is the politically engineered lack of competition. Airbus is snowed under with orders and would probably face similar problems if it tried to scale up production to get even more. For decades the US plane makers didn't have to worry about competition until the European airlines finally got the planes they wanted and Airbus became a success. Consolidation and a duopoly were considered the only way to preserve profit margins jobs and US airlines were strongarmed into continuing to buy Boeing. Though, to be fair, if some of them had the choice, they'd buy the cheapest, crappiest things out there because most US airlines hate passengers that can't be transported in boxes.

>To be fair, even with these fuckups, the planes still have a great record.

Not sure that Lion Air or Etheopian Airlines and 346 dead would agree...

I'm not sure that many in the aviation engineering / maintenance world would agree either. There's been a background hum of reports of FOD and defects on Boeings for a long time now. I'm not sure the USAF or the US Army would agree either. The problems they have had with new Boeing products in recent times have been widely reported. These include reports of a whole batch of brand new Apache helicopters sent back over build issues. The KC46A has been extremely problematic to bring into service, with at least one exceptionally dangerous in flight failure that could have killed an entire crew and whomever they would have crash landed on (the hold cargo clamps suddenly released the hold cargo; fortunately, they were straight / level at the time and spotted it, and managed to fly without the cargo shifting). And so forth. The replacement Air Force One has been a farcial procurement.

>Airbus is snowed under with orders and would probably face similar problems if it tried to scale up production to get even more.

Actually, Airbus has successfully scaled up several times already, and managed to avoid such fuckups. I'm sure they had teething troubles in scaling up, but they've managed to keep those from entering into service. They have FALs all over Europe, in Mobile Alabama, and in China. The quality from all of them has been pretty good. Getting the Chinese one working as well as it does is a major accomplishment for both Airbus and the workers there, and is actually a major threat to Boeing. It's creating a generation of Chinese workers who thoroughly understand the point of good QC / QA, and may take that expertise into COMAC. Airbus's production rate for just A320 family jets is insanely high, 2.5 a day, every day of the year.

>Consolidation and a duopoly were considered the only way to preserve profit margins jobs and US airlines were strongarmed into continuing to buy Boeing.

The mistake Boeing made was to focus on profits, not market share. The company has been "successful" in the eye of investors because they've made profits. However, it's easy to make profits in a growing market where one's competitor has insufficient capacity to supply the whole market. John Leahy at Airbus took a different approach; he chased market share as the key metric for company success. He's the one who made Airbus equip itself to be able to take a large market share off Boeing. His point was that it would be easier to sell lots of jets if everyone thought Airbus could actually make lots of jets. Conversely, it would be hard to sell any jets at all, if customers thought they'd be delivered very slowly. And, he was right.

Looked at from a market share point of view, Boeing's performance since 1990 has been woeful. The mess they're in today is also traceable to short term profiteering; the surprise announcement of the A320neo bumped them into launching the MAX program instead of concentrating on a new design. What a mistake to make.

The result is that Airbus has now got them penned in from all angles; A320neo seems to have 737MAX licked (simply by not crashing a lot). A321XLR and A330neo has removed any market for Boeing's aborted NMA. 787 is reputed to be struggling to achieve good sale prices as the A330neo is easily cost competitive with it and costs Airbus a whole lot less to manufacture. The A350 is doing well at the top end of the market whilst 777X (which is rumoured to be a whole 40 tons heavier) is still not in service. And even the "pointless White Elephant" A380 seems to have come roaring back into large scale use, and now everyone is wondering when (not if) Airbus will be obliged to deliver an upgraded model.

Plus, Airbus now has the A220 program for $1, possibly the finest small jet that has ever existed, a hit with the passengers and airlines, and has a whole market segment all to itself that Boeing hasn't even begun to think about filling. Considering that Bombardier looked initially to Boeing to partner on it, one can only say that this was a significant miss by Boeing.

To be fair, if this issue was with Airbus we never would have heard of it. It would be a minor thing, and other than customers being notified about the delays for the multi million/billion dollar orders they're waiting on the average person would never know or care.

It is only because any news coming out of Boeing that is in any way negative is going to spread far and wide for a while. And deservedly so.

That's probably true; the system is working as intended. Boeing screwed up, so the company is now under increased scrutiny from customers, regulators, the media, and shareholders. The extra scrutiny will continue until the Boeing re-earns the trust that has been lost. And deservedly so, as you said.

The problem is, the last time we thought Boeing had earned that trust and backed off on the regulations, airplanes started crashing. There should be no “until” in that statement, Boeing should be under severe oversight, period, for good.

You call slandering a company without any proof - fair ?

I forgot this is America, the land of bullshit, google to facebook. CEOs saying words over actual physical evidence, the American dream over the reality of homeless and poor people.

Ha! Home of the Homeless.

How is an article telling us about rivet hole issues in the 737 Max "slandering without any proof?" Are you claiming the Reuters article is lying? If so, where's your proof? Because I will trust Reuters one hell of a lot more than some rando called "CowHorseFrog".

> To be fair, if this issue was with Airbus we never would have heard of it. It would be a minor thing,

Re-read your own coment, you claimed Airbus would cover it up .

They meant Airbus wouldn't have let it out of the factory.

They'd have found the problem and told the customer "sorry, we found a defect and your delivery will be delayed while the part is remanufactured"

How can a company be that bad...... and still be in business at all?

Do you mean Boeing? Or is it Fujitsu? Or BT? Or Crapita? Or Ryanair? Or beardienet? Or RBS. Or...

The list of bad/evil/shit companies is a very long and ever-growing one.

To keep their common certification Boeing also kept the de-icing system in the 1950s. The 737 is a short two engine version of the 707 which first flew in 1957 but was a production version of the 367-80 which first flew in 1954 and was itself derived from 1940s designs. So anyway, the overhead panel, which controls fuel, hydraulics, electrical systems, and bleed air, among other things, is from the original 737. It has had additions, but you can see to look at it that it is a history of switch and display technologies. Nothing significant was ever moved or removed.

So the 737 MAX has manual de-icing controls. In the past the engine inlets were metal. De-icing air is passed through them and heats them up so ice can't form. Two things have changed though, as engines become more efficient they also run hotter, and the inlets were changed to composite. On Airbus that's no real problem, Airbus has automatic de-icing, so when ice is detected the de-icing is switched on and the cold wet air cools the inlets. But on Boeing you have to watch the temperature and conditions and switch de-icing on when appropriate. But if you forget to switch it off the deicing when not in icing conditions you cook the composite inlet, because the hotter engine gives hotter bleed air, and the composite inlet can't stand the same abuse as metal. The cooked composite isn't as strong as it once was and can fail, blowing parts into the engine, which then deconstructs itself.

How should they have done it? Automatic anti-ice, like the 777 and 787. It's not that they don't have the tech, it's just that the aircraft is stuck in the 1950s because some big customers don't want to have a second type rating required.

The 737 type should have been retired a long time ago. The airframe has been abused far beyond what it was ever designed to do.

Let it go. Replace it.

The Wright Flyer had no windshield and so no requirement for windshield wipers.

Since the Boeing 737 is really just a development of the Boeing 000 (aka the Wright Flyer) there is no requirement for it to have windshield wipers.

All McDonald Douglas Boeing had to do was find who owns the Wright Aircraft company today, buy it and do some renaming

Now that it seems that the US flying public (and therefore US airline execs) have woken up to the problems MAX has, it seems like some of those big customers are beginning to vote with their cheque books and are actively looking elsewhere. It's a major screw up by Boeing.

One can see why Boeing would have been anxious to pander to a couple of big customers' desires to avoid pilot re-training. Had they crossed the "training required" rubicon, that would have then opened up the possibility that airlines like SWA would take a look at Airbus. The problem with that is that, seemingly, once an airline gets a taste for Airbuses the cockpit commonality that Airbus already has across their entire line up and the FBW flight characteristics all being the same (A318 all the way up to A380) tends to result in airlines buying more Airbuses.

The real answer is that Boeing should have gone for cross-fleet cockpit commonality long, long ago, back in the 1990s when it first became evident that Airbus were doing that and what it would bring. That would likely have meant scrapping the 737 long ago (the cockpit is pretty narrow, apparently). That would have been a pretty big hit, but nothing like as big a hit if they tried to do it nowadays.

Make the engineers, software developers, QA, their supervisors and executives ride a pre-delivery test flight of every aircraft they make. No parachutes allowed. It'd be good PR to show confidence in the product, inspire better attention to getting it right, and if any of them screwed up, natural selection would eliminate the problems. Icon because Boeing.

While I get your point, I'm not sure the engineers, devs, and QA can be entirely blamed other than for just doing what management told them to do. I think loading up the entire plane with managers and executives, especially executives, would accomplish what you wanted. Because then every one else doing the actual work would suddenly be allowed to care about quality again.

No make the executives liable for premeditated manslaughter for any crashes caused by cut backs.

>No make the executives liable for premeditated manslaughter for any crashes caused by cut backs.

But the problem wasn't Boeing it was a totally independant supplier spun off from Boeing

The WhiteStar line can't be held responsible for the Titanic because look-out services was outsourced to a gig worker in the Crow's nest

There's an old story that Jaguars didn't become reliable until Jaguar's management was forced to only drive Jaguar.

Boeing is an example of American extremism.

Boeing had a good run wih the 737, they also had good profits making it in house, but they had to go for a few extra dollars with their continual cut backs of quality control and bullshit outsourcing.

737 Max - problems- how long have you got?

777X - long delay, cargo door failure - lets's see, maybe 2026

787 - unbelievable quality problems in South Carolina

Engineers in charge == lower profits

Bean counters in charge == Well...see above!!

Sad really........but I will try very hard NOT to fly Boeing.......

It's a good thing for Boeing that passenger aircraft are only a side hustle to their core business of weapons manufacturing.

Boeing make almost exactly the same amount of $ form civil / military+space and "services"

I suspect they do a lot of spreadsheeting to decide how much profit they make in each of these depending on who they are going begging to at the moment