this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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At this point, Boeing should not be given the benefit of the doubt unless and until they are able to restore confidence in their QC processes and safety-first culture in general.
More to the point: the bean counters running the company need to be replaced with engineers who know what it is this company is doing and what they build. It's not an overnight fix, but so long as the C-suite is trying to go "lean and mean" every 5-10 years, this will happen again and cost lives.
McDD really did an unbelievable amount of damage to Boeing. It’s an incredibly sad byproduct of the saga of deregulation and regulatory capture, alongside the massive downscaling of antitrust litigation and legislation.
Interesting. When I was growing up it was MDD, Lockheed and Boeing I flew. Now it seems it’s just Boeing and airbus. I wasnt keeping track when the merger happened.
Lockheed left the commercial market after the L-1011 didn’t sell as well as they’d forecast, and Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas in the 1990s. It was supposed to be a merger of equals, but the finance people at McDonnell-Douglas ran the show and won the merger over the engineers who ran Boeing.
Interesting. When I was growing up it was MDD, Lockheed and Boeing I flew. Now it seems it’s just Boeing and airbus. I wasnt keeping track when the merger happened.
Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO during the 737 Max crashes, was an engineer by training:
-- Wikipedia
And, of course, even though he put profits ahead of safety and is therefore partially responsible for hundreds of deaths, he walked away with a $62.2 million golden parachute. The incentives are not aligned with safety, aside from how it affects their share price.
I keep seeing people say this and
Obviously Muilenberg didn't fix everything wrong with the company during his time there, for all i know he made it worse. However, i keep seeing this cited as some kind of own to the critique of modern Boeing and it isn't. It just isn't.
I was responding to "the bean counters running the company need to be replaced with engineers" by pointing out that the man at the top is, at least by training, an engineer.
Let's look at the timeline:
An aerospace analyst writes:
Are you seriously arguing that a man who is qualified to see the problems and dangers of the 737 Max and then chose to ignore them in favour of pressuring regulators and collecting profits shouldn't be held responsible? He was in a senior position while the development happened and was in the top spot when it was certified. If the head of the company shouldn't be held responsible, who should be?
Ignoring his time as president, four years is definitely enough time to see what kind of leader he was, and all of the internal messages coming out show no attempt to change the culture.