Boeing Refuses to Cooperate With New Inquiry Into Deadly Crash

[FriendlyFire]

This looks like Boeing is trying to cover up the extent of the problems with the 737Max
It gets worse because Boeing ignored all the recommendations of the NTSB to correct the problems with the 737Max that were the cause of this crash.

At this stage with huge inventory of 737Max waiting for certification and delivery. Its no wonder why Boeing dosnt want to re-open the investigation.

Boeing Refuses to Cooperate With New Inquiry Into Deadly Crash
Dutch lawmakers are reviewing an accident with striking parallels to the recent 737 Max crashes. U.S. safety officials also declined to participate.

After a Boeing 737 crashed near Amsterdam more than a decade ago, the Dutch investigators focused blame on the pilots for failing to react properly when an automated system malfunctioned and caused the plane to plummet into a field, killing nine people."

Dutch lawmakers are re-examining a 2009 accident involving a Boeing 737 NG that killed nine people near Amsterdam. On Thursday both Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board refused to participate in the new investigation, saying that the original inquiry was thorough and complete. But Dutch officials say Boeing “has a lot to answer for.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/...module=News&pgtype=Homepage#commentsContainer
https://www.ccn.com/boeing-accused-of-pressuring-investigators-in-2009-air-crash-investigation/

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Oh hey I was just about to post in the space thread that it has been revealed that in addition to a timer issue and faulty thrusters, the Starliner also had a catastrophic software error that NASA engineers had to diagnose and correct in flight. It's a good thing the flight was unmanned because they could have killed someone. At the post-flight press conference, NASA had indicated they would likely give Boeing a pass and not make them re-fly the test flight. Now, Boeing has charged $410 against last year's profits to prepare for a re-flight that has not been announced but has become an open secret in the industry.

Boeing needs to be broken up and senior executives need to be held accountable.

 

[Berzerker]

Was this the predecessor to the 737 Max? Did people survive or were there only 9 people onboard? That sounds like the problem these recent planes had when they crashed.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The predecessor to the 737Max is the 737, which is the cause of their problems. They tried to stretch the design to fit another segment of the market and gave it bigger engines. This set off a cascade of aerodynamic handling changes to the vehicle which should have caused a bigger redesign. Instead, Boeing opted to use software to automatically correct handling deficiencies. Unfortunately, they botched it terribly.

I don't think there have been any fundamental changes to survival statistics to airplane crashes but I am not well versed.

I just think that from a fundamental physics standpoint, there is only so much you can do to make an airplane more survivable in a crash considering the forces and velocities at play.

 

[Commodore]

Boeing needs to be broken up and senior executives need to be held accountable

Nah, just kill their business by cancelling all their DOD and other government contracts they have. And they should be forced to turn over all designs and manufacturing data for any aircraft they produce for the military so we can hand them over to other companies to take over production.

 

[Estebonrober]

This is what happens when you take an engineering company and run it with nothing but finance guys.

 

[innonimatu]

At the post-flight press conference, NASA had indicated they would likely give Boeing a pass and not make them re-fly the test flight. Now, Boeing has charged $410 against last year's profits to prepare for a relight that has become an open secret.

Boeing has a future if it can make such a cheap launch
Sorry, i know there's a "million" missing there but couldn't resist joking.

Will there be something salvageable from the rot inside Boeing? The current board is still the same cabal that sunk the company's technical competence for the sake of shorty-term profit. Or rather, personal profit: bonuses and moving on to wreck some other corporation.
Can someone honest be appointed to head the company? And who can do hat appointing? Can the company be split/unmerged into a "good" and a "bad" part?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I think a breakup is the way you're going to have a shot a reforming the company's culture.

Was this the predecessor to the 737 Max? Did people survive or were there only 9 people onboard? That sounds like the problem these recent planes had when they crashed.

Oh I think I misread you. The Starliner is their new astronaut capsule for trips to the space station. It had a horribly botched test flight which could have killed people had they been aboard.

 

[Kaitzilla]

in addition to a timer issue and faulty thrusters, the Starliner also had a catastrophic software error

Thank goodness for testing!​

At the post-flight press conference, NASA had indicated they would likely give Boeing a pass and not make them re-fly the test flight.

What?!!

Now, Boeing has charged $410 against last year's profits to prepare for a re-flight that has not been announced but has become an open secret in the industry.

Oh, that's good. Nasa must be trying to treat Boeing's stock gently with fake public confidence.

This is what happens when you take an engineering company and run it with nothing but finance guys.

Right, this article traces the main problem back to when Boeing moved their headquarters to Chicago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/

On the tarmac, Condit stepped out of the jet, made a brief speech, then boarded a helicopter for an aerial tour of Boeing’s new corporate home: the Morton Salt building, a skyscraper sitting just out of the Loop in downtown Chicago. Boeing’s top management plus staff—roughly 500 people in all—would work here. They could see the boats plying the Chicago River and the trains rumbling over it. Condit, an opera lover, would have an easy walk to the Lyric Opera building. But the nearest Boeing commercial-airplane assembly facility would be 1,700 miles away.

The isolation was deliberate. “When the headquarters is located in proximity to a principal business—as ours was in Seattle—the corporate center is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations,” Condit explained at the time. And that statement, more than anything, captures a cardinal truth about the aerospace giant. The present 737 Max disaster can be traced back two decades—to the moment Boeing’s leadership decided to divorce itself from the firm’s own culture.

And which culture did they take on?
McDonnell Douglas

By the time I visited the company—for Fortune, in 2000—that had begun to change. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas—so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant. “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money,” went the joke around Seattle. Condit was still in charge, yes, and told me to ignore the talk that somebody had “captured” him and was holding him “hostage” in his own office. But Stonecipher was cutting a Dick Cheney–like figure, blasting the company’s engineers as “arrogant” and spouting Harry Trumanisms (“I don’t give ’em hell; I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell”) when they shot back that he was the problem.

McDonnell’s stock price had risen fourfold under Stonecipher as he went on a cost-cutting tear, but many analysts feared that this came at the cost of the company’s future competitiveness. “There was a little surprise that a guy running a failing company ended up with so much power,” the former Boeing executive vice president Dick Albrecht told me at the time. Post-merger, Stonecipher brought his chain saw to Seattle. “A passion for affordability” became one of the company’s new, unloved slogans, as did “Less family, more team.” It was enough to drive the white-collar engineering union, which had historically functioned as a professional debating society, into acting more like organized labor. “We weren’t fighting against Boeing,” one union leader told me of the 40-day strike that shut down production in 2000. “We were fighting to save Boeing.”

I guess it's a tribute to their skill that workers of Boeing made it 20 years under those conditions.
Now in Q1 of 2020 so far, Boeing had ZERO orders for new commercial planes.

Maybe they can get that $40 billion back they spent buying their own stock the past 6 years by reissuing it at lower prices?
A shame they had nothing productive to spend that money on.
https://www.businessinsider.com/out...es-2020-1#is-it-too-early-to-start-drinking-9

 

[Estebonrober]

Thank goodness for testing!​

What?!!

Oh, that's good. Nasa must be trying to treat Boeing's stock gently with fake public confidence.


Right, this article traces the main problem back to when Boeing moved their headquarters to Chicago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/

And which culture did they take on?
McDonnell Douglas

I guess it's a tribute to their skill that workers of Boeing made it 20 years under those conditions.
Now in Q1 of 2020 so far, Boeing had ZERO orders for new commercial planes.

Maybe they can get that $40 billion back they spent buying their own stock the past 6 years by reissuing it at lower prices?
A shame they had nothing productive to spend that money on.
https://www.businessinsider.com/out...es-2020-1#is-it-too-early-to-start-drinking-9

it’s a bloody travesty

 

[GenMarshall]

Sounds like to me that Boeing needs to step up their quality control game. especially if they're still using the core design of the original 737 from the 1960s (which itself has some elements of the 707).

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Surely there's something to be said for longevity and stability in design though, with regards to safety? In general I mean.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Oh, that's good. Nasa must be trying to treat Boeing's stock gently with fake public confidence.

I think the admin that first hinted they might skip a re-flight simply did not know what happened in mission control. The situation was still evolving behind the scenes and he may not have been aware how serious things got and how completely out of their league the Boeing team was.

it’s a bloody travesty

Absolutely. Boeing is one of America's biggest exporters and an industrial giant. The company itself is rotten and needs reform, as does the government which decided to let proper regulation take a backseat to profit.

Sounds like to me that Boeing needs to step up their quality control game. especially if they're still using the core design of the original 737 from the 1960s (which itself has some elements of the 707).

Yeah they need to up their QC game but this is a much deeper issue than just that. The entire corporate structure has been built around the idea of extracting maximum profit at all stages without any regards to ethics or morality. So they didn't just let QC atrophy - they actively attacked it as a cost center that needed to be destroyed. That's a different mentality altogether and much more serious imo.

Surely there's something to be said for longevity and stability in design though, with regards to safety? In general I mean.

The design itself is fine*, Boeing just decided to maximally cut corners when they enlarged it to avoid regulatory hurdles. Then, to add insult to injury, the software workarounds they devised to defeat the regulations ended up being written very shoddily, with little testing**. Finally, as if this all wasn't bad enough, Boeing decided to maximally monetize training for the use of the new systems, so many pilots didn't know how to work the system which itself didn't work correctly to begin with. This goes back to them building the entire business structure around extracting profit at all stages and shows why the problem is much, much worse than lazy QC.

*Early 737's were pretty unreliable but by now Boeing had worked out all the flaws in the basic types. The MAX was a new derivative.

**And there was testing that uncovered problems, but as that would have cost money to investigate and fix, tests were ignored. The regulators weren't watching over this process so Boeing got away with it...until they didn't.

 

[Socrates99]

Yelp reviews should fix all of this right libertarians?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I honestly think the only way this company can be turned around inside of 24 months is to break it up. Even then, it's not guaranteed that the new entities won't carry on with their own fragments of the old leadership and culture. But hopefully if you break it down into small enough pieces, the front-line managers and engineers will be able to reassert a more positive corporate culture.

 

[GenMarshall]

Yeah they need to up their QC game but this is a much deeper issue than just that. The entire corporate structure has been built around the idea of extracting maximum profit at all stages without any regards to ethics or morality. So they didn't just let QC atrophy - they actively attacked it as a cost center that needed to be destroyed. That's a different mentality altogether and much more serious imo.

I’m just hoping other companies like General Dynamics don’t fall into that habit of letting their QC slide. Especially when one of their subdivisions build and launch nuclear submarines. Those you cannot cut back on QC or you’ll regret it.

 

[Hrothbern]

I honestly think the only way this company can be turned around inside of 24 months is to break it up. Even then, it's not guaranteed that the new entities won't carry on with their own fragments of the old leadership and culture. But hopefully if you break it down into small enough pieces, the front-line managers and engineers will be able to reassert a more positive corporate culture.

yes... not only QC
Standing your ground as QC does not work well when the whole culture starts overwhelming QC... you just lose your job instead of winning.

Question
My experience with company cultures of engineering companies is that if they do not develop enough new products, new generation of products... the accent of the company culture shifts to production culture of existing products.
And that is a totally other ballgame.
Instead of QC like mindset heavily involved in R&D, the testing developing, the "better safe than sorry" thinking.... the mindset shifts to tweaking designs and cost optimisation.
The mass commodity mindset that favors the careers of other kinds of engineers, procedures, escalations, etc
In CEO language... moneyprinting from your existing products.... focus on marketing, scaling up volumes etc
Fits also to that story that the strategic HeadQuarters was moved away from Seattle to Chigago. The clean cut of those two worlds: true engineering and money-shareholders


Had civil airplane Boeing the last two decades really new airplanes, new R&D and D stuff on their drawing tables, or was it more production tweaking-optimisation ?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Unfortunately I have not had a long enough career/enough jobs to fully know myself whether or not your comments are generally accurate with respect to the shift from R&D into cash-cow production. However, I tend to agree with your assessment of the phenomenon as valid.

Had civil airplane Boeing the last two decades really new airplanes, new R&D and D stuff on their drawing tables, or was it more production tweaking-optimisation ?

Well I finished this big messy answer and realized that the TL;DR: version is "Mixed bag"

Spoiler Aircraft Divisions :

The 787 was a huge, clean-sheet project. They really tried to innovate on that one, unfortunately much of the innovation was based around a flawed understanding of how their supply chains could be leveraged to reduce costs. In other words, they were trying to be innovative more on the business side than the technical side and it blew up in their face and cost them a lot of money. The 787 does have new tech - it's extensively carbon-fiber and it is a hybrid aircraft that uses batteries instead of engine bleed air for auxiliary systems which makes it more fuel efficient.

But the rest of their aircraft divisions (both civil, commercial and military) produce endless rehashes of the same products. They put new fuel tanks and stealthy features on an F-15 and tried to sell it to the Air Force, for example. They stretched the 737 and made it the MAX, and put 787 parts and technology into the 777, called it the 777X and are trying to sell them to airliners.

Spoiler Space Divisions :

They spun off their main rocket division in the early 2000's and their remaining space and rocket divisions have kind of gone to poop. They have tried new things though; the Starliner capsule is mostly new technology and in some ways (ground landing on airbags) it is more innovative than SpaceX's offering. But that program has been run as a relentless, eyebrow-raising cash grab since the beginning and is constantly under pressure from government auditors due to Boeing's abuse of the contracting system.

Their sheer size has meant they have gone toe to toe with NASA on technical and programmatic issues and won - only to have it blow up in their face when the first Starliner failed miserably. Sounds a bit like how they played the FAA doesn't it?

They still have a rocket division in Huntsville/Mississippi as well, and that has produced a new rocket design (the SLS) that is a grab-bag of parts of older vehicles like the Shuttle and even Apollo. This program, like the Starliner, has also been the subject of massive controversy due to Boeing's abuse of the contracting system and NASA's complete acquiescence to that abuse up until Jim Bridenstine took over. Jim's done a lot to combat that but the program was already baked in as a graft machine before he took the job.

They occasionally start up more daring projects like a recent space plane for DARPA (military R&D) that was supposed to be able to fly to space 10 times in a day. They made a lot of progress on that program and then unilaterally cancelled it. It is believed they did this when they realized they would not be able to make as much profit on the contract as they thought they could and they have no interest in trying to develop a business case for the program unless the government directly pays them to do that on top of the tech R&D.

Spoiler More graft :

Boeing also has prominent Senators who try and feed Boeing a steady stream of contracts. Republican congressmen recently called on NASA to cancel the entirety of their commercial cargo and crew efforts and award them all to Boeing. Those efforts have been a resounding success for every company involved in them - except for Boeing. Yet the GOP is arguing that Boeing should be given all the money. That's not suspect at all. /s

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I guess one argument that I can make about that mixed bag is that it sort of underlines my broader point. Everything they do is about maximizing profit extraction. It doesn't matter if they are tweaking old designs, making wholly new designs or rearranging the parts of old design into new designs. None of those things are characteristics they really care about. All they care about is extracting as much money as they can and they'll do whatever it is the government and customers say they want but simultaneously do it for as cheap as they can get away with while charging as much as they can get away with. They will break the law and all ethical and moral standards as they do so because that's how they figure they can minimize cost most efficiently. And they keep getting away with it, so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle!

inb4 'that's just how capitalism works'

Maybe, but it shouldn't be allowed to work that way. FAA regulations are said to be written in blood for a reason, after all.

 

[Broken_Erika]

737 Max: Debris found in new planes' fuel tanks

Boeing's crisis-hit 737 Max jetliner faces a new potential safety issue as debris has been found in the fuel tanks of several new planes which were in storage, awaiting delivery to airlines.

The head of Boeing's 737 programme has told employees that the discovery was "absolutely unacceptable".

A Boeing spokesman said the company did not see the issue further delaying the jet's return to service.

It comes as the 737 Max remains grounded after two fatal crashes.

The US plane maker said it discovered so-called "Foreign Object Debris" left inside the wing fuel tanks of several undelivered 737 Maxs.

A company spokesman told the BBC: "While conducting maintenance we discovered Foreign Object Debris (FOD) in undelivered 737 Max airplanes currently in storage. That finding led to a robust internal investigation and immediate corrective actions in our production system."

Foreign Object Debris is a technical term that covers any substance, debris or article that isn't part of a plane which would potentially cause damage.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51499777