I figure it’s about time for a 737-MAX update. First, if you haven’t seen it, John Oliver’s Boeing dissection from last week is a tour-de-force and worth a watch.
Second, those fuckers running Boeing are stonewalling the NTSB in their investigation on the door plug blowout of Alaska Air 737-MAX-9. Here’s an exchange between NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy and Senator Maria Cantwell:
“…[E]very shift is documented, you know the workers that were involved in this particular area, you can get their names, you can ask for interviews with those individuals. And you’re saying that that hasn’t happened?” Sen. Cantwell asked Chair Homendy.
“We have gone through emails, we’ve gone through texts, we’ve looked at pictures to begin to get a picture of the date in mid-September, the two dates in mid-September that we believe the work occurred,” Chair Homendy responded. “We haven’t received that information directly from Boeing. We also believe we know what shift it occurred on. But we still — there is one team … that deals with the doors, of 25 people. Why we don’t have those names today, two months later, is really disappointing.”
The reason they’re stonewalling is, of course, because the truth is appalling. It’s obvious at this point that they let a 737-MAX leave the factory without four life-safety critical bolts installed. Presumably these 25 folks will tell a tale of lax oversight, rush to get planes out the door, and general sloppiness. I’m guessing the morons in charge at Boeing believe that we’ll all forget about this turd if they delay their response, but clearly that’s not going to happen.
Oliver’s piece compares the 737 to the DC-10, the last plane designed from scratch by McDonnell-Douglas before they merged with Boeing and effectively took over. That turd took a hell of a long time, and a lot of dead passengers and crew, to get sorted out. McDonnell-Douglas didn’t design another plane from scratch after that. Instead they milked their old designs (DC-9 and DC-10) with an endless series of stretches and minor re-designs. The last DC-10 variant, the MD-11, is notorious for being hard to land due to lack of engineering expenditure:
[T]he MD-11 is essentially a stretched DC-10, with winglets, a 2-crew cockpit (one fewer than on the DC-10), and a few other nips and tucks. Significantly, the designers increased the operating weight and the length of the aircraft, without re-engineering the wing and rudder. As a result, the aircraft has rather sluggish roll and yaw responses to control input at low speeds, i.e., on short finals and during the landing flare.The second significant factor that affects the MD-11s landing performance is speed. In order to compensate for the MD-11’s higher operating weight and reduced rudder authority, its approach speeds can be substantially higher than other comparable commercial jets. […]
It’s only used as a freighter now, thankfully. The legacy of “just one more stretch” lives on with the 737-MAX and the MCAS software “solution” to the engineering challenge of putting large modern high-bypass turbofans on a plane that first flew in 1967.
The amount of real value (not stock value) lost by the looting of Boeing by a bunch of MBAs is staggering.
Ryan
Is 4 bolts enough? Can’t we through legislation make it, I dunno, 30?
trollhattan
I can say the FAA pivot to letting aircraft manufacturers do their own certification and QA/QC has sure worked a treat. Think of the savings!
I am Rand Paul and I approve this message.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Ryan: Serious answer: yes. The bolts hold the plug in place so it doesn’t transition up and out. There are a dozen stops that keep it from blowing out as long as it doesn’t transition up. If the bolts are installed correctly they are wired in so they can’t loosen up. The same design has been used on the longest stretch of the previous generation of the 737 with no problem
(More than you ever wanted to know about the door plug available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYltSd3kWX0 )
sukabi
local news (PNW) had 3 different stories related to boeing 737s, only one of them was a maintenance failure well after it left the factory (plane’s been in service for 20+ years) tire/ wheel fell off after takeoff…
p.a.
Don’t know about “kill all the lawyers” but kill all the MBAs could arguably lead to tremendous societal improvements.
Worked at New England Tel with a lineman who was up in the bucket when the boom failed. He was aloft on an overpass above a state highway when the boom separated from the truck bed. 29 bolts held the boom to the bed. Never heard how many had to go bad such that the ALL failed. Him, the bucket, the whole boom fell off the truck and off the overpass. It was winter early-mid 1990s when we had several 100+ inch snow totals in RI. He landed in a deep drift/plow pile on the side of the highway. Survived; internal injuries, broken bones. Could walk & function normally (pins & plates) but never worked again. Lawsuits galore. The company was obviously responsible for truck maintenance but they don’t BUILD or design the trucks, and NET leased our trucks from a Cali company. That NET owned.
twbrandt
Then there is the Alaska Airlines 737 that arrived at PDX with an open cargo door.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
I’ve been reconsidering my position on MBAs. The degrees, not the holders, I’d never wish anyone harm.
My last boss held an MBA. He was still basically kind and concerned with the well-being of strangers. He deeply appreciated that the hospital where we worked specifically served the poor and unhoused.
It occurs to me if we are to untangle the knots that unethical financial wizards have tied our system into, ethical financial wizards must be included in the process.
Doesn’t mean I’d recommend pursuing a business degree to anyone, especially over anything else. Which, as we all know, a wise student should only be looking at money and job prospects when selecting a college career (barf).
Redshift
Ms. Redshift just booked a flight and went at a less convenient time to avoid being booked on a MAX. (Of course, they could reshuffle equipment between now and then, but it’s worth a try.)
I really liked when we didn’t have to keep track of plane model safety records the way you look up a car model in Consumer Reports…
Dan B
I’ve lived in Seattle for 50 years. It was the Boeing Bust when I arrived. The current crisis is due to the merger but also moving headquarters to Chicago meant that the executives were separated from the engineers and managers. The engineers used to rein in the bean counters. No longer. Boeing used to be proud of selling more planes than any other company. No longer.
cmorenc
Ruh-roh – the assigned plane for my May 2 flight on United from Raleigh-Durham to Denver is the Boeing 737-Max-9 (!!!) And the connecting flight DEN-Grand Junction is the 737-800, which curiously has the same United flight number (1714) as the RDU-DEN flight the same morning (1714) which initially caused me to assume there was a troublesome error in the United reservation system (the customer service rep assured me the flight numers were correct) – but now that I realize I’m scheduled for a ride on the 737-max-9, the baffling flight numbers may be the least of my potential problems. Oh, and on the respective return flights May 21, I’m on a 737-800 and 737-max 8. Ugh.
Redshift
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: I don’t think business degree has to mean MBA, though. According to an article in Forbes, about 40% of Fortune 100 CEOs have an MBA. It also says that for an MBA (unlike other degrees CEOs have), “grades matter less than the school’s brand and the networks formed,” which tells you something about the educational value of the degree.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Well, I should find out where my boss got his because he’s swell. I think URI, though, state school.
Another Scott
@p.a.: A good friend’s father worked on power lines in a bucket truck in Dayton, OH. Something bad happened once when he was up in the bucket and he fell out. I don’t know all the details, but apparently a lot of his internal organs “fell out”. He survived, they put him back together, but his insides were never right after that.
:-(
One really, really does not want to fall out of a bucket truck.
Boeing needs to get its management act together and fix their problem reporting system and processes. And until they do, the FAA and NTSB and several other 3 and 4 letter agencies need to be camped out in their factories and management conference rooms to make sure that they’re actually doing their jobs.
MM’s story now reminded me to find his previous pointer to the story reposted at EmptyWheel. Stonewalling isn’t going to fix that toxic culture.
Grr…,
Scott.
PaulB
The baffling thing to me is that they don’t appear to have learned anything after all of these years of failures: saving millions of dollars in cost-cutting measures but losing billions of dollars in lawsuits, redesigns, grounded fleets, delivery failures, union good will, engineering good will, customer good will (both airlines and passengers), and market share. Nothing they are doing is working.
Why is it that so many of these people, when something clearly doesn’t work, insist on continuing to do it, or worse, getting even more extreme?
CaseyL
The enshittification of Boeing is the same story as the enshittification of the rest of the corporate economy.
It’s just, when their product fails, it gets noticed more than (say) rotten household products and non-existent customer service, which we now accept as our lot in life.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
We make our own reality. -Bush or Cheney or someone in that admin
Nukular Biskits
Some of you may remember I wound up being stuck in San Diego for an extra couple of days due to United being unable to accommodate flights due to pulling so many 737 Max A9s out of service for inspection.
There are worse places to be stranded, I suppose, but I was on company travel so no money out of my pocket.
Another Scott
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: Turd Blossom. IIRC.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: Nah, much simpler: they keep getting rewarded for it. Now you may ask, ” why is that?”
I have no answer.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Another Scott: Thank you. 💩
They and people like them decide who gets rewarded what.
Nukular Biskits
@PaulB:
What gets me is that, according to John Oliver’s piece (which I have no reason to doubt), is that all this corner-cutting was to maximize profit and, thus, shareholder dividends/share price.
Did NONE of this EVER effect Boeing stock prices or dividends?
Ken
Some righteous rage in that John Oliver piece. I think comedians are at their best when they punch up.
Dan B
@Ken: We’ll probably watch Oliver tonight. It’s close to home. Boeing Field is a mile west of us and we can walk three blocks south to a spot where we can see the Renton plant where 737’s are assembled. So it’s literally close to home.
Ken
Possibly, but with Boeing putting 92% of their revenue into stock buy-backs and dividends (according to the John Oliver piece), the prices would have gone right back up.
NotMax
Noting the death at age 88 of stalwart singer/actor Steve Lawrence.
Remain blown away at the technical prowess of this number he participated in, considering the cumbersome cameras and cables at the time it first aired – live.
Nukular Biskits
@Ken:
Excellent point.
Snarki, child of Loki
For EVERY passenger that dies in a Boeing plane mishap, one Boeing C-suite exec should be tossed out of the window at the top of their Chicago sky-scraper.
Starting with the CEO and working downward until they’re all gone. Are they flight risks? Find out!
ColoradoGuy
Reagan is the monster that keeps on giving.
* Corporations buying up their own stocks, which was illegal before Reagan. The leveraged buyout craze, made possible by dismantling FDR’s legislation.
* Overturning the Fairness Doctrine, opening the door to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
* Dropping the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 35% because fuck you, that’s why. Also removing the income tax deduction for credit-card debt.
* Clarence Thomas, appointed to the EEOC specifically to destroy it (yes, THAT Clarence Thomas).
* The first wave of climate denialism, sponsored by the same PR agencies that worked for the cigarette companies, that purposely destroyed the careers of several top scientists.
* Treating the AIDS waves of agonizing death with denialism, as a topic of humor, hate-fodder for TV evangelists, while slow-walking the research. (Sound familiar?)
Leto
United 777 taking off from San Francisco heading to Japan looses a wheel that hit a car in an employee parking area.
Nice little video, plus what the car looks like.
Ken
@Nukular Biskits: It also occurs to me that if investors know that buy-backs are Boeing’s policy, they’d have no reason to sell in the first place. Nowadays people don’t buy stocks because of what they think the company will do; they buy them because of what they think the stock price will do.
cain
@trollhattan:
I hope Rand Paul gets a first impression of laxed airplane safety shit when he goes on a demonstration flight from Kentucky to Greenland.
cain
@Redshift: I’ve been told that MBAs are a dime a dozen. It doesn’t mean much – yes I assume that where you got your MBA might mean something.
I will never willingly get an MBA.
Nukular Biskits
@Ken:
I suspect you are correct on that point as well.
I’m not investment savvy … T. Rowe Price manages my 401K, and that’s in a fund with a goal of retirement in 2030 (I think … haven’t looked at it in a while … LOL). My limited understanding is that investment firms seriously dig into the sectors and businesses in which they choose to invest, looking at the probable long term performance.
A lot of today’s individual investors, though, are more interested in short-term trades based solely on stock price; i.e., buy low, sell high.
So, yes, I could see how that latter group could turn a blind eye to the systemic issues at Boeing.
P.S. Forgive the oversimplifications there … like I said, I’m definitely not an investment manager.
Nukular Biskits
@cain:
I suspect his neighbor would buy the plane ticket.
Redshift
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
That would fit. The article implies that you should get your MBA from an elite school if you want to be a CEO, but not where you should get it if you just want to do a good job.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Not good that you and I aren’t likely the only ones who look at these objectives as being at odds.
mrmoshpotato
@cain:
Then I guess we need to put you through business school against your will! Mwhahahahahahahaha!!!!
Uncle Cosmo
Ticket?? Hah. They’d truss him up like a Thanksgiving turkey, wrap him in a black contractor trash bag, pay someone on the ground crew to let them stuff his wuthless butt into the nose wheel well, and take videos from a safe distance as he destroys some poor schmuck’s car when he lands on it.
gene108
I wonder when some enterprising country will start subsidizing a commercial passenger airplane manufacturer, who can offer the quality and price value Boeing no longer can?
I don’t think many people appreciate that the U.S. is a leader in the commercial passenger airplane market. Outside of Airbus, there aren’t any major competitors.
I get the feeling Boeing will go the way of U.S. auto manufacturers, who took decades to get their shit together when they got real competition from Japanese makers and lost their dominance in the U.S. auto market.
gene108
@PaulB:
Boeing isn’t going to lose billions in lawsuits, redesigns, etc. They have one real competitor. The lawsuits usually settle for less than the initial judgement. Redesign only costs money, if Boeing cares about improving quality, which doesn’t seem likely.
They’ll lose goodwill for sure.
I think they are banking the the high startup costs to enter as a competitor to make sure they are viable even as quality suffers. Airbus can’t fill all the orders, and after Airbus, who else can compete with Boeing?
Melancholy Jaques
@gene108:
I remember watching that happen in the 70s and 80s. It was like the Big Three just did not care. There were waiting lists to get Hondas
Same thing with motorcycles.
Another Scott
@gene108: Comac is coming.
Reuters.
… gradually, and then suddenly.
Uncle Sam buys a lot of Boeing stuff, so they’ll (or someone with their IP and factories) will be around for a long time. But Lockheed doesn’t make commercial airliners any more…
Cheers,
Scott.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ken: Which explains why the shitsack that goes by the name of Greg Gutfeld sucks big time.
Villago Delenda Est
@Redshift: George W. Bush holds a Harvard MBA.
Just sayin’.
polyorchnid octopunch
As is often the case when looking at MBA destruction of formerly innovative firms (think HP, for example), the biggest cost to the economy is the destruction of expertise. While the old demotivational poster had it that “Meetings, because none of us is as dumb as all of us”, in the real world when you have real expertise in teams the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and I think you can make a decent case that destroying that to turn it into cash is the true product of modern business education.
RaflW
Leeham News published an exposé quite some time ago via an anonymous commenter who seemed highly credible, detailing how the door removal was probably logged in the unofficial computer log and not logged in the official record of construction of the plane.
Boeing really, really does not want this massive, imo ILLEGAL (if true) misuse of the parallel tracking systems to let a potentially very fatal error ‘slip’ thru.
Boeing has become an absolutely crap company, which is a massive indictment of the dividend/stock before all else culture there. I’m furious that Delta, my preferred airline, is planning to go ahead with a huge Max10 order. It’s a bucket of junk and the FAA should, in a just world, flat out refuse to certify it.
cain
End of the week and I’m making a chicken tagine in a traditional tagine clay pot! Of course, the spicing has been adjusted for an Indian taste – eg it’s spicier but still have the other ingredients.
cain
@RaflW:
There is probably some kind of strong relationship between the two but yeah, Delta is my preferred as it has never fucked up as a company any of my travels.
RaflW
@PaulB: “Why is it that so many of these people, when something clearly doesn’t work, insist on continuing to do it, or worse, getting even more extreme?”
In this case, American Airlines literally ordered 85 new Max planes four days ago. If our shitty ‘legacy’ airlines keep ordering the even shittier airplanes after this sequence of fiascos at Boeing, there’s clearly no incentive for Boeing to do better.
CaseyL
This is part of the reason why I am going to do my best to not travel by plane for the foreseeable future. Train or road trip, and that’s it.
RaflW
@cain: Delta’s bean counters love the 737-900, even as the CEO acknowledges that customers consistently rate it lower in their ‘net promoter scores’ (NPS). Why this matters: NPS tests people’s willingness to recommend a company.
Even if passengers don’t know what plane they are on (many don’t), they know when they board/fly/arrive that they had a crappier time on a 737-900 than they have on other Delta flights, and they tell the airline so in their after-flight surveys.
But they’re ordering more shit-bucket 737s because the operating cost story is more compelling than risks to NPS (because the customers keep coming back, even if they claim they won’t recommend Delta to others).
That’s MBA-speak for: Cost trumps customer satisfaction, especially in an oligopoly/hub captive system.
Miss Bianca
@Uncle Cosmo: “As God is my witness, I thought
Rand Paulturkeys could fly.”Another Scott
@RaflW: MM pointed us to that in a January post about this. A link to it is in the EmptyWheel link in my #13.
It rings true, and it’s a horrible indictment of Boeing’s management.
Grr…,
Scott.
surfk9
@polyorchnid octopunch: I had that poster on the wall of my office for years
prostratedragon
@NotMax: That was very good. No dropoffs in sound, no wires or booms showing that I could see, lots of camera movement, and sold performers.
CHETAN R MURTHY
Long time ago I read a report of a study into the efficacy of NBA education. They did something somewhat like taking a cohort of people who had been accepted and then for some random reason didn’t go, and matching them up with a cohort of people who had been accepted and went to NBA school. And what they found was that there was no difference in the career outcomes for the two groups. In short, what matters is not that you got an MBA, but that you’re the kind of person who could get an MBA.
Frankly, having known a bunch of MBAs, I think this is about right. I have a friend who got a Sloan school MBA from MIT and she was quite clear on how hard she worked to get a B and couldn’t manage it. All she could get was A’s.
Chetan Murthy
@CHETAN R MURTHY: oops, s/NBA/MBA/
Chetan Murthy
@CHETAN R MURTHY: Another friend at the Cornell Johnson School of Management told me that the key skill MBAs have is being the life of the party. Got a boring party? Throw ten JGSM students in, and it’ll be rockin’. And she was very clear on just how remedial all the education was: they have a “summer camp” before first-year, for those students who never learned any math, and it’s pretty damn remedial.
Don K
@Nukular Biskits:
Not saying it’s true of all investment advisors/analysts, but your average Wall Street analyst is good at putting together a five-year spreadsheet showing that, with the cost reductions management has achieved, this stock is a steal at the present price, never contemplating that there’s a potential downside to cheaping out the product, whether in lower sales, lawsuits, or other bad things.
Street analysts love cost reductions, because that’s something that can be measured and compared to management commitments, whereas investments in quality have uncertain payoffs at some future date, so cost-cutting is the order of the day regardless of the strategic effect on the company.
dimmsdale
@PaulB: Wasn’t there a wholesale rejiggering of CEO pay some years back, whereby CEOs ended up getting paid in company stock rather than salary/bonus? Thus the CEO’s business goal became jacking up the stock price so he/she could cash out when the time was right, rather than running a solid company that would have a respectable life after the CEO left? (Remember, during the Enron crisis, that one of the most commonly heard acronyms explaining its spectacular executive malpractice was YBG/IBG (“You’ll Be Gone/I’ll Be Gone”)? Just my opinion, but CEOs and/or top corporate executives, MBA or not, have one goal: to get PAID, and preferably stratospherically. Running a business is just a sideline, or means to an end. The goal is GET PAID, and all the cost-cutting, outsourcing, layoffing tactics they employ exist to get them PAID.
Uncle Cosmo
@Miss Bianca: “Nothing became him so much in life as the smartphone video of him departing it in a freefall at terminal velocity concluding in an employee parking lot!” ;^p
Tl;dr: Gobblegobblegobblegobblegobblegobble!!
Uncle Cosmo
IIRC some years back someone analyzed top executive compensation as a function of corporate performance and found a strong correlation – in the negative direction: The more you paid the CEO, the worse the corp did. Which made and makes poifick sense: Boards of Misdirectors award a CEO major bonuses and pay hikes for last year’s performance, which generally said mook had fook-all to do with – in most cases it was a statistical blip uptick – at which point performance would generally blip back down in a reversion to the mean.
Tl;dr: CEOs have no idea what the fuck they’re doing but, just like Presidents, get praised or blamed for their predecessors’ actions & compensated accordingly. (Even shorter version: Fuckem!)
VOR
@dimmsdale: Look at IBM. For about 15 years their objective was increasing earnings per share. One of the ways they accomplished this was massive stock buy-backs, thus reducing the number of outstanding shares. In 2012 IBM was a $100B/year revenue company. When CEO Ginny Rometty stepped down in 2020 their annual revenue was down to $60B after sell-offs, spin-offs, and cutbacks. They had one, only 1, quarter where revenue grew over prior year in the entire 9 years Rometty was CEO. During those 9 years they spent over $80B on stock buy-backs. She did what the Board of Directors paid her to do and got bonus after bonus.