This may not be completely accurate. According to [1], these pilots were part of a redundant program not related to the 737 MAX.
Doesn't make this a great move, I still question it, but the original article didn't include any response from Boeing, and they are claiming something quite different.
While I do not believe there are many incentives for Boeing to be frank about its motivations or the specifics of the layoffs, I am glad you added this article, as it does provide a response to the allegations, and more details to further probe.
This website served me an ad about L3Harris' flight data recorder. I haven't been looking for a new flight data recorder recently. So why would they market such a specialized device to random people like me?
Presumably they're serving you ads based on the site you're visiting rather than tracking you from site to site across the internet. Kind of an old-fashioned way of doing things, but might make sense for niche publications like this.
I mean I’m in the industry of building and selling them. It’s weird to me that they’re hitting a software engineer with their own company’s ads.
As you allude to, you’d think the ads need to land in front of the business and management types in warehouse and industrial spaces.
It feels like they can’t target precisely enough so they just kind of target certain keywords that is a very widely cast net.
It happened at my last company too. They were so proud of being a real company with an ad campaign and then I immediately saw their ads all the time. I was really expecting some level of precision.
>It’s weird to me that they’re hitting a software engineer with their own company’s ads.
Sounds like super normal? The track interest, not exact profession. So they know you're highly interested in the industry and its products, but not that you're building them yourself...
This is a wild stab in the dark, but it could be some sort of legal distancing or compartmentalization of liability. If this is a pure cost-cutting measure, it hardly seems worth the optics of this action.
Some sites show it on the booking page, and if not, there are various sites* on which you can look up the flight number to see what aircraft type has been used historically. Sometimes several different types are cycled on a given flight (e.g. Boeing 777 and Airbus A350), but for many flight numbers it's always the same aircraft type.
For example, American Airlines has tons of both 737 and A320 aircraft, but AA858 seemingly always uses a 737-800 (B738):
Depends on the route and on the airlines available. For example, Delta doesn't currently have the 737 Max, and I highly doubt they will order it in the near future. In Germany, Lufthansa doesn't have any 737 in its fleet anymore.
... book on an airline that flies Airbus only. There may be a few of those, but it severely limits choice in airline.
... try to determine which Boeing model is used, and be willing to walk away at the gate if the plane is changed out (losing the ticket, or at best incurring a typically large change fee).
The upside is that they pay your family approx 144K USD if it smashes into the ground and you don't make it ... for many people that is a nice chunk of change.
A more likely stab in the dark is that they were financially in some trouble after the MAX issues, have been put in further trouble by many of their customers becoming borderline bankrupt, and this is just a stereotypical cost cutting move.
Given the article describes the outsourcing company as located on the Isle of Man, and wrapped in shell companies, I have a hard time not believing legal distancing reasons or at least maybe shady tax evasion practise
Well, I guess Boeing was in trouble after the 737 and then came Covid and the associated collapse of air travel. Together with the announcement of moving the 787 production to North Carolina last week, this feels like grasping for straws.
With travel restrictions, people afraid of catching covid, economy crashing, and plenty of good competitor planes with better reputation, why would airlines need (or want) to buy these planes?
Sure. Maybe not in 2020, or even 2021, but at some point travel is likely to resume to pre-COVID levels. How long that takes is anyones guess, but the desire for a more efficient aircraft to cram even more people inside of to save on costs will always be a priority for any (remaining) airlines.
I was flying all the time for 5 years because our partners, investors, clients etc demanded it. I had many weeks in those years where someone mailed on sunday that I was expected tuesday morning in HK and thursday in melbourne and then could be gone sunday. I live in EU so that's a nice haul for 1 week of business; quite painful with some kind of permanent jetlag.
Then COVID arrived and now suddenly everything is easy over zoom, email & chat. Even now that travel is allowed again in a lot of places I was supposed to jump to inside EU, no-one asks for it anymore. Saves everyone bucketloads of money (I wasn't sitting in economy), much better for the environment, and, for most purposes that the travel was thought to be vital for, it's actually more efficient this way. People are well rested and progress is made faster as people are less likely to fall into the bullshit of lengthy business lunches/dinners and late night drinks (basically getting hammered which in some circles was mandatory otherwise they wouldn't play) etc. Most of the people I work with (and have worked with for years) don't assume they or I will have to fly, when it's allowed again, more than once a year. And I don't miss it; it was really tiring.
I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She's been waiting for me all these years. She's never taken another lover. I don't care. I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier.
I doubt this. I’ve worked on and off remotely and with distributed teams for most of my career. For many of us, there is something severely missing when remote-only. It’s only been a few months. I don’t believe we’ve had a paradigm-shifting breakthrough in the nature or office life. I think what’s going on is 1) tech companies are taking a good opportunity to diversify out of the long overpriced SV labor and real estate markets, and 2) companies trying to keep a stiff upper lip and show how adaptive they are by appearing to embrace the “new normal.”
Travelling from the a regional airport in the UK to a regional airport in the US rather than transiting through a major hub in a different state will surely be in huge demand.
Now seems like the ideal time to invest in these planes. Most people won’t care what metal they ride if it’s cheaper.
Well the big benefit of the MAX is the engines, and the new engines have a much bigger fan, which means a complete rearrangement of how the engines are mounted on the wing, and how that affects the wingbox, which means in effect yes, they need the MAX. Boeing before the MAX faced the dilemma of the successful 737 form factor, but the requirement for larger fans for more fuel efficiency. They had to toss up between a newer replacement model (complete with more ground clearance, new design which is about a decade long timeframe, with the osbourne effects etc) or shoehorn bigger fan engines on the 737, which is what the MAX is.
In short if you want the ~15% improvement in fuel efficiency of modern engines with the 737 airframe you need a MAX. It is bordering on impossible for Boeing to take the 737 airframe any further after the MAX.
They do need it, they are a low cost airline that gets its main cost benefit by having only one supplier and one airframe. I guess you could say they don't need to be a low cost airline as well, but that statement would hold the same amount of weight as saying they don't need the MAX.
i'm sure if Southwest offers 15% discount to fly on MAX, vs regularly priced tickets on regular plane - nobody is going to choose MAX.
Consumers, in aggregate, are way smarter, than the corporate folks
Boeing are going to rename the MAX so a lot of consumers won't even know they are flying a MAX. From memory Ryanair have already named their model the 737-8200 (which is a semi custom version of the MAX-8 just for Ryanair where the toilets are just oversized shoeboxes to fix an extra row if memory serves).
Also, it's not just the 15% decrease on fuel burn (which obviously doesn't equate to a 15% cheaper flight) but Southwest was the launch customer for the 737 NG series which means their initial 737-700 planes are now 24 years old, which means increased maintenance costs; a 24 year old plane is probably coming up on its second (or third for planes that have a higher duty cycle) D check which would be approx USD1.1~1.8M depending on the amount of remedial work / engine replacement etc. So avoiding a D check can save a lot of money. Multiply that by the 495 737-NGs that Southwest has and it is a very big number.
Here's a link[0] that gives an idea of how modern commercial aircraft checks work.
Btw, there's a 737 MAX update Sept 24 from blancolirio about Boeing and the FAA hammering out modifications to training and systems that will eventually put the idle birds back in the air.
Most of the US airlines will end up bankrupt in the next 12 months which will give the re-organized companies a lot of contractual leeway in deciding what planes they really want to fly.
I would discount anything Boeing says or does at this point. Their financial outlook is tied to the airlines but worse. The upside is the assumption of federal bailouts for Boeing are morning likely than those for airlines. Whether or not that outlook retains Boeing's current equity holders is another issue.
I will not...but I dislike flying sufficiently that I won't fly on anything else, either.
For people who actually do fly, there is not really a good reason to avoid it after it is cleared by several national regulators (several in case you don't trust the FAA) to fly again. When that thing gets back in the air the systems that were involved in the two crashes are going to be among the most scrutinized and independently reviewed systems on any plane designed in the last 20 years.
You may still die on one, but it will be due to something other than anything related to MCAS.
Most of what I've seen says that the problems with the 737 MAX flight control software were were with the specification, not the implementation. The coders, wherever they were, implemented correctly what the specification said they were to implement.
The flight control software wasn't worked on by the infamous $9 an hour engineers. That was the multi-function display, on which one could only actually get as far as possibly contributing to not displaying the AoA disagree warning if I recall correctly.
What it does demonstrate, however, is Management's ruthless devotion to chasing the bottom dollar. What further probing may have been done by someone more deeply invested and dedicated to the task? I don't at all blame someone only getting $9 dollars an hour for "Yes-manning" it. I do, however, blame the exec woefully ignorant of the environment and effect on overall culture that has. When you start engineering for the sake of financials like that, you intentionally invite writing checks your work culture can't cash down the road.
I've said it in every previous post where Boeing makes a profit vs safety trade-off:
We should nationalize Boeing.
It's in our strategic interest to be able to manufacture planes, Boeing provides lots of decent wage jobs, it has wildly overpaid executives, and it had shown that when given the choice it will choose profit over safety. Nationalization removes the profit motive, ends the bizarre tax subsidies that get pushed around.
Boeing is already a public/private enterprise. The down years in commercial aircraft are propped up by US Gov defence orders, lots of primary research is funded by the US taxpayer, the US Gov works very hard to help Boeing sell airplanes, and there’s heaps of tax breaks available at the State level.
Many of the trade offs that Boeing has made - outsourcing, devaluing internal expertise, focusing on shareholder returns over risky long-term bets, and aggressively fighting unions - mirror US culture more generally. There’s little evidence that nationalising Boeing would change this - as an example related to this news story, the DoD is outsourcing more and more of its training and aggressor flying to private corporations.
It is worth pointing out that many of the points about Boeing being a public/private enterprise also apply to Airbus.
Disagree 100%. To me, what we are seeing IS the effect of a company that HAS been effectively nationalized, too big too fail, and time and time again doesn't feel the brunt of its horrendous decisions.
With benefit of hindsight, I wonder how I would have driven that policy initiative, if I had been pro-monopoly. I think as the largest customer (US Fed Govt), my quid pro quo would stipulate keeping IP and mfg domestic, and curtail the financialization (execs, board, and biggest investors goosing the stock price, buy backs, etc).
In other words, The New Deal. Forging national security thru appeasing both the war hawks and labor.
Boeing is already a nationalized business. They're financially propped up by the US government which is why they've been able to make all of these horrible decisions without any consequence. They're no longer a tech company. They're a zombie financial institution.
The point you are making is getting lost in splitting hairs over semantics of “nationalized”. It is rather short sighted for a nation that has for the past 2 decades given primacy to force over diplomacy to outsource military and critical industrial know-how. This stuff used to be state-craft 101 but apparently the ‘dumb down America’ project was more successful than possibly originally intended.
> How much do upper management of utility companies get paid?
Competent, cheap and limited power. Pick two.
The executive of Boeing, public or private, will control vast resources. If you underpay, you will get an idiot who follows the rules or someone who makes up the difference in undesirable ways. (Someone competent motivated by a sense of duty has better options in terms of executive staffing.)
There is little evidence that highly paid executives make better decisions than other similarly educated individuals. They're just "smarter" in the sense of getting into a company and/or field that pays more for similar expertise. The reality shows that huge companies make lots of mistakes, but they're often protected from these mistakes by their strong position in the market. See for example companies such as IBM, GE, GM, etc.
An excellent example would be Boeing before their merger with McDonnell Douglas. Boeing originally had an engineering-lead culture. After the merger, their exec salaries ballooned, profits grew, but engineering quality suffered.
Lucratively high exec pay is a recent phenomenon. There were plenty of successful companies before the last 40 years.
When that happens, the US will just ban Chinese aircraft from US airspace and impose economic sanctions on the Chinese aircraft industry under the pretext of IP theft and/or National Security<tm>.
That is the Washington solution for Huawei, TikTok, and Tecent after all.
They can do airframes but they are still far behind in avionics and engines. If the C919 ships in 2-3 years at all, it will be with CFM LEAP engines and American avionics. The problem for China is you cannot cut quality in aviation; there is no such thing as an affordable, lower quality product as there is in consumer products. We’re talking ca. 2030 for a competitive Chinese airliner.
China has been capable of creating quality products in other areas, for example their national high speed train, satellite, and electric car industries. Avionics take time, that is true, but I would say that in 3 years they will have the necessary technology.
Counterpoint: Sukhoi Superjet had its "deliveries" years ago, and now several of them have crashed and nobody wants to buy or fly them anymore. And that _Sukhoi_ - those guys have been designing and building planes for 81 years. Just not passenger ones. On paper, the plane is "competitive". Doesn't mean jack squat.
Absolutely disagree. Boeing is a direct result of mismanagement and protection because of government involvement.
What people use and want is the most effective signal. If regulation by government worked why hasn’t FAA succeeded? Largely many would argue they have statistically.
I prefer something closer to an emergent regulatory body that convenes on conferences and protocols.
Nationalism would be a nightmare. There’s so much to unpack there on mechanics and rights.
Boeing should just fire everybody who’s not part of management, subcontract an Indian or Brazil company and buy back its own stocks from the remaining money.
To tell you the truth even I wasn't sure if I'm writing sarcasm or if I'm serious. I was considering deleting my comment before I saw how many upvotes it was getting.
But then what of the "shareholder value"? They'd have to pay out tens or hundreds of millions in executive bonus and would not be artificially inflating the stock.
Seth Godin often makes the distinction between having a brand and a logo with interesting examples. The one I like is that if you can put your logo on a competitor's product and nobody would know the difference, you don't have a brand, you have a logo. The example he uses are hotel chains.
Don't work with coca cola, I would no be able to differentiate a Pepsi bottle with a Coca-Cola logo (note that I dislike every sodas :) ); the Coca-Cola is still powerful, perhaps it does not even need a product :)
This probably depends on how you define soda drinkers. My understanding is studies haven't shown that in general. I've failed a grocery store blind taste test myself. But I didn't prepare in any way.
Thats said, I have caught when something was not Dr Pepper, though I couldn't tell you what it was.
Fair point. Perhaps “soda drinkers who have a clear, established preference for one brand over another” (which is what I presume would lend value to that brand and what I had in mind, but definitely isn’t what I said).
I've done it (only single blind) and was right every time. Only people who can't distinguish I believe just never drank both beverages close to each other.
It says they're outsourcing to this Manx company. The British regulations and so on are presumably similar to American ones, but it does mean there's probably less communication back to Boeing of any relevant feedback.
It's spelled the Isle of Man. It's a tax heaven. They don't have any sizeable administration to supervise or enforce any legislation nor do they intend so. Obviously their "business model" is to attract rich people and shady businesses that they don't offer any public services for. The nominal taxes they collect are good income for their little island. But for those who pay them much cheaper than what they would have to pay in a more functional state.
Disclaimer: Have been there for a holiday trip. Nice place if you disregard the moral aspect of the British Crown "owning" the place.
I'm rolling my eyes at this. The dreaded MBAs salivating at obscenely huge bonuses doing this to benefit themselves and stockholders at the expense of humanity.
The current leaders of US companies proudly and strongly resist considering their product lines as meaningful, beyond ROI.
But that doesn't work when you're in aerospace and have no regard for engineering tradition or skill.
You can see that in the implosion of GE, and now Boeing.
The US government needs to come up with a requirement that private contractors mandate high-quality training and oversight embedded into their internal processes.
Ironically, flight training materials and evaluation is very high-quality in the US, but it's a single manufacturer, Boeing, that's struggling to meet quality standards across all of their airliner models.
Er, the article is not about manufacturing outsourcing, it's about eliminating the last seven remaining Boeing-employed flight training pilots - who were apparently tasked amongst others with quality control of the training pilots from contractors.
Comments on this topic, on this and previous articles, almost universally blame Boeing management for issues including lack of QA. So please take whatever anti-Indian racism ax you've got to grind somewhere else.
edit: Although I do find it funny that your comment generalizes that all HN posters are Americans and that all Americans think alike.
> It's funny that Americans on HN and reddit are trying to blame Boeing's technical incompetence on Indian suppliers and subcontractors. Why are Airbus planes not suffering similar problems and why is Airbus not blaming it on Indian suppliers and subcontractors?
It could have something to do with American business culture as well.
When American companies outsource, they seem monomanically focused on paying the absolute least amount of money per body, which tends to get you relatively incompetent people in any location. They will then engage in brazen denialism that doing something like that will reduce quality.
Maybe European companies prioritize quality more, and are thus willing to pay for more of more skilled people when they offshore.
Don’t attribute to racism that which can be adequately explained by greed. The good thing about greed is that it’s generally colorblind. The bad thing is that it’s much harder to stop than racism, which is rooted in ignorance. Enlightenment tends to beget more greed, and that’s just the American way.
It's pretty mainstream to say that racism is a result of greed. If you're going to force resources to be distributed unevenly in your favor, you have to come up with reasons why you must deserve those resources more than others. If there are convenient physical features to use in that reason, then you'll get racism. So a greed that doesn't have a racism is just one where everyone shares the same features. If your definition of racism is inclusive of distinctions in language or manner, then it's probably not even possible to have greed without racism.
It's the greed that should be attacked, its expression (in racism) is arbitrary.
> The good thing about greed is that it’s generally colorblind.
So I'm saying the opposite of this. Greed is never colorblind, it sees whatever color is convenient at the time.
1. Racism and greed can very easily coexist. Just look at the entirety of American history for examples.
2. Racism is not easy to stop and not as simple as addressing ignorance. Again, I invite you to look at the entirety of American history for examples. You could also look to current affairs.
I think a lot of us, working in pretty much any large industry, have seen what happens when outsourcing goes wrong. Which is of course not to say that it always goes wrong, but, well, it often does.
The typical way it goes is:
- the board has heard that outsourcing can save them millions, and that "everyone is doing it"
- the business signs a big contract with the likes of TCS, Capgemini, Cognizant, etc, paying peanuts
- over the next few years, it's absolute mayhem, and customers and internal users alike are not happy. Internal tech projects and upgrades fail spectacularly, and there is downtime across the everything
- and now answering your question: the board will never place the blame on the decision to outsource, because they made that decision. The business has spent so much money and burned so many bridges in the process, that it may be impossible to go back
I've worked in enterprise-scale companies for 20 years, and for a good chunk of that, I've seen several outsourcing horror stories unfold before my eyes. I've also led teams of offshore developers, and led cross-global teams including offshore workers. I've seen both good and bad.
IME, there are 2 types of outsourcing that companies do. First is wholesale outsourcing of all IT operations - service desk, networking, workplace services etc, and often also including "staff augmentation" for small software projects. I have seen this with Capgemini, Cognizant and TCS, and I've never seen a good outcome from this style of outsourcing. The way it works is that the business pays peanuts, and they get offshore workers who are (largely) completely incompetent - the number of times I've come across networking (or whatever) "specialists" who barely know which way to hold a mouse is truely frightening (I swear I'm not exaggerating). I literally have no idea how the big firms keep getting away with this.
The other style I've seen is consultancy, where TCS, Cognizant, Capgemini or whoever is engaged for 1-2 years to build a specific system. We all know these invariably go horribly wrong when it's a government that's the customer, but I've largely seen these as successful within the enterprise. The offshore personnel assigned to projects tends to be a mix - you'll have a core of competent architects, designers and developers, a few barely mediocre developers, with a supporting cast of totally incompetent developers who have literally no idea what they are doing. These projects are usually ran pretty well, with good engagement with the business. The core of competent people do all the work, with the mediocre ones taking days to complete hours of work, and the incompetent people are basically ignored - it's weird, the customer pays for them, but at best they do nothing.
Oh, there is a third style too, very rarely seen in the enterprise space - shop around and find a small offshore business specialising in software development. I've had great success when I've pushed for this style in the past, with offshore devs in India and China.
HN is and has been passively aggressive towards Indians, I think anyone who browses this forum for a month would know that, it's hardly news. I also don't understand your critique and would advise you to refrain from generalizing all Americans as an extrapolation of this extremely niche forum.
'HN is and has been passively aggressive towards Indians, I think anyone who browses this forum for a month would know that, it's hardly news.'. --- This is a generalization unsubstantiated with no data or references. I find no evidence of this
Even within HN, I'd say it's only a small but vocal minority of Americans that express these kind of views. From what I can tell, the underlying causes are animosity about the H1B program, misconceptions about migrant workers, and latent racism.
But to be clear: plainly not all negative comments about H1B or outsourcing fall into the above category.
You're absolutely right - especially the second point. With that said, I often find the xenophobia here a bit disturbing, but (and thats a massive but) to say those are "typical American ethics" (like above) tantamounts to a sweeping generalization. One which does not represent American values at all.
America has two sets of values, urban and rural. I just finished a 3 hour drive between Indiana and Ohio and you will go 30 minutes seeing only trump signs in rural yards then see it slowly swap to Biden and blm when you get into more dense areas then slowly phase back into trump signs as you get back into rural towns and farmland. Very rarely do you see two different signs in the same area, though wihh how polarizing politics is now that could just be to avoid antagonism.
> HN is and has been passively aggressive towards Indians
HN is not a person, so it doesn't have feelings. Any population sample of millions of people, which HN is, is going to surface examples of pretty much whatever feeling or view you care to mention. I'd be careful not to draw general conclusions from this, because people tend to do that as a mirror image of their own feelings and views, not through any objective perception of HN.
You'll notice I stopped engaging with the replies once I recognized there was a texas-sharpshooter being invoked by my subconscious self through the parent comment. If we got a DUI but for using the internet, I would be top10 ;)
That same year, Boeing opened what it called a “center of excellence” with HCL in Chennai, saying the companies would partner “to create software critical for flight test.”
In 2011, Boeing named Cyient, then known as Infotech, to a list of its “suppliers of the year” for design, stress analysis and software engineering
Well that does not sound like only some payroll or HR outsourcing to me.
> Boeing only outsources some internal IT to Indian subcontractors. The internal IT is things like HR, payroll etc.
This statement is obviously incorrect. As stated on boeing.co.in[1]:
> Today, Boeing India has 3,500 employees, and more than 7,000 people who work on dedicated supply chain jobs with Indian suppliers across manufacturing, engineering and IT sectors. BIETC undertakes complex advanced aerospace work and supports Boeing’s global engineering growth. Boeing’s wholly owned engineering and technology campus with future avionics manufacturing and assembly capability is coming up in Bengaluru.
The question still remains - Was the malfunctioning of 737Max flight control software developed in India? If yes, was the development in charge from the US? If no, why is there a repeated insinuation of liability towards India?
> No, the malfunctioning 737-MAX flight control software was NOT developed in India. The Boeing apologists on reddit have been making up those claims for months.
I think you are using the word "apologist" backwards.
An apologist is someone who defends something, so a Boeing apologist is a Boeing defender.
I think the “apologists” on Reddit are trying to defend Boeing by shifting blame away from the company and to whoever they claim actually wrote the software.
And here one might have hoped that the bean counters at Boeing had learned from the various disasters of the last years.
Especially "amazing": even if every one of these pilots earns a million dollars a year and the "contractors" half of that, they'd still only save about 3.5 million dollars a year. Just... what the fuck? On the scale of Boeing, that's a drop in the bucket.
Because that's how the incentives align. The goal is to cut costs, the cost of outsourced training pilots + the margin of the outsourced contractor will need to be lower than the cost of in-house training pilots.
Also because that's how pretty much all of outsourcing goes, it doesn't take a seer to realise that what's happened essentially every time is going to happen again. Even less so considering Boeing's recent history of cutting costs at the expense of safety and reliability.
You've just explained that the costs will be lower, not that the quality will be lower. It's possible costs will be lower due to better efficiency and hiring in different markets, not due to worse pilots.
Hiring me in the UK is cheaper than hiring someone else in Silicon Valley. I don't think that necessarily means I'm any worse a programmer, does it?
> You've just explained that the costs will be lower, not that the quality will be lower.
I've explained that there are no incentives for the quality being the same, only for costs to be lower. Which has essentially always resulted in quality dropping. Including in Boeing's own recent history.
> It's possible costs will be lower due to better efficiency and hiring in different markets, not due to worse pilots.
It's also possible that you start shooting solid gold out your ass.
> Hiring me in the UK is cheaper than hiring someone else in Silicon Valley. I don't think that necessarily means I'm any worse a programmer, does it?
If the goal is solely to hire a cheaper developer, it's not you they'll be going to.
Do you think there's never any inefficiency in a system? It's possible they could lower cost but keep the same quality. There's an incentive to do that.
If you’re saying that Boeing currently incentivizes quality over cost, what evidence are you basing that on? There are lots of news articles on the development of the 787 and 737MAX showing Boeing only too willing to compromise on quality.
If you’re just speculating that it’s technically still possible, then how is that valuable discussion? As OP said, it’s also technically possible to crap gold. So what?
It’s not that you’re a worse programmer but rather that if I hire a contracting firm that employs you and a dozen programmers worse than you, that you’re the one on the initial sales and scoping calls, then if I’ve thought to ask, you’re assigned to my project for a few weeks until you are pulled off (to the next sales engagement requiring someone actually competent) and a less competent programmer from the bench is free to take your seat. Then, when the project starts falling behind, another is added on T&M basis because some scope changed somewhere no doubt...
The firm has every incentive to do this (including hiring cheap programmers who would have difficulty remaining employed directly on their abilities) and I’ve seen this happen more than rarely. There are good and terrible programmers everywhere in the world, yet I can’t ever recall the “new programmer on your account” being excellent; I don’t think that’s by chance.
The “outsourcing” of critical functions concerns me way more than the “off-shoring” does.
Boeing seems to have a knack for picking less-than-competent overseas contractors, as evidenced by their many failures shown in recent years.
Whether or not this new outsourcing will go the same way is unknown. But based upon their demonstrated results from the last decade... it's not hopeful.
Is this a relevant problem when the contractor in this case is based on the Isle of Mann? Do you think the US has some kind of monopoly on competent pilots?
How's it relevant that the company is a "contract house incorporated in the Isle of Mann" when its "ownership structure is a company within a nest of shell companies"? You think that island of 50km on the long side hosts this world class pilot training center?
When handing over the responsibility of training pilots to some entity inside another entity, like layers of an onion, it means you outsourced it into a black hole of regulation and competence. That structure is made to specifically obscure what these "cost saving" measures actually imply.
When we're talking about this kind of critical activities you want them happening somewhere where you can actually hold people accountable. Somewhere with visibility, transparency, and working judicial and legislature.
> Somewhere with a working judicial and legislature.
And where would that be?
If the USA's (or wherever) justice system can be bamboozled by off shoring liability, that's indicative the system is broken and / or the necessary treaties are intentionally absent / weak.
No one is getting trained on the Isle of Man, that’s just the company’s domicile. customers are still getting trained at the same locations under Boeing supervision.
As much as I hate to draw attention to the man's article because on the one hand I really do think as a commentary on what the real cause of the 737 MAX incident was I think it's totally off the mark; but the article does highlight some cultural problems that exist in other parts of the world that could lead a reasonable reader to the conclusion that outsourcing is fraught given there's a chance of propagating bad habits abroad.
I emphasize I only offer it as a source of examples of bad airmanship recognized abroad. I still patently reject his conclusions of ultimate fault for the 737 MAX crashes.
Given the choice between having the internal Boeing trainers mentioned in the article, or potentially delegating it to a contracted pilot with said deficient airmanship, without the context I personally have into the industry from extensive hobbyist research, I couldn't fault someone for being wary. Especially given experiences with outsourcing in other verticals.
It's just not a move that makes sense in the current business world either unless I'm woefully out of date. Training pilots on proper aircraft operating technique should be part of Boeing's core competency. Since you really can't separate a highly technical product like an airliner from the dissemination of the skills and knowledge to use it.
To be frank I think Boeing management is trying to pilot the company into a smoking crater. If I had voting rights capable of moving anything, I'd be looking at votes of no confidence across the management echelon.
If you want rock solid proof that the company they are outsourcing to sucks and quality is going to drop, you aren't going to find it because that's the entire point of this move.
But ask yourself how many times quality has gone up after outsourcing critical operations to a group of shell companies based in a low regulation polity.
Also ask yourself why a safety and reputation critical company seems to have a corporate structure indistinguishable from one used to dodge legal liability in tax evasion cases.
How many leading aerospace companies do you think are based out of the Isle of Man? It does not even have a major airport.
Most of those 150 held previously valid licenses; they were just holding out on taking the new style certification exam (which they do deserve stick for)
Doesn't make this a great move, I still question it, but the original article didn't include any response from Boeing, and they are claiming something quite different.
[1] https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2020-0...