To me it says their lawyers don’t trust Boeing enough. My cynical side says companies never give a shit what their customers think in an industry like aviation where they have so few or no other real options.
I think we should nationalized Boeing, fix it and re-ipo it. Not because I think government can do better at operating at a profit, but because it would be a sick burn: your company was so poorly managed, it had to be taken over by the feds because an airplane version of Amtrak is a better alternative to letting the you clowns continue to manufacture aircraft.
Strongly agree, I just don't believe there is the political will to do it at this, so we're left with capital market and corporate leverage mechanisms to encourage a positive outcome.
Much easier to get everyone in a room and say, "We're going to starve Boeing of revenue until it walks into Chapter 11, at which point we'll be ready to recapitalize and install new folks." Absolutely not my preferred thoughts on fixing a rotting enterprise, but you go to work with the tools you have.
I just don't see how this can happen unless you have global consensus. They are booked until what the next 8 years? Whats to stop non-american airlines desperate for slots on the new aircraft from snapping up those slots?
The risk is that this simply makes their culture problems worse. Governments aren't famous for turning around failing private companies.
And then there's, y'know, the whole DEI angle. Being acquired by the US Government isn't going to make them more likely to promote white male engineers to sort things out.
You're using facts in an emotional argument. When the phrase "doesn't feel" is used, logic goes out the window. Have you not ever had an argument with a significant other?
Commercial aviation is about 10X safer than driving per mile. That is a valid comparison if you need to cover a distance and have a choice of driving or flying. You should also add an amount of risk for driving to the airport. Flying is clearly safer than driving for long distances.
It is less clear if the choice is driving to a beach two hours away or flying to a different beach two hours away by air.
I think that -people- care for customer well-being.. but that it's barely cynical to say that a board of a publicly traded company only cares about it insofar as it effects shareholder returns.. and with proper market positioning, customer well-being is barely necessary..
The board orders subordinates to be safe and cheap. When safety fails to materialize without throwing money at the problem they pretend it's not their fault. What's missing is not care, but commitment. Care without commitment is wishful thinking and I'm sure there's plenty of that.
If an airline is shown to take risks with its passengers' safety, that airline is dead, so here I would expect shareholder returns to do the job very effectively.
And in calculating that tradeoff I would expect them to weight passenger safety very, very highly, unless they want to go out of business (and possibly be liable for corporate manslaughter and go to jail?)
If Boeing really cared about their customers, they would tighten the bolts on outgoing planes to make sure that they wouldn't lose doors and windows and stuff. Maybe Alaska does really care, but I must confess my first thought was also "cagey PR move."
I've seen many products and services clearly making their products worse in order to make more money. Airlines have done similar things with passenger space and various fees, it's not so hard to imagine them cutting corners only to be surprised that they've gone too far and inadvertently impacted airplane safety.
Sure they care about customer wellbeing but isn't making money higher on their list of priorities?
It’s too reductive to talk about what “Boeing” thinks and does as if it’s one single entity with a single purpose and complete alignment on all things. The person(s) who failed to tighten bolts could easily have been doing exactly the right thing, for instance if training and documentation were screwed up.
Boeing in general seems to have a serious culture problem that we should condemn, but it’s not like the “they” that set cultural norms is the same “they” that’s out there on a supplier’s factory floor with a torque wrench.
Being reductive can be a good rhetorical tool, but in this case I think it’s better to view the problem as culture and system rather than a single personality with ill intent.
yeah that's my attitude during working hours. maybe a person cares, but a corporation can't. i expect a corporation cares about making money, and to some extent that correlates with not killing me, but who knows.
A corporation is a legal fiction. It doesn't actually do anything, it doesn't make decisions. The people who work for the corporation do. Liability should not stop with the corporation but with the actual human beings making the decisions.
You are not exhibiting nonlinear-systems thinking. A corporation is not purely hierarchical. Effects are very diffuse from decisions. Humans don't control things; humans interact with things.
You are blaming the wrong party. They’ve gotten that perspective from experience not thought vacuum. There are many industries, commercial airlines included that do not have competitive capitalist environments. There are typically 3-5 big players, typically heavily in bed with the gov whose incentives aren’t aligned. Telco, domestic automakers, insurance come to mind initially.
There is also a corporate greed, which is leaking into tech with commoditization, problem in America where fewer and fewer companies treat their employees as assets and rather treat them as cogs. People are loosing their tolerance.
> There are typically 3-5 big players, typically heavily in bed with the gov whose incentives aren’t aligned.
Things are just as bad in big tech. Ever tried to get support from Google? Many modern companies cut customer support to the bare minimum.
Then there's stuff like the 23andMe saga (also on the front page of HN right now), where the company actively blames their customers for their fuck up.
Yep. Heck I am a part of the tech industry and have pretty much lost all trust in the tech industry. It's hard to see and experience widespread misbehavior without beginning to expect it.
The airlines are one of the few industries where almost everyone comparison shops for each and every purchase. The list of airline bankruptcies is very very long as are the new entrants.
Sure if you fly to some very small destinations you will have very limited choices, but almost definitionally that's a small fraction of the total trips.
which works on a fundamentally different model from other airlines (limited network, fewer flights per week.) It is getting harder and harder to see the difference between traditional airliners like Delta and "low cost" airlines like Southwest.
People do compare prices on competitive routes. Airlines, in the US at least, try pretty hard not to compete on quality and the mediocrity of the 737 is part of that. Every other commercial airliner built today has a modern fly by wire system which can accomplish what MCAS was supposed to do in a safe way. The 737 is noisy for its size
not just in the passenger cabin and on the ground but particularly in the cockpit (years back I wrote a comment on an av blog about the noisy 737 and pilots joined in.) The 737 struggles to take off under good conditions and has to be grounded under conditions that other airliners handle easily. The 737 also lacks the anti-turbulence feature of the A320 which uses the fly-by-wire system to smooth out the ride.
People are so used to the dismal 737 and only somewhat better A320 that they have a hard time believing that modern airliners like
can be much smaller but much more comfortable than the 737 but people who fly it become believers, the more people who get to experience them the more people will demand them. They cost less to operate too and being a little smaller could support a more efficient network just as 2-engine widebodies replaced 4-engine widebodies.
That is what the feet message and communicate. If they say we do a deathmarch on this project, that is what your managers polished shoes tell the world.
True. The reality I think is that many of those who do believe that they care just don't actually care as much as they'd have to for a positive effect. Delusion is a strong force.
While I think it is commonplace to assume that, it's just an assumption and I feel HN would be better if we just stuck to known facts and marked hearsay as hearsay.
Probably projection. Maybe also motivated by office jobs having tons of people freeloading and genuinely not giving a fuck, which just doesn't work in labor jobs.
