IMHO, two things keep Boeing running afloat: 1) the Airbus production queue is already full for upcoming years, and 2) their military connections and strong lobbying within US airline companies. If there were more competitors in the US, Boeing would have been out of business years ago.
United is openly fishing for a discount from Airbus by saying they will switch if they receive an offer where the economics work. But for Airbus there isn't really an incentive to hurt Boeing by offering a large discount. They are better off maximising their own revenue and letting Boeing be Boeing.
Allegedly (from just random messages across different message boards) Airbus is likely nearing their backlogs to a point in time when they plan an A320 successor. Of course, they can still build the current A320 family but their production capacity for it will be decreasing steadily in the future. So they might not need a hell of a lot more orders.
But they do want more companies in their team when the successor comes.
I for one would question if a company will stop making a incredibly successful product. Their dreams of a A320/A321 successor will likely not be ready as soon as they think. They are increasing production and will continue to try.
At the same time they will stretch A220, then they can hopefully move production from A320 to A321.
I've been reading about them for years. Rolls-Royce was going to make the engine (the most important and innovative part of the plane), they dropped out in 2022, and then they said they are going to make their own engine. That update you posted is from 2022. Latest update they've posted is from June 2023[0], and they only mention some contractors and that the engine doesn't exist yet. I think the whole thing is vaporware, they'll never make a single flight.
wow. It's probably a mistake to try to build your own engine. They are so complex and building on top of decades of engineering seems to be the right move. Tesla was barely able to do it and building an electric drivetrain is a lot simpler than a supersonic capable jet engine...
What I've read is that no established manufacturer was interested in developing a non-military supersonic engine, probably because they don't expect to recoup the costs.
I want them to compete, but the reality is that no-one has made an economically viable SST despite half a century of trying. If there's anything that modern air travel proves it is that the price of the ticket far outweighs ANY other factor, and SSTs. are not capable of being cheaper than subsonic transport. At least not with our current paradigm of energy/fuel being a major cost of flying.
I wouldn't hold your breath. The XB-1 prototype was supposed to fly in 2019 and still hasn't:
>At the June 2019 Paris Air Show, Blake Scholl announced the date for first flight was pushed out to 2020, six months later than previously planned...
>Medium-speed taxi testing was performed in November 2023, with the aircraft reaching a top speed of 94 knots.[22] Following testing, in January 2024 Boom delayed the first test flight to early 2024 to implement safety improvements (wikipedia)
And that's just the single seat prototype. Once they've flight tested that they have to do the full design and prototype testing for the passanger model.
COMAC is already eyeing 10% of Boeing/Airbus' lunch and they've been working on it for years with state-level "help" that resulted in espionage arrests/convictions. Airplanes are extremely complicated.
>Is it a good time to pitch an aircraft manufacturing startup at Y Combinator?
The exit plan for all aviation startups in the US is to sell out to Boeing or Lockheed (preferably with an acquihire), or be folded into their supply chain. Zero exceptions.
> probably easier to ask Elon to start building airplanes
I’m not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but I had the same thought. I can’t imagine that building an airplane is more complicated than self-landing rockets. He could integrate them with Starlink too so customers on the flight had actual wifi that works.
The reusable, self landing rocket is certainly more complicated in some ways. But airplanes, and their engines are probably more complicated in other ways. SpaceX’s rocket engines are an engineering marvel. But they only need to run for minutes at a time. Aircraft engines can run for hours at a time, and for 10s of thousands of hours before a major overhaul is needed.
It’s a different kind of complexity.
On the starlink side, customers will get that anyways. The existing plane operators will start using it for their internet.
The government should go the EU way. Build the tracks but lease out the actual operations to private companies that can bid for track and station time.
For example, I suspect if Amtrak was forced to compete with private firms for track time in the NorthEast corridor you’d see an explosion of service and a dramatic drop in prices.
I suspect flights like Boston-NYC and DC-NYC would reduce dramatically.
And maybe even more importantly there would be greater lobbying efforts from private firms to upgrade the tracks and improve the routes.
Currently it’s very difficult for Amtrak to push for that because it’s quasi public nature means there is limited profit incentive and no opportunity to raise capital from the private sector.
That would change if at least a couple of private firms could get going in the NorthEast corridor.
No. The only way Europe is doing it that way is because all the national train companies exist and are simply not going away politically. So now they make it somewhat easier to operate train in the other countries.
For the US, it makes sense to have a single main carrier for much of the core system.
> For example, I suspect if Amtrak was forced to compete with private firms for track time in the NorthEast corridor you’d see an explosion of service and a dramatic drop in prices.
That is most probably wrong. Train operations cost once all the infrastructure is paid for is really not that different government vs private. There is simply not that much to compete on.
In fact some of the things that can be improved most, like ticketing and scheduling can be improve more for the costumer if there are less options.
Europe has seen very little actual private companies that compete very well and make a significant difference. There are a few things you can differentiate on. Some budget trains just use shit old rolling stock for example. Just finding creative ways of paying people less.
The reality is, most of the cost is in setting up infrastructure including signaling, maintaining that, then buying nice trains and training good people.
Some private train companies have gotten some investment to buy some nice train sets, but nothing about that is all that amazing. If the government operator had the funds, they could do the same and run the same route.
The reality is that competition on fixed rail infrastructure might be worth doing but its not some magical cost cutting tool.
Politicians who want to offer their constituents good train service should the the ones lobbying. The reality is, if you have private rail companies, they will mostly lobby for ways to reduce work pay because that where they can compete against Amtrak.
My understanding is that the big difference between the US and the EU is that in the US rail prioritises cargo over passengers. Amtrak is already competing against a lots of other companies for track time, it's just that those companies are moving cargo rather than people, since that is apparently where the money is.
Government will keep BDS alive, in any case, and probably some part of BGS. I would not be surprised to see a Boeing breakup, a la GE. Keep a very watchful eye on whoever might scoop up BCA in such an event. I suspect Comac might try for it, but with a third party so as to not rouse the natives - maybe Embraer but with Chinese money.
More likely private capital, though, or some Hyperillionaire from Seatopia.
While running through the Spreewald, my troops also enjoy oral readings of such classics as "Libertarian Aryan Rocketmen will Save the West from the Red Horde".
From what I gather, the C919 in its current form is not a real threat to Airbus and Boeing - its fuel economy is in line with the previous generation of 737 and A320, and it's not really cheaper to buy either. If you look at the orders for the C919, they're mostly from China or from companies with strong ties to China ("GallopAir is a start-up airline in Brunei owned by Chinese businessman Yang Qiang")...
Boeing's not going anywhere as long as the US exists. It is the state monopoly on civil aviation. However, allowing these rogue MBAs to run amok with it over the last 20 years has been an absolute disgrace. Any sane, democratic, society that had not been beaten into the dust by regulatory capture and corporate lobbying would have cleaned house on them and sent people to jail after they killed hundreds of people through pure greed. It's a pathetic state we're in now to realize that it's probably going to take another 200+ dead Americans on a domestic scheduled flight before anything even remotely material happens about it.
Serious question: Is it remotely possible for Lockheed Martin to start making passenger jets? They’ve won every 5th gen fighter and bomber contract over Boeing.
Very hard to break into the boeing/airbus duopoly. All the supporting infrastructure: maintenance engineers, parts, pilot training, etc... is all heavily invested in those two. An airline would have to make a substantial investment to transition off, and their margins are already pretty thin. Not to mention most of them have large backlogs of orders for planes that haven't even been built yet. As a manufacturer would need to heavily subsidize the transition in order to make it work. Would take a tremendous amount of capital and many years to pull it off. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
> boeing is needed for national sovereignty concerns. Same reasons all other countries have flagship carriers.
Is there a connection between flag carrier airlines and aircraft manufacturing? That never occurred to me, since most flag carriers fly Boeing and Airbus like everybody else.
But I guess for larger states, like Aeroflot / Air China, they probably subsidize the local manufacturers?
In any case, I'm inclined to push back against your assertion that this is the "same reasons [sic] all other countires" have them - I don't think very many flag carriers are supported because of manufacturing concerns, or that the relationship is similar to the US State's relationship to Boeing. That seems like a stretch to me.
> Not about the article, but... I find it ironic that a pop-up with the title "We value your privacy" makes me accept 1532 partners to sell my data to.
Par for the course. I read the other day that a major automakers infotainment system will assure you your driving data will not be shared with third parties without your consent...on the screen where you agree to the off-screen legalese that includes a consent allow them to share your driving data with third parties.
> General Motors is not the only automaker sharing driving behavior. Kia, Subaru and Mitsubishi also contribute to the LexisNexis “Telematics Exchange,” a “portal for sharing consumer-approved connected car data with insurers.” As of 2022, the exchange, according to a LexisNexis news release, has “real-world driving behavior” collected “from over 10 million vehicles.”
> Verisk also claims to have access to data from millions of vehicles and partnerships with major automakers, including Ford, Honda and Hyundai.
> ...
> The other automakers all have optional driver-coaching features in their apps — Kia, Mitsubishi and Hyundai have “Driving Score,” while Honda and Acura have “Driver Feedback” — that, when turned on, collect information about people’s mileage, speed, braking and acceleration that is then shared with LexisNexis or Verisk, the companies said in response to questions from The New York Times.
> But that would not be evident or obvious to drivers using these features. In fact, before a Honda owner activates Driver Feedback, a screen titled “Respect for your Privacy” assures drivers that “your data will never be shared without your consent.” But it is shared — with Verisk, a fact disclosed in a more than 2,000-word “terms and conditions” screen that a driver needs to click “accept” on. (Honda does mention Verisk in an FAQ on its website and Kia highlights its relationship with LexisNexis Risk Solutions on its website. A Kia spokesman said LexisNexis can’t share driving score data of Kia participants with insurers without additional consent.)
Boeing's problems could be solved if they cleared all of the McDonnell Douglas accountants and MBAs from upper management and went back to being a company run by engineers who created fantastic aircraft designed by engineers (not focus groups) and on schedules set by the engineers. Sadly it might be too late for that.
The merger happened 30 years ago, and in fact some of Boeing's best and most successful years as a company were well after that. All the executives and "accountants and MBAs" behind it have long retired. It's time for people to stop blaming the McDonnell Douglas boogeyman and accept the fact that Boeing has simply been going down in management, quality, QA, accountability and more for many years now.
For example downsizing their Washington manufacturing facilities and outsourcing critical R&D to cheaper countries didn't come from McDonnell Douglas.
> in fact some of Boeing's best and most successful years as a company were well after that.
That's logical, isn't it? If your claim is that the company cut the long-term philosophy and squeezed short-term benefits, the most profitable time for the company is logically going to be the time where benefits go up while long-term investments are no longer made.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, just that your rebuttal isn't going to convince someone thinking like that.
MBA thinking is exactly about squeezing profits by cutting expenses. You can completely gut a company's future by doing so, while having multiple years of profits guaranteed by backlog orders.
There's some kind of inertia, were bad and good decisions take some time to have their effects felt.
Likewise, due to the same inertia, unless something dramatic happens, the current administration of a company is downstream the culture of previous administrations, as the people at the helm in the present were promoted, hired mostly based on the criteria of the the last past dramatical cultural change, that was the managerial takeover by the MD bureaucrats post-merge.
And how long did it take Jack Welch to bleed GE dry? Decades. With companies this size, it doesn't happen overnight. There is a LOT built up before you that you have to systematically destroy.
A lot of folks don't realize that MBAification of companies does not have an immediate feedback loop. The entire point is that in the short term it does super well, with the costs being realized in the long term.
Boeing's timeline of failure actually matches the trajectory of other MBAified companies.
And it’s not necessarily the fault of the specific person in that position but rather those who set the priorities of what that position needs to accomplish - the Board of Directors. The MBA in itself didn’t cause the failures. I don’t fault an engineer going through the hoops to check the MBA box in order to be a viable candidate for that position. I almost did the same a few years ago to do the same. My motivation wasn’t money or ego though it was because I imagined I could make a difference in our organization if I had a better hold of the reigns. I ended up not doing it and decided it was just time to move on instead. In the end it was me being a bit selfish and my motivation was simply quality of life for myself and family.
A lot of people on this forum just use the MBA as a dirty four letter word (minus one letter) without understanding what it is or what it means.
There’s no such thing as being “MBAified.” An MBA is a generalist degree that contains the bare minimum information you need to operate a corporation.
You know how in undergraduate computer engineering you learn many different subjects like power systems, microcontroller programming, computer programming, transistors, basic processor design, digital/analog circuit design? And how nobody is going to use all those subjects in the real world? That’s exactly what an MBA is like: it’s got subjects like corporate finance, organizational behavior, information systems management, marketing, etc. Just about nobody with an MBA is going to use ever single one of those subjects on a daily basis.
Nobody else is being judged by their degree. It’s ridiculous, and kind of disgusting that people act like learning the set of knowledge contained in an MBA makes you a worse manager. Armchair engineers seem to think they could run a multi-billion dollar aircraft manufacturer using avionics engineering skills alone without understanding the concepts you learn in an MBA like inventory turnover, cash flow, global operations, or how to design the organizational structure of a company with tens of thousands of employees. In what way does an engineering degree prepare you to do that job?
Imagine if you were a nurse and you got told that you were a worse nurse because you got a nursing degree. That’s what the engineer-types who dunk on MBAs are doing.
Of course nobody is blaming literal MBAs. We are blaming this kind of managerial culture best symbolized by Harvard Business School and MBA programs.
The whole idea that no matter what a company does, a generic degree holder, with an education heavily centered on accounting and finance can be the ultimate decision maker without taking into input any other aspect behind financials and accounting.
Most business type have this misguided idea that we engineers don't value business and financial knowledge. We do, what we question is the hubris of business people that seem to believe that domain knowledge is not important, and that managing a soft-drink manufacturer is the same as manufacturing a tech company. It is not.
The problem with your analogy, is that no nurse are being taught on nursing programs that all that matters is what they learn on their programs. If this happened, yes, nurses would be worse nurses by having those degrees.
But everything you said assumes the MBA and culture is a certain way. My classes quite often emphasized case studies where long term thinking, innovation, and quality were key to success: examples like Costco and the Toyota Production System were in my materials published by Harvard Business Publishing. The way that Trader Joe’s gives store employees the freedom to respond to local tastes was another case study I read about.
My courses emphasized gathering feedback from employees and empowering them to make decisions. We learned about multiple different ways to compete which were very often not based on “cost cutting.”
Honestly, I think this discussion won't go anywhere because you've taken this personally due to the time you've spent on getting your MBA.
MBA also can't really be compared to Nursing, or really most other degrees. Nursing is a real thing, that can have completely quantified measurement on success.
MBA is...not. In some capacity MBAs are a self-fulfilling role, where the existence of the degree and the artificial rarity associated with the "big schools" around it, create a necessity for more MBAs in the future.
The impact of MBAs can't really be quantified either. First, we don't know what firms are working with what employers sometimes until decades later due to the various NDAs and secrecy around them. Sometimes going as far as the firms taking on obvious conflict of interests, but being able to keep them hidden (e.g. taking on the FDA, and addictive drug manufacturers at the same time.) Second, due to how these firms operate, and the impact of short term vs long term thinking - the negative results of MBAified management strategies do not come across for years. And when the negative results do happen, the blame is either pointed at ${politicians}, ${immigrants}, or ${economy}. When was the last time a firm took responsibility for destroying a company? Even if you think MBAs don't actually destroy companies all the time, by just nature of it being an intervention it's bound to happen at least __once__ right? When has a firm taken responsibility for this happening?
And this is again, one of the differences MBAs have with nursing. Nurses do absolutely from time to time make the situation worse for patients. But responsibility is given and understood.
If you'd like to discuss we can. It seems like you don't really want to learn anything about what an MBA or a person who has one is like and have some preconceived negative feelings about them, but if you're willing to listen I can tell you.
I'd probably start by saying that not all people with MBAs are in the executive leadership team, CEOs, board members, etc. They're not all "the fat cats in charge." In fact, most aren't. You have people like business and financial analysts, salespeople, and people managers with those degrees. For example, a couple of my classes involved learning about effective people management, the kind of thing that would benefit an engineering manager.
> MBA also can't really be compared to Nursing, or really most other degrees.
How so? It's got classes, tests, math, writing, reading, analyzing. It sure felt like a degree to me when I was writing papers, citing sources, putting formulas in spreadsheets, etc.
> In some capacity MBAs are a self-fulfilling role, where the existence of the degree and the artificial rarity associated with the "big schools" around it, create a necessity for more MBAs in the future.
I would ask how is this different than any other job that asks for the candidate to have a degree or a presigious degree? Do I need an engineering degree to write code? Technically, no. For an MBA there really isn't any scarcity unless you are looking for an extremely prestigious job that wants a prestigious degree program, which is the the exact same thing that engineering firms hiring MIT graduates do. It's way easier to find accreddited online MBA programs than it is to find online accredited engineering programs, especially for engineering programs that require in-person lab work.
> First, we don't know what firms are working with what employers sometimes until decades later due to the various NDAs and secrecy around them.
This is quite literally untrue in the context of public companies that have mandatory disclosures like the 10-K. Also, you know how Hacker News has a bunch of articles about the goings-on of businesses on the front page every day? Yeah, those are articles that can be used as information for analysis. I cited TechCrunch a decent number of times during my time as a student. How do you think business leaders analyze their competition? They don't just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and say "I don't know what my competitor is doing, they won't tell me, it's behind an NDA!" No, they gather information about their industry to benchmark just like you and I do.
And sure, the case studies we used in class were sometimes 10 years old but that didn't make them worthless, and quite often they were much newer than that. Some car companies could still learn a thing or two from the Toyota Production System from the 1980s.
Now, let's talk about your last two paragraphs. You are essentially saying that business leaders never take blame for anything, and that everyone else takes responsibility and blame. But that's really not true either: business leaders are more frequently compensated with performance incentives and company stock compared to engineers, nurses, etc. That means that poor long-term company performance will lower their pay.
Sure, there are cases where executives abuse these compensation schemes, but overall those compensation schemes are there to make sure the executive leadership makes the kind of decisions that grow the company and make its shares more valuable.
> When was the last time a firm took responsibility for destroying a company?
When was the last time an engineer took responsibility for destroying a company? Or a nurse or doctor took responsibility for destroying a medical practice? How many doctors are out there agreeing that they engaged malpractice when they get sued? It's kind of a ridiculous question, isn't it? Who is raising their hand and saying "blame me” as a generality? I don't know a lot of general humans like that who volunteer to be fired, be thrown in jail, or face fines.
> All the executives and "accountants and MBAs" behind it have long retired.
They have, but they have left the cultural infestation behind. You'd need a complete purge of Boeing's leadership, as well as a re-integration of Spirit Aerosystems.
If you did that this afternoon, Boeing would cease to operate. There are no candidates ready and able to step in. They have to be trained, they have to gain experience, etc.
I like this idea of geriatric McDonnel Douglas vice presidents being taken out of cryosleep every few months to make a terrible engineering decision then being put back in their cabinet.
Destroying a successful culture can happen slowly over time, but once it happens, there’s no recovery from it. That’s what seems to have happened with Boeing. The 777 was the last fully pre-merger aircraft. The 787 started right after the merger and mostly seems to have escaped the problems. But since then it’s been a shit show.
We may (justly) blame the problems of today on the culture change that the merger brought. But that gives us no way forward, and 27 years later, there's no way of un-scrambling the egg. To fix Boeing, we're going to have to start with the Boeing we have now.
There's no reason to complain about stock buy backs. Most profitable public companies should be returning a portion of those profits to shareholders through stock buy backs.
Only a company that is decrepit and unable to figure out how to invest in their own growth and improvement does buybacks. Actually investing is a far better for long term shareholdes. Once company uses buybacks accessibly, you know the management doesn't have it.
That is just completely wrong and displays ignorance of the basics of how capital markets work. Investors want to maximize their risk-adjusted rate of return. Even if a corporation still has some potential growth opportunities, investors may prefer to get their capital back so that they can invest in other more profitable ventures and they will exercise their votes accordingly.
And if you're certain that "management doesn't have it" and can convince enough other investors to provide funding then you can take over the entire company and run it as you see fit. Activist investors like Pershing Square Capital Management do this all the time, and despite some high profile failures on average they are very successful.
And there is fundamentally no major difference between paying dividends versus stock buybacks, just a matter of tax efficiency. It's sad to see people (who likely aren't even shareholders) complaining about buybacks without understanding that.
> That is just completely wrong and displays ignorance of the basics of how capital markets work. Investors want to maximize their risk-adjusted rate of return. Even if a corporation still has some potential growth opportunities, investors may prefer to get their capital back so that they can invest in other more profitable ventures and they will exercise their votes accordingly.
It's hilarious how you put these two sentences together completely ignoring the possibility of selling you shares on the open market if you "prefer to get your capital back". That's a real display of ignorance.
It's sad to see the level of aggressive ignorance on HN sometimes. Many investors prefer to have the capital returned through stock buybacks and/or dividends than sitting in a corporate treasury where it can potentially be squandered. The fact that investors can also sell their shares is irrelevant.
No they should not. Stock buybacks of such recklessness were not even legal until Reagan - for this exact reason. It's not good business when your stock is growing and your company is dying. In fact, it's just an accounting trick which is essentially vulture capitalism - but from the inside.
"The $11.8 billion Bed Bath & Beyond spent on its own stock since 2004 comes to more than twice the $5.2 billion in debt it had on its books in its most recent SEC filing, a debt load that proved crushing for the company. It left the company unable to buy the inventory required to create the sales it needed to reverse losses.
“The company’s stewardship of their capital failed,” said Declan Gargan, retail director and credit analyst who follows Bed Bath & Beyond for S&P Global Ratings."
Nonsense. If the shareholders prefer to take capital out instead of reinvesting in the business there's nothing wrong with that. And if businesses sometimes die as a consequence then so what. Individual businesses have no particular right to exist indefinitely.
The only reason that companies use stock buy backs instead of dividends to return capital to shareholders is double taxation. If Congress eliminated the double taxation then there would be little reason for stock buy backs.
Snarky complaints are cheap. What are you proposing exactly? Should people donate their capital to businesses and expect nothing in return? Should all businesses continue operating forever?
Again. This is why this used to be illegal. Why should the new shareholders have the right to destroy something others spent decades building? A successful company constantly provides sustainable returns, then a group comes in and says "that's enough, let's milk this cow until it dies. Thanks for doing the hard work! Also, to the shareholders that got screwed as the company stock crashes finally - too bad, play again".
When you own something that means you have the right to do pretty much whatever you want with it. That is the fundamental social contract with private property. If I want to buy a bunch of diamonds and smash them with a hammer then I can do that, regardless of whether you think it's a good idea.
Businesses fail for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they get too aggressive with the capital structure and blow up. This is a feature, not a bug. While the experience may be painful for some stakeholders in the short term, over the long term this creative destruction unlocks latent value and increases economic growth.
And if old shareholders want to prevent new shareholders from having the ability to destroy the company then that's easily accomplished. Just establish separate share classes with different voting rights. Many companies already do this.
- losing money year after year and amassing further debt and liabilities
- buying your own stock at market highs
they are just reckless.
At that point why don't just buy another's company stock instead of your insanely overvalued one. It's nonsense.
There's a reason why Buffett buys back Berkshire, but only if he finds the stock being undervalued. Otherwise it's not the best use of Berkshire money, it's just stupidity.
Please understand that buybacks are just one way to use money a company has and they are not always the best usage of money and they aren't even the best way to return money to shareholders (e.g. buying your own stock at market highs is a terrific way to burn equity as Meta has learned few years ago). It really can be nothing more than money burning.
There is no reliable way to determine whether a stock is overvalued or undervalued, so those are meaningless terms which apply only in hindsight. You are essentially claiming that Boards should be able to time the market, which is absurd and not actionable.
As for R&D and QA budgets, what is the correct amount? There is no reliable evidence that Boeing's recent troubles are caused by any particular spending amount on those line items. From the outside the problems seem to stem from culture and lack of discipline than from spending levels. But the reality is that all of us here are just guessing and don't know what's really going on.
And don't presume to condescendingly tell me what to understand. I understand stock buybacks perfectly well. In many cases they are the most tax efficient way to return capital to investors.
The CEO who stepped down during the MAX crashes held two engineering degrees (no MBA) and started as an engineer at Boeing well before the McDonnell Douglas merger [0].
He was CEO from 2015 onwards. The MAX' first flight was 2016. It's safe to say that Dennis didn't have a say in greenlighting the MAX program, unless he was such an impactful CEO that he could greenlight MAX and get the plane built in a year, in which — well, good job? It turns out that during the max program, Dennis was managing Boeing's security division.
Pointing to Dennis as a failure of an "engineering CEO" because of the MAX incident isn't accurate.
For the MCAS problems I'm far less interested in when the plane was developed than I am in when the decision was made to not properly train pilots on the MCAS system.
According to the Seattle Times [0], it was in 2016 that MCAS was made more powerful and it was determined that a 10-second reaction time would be required to avoid catastrophe. In that year, in spite of the fact that they changed MCAS, they did not submit the new hazard assessment documents to the FAA. That article also seems to indicate that it was after 2016 that they scrubbed all references to MCAS from the manual.
I hear you, and there's relatively little literature on what making MCAS more powerful means.
You might assume that this was after the first test flight (also 2016), and that the lead engineer on the system decided to increase the lift MCAS applies after a real-world test. Would they run that by the CEO? Surely not. Was the MCAS system already approved before Dennis? Yea. Would Dennis take a massive risk by cancelling a 6 year project as he became CEO? Definitely. He's between a rock and a hard place. I can't see that he's at fault.
The people who are at fault are the ones who green lit. IIRC, that was an MBA CEO, obviously in tandem with an engineering team who came up with the idea.
> Would Dennis take a massive risk by cancelling a 6 year project as he became CEO? Definitely. He's between a rock and a hard place. I can't see that he's at fault.
You're inventing a false dichotomy here. The problem with MCAS was not that it was approved at all, the problem was that it was scrubbed from the documentation and that the company decided to not train pilots on it. The 10 second reaction time would be plenty if the pilots had a mental model for what the hell was happening, but they didn't because Boeing decided to skip training on it and pretend that flying the Max 8 was the same as flying any of the older models.
Muilenburg was in the driver's seat during the interval between first test flight and FAA approval. He was in the driver's seat when the first plane was delivered. He was in the driver's seat when the first crash happened. He was in the driver's seat when the second crash happened. We can speculate about whether or not he was looped in on any one of the decisions that led here, but it was ultimately his responsbility to be looped in where needed and to set expectations for how Boeing was run.
I get that there's a strong desire among engineers on HN to believe that "our people" wouldn't let things like this happen, but you're going to great speculative lengths to place the blame on MBAs when the simpler answer is that an engineer as CEO actually did allow this to happen and then, when pressed, repeatedly refused to acknowledge that Boeing screwed up [0].
To be clear, I'm not saying this to vilify Muilenburg, I'm simply saying that the narrative that this is a question of McDonnell Douglas MBAs vs old-school Boeing engineers is wrong. The system is much more complicated than that, and people who place the blame on MBAs are projecting their own career frustrations, not rationally analyzing the facts.
Yeah, it looks like his career at Boeing prior to being President and CEO was entirely on the defense side of things, although it's worth noting he became President in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
> Muilenburg held numerous management and engineering positions on various Boeing programs, including the X-32 (Boeing's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter competition); Boeing's participation in the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter; the YAL-1 747 Airborne Laser; the High Speed Civil Transport; and the Condor unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. He was later vice president of the Boeing combat systems division and program manager for the Army Future Combat Systems program.[10] Muilenburg was president and chief executive officer of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, later renamed Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS), from September 2009 to 2015.
> In December 2013, Muilenburg became the president of Boeing.
If a Private Equity group decided to buy them out and restructure, it would make a fascinating case study. If some radical restructuring does happen, I hope they bring along a film crew to make a documentary in the process.
Not advocating. Very few companies can be overhauled in a significant way while remaining public. Boeing is a strategically important company from an economic and military perspective, so I have to imagine it will be treated as a special case.
> If a Private Equity group decided to buy them out and restructure, it would make a fascinating case study.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but my impression is private equity makes the same kind of detrimental changes that Boeing has already been making. IIRC, they're known for cost cutting and cashing out goodwill, not making expensive culture changes to pursue engineering excellence.
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
The examples of IBM and Xerox were truly dominant in their day.
I'm not going to get into the definition of "monopoly" here. But there's a reason for the "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" quote, and there's a reason that "Xerox" is/was basically synonymous with "photocopy". No one calls an Android device an "iPhone".
Apple captures basically 100% of the market excitement and profit, but not sales or penetration. Apple is not dominant anywhere near what IBM and Xerox were.
So, for me this fails the test of ~"sales and marketing running the company and not bringing forward great new products". Apple is still delivering.
Apple is not all things to all people -- but no one is without choice. I think Apple, and Apple customers, are happy with Apple.
People so eager to defend Apple from "monopoly" that they completely ignore the point, which is equally valid when you are not a monopoly but have a extremely sturdy market penetration.
Not sure I buy that. They're one of only two options in operating system but one of many in hardware models. They're much less able to win regulatory capture being a far less regulated industry and in a consumer market.
Pray tell, what are my options in hardware if I want a laptop with a good (Apple-level) touchpad, battery life, screen and performance?
You could argue I'm just saying they're high quality, which may be true, but the software has been degrading and I have no options if I value openness _and_ quality.
How is being the only good company making laptops a monopoly? Seems like you recognized that point in your second paragraph but bears repeating how ridiculous of a comparison to Boeing that is
I don't give a shit about touchpads. Apple for the majority of its history didn't have superior performance and even today they have some product that are under-powered in regards to ram.
I can flip it and mention features that Apple products don't have that I like.
But this isn't actually an argument for monopoly. That just an argument that you like a company more then the other.
In the "gigantic moats with minimal connection to product quality" sense. The app store and rich messaging have clear two-sided-market dynamics and they own a bunch of customer photo albums too.
Anticompetitive market structure is bad for consumers loooong before it results in an actual literal "only one company in a broadly defined niche" monopoly.
What's your point? During the recent troubles at Boeing, very few of their top executives came from sales and marketing backgrounds. The commercial airliner business is completely unlike the consumer electronics or office automation businesses. Airliner customers are a lot more sophisticated and care deeply about product quality issues which impact their own businesses.
Friendly reminder that Boeing has recently had a series (EDIT: one, also terrible) of engineers as CEOs. The MBA trope is a noughties-era Silicon Valley meme.
Right, undergraduate physicist (Stonecipher), MBA (McNerney), engineer (Mullenberg) and now an accountant (Calhoun). Jack Welch, similarly, was a chemical engineer. (I was counting Stonecipher in my series, but you’re right.)
Plenty have looked for the connection. It hasn’t surfaced. The problem is short-term incentives, a lack of a principled culture and corruption. We each like to think our in group is immune from those forces, and some certainly are more than others, but none in totality.
The Mad Dog nickname came not only from its MD initials but also because it took off like a rocket and makes a hell of a lot of noise. Unlike later automated planes, the Mad Dog also needs full hands-on attention from the pilot during takeoff and landing. (i.e. doesn't kill you with MCAS)
The article doesn't say they're switching to Max 9 because they care about safety or quality.
It says they're switching because Max 10 isn't certified (and probably won't be any time soon, considering recent events). I read that as they would happily get it but they worry the FAA won't allow it.
They're happy to order the Max 9 which had the door problem.
My understanding is that the Max 9 has no inherit door problem, but it had a process/installation that lead to the incident? Boeing has a problem, but not the Max 9?
The process problem _was_ specific to the Max 9 however, as it was the only one with a door plug to be incorrectly installed. The Max 8 never has that exit fitted and the Max 10 always has that exit fitted. Max 9 is the only one that can plug it.
I would second this. I believe people are bunching a lot of things together: pilot error, maintenance issues, airplane defects into one big "BOEING SUCKS" billboard.
Looks to be pilot error. No one discussing Boeing's fundamental flaws is thinking about that one though, but of the 400+ dead because of MCAS. Which has been attributed to pilot error because "3rd world countries".
That’s the one. The MCAS incidents were very clearly faulty processes and software and to have two catastrophic incidents have to happen to get to the cause is tragic.
Currently people are latching onto every tidbit that goes wrong on or around a Boeing hull.
'People' should read avherald more often instead of getting their info from sites that are after 'engagement'.
Incidentally that site shows how safe flying is on average. 5 incidents daily on 90k passenger flights daily (number pulled out of Gemini's ass) is basically nothing.
It really makes whole thing look weird. Isn't Max 10 just bit longer version? So how can one be certified and not the other? And isn't the type rating for flying one same? If they don't make reasonable move now and finally treat them different from past 737s?
There've been so many issues it's definitely getting confusing, but the thing blocking the MAX10 certification is a problem with the engine anti-ice system.
You're correct that this problem exists on all MAX variants, but those other variants are already certified (the issue was discovered post certification), and it's deemed to be not severe enough / with a good enough mitigation that they are allowing Boeing some time to come up with a fix for the already-certified design, and continue producing it. The expectation is that once Boeing has a proper fix and retrofit plan, it will be required by an AD on all aircraft. However it's unlikely the FAA will certify the new MAX10 variant with this known issue, and so far Boeing doesn't have a fix.
Before all the posters who only read the title and post w/ assumptions as is common in Aviation threads.
> United specified that the removal of the MAX 10 from its delivery outlook was due to the unknown certification timeframe for the largest variant of the MAX family.
> “We are in the market for A321s, and if we get a deal where the economics work, we’ll do something. If we don’t, we won’t and will wind up with more Max 9s.”
The A321neo delivery schedule is late and incredibly backlogged too.
The Airbus backlog is so comically long it's hard for me to imagine why United would even suggest that they could get A321s. If they're not already in the queue, they're not getting A321s. Is there something I'm missing? Some way for United to jump the Airbus queue?
A321neo: 1282 delivered (since 2017!), 6169 orders, so 4887 in the queue (or about 25 yrs worth [1]).
A320neo: 1929 delivered (since 2014!), 4124 orders, so 2195 in the queue (or about 11 yrs worth).
Across all aircraft, 15,276 delivered, and 23,828 ordered, so their outstanding orders are more than half of all Airbus ever delivered (and more than 60% of all Airbus in operation).
Must be nice to work for their sales department...
Probably court of public opinion noise making for possibly investors?? It's not like they can use it as leverage against Boeing, as Boeing would be well versed in Airbus production capabilities. So, get out in the public to would be arm chair emotional investors to win some over is me being generous in such a lame comment from them.
i wouldn't be surprised if they can get their hands on "2nd hand" a321s from companies that might find they don't need it or they want to shift to another model
Airbus is adding capacity, but the queue will remain long. Aircraft have really long life cycles. A model can remain in production for decades, and individual aircraft can also have life spans measured in 20-30+ years.
The current backlog is around 8500 aircraft, and their current production rate is around 700-800 aircraft per year. Last year they build 570 A320's - so around 48 per month. Airbus' goal is to get to 75 per month by 2026.
Aircraft factories are obviously very expensive, and super expanding to burn down the queue right now would probably harm Airbus in the long term, especially since the airliner market is uh... really cyclical. I understand that the current backlog is something of a result of the pandemic.
Very very very long. More capacity takes huge investments and many years to bring online. Airbus won't do that for a temporary increase in orders.
Large airplane orders are always significantly discounted. Airbus has an easy option here, reduce discounts (which rumor is they have already done significantly) and make a lot of money. Let the queue be the queue, they can't add extra capacity in the short term anyway.
So going with Max 10s wasn't a realistic alternative anymore (at least in part due to deserved regulatory scrutiny on Boeing), so to still have leverage in negotiations with Airbus they switched to Max 9 as their backup plan?
This is good. Boeings problems can be slowed down if they stop producing that airplane. They need to simplify and regroup. United just gave them another reason to do so. Let’s hope other airlines follow.
The Max 9's that United has asked them to switch to is the one that was recently grounded for the door plug issue.. I'm not so sure this is the sign that you're assuming it is?
> Finally, killing off the 10 will likely force Boeing to actually build a new plane instead of iterating on a half century old design.
AA just ordered a ~100 of them. They are still making the Max10. And the problem that has caused certification issues for Max10 still needs to be fixed for Max9. Just not a big enough issue to ground existing planes.
Yeah. It seems like United really needs these planes and is prioritizing converting to an order than they can get sooner. And AA is confident that this type will eventually get certified (so they are ordering them) but don't need them as sooner as United.
Weren't they doing this and then got pushed out by Boeing? It seems like the business of making airplanes has an incredibly high cost of entry, tons of regulation, and fairly thin margins. One incident would be all it takes to shut a newcomer down.
I think that whole situation is what eventually meant MD being purchased by Boeing, Lockheed leaving civilian aircraft manufacture, and Rolls Royce being bailed out and semi-nationalised. The DC-10/L-1011 competition was an amazing period of time with some massive impacts in civil aviation, all because two companies fought (and both lost, kinda/sorta) over a segment only large enough for one of them.
They didn't get pushed out by Boeing. Boeing launched the successful widebody 747. The LM and MD both launched wide-body tri-jets. Airbus launch widebody 2-engine jet. But the market simply was only big enough for one of each.
So LM and MD basically competed. MD having a more established costumer base, lower prices and being first to market won against the more fancy LM jet. So really its more accurate to say that MD killed LM.
But really it fucked both companies over, widebody tri-jets just weren't a big enough category. LM engineering was mostly on point. They should have just build a twin-jet instead.
The problem is, a single project is so expensive it might take the company down. LM made a bet, lost and it almost destroyed the company. So they didn't want to bet again.
The person you replied to directly said 'what if lockheed martin' started producing planes to compete. You answering 'what is a brand new company screws up' has nothing to do with that.
They definitely didn't say 'what if' but 'what would it take'. Which would be a massive subsidy or investment to get enough runway to get a plane out and see if it can compete.
As far as examples of 100 billion dollar companies going bankrupt? 5 of those.
Building ~ 160 F-35's a year, with special alloys and coatings is a lot different than building 200 commercial aircraft, made out of aluminum and rivets.
how much will boeing's recent setbacks impact the consumer's behavior? eg, creating a preference for airlines / routes that utilize airbus products? has this impacted anyone's decision making process when booking a flight?
Marginal changes. Most people need to fly the route they need to fly. If they're corporate, they have preferred airlines. If they're consumer, they want the lowest fare for the destination. Plus, even if you can filter by plane type, there's no guarantee that plane type is what shows up at the gate - 737NG and 737Max are roughly interchangeable for many routes. Swapping an Airbus for a Boeing would be very rare, but still not impossible (you just can't re-use the same flight crew).
If I book a flight I will definitely try to avoid flying Boeing. If there's an alternative comparable flight with an Airbus, even if it's a bit more expensive, I will book it instead.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who takes Boeing's reputation into account here.
Counter-anecdote: for long haul international flights I seek out the B787 dreamliner because of how comfortable it is.
The question is ultimately whether it changes broad consumer behavior. No doubt it does for a few, but for most I imagine it simply doesn't weigh as high as cost or convenience
From my experience, the seats are better designed than those in the likes of the Dreamliner, there likely is more legroom too given their slimline design (obviously can differ a bit on airline customisation). Things like the screen can pivot and aren't fixed like the new Boeing's, climate control and lighting are great (but wouldnt say necessarily a differentiator).overall just a more high quality feel.
Resistance to turbulence is also better and best on the a380, Dreamliner for instance bounces around the sky.
In other news, the whistleblower who brought to light the quality issues with the Dreamliner died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound yesterday [0].
