What The * Happened to Boeing

[Filippa Eilhart]

50 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I don't get the smartassery on display here. Why are people acting as if a trip on a Boeing aircraft is some kind of cosmic inevitably that it would be foolhardy to even begin to attempt to avoid?

Anyway in answer to your questions, 1) yes, and 2) last minute equipment changes are extremely rare*.

*source: 25 years of experience working in the corporate travel industry. 

I’ve had last minute changes of plane quite often, but maybe it’s a EU vs US thing. I also don’t have that much of a choice of my chosen routes. I wasn’t trying to be a smartass, it’s just the last thing I have on my mind when  I choose a flight as I don’t have that many options to start with :shrug:

[A True Kaniggit]

3 hours ago, Spockydog said:

I don't get the smartassery on display here. 

Because flying on Boeing is still safer by the numbers than every time you step into a car.

Even though they have been the shittiest airline lately.

[Spockydog]

6 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Because flying on Boeing is still safer by the numbers than every time you step into a car.

Even though they have been the shittiest airline lately.

Yeah, and you realise that we do not live in a world devoid of free will, right?

And seeing as we're all being smartasses right now, Boeing isn't a fucking airline.

 

 

Edited March 23 by Spockydog

[A True Kaniggit]

50 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Yeah, and you realise that we do not live in a world devoid of free will, right?

And seeing as we're all being smartasses right now, Boeing isn't a fucking airline.

 

 

Haha. You’re correct. It’s a fucking manufacturer (airplane maker) 

[Spockydog]

11 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Haha. You’re correct. It’s a fucking manufacturer (airplane maker) 

Yeah, who's the smartass now, you oily-assed sea bird. 

 

[A True Kaniggit]

9 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Yeah, who's the smartass now, you oily-assed sea bird. 

 

..... me?

 

I'm slick as snot and I ain't lying.

[DMC]

As long as we're all being smartasses, should be clear Boeing is one of the largest defense contractors in the US (and subsequently the world) along with Lockheed and RTX.  Nearly half their revenue comes from the federal government.  And not just for building aircraft, but also, ya know, weapons and defense systems and the like.  Just a few weeks ago they were awarded a contract by the US Space Force to build a WGS communications satellite.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Is it too much to ask?

 

https://imgflip.com/i/8k9irv

 

 

 

 

 

[A True Kaniggit]

12 hours ago, DMC said:

As long as we're all being smartasses, should be clear Boeing is one of the largest defense contractors in the US (and subsequently the world) along with Lockheed and RTX.  Nearly half their revenue comes from the federal government.  And not just for building aircraft, but also, ya know, weapons and defense systems and the like.  Just a few weeks ago they were awarded a contract by the US Space Force to build a WGS communications satellite.

But are you really being a smart ass in this post?

Seems to me you’re just being kindly informative. 

[Kalbear]

Boeing CEO resigning today, along a few others. I'm sure they'll be crying into their golden parachutes

[Zorral]

My brother's response to this news:

... it would appear that the latest management, that is now leaving with their millions, really didn't have clue on what to do to fix the issues.  They are having quality audits of the entire 737 Max assembly process with the FAA observing.  However, I'm not so sure the FAA has good skill sets left after the agency has been stuffed with political appointees that really don't know the industry.  Only time will tell if they can find a skilled person that understands how to build aircraft to lead the company.

This is just killing his generation of former Boeing engineers. But they've been seeing this in process for a very long time now.

Edited March 25 by Zorral

[Loge]

35 minutes ago, Zorral said:

My brother's response to this news:

... it would appear that the latest management, that is now leaving with their millions, really didn't have clue on what to do to fix the issues.  They are having quality audits of the entire 737 Max assembly process with the FAA observing.  However, I'm not so sure the FAA has good skill sets left after the agency has been stuffed with political appointees that really don't know the industry.  Only time will tell if they can find a skilled person that understands how to build aircraft to lead the company.

This is just killing his generation of former Boeing engineers. But they've been seeing this in process for a very long time now.

Corporate headquarters is now in Arlington, VA. Shows where their priorities lie.

[Mudguard]

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

My brother's response to this news:

... it would appear that the latest management, that is now leaving with their millions, really didn't have clue on what to do to fix the issues.  They are having quality audits of the entire 737 Max assembly process with the FAA observing.  However, I'm not so sure the FAA has good skill sets left after the agency has been stuffed with political appointees that really don't know the industry.  Only time will tell if they can find a skilled person that understands how to build aircraft to lead the company.

This is just killing his generation of former Boeing engineers. But they've been seeing this in process for a very long time now.

Very sad to hear all this.  It's a massive waste of engineering talent.  Something needs to shake up the airline industry.  It's gotten very stagnant for a very long time now.  The way that government contracts are awarded, at least in the past with cost plus type contracts, just rewards waste.

Reminds me of the space industry, which really hadn't moved significantly forward for decades until SpaceX came along.  I know Musk is problematic for many reasons, but objectively, SpaceX has been a catalyst for the space industry.  All these airline manufacturing companies need a real competitor that threatens to put them out of business to force industry change.

[Wilbur]

GE and Motorola had a lot of cross-corporate interactions.  GE took Motorola's Six Sigma and turned it into a quasi-religion; GE adopted the Motorola Leadership Factory model where a high-potential employee who wanted to be a VP needed to spend a couple of years in Internal Audit learning the business, and Motorola took on Individual Dignity Entitlement from GE.  IDE was Jack Welch's baby, and here is a post from a Motorola Alumni group where I am a member:

"Who remembers when stack rating IDE with its Needs Improvement ratings was explicitly implemented at Motorola? GE's Jack Welch is largely credited for the practice.  I came across this quote on reddit: "If you and your teammates are put on a ranking which is required to have a high/middle/low distribution:

• You should stop helping your teammates.
• Your manager should always have a new bad performer who exists specifically to be fired to protect the better employees.
• You never want to go work in a team with great people you could learn a lot from because you'll just be the one at the bottom.
• You should never take responsibility for failure.

And so on and so on. You should be your worst lone wolf self, because anything else is punished by the system. It's basically sociopath training."

I got in a lot of very heated discussions about ranking my employees in this system, since it inherently assumes that you are such a moron that you somehow hired staff who Needed Improvement or needed to be fired.  My argument was that if I did indeed have such ineffectives in my headcount, surely it was ME that needed to be fired.

Anyways, my point is that Boeing's recently-departed CEO was an acolyte of Welch, and Boeing also engaged in this sort of nonsense once he arrived.  Now I know and interact with other guys who were Business, Group, and even one Sector VPs/Presidents from GE, and they are not all bad people.  However, the ones I know are all either retired, BoD types, or run small businesses.  The real sociopaths got out to infect places like Boeing, or else drove the various bits and pieces of GE into the ground.

See this article: Boeing's shakeup and GE's fall: 2 more black eyes for Jack Welch's legacy (yahoo.com)

No company can be successful without good people, and you can only retain good people if you treat them right, and you can only get the best out of good people if you remove obstacles to their success, not add to the stress and burdens of their lives.  IDE rankings made the lives of all the staff hell, no matter how much glee it gave Jack Welch and his ilk.

Neutron Jack loved the idea of wasting the headcount, working the corporate accounting posture to its most aggressive position, and especially taking any action that the Wall Street investment banker analysts liked.  Calhoun took that same stance at Boeing, and the company is lucky to be getting rid of him, before utterly destroyed and sold off the parts like Flannery and Immelt at GE after Welch, or like Sanjay Jha and Ed Zander did at Motorola.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

53 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

GE and Motorola had a lot of cross-corporate interactions.  GE took Motorola's Six Sigma and turned it into a quasi-religion; GE adopted the Motorola Leadership Factory model where a high-potential employee who wanted to be a VP needed to spend a couple of years in Internal Audit learning the business, and Motorola took on Individual Dignity Entitlement from GE.  IDE was Jack Welch's baby, and here is a post from a Motorola Alumni group where I am a member:

"Who remembers when stack rating IDE with its Needs Improvement ratings was explicitly implemented at Motorola? GE's Jack Welch is largely credited for the practice.  I came across this quote on reddit: "If you and your teammates are put on a ranking which is required to have a high/middle/low distribution:

• You should stop helping your teammates.
• Your manager should always have a new bad performer who exists specifically to be fired to protect the better employees.
• You never want to go work in a team with great people you could learn a lot from because you'll just be the one at the bottom.
• You should never take responsibility for failure.

And so on and so on. You should be your worst lone wolf self, because anything else is punished by the system. It's basically sociopath training."

I got in a lot of very heated discussions about ranking my employees in this system, since it inherently assumes that you are such a moron that you somehow hired staff who Needed Improvement or needed to be fired.  My argument was that if I did indeed have such ineffectives in my headcount, surely it was ME that needed to be fired.

Anyways, my point is that Boeing's recently-departed CEO was an acolyte of Welch, and Boeing also engaged in this sort of nonsense once he arrived.  Now I know and interact with other guys who were Business, Group, and even one Sector VPs/Presidents from GE, and they are not all bad people.  However, the ones I know are all either retired, BoD types, or run small businesses.  The real sociopaths got out to infect places like Boeing, or else drove the various bits and pieces of GE into the ground.

See this article: Boeing's shakeup and GE's fall: 2 more black eyes for Jack Welch's legacy (yahoo.com)

No company can be successful without good people, and you can only retain good people if you treat them right, and you can only get the best out of good people if you remove obstacles to their success, not add to the stress and burdens of their lives.  IDE rankings made the lives of all the staff hell, no matter how much glee it gave Jack Welch and his ilk.

Neutron Jack loved the idea of wasting the headcount, working the corporate accounting posture to its most aggressive position, and especially taking any action that the Wall Street investment banker analysts liked.  Calhoun took that same stance at Boeing, and the company is lucky to be getting rid of him, before utterly destroyed and sold off the parts like Flannery and Immelt at GE after Welch, or like Sanjay Jha and Ed Zander did at Motorola.

Corporate culture is fucking insane.

[Wilbur]

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Corporate culture is fucking insane.

It sure seemed that way after Relative Performance Assessments rolled out.  Lots of old-line Motorolans - directors, managers, research lab middle managers - just walked away in the mid 2000s.

[straits]

Quote

 

Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

...

Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nation’s reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.

 

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Rage-inducing

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 hours ago, straits said:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Rage-inducing

 

Damn.  The level of cynicism and arrogance in US Corporate culture is insane. No wonder these shits like Trump.  He’s their wunderkind.  He makes money without having to build anything and somehow his illegal actions in making that money never quite stick to him.  He’s the pinnacle of everything they want to accomplish.

:beats head against desk:

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Damn.  The level of cynicism and arrogance in US Corporate culture is insane.

It's always been that way. Plus you forgot to include the blatant unchecked corruption. 

[Which Tyler]

5 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

It's always been that way. Plus you forgot to include the blatant unchecked corruption. 

Of course.

The only difference between a Boeing, or a Nestle; and every other large corporation is... they got caught.