Posted on 11/13/2019 6:06:24 AM PST by daniel1212
Boeing is in need of major changes, but I find it hard to believe that Congressional investigations are going to help the situation.
Boeing may well be rotten to the core. I don't know. Congress definitely is. The idea of Congress sitting in moral (or any other) judgment of Boeing is repulsive. They hypocrisy of congressthings seems boundless.
Maybe that Airbus tanker for the Air Force was the right solution all along?
Whether the company has lost its way or not, this suggestion is not going to help.
I understand, and was just reporting, not advocating.
What’s wrong? Thinking they’re too big to fail, they’ve tried to relegate QA to a process. QC can be a process, but QA must have intellectual involvement to intervene when QC identifies process problems. And you cannot have a proven QC process without independent QA. But the real culprit: they sell QA/QC as part of their marketing portfolio, and the production line includes the rote QC, but real QA is a hindrance to the production schedule. After all, no QA manager receives his bonus for stopping the production line, does he?
I was a contractor at a Boeing office a while ago. The purpose of the project was not to do any actual work on the project. The purpose was to convince the government to extend the project by many years and millions of dollars. The government seemed to encourage this behavior. It’s the only company where I have worked where I and my team were yelled at for being ahead of schedule or ahead of other teams because we were making them look bad.
“It needs tough love — in the form of Congressional investigations.... “
Seriously??? An investigation by this congress???
While I agree that Boeing definitely needs a top down, major shake-up, the last thing this company needs is to be investigated by a bunch of complete blithering idiots. I’m pretty sure the average working guy in any of Boeing’s plants have multiple times more experience regarding the aerospace industry, than all 435 representatives combined.
I’ve gotten very tired of listening to these ignorant, holier-than thou people act like experts, just to try and make themselves feel relevant.
Corporate Boards. Their just politburos for CEOs. None of them are holding their CEO’s accountable.
So, another highly regulated company that must submit to a massive, growing gov’t agency for every detail is being attacked.
It should be the leadership and lifetime parasites at the FAA who are terminated from employment for not doing their jobs of oversight.
Boeing has its flaws, but if the federal agencies we spend billions for cannot prevent such mistakes, then we are wasting billions.
Deep State and Military Industrial Union complex meet to pretend outrage, what could go wrong.
We know Obama used the fines on those companies to fund his political action committees
We are getting Sovietized.
I have defended the 737 MAX. Boeing may be a mess overall. When they fall short they should pay.
I still am not convinced that the 737 MAX had unacceptable instabilities in flight. Two crashes is enough for outsiders like me to jump to conclusions, but I have not. Also, those who stand to gain financially from the crashes are going to pile on.
The head of the FAA, a pilot, said he wanted to fly the 737 MAX. I need to hear from him or someone who’s done that. I’d like them to test a ‘MAX before the recent modifications.
Unfortunately, politics would probably preclude the testers from giving an honest answer.
That sound like a tactic that may not be restricted to Federal government contractors.
Like many US companies, Boeing used cheap, near-zero rate, fiat money from the Federal Reserve (like many US corporations) to Wall Street, to buy back their stock. They went deeply into debt, and spent $43 Billion to reduce outstanding shares by 25%. This had the effect of making management and their vested options very wealthy, by making earnings per share higher (fewer shares, same profit) and also goosing the stock price and increasing dividends.
Meanwhile, their cash-flow has been strong because they are in the sweet-spot of life cycles of airplanes like the 787.
Boeing has not used this money to increase R&D or new plane development, as its R&D budget has remained the same for the last 6 years. The problems with the 737 max are directly a result of that - they didn’t spend to develop a new airframe, rather attached new and more efficient engines to an existing 737 airframe. Now they have taken a $5 billion charge on the 737 max, and their cash flow is negative - all with the greatly added debt burden of the last 5+ years.
Will this short-term, Wall Street financial engineering come back to bite them? In some ways it has, but the company will really find out in 10 years, when the present crop of management is long gone.
At least they have a diverse work force.
From what I read , among other issue, lack of info on how to deal with the problem was a problem. "One captain called the aircraft's flight manual "inadequate and almost criminally insufficient."
Made me think of https://www.nasa.gov/feature/geminis-first-docking-turns-to-wild-ride-in-orbit Armstrong's quick thinking led him to turn off the entire OAMS system and then use the re-entry control system, or RCS, thrusters on the nose of the spacecraft to regain command of Gemini VIII and stop the spin.
The Airbus A330 MRTT was ready to go in 2011, is already in service in a number of other countries, was actually selected first by the Air Force before Boeing screamed at a few of their pet Senators to undo the deal, and would have been built in Alabama, providing a lot of jobs for Americans.
But Boeing's backroom dealing won out again, and here we are.
Two pieces of news broke late this week concerning the U.S. Air Force’s Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, whose total value has been estimated at $85 billion. First, the service stopped paying Boeing for ICBM-related technology-development work that began in 2017. In response, the company has begun to break up the specialized team of engineers it brought together to create a replacement for the Cold War-era Minuteman III, according to a Boeing source close to the project.
Second, a Northrop Grumman filing revealed that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into allegations that the company is not abiding by an agreement that allowed its 2018 acquisition of Orbital ATK, one of just two U.S. makers of solid rocket motors. Those terms required the company to sell rocket motors “on a non-discriminatory basis to all competitors for missile contracts.”
They were planning to move the corporate offices anyway, but the logical choice would have been someplace closer to their production plants.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.