Agree with the correlation and the coinciding point in time. The real culprit was Harry Stonecipher... a real asshole CEO that had been at McD only a very short time before the merger — came from Sunstrand. He did straighten out the scandals that had been at McD... but his drive for cost savings and massive outsourcing that he and Alan Mulally (former President of Ford Motor Company) conjured up really screwed Boeing up... The 787 launch was nothing short of disaster and it seems that they have not had a successful new product launch since.
Growing up I remember Boeing being an american juggernaut. How could they have screwed this up? Did they see themselves as too big to ever fail? “We can never be wrong”
Is this rock bottom for Boeing?
Boeing was really hard pressed in the 90s with the Aerospace consolidation of the post Cold War era and the development of 777.
They were dealing with tons of red ink from Triple Seven development costs and the need get cash flow from production contracts - some of which had really tough non delivery penalties.
The Unions realized the leverage they had over Boeing and launched a series of extortionate strikes with terms that Boeing could not afford to accept but simply could afford to turn down.
Boeing was forced to cave in to union demands under extreme duress but but the contract negotiations led to a serious break between Boeing and it's labor unions.
In reality, Boeing had been very, very good to it's workers over the years and they were a very well compensated and pretty entitled and pampered work force.
Boeing management saw the Unions tactic of negotiating with a gun pointed at the companies head and a willingness to pull the trigger as a fundamental betrayal of a company that treated it's workers very well. In addition, the costs of the new union contracts that Boeing was extorted into knuckling into were not economically viable
At that point, the decision was made to subcontract as much of the production that had previsously been an exclusive for Boeing production workers down to it's subs.
Boeing really had no choice in the matter - they had pre existing contracts with fixed pricing that simply was not practicable under the new labor contracts.
This subcontracting resulted in a slow erosion of Boeing's in house manufacturing capability which over the last 30 years has resulting in a situation where Boeing is reliant on subs and no longer has full control or viability over it's manufacturing process.
Boeing aircraft are becoming increasingly more and more complex to produce at a time when the adoption of DEI across it's in house production and subcontractor network is producing a dumbed down, lower skill but even more entitled labor force that is increasingly less and less capable of dealing with that complexity.
Add in the supply chain stress of Covid and you have a lot of hard and complex challenges for a crew that is increasingly unable to deal with even simple challenges.