Thread: Time for Boeing to admit defeat..?

My 2 cents worth...

Boeing was built by 'Engineers'. and Practical People striving for excellence, but complacent management allowed a lowering of. "morals", and the focus shifted to 'The Bottom Line'. Joining with Douglas did no favours...

How many other great businesses were destroyed by myopic/inept/greedy Management ? Rover and British Leyland spring to mind.

I was reading before its launch that what remains of Boeing's reputation rests on the success of the Starliner, if it fails Boeing is finished.

Originally Posted by superquag

My 2 cents worth...

Boeing was built by 'Engineers'. and Practical People striving for excellence, but complacent management allowed a lowering of. "morals", and the focus shifted to 'The Bottom Line'. Joining with Douglas did no favours...

How many other great businesses were destroyed by myopic/inept/greedy Management ? Rover and British Leyland spring to mind.

It was not complacent management, it was deliberate.

After the merger with McDonnell-Douglas, the McDonnell-Douglas management management team took control of the merged company and deliberately applied the same management techniques that had destroyed their company. This involved moving head office away from where aircraft manufacture took place in Seattle, to Chicago, a financial centre, and systematically removing engineers from management, replacing them with MBAs. (This ensured there was no career progression for engineers) As far as possible non-core operations were spun off or outsourced, for example the fuselage facility in Kansas, now Spirit, which starred in the recent window plug incident, and the outsourced software development responsible for the 737Max crashes.

It took more than a decade for the problems to start to manifest, as the strong engineering culture of Boeing took time to destroy. But meanwhile, think of the management bonuses and share buybacks that they were able to get organised!

Interesting take on the Starliner debacle:

There is a lot of doomsday media going around about Boeing, but it needs to be kept in perspective, and I do wonder what the agenda of that video was - to promote another option perhaps.

For Starliner, it is a pretty ambitious program they're running, and based on what has been said, its not so much that the collaboration between Boeing and NASA is so different to anything else globally (noting the Russian reference), but that SpaceX is more an outlier in its excellence (thankfully). Sending rockets into space and returning them is pretty wild even today. Even the SR71 Blackbird from Lockheed leaked like a sieve when cold so that it would seal at Mach 3.2, and the Starliner is a fair bit more wild than that! I appreciate some people cant comprehend that comparison, good luck to you.

WRT Boeing, we have to remember that almost half of the commerical aircraft in the sky are made by Boeing and they generally don't fall out of the sky or have doors blow off. Airline companies are still ordering them in similar numbers to Airbus. They're getting a lot of bad media now, some of it fair and some of it not, but they will press on into the future as a company as they still have support by the industry.

I don't disagree with your points, but you should be aware that Bill Whittle has made a series of documentaries re the space program, particularly the Apollo missions. He has a very long history with the whole thing, and wants to see success. Right now there's no real success to see, at least not from Boeing. And NASA is standing in the way of SpaceX, who could go and get the astronauts on short notice. In all probability they are already prepared.

Totally agree that Boeing is necessary, but, as been stated on this and other threads, they need to get back to having engineers running the place, not accountants and business graduates. The troubles at that company run far deeper than the publicised disasters.

In many respects Boeing is "too big to fail". Of course airlines are still ordering Boeings - there is no realistic alternative. The only other supplier in the world capable of producing large modern airliners in any numbers is Airbus - and their order book is full for the rest of this decade!

But the MBAs have gone a long way towards destroying the company, and the Starliner is in real trouble - mainly trouble for Boeing. Unlike their previous NASA contracts, this is a fixed price contract, rather than cost+, and any more extra work is entirely at Boeing expense, on a project that is already losing money. With their airliner issues, the question is where is the money coming from? Giving up is probably not an option either, as they could then be forced to pay for SpaceX to carry out the missions Boeing has contracted to do (and already been paid for). Quite apart from any penalties that might be applied, and the bad publicity from this.

Compare Nasa funding to Boeing and to SpaceX. $4.2. to $2.6 Billion. Then compare success. There's no contest. I know this is the aerospace division of Boeing, but it is moribund, where execs get paid regardless. SpaceX is a nimble, results driven organization, funded by many streams, not least the wildly successful StarLink ( It isn't on par with any ground based ISP/Telco.... yet, but it's a very agile cat amongst some very fat pigeons ). People don't perform at SpaceX they get replaced by those who will.

When JFK said that the US would put a man on the moon and bring him safely home it was utterly unthinkable that any entity other than the US Government could fund such an exercise. 60 years on and the Government is in the way. I'm sure we've most of us heard the not so apocryphal stories of $1500 toilet brushes. I'll bet you won't find any of those at SpaceX. Or probably Airbus, for that matter.

I'm on record saying I heartily dislike government interference in business or market decision making, but I honestly believe Boeing needs to be broken up. "Too big to fail" is a nice turn of phrase, but it's also indicative of complacent monopoly. This has almost inevitably led to the current situation, where Boeing cannot compete. Don't forget, the 737 Max disasters were a direct, forensically provable, result of a Boeing knee jerk response to the Airbus A320 NEO, and Boeing trying to avoid the high cost of pilot recertification, on what should have been classified as a new type, by simply pushing new data to pilot's iPads.

Boeing was once a great company, but in my opinion the current management deserve all the opprobrium they have and will receive.