I think the ultimate problem with Boeing is that they're too big to fail. They're too important to the US's strategic interests so the government won't allow them to go out of business despite gross incompetence.
A classic case of "putting all your eggs in one basket."
How does a failure look like? I mean, this is not a financial institution and in the case of a financial failure people who make planes, the machines they use and all the IP wouldn't disappear.
The Boing might actually be too big to fail but their failure, IMHO, looks like what we have today: An inability to make high quality cutting edge aircraft. For the USA, the disaster would be to be reliant on EU/Russa/Brazil/Canada/China for conducting its transportation operations in this massive country.
What happens if people start freaking out when their planes are not Airbus? Would increase in government contracts keeping the stocks and profits the same mitigate the problems?
So maybe Boing has failed already, its just that its still institutionally solvent for one reason or another.
> in the case of a financial failure people who make planes, the machines they use and all the IP wouldn't disappear.
Things get lost all the time. People move on, retire, machines require maintenance and remanufacturing, IP might describe an end state but not how to get there. Some say Boeing itself is an example of this after the MD merger.
Sure, but maybe fire and prosecute some of the execs?
Given that they are largely not responsible in delivering the value that will ensure continued success of the company, signal that risking the lives of people is not a good business strategy, and may act as a wake up call for others in leadership positions that they should be leading towards what is best for customers and the business and not what is going to give them the biggest short term payday.
Call me a cynic - but isn't an organization like Boeing designed to diffuse responsibility, so as to shield the guilty behind corporatespeak ? Sure you can subpoena millions of pages of documents and countless emails, but then the sheer size of the legal effort threatens to defeat the entire idea of assigning responsibility.
You're correct, but my point is that it should not be allow, especially in cases where the corp involved is directly responsible for the safety of end users.
I think the problem is not that Boeing is too big to fail, it's the massive cost of designing, certifying and efficiently building a new airframe, which makes it hard for a competitor to emerge. The US doesn't really have another basket to put eggs into.
Except that they have had issues with other things as well. Over on the space side, their Starliner crew capsule has had several safety debacles over the past 4 years, such that maybe it'll finally carry crew this year. First it was poorly tested software, then stuck valves, then the tape they wrapped certain wires in to make them more fire resistant turned out to not work, and then finally after all that testing, their parachute system had issues.
Boeing has had cultural issues for a while now, part of their rocketry division was forced to be spun out (by the government) with Lockmart's into ULA because Boeing was caught conducting espionage on Lockmart, which would've potentially disqualified them from bidding on launches. They had also had information leaked to them about bidding on the Artemis lunar lander contracts.
Plus other incidents like trying to get people at ULA proposing things like orbital refueling systems fired because if they allowed such technology to emerge, Boeing couldn't get blank checks from the government for building near-useless rockets.
That last one, in my opinion, making it clear that they're exploiting the perception that they're too big to fail.
Not a great example. Any plane would have crashed with the pilots doing what they did. Most planes don't do well when you try to climb them out of a stall. (Climb out, not power out.)
"Air France and Airbus have been investigated for manslaughter since 2011, but in 2019, prosecutors recommended dropping the case against Airbus and charging Air France with manslaughter and negligence, concluding, "the airline was aware of technical problems with a key airspeed monitoring instrument on its planes but failed to train pilots to resolve them"
Seems like nobody hired him as CEO. Him and some buddies tried to start something, and it didn't get anywhere, and they lost money with it. Sounds quite reasonable to me :)
A known quantity to the industry who managed to deploy billions in budgets for a massive player is valuable at the helm of any company that wants those kinds of things.
I thought he was put CEO of an existing company that did something. This was just him and some buddies starting a new venture that didn't go anywhere, and they only lost money with it.
I mean, it's far less paradoxical than it sounded at first.
IIRC Boeing's defense and airliner business units are separate. So they really aren't too big to fail: the defense side is insulated from the commercial airliner side.
I’m unsure what you mean by transport and logistics; we use civilian airframes with any amount of modifications for only one in production aircraft that I’m aware of (P-8 Poseidon is based on the 737). The TACAMO and AWACS are both based on the 707, which is long since out of production. None of our strategic lift capability (logistics in your comment?) is based on civilian airframes.
Thanks! I was in aviation, but primarily tactical and expeditionary. I always forget about the C-40 despite having ridden in one multiple times.
The E-4 and VC-25 aren’t really a fair one; you don’t need the divisions to be the same company for their integration (though I suppose it would make it vastly cheaper). We also don’t fly many at all (meaning cost per unit is relatively inconsequential).
I also somehow always forget the tankers. Thanks for that.
I’ll still maintain the links aren’t necessary. I honestly think a dedicated military platform for all of those would have been a smarter investment and that the current way of modifying airliners is suboptimal.
It's agree it's probably suboptimal, but I don't think anyone's going to be willing to front the cash for development of a new airframe specifically for military/government use. The advantage of the airliner route is you have at least some revenue stream to fall back on if the military decides it doesn't want the new shiny or a court/congressional committee decides the military went about choosing the new shiny the wrong way, which happens often.
It's just a ton of financial risk. I guess the new supersonic startups like Boom think they bring enough novelty to the market to justify that risk.
Why is that? Could it be that reduced commercial aircraft lead to better outcomes for high speed rail and future suborbital passenger rockets? Is seeing a strategic interest in commercial aircraft a local minima that prevents further improvement?
It’s that keeping capacity for one of the leading forms of global travel is a strategic interest. Don’t let your conspiracies get in the way of the obvious.
Also I feel like the rail circle jerk is so unearned. Last time I was in London it cost 100 pounds to fly to paris from London downtown airport and 600 to take the Chunnel. How “superior”.
Hey, no paranoid conspiracy intended. Simply thinking out the counterfactuals.
Is tying a particular activity to "national interest" itself a form of paranoia? What about passenger aircraft is a strategic interest? For example, the US seems to do ok with little large-scale shipbuilding outside military concerns. People seem to take cruises from the US in ever-larger cruise ships without a domestic capacity for building them.
Additionally, no disagreement on my part regarding the high regard people have for hypothetical rail. On the other hand, I'm open to the idea that high capacity terrestrial transportation similar to rail would have cause to improve if airplanes weren't in an optimization sweet spot.
I don’t see the paranoia or conspiracy in their comment. Plane based infrastructure could be a local minima that we’ve bungled our way into without any need for coordination.
The US military is a massive inefficient bureaucracy. Just look at the $5 billion and 8 years wasted on their failure to implement an ERP software system that is standard in large organiations https://www.thirdstage-consulting.com/lessons-from-the-us-ai...
Note the senate investigation report that describes an “organizational disaster” that caused the failure. Don't assume competence because of size and persistence.
I think this is a common civilian misunderstanding of how the military breeds competence.
The US Military is absurdly competent at what its mission is, war fighting and logistics. What it is not competent at is things that are not yet internalized as part of that mission. Unfortunately non visible logistics (software) hasn’t made that cultural shift yet, and once it does will take a long time to breed the institutional competence that the military leans on, primarily due to the compensation gulf.
The US military is the largest employer on Earth, some amount of bureaucracy is inevitable. But they are not a business and do not optimize for dollar-efficiency like for-profit businesses do. They optimize for other goals.
'Wasting' 5 billion out of an 842 billion dollar budget, for an organization that doesn't even have to make money, is nothing. Plenty of startups squander even more money, and never accomplish any of the entire point of a for-profit company, making money.
Federal government can run itself fine as long as congresspeople aren't staging stunt shutdowns. They owned a controlling share in GM from 2009–2013 to bring the company out of bankruptcy. They own the Tennessee Valley Authority which operates no better or worse than other utility companies. The Alaskan sovereign wealth fund owns hundreds of companies and properties throughout the US.
There isn’t a meaningful difference in competence or bureaucracy between a too-big-to-fail company the size of Boeing and a large state institution. The difference would be in who can set the org-wide incentives and goals. Clearly shareholders aren't interested in safety being one of the goals.
Isn't this what our version of capitalism encourages?
Grow to dominate so much of the market and of stock and pension portfolios at all costs, that you'll have to be bailed out no matter your incompetence.
So as long as this behavior only gets rewarded and never punished, why would you expect different results?
Car manufacturing is similar in a lot of ways yet notably different in the putting all eggs in the same basket sense that parent mentions. Ford and GM are too big to fail yet they do compete and it does lead to at least one of them making decent cars that don’t fall apart under you.
That is true, but Boeing wasn't always the only player in aircraft manufacturing either. Even subsidizing two or three players so that they can compete might be better for safety and quality than letting them merge and operate as a complete monopoly.
Modern capitalism supresses competition, that's what happens. What if McDonnell Douglas had never been merged? What if Embraer had been bought by Boeing?
That's the harm that monopolies do to society and yet somehow they have been even incentivized in recent times.
A classic case of "putting all your eggs in one basket."