Monday, January 13, 2020

I'm not going to fly on a Boeing 737 MAX

It seems that it was "designed by clowns":
The release of a batch of internal messages has raised more questions about the safety of Boeing's 737 Max.
In one of the communications, an employee said the plane was "designed by clowns".
Apparently Boeing is all butt-hurt about the content of the documents but disclosed them in the interests of transparency.  I guess that's a good thing, but this is really bad for the company:
One unnamed employee wrote in an exchange of instant messages in April 2017: "This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."
And this is really, really, really bad for the company:
In February 2018, a Boeing worker asked a colleague: "Would you put your family on a Max simulator-trained aircraft? I wouldn't."
"No," came the reply.
Woah.  Boeing employees who built the aircraft won't let their families fly on it.

I don't know if the MAX needs to be a write-off, but I really can't see how you get people flying on this, other than by tricking them.  At least, those who pay attention.

Prediction: the first airline that puts them into service and then suffers a crash will be sued out of business, and these documents will be prominent in the legal actions.

And this has the ring of God's Own Truth to it:
"I don't know how to fix these things... it's systemic. It's culture. It's the fact we have a senior leadership team that understand very little about the business and yet are driving us to certain objectives," said an employee in an email dated June 2018.
I wonder if criminal indictments are in the leadership team's future?

3 comments:

juvat said...

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to be well applied to Boeing.

Kinnison said...

They were doomed once they moved the corporate offices to Chicago away from the factory.

Beans said...

Most of the issues can be linked to Boeing being blackmailed by 2nd and 3rd world countries.

"How?" you may ask.

Well, this is how. Most nations (practically everyone except the USA) don't have private airlines, they have state-owned airlines. And in order to sell 737-MAX to all these state-owned lines, the states said "X part of plane MUST be made here, in this 2nd or 3rd world country, that can't make planes normally, even small ones."

That right there has doomed most of the later gen Boeing product. Why did Boeing use Indian coders (who mostly didn't code)? Because India said they had to in order to sell their planes.

Simple as that. Rather than the company saying 'Screw You, just go buy Airbus and find out how screwed you are (since, well, Airbuses have lots of problems just as bad as the MAX but aren't written about. Remember the rash of Airbus crashes due to their tails falling off, or the rash of Airbus crashes from their flight-computers taking over and crashing the planes (sometimes while the aircrew is frantically trying to take manual control?))

Yeah. Boeing screwed up. Yes, blame the administration, but don't forget that Airbus, or the Russian airliner companies, or India's homegrown airliners, or Red China's homebuilt aircraft, all tend to have a much higher ratio of bad-things-happening in comparison to even Boeing's latest mess-up.