Apparently the folks at Boeing are behind - like, REALLY behind - on delivering new Air Force Ones.
The new delivery date is just “At least 2027” and some sources say they have little hope of it happening before 2029.
I’m not suggesting an aircraft manufacturer should do a rush job, but the fundamental platform here has been produced since LBJ was the President. I do not quite grasp why Boeing is incapable of producing the aircraft in a reasonable period of time. They’re already been working on this for YEARS.
What the hell?
It’s a shame. Boeing used to be on of the greatest companies in the world.
They’ve been struggling to deliver regular airplanes for normal people, too, so it should be no surprise delivery of a special order would also be problematic. There are discussions here on the board in various threads about the demise of Boeing, and I think most of that has to do with top management that used to be made up of engineers being replaced by bean-counters. Maybe that’s an oversimplification but it’s how I understand their current problems.
The upside of this is that Trump, who has a mental age of about six, is furious and stamping his little feet that he very likely will never get to fly in the new Air Force One. He probably sent Musk there to shake them up. He already called the president of Boeing to yell at him.
One of Richard Nixon’s henchmen who wrote about his experiences in the administration mentioned taking delivery of a second plane to serve as Air Force One in 1972, at that time still based on a 707. The interior smelled like a new car, which everyone thought was pretty cool.
That is absolutely my understanding, as well. In particular, when Boeing “merged” with McDonnell Douglas, it fundamentally was a takeover of Boeing by MD’s senior management, which did not have the same respect for Boeing’s engineering prowess and quality culture, because they perceived it didn’t contribute to the company’s bottom line.
I don’t know why the delays and cost overruns are so substantial, but the issue here isn’t one of “the fundamental platform” but rather of the changes to the platform that need to undergo certification.
I can only speculate as to the changes being made, but given as the interior is fully custom and every aspect of it needs to be certified, this is definitely a job that’s on the order of “years” to complete. And it’s an old platform, and I imagine they’re trying to install much newer technology, and those interfaces have to function. That probably leads to cascading changes being required beyond the original envisioned scope.
There’s definitely incompetence and I can speculate on sources of that in terms of civil airworthiness procedures, but when you basically gut a plane and redo the interior you’re in for a lot of work.
I had read that Boeing was merely taking already-existing 747-800 airframes and modifying them to be VC-25s. One would have thought that shouldn’t take them long.
Basically they went from an engineering focused company, to one driven by finance types who are more concerned with the financial/operating metrics, and less with the actual products.
It’s a pervasive problem in the business world, IMO. Most companies above a certain level are staffed by finance and generic “business” types, not actual line-of-business people who have actually worked hands-on in the industry. It’s a problem if you start hiring external finance people to be execs in your company if your company isn’t a finance company, because they look at it from a fundamentally different perspective. Boeing isn’t fundamentally different in their eyes than say… Hershey’s Chocolate. Both companies produce products, etc. and they look at the profitability, costs, etc… without really having a lot of respect for what makes an aircraft manufacturer different from a food manufacturer.
Not incidentally, that’s why politicians are so bad at dealing with the civil service bureaucracies. They’re basically this sort of exec who gets elected every so often and has no idea how a city’s water department works, how the State’s parks department works, or how the Federal personnel office works, so they think they can just make cuts and change stuff based on what the public thinks. It isn’t a good idea, but many do it anyway.
For what it’s worth, after many delays (some of them imposed by Trump during his first term), Boeing finally began work on converting two 747-8s to VC-25s (the technical name for the converted planes that will be the new Air Force Ones) in 2020. They were originally slated to be delivered in 2024.
@mnemosyne explained (just above) why it’s not at all that simple, especially when airframe modifications are involved, regardless of how seemingly minor.
For additional reading, this is a transcript from an NPR radio program, “On Point,” about the management issues at Boeing. It’s a long read, but it discusses the finance-first C-suite at Boeing, and in particular, how they were/are members of the Jack Welch “school” of management (which is not a compliment).
I’m not defending Boeing, it’s definitely taking an alarmingly long time. COVID can be blamed for some of that, and incompetence for another part. And, I suspect, frequent changes to demands from the customer…
My point is that it isn’t an easy task to design, install and certify an entire new aircraft interior even under normal circumstances. There’s a lot of qualification and substantiation work that the public never sees. There are regulatory hurdles to overcome (assuming they are seeking civil approvals for this part of the work) such as getting exemptions, special conditions and equivalent level of safety findings (did you know you can’t have doors inside a plane separating passenger compartments, per the regulations? You need special authorization for that, on a case by case basis. Pretty sure Air Force One has rooms…)
The fact that the airframe is old and an existing approval doesn’t mean much. You still have to certify everything else and it’s not trivial.
From what I read somewhere, even for large-ish civilian aircraft like the Boeing BBJ (a modified Boeing 737) that are purchased for use as a business jet, the plane is delivered with a raw “green” interior to a specialized company for fitting out the interior, and the cost of that fitting-out alone can run into millions. Even if there’s nothing obviously special about it.
Completely agreed. And, as rigorous as the certification for any airliner should be, one would expect it to be even more rigorous and painstaking for the new Air Force One.
Apparently, due to the revised contract which Trump essentially forced Boeing to sign on the project, they’re going to take a loss on it.
To what extent the delays are driven simply by the fact that this is a complex project, which should take years even in the best of circumstances, versus the wrangling between Boeing and the White House, and versus the fact that Boeing’s engineering culture and employee satisfaction have been torn apart by the bean-counters, I do not know.
Absolutely true. I’m not comfortable giving examples, but even relatively simple work (taking one galley unit out and putting in another one configured differently) can cost tens of thousands of dollars in certification fees alone.
The regulations and procedures are part of federal law. It’s an entire career for people to be the experts who can bridge the gap between the designers/customers and the regulators. It’s an incredibly nerdy intersection of engineering and law - and admittedly reams of paperwork - but it’s a heck of a lot of fun. At least, I think so. I’m paid rather well for it too
When I was first getting into business in the 90s, Jack Welch was commonly viewed as a genius, and I had to watch some videos of him. I disliked him immediately and saw through the bullshit. The fact people APPROVINGLY called him “Neutron Jack” because he saved money by firing people struck me as being so obviously short sighted that it was almost silly.
Now people praise Elon Musk for firing people. He fired most of Twitter, and now the company’s worth a fraction of what it used to be (though he may not care, he bought it to serve as his propaganda tool.)
I have a similar memory of Welch. I started my career in '89, and he was one of the icons of the U.S. business world at that time, frequently appearing in BusinessWeek and such, and generally celebrated for his strategies and philosophy.
Now, years later, while the consensus on his approach seems to be that he wasn’t the genius that he was believed to be at the time, too many U.S. businesses (as well as the current occupant of the White House) are following the exact same strategy.
I also remember when Jack Welch was celebrated for his leadership of General Electric. Today, it barely exists as a couple of tiny companies though at one point, it had all sorts of businesses (locomotives, appliances big and small, light bulbs, generators, medical equipment, etc.)
