Think the auto industry on steroids. Don’t know if it will do any more success in the end but its almost a sure bet.
One of the effects of the 737 MAX may be an end to Boeing’s recent defense business strategy of wildly underbidding rivals on major contracts (to an extent that industry experts believe Boeing will lose money on the contracts). They’ve been a ble to pursue this strategy because the commercial business offsets the losses and allows them to establish a long term dominance in certain systems.
The thing is, the old 737NG line is now pretty much obsolete compared to Airbus’s A320NEO (which is why they developed the MAX in the first place). If that was all they had to offer in that market segment they’d have to sell it at a substantial discount for airlines to choose it over what Airbus has to offer. In hindsight they probably would have been better off developing a completely new plane to replace the 737, but now I don’t think they have much of a choice other that to get the MAX flying again in the short term. In the long term they should still design a new plane to replace it.
This. I saw the same thing at GE - a gradual concentration of managers in one ‘center of excellence’, far removed from their customers and engineering teams who had actual field experience. It was a disaster. Central control and management of distant teams and customers is a really bad idea that companies keep making over and over again.
Re: The Boeing HQ move. The new boss was from Chicago. Wanted to continue to live there. So they invented an excuse: Chicago is more centrally located to clients. Right. Did they look at a globe?
So a ton of management had to move to Chicago or quit. I assume that not all the experienced people moved. That had to hurt to corporate memory and the culture.
One of the all time great stupid moves in US corporate history.
That was a stupid reason to move HQ. Perhaps one of their products could have been used to ferry the CEO back and forth to Chicago weekly?
Boeing’s rocket recently failed to dock with ISS.Software glitch they said. NASA is currently wringing its hands over demanding an unmanned do-over, or moving straight to a crewed mission. If Boeing convinces them to do the later, we could end up with a bunch of dead astronauts on our hands, vs a $500 million or so charge for a repeat. Should Boeing mess this up, they will be in very deep trouble.
The KC46 tanker program is having troubles too (although military stuff always has problems it seems).
It’s a good sounding story, but the thing is, Boeing’s CEO at the time was Phil Condit. Condit was not from Chicago, he was from California, and had worked for Boeing for 36 years. At that point he’d already been the boss for five years. The company’s President - because he’d come over from McDonnell Douglas - was the luxuriously named Harry Stonecipher, who also wasn’t from Chicago and was not at that point new to Boeing.
ISTR the local stories seemed to center around King County not licking Boeing’s seam hard enough with a beneficial tax package after they tore up an ages-old horse track (Longacres) to build their new office complex there. It may have been just some cover-up excuse, but they claimed that Chicago was rolling over more convincingly for them. My memory may be faulty, though.
The other commercial crew capsule exploded during testing. I don’t think the general public realizes how devastating that was. Whereas the Boeing capsule’s failure would not have resulted in loss of life.
they probably should throw away a lot of the current software and start from scratch. Instead they will end up fixing stuff broken by other fixes.
Something to keep in mind is that the 737Max model had flown thousands of hours prior to the Lion Air crash. The two units that crashed both had single Angle Of Attack sensors, unlike the majority of units. Faulty data from the AOA sensors led to the crashes. Having a single AOA sensor was a cost saving measure, which was not taken by all aircraft buyers.
The 737Max is inherently unstable, but the software corrects for that. When the sensors fail, the software pushes the nose down very rapidly, which the pilots were unable to prevent. The software can be switched off, but the pilots were not aware that the software was the problem. Boeing had not told the airlines about the software, nor included how to deal with software errors in training.
So the Max is not a faulty aircraft which will fall out of the sky immediately. However, in certain situations, the plane will try to fly into the ground. The pilots can prevent this, if they know how. Insuring that all aircraft have two AOA sensors will be a big step toward making the Max a safer aircraft. Training pilots how to defeat the software will also be a big step.
But Boeing needs to engineer a new aircraft, with higher landing gear and a different wing, so that the new engines can be mounted under the wing, not in front of it.
Haven’t they already built hundreds of the 737 Max (with or without the two angle of attack sensors)? I think they continued production until recently, so they need to convince someone to buy them.
You would not think these would be hard anymore, but apparently we have not advanced as much past the 1960’s in space hardware as I would like to think. It is still a hard problem.
This was not how I understood the issue. The reality I understood was much worse. All the planes were fitted with dual sensors (left and right), but software sometimes struggled to deal with conflicting inputs, or just chose to use the less-favorable reading. The planes that crashed due to conflicting inputs were not fitted with an indicator that informed the crew of the conflict.
AAUI, the indicator light was a thirty thousand dollar option (not sure where I saw that number).
A quick search does not reveal how many boeing employees are in Chicago. IIRC it’s only in the hundreds. Big controversy at the time because it was one of those “look at all the jobs for the tax break” deals, and ended up being just a few hundred employees 'cause the then CEO wanted to live in Chicago and not Seattle. Obviously the Chicago weather vs Seattle was a big draw.
Boeing, being quite skilled at sucking on the government teat, has employees in all 50 states.
Here is the Boeing website breakdown of employees as well as orders. For employment, Illinois does not make it into the top 10, which means there are less than 3000 employees in headquarters out of 153,000 employees. http://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/
Here is a link to when Boeing opened and expected to have 400 employees: Boeing Begins World Headquarters Operations in Chicago - Sep 4, 2001
Those planes already have buyers. Boeing (and Airbus and every other commercial aircraft manufacturer) doesn’t just build planes and hope some airline decides to buy them. They take orders sometimes years in advance, so when a plane comes off the line they already know what airline it’s going to. Those planes they’ve built are to fulfill orders from airlines that have already agreed to buy them.
Holy fuck, have you even been to Chicago? What about Chicago weather would make it preferable to Seattle? I mean, in Chicago, people die in the spring when big chunks of ice fall from the tops of skyscrapers.
You’re both half right. The B737 MAX all have two AoA sensors (I suspect ALL B737s have had two AoA sensors from the very first model, but not sure), however the MCAS software only used one sensor for each flight. If the sensor it used failed then the MCAS would act on bad information. The use of AoA indicators and AoA disagree warnings in the flight deck may give clues to the flight crew about what is wrong but would not have done anything to fix the underlying problem of the MCAS relying on a single sensor.