It certainly was not. In addition to the points cited above by @OttoDaFe and @kenobi_65, back in the days when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas were separate companies, I think the general sense in the industry was that Boeing was where you went for quality. MD’s reputation got even worse after so many issues and accidents with the DC-10 that I thought the whole fleet might be permanently grounded. When Air Canada was looking for a wide-body tri-jet, they were praised by industry observers for their diligence in ruling out the DC-10 and opting for the Lockheed L-1011 instead.
A few decades later, the top brass at Boeing thought it would be a fine idea to buy the company that designed and built the DC-10…
As a longtime Seattle resident before my relocation to Europe, I can confirm this was certainly the local perception. We had hometown pride in Boeing’s culture of engineering and manufacturing quality, and we were smug when the merger with MD was announced; we knew MD was subpar and we assumed Boeing would “fix” them. But then we observed with growing dismay as the opposite happened, as MD leadership began infiltrating Boeing’s upper ranks and the language coming out of the company gradually morphed from focusing on product quality to an emphasis on stock price and financial performance. The decay was slow, but it was unmistakable. When the business office moved from Seattle to Chicago (prior to its latest relocation to Virginia), we knew the transformation was complete, and the old Boeing was dead.
I was flying between Toronto and Vancouver on a Canadian Airlines DC-10 at about that time. Such incidents were often in the news. Anyway, on this flight, some ceiling ventilator turned on while we were still on the ground, and a bunch of crud fell out.
Passengers became unnerved (I guess we all had been watching the news), and the flight was delayed while a mechanic checked it out. Turned out that the ventilator had not been turned on in a while, and the crud was nothing more than dust that had collected on the vent grill. Reassuring, but I noticed that we all paid strict attention to the safety briefing before we took off.
We got to our destination safely, in case you were wondering.
Yes, and it assumes that all flights are on planes with equal risk of mechanical failure, operate in equal atmospheric conditions, and are managed by equally capable pilots and air traffic controllers.
The entire point of the concept of probability is to be able to generate predictions when you only have imperfect information. If you know a coin’s pre-toss orientation and the height and spin rate of the toss, you can predict a heads or tails result with better than 50% accuracy. This does not mean that declaring (without such detailed info) that a coin has a 50% chance of landing on tails is a hugely flawed piece of reasoning; likewise, it is not flawed reasoning to make probabilistic estimates of transportation safety based on broad averages. If we insist on perfect information before making predictions or comparisons, then we will never be able to make those predictions/comparisons.
Having said that, suppose for the sake of discussion that you are indeed far more safety-conscious than the average driver. I cited the odds of death (based on broad averages) for a 20-mile round trip drive to/from the airport as 1 in 1.8M, whereas the odds of dying on a Boeing flight was cited at 1 in 13.4M. You’d have to cut your driving risk down from the national average by a factor of 7.4 to match the risk profile of a Boeing flight. Just how much safer than the average driver do you believe you are?
Let’s remember. Boeing did not buy Douglas. They bought McDonnell-Douglas. That difference is huge.
McDonnell-Douglas was two companies that had legally merged a long time before, but had never functionally combined. McDonnell made fighters and space stuff for the government and was doing pretty darn well at soaking the Feds. Douglas made airliners and military airlifters but by that time had a small portfolio of largely obsolete products. And had shrunk below critical mass of revenue to be able to afford to develop any all-new ones.
Meantime, then-Boeing had rather few government contracts and no prospects for new DOD or NASA work. So Boeing management had an idea. Buy the combined entity, get all that sweet sweet McDonnell DoD / NASA largesse, and quietly kill Douglas, their only domestic competitor at the time. Masterstroke. It really was.
They utterly underestimated how much better the MBAs at McDonnell (not so much Douglas) were at playing corporate internecine warfare than were the engineering-based managers at Boeing. Soon McDonnell managers held all the key positions and the rest is history.
The attempted soaking of DoD / NASA continues apace and Boeing still makes airliners sans any US-based competition.