I predict that the decline and possible fall of Boeing won’t be arrested by this too little too late firing:
Aviation industry analysts said the sudden dismissal of Dennis Muilenburg, who had worked for Boeing for more than three decades, was a desperate attempt by the company to win back the trust of regulators and the public after crashes of its 737 Max aircraft led to the deaths of 346 people and accusations that Boeing had misled regulators and its customers.
This firing comes after news that recent testing of 737 pilots in MAX simulators showed that more than half of them responded to problems with the wrong procedures, even though they all got themselves out of trouble.
If you want to read a damning assessment of Boeing’s strategy around trying to make the 737 big enough to occupy the lower end of the market that the 757 used to occupy, Patrick Smith’s analysis is well worth a read. In short, Boeing missed the boat by not creating a 757 replacement (the never built 797), and the Airbus A321 is a better choice for the around 200 seat market for carriers that aren’t wedded to the 737 platform. The 50+ year-old 737 design is too loud, too uncomfortable, and doesn’t have the performance for the niche that Boeing is trying to satisfy with the MAX.
In addition to all the practical issues that dog the 737’s latest stretch, I think the real question is whether travelers in the US will even fly in the damn thing. My guess is that it will be actively avoided, and any incident, no matter how small, will be front page news. The 737 MAX is the Comet of US aviation.
trollhattan
He’s a bean counter, not an “airplane guy” to use the old Boeing vernacular. IMO only an airplane guy can save the place. If this is a temporary appointment until they bring in a long-term CEO, fine. If not, they’ve probably made a fatal decision.
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan: The removal of Boeing’s HQ from Seattle to Chicago was an indicator; the MBA scum didn’t want to be in Seattle. Where they’d be pestered by actual fucking aviation engineers, who put quality ahead of profit.
John Revolta
@trollhattan: See, that’s old-fashioned thinking. You don’t need so-called “specialists” to run a business! Every business is the same! Just bring in a squad of hard-chargin’ MBAs and the money will come rollin’ in!!
Martin
I think Boeing is truly fucked. They are an outstanding analogue manufacturing company in an increasingly digital systems world. As good at they are at the former, they are roughly as bad at the latter, and that’s ingrained in their culture.
Companies seem to only be able to make cultural changes like this under severe crisis – bankruptcy without bailout levels of crisis – and even then, it requires a board that will steer a reinvention rather than constant cost-cutting and efforts to return to glory.
Boeings problem is twofold – 1) too many finance guys on the board, and an odd number of biotech/medical guys. 2) Boeing can count on being bailed out, so they don’t really need to change. In fact, they’ll be incentivized to not change because government contracting demands it, and because Boeing doesn’t have the clout to change the airline industry in the manner that it needs to change, but the federal government won’t tolerate the US not having a domestic aircraft manufacturer. So, I think we’re just going to subsidize their ineptness.
Aleta
Evangelicals feeling threatened and symbolically offing each other. What took the media so long to fully report on their lost business income if they opposed Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/12/23/christianity-today-called-trumps-impeachment-why-it-could-cost-magazine/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_evaneglicals-130pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
John Revolta
@Martin: So basically, Too Big To Fail, yeah?
CaseyL
@Villago Delenda Est: Exactly right. Boeing “took over” McDonnell Douglas, but it worked out the opposite way, with MD hollowing out the Boeing execs and replacing them with Chicago Business-trained MBAs.
Destroying the unions, outsourcing manufacture, and evading oversight was the very opposite of the old Boeing culture, and look where it got them.
CaseyL
@Villago Delenda Est: Exactly right. Boeing “took over” McDonnell Douglas, but it worked out the opposite way, with MD hollowing out the Boeing execs and replacing them with Chicago Business-trained MBAs.
Destroying the unions, outsourcing manufacture, and evading oversight was the very opposite of the old Boeing culture, and look where it got them.
dimmsdale
Thanks for the link to Patrick’s page; I’d just mention that Naked Capitalism has been tracking the MAX debacle from a corporate systems/compensation perspective and their post today is well worth a read, including the comments. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/12/muilenburg-forced-out-of-boeing-but-737-max-no-closer-to-flying-what-happens-if-it-stays-grounded.html
We seem to have passed into an era in which current corporate management contorts their companies into whatever shape necessary to jack up management compensation (often stock-price-based), and the specter of Boeing destroying its own reputation as a safety-first aerospace manufacturer in order to line the pockets of an elite few, and thereby destroy its own business as well, would be just desserts, if it weren’t for all the lost jobs and lives involved. The FAA, perpetually starved for funds, has offloaded much of its key regulatory responsibility to Boeing itself and destroyed its own reputation internationally as a result.
This is rampant Republicanism, and this sort of corporate maggotry needs to be slapped down, and hard.
Yutsano
@Martin: This is just the commercial aviation division. Boeing still makes a nice killing in the weapons department. The company won’t totally die but oh man does commercial aviation need a massive overhaul.
Another Scott
The Patrick piece is good, but leaves out something important. The airlines determine what planes get developed and built. Southwest only flies 737s and they wanted a new 737, not a new 757. So Boeing tried to make and keep them happy.
Of course, Boeing deserves a lot of blame for not telling Southwest that what they wanted couldn’t be done. But Southwest and the other airlines demanding the plane deserve blame too. The mania for cutting costs has real implications for safety, security, and the health of the economy. People lost their lives because of excessive cost cutting and that needs to be recognized and fixed.
Cheers,
Scott.
Robert Sneddon
The 737MAX is actually a quite decent aircraft with a number of performance and quality improvements compared to its predecessors — it actually flies faster burning less fuel per kilometre due to an improved wing profile meaning less time gate to gate, for example. The problem is the 737MAX is certificated and sold as a 737 with a few slight tiny little insignificant differences so it can be treated as the same as earlier designs in terms of crewing, maintenance and ground operations, something demanded by a number of big customers, mainly the short-haul low-fare specialists like South West Airlines, Ryanair and the like.
The problem is that MCAS was was added to this otherwise-decent aircraft design to make it feel nearly like its predecessors in a single very tight corner of its performance envelope (a power climb into a stall) and thus allow pilots qualified on the earlier versions to fly it without extra training to cover this part of the envelope. Without MCAS the big customers were reluctant to buy the MAX and there was an alternative, the Airbus A321neo which ticked most of the MAX’s buttons in terms of modernity, fuel economy etc. but it wasn’t a 737.
South West Airlines only flies 737s, it’s got well over a thousand pilots and First Officers who can fly any 737 in their fleet. Any given flight crewmember can be rostered to fly any of their planes in the left seat or the right seat at short notice, a big cost saving. Having to train all those people so they can also specifically fly the MAX or have to rejig the crew rostering system so only MAX-qualified pilots would be rostered to fly the MAX, well that wasn’t going to happen and Boeing knew it hence the sticking-plaster of the MCAS which was ill-conceived, poorly specced out and badly implemented.
My guess is that the MAX will eventually be recertificated as a new airframe with no MCAS, Boeing will discount the new planes and/or pay for the retraining of a lot of pilots to get certified to fly the MAX and it will fly again in revenue service. Yes, it will cost Boeing billions (tens of billions perhaps) and yes, I’d be happy to fly as a passenger in a MAX under those circumstances.
Bill Arnold
@Aleta:
The US Christian right is religious syncretism, an unholy (literally!) blending of Christian canons and the Republican party canon. Some might call aspects of it an abomination.
J R in WV
This whole 737MAX drama is a serious object lesson in aircraft design and corporate governance. You would have thought that after all the aircraft design lessons learned upon the deaths of paying passengers that lesson would have been well and truly learned already, but NOT SO!
Same for corporate governance. We have a ton of proxy statements to vote every year, we I to vote on the members of the boards of every company we own a little stake in via stock equity investments. There is no resume for those potential board members in the proxy statements, just a name, some with DR. or PhD along with the name.
It is fine for MBAs and financiers to be part of the management of financial corporations, like large banks and brokerage firms. But corporations making all their profits from technical accomplishments, like Boeing, should at most have 1 or 2 finance folks on the board, with all the decision making power in the hands of scientists and engineers. Not accountants. Look where that took Boeing!!
Another Scott
@Robert Sneddon: My understanding is that MCAS is essential because the plane is aerodynamically unbalanced because the engines are too far forward (necessary for the larger-diameter engines to have 18″ of clearance to the runway). Something needs to automatically counteract the tendency of the plane to pitch up too much (and stall). If it we’re just a matter of trimming the wing design or something, surely the would have done that (rather than have an automated solution).
I would expect them to eventually certify it with MCAS, but with extra sensors and extra redundency and extra training…
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@John Revolta:
Just bring in a squad of hard-chargin’ MBAs and the money will come rollin’ in!!
Let me finish that for you.
Just bring in a squad of hard-chargin’ MBAs and the money will come rollin’ in, as the workers and quality go rolling out!!
Procopius
@trollhattan: I remember (vaguely) back in the ’60s, there were rumblings in the Detroit auto community over the trend to putting marketing or finance guys in the CEO seat instead of production guys. Maybe it was later than that, but surely by the ’70s. I’m thinking guys like “Engine Charlie” Wilson (production) at GM and Robert McNamara (beancounter) at Ford, but it was seen in every industry. I think that has a lot to do with the decline of US industry. Of course the US auto community is a special case of stupid.
dimmsdale
@Another Scott: The whole point of the automated MCAS system (as I understand it) was to automatically counter the slight tendency of the MAX to pitch slightly nose-up under certain circumstances; the plane was perfectly flyable manually without MCAS but would have required classroom training, simulator time, and an additional rating for pilots–an expensive process that neither airlines nor Boeing wanted to spend the money on. Boeing f*cked up the execution, that’s all, entirely out of penny-pinching on safety to fatten the top executives’ wallets. And the FAA f*cked up the certification; Boeing had long wanted to bring certification in-house rather than have the FAA do it, and the FAA, chronically short of funds for inspectors, went along with it, so Boeing’s in-house “certifiers” signed off on MCAS when they shouldn’t have.
Here’s a really useful Youtube channel by an airline pilot certified to fly the MAX and other airliner types; he breaks the stuff down so it’s understandable and I check back with him a lot; there’s an update on the Muilenberg firing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mogATt42tA4
Another Scott
@dimmsdale:
Thanks for the pointer. This long video on the 737 Max and MCAS was very helpful to me.
Cheers,
Scott.