I can’t say that I follow the aviation world but wtf is happening with Boeing? You read about the door blowing out and then the entire company seems to just fuck everything up in the space of what… a month?
—edit Interesting stuff, thanks for the replies!
I don’t follow it either, but read up a bit on it (partially from here https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/22/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever/) and the basic gist of it seems to be:
Boeing has been fucking up perpetually since shortly after merging with McDonnell-Douglas (a company that was apparently well-known in the industry for perpetual fuck-ups) in 1997, but political influence/interests/corporate capture has prevented it from actually failing the way that commercial companies that perpetually fuck up ought to.
What we see now is just another case of some of those fuck ups becoming visible again.
The US health care system has been in trouble for a long time, but the current nightmare starts with the deregulation of pharma. Pharma companies interbred with one another in a string of incestuous marriages that produced these dysfunctional behemoths that were far better at shifting research costs to governments and squeezing customers than they were at making drugs. The pharma giants gouged hospitals for their products, and in response, hospitals underwent their own cousin-fucking merger orgy, producing regional monopolies that were powerful enough to resist pharma’s price-hikes. But in growing large enough to resist pharma profiteering, the hospitals also became powerful enough to screw over insurers. Insurers then drained their own gene pool by combining with one another until most of us have three or fewer insurers we can sign up with – companies that are both big enough to refuse hospital price-hikes, and to hike premiums on us.
As someone who has worked in aerospace, and is also familiar with the saga of Boeing:
Boeing bought McDonnell in the mid 90s, but the McDD leadership essentially was able to work the situation such that they got inserted as the leadership and management of the now-merged company. They then proceeded to focus heavily on financial matters and stock price, with extremely predictable results.
To wit: there was actually a brand new plane in the works to replace the 737, but it was killed because leadership wanted to wring every possible penny out of the 737 design, despite the fact that the platform had reached its limits in several important and meaningful metrics. One of those metrics is “modern efficient engines can’t fit under the wings anymore”, which led to the (now obviously) ill-advised nacelle redesign and subsequent CG changes that necessitated MCAS if they wanted to maintain pilot type ratings without a new training/rating program (because those are expensive)… and then they made redundant safety features around that whole thing optional add-ons. For this door snafu, it was a matter of outsourcing work and then never doing the absolutely required work of fully integrating QC process and systems between the contractor and Boeing.
There are of course many more projects and issues within those projects - the 737 is just one of the most glaring current focuses (as in: the defects are CLEARLY design and manufacturing process defects).
Boeing has a disturbingly clear record of prioritizing profit over safety repeatedly in the last few decades. Things are just coming to a head now, because the lack of safety-oriented culture has truly come home to roost.
If you’re talking about the 757 that lost a nose wheel recently: it’s still under investigation, but at this point I think it will likely be chalked up to a one-off maintenance miss
Boeing seem to have dropped the ball pretty bad in recent years, and it’s now seemingly all coming to a head.
There were the 737 MAX MCAS crashes before that and some other quality issues that were less reported on with the control surfaces on the tail fins and the rear pressure bulk heads in the tail.
