The year: 1997. Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas. The finance and marketing wizards at McDonnell Douglas immediately ambush the engineers and take over the Boeing corporation.
What happened next?
First, the corporate headquarters are moved to Chicago. Then, the financial wizards who were running the company decided to build a new airplane, first known as the 7E7 and later as the 787 or Dreamliner.
A Product Development Fiasco
Boeing began work on the 787 in 2003. The first aircraft were sold to All Nippon Airways and scheduled for delivery in 2008.
Boeing took a radically different approach in designing and building the 787. In the Wikipedia article about the 787 it says:
The directors on Boeing's board, Harry Stonecipher (Boeing's President and CEO) and John McDonnell issued an ultimatum to “develop the plane for less than 40 percent of what the 777 had cost to develop 13 years earlier, and build each plane out of the gate for less than 60 percent of the 777’s unit costs in 2003", and approved a development budget estimated at US$7 billion as Boeing management claimed that they would “require subcontractors to foot the majority of costs.”
Instead of designing and building the aircraft in Seattle, the company spread out the design and engineering tasks around the world. The company opened a new manufacturing facility in South Carolina that would be used by subcontractors to build major components of the 787. Boeing executives wanted to take advantage of South Carolina’s status as a “right to work” state that is hostile to labor unions. That would reduce costs, the financial people reasoned.
I was reading The Wall Street Journal regularly around this time (pre-Murdoch). I followed the story. I know it wasn’t going to end well.
Over the course of the next several years, the launch of the Dreamliner was repeatedly delayed. The first aircraft were too heavy. Some simply had to be scrapped. Subcontractors had difficulty building components—in some cases because they didn’t have the engineering expertise to design them. The Wikipedia article about the Dreamliner is an amazing story about problems, delays and, and costly mismanagement.
The first Dreamliner was delivered in September of 2011, four years after it was scheduled to be flying. The program reportedly cost Boeing $32 billion. The earliest aircraft were sold at a loss of $45 million per aircraft. Some financial analysts believe that that Boeing will never make a profit selling the aircraft.
A Bigger Disaster: The 737 MAX
The Boeing 737 is arguably the most successful passenger airliner ever built. The first 737 took flight in 1967 and new models and variations on the airplane have been being built and sold continuously ever since. Boeing has built and sold nearly 12,000 airliners based on the original design.
In 2006, with the new finance-oriented executives in place, Boeing considered creating a brand new airplane to compete with the newly-launched Airbus 320. However, Boeing was already bogged down in the Dreamliner project. So the decision was made to do another variation on the old 737 design. The new aircraft would be longer and most significantly, it would have new, more efficient engines.
The new engines posed an engineering problem, though. They were too large. The mountings for the engines had to be redesigned and the resulting changes in their weight and location changed the flight characteristics of the airplane. The 737 MAX had a tendency, in certain conditions, to allow the nose of the airplane to go up and possibly stall.
Stalling is a bad thing in any vehicle. Stall out a car on a busy street, and you become a dangerous traffic hazard. Stalling out an airplane is a lot worse. It can be fatal.
So the engineers at the new Boeing company designed a sort of stall prevention system (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) into the airplane. If a sensor on the outside of the airplane detected possible stalling conditions, the airliner would automatically point the nose of the plane down and power up the engines—steps that would prevent a stall.
In order to sell the airplane and compete with Airbus, Boeing told customers that the 737 was just like all the other 737s. Pilots wouldn’t need any training. And Boeing didn’t explain how the automatic stall prevention system worked, because, they told their customers, the airliner was just like all the other 737s.
The Crashes
Lion Air flight 610 crashed on October 29, 2018 killing 189 people on board. Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed on March 10, 2019 killing 157 people. The Boeing 737 MAX was grounded for 20 months while investigators determined that the automatic system Boeing had built into the aircraft was significantly involved in causing the crashes. Wikipedia says that “After being charged with fraud in connection of both crashes of the 737 MAX, Boeing settled by paying over $2.5 billion in penalties and compensation: a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, $1.77 billion in damages to airline customers, and $500 million to a fund for the families of crash victims.
Would these crashes have occurred if the old engineers were still running Boeing? No, I don’t think so.
The Suicide
This is the story that re-focused my attention on Boeing recently.
There was this guy, John Barnett, who worked as a quality inspector for Boeing. He was, according to everyone involved, a pain in the rear end for Boeing. He was a quality control guy, and he kept finding and reporting problems. In other words, he kept doing his job.
He took a lot of heat for being the kind of person that he was. The company was pretty upset with him. He was, perhaps, a little paranoid. He actually told his family that if they ever found that he has “committed suicide” that it would not be true.
On March 9, 2024, Barnett was found dead in his truck, apparently having committed suicide.
Here’s one account of his story. There are many more online.
I’m not a big fan or believer in conspiracy theories. But this . . . ? Wow.
Anon.
Ridge