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Boeing: internal emails reveal chaos and incompetence at 737 Max factory
[On] Thursday hundreds of pages of internal messages were delivered to congressional investigators in which Boeing executives mocked their regulator, joked about safety and said the Max had been "designed by clowns".
Shocking as the emails are, they will come as no surprise to those following the Boeing story. Last month Edward Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing's 737 factory in Renton, Washington, told Congress he had witnessed "chaos" at the factory where the Max was built and had warned management that "Boeing was prioritizing production speed over quality and safety". His warnings were ignored.
Boeing Mocked Lion Air Calls for More 737 Max Training Before Crash
Indonesia's Lion Air considered putting its pilots through simulator training before flying the Boeing Co. 737 Max but abandoned the idea after the planemaker convinced them in 2017 it was unnecessary, according to people familiar with the matter and internal company communications.
The next year, 189 people died when a Lion Air 737 Max plunged into the Java Sea, a disaster blamed in part on inadequate training and the crew's unfamiliarity with a new flight-control feature on the Max that malfunctioned.
[...] "Now friggin Lion Air might need a sim to fly the MAX, and maybe because of their own stupidity. I'm scrambling trying to figure out how to unscrew this now! idiots," one Boeing employee wrote in June 2017 text messages obtained by the company and released by the House committee.
In response, a Boeing colleague replied: "WHAT THE F%$&!!!! But their sister airline is already flying it!" That was an apparent reference to Malindo Air, the Malaysian-based carrier that was the first to fly the Max commercially.
Boeing's biggest supplier lays off 2,800 workers because of 737 Max production suspension
Boeing's largest supplier is laying off a significant number of its employees because of the 737 Max production suspension.
Spirit AeroSystems (SPR), which makes fuselages for the Max as well as other items for Boeing, announced Friday that it is furloughing approximately 2,800 workers. Shares of the Wichita, Kansas-based company fell more than 1% in trading.
"The difficult decision announced today is a necessary step given the uncertainty related to both the timing for resuming 737 Max production and the overall production levels that can be expected following the production suspension," Spirit AeroSystems CEO Tom Gentile said in a press release.
Woodward to Combine With Hexcel in All-Stock Transaction
Woodward Inc. will combine its operations with Hexcel Corp. in an all-stock transaction that gives it a controlling stake in the merged entity, creating one of the world's biggest aerospace and defense suppliers.
The transaction, which the suppliers to Boeing Co. are billing as a merger of equals, will create a company named Woodward Hexcel with annual revenue of more than $5 billion. While suppliers are hurting because of Boeing's travails following the crash of two 737 Maxes, executives said Sunday they're driven by the pursuit for more-efficient engines over the next 20 years, not the 737 Max issues.
Previously: a lot
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:56AM (17 children)
...maybe someone can find it (it was in the bbc coverage), but something along the lines of
"the problem is that no one in the senior management understands the technical stuff, so we end up in a mess"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday January 15 2020, @12:56PM (12 children)
Boeing faces fine for 737 Max plane 'designed by clowns' [bbc.com]
Congress: Well congratulations, you got yourself caught. Now what's the next step of your master plan?
Boeing: Crashing this plane — with no survivors!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 15 2020, @01:43PM (4 children)
If I recall correctly, their next step was to fire everyone who "used unprofessional language" which is a great way to rid yourself of every actual engineer on staff and end up with an amazingly competent team of powerpoint experts.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Wednesday January 15 2020, @01:51PM (3 children)
The next step is stop designing planes saving a lot of lives in the process.
(Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 15 2020, @01:56PM (2 children)
No, it's definitely to have Boeing-797-design-TOPSECRET-final(FINAL)-FINAL.ppt shipped to the factory floor for fabrication
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Wednesday January 15 2020, @02:11PM (1 child)
Wait, I thought I saw "Copy of Copy of Boeing-797-design-TOPSECRET-final(FINAL)-FINAL.ppt" just last week!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @02:29AM
Nah, that was 217 revisions ago. Hardly anything's the same. The latest model contains 4528 miles of green tape.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:15PM
Boeing could adopt a page from AT&T and try to ensure there are survivors, and then harvest their vital organs. Require airlines to have a clause in the ticket agreement similar to AT&T's clause that allows harvesting the vital organs of the ticket holder and their family members, unless their cable tv provider has already gotten them first.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:34PM (1 child)
Holy hell - this is going to be bad.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:39PM
Boeing is probably the single most well connected company in congress. Nothing's going to happen to them except some token executive shuffling.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:03PM (3 children)
Just for the record: I do NOT work for Boeing!
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:06PM
I was wondering when someone would add the "supervised by monkeys". If they said "supervised by apes" it would not be an insult, since humans are apes.
Well done, wrapping it in a joke that got a chuckle from me.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:09AM (1 child)
And that's an important point, this stuff sounds bad, but has anyone not experienced something similar, whatever their employer may be? Every company will cut corners and whatnot at some point or other, it's just that it's usually not discovered. It's the same thing with investigations into acrimonious police cases which always turns up assorted mistakes, not necessarily because this one was especially badly handled but because everything that's done inevitably ends up with mistakes somewhere along the line once you look at it hard enough.
Not defending Boeing, just pointing out that most people will have experienced a "patch the leaky boat", "piss poor design", "supervised by monkeys", and similar moment one or more times in their career, it's just that it usually works out OK, or at least OK enough to go unnoticed.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday January 16 2020, @06:31AM
True, but if Epson does it their printer gets some bad reviews; if Boeing does it a lot of people die.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:17PM
A problem I have with these kind of things is that it is really easy to take out of context. I bet you can find some version of your quote in employee emails from almost any company that designs and builds things. The worker bees bitch about management and how incompetent they are. It makes great headlines, but it doesn't tell you whether there were real issues or not. There's always that one person who shits on everything, or predicts doom and gloom if things aren't done his way. Is that the case here, or was there systematic problems and concerns that were ignored. This is why it takes a while to do these investigations.
The second one says they mocked calls for more trainers. The quote says "and maybe because of their own stupidity". What does that mean? In some ways it sounds like Lion Air might have had what they needed, then didn't due to some issue on their side. For instance, let's say the trainers were delivered as software and Lion Air accidentally threw them away or deleted them off their system, then I can see how they might get mocked in an internal email for messing up. In this case I would want to know were they denied trainers when asked, and why did they fly them if they felt they needed trainers but didn't have them. Again, that quote is very nice and juicy and makes great press, but it tells you nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @10:41AM (2 children)
The real problem is no one is senior management risks ending up in prison even if they're responsible for hundreds or thousands of people dying.
If such a risk is significant, you'd see attitudes change. The engineers who understand tech AND also have the same risk or greater will start speaking up. They'll start saying stuff like "Boss, can you send me an email confirming your views that, we should save money and risk the plane crashing if this one sensor fails? These sort of sensors have been known to fail."
Boss, "Wait, you grossly misheard me, I said we should rely on more than one sensor, Boeing places a high importance on safety!".
But why should there be any change, if all that happens is nobody of significance ends up in prison, the company pays some fines, the CEO gets a 60 million dollar parachute while keeping the rest of his millions.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/19/why-boeing-and-its-executives-should-be-prosecuted-for-manslaughter/ [counterpunch.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:24PM (1 child)
Ha ha ha!
Next email will be - Boss, I need this job, I made a mistake, there's no problems anywhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @07:48AM
Currently the problem is the risk of prison is low even for the normal grunts.