Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections

Depends what you mean by industry.

If you mean the US big airliner industry, then Boeing is essentially it, so yes, And I presume it comes directly from the FAA delegating so much of their job to Boeing meaning Boeing had to inspect itself.

The you had the bad deal grand fathered between USA and EU : FAA inspect Boeing planes, EASA has to accept that certification without checking by themselves.

Airbus need to be certified by the EASA, they have much less if any delegated authority for that (though they do pay a lot into that, there is a difference between you need to pay into your regulator and you are your own regulator through your own employees). And then they need to separately be certified by Boeing.

This means the surface area for Boeing screwing around is much, much larger.

I don't doubt there are flaws if we looked into airbus assembly, but I highly doubt they would be systemic and part of a larger screwed process like what is being found at Boeing.

Yes, I mean obviously cargo ships are not well inspected, they lose power all the time and companies just hope it doesn't happen near anything important. The oil industry is like this, you've got bottom-of-the-barrel tankers (https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-...), spills continuing for decades (https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-f...), leaking methane wells permanently abandoned by "bankrupt" companies, etc.

You're definitely right that we're all paying extra attention to Boeing at the moment, but if you look around I think you'll find that there actually have been pretty recent famous failures in quite a few industries.

The owners/economy has demanded for things to become more efficient then last year every year for decades now.

If no massive technological breakthrough happens at some point the operation is as efficient as it can be while producing safe products but still you have to become more efficient for next quarterly/yearly results to keep the shareholders happy (if you can't find new clients to expand to). It is at that point that you start cutting corners and end up in situations like this.

This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean.

This is a Boeing specific problem. Boeing does things which no other company would dare doing, the failure on engineering the MAX is simply inexcusable. The same goes for the failure to correctly plug a door. These things don't happen by chance, they can only happen if you have a deep institutional rot in your organization. These things don't happen by chance, because the systems are designed in a way such that they can never happen. If they do happen the system has failed.

The entire airline industry knows that if you are lax on safety critical issues, there will be consequences. The consequences over the last few years have focused on Boeing, because it actually is a Boeing problem.

> Is this the kind of problem that is being uncovered because of the extra scrutiny that Boeing is currently under?

Yes.

> To put it another way, is this the kind of problem that is endemic across industry and we’re only finding out now because we are taking the time to look?

That is a completely different matter. The increased scrutiny on Boeing can simply be uncovering that the wheels have been coming off for a while as result of the stock-chasing policy they’ve been following for 25 years.

Previously it could be covered up because their primary regulator was too hands off but recent events have led to the FAA dedicating more resources to Boeing, and thus having a lot more opportunities to trip over malfeasance.

You are inverting cause and consequence. It's because Boeing has had so many failures that it has come under particular scrutiny. Failures which, from a statistical point of view, suggest that there may be a cause to look for. Other companies do not have as many (and as basic) problems.

According to the Netflix documentary on Boeing’s culture and engineering problems, those have been there for years. Falsifying quality reports had been going on regularly at Boeing. Quality engineers were harassed out of their positions, and this was all lead by the executives in charge.

This was the stuff that former quality engineer and whistleblower was in the middle of a five day deposition when he died to a gunshot wound. Allegedly “self-inflicted”.

This stuff isn’t being uncovered so much that there had been people loudly trying to tell this to the world for years now. What’s changed is that with the series of very public failures and flight safety, it’s become difficult to spin this away. In addition, the executives may be facing felonies — not for harassing whistleblowers, but in regards to flight safety.

It’s galling to hear them “celebrate” the whistleblower for the issues reported in this article. Boeing used to have a culture where quality was the top concern, ahead of profits. With three whistleblowers dead in the past several months, the optics is not looking good for Boeing. Maybe this is more spin.

Boeing used to have a safety culture and and engineering excellence culture. That changed over the past twenty to thirty years as leadership rotted the company and monetized that rot by choosing to skip safety and engineering in favor of profits.

Auto manufactures issue recalls fairly regularly. To me, this shows how easy it is to "miss" something, or let something questionable pass and hope for the best while knowing there is a mechanism in place to bring things back. Food industry also has recall notices frequently. Both of these industries have inspections not by the manufacturing company. Boeing weaseled their way into self inspection and certification. OF COURSE things went bad. I can think of no examples of self policing working, ever. They eye of Sauron is on Boeing, but it is of their own making.

Thanks to M&A's, Boeing is the industry (at least in the US). Then the bean counters figured out that they can outsource a lot of the manufacturing to '3rd parties' who pinky-promise they have a functional QA process.

When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!." All the airframe problems? Well, that's Spirit Aerosystems!

There should be a lot of Boeing execs in prison for manslaughter.

It is the result of the McDonnell Douglas Merger. McDonnell Douglas' focus on affordability and shareholder value replaced Boeing's passion for great planes.

It is kinda funny - Boeing bought the company but it was McDonnell Douglas executives who held the rulership of the merged company

Boeing's Downfall: A Tale of Corporate Culture, Greed, and Safety Compromises https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boeings-downfall-tale-corpora....

No, this is relatively new. This is the result of decades of the quest to "dismantle the regulatory state".

The book Flying Blind is a thorough account of how Boeing transformed from a respectable engineering shop to a business-school-jock-run FAA revolving door. Unabated capitalism sort of doesn't work when your planes are losing pieces mid-air and Airbus is eating your dinner.

Not surprisingly, there are solid arrows leading to GE and Jack Welch.

It is endemic across society. People confuse goals with results all the time, and accept that inspections are scheduled or that some box was checked in lieu of an "actual" inspection all the time. It is one of the major reasons that I am always very skeptical of the "just throw more regulations at it" solution to anything; generating paperwork and generating compliance are two very different things.

The fundamental error of bureaucracy is to conflate paperwork with reality.

The shocking thing is that as cynical as that may sound, things do in fact generally work. This suggests that the problem is less on the side of reality and more on the side of the paperwork and the bureaucracy. You see this one instance where the mismatch is problematic, but honestly there's immense mismatch everywhere, and generally, things work, because while in bureaucratic theory a mismatch between paperwork and reality is itself intrinsically a problem, in reality, it's only a problem if something goes wrong, and usually it doesn't.

If that doesn't make sense to you, consider that there is an evolutionary process in play. The particular ways in which mismatches cause real problems tend to get squeezed out of the system by the very failures they create, whereas all the harmless mismatches can persist. And yeah, eventually some of those "harmless" mismatches will get upgraded to "whoops less harmless than we thought", but they will be the exceptions, not the rule, and calling in advance which they will be is a lot harder than meets the eye.

There's kind of a variant of Gell-Mann Amnesia at work here; $YOU know that in the specific place you work, paperwork is a faint echo of reality, documentation is perpetually underinvested in, processes are constantly diverging from the paper processes, the field workers in charge of managing paperwork generally coevolve a particular "flavor" of compliance that passes initial checks but may have shall we say "complicated" relationships with reality... but $YOU think that all the other paperwork in the world is being done studiously by superhumans with unflagging concentration, impeccable ethics, and presumably, about 96 hours in their day. It seems to be built into the human condition somehow. Somehow, we are all bureaucrats at heart.

I work in a different sector. If we built planes it'd be raining bodies.

If you go looking you will find. And it's almost never pretty stuff. There is however a lot of paperwork filled in that says everything is fine.

A lot of people defending Boeing are simply using the Trump playbook. Which always goes as follows: Yes it's true -- Boeing may be bad -- but even Airbus is worse! It must be the entire industry that is doing this due to increased scrutiny on Boeing -- drain the airline industry swamp!

McDonnell-Douglas have no involvement with Airbus and Airbus still maintains an immaculate safety record the past few years relative to Boeing. Boeing alone was never the issue -- their partnership with McDD however has caused these issue perhaps the US gov should buy out their stake with a compulsory purchase order for the sake of national security.

Boeing is only a few disasters away from a complete loss in confidence in the company at this point.

It was all the fault of this one guy not doing his job. Also, it's just a coincidence that we fired his peers who were doing their jobs, and that the one who went to the feds was found dead in his car recently.

They remember that VW "it was a lone developer" play.

Exactly this. Could it be we told the safety inspector to do X inspections a day (which would be literally impossible) or be reprimanded? Nope, it's the person's fault for falsifying the inspection. No need to do a root cause analysis.

Regulators are generally blinder when it comes to huge organizations. Boeing is a huge DOD contractor. They have a direct line to people at the top of the US govt., just like other huge organizations.

It is a big fish, and it is hard to fry.

US govt. discussed shut downs during COVID with largest organizations in the US before they even occurred. Some knew they were coming before anything was announced.

It isn't some kind of conspiracy either, most governments will "care" more about the biggest contractors and businesses in their nation.

I will say it's having an impact on me personally. In the tech world, we work in 2 week Sprints and Sprints have Stories. Stories are Pointed efforts rated on level of effort that need to be completed within a single Sprints. Developers can only be allotted X number of Points per Sprint. If stories aren't done, then you usually need to reflect on why and improve, typically breaking down high pointed stories into smaller ones. The problem with many organizations face is that instead of leaving a Story open and answering the why, they'll simply close the problem Story and open a new one with the missed worked. This causes problems all over the place and snowballs if not addressed. In my situation, we also cancelled Retros so concerns weren't being raised further compounding things and finger pointing.

So what may have started as an over zealous developer with a well intentioned manager can become a trend leading to missed deadlines, cut corners and defective code making it to production.

I started to realize that I was no different than Boeing; that I was Boeing and that hasn't sat right with me. So for better or worse, I'm going to be more vocal about things.

Not sure what you mean: there have, to-date, been no repercussions for Boeing! They're getting away with all kinds of shit here!

In an ideal world, companies with a massive safety-related function should have Warhammer 40k gun servitors hovering over the execs in the event they cut corners on safety with orders to empty the clip!

Boeing are really a gov extension these days from what I can see.

I'm not a fan of industry "self-regulation."

Everyone keeps calling for it (as opposed to government regulation), but these stories keep popping up.

We need to have self-regulation success stories to be highlighted, if we want to go that way.

> I sincerely hope this whole Boeing debacle will be used as wake-up call for other large corporations

Why would it? Stock's still up from 2016, higher than Airbus has ever been and those who sold between 2018 and 2020 made absolute bank.

It's not hurt any current board or C-suite member to say nothing of those who actually taken the strategic decisions leading to the current fallout, I've not seen anyone seriously suggesting Stonecipher should be even mildly inconvenienced.

I'd hope it'd be a signal that we can't allow an industry to regulate itself

Accountability seems to be slower in the pharma industry, but it did come for Theranos and Purdue. There doesn't seem to be the same kind of safety issue, only horrific pricing issues and a complicated supply problem for certain kinds of medications.

Unless the whole management got enough punishment, it's only going to serve as incentive for them to keep the old way.

Like, put your feets into their shoes -- wouldn't you?

By saying enough punishment, I meant at least something like Enron -- Exec went to jail, regulation people got slashed and hacked, company re-structured as we cannot afford to lose it.

>it's time to nationalize Boeing

I seem to have lost the thread between that and

> The people who run the company should be the people who know how to build planes. It's in our economic and industrial and defense interest to have a well run, high quality aerospace manufacturer.

As a reminder, the leadership competitions in bureaucracy select for loyalty to the bureaucracy, not the bureaucracy's stated mission. Exceptions are rare and fleeting.

I'd say reversing the McDonnell Douglas merging via antitrust enforcement would be a more promising route given the issues the US government has with running anything competently.

If the FAA can't hire competent independent inspectors then just let the competitor do the inspection and tie the bonuses for inspectors to finding something wrong with the competition's planes.

Yeah, but actually, that nationalize part isn't something in trend in USA, isn't it ?

Gwynne Shotwell, engineer and COO of SpaceX maybe considered from the job of CEO of Boeing. It seems to me more USA-ish move than nationalize Boeing. Don't know witch one is the best for Boeing in the end.

>So raising prices tends to be limited to where demand is ineleastic or you have or can construct a monopoly or enclosure of some kind.

United States Medical

Anyway, outside of that, this typically is a good thing. $200 flat screen tvs make it easier to live life. I remember moving out of my parents house and being amazed at how affordable the minimum products were. Yes offbrand TV with 50 hz, yes you $2/lb meat with 30% fat, yes your shower curtain was a pain in the butt to install... But making 19k/yr, I could afford it.

Total nonsense. Do you not know what is happening in the airline industry right now?

Boeing is not facing a stagnant market, they have customers even now begging them to give them planes as soon as possible. What Boeing is trying to do is fill enormous demand, they actually could easily grow if they had the leadership capacity to do so.

Boeing is in the position of TBTF. The best can happen is a change of management but this doesn't solve anything. Good leadership does not grow like grass, and if the soil is corrupt none grows.

I’m not knowledgeable in this area, is there any precedent or legal method for the US government unilaterally shutting down a large publicly traded conglomerate (purely as a hypothetical)?

Not that I think they’d actually do it, I’m just curious if it’s even possible.

I imagine they could bog them down with lawsuits but Boeing has a deep war chest and it would take many years.