Yes, but Boeing (aka McDonald-Douglas) really wants to get rid of the unions in the Seattle area plants.
Prior to the 1997 purchase of MD by Boeing, Boeing’s culture was very engineering focused. When MD came on, a large chunk of MD management were retained and soon after Boeing moved it’s official headquarters from Seattle to Chicago (where the MD headquarters were). Since then, a lot of the business decisions seem to have been more driven by management than engineering.
Pre-merger, MDD HQ was St. Louis, Missouri. The public theory behind the move was that the overall org needed a more central HQ (BCAG was primarily in Seattle, but there was still a significant presence in Texas and Wichita plus the legacy Rockwell sites).
The cynical explanations are/were that Boeing had to call Washington states’s bluff for negotiating leverage (The MDD commercial stuff in California was a dead end). My pet theory is that more states == more Congressional representation.
Which is too bad since arguably 787 is a more advanced aircraft, while A350 is more conservative. Too bad Boeing management is bent on screwing Boeing engineers and their achievements.
Yes. That's on the civil side. On the defense & space side, BDS is working hard to shut down the storied ex-McDonnell Douglas Huntington Beach, CA facility and move to FL, Huntsville AL, and other LCOL sites. It's now as if certain iconic HB buildings never existed - they've already been razed.
So 787s are assembled at both Seattle, WA, and North Charleston, SC, plants, but it is the South Carolina-produced planes that seem to be drawing complaints:
> Some of the airlines buying 787 Dreamliners built at Boeing Co.’s North Charleston campus are complaining about “unacceptable” production mistakes and poor quality, and analysts say the criticism points to issues deep within the aerospace giant’s culture.
Supposedly some airlines refuse to take delivery of airplanes assembled in SC:
> Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries.
Thanks for the links! One would have thought that after the 737 Max debacle, Boeing would do anything possible to at least retain the trust of their customers for the 787. Instead, they seem to be eager to set up another debacle with the 787...
Presumably because you can buy a Boeing today where you would have to wait 5+ years for an Airbus.
Of course if they keep sliding then you might as well buy a Chinese or Russian aircraft instead of Boeing if you want something now and don't care about quality.
The 737 has succumbed to the same disease as software. What originally was a successful well engineered product gets loaded with extra bells and whistles until it collapses under its own weight. This process is accelerated with MBA manager.
Mother Nature is judge, jury and executioner when it comes to abuse of aerodynamics. MBAs don't get the message until there's smoking wrecks.
Passengers may decide to refuse flights on 737s. There's lots of parked aircraft at the moment and will be until the pandemic is well past. It might be a couple years.
That's a broad brush you get there. There have been detailed investigations that show that specific actions by specific people in Boeing and the FAA led to a single point of failure, from which it is nearly impossible to recover, being permitted to get into production, in a passenger aircraft. On top of that, after one of those planes crashed in a way that is attributable to this gross defect, the pilots were blamed by Boeing, to deflect from having to fix this defect.
So, while it may come down to that you can't run an airplane maker like a soft drink company, there is a lot of detailed information about why. No need to generalize.
In fact there are confounding details that suggest that "MBA manager" is the wrong generalization. Dennis Mullenberg, who was the CEO fired due to the 737 fiasco, came up through Boeing engineering, after joining as an intern in the 1980s.
He was replaced by David Calhoun, a director at Boeing, who came up through GE and Blackstone and was the co-author of a generic seeming self-congratulatory business book called "How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You're In" That sure makes it seem like he could sell Coke on Tuesday and airliners on Thursday.
Maybe the real answer is that the FAA was lulled into complacency, and an engineer who should have been minding the shop wasn't.
"So, Seattle finds itself where Pittsburgh was in the 1970s and Detroit in the 1960s. The city is about to lose a central part of its industrial base. Today, Pittsburgh, the "Steel City," has no steel plants at all." ... "Seattle will finally become fully post-industrial in the third decade of the third millennium."
Yeah the Everett plant only employees 30k according to the Boeing site which is 1% of Seattle's population even if the whole plant went away. It'd hurt to lose for sure but I doubt it will be disastrous the same way it was when steel and cars left other cities.
That feels like a scare piece. It’s a big leap to go from moving production of one type of plane to the other facility where that plane is produced...all the way to assuming they are shutting down everything.
I live in SC and worked for a company in Seattle when the Charleston plant opened. From day one this type of scare tactic talk has been circulated. My cab driver from the airport told me “they are moving everything to South Carolina! Can you believe that!?”
The plan is if the 787 ramp up in SC goes well the 777x will be the next to get moved, and 767 will end its run in Everett and then the lights turned off.
It's hard to believe that the current Boeing leadership will turn things around with even less focus on quality and talented workers. Feels like they should be moving back towards engineering driven approaches.
> While Boeing has nurtured generations of aerospace professionals in the Seattle area, there was no comparable work force in South Carolina. Instead, managers had to recruit from technical colleges in Tulsa, Okla., and Atlanta.
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.
> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.
On one hand, it must be a nightmare right now for anyone in the airline industry (from suppliers to operators etc). On the other hand, it's the perfect time to relocate factories and make changes to processes and try new technologies.
I am not so sure. What about funding? Any move like that is going to cost a huge amount and this is risky proposition at a time when it is not exactly known what the future of the industry is going to be.
There is definately that. I wonder if it helps though: if you're raising/borrowing/getting given 10bn to stay open, how hard is it to get another 1bn for plant re-arrangement or new software? It's all part of your efficiency savings, return to profitability plan right?
To each their own, but the 737 NG (aka the models before the Max), the 747-400 / 747-8, and the 787 all have a lower number of fatal crashes per million flights than the Airbus A320 family and the A330.
That's certainly true, but the overall stats are all over the shop (http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm). And many of the more modern models have never had fatal crashes, making this kind of comparison impossible.
These are all true statistics. I’d be curious to see an academic analysis on QC, flight hours, maintenance routines/quality of maintenance, and other factors that might play into why those aircraft have better safety ratings than competitors. It might be interesting to see if Boeing QC issues off the assembly line lead to better maintenance routines, which in turn results in safer overall operation. A result like that doesn’t imply that the manufacturer, Boeing, is the most influential component to safety.
Isn't the North Charleston plant the one riddled with serious QC issues, and the one Qatar airways refused to take deliveries from?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
Yes, but Boeing (aka McDonald-Douglas) really wants to get rid of the unions in the Seattle area plants.
Prior to the 1997 purchase of MD by Boeing, Boeing’s culture was very engineering focused. When MD came on, a large chunk of MD management were retained and soon after Boeing moved it’s official headquarters from Seattle to Chicago (where the MD headquarters were). Since then, a lot of the business decisions seem to have been more driven by management than engineering.
Pre-merger, MDD HQ was St. Louis, Missouri. The public theory behind the move was that the overall org needed a more central HQ (BCAG was primarily in Seattle, but there was still a significant presence in Texas and Wichita plus the legacy Rockwell sites).
The cynical explanations are/were that Boeing had to call Washington states’s bluff for negotiating leverage (The MDD commercial stuff in California was a dead end). My pet theory is that more states == more Congressional representation.
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>"...Boeing (aka McDonald-Douglas)..."
Boeing subsumed McDonnell Douglas, not a McDonald's franchise, and did so under pressure from members of the Clinton administration.
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From that simplified model, it sounds like the focus on functions than value, and constant negotiation with unions, helped Boeing survive.
I wonder what makes it possible for said management to continue union busting if literally the opposite is proven to work...
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The move to Chicago was more about Condit escaping his wife.
That sound you hear is corks popping in Airbus’s A350 sales office
Which is too bad since arguably 787 is a more advanced aircraft, while A350 is more conservative. Too bad Boeing management is bent on screwing Boeing engineers and their achievements.
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Yes. That's on the civil side. On the defense & space side, BDS is working hard to shut down the storied ex-McDonnell Douglas Huntington Beach, CA facility and move to FL, Huntsville AL, and other LCOL sites. It's now as if certain iconic HB buildings never existed - they've already been razed.
Acronym expansions for those not-in-the-know:
∙ BDS = "Boeing Defense Systems"
∙ LCOL = "low cost of living"
(I'd hate to have to maintain your code, V_Terranova_Jr.)
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The salient aspect of the destination sites isn't low cost of living, it's "right to work" laws and other anti-union policies.
Not only Qatar, the US Navy was not accepting those either since a while back. Don't know if that ever changed.
> Not only Qatar, the US Navy was not accepting those either since a while back.
The whole KC-46 tanker program is quite the mess as well:
* https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/03/31/the-air-forces-kc...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-46_Pegasus
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So 787s are assembled at both Seattle, WA, and North Charleston, SC, plants, but it is the South Carolina-produced planes that seem to be drawing complaints:
> Some of the airlines buying 787 Dreamliners built at Boeing Co.’s North Charleston campus are complaining about “unacceptable” production mistakes and poor quality, and analysts say the criticism points to issues deep within the aerospace giant’s culture.
* https://www.postandcourier.com/business/airline-surveys-poin...
Supposedly some airlines refuse to take delivery of airplanes assembled in SC:
> Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
* https://leehamnews.com/2020/09/14/pontifications-boeing-sc-m...
At this point, given how much Boeing seems to have turned its own reputation to ash, why would one buy an aircraft from them?
Thanks for the links! One would have thought that after the 737 Max debacle, Boeing would do anything possible to at least retain the trust of their customers for the 787. Instead, they seem to be eager to set up another debacle with the 787...
Presumably because you can buy a Boeing today where you would have to wait 5+ years for an Airbus.
Of course if they keep sliding then you might as well buy a Chinese or Russian aircraft instead of Boeing if you want something now and don't care about quality.
Well, if Airbus would be willing to build a few more plants they'd probably unleash a large amount of pent up demand and get more orders on the books.
I guess they're "successful enough" and don't feel tempted to potentially over-extend themselves.
Is it really true that you can buy a Boeing instantly? I have read that both manufacturers have order queues for years ahead, but I can be mistaken.
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The 737 has succumbed to the same disease as software. What originally was a successful well engineered product gets loaded with extra bells and whistles until it collapses under its own weight. This process is accelerated with MBA manager.
Mother Nature is judge, jury and executioner when it comes to abuse of aerodynamics. MBAs don't get the message until there's smoking wrecks.
Passengers may decide to refuse flights on 737s. There's lots of parked aircraft at the moment and will be until the pandemic is well past. It might be a couple years.
Passengers may vote with their feet for Airbus.
That's a broad brush you get there. There have been detailed investigations that show that specific actions by specific people in Boeing and the FAA led to a single point of failure, from which it is nearly impossible to recover, being permitted to get into production, in a passenger aircraft. On top of that, after one of those planes crashed in a way that is attributable to this gross defect, the pilots were blamed by Boeing, to deflect from having to fix this defect.
So, while it may come down to that you can't run an airplane maker like a soft drink company, there is a lot of detailed information about why. No need to generalize.
In fact there are confounding details that suggest that "MBA manager" is the wrong generalization. Dennis Mullenberg, who was the CEO fired due to the 737 fiasco, came up through Boeing engineering, after joining as an intern in the 1980s.
He was replaced by David Calhoun, a director at Boeing, who came up through GE and Blackstone and was the co-author of a generic seeming self-congratulatory business book called "How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You're In" That sure makes it seem like he could sell Coke on Tuesday and airliners on Thursday.
Maybe the real answer is that the FAA was lulled into complacency, and an engineer who should have been minding the shop wasn't.
related article from local Seattle newspaper: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/09/44441906/the-dea...
"So, Seattle finds itself where Pittsburgh was in the 1970s and Detroit in the 1960s. The city is about to lose a central part of its industrial base. Today, Pittsburgh, the "Steel City," has no steel plants at all." ... "Seattle will finally become fully post-industrial in the third decade of the third millennium."
Seattle is still in a better position than those cities due to Microsoft and Amazon, which will soften the blow, but it will still be quite painful.
Those avionics assembly people can go to work in the tech companies....doing what?
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Yeah the Everett plant only employees 30k according to the Boeing site which is 1% of Seattle's population even if the whole plant went away. It'd hurt to lose for sure but I doubt it will be disastrous the same way it was when steel and cars left other cities.
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That feels like a scare piece. It’s a big leap to go from moving production of one type of plane to the other facility where that plane is produced...all the way to assuming they are shutting down everything.
I live in SC and worked for a company in Seattle when the Charleston plant opened. From day one this type of scare tactic talk has been circulated. My cab driver from the airport told me “they are moving everything to South Carolina! Can you believe that!?”
It’s a narrative to rile people up. That’s it.
The 777x and 767 will still be here at least.
The plan is if the 787 ramp up in SC goes well the 777x will be the next to get moved, and 767 will end its run in Everett and then the lights turned off.
yeah and 737 assuming nothing changes
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Strikes are expensive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_machinists_strike_of_...
The fact that this is even a maybe says that they expect billions in quality control issues from South Carolina a decade.
It's hard to believe that the current Boeing leadership will turn things around with even less focus on quality and talented workers. Feels like they should be moving back towards engineering driven approaches.
Are you implying South Carolina workers are less talented than those in Seattle?
Less qualified and less trained.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
> While Boeing has nurtured generations of aerospace professionals in the Seattle area, there was no comparable work force in South Carolina. Instead, managers had to recruit from technical colleges in Tulsa, Okla., and Atlanta.
> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.
> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.
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On one hand, it must be a nightmare right now for anyone in the airline industry (from suppliers to operators etc). On the other hand, it's the perfect time to relocate factories and make changes to processes and try new technologies.
I am not so sure. What about funding? Any move like that is going to cost a huge amount and this is risky proposition at a time when it is not exactly known what the future of the industry is going to be.
There is definately that. I wonder if it helps though: if you're raising/borrowing/getting given 10bn to stay open, how hard is it to get another 1bn for plant re-arrangement or new software? It's all part of your efficiency savings, return to profitability plan right?
This could also be seen as Boeing pursuing union and gov't concessions so I wouldn't rule out a last minute change-of-heart.
Labor costs.
Manufacturers of cars, airplanes and high-value taxpayers moving out of socialist-dominated states... It’s going to get even worse if Sleepy Joe wins.
If it ain't Airbus, Bombardier, or Embraer, I ain't going.
To each their own, but the 737 NG (aka the models before the Max), the 747-400 / 747-8, and the 787 all have a lower number of fatal crashes per million flights than the Airbus A320 family and the A330.
That's certainly true, but the overall stats are all over the shop (http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm). And many of the more modern models have never had fatal crashes, making this kind of comparison impossible.
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These are all true statistics. I’d be curious to see an academic analysis on QC, flight hours, maintenance routines/quality of maintenance, and other factors that might play into why those aircraft have better safety ratings than competitors. It might be interesting to see if Boeing QC issues off the assembly line lead to better maintenance routines, which in turn results in safer overall operation. A result like that doesn’t imply that the manufacturer, Boeing, is the most influential component to safety.
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https://www.aerotime.aero/rytis.beresnevicius/23039-if-it-ai...
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“If it’s Boeing, I ain’t going” rhymes better
Well yes, clearly.
As a pilot, I saw "gear up" and thought a 787 had landed gear up. What a terrible headline.
No, I saw "South Carolina" and instantly knew this article was about union busting.