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Comment by dhruvrrp

5 years ago

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...

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dhruvrrp

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Tagbert  5 years ago

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.

  • coredog64  5 years ago

    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.

    • palefirewax  5 years ago

      When I was working at Boeing, my boss who was around during those times gave this anecdote.

      Apparently in return for being allowed to build the 777, the city of Everett (maybe it was Renton or the state of Washington) demanded large amounts of public works/benefits. Boeing was not pleased with this but in order to make the 777 happen they did all the stuff required. However, they vowed to never have to deal with such nonsense again. To make that happen, they moved their HQ (it was eventually decided to be Chicago) and began to consider relocating their plants to another state. Eventually, that became South Carolina. Or so the anecdote goes.

      I don't think my boss was very high up back then, so I can't speak to how factual it is, but it sounds plausible.

  • nickff  5 years ago

    >"...Boeing (aka McDonald-Douglas)..."

    Boeing subsumed McDonnell Douglas, not a McDonald's franchise, and did so under pressure from members of the Clinton administration.

    • wahern  5 years ago

      From the [archived] contemporaneous articles I've read it was Boeing's CEO and Chairman, Condit, who pushed heavily for the merger. Condit engineered the exit of Boeing's CFO, a skeptic, as part of an unfolding strategy to replace much of Boeing's original executive staff with those from McDonnell Douglas.[1] And he had the board's support as the Boeing board was enamored of McDonnell Douglas executives' financial engineering strategies.

      So while it may have nominally been McDonnell Douglas' culture that ruined Boeing, it was also very much an inside job. Boeing's leadership had already been fatally infected years prior and invited McDonnell Douglas in with the intention and purpose of adopting their culture.[2] The demise of Boeing culture was a fait accompli before the merger.

      This notion that Boeing was a victim is revisionist. To the extent it was a victim, it was a victim of the wider business and finance culture. There's no need to spin conspiracy theories about how it happened; it happened in the normal course of things, unfortunately. While Condit was clearly the immediate driver, the choice of Condit as CEO years earlier wasn't accidental.

      [1] "The exit by Givan, 62, who has held the post of Boeing finance chief and senior vice president since 1990, stems in part from disagreements with other executives over the conservative accounting methods used by Givan, say people close to the matter. For example, some officials believe he was too stringent in assessing how Boeing would accumulate charges for problems incurred in the course of its commercial-airplane order boom." https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug...

      [2] "'When people say I [Condit] changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.'" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

  • numpad0  5 years ago

    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...

    • salawat  5 years ago

      Investors speak financials. Not nuts n' bolts. As it turns out, there are many ways to make a company with a culture going down in flames look fantastic on the books apparently.

peteretep  5 years ago

That sound you hear is corks popping in Airbus’s A350 sales office

  • FeistyOtter  5 years ago

    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.

    • peteretep  5 years ago

      I'm not disagreeing with this, but can you give some examples? As a passenger -- other than the windows -- there's very little difference I've noticed over the course of ~40 flights on each.

      3 replies →

V_Terranova_Jr  5 years ago

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.

  • rectang  5 years ago

    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.)

  • jgwil2  5 years ago

    The salient aspect of the destination sites isn't low cost of living, it's "right to work" laws and other anti-union policies.

bilbo0s  5 years ago

Not only Qatar, the US Navy was not accepting those either since a while back. Don't know if that ever changed.