United Airlines’ patience with Boeing is maxed out after repeated safety issues United Airlines, which boasts one of the world’s largest fleets of Boeing aircraft, is considering a future without the next version of the American manufacturer's troubled 737 jet series, the Max 10. In a Tuesday interview on CNBC, United CEO Scott Kirby referred to the recent grounding of the 737 Max 9 after an door plug …
I think we are so used to apologies these days, that it's fake by all standards.
I remember watching a TV program back in the 70's... 5 minutes in the black card with there is a technical fault popped up, that stayed there for the next 40 minutes, then sound came back briefly, then sound & a black & white picture which flipped over to colour for the last 4 minutes including end titles.
& the kicker from the continuity announcer "We are sorry for the technical issues you experienced during the program, we do do hope it didn't spoil your enjoyment of the program too much!".
No its fake because the words are not genuine.
Being sorry is about being responsible. If you come to my house and drop icecream on the floor, sorry doesnt cut it, sorry means cleaning the floor.
Corporate leaders are hypocrits not because of what they say but because they dont take responsbility. THey always take millions for work they didnt do, but when things go wrong they dont pay those millions back do they ?
WHen the maxes smashed into the ground, the leadership got millions years because of their brilliant decisions, but did they pay for their mistakes in anyway like lifetime jail for each person that died ? No they got nothing, so just like a murder who kills and doesnt goto jail, these psychopaths also do the same again and again.
Boeing used to have an incredible safety culture. Anyone on the line could raise a problem and stop production if they believed it was a safety issue. This all changed after the merger with McDonnel Douglas. The bean counters took over and went from a safety first to profit first culture. Which also involved moving the headquarters away from Seattle.
There is an excellent documentary on Netflix that details all this. Downfall - The case against Boeing.
Seems like the trend of moving manufacturing to Asia starts bearing fruits.
There are fewer jobs in manufacturing, so there is no incentive to get educated and trained in that space, because there is always that risk that after spending best part of your life on becoming best at your craft, well, your employer gets bought by a big corporation, everything gets stripped and shipped overseas and suddenly you find there is no work for your skillset.
Can only upvote this once.. sadly.
This is exactly what everyone in the manufacturing business is now facing as my generation have had enough and goto god's waiting room (retirement), we said we'll need to train people but 'costs too much' and 'we can outsource it' and 'china can fill in' came back...
And you're right... who wants to do this.... 4 years of apprenticeship + 4 years as a journeyman and you'll be getting good at this game for a wage barely better than a forklift driver at a supermarket, and all the time knowing that somewhere on some accountants spreadsheet your fate is being decided.
The sad thing is its not the dirty factory image so beloved by rose tinted old timers and students of Marx, its clean(ish) and can be quite interesting especially since our main tools now are computers and robots.
But the C-level guys must have their bonuses, so once proud manufacturers look to employing the least trained and cheapest staff they can with the result the door blows out and lands in someone's back garden........
>The sad thing is its not the dirty factory image so beloved by rose tinted old timers and students of Marx...
There's nothing rose-tinted about mid-19th century factory work. Its well documented. People fooughtt hard against bitter opposition to improve working conditions, a process that took 100 years or more.
Marx himself was just an economist who wrote about a theory of the relationship between capital and labor. His theories are relevant even today, just like anyone else from that period (and before). He gets a lot of crud thrown at him because of has association with a later group of revolutionaries (Lenin, Trorsky et al) but they're literally a generation or two after him, the crap gets thrown at Marx because there's this sneaking suspicion that he might just have been right.
Have you actually read the first communist manifesto yourself? The neocons have lied to you about what it contains. Here are some of its key demands, do let us know which ones you disagree with?
Free education; progressive rate income tax, at the time it was flat 3%; a central bank that could lend to people to invest
yes I've read the communist manifesto, and it says that private property should be forbidden. At the beginning, I thought that he wanted to restrict that to private property concerning production facilities – companies – but he says that that's not enough so better ban any private property at all. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy ... where did I read about that lately ?
No thank-you
According to wikipedia, the manifesto contains a "transitional" or short term policy of "the abolition of private property in land and inheritance".
Those two items, land and inheritance seem central to the 1%. So any plan seeking to eliminate social ghettos created by meritless accumulation of wealth would be right to target those policies.
No, it doesn’t. It explicitly doesn’t. “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.” And in the famous “10 points”: “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.”
You fail to understand what the word “property” actually meant in England in 1848. Pre-1832, the right to *vote* was restricted to men owning freehold lands or tenements with an annual net value of 40s or more. You had to own property to vote. That is what is meant.. Marx was against the *rentier class* and industrial capital, and anyone who was a middleman rather than a producer. And yes they did think that landlords should be expropriated. His point was that 90% of the now-urban population owned literally nothing at all. They had nothing to expropriate.
But the next class up, the artisan class, they did own their tools and means of production, the hand-weaver etc. The Communist Manifesto is explicit that those people should *not* be expropriated. In fact, that’s exactly why the Marxists demand a central bank, to allow individuals who own their own means of production to access annual capital to make a livelihood, rather than having to go to the (factory) capitalists. Because in the absence of protection, the capitalists effectively expropriate the artisans by lending money on abusive terms.
What you are thinking of is the collectivist ideology, of Trotsky and Lenin, not Marxism.
Ironically, Marx was pro-Capitalism. His Manifesto warned of Capitalism's harshness alienating workers and starting a Communist revolution, The capitalists listened (a little), treated workers like humans and quelled the revolt. But they didn't read Das Capital vol 3, which predicted the next disaster (which we now see) of Finance Capitalism displacing real production, leading to ...out sourcing, loss of skills and decline. Marx must be saying, "Told you so..."
Or, Marx’s concept of the Business Cycle. The very idea that high prices would cause capitalists to (over) invest in the means of production, prices would crash, investment would drop, supply would drop, prices rise, rinse and repeat.
Not only was this new at the time, all of classical economics before him said this was wrong. The sainted Adam Smith said that supply and demand was a *stable* operating point without oscillations, fluctuations were purely exogenous.
Before Marx…..and after him! If you take any of the Austrian economists and use the same equations that they faithfully write in their books (to justify the all the conservative BS, Laffer curve etc) and put them in an economic model, those models show exactly that. In the neocon models. Business cycles “don’t happen”. The Austrian equations and models give ludicrous predictions, and haven’t been used by any serious modelling economists (Bank of England etc) ever since they were published because they are known to be silly and wrong.
All modern economics models trace their roots directly to the baby steps in Marx’s Capital. But nobody is allowed to say that, because it’s embarrassing.
"He gets a lot of crud thrown at him"
Because he accurately documented everything WRONG with capitalism as existed at that point
Whilst he wrote communist theory, it was a thought experiment he knew full well it wouldn't work due to human nature and spent a long time trying to work out variants which might have a chance
Marxist theory was based on post-capitalist/post-scarcity ideas - even when he wrote it the notion of "full employment" was already obsolete (The easiest way to pick the point is when child labour started being regarded as a bad thing) - which was significantly before Marx' time
(Hint: No amount of protest, environmentalism or government pressure has ever stopped commercial practices which were profitable, however they've been used as scapegoats in order to save face when failing businesses go under or get out of whatever trade they're losing money on)
While people think the obivous winner here is Airbus, given their backlog Airbus probably haven't seen much of a benefit.
COMAC and their C919 however? I'd love to see what their pre-sales team is up to right now. They must be grinning ear to ear. Especially if COMAC can get certification from regulatory agencies like EASA and the FAA.
Not likely, they only announced the stretched version in November 2023. Existing C919 has its certifications, but the stretch would also need to go through this in addition engineering and design works.
United is already and Airbus operator, so its not a long jump to see them go Airbus. The only hold back would be the delivery backlog for Airbus, but this would be the lowest risk option for United.
@RIchard
An airframe without engines, landing gear, cockits loaded with flight control software, and al the other precise technical measuring instruments is going no where.
All the items i listed above all come from Western suppliers, the chinese airframe isnt going anywhere without them, its just a hunk of metal sitting in the factory.
Next your going to think that the chinese can build an F1 car, just because they built the frame. Let me know how well it goes against a real F1 car with a real engine.
Life is a bit more complicated than just building an airframe, the airframe is probably the easiest part of any plane to build. THe real genius is making all the other components at the levels of performance that they have.
Just after the USSR fell, sure the Russians had engines, but they all bought RR, GE and PW becuse they were streets ahead of their junk.
United have already taken delivery of the first 3 of 130 A321 Neo - besides having a large existing fleet of other A32x models. Hence converting some Max 10 orders to A321 Neo is just a question of juggling delivery dates - and possibly Boeing contract penalties.
COMAC might make a difference in taking orders from Asian & African airlines that would have gone to Airbus so reducing future backlog. At this stage I can't imagine any major US or European airline take the political risk of buying Chinese. But if they can make a success of the 919 which is a catch-up 737/320 design then the next generation may be a more compelling option. It took Airbus many, many years to break into the US Boeing/Douglas/Lockheed dominated market. I doubt the Chinese could do it faster.
Passengers don’t buy planes, airlines do.
The market for decades has been determined by high-cost, but lasts-forever. If the build quality drops, airlines stop buying the premium model. If it’s crap, just buy the Comac at half the price because Boeing or Airbus no better.
Air France might not think like that, but the global market largely consists of carriers like Lion Air in Thailand. They have a lot more planes on order than Air France.
Absolutely. But the point remains that for the vast majority of aircraft *owners*, selecting which aircraft to buy is almost entirely a *capital structure* decision. Purchase price, depreciation curve, and implied operating expense. Neither safety nor equipment enters in directly; safety is just a % risk on depreciation. I know that seems obvious, but it isn’t true at all for cars or houses for example. Most cars are driven by their owners, who care directly about what its like to drive, whether the seats fold back for the trips they have in mind; only a minority of cars are fleet-owned.
"only a minority of cars are fleet-owned."
Not sure of the percentage changes in recent years, but the UK car market is leaning strongly in the direction of leasing rather than owning these days. Yet more "subscriptions" for the renter classes, nothing owned. I wonder what will happen when these people owning nothing retire and find they can no longer afford all the subscriptions? Shades of the misunderstandings of Marx upthread! What those people are worrying about is already happening ;-)
Comac aren’t really going to be interested in the FAA or EASA. Those countries will never accept them, but neither is it vital. 80% of sales are outside those regions.
But it’s really worse than that. Like the car market, the new plane market is really driven by the *secondhand* value. The lifecycle of a plane as it ages is often sold new in home market flat-carrier, then secondhand to tier 2 emerging market flag carrier, then emerging market leasing companies; then finally goes to Africa or Latin America minor carriers to die. 25-30 year lifespan.
The first owner is happy to pay $150M, because they get to sell it on at $100M, depreciation is low because of the long life. But as soon as the build quality drops; the predicted lifespan goes down, and you can’t sell it on. As a secondhand buyer, you won’t buy a premium plane with 10 years on the clock at 40% new price if it’s on its last legs.
If your budget is $60M, you buy a *new* Comac.
And once the bottom falls out of the market for 10yr old MAXs to sell on, nobody will buy them *new*.
That’s the real threat.
Always a risk to betting against the speed of Chinese engineering and technology development. Granted the Chinese are probably still learning hard to create an infallible quality/safety culture and innovation in their aerospace sector. Boeing had it - and lost it after the McD takeover. So given the choice of flying on a B737 Max, A321 or COMAC C919 - I think competition for last place is getting tighter.
Have you seen the quality of Chinese cars and buildings ?
There are many videos of Chinese cars where they are driving down the road, and the wheels literally roll off, or buildings that have slabs falling off.
WHen was the last time you saw or heard of a non Chinese car driving down the road and its wheels feel off ?
When was the last time a building had a huge slab just fall off because it fell off ?
These things happen on a regular basis in China.
Not betting against their engineering skills or ingenuity, but I do think there is a systemic risk. Accidents were fairly common in the West until we developed the no-blame, safety-first culture. It's very, very had to see this happening in a country where the party effectively is both regulator and regulated.
Given the manufacturing cost may not be significantly different and only a part of the lifetime operating cost - that suggests the margin - which will mostly go to R&D - doesn't bode well for Boeing to compete with the next generation airframes.
Outsourcing to Spirit may have been a good short term cost saving but has the full ongoing consequences been factored into the business plan?
... until Boeing started playing fast and loose with type-certification regulations. It needed a bigger model to compete better with Airbus, but it didn’t want to go through the cost of regulatory approval for an entirely new family of aircraft. Hence the control-system shenanigans on the MAX, to try make it handle like an old-style 737, so Boeing could persuade the authorities to just pass it through as a minor variation on the good old 737. Which it wasn’t.
Now the whole “737” family name is tainted. Turns out shoddiness is endemic throughout the product line.
The unreliability of the old DC-10 drove McDonnell-Douglas to the wall, so it ended up being acquired by Boeing. Now I think the 737 is likely to do the same. But who will acquire the company now? Will the US Government nationalize it? It’s not something they do, but I don’t see that they have a choice.
Reality check:
Boeing started on the downhill slide when they were bought up, manglement were moved the other side of the country under Beancounter Central, and the engineers lost control.
The DC-10 was a perfectly good airplane. Just, early issues and lethal bad luck gave it a bad name it never recovered from. The 737 is way past that vulnerable early stage, even able to survive criminal disregard for safety.
The US Government don't nationalize. The usual trick is for the Defense dept to give them a lucrative contract for a brand new "military" transport. Or, maybe Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin would want to pick over the bones, should it come to that. Or some smaller fry with big dreams - it has happened.
"...Boeing started on the downhill slide..."
in 1971 - that's when the 747-100 BROKE the company, leaving financiers in charge. From there the failure was inevitable.
The merger with McD-D was merely the point where the beancounters gained full control of the company, not a poison pill
Don't forget: Congress put the FAA under pressure to accept self-certification. After all, why should the taxpayer pay for engineers who know what they're doing to do the work when you can get the companies to do it "for free".
Isn't Conflict of Interest the new Dan Brown novel book?
This post has been deleted by its author
That turned out to be a reverse takeover. Boeing bought up the remains of McDonnell-Douglas, but then they put the MDD execs in charge. Who thought that was a good idea?
And yes, I remember when satyrists would sing, "I believe that pigs and even DC-10s can fly."
Indeed - the older 737s were wonderful. Unfortunately, there's a fundamental flaw in the design of all the 737MAX variants - they are aerodynamically unstable. Boeing had to make a software fiddle to try to make them behave within their permitted flight envelope only. Actual pilot control is minimised, because they might try to make the plane do something that it can't handle!
Because of the compromised geometry of the aircraft, the engines had to be moved (to prevent them dragging on the ground during take-off and landing), and this altered the fundamental balance of the airframe. Every last one of the series is an accident waiting to happen. The collapse of manufacturing standards at Boeing, and their reliance on flight control software and firmware bought in from India means that there's precisely no chance whatsoever of those aircraft ever being safe.
It's just a matter of time before Boeing collapses altogether.
I'm also unhappy with some of the standards at Airbus - indeed, their larger aircraft still scare me - but their standards are somewhat better than Boeing's....
I still won't fly on either 737MAXs of any variety or on any of the later fly-by-wire Airbuses. I value my life!
The A380 is a thing of beauty. It's incredibly quiet inside - I get an inkling of what it must have been like in an airship.
It seems preposterous that something this big can even get off the ground, and the economics are mad unless it is filled to capacity - it needs something like 19 flight attendants, to get all the passengers off in an emergency. As a result, it failed commercially, and production has ended.
But it is nonetheless a stunning piece of engineering, and if you get the chance to travel in one (mainly Emirates these days) you definitely should.
Boeing, the amazing engineering company of 80 years, got taken over by the f@#$ing MBAs at McDonnell Douglas in 1997 and it's been downhill ever since as scum of the earth MBAs (but I'm being redundant) do what MBAs gonna do.
Yeah, supposedly Boeing bought McDD, but it ended up with the McDD management in charge - reverse merger. These are people who would happily grind live kittens and puppies into blood meal if they could figure out a way to make a profit on it. So they lobbied the FAA that having actual inspections was too onerous and they would take care of it fo sho, no need to worry. And then they moved HQ to Chicago so they'd be far, far away from any actual tedium like having to deal with the grubby little details of building and designing planes. CEO Phil Condit explicitly said this!
The 737 Max stall disaster was 100% what you'd expect from MBAs. So is this.
Nose wheel falls off Boeing 757 airliner waiting for takeoff
According to a preliminary FAA notice, none of the 184 passengers or six crew members aboard were hurt in the incident.
The report said the aircraft was lining up and waiting for takeoff when the “nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill”.
If it's Boeing, you ain't arriving.
Last 757 was built in 2004, so that's at least a twenty year old relic you're talking about, and by now the undercarriage will have been through many maintenance cycles. Whatever caused the problem is unlikely to have any original design or manufacturing cause.
But that doesn't stop the latest iterations of the 737 being shoddy, bean-counted shit. All of the 737's problems come down to lack of investment in a modern replacement airframe, because it was cheaper and easier to botch around the existing 737 than to design a new airframe. Given that from concept to first flight is ten to fifteen years, I'd imagine early stage work on that replacement had already begun in the early 1990's, and was promptly killed off by the McMoron Clueless leadership. If Boeing is to recover, it needs to track down everybody who's been inculcated into the McD culture of corner cutting, and sack them.
The McDD MBA regime at Boeing made a decision to axe the 757 and to develop the ancient 737 even further, to wring yet more profit out of it. If they had developed the 757 instead they could've fitted the modern big turbofans under the wings, so no MCAS would have been needed and the world would hardly have noticed a little panel falling off now and again. Oh and 346 people would still be alive.
And the particular airframe was delivered in 1992.
So if the airline haven't had to do any replacement or maintenance on the nosewheel in the last 30years then that's an even bigger credit to Boeing's designers
Interviewer:
So what happened in this case?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator:
Well the front fell off in this case, by all means, but it's very unusual.
Interviewer:
But Senator Collins why did the front of the ship fall off?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator:
Well a wave hit it.
Interviewer:
A wave hit it?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator:
A wave hit the ship!
Interviewer:
Is that unusual?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator:
Oh yeah! At sea? Chance in a million!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
Sad for a great company like Boeing, they have unfortunately hired absolute idiotic morons to their "leadership team". Same applies to Google. We are living in a time where the good and great people in world-facing companies are being failed by moronic idiots that are in their positions as a result of "diversity". Idiocracy right there.
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