Why Boeing Is Such A Shitty Company, R. Reich; Safety, Mgmt, Private Equity, Outsourcing

Last edited Tue Mar 26, 2024, 02:06 PM - Edit history (1)

Why Boeing is such a shitty company (continued), Robert Reich, Substack, March 21, 2024. Ed.

Friends, On Friday, machinists at Rogue Valley International Airport in Medford, Oregon, discovered that a United Airlines plane that had landed from San Francisco was missing an external panel (see photo, above). The plane was manufactured by Boeing. It was carrying 139 passengers and 6 crew. No one was injured, thank heavens. The missing panel went unnoticed during the flight.

Last week, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet went into a dive on a flight from Australia to New Zealand, injuring 50 people.

Afterward, Boeing alerted airlines to a potential problem with loose switches on pilot seats, “resulting in unintended seat movement” that could affect the controls. These latest incidents come after a cabin door blew out on a Boeing 737 Max 9 in Jan., a few minutes after takeoff. The incident, on Alaska Airlines flight 1282, left a gaping hole in the side of the plane and forced an emergency landing.

Since the Alaska Airlines cabin door blow-out, federal authorities — including the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) — have launched investigations and required inspections on 171 Boeing planes. Those inspections have found that bolts and other hardware on multiple planes weren’t tight enough, according to both United and Alaska Airlines. The door panel involved in the Alaska Airlines blow-out was missing 4 bolts.

Boeing 737 Max planes have been the objects of safety concerns for several years. In 2018 and 2019 many countries grounded them after Boeing 737 Max 8 planes were involved in 2 crashes that killed hundreds of people. A Dec. 2021 Senate report criticized Boeing’s chronic understaffing and its downplaying of concerns raised by engineers in the company. That report was based on the testimony of 7 whistleblowers who were concerned about its production practices. Recently, John Barnett, another whistleblower and former Boeing quality control manager, died of an apparent suicide.

What’s the underlying problem? Why has Boeing become such a shitty company when it comes to quality control?...
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-boeing-is-such-as-shitty-company