Aviation BS and Photo Thread

Here's the day she flew over DC before going to her home at Hazy.......

 

I think the year was 2019 but it could have been 2018.

 

Any homebuilders here? I completed and flew my Van's RV-7 about 13 years ago. 1400 hours and counting on it now, fly it several times a week.



Meanwhile I'm fortunate to have a hangar at an airport with some interesting aircraft. These two live in a hangar around the corner from me, they were pulled out and readied for a flight to an airshow a couple of days ago.

 

And don't forget the core stage of the SLS.

Lockheed started this, but since they also received the Orion contract, it was deemed "unfair" for one company to have so much business, so Boeing got it. Started from scratch (throwing out all Lockheed's work, which we already paid for), blew the schedule (cost plus contract), contributed to the many years of delayed launch.

 

Boeing hasn't earned a goddamn thing. This is a handout to bolster their rightly deserved, and "earned" notoriety as cost-cutting charlatans who put the entire global community at deadly risk with their business decisions. Some of the details I've read from former QC employees is fucking criminal.

 

What happened to Boeing? There were a great company - what, 30 years ago?

 

Merged with another lessor company and let the bean counters take over.

 

Well, as you pointed out, consolidations are probably one dimension of it.

As a former Boeing employee (in tech on the corporate side of things, not within any one specific business unit), I can tell you that another dimension is poor talent management. They knew it, but realized it a little late, and some of the actions they were taking were a bit off. When I was there 7+ years ago, more than half of the staff was eligible for retirement within 5 years. They were pushing to hire college graduates to fill the ranks. The old guard had no interest in training these new grads, and there was a gap in the middle - very few people with 10+ years experience and several years left before retirement existed.

On top of that is just the changing culture of the younger workforce. Boeing is an old company, pretty set in their ways. People follow "the process" without question, even if the process was designed decades ago to solve a different set of problems.

As far as bean counting, it's the same as any company. Companies find it hard to just stop doing something to save money -- they try to keep doing everything they are currently doing but cheaper. Which ties into the process point above.

Anyway, I'm sure there are many other factors as well. I don't know the details of the latest competition, what was submitted or how it was evaluated. But I can't imagine trusting Boeing with another contract based on recent performance.

 

McDonnell Douglas built some good planes, back in the day. A quick lookup showed they were on a fairly steep downhill dive the last 10+ years before the merger/takeover.

 

They had some workhorses for sure.

One of the stories I heard while there was that the government asked for a single-engine design and McD showed up with a twin-engine design because they knew better. It didn't go over well. But they still make the F-15 and F-18 there in St. Louis.

What struck me while I was there is that Boeing had 2 distinct cultures, one born from McDonnell and the other from Boeing. Can't really say one was better than the other, just different.

 

CEOs and accountants.

 

Succession planning in general is overlooked. It's not billable. The middle gets overworked, looks elsewhere or just rides it out to retirement if the C suite doesn't drive it.

 

That is definitely a problem when the 2 cultures do not merge.

 

That said, it was phantom works (aka McD .mil) that won the contract. So.. I mean yeah the whole 'McD were accountants and made Boeing suck' meme has proved out, but also McD .mil stuff is still getting decent wins. (F15EX, F18G, etc).

 

The McDonnell Douglas merger killed them. The companies sole focus became stock price, everywhere you looked there was a stock ticker, even in the elevators! Quality became “unnecessary overhead”, which we have seen the results of with the KC46, V-22, 737 MAX, 787 production delays, 777-8 and 777-9 delays. The company culture changed from doing things properly to doing things as inexpensively as possible.

 

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....^^^... Yes, yes and yes ... we did a joint venture with them and I wish I could tell you more here, but I cant. Don't want to be sued.

Before the merger, Boeing was "engineer & quality driven" .... after the merger. it was "profit driven".

 

Spent my early career there in the Puget Sound, what feels like lifetimes ago. Worked with a lot of people from the old times..some were literally in tears talking about how it used to be.

One guy put it this way: "Boeing used to be an aircraft company. Now it's a financial institution that just happens to make airplanes."

 

The demise of Boeing sounds similar to NASA.

My Dad worked there during the Apollo program. Everyone was focused on going to the moon - going above and beyond, developing all this new, cool stuff.

I worked there during the Artemis program - or rather between when they were supposed to first launch until finally did launch. I had such high expectations, which were not met. Between the bureaucracy, layers and layers of people "in charge", and many people thinking of this as just another job, it was extremely disappointing. Throw in changing administration and focus, and DEI, and you see the downfall of a great administration.

 

Are you referring to the body count of the Osprey and 737?