It seems like it is time to nationalize Boeing.
…imagine fuxking NASA pulling this off. After so many fuckups in USA that didn’t end with nationalising, a goddamn NASA going “welp, that’s it” and managing to push for nationalising Boeing…
NASA’s biggest issue over the last 35 years is that it became a political target. It is really hard to do long term design when your mission changes every 4 years along with a different budget. NASA should have a budget that is only reapproved every 30 years and should not have to worry about outside influence from a president dictating its mission.
Oh god, they certainly don’t deserve that. When a company screws up this bad you don’t buy them… Fuck…
You just stop giving them contracts and watch them go belly up. Problem solved. We have plenty of other aerospace companies to fill the void and plenty of new startups who would love the chance to prove themselves.
When a company is collapsing in on itself, why would you want to pay a bunch of executives for privilege of inheriting their mess? Wait… are you the CEO of Boeing?
Just like their planes. Al Jazeera made a really awesome documentary about Boeing and their terrible quality control. They gave some workers at one of the major Boeing assembly facilities hidden cameras and microphones, and let them interview their colleagues. The factory is full of crackheads, and most of Boeing’s own employees who literally put the fucking planes together said that they wouldn’t fly on these planes themselves.
most of Boeing’s own employees who literally put the fucking planes together said that they wouldn’t fly on these planes themselves
Jesus Christ.
Rejects from the plane assembly line. Now that’s scary!
It’s what we call a normal day at Boeing
They did another documentary years prior on the 737 NG, equally damning.
Thanks for the recommendation
At this point the government just needs to sue Boeing into bankruptcy. They cannot be allowed to continue to gamble with others’ lives while taking taxpayer money
The need to seize the company. Boeing holds too many military contracts to be allowed to die. They build planes for the military, so they’ll get an inevitable bailout.
Instead, the government should start seizing parts of the company as part of the bailout. “Oh hey, we paid you all this money, so we own these parts of the company now. Shareholders have been fairly compensated for it by the bailout money, so you can’t say it’s unfair. You have proven that your leadership is lacking and you can’t be allowed to operate without oversight. So now that we own large swaths of the company, we’ll be making lots of the big decisions.”
lol boeing gets like half of their money from the government, I don’t see the government suing them anytime soon
The US is just collapsing everywhere. What a time to be alive.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, everything people have built up to now relies on a significantly greater amount of complexity. There is a lot which works well and is held together by hardworking, unsung normal everyday folks, but you don’t make the national news for getting shit done or keeping stuff functional.
That said, yeah the bean counters have fucking ruined engineering firms, and it’s a story which repeats itself over and over. There’s also the issue of nepo babies or “I know this person” incest in a lot of places where qualified people are passed over for someone “you know”. The nepotism and cronyism phenomenon is a huge problem for many institutions, not just engineering firms. Nepotism and cronyism is not just an American issue, it’s something you see everywhere.
Regarding unqualified people, I do think maybe standards should be raised for entry into some college programs. But the only way raising standards would make sense if we significantly invest in public education. In short, a lot of “breaking” of America is the direct result of short sighted Republican policies.
Boeing shifted production to break the Seattle unions. That’s been a sound financial decision so far…except for all of the failures and dead people.
Well Boeing is just overall imploding…
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I taught business ethnics for MBAs when i was in graduate school.
The only ‘ethics’ they learned was ‘maximize shareholder value at any price’. They spent an entire semester learning to to argue why murdering people and abusing people was morally justified as long as the share price goes up. That was the curriculum. Nothing else mattered.
If humanity survives this with our records intact, future historians will put a huge chunk of the blame on that mentality.
It really started with Dodge vs Ford, that codified the mentality as mainstream and we have paid the price for it every year since.
Didn’t two Chinese rockets just blow up a couple months ago? I don’t think a couple specific aerospace examples on the cutting edge are indicative of broader issues lol
Is this “whataboutism”?
Boeing has a track record of shoddy work. As the crown jewel of US manufacturing and the largest exporter, the cumulative failures over the past years are indicative of systemic failures in the US system.
Perhaps there would be less pushback if you heard it from an American?
Boeing Is Everything Wrong With American Capitalism | Robert Reich
Lol
literally every post I see from lemm.ee users is hot trash. Can we please defederate them?
Holy shit. At this moment it really feels like Boarding just need to start at the top and fucking fire everyone involved with safety standards and manufacturing.
Hell no. FAA needs to realize what a disaster they’ve created by allowing self regulation of this industry and Crack down to a level that essentially strangulates a company like Boeing. Let them die and allow space for something newer with a quality and safety focus to grow. Saying they’ve fired people and put new people in won’t change anything. They’ll still slack on safety for profits.
I’ve wondered about this, killing the “company” never really seemed like that big of a deal, as the structure (both physical building/tool/systems and operationally) don’t simply vanish. You still have the knowledge and skillsets in the population, and the supply chains still exist.
The real problem with these “too big to fail” entities is that the people pulling the levers that cause failures never have any consequences whatsoever.
Yeah, you’ll always need banks, energy, transportation, defence etc - operational mechanisms for exchanging goods, building, buying etc will never go away or ‘fail’ - but their operational practices absolutely could and should change
I’m so sick of the wealth class abusing absolutely everything to guarantee themselves more money than they could ever spend.
Sure the FAA needs to do this. We also need to fund the FAA and other regulatory agencies at the level they could. Whole towns in Texas have had large portions of them vaporized. Due to no proper OSHA and hazardous chemical safety handling inspection and accountability. And yes you read that right. Plural, it’s happened multiple times.
Often tens to hundreds of inspectors at most. Employed by these agencies are responsible for inspecting tens of thousands of sites each across several States because they are so under staffed and funded. And you want to guess who’s responsible?
Who cares what Boeing does, the solution is simply to stop giving them contracts. Let them work out how to reimagine their company, just not on our dollar.
Define “unqualified.”
Like, unqualified to even build a see-saw for a public playground? Agreed
Unqualified to work for Boeing? Highly debatable at this point
Can we please instate a corporate death penalty? And some sort of persona non grata for executives who contributed to the condemnable behavior?
Also, new rule: if the sum of pay and benefits for a company’s C-suite and stock buybacks is greater than the sum of the pay for your non-contractor employees then all the stocks bought back must be transferred to your employees and contractors.
Can we please instate a corporate death penalty?
That shit doesn’t even work for petty crimes, why do you think it would work for people who can buy their way out of it?
Don’t say “no” just because it hasn’t worked yet!
Be bold! Be daring!
Stomp on a CEO’s crotch!
Nah, I don’t want to be choked out by their private militia.
But hey, if that’s something you’re up for dying pointlessly for, be my guest!
Stomping on their crotch will hurt them less than taking their money.
Fine the CEO’s personally at 90% yearly salary for fuckups like this and shit will change real fast.
this will keep happening if you don’t put people in prison for it.
Silly billy, rich people don’t go to prison anymore, that’s for the poors.
of course. the prison is for people who steal hundreds, not millions.
Every company is trying for the most unqualified workforce these days… but at least most of them don’t involve flight.
Well that’s nothing new - I worked for them “briefly” (as in weeks - ended up with a better job offer!!) and as an actual aircraft mechanic I was disgusted by what I saw - they had supervising roles filled with non-aircraft trades people, training was done by a former boat mechanic, there were butchers and carpenters - who, if you asked them thought they were far more capable than an aircraft mechanic as, actual aircraft trades are considered “problematic” by Boeing management (who are all ex Toyota staff for the most part…) because - aircraft mechanics are too slow for a production line environment as we tend to take our time too much for their liking (oh because we want to get it right first time?!) 🤦🏼♀️
I left and a week later the Max was grounded - the garbage that was spewing from senior management right before the grounding was eye roll inducing - about how they stand by the product bla bla bla and have no idea how shiny new aircraft could just fall out the sky……of course we know how that turned out for them….
But yeah, Boeing, like Rolls Royce are not the brand a lot of people should think of as “high quality” until they sort their QA shit out and start employing actual aircraft tradespeople and engineeers who know what they are doing 🤷🏼♀️
Boeing was one of my accounts back before the pandemic. I had to respond to RFPs where my employer sold services to Boeing. They sucked to work with and just didn’t understand really basic things about the services they were requesting in their own RFPs.
Disney and Walmart on the other hand were great. They were not pushovers, but they were consistently friendly, and they always knew their shit.
imagine we find out Boeing really did build that submersible
In a not so shocking comment, Boeing is run by an unqualified management.
I still hate that NAA ended up in Boeing’s hands after only two buyouts.
Totally nothing wrong with an aerospace company buying out its competitors and then promptly liquidating its assets.
Google does it all the time!
This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector. Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money? If we nationalized these initiatives again and cancelled the private contracts with these crooks, there would be no incentive for profiteering and corners would not get cut as often as they do now.
Sure, it would be a big cost to the taxpayer once again, but I think I’d rather have a reliable space program and like 2% less military budget to fund it, I think we’ll manage somehow without producing more tanks and planes that nobody is asking for.
NASA blew up a fair few rockets, and lost two shuttles, so that’s not necessarily the better option.
Fair point, I don’t want to fixate on that one aspect of the colossal technical challenge that is getting spacecraft into orbit, but I’m still of the opinion that a nationalized and fully government-funded space program will always yield better results than a privatized one because there is no profit-taking incentive.
spacex was intended to blow up on launch pads
boeing was not intended to drop doors off of planes, ever.
There is a slight difference here.
This wouldn’t be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector.
While I like the sentiment, you should know that you are absolutely, completely, 100% wrong.
The space shuttle was the deadliest spacecraft in human history, not just in the US, but in the entire world. And mind you, NASA spacecrafts are all also quite literally built from parts delivered by the lowest bidder.
For the record Boeing sucks and is doing a pretty crappy job right now, but regardless, it would be safer to launch on the Starliner 20 times in a row than to ride in the space shuttle once. At least the Starliner has a launch escape system.
To be fair to the shuttle though, it is objectively cool. While not a good way to get to space, that thing was awesome in every sense! I truly wish I had gotten to see it launch in person. Also the RS-25, the main engine, is a pretty badass rocket engine, there was so much about that vehicle that was great, it’s a shame that it never quite fulfilled its promise.
I followed the Space Shuttle program pretty heavily as a kid and got to see a few launches from the Cape.
Truly loved the innovative look and the futuristic (lol, at the time) feel.
In retrospect, it was a good try with bad funding, and an exceptionally expensive satellite positioner that never lived up to its promised turn around time.
I loved it, but it kind of was an objective flop.
Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money?
I mean, spaceX has a fantastic track record. In their entire history, they only once failed to deliver a payload to orbit, and that was like just a month ago that they had their first failure after well over 300 successful launches. That’s record setting reliability in orbital rockets.
They blow up a lot of rockets in testing and development, but that’s kind of just how rocket development goes. It’s the same for NASA, Russia, and everyone else who designs rockets. You blow some up during development.
I’m just saying, I’m not sure you can lump SpaceX and Boeing together, they’re very different companies with very different track records.
Who do you think built the shuttle…?
Also, not defending the Musk shitstain, but focusing on “blowing up launch pads” tells me you probably know very little about the Space industry or development.
but focusing on “blowing up launch pads” tells me you probably know very little about the Space industry or development.
That wasn’t the focus of my post, but are you suggesting that there is a nonzero number of rocket explosions that would be considered acceptable?
I don’t need to be Elon Musk, or even know much about the space industry or development to know that the target number should always be zero.
but are you suggesting that there is a nonzero number of rocket explosions that would be considered acceptable?
…yes? During development specifically. Of course there is.
Let me know how that interview goes, because if the rocket you developed and spent billions of dollars building explodes at launch, you’re going to be looking for a new line of work.
I’m sure the next aeronautics company will totally understand. Mondays, am I right?
See, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you keep showing more and more that you’re not following what’s happening in the launch business at all.
So for coming up on 10 years now, SpaceX has been absolutely kicking everyone’s ass. China is now coming up on being second.
They’re following processes of rapid iteration. During design, they build quickly (and relatively cheaply). They launch frequently. Those launches may not go perfectly. Sometimes they explode. But they get a LOT of data. This helps them iterate quickly.
This is different from what Boeing, Blue Origin, etc have been doing (and at different points, at NASA’s direction) - the “try to build it slow but steady, and perfect the first time” method. Guess what? That has been working horribly. It takes way way longer, costs way way more, etc. And they’ve left the door open for SpaceX to take over. They’re quickly becoming the ONLY game in town. And neither they nor, say, Blue Origin have really been focused that much on profit.
Rapid Iteration is also what we did early on in the space program. A lot of stuff failed (blew up) but we were making REALLY rapid progress.
Now - once the rockets go into production, they absolutely CAN’T blow up. ESPECIALLY with people inside. That’s a totally different thing.
SpaceX just lost had their first operation failure in like a decade. After hundreds of successful launches. It’s the best record I believe any rocket series has ever had.
You also picked tbe Shuttle as an example of things working well. It’s ironic - that’s specifically when everything started turning to shit - massive cost overruns, massive, years-long project delays. The delays for manned spaceflight, for launch systems, were a brand new thing starting with STS.
Blowing shit up is absolutely a valid part of the learning/development phase of rocket design.
Okay, you’ve made some pretty salient points. I’m not too proud to admit that my understanding of the topic is limited. I appreciate you taking the time to educate me more on the subject.
Man, this has been a nice day full of niceness. It’s just…nice.
Have a good weekend, furbag. You’re a classy dude/ette.
There is a reason we moved this to the private sector. Govt bureaucrats can’t get out of their own way and every project triples in cost, with no single person calling the shots to get the job done. Govt cannot keep up with the pace we need.
Boeing is hot garbage.
SpaceX has a shit face, but they are incredibly competent and effective at iterating their way to space.
NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.
Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.
I agree with everything you say and I am all about the way that you captured the dysfunction of the political apparatus and its inability to deliver for a price and on a date. I think my argument is that that’s exactly why the government should not be in charge of this stuff. It should not be political. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid billboards in space, but at least we’ll be able to finally get out there.
The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?
Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.
Sounds like Boeing is being run by an unqualified work force
