Boeing Aircraft

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After reading this, not a warm and fuzzy feeling flying in a Boeing aircraft. In the meantime, Airbus is eating their lunch. Wonder how long it'll be before they'll be on their knees in Washington, like the Big Three, asking for a bailout.


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I have a fascination with watching air disaster documentaries, and the forensic investigations involved in finding out why the airplane crashed.
Many Boeings have crashed and burned, along with thousands of poor souls.
 
What a shame a another American company ruined by corporate greed,their B17 & B29 saved the world in WW2, i have been to the Boeing factory twice & was in awe of its size seen 747 & 777 being built lets hope they can get their act together or the Europeans will have the market all to them self. its a wonder the Chinese don't get in to the business, but i would not fly in one.
 
It used to be “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going!”

things have certainly changed.
I had that t-shirt. Hundreds of thousands of air miles and I was a staunch Boeing man. That's changed now
 
The real problem seems to lie with the Georgia plant and takeover by executives with almost no technical knowledge
 
The real problem seems to lie with the Georgia plant and takeover by executives with almost no technical knowledge

do you mean South Carolina? That’s where they are building thr 787s now.

i think it was the lack of technical approach that extended the 737 so far past what it should have been that caused the issues that led to crashes in the MAX. I have heard a very detailed explanation of all the workarounds they had to do to offset the physics changes and it’s a wonder no one stepped in and just said STOP. Groupthink I guess…
 
I have followed this from the beginning. There has been much hype over the 737 Max and it’s troubles. THe two crashes were over seas with less qualified pilots than we have in the US. The fact remains that Boeing tried to pull a fast one to sell more airplanes. They took the 737 airframe and added much, much larger engines And tried to pass it off as a simple upgraded aircraft. It is fantastically efficient and familiar to pilots. It will still be a top seller. Boeing should have been honest that this was basically an all new airplane and would require pilots to be certified on this new plane.
Now the FAA is on their backside and they can’t get the 777X out to customers without more rigorous testing.
With The current and ongoing scrutiny we can be assured that these planes are very safe to fly.
Philip
 
Let me state up front that I am a former executive of one of Boeing's primary competitors in their defense related work. I can't speak to the company's civilian aircraft production, but I dealt with them and competed against them for defense contracts for more than a decade. I have dealt personally with Dennis Muilenburg when he ran that sector of the company.

Culturally, Boeing was a bit of an outlier. For instance, it was a company that did not value contradictory input from its subordinate executives or engineers, or from partner companies. Thankfully, that is not the typical approach of most large engineering enterprises.

With respect to that culture, there is a lot of truth in this article. Boeing has had a well earned reputation for squeezing suppliers. Often small suppliers would be driven out of business, and Boeing would simply absorb the work internally. As a partner on a major contract, we and the other majors typically would be forced to expend enormous energy protecting our share of the project. Our relationships with Lockheed, BAE, and GD were far more constructive which also generally worked to the interest of the customer. In my experience, Boeing's most egregious behavior was its predatory mismanagement of the Army's Future Combat System Program in the early 2000's.

However, there is a lot of typical anti-capitalist nonsense in this article as well. The Boeing Company existed and had the fiscal wherewithal to purchase McDonald Douglas only because it had been a hugely profitable enterprise previously. The notion that it had been a company run by altruistic engineers uninterested in the company's bottom line is farcical.

Yes, creating share holder value is extremely important to every publicly traded corporation. Yes, business management plays a huge part in driving that perceived value. Successful design works when customer requirements, engineering decisions, and cost analysis are in balance. When they get out of balance bad things happen. In the world in which most of us have familiarity, the post 1964 Winchester product list is the best known example of out of balance offerings.

I have no inside information on the 737 MAX project. It does appear, however, that the reuse of much of the original 737 structural engineering led to blue sky cost analysis. That analysis found its way into pricing, securing orders for an aircraft that subsequent systems engineering indicated couldn't be built within acceptable profit margins. (To remind the socialists among us, products sold at a loss result in fiscal collapse - whether publicly, privately, or government owned entities.) It seems clear that the project was so far along, that a design restart was impossible - particularly with a competitor sitting in the wings with nearly equivalent offerings. In such an environment, cost and schedule inevitably became the driving concerns. String too many "good enough" compromises together, particularly software engineering, in a satellite, weapons system, or passenger plane and bad things will happen. It appears even the test pilot was caught up in the snowballing catastrophe.

As is the case in virtually all such failures, the costs of those decisions will far outweigh the feared loss of margin. Losses in Boeing stock value, customer order cancelations, and now liability payments wouldn't be survivable by a less robust company.

But it was worth the tax break...

And this statement is ridiculous.
 
About 50 years ago I boarded a DC-10 in Portland OR for a flight to Chicago. The take-off was delayed because they were having trouble closing one of the cargo doors. Finally they said they got the door closed and we left, landing in Chicago with no further delay. the plane was scheduled to go on to New York, then to Europe including Turkey. A few days later I read that a DC-10 had crashed in Turkey and investigation showed the problem was a defective latch on the cargo door. I've often wondered it that was the plane on which I was ridding and how close the door may have come to opening during the PDX to Ohare flight.
 
About 50 years ago I boarded a DC-10 in Portland OR for a flight to Chicago. The take-off was delayed because they were having trouble closing one of the cargo doors. Finally they said they got the door closed and we left, landing in Chicago with no further delay. the plane was scheduled to go on to New York, then to Europe including Turkey. A few days later I read that a DC-10 had crashed in Turkey and investigation showed the problem was a defective latch on the cargo door. I've often wondered it that was the plane on which I was ridding and how close the door may have come to opening during the PDX to Ohare flight.
20-20 hindsight, at the time, if you had the tail number of your flight, you could have cross checked it with the one that crashed.
 
do you mean South Carolina? That’s where they are building thr 787s now.

i think it was the lack of technical approach that extended the 737 so far past what it should have been that caused the issues that led to crashes in the MAX. I have heard a very detailed explanation of all the workarounds they had to do to offset the physics changes and it’s a wonder no one stepped in and just said STOP. Groupthink I guess…
Agree! Almost seems like a common illness in any large bureaucracy- public or private or military. Maybe a DNA of arrogance develops from within. IMO, something similar to NASA and the US Space Shuttle basic design- flawed from the get go, but invisible to or ignored by most from within.
 
The most dangerous part of any trip involving commerical aviation is the drive to and from the airport. Book your flights and relax, whether you're on a Boeing or Airbus (or a Bombardier, Embraer, etc). You might get a little concerned if you are on an Ilyushin.
 
Approximately 70% of all airplane crashes are caused by human error. Pilots, ATC, maintenance, etc. Approximately 30% by mechanical failure, running out of fuel, or engineering flaws, etc.

It has been said that airline travel is safer then automobile. That may be true, but if the engine goes out on my truck, I won't be screaming out of the sky from 35,000 feet, and end up as an ugly spot on the landscape, where DNA samples will be needed to identify my remains.

Anything in life is a gamble.

Boeing just admitted to fault in the Ethiopian 737Max crash, and is making settlements with the victims families.
I wouldnt get on that airplane, even if they claim to have fixed the computer glitches.
 
About 50 years ago I boarded a DC-10 in Portland OR for a flight to Chicago. The take-off was delayed because they were having trouble closing one of the cargo doors. Finally they said they got the door closed and we left, landing in Chicago with no further delay. the plane was scheduled to go on to New York, then to Europe including Turkey. A few days later I read that a DC-10 had crashed in Turkey and investigation showed the problem was a defective latch on the cargo door. I've often wondered it that was the plane on which I was ridding and how close the door may have come to opening during the PDX to Ohare flight.
The 747's had the same cargo door issues. The cargo door on this 747 opened in flight. The rapid decompression sucked 2 rows of seats right off the floor, killing 9 people. 1 man who was sucked into the engine had to be identified by DNA samples. Everyone else survived. The flight was on it's way to New Zealand. It had to turn around, and barely made it back to Honolulu on 2 engines.
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The 747's had the same cargo door issues. The cargo door on this 747 opened in flight. The rapid decompression sucked 2 rows of seats right off the floor, killing 9 people. 1 man who was sucked into the engine had to be identified by DNA samples. Everyone else survived. The flight was on it's way to New Zealand. It had to turn around, and barely made it back to Honolulu on 2 engines.
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Hell of an airplane and hell of a pilot though. The aircraft survived this sort of damage, explosive decompression, and an emergency flight and landing with only the port side engines functioning.
 
The explosive decompression also sucked out all the emergency oxygen masks. The plane had to make a rapid descent to reach breathable air below 15,000 feet, while doing an emergency fuel dump. A move that puts tremendous stress on a compromised airframe.
No doubt, a very terrifying ride.
 
Aloha flight 243. Another decompression event on a Boeing 737. A poor Maintenance department overlooked fracturing skin on the airplane.
A flight attendant was sucked out, and never found. The only fatality of the flight, with 65 people wounded.
The pilots on this plane also did a heck of a job getting this plane on the ground without busting it in half.
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