Almost all of this can be laid specifically to the moment when Boeing passed over Alan Mullally for its next CEO in favor of a bean counter. Mullaly went to Ford and rescued that company. If Boeings board were serious about a true turnover here, they need to try and find Mullally And get him on the board right now. At this point the best outcome that I see is a BCA sale to Lockheed. That’s a high order, Elon tried to lure him to Tesla, but was unsuccessful.
It’s also worth noting that this is the ultimate outcome of the never rewrite anything mentality. Sooner or later technical debt catches up with you, they needed to launch a new, narrow body 15 years ago, but kept soldering on with the 737, which in turn is really a Boeing 707. While the 797 is the plane that launched the jet and unquestionably the greatest airliner of all time, it’s time is long long past.
You can recover from where boeing is at now. It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders, or commercial disaster that was the A380, or the first 350 proposal but they have to want to change.
Comparing Boeing's woes to the A320 crash is to take a false middle ground. The A320 crash was the result of pilot risk taking for the purpose of showing off the plane. It didn't happen as the inevitable consequence of a company that prioritised profits over safety and had established management culture and government relationships to enable that.
The Pilot literally turned off safety features on the plane. They simply miscalculated and didn't plan properly. They had not even seen the place where they wanted to fly this demonstration. It was incredibly reckless.
Given Ford relentless push for more pickups and systematic reduction in all smaller cars. I would say Ford killed about few 1000x more people the Boeing ever has. And they have equally done a huge amount to prevent regulation, both in terms of safety and fuel economy. The US still doesn't even test how well cars do against pedestrian. The list goes on and on.
We hold Boeing to a much, much, much higher standard. And that is a good thing. So to give this guy credit when he has been involved with Ford, a company that has done an incredible amount to make the world more unsafe, we should maybe not just to conclusions about how much saver boing would be with him.
That said, safety at Boeing even from a business perspective would have been different, so his intensives there are very different.
If we actually ever want to really deal with traffic accidents, we need to approach it with the same systematic root-cause analysis and immediate action principles.
That is what they have stared doing in some of the leading countries and its amazing. Every accident leads to adjustment in the infrastructure, Identifikation of other locations with the same potential issues and updated road standards.
Unfortunately we are still far to lax, on actually regulating the cars themselves and far to forgiving on cars, car company and drivers. The arms raise of 'my car is bigger then your car' shouldn't be allowed. Cities shouldn't allow these horrible F-150 type cars into them at all. The list goes on.
It’s also worth noting that this is the ultimate outcome of the never rewrite anything mentality. Sooner or later technical debt catches up with you, they needed to launch a new, narrow body 15 years ago, but kept soldering on with the 737, which in turn is really a Boeing 707. While the 797 is the plane that launched the jet and unquestionably the greatest airliner of all time, it’s time is long long past.
You can recover from where boeing is at now. It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders, or commercial disaster that was the A380, or the first 350 proposal but they have to want to change.