If you’ve ever watched a chicken fly, it’s not a pretty site. No sweeping wings gliding majestically in a breeze, circling up in a thermal. Nope-they are heavy, lumbering, clunky beasts that can get on top of the shed, or car, or whatever they need to evade a dog. But that’s really about all they can do. It’s almost amazing they get in the air at all.
In fact, their wide fat bodies and clunky wings are reminiscent of some ugly airplanes which are wide, and fat, and heavy, made by Boing. They are not graceful, and sometimes they have trouble staying in the air.
The Boeing problem though is completely a product of Donald Trump and Conservative politics. giving the company everything they’ve asked for. Plus old an fashioned management vs workers mentality. Over the last few decades, Boeing has absolutely lost it’s way, because they have gotten away from things that used to work so well. Things like strong government oversite and strong unions building their equipment.
When they went to outsource to save money, as with Spirit, they left behind the unions as fast as possible. Sure the pay is decent in a non-union airplane factory, but these are not jobs to be loyal to. They are just factory jobs. The hourly folks in those plants have skills, but there’s plenty of room for laziness and incompetence. A union shop encourages seniority, loyalty and, sometimes, satisfaction at seeing the company thrive while workers thrive. These don’t happen at production rate focused companies founded solely to make parts cheaper, not better.
Instead, you’ve got at will employment, workers with a gun to their head making production quotas or else. During my years at Amazon they cultivated loyalty and motivation with lots of T Shirts and the occasional ra ra meeting. T shirts don’t go far in loyalty when the boss decides productivity is going up, so fewer people do more work. With the constant threat if you don’t want this job, we’ve got plenty of people who’ll take it and be happy. That is no way to build an airplane.
Likewise, under 4 years of Trump, the FAA chased off as much talent as the politcals could while installing loyal yes folk. Political appointees running quality control and oversite at aircraft factories are a recipe for disaster. These are people who say yes to Boeing when the company wants cheaper, less redundant software with fewer hours of testing. The kind that crashes multiple airplanes and kills hundreds of people.
Just yesterday Boeing received a notice of investigation from the FAA. This would never have happened in a Trump administration. A few brave journalists like John Ostrower at Air Current Magazine have been following Boing, and keep finding more they’ve done wrong with the 737 MAX.
Under Trump management got a lot of what they wanted, especially in heavily regulated industries. The aircraft segment is just spectacularly hi visibility. They got the cash savings investors demanded, and it’s starting to run the company into the ground because it’s losing site of the long game. Until the company returns to what’s worked well it will be vulnerable to problems of their own creation, which kill people.
Chicken little needs to tell Boeing the sky is falling. But they probably won’t listen until they crash a few more planes.