Comments on: It wasn’t a 100 percent honest honest mistake

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 02:31:36 +0000

Not an honest mistake.

The fact they did not have even a simulator that represented this aircraft model and its significant changes tells everything.
That the FAA went along with it too.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 23:03:11 +0000

A little strange that Boeing agreed to at $1 million per plane penalty clause…if they had held out for something more reasonable, in terms of the actual economic impact of Level D simulator training, say $100K, would Southwest have walked away from the deal? Seems unlikely…if so, then the $1MM number was basically chest-thumping.

And with a lower number, there would have been far less pressure to keep the feature out of the manuals and invisible on the panel.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 21:41:39 +0000

The whole thing ties into my observation that we’re really not very good at this whole “organization” thing… Every institution we create becomes a power sink, which attracts the parasite do-nothing apparatchik types.

Personally, I think the only way forward is to either figure out a way to make a self-cleaning, self-regulatory bureaucratic structure, or to just eschew the entire mess. The paradigm is wrong; humans are wired for small groups and chaos above that.

My guess is that if the project to colonize and spread out to the Americas by the ancient ancestors of the Amerindians had been run by some kind of NASA-like entity, they might have made it as far as the Aleutian Islands about the time the Vikings found Greenland.

Humans do not do large-scale very well, unless it is something military. Killing people? Yeah; we’re real good at that, and can make it work despite our predilection for corruption and malfeasance in our organizations.

I suppose another path might be to just say “F**k it, we’re crooked and slimy bastards… Let’s go with that…”, and somehow institutionalize the corruption such that it actually works effectively. Dunno what that might look like–East India Company on steroids? No matter what, though, what we’re doing currently is just not working out over the long haul. Boeing is a perfect example of how the suits capture an organization and remold it in their image. See also: Saturn, within that which was GM.

The “Suit Mentality” is pernicious, and damn near as hard to eradicate as that fungus that reprograms ants–Cordyceps. It’s also as inimical…

By: Wang Wei Lin

Wang Wei Lin — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 21:08:53 +0000

The suits destroy everything. GM with its 1:1 ratio of salary to hourly workers has whole departments of people who can’t find the oil dipstick even if you open the hood for them. Since salary workers tend to make more than hourly workers the ‘cost’ of the line worker is not the burden, but the suits won’t talk about that.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 17:50:10 +0000

I’m “local” to Boeing, and hear from people actually in the company. The engineers have been predicting something like this happening since McDonnell-Douglas took them over.

On paper, the deal was that Boeing bailed out MD; reality was that MD’s business executives took over Boeing from within, and the company started following the siren song of the MBA, rather than the traditional Boeing engineering culture. The fruits of that were the disastrous outsourcing on the 787, and now this. Whether Boeing can survive or get back to the original corporate culture is the question, and I venture to predict that if the MD corporate culture remains dominant, the company will go bankrupt.

MD was that crooked. They were never really an aerospace company after the suits took over, and once they ran MD into the ground, those same suits parasitized a new host. It’s a mess, and will continue to be one so long as the corporate culture remains under the domination of the old MD dumbasses that ran that company into the ground.