The Dreamliner program looks like a real mess. I wonder how much of this is a result of labor issues?
26 thoughts on “What Is Going On With Boeing?”
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The Dreamliner program looks like a real mess. I wonder how much of this is a result of labor issues?
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Maybe they’ve lost the institutional knowledge how to develop a new plane? Or become infected with cost-plus thinking? Seriously, when was the last time they tried to build a new commercial jet from scratch?
Is building a plane from scratch even a good idea?
Frankly, it looks like serious mismanagement to me. Though that is in hindsight. For example, they seem to have done a really poor job of managing expectations. Just delaying pre-orders probably would have helped their image problem a lot. But they were accepting them way back in 2007.
As to “building from scratch”, composites have a significant advantage over aluminum frame aircraft. But composites are very different in how they are manufactured, used, and maintained. Any use of the materials would result in a greatly modified aircraft structure, production line, maintenance planning, and aircraft certification.
It was a big gamble, but even with the delays, they’ll have the aircraft out well ahead of anything comparable from Aerobus (who at best has an aircraft, A350-XWB with an Al-Li frame coming out in 2013 or so, according to Wikipedia). The only remaining problem is the safety of the aircraft. Composite failure in such a large structure is still not fully understood. And due to the troubles of its development, there may be hidden safety issues.
According to the article they also have new engines (although from two suppliers) and a radically different supply chain. Couldn’t they have tried the composites on something smaller first?
They are having the same problems with the 747-800, the next generation 747. They recently fired the 747-800 project manager.
I don’t think its labor. I think its mismanagement. More specifically, they are experiencing the fallout from Phil Condit, who was Boeing’s CEO during the 90’s. Phil Condit took down the institutional “firewall” that shielded the commercial aviation division from the military contractor division. The problems of military contracting have infected the commercial aviation division. Defense contractor managers could not manage their way out of a paper bag if their lives depended on it.
The big issue with switching over from metal airplanes to composite ones is that it involves a serious overhaul of the supply-chain. Defense contractor managers do not have the capability of making this kind of change over.
However, I think Boeing has a deeper problem, one that is common to almost all industry in the U.S. The old engineers and managers who actually knew anything are retiring, or are being forced out by HR bimbos (who know nothing about either engineering or management). The “young” people (those who graduated from school starting in the late 80’s) do not know anything. These are the people who made their way through school by “playing the system” as opposed to actually learning. These are the people who have infested the U.S. business culture starting in the mid 90’s. This problem is not limited to Boeing, but is common to all businesses in the U.S. GE supposedly has this problem in spades as well.
No matter how screwed up things are at Boeing, I suspect they are even worse at Airbus. Airbus was able to deliver the A380. However, I think this plane has performance problems and may be unsafe as well. The A380 is largely a metal airplane. The A350, which is supposed to be delivered in 2013 is said to have many development issues as well. Also, the European governments will likely not be in any financial position to back Airbus (which relies heavily on government subsidies) by 2013. If Airbus still exists in 2013, it will most certainly be an all-German company (as it should).
Germany is the only productive part of Europe. The rest of the EU lives parasitically off of the Germans. This state of affairs will not last long.
Kurt9,
Perhaps the EU should be broken up. That way British Industry could free itself from the shackles of Brussels bureaucracy – which is led inevitably by the Germans, French and Italians.
Germany is the only productive part of Europe.
Heh, you’re not counting the UK then? Or Slovakia and the Czech republic?
Well, when you screw the engineers of the company and put a bunch of Harvard business school grads in charge of the company, it is bound to go to hell shortly thereafter.
What he said.
A great many of my friends at Boeing lay the blame squarely on the shift in management culture since the McDonnell-Douglas merger.
“The company aimed to reduce the cost and risk by outsourcing an unprecedented share of manufacturing and design work to partners around the globe.”
Yeah, that worked out great. I bet the guy who signed off on that brilliant decision will take home more in one month than I do in six. And they say the Invisible Hand never makes a mistake…
“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.”
– Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC, 1980
A week ago Elon Musk was saying SpaceX pretty much has to be vertically integrated because the supply chain is shallow. Boeing is trying something new with an all composite plane, and are havinging problems with their supply chain.
Maybe what the aerospace industry needs most is to learn from the logisticians at Walmart and Greyhound.
Kurt9 sez: The “young” people (those who graduated from school starting in the late 80′s) do not know anything. These are the people who made their way through school by “playing the system” as opposed to actually learning.
I’m not seeing that to any greater degree with the more recent graduates than I did with my contemporaries that entered the industry in the mid ’80s. You have to be careful who you hire, but again that’s always been the case. I fight tooth and nail with HR to leave a position empty until I find the right person rather than drag my team down with a non-performer, though. One positive thing I’m seeing is less pressure for good engineers to become mediocre managers; there is respect for high quality senior engineers.
I think the 787 root cause was the disastrous decision to outsource system integration to the major airframe subs. Boeing expected to get fully assembled, integrated and tested subassemblies (with LRUs and everything), and that was well beyond the capabilities of the supplier base. Everything else (except the wing stress screwup, which I have no clue how they missed) is fallout from the overhigh expectations of what they would get from the major airframe subs.
What has surprised me is that I haven’t been hearing about S/W issues being implicated in the 787 slips; I wonder if it really hasn’t been a problem or if they’re just being more successful than usual about keeping those problems hidden…
Maybe Rand means that the labor problems at Boeing Seattle led to the decision to outsource?
@kurt9 –
I agree whole-heartedly with this:
The “young” people (those who graduated from school starting in the late 80′s) do not know anything. These are the people who made their way through school by “playing the system” as opposed to actually learning. These are the people who have infested the U.S. business culture starting in the mid 90′s.
I found that big aero firms use electronic screening and arbitrary cutoffs for GPA and test scores to week out their applicant pools. The problem with that is, while you get some good researchers, you are pretty much ensuring that you won’t get anyone who thinks outside the box, devotes a lot of time to engineering on their own projects, decided to go for a very broad educational background that doesn’t fit usual programs, or simply is very good at lots of things instead of being great at one thing. My interviews with NewSpace firms are much more about my reasons for applying, the actual deliverable items I have made in my life, and the way I approach design and problem-solving. Some of the best engineers I know in NewSpace, from Mojave to SpaceX, either had crappy GPAs or are “continuing to work indefinitely” on their final degree.
There are lots of reasons for it. Some of them built student satellites which ate into their study time. Some of them were devoted athletes. Some of them just partied a few years away before getting back on track. Some of them got business degrees then realized later that they were better at engineering. Some of them are simply much better hands-on than they are at exams. The point is, the big aeros passed up the majority of them, and the rest they bored or jerked around enough during the interview process or the first couple years of employment that they lost them. So for decades, companies like Boeing have been infiltrated by good test-takers. They are great at crossing the t’s to get FAA certs and military cost-plus contracts, but it’s a total crapshoot whether someone like that is any good at weighing engineering and cost tradeoffss, and having the balls to carry them into hardware that is unlike anything flown before. Good luck building a reactive entrepreneurial organization with that.
The old engineers and managers who actually knew anything are retiring, or are being forced out by HR bimbos (who know nothing about either engineering or management).
This aligns with my experience at Boeing. Boeing is on the cutting edge of gender equality and from personal experience are promoting women with dubious backgrounds into positions of managerial and technical responsiblity which they are ill equipped to handle.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t technically qualified very competent women engineers at Boeing, there are. But for some reason, these folks don’t seem to be welcome at the high project management level.
I wonder if the erosion of system engineering capabilities in the industry affected the Dreamliner. System engineering in the aircraft world is more of an accounting, interface-control-document function compared with system engineering on the space side, but a well-run system engineering group who understands how the subsystems interact would have prevented many of the Dreamliner problems.
In my view (as a software engineer on a project associated with the 787 and other airplane programs), the management culture at Boeing is really broken. The Boeing management has a motto, “Find a Way.” To them it means “figure out some way to get the job done,” but what it *really* means is “ignore problems for as long as you can, don’t report them up the chain, because it will make you look bad.” When the truth of the situation inevitably comes out (as it has several times now on the 787 program), they end up having to take delays and other drastic measures, because the senior managers were *completely unaware* of the reality of the program. The lower-level managers don’t tell them, because they are busy trying to “find a way,” rather than look bad. They claim to encourage reporting bad news, but in truth they don’t. This management problem is compounded by what is (in my opinion) technical incompetence up and down the management chain. Some people have said that you don’t want your brilliant engineers to become mediocre managers. Generally I would agree, but in fact, at Boeing, managers often make technical and engineering decisions, so the managers need to be technically competent. The sad fact is that many/most of them aren’t. The best engineers don’t want to play the BS games that managers have to play at Boeing, so the people that go into management are the ones with, ahem, “people skills.” This leads, naturally and obviously, to bad decisions. I’ve seen it time and time again, and I really worry about Boeing’s future. China already has plans to enter the commercial aviation market. It will take them time, but in 25 years or perhaps less, they could be a major player.
The failures at Alenia should serve as a warning to people who worship at the altar of free trade. The cheapest labor market isn’t necessarily the best. As someone here noted, SpaceX is integrated vertically and keeps its capabilities in-house. Aerospace products have been one of the few things the U.S. still makes–and makes well–domestically. It was one of the few hedges we had against the trade deficit and national technical capabilities, when we used to care about such things. Perhaps this will serve as a hard lesson on the downsides of depending on a “world-wide supply chain.”
/b
Dennis,
[[[Well, when you screw the engineers of the company and put a bunch of Harvard business school grads in charge of the company, it is bound to go to hell shortly thereafter.]]]
You have it exactly right. As Robert Townsend noted in “Up the Organization” (1967) the only reason to hire Harvard Business grads to put their name on the door to impress investors. But you never ever give them any management duties. Sadly, that is what business has been doing and combined with ‘thinking by the numbers” and the adoption of management fads as quick ‘fixes” real management has left many business enterprises.
As Robert Townsend noted in “Up the Organization” (1967) the only reason to hire Harvard Business grads to put their name on the door to impress investors.
As Ben Rich wrote in Skunk Works, “2/3 HBS = BS”
As a mechanical designer currently contracting for a division of GE, and with over a quarter century of experience in the field, this comment thread resonates with me very strongly.
Rand, I really don’t think that the labor part of the equation is a major part of the problem. There are certainly some abuses, but not to the extent that cripple the company, except in some rare cases.
I see serious problems at both the engineering level and the management level.
Engineering: far too many of the kids coming out of school don’t know any CAD software. The few who know a little think they know everything, and will not listen to anyone older. One engineer I am currently working for is completely unable to read drawings of any sort. He does all of his work with Excel and PowerPoint. Needless to say, getting his work done is a real challenge for me. This is a mechanical engineer, BSME and all. Most of the younger engineers, and a lot of the older ones, disdain the shop floor people with a level of contempt that I find sickening.
A previous client had serious issues on the shop floor with problems that could have been quickly resolved had there been any manufacturing engineers assisting on the floor. But at this client, that was a career killer.
Management: Affirmative action, diversity, outsourcing support, using cheap equipment that bogs down when the model files start exceeding 5 meg, unrealistic deadlines, too much time in meetings to determine why the work isn’t getting done.
One of my previous clients laid off several hundred engrs, designers and such when they lost a contract. The same client, after axing the engineering staff, added several dozen MBA types to try to streamline their financial process, but if there are no engineers to create or innovate, how do they expect to get more work?
And yet Aviation Week, GE and several other companies and organizations want kids to go into engineering???
I forgot to say, that I realize that there are exceptions to what I said in my previous comment. I have worked with a few young engineers who have a real knack for the work, and are a pleasure to work with.
Not all engineers are twits, just as not all middle aged mechanical designers are handsome chick magnets like me…LOL
Most of the younger engineers, and a lot of the older ones, disdain the shop floor people with a level of contempt that I find sickening.
I’m starting to see a lot of this. Absolutely no sense that the guys on the floor are every bit as critical to the design as the guys in the cubicles. It’s “well, I could do their job”. Maybe so, maybe not, but we paid you to do your job, so that the floor guy could do his job better. Want to prove to me that you understand the shop floor, find ways to improve the shop or create things that work with how the shop floor gets things done. Otherwise, punch a time clock and stay out of the way of the direct labor.
Most of the younger engineers, and a lot of the older ones, disdain the shop floor people with a level of contempt that I find sickening.
This confirms my opinion that new engineers should pull an apprenticeship on the manufacturing floor learning how things are built and then another stint in the service department learning how things break and are repaired. Maybe then they’d design stuff for easier assembly and repair. In union shops, there would have to be an agreement with the union to allow this to happen but the case could be made that better products would make the company stronger, leading to greater job security.
When Kelly Johnson established the Skunk Works in WWII, he took a handful of his best engineers and machinists with him. The machinists were so experienced that they often knew what had to be built. They’d turn over the finished part to the engineers who would then do the drawings. It was that kind of partnership between engineers and the shop floor personnel that allowed the Skunk Works to perform miracles such as going from contract signing to first flight of the XP-80 in about 140 days.
I’ve heard Scaled Composites goes one step further. I’ve heard that none of their engineers are allowed to design a part that they themselves could not build. If true, that expains a lot of the company’s success.
If I recall one of the requirements to get into an engineering program in Germany is to first learn a trade like welding, diesel mechanics, electronics repair, etc. That might be good requirement to add to domestic programs in engineering, a minimum of a year working in a technical trade.
Same with business. I know from experience my best management students are those that have actually worked in management or at least been supervisors. They actually have a real world framework to apply what they learn to.
By contrast the kids that go straight from High School through the bachelors to the MBA are so gullible as to believe anything you tell them, no matter how dumb.
After a stint, some years back, working for a now-defunct big box computer chain, I reworked an old saying: “Those who can’t do, manage. Those who can’t manage, manage retail.” Scary to think that aerospace now seems substitutable for retail in that formulation.
As to all the 787 integration screw-ups, I suspect more than a few probably have their origins in what I am given to understand is the use of CATIA as the foundational parametric modeling software for the project. I took a couple of intro classes on this digital carbuncle at my local CC awhile back; this is a deeply opaque and unimpressive piece of code. But, hey, it’s French, so it wasn’t really written by, you know, human beings.
I haven’t set foot on an airliner since before 9/11. Methinks I’m now going to be looking to run my ground-pounding streak out to something truly Ripken-esque.
Unless Elon gets into the airliner business, of course.