Ethiopian 737-8 MAX down. No survivors.

Another spot on great post.
They should hire you to sit on their review board.

 

I might not be too smart by blowing off steam on this forum. Can't ever predict how some people react to criticism but I can't help looking back at all of the good work that was done by so many good people. Over the years I met Bill Allen several times at functions out on Boeing Field and he was always approachable and interested in your job. Many times Mal Stamper would appear on the 747 production line, always smiling and friendly, Joe Sutter the same way. And one did not work for Allan Mulally, you worked with him and you never knew when he would pop up to have a chat with you. Not one of these people were in Chicago! They were next to the production area and accessible to the people that were building the airplane. Never doubt how invigorating that is to a lowly employee.

 

Boeing's corporate headquarters being in Chicago would not be a problem if they kept the headquarters of Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle and gave them the autonomy to make the decisions on future airplane programs.

It works pretty well with my last employer, Lockheed Martin. Their corporate headquarters are in Bethesda, MD, but the HQ for the Aeronautics Company is in Fort Worth, adjacent to the mile-long plant which is now exclusively building F-35s. In Marietta, we had constant contact with Fort Worth but relatively little with Bethesda, whose approach towards Aeronautics was largely hands-off. One difference it that aeronautics only makes up about 27% of L.M.'s total business; I suspect that the percentage at Boeing is rather higher.

 

Mulally was a good leader on the 777 program, but mostly because he had an incredible supporting staff of principal engineers with (guessing) avg 30+ yrs experience developing the airplane. While an engineer by degree, early in his career he never was in any one position for more than 6 months as I recall. He was a chosen one, picked to climb the golden staircase from the very beginning. Probably one of those beginning engineers who you were glad to see leave your group, only to realize he became your boss.

Did you ever hear the stories of Mulally always bumming money off the office staff to buy coffee. I recall they gave him a jar full of change when he left.

Mulally was not in Chicago only because he got passed over for CEO, so he quit and went to Detroit

 

Possibly too long.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ryanair-says-boeing-eyes-max-205238086.html

 

Damage/image control at SWA
https://news.yahoo.com/southwest-updates-safety-information-cards-164756257.html

 

I was making a general observation re people in Chicago. My point was that before the move to Chicago upper level of execs were involved in operations and people and were visibly integral members of the company .
Re supporting staff on 777. I won't ever class myself in the incredible supporting staff but I'll never forget the morning in Everett when a stranger showed up and went into the bosses office for 30 minutes. Both came out and looked around the room while discussing things before leaving. That afternoonI I was told that I was one of 6 that were to report to Renton to start the new airplane , the 767X, that quickly turned into the 777. When things got rolling down there it was obvious that there was some heavy horsepower in the engineering groups. So, you are correct, Mr Curry.

 

I'd actually like to nominate Bob to chair a past/present Boeing employees team to pressure the Boeing board to make sweeping changes to current management and practices.
As a 25+ year Boeing supplier, I've witnessed past programs with their ups & downs and generally ignored the silly things that managers get caught up in, but the current situation feels different.
The overarching concern today appears to be increasing shareholder value at the expense of long term viability. When stock options for execs drive multi-million $ compensation, free cash in the billions is used for stock buyback and increased dividends, the equation for the future seems skewed away from what had made Boeing great. As a supplier, the constant pressure to reduce cost on a yearly basis to retain business sends a message that quality & performance might not be as important as the daily stock price.
As Bob noted on the QC reduction, many initiatives being rolled out increasingly put the current thinking into question. The KC767 should have been watched like a hawk during build and the customer still found FOD on the the few aircraft delivered. 787 SC has always been on a different level in terms on QC and culture but not in a good way. FAA delegation and other 737 issues will be dealt with by legal means unfortunately, but the common threads to all these areas lead back to C suite attitude and direction.
Even with all the planes rolling through Renton today that have no new home to fly to in 2019, share prices remain stable. In today's environment, perception and reality seem to be interchangeable, unless shares drop, there will be no incentive for any positive change.
My fear is that the favorite option for truly bad news will be a strategic bankruptcy. With all the history and tribal knowledge that Bob's generation was part of building, it would be my hope that these dark paths can be avoided.
As noted in a June Bloomberg article on GE's Jack Welch, there's no magic bullet, only hard work and great people. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-12/reassessing-jack-welch-s-legacy-after-ge-s-decline-joe-nocera
My $.02

 

If any of my buddies heard that I was on a board they would still be laughing. The only board that I was ever one was 3 meters above the swimming pool when I was a clown diver in water shows after the war. Hard work... That is all I remember from my Boeing days, especially the 707 and 747. Those were both ground breaking programs fraught with unknowns and and many backward steps. Work? Twelve hour days from Monday to Friday and 8 hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays. One of my glaring memories of many was the steady grind to get the 707 going and we were two weeks behind schedule on getting the flight deck wiring completed in the mock up. It was finally finished when one day the engineer in charge of it, Joe R. , walked in and told the mock up supervisor to rip it all out because they were going to do it over. The mock up guy exploded in a screaming tirade about blowing his schedules. Joe stood there and listened until the smoke cleared and said, " Rip it out" and walked back to his building. No way to argue with the engineer. The wiring installation WAS a rat's nest and the re-do was much better and safer. As usual, the lost time was made up by a super effort of the guys on the production line. There was never a problem with the final configuration of the flight deck wiring. This was typical of many things in getting the 707 down the line . It was an experimental program in a way and nothing was spared to get it as good as we could but there were some mistakes that were corrected in subsequent programs.

 

Maybe if Bob won't do it, they can get Alan Mullaly to dress down the current Boeing management.....

 

It sounds like they’re running out of storage room in Renton. Are they going to try and get ferry permits to another field or suspend production?

 

WSJ today:
Boeing 737 MAX Grounding Could Stretch Into 2020
Company executives, FAA engineers and regulators have expanded their safety analyses to cover a growing list of issues

 

Boeing switched back to the original name already?

Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I don't know about Boeing, but apparently Ryanair will; Ryanair is hurt rather badly by the grounding, and fears that "Max" will be difficult to market when the plane takes to the skies again.

Rgds

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/15/boeing-737-max-ordered-by-ryanair-undergoes-name-change

 

I'd just continue what came before and rebrand the MAX 8 and MAX 9 as the 737-10 and 737-11.

 

This one is from the beancounters....

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/18/boeing-737-max-business-charge-revenue

Rgds

 

That one too:

Boeing posts its biggest loss ever because of the 737 Max crisis:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/24/business/boeing-loss/index.html

Rgds

 

Ky Warns Max Crisis Could Alter FAA-EASA Relationship
by Cathy Buyck
- September 3, 2019, 3:09 PM

Creative Commons (BY) by DGLR e.V.)' style="box-sizing: border-box;"> Image Unavailable, Please Login
EASA executive director Patrick Ky (Photo: Flickr: Creative Commons (BY) by DGLR e.V.)
de-alignment” of the FAA and EASA, expressed on several occasions by Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury. Speaking during an exchange of views with the European Parliament’s transport committee on Tuesday, Ky said that the FAA finds itself in a “very difficult situation.”

“It is very likely that international authorities will want a second opinion, or a further opinion [once the U.S. FAA clears the Max to fly],” he noted. “It was not like this a year ago.”

Ky said EASA did not audit the FAA and how it certified the Max and the problematic maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS), which safety authorities consider a major cause of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 crashes. However, the Cologne-based body is part of the international panel of safety technicians scrutinizing how the FAA allowed the airframer to oversee parts of its own certification. “What is certain is that the authorities have a critical eye on it,” Ky said, confirming an observation by an MEP that Boeing “auto-certified” the MCAS.

“Yes, there was a problem in this notion of delegation of the MCAS assessment [to Boeing],” he continued, adding that the conclusion will appear in the Joint Authorities Technical Review’s report scheduled for publication next week. “I have a lot of respect for my counterparts in the FAA; they have strong ethics. But what is needed is a change of their methodology,” explained Ky.

“[A similar situation] would not happen in our system. We have a very structured way of delegating and an agreed methodology,” Ky insisted, though he admitted that with a staff of 800 his agency does not have enough personnel to dissect each software analysis OEM’s like Airbus, Safran, or Rolls-Royce produce. “That is simply impossible,” he stated. “But everything that is safety-critical has to be seen and validated by us.”


EASA banned the Max from flying to and in European airspace on March 12. It set four conditions before the Max can return to service in the continent, including the certification by EASA itself—without delegating to the FAA—for all design changes proposed by Boeing. In addition, in a demand Ky called “not very popular with our American colleagues,” EASA has asked for a “broader review of the design of safety-critical systems” of the Max—domains that the EU-U.S. bilateral safety agreement delegated to the FAA. EASA also wants a “complete understanding” of the two accidents from both a technical and operational point of view and for adequate training of flight crew.

EASA, in theory, could set its own flight crew requirements for Max operations, Ky told MEPs. “I can guarantee you that the training requirements for the return to service of the Max will be defined by us and us only,” he stated. However, he also said it would “not make sense” to have different training requirements for the Max between the EU and the U.S., or the rest of the world. EASA communicated its flight and simulator requirements—a total of 70 test points, including angle-of-attack failures, stabilizer runaway, and MCAS inoperative—already at the end of May. Simulator evaluations took place in June and July.

Ky noted an “unprecedented level of effort” put into the Max involving around 20 multi-disciplinary experts including test pilots and engineers by EASA. The agency holds two to three weekly web-based meetings with Boeing and has reviewed more than 500 documents and actions.

Ky conceded he could not issue a timeline for the return to service. “Honestly, it would be impossible for me to give a timeline,” he said. “When we discussed with the FAA in April, they said May. And then everything was delayed by one month, and another month.”


FAA: International Panel Nears Release of Cert Findings
by Kerry Lynch
- September 5, 2019, 1:07 PM

Saying the Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR) panel is taking additional time to complete its review, the FAA is now expecting the group to submit findings on its probe into the 737 Max certification activities in the next several weeks.

Formed in April, the panel comprises technical experts from the FAA, NASA, and nine civil aviation authorities, and is chaired by former National Transportation Safety Board chairman Christopher Hart. The JATR has delved into issues surrounding the design, certification, regulations, compliance, training, and Organization Designation Authorization activities associated with the 737 Max. Initially, the goal was to complete the review within 90 days.

In an update, the FAA said the panel is “finishing documenting its work” and “We expect the group to submit its observations, findings, and recommendations in the coming weeks.”

The FAA cautioned that the certification review is separate from its own review surrounding efforts to return the Max to service and stressed it is following a “thorough process” rather than a prescribed timeline. The beleaguered agency also reiterated it welcomes scrutiny of the experts and “will incorporate any changes that would improve our certification activities.”

That update on the work of the international panel, however, was released as European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) executive director Patrick Ky warned that the Boeing 737 Max grounding and the relationship Boeing allegedly enjoyed with the FAA during the certification of the model could trigger a “very strong change” in the hierarchy of the relationship between the certification authorities.

 

As much as Boeing screwed the pooch on this, as has been talked about here it’s not the Boeing of old, hopefully the money men in Chicago let the engineers in Seattle fix the plane and all will be well . My concern is for the rest of the world , (not US trained pilots) ..not matter how automated the plane is aka scarebus , if the guys up front aren’t properly trained they are going to be drilling smoking holes in the ground. 1500 hrs and an ATP license looks like a pretty good idea right about now. Juan sums it up pretty good . I’ll happily fly on a southwest max when they’re back in the air

 

I'm not a pilot, but I enjoy following AviatorChat, and I do travel via commercial airlines regularly. I thought the article in the 9/22/2019 edition of the New York Times Magazine was very interesting (essentially the author makes the point that, in both 737 Max crashes, poor training and safety practices at the subject airlines were significant factors in the crashes regardless of the mistakes Boeing made in the development and rollout of MCAS).

I know there are folks on this forum with significant commercial piloting experience, and I'd love to know what they think about the article and its analysis.

 

I liked that it covered the differing design philosophies of Boeing and Airbus. It painted a very bad picture of Lion Air's practice of how they used simulator training allowing observers in the box to qualify as their training. It pointed out the dilemma that both Boeing and Airbus face when trying to sell aircraft into places where the quality of the pilot and support infrastructure is weak -would one really want to walk away from major sales opportunities because the airline is meeting only minimum standards?

 

I have been thinking about airline crew training and the lack of "airplane" in the current crop. When I was active in the 60's, 70's , and 80's, I flew with a lot of airline pilots who lived and breathed flying airplanes ...anything with wings. They were real "airplane" guys. My first thought comes to my late friend Jack L. who flew for United Airlines. He flew B-24's during the war and flew DC-3, DC-4, DC-6, DC-7, DC-8 series, and 727. He said that he flew "Nose Draggers" for a living and "Tail Draggers" for fun. And did he ever! He had a couple of antique Moncoupes, a C-185 and flew anything that was offered to him. When we were visiting Ernie Gann on San Juan Island in the late 70's, Ernie offered his Bucker Jungman for Jack to fly. Jack wrung that airplane out and ended his session with an outside loop. Ernie commented that Jack was a flyer of a vanishing breed and then Gann took the airplane up for his own session of aerobatics that had all the maneuvers including a snap roll at the top of a loop. He was just under 70 at the time. If you don't know about Ernie, he flew for the airlines for many years and also during the war. My favorite hangout was Thun Field , south of Seattle. It was Mecca for the homebuilts and antiques and the array of older airplanes and newer homebuilts was wonderful. At least 80% of them were owned and restored by those with the money to do, airline pilots. I won't name all of the different types but at one time it was a flying museum. One pilot owned several beautiful Travel Airs and a Waco 10. Others cherished things like old Aeronca C-2's and C-3's, and Curtiss Robins. I got to fly many of them and got to fly in many of them but I had been doing that since 1936 .I guess that I got carried away here so I'll close by saying that I was fortunate to have had the chance to fly with real flyers that Ernie said, " Was a vanishing Breed."

 

I forgot to mention that Jack's final airline flight was as captain of a 747. Ernie's last airplane was a Pietenpol Aircamper.

 

New York Times Magazine opined that it was the Lion Air order.

Went in depth into the difference between Boeing and Airbus design view, and went WAY deep into the current crop of pilots, in Indonesia and Africa, and that they were just kids with Sim training only.

Of course if Boeing would describe these LATENT software systems in a manual, that would help, IMO.
The Lion Air flight that crashed had had the SAME malfunctions on a previous flight, only a "jump seat" pilot with more real world experience had helped them turn the sh*t off....next crew, not so wise, not so lucky.

That Ethiopian flight never throttled back from take off thrust, towards the end the wings tore off....400 knots??

I's a mess but it's not just $8 an hour software writers

 

Sounds like Jeff Kennedy is citing the same item...sorry....