Good luck Boeing Starliner

And to prevent the second possibility, they hold onto the boosters for 48 seconds longer?

 

'boeing ceo resigns'

 

You can thank Soviet Rocket Program scientist Sergei Korolev for the "discarding spent booster" concept.

 

I was surprised that Muhlenberg lasted that long. Boeing is obviously part of the Government "kiss nice person" mentality that we accuse the Europeans and China of.

 

You misspelled "major US government contractors"

 

That's probably all due to the 737 Max debacle. Heads had to roll for that one and I'm surprised it took this long.

 

the irony is that the plane was developed under his predecessor

 

When one is on top too long; one begins to take things for granted and one becomes complacent.

Witness North American Aviation and the Apollo 204 fire.

 

Yeah, but this big issue was how it was handled and it was handled very badly. They could have made it right and didn't.

That was such a shame!! From what I've seen & heard, the pre-fire Apollo spacecraft was a real piece of junk.

 

Resigned, fired, it varies by headline.

But I don't think it was only for the Max. CEO / President / Director Muilenburg was previously stripped of his Chairman of the Board title October 11. Then McAllister, head of the commercial airplane division and more directly tied to the Max, was ousted on October 22.

So I think this Starliner flub was one of several straws added to the basket last week.

 

The Soviets switched to an atmospheric mixture of nitrogen and oxygen after they and a similar disaster with pure oxygen before Gagarin's first successful flight. Yet, Apollo still switched to pure oxygen after achieving a successful orbit.

 

After the fire, Apollo greatly reduced the pure oxygen pressure to something much closer to its sea level partial pressure.

 

new ceo was at general electric for 20 years, good luck to them

 

Hope he is not like Jack Welch who "offshored" many jobs out of GE. They love Welch in India and have places named in honor after him.

 

Yeah, the Apollo fire was extra bad because they had increased the internal pressure with pure oxygen to above one atmosphere making for a lot more O2 to catalyze the fire. Also, the construction of the spacecraft was very slipshod. Immediately before the fire, they were having communications problems and I wonder if that might have had something to do with igniting the fire.

 

It was the "it's good enough for government work" attitude.

McDonnell Aircraft did better with the Mercury and Gemini spacecrafts.

A lot of quality has to do with organizational culture. In many dysfunctional organizations, employees and especially inspection and certification personnel are led to believe that speed and loyalty to the organization is more important than integrity.

Basically, if you won't approve it, we'll find someone else who will. Accordingly, the certification inspector is labeled not a team player and less likely considered for promotion.

Like Boeing and the FAA, disaster happens when the two dysfunctional cultures work together.

The results might not have ever surfaced if not for two crashes of the 737 Max.

 

If the FAA analysis after the first crash was reasonable, then even if these two particular crashes hadn't happened, plenty others still would, very roughly 15 over the operational life of the model.

I.e. the dysfunctional results were going to surface, no matter what.

 

That's what one gets when one hires all "YES MEN."

 

It's amazing that we still see those attitudes in businesses today. I'm convinced that most big companies survive mostly by inertia rather than long term vision.

Before becoming a missionary, I worked for Ball Corporation for 22 years starting in '76 making aluminum beverage cans and the revolution in thought for us started around 1990 give or take a couple years. It was gradual but profound. When I started, quality control was the enemy. They thought of their job as finding reasons to shut down machinery. Production saw their job as keeping product defects hidden in order to send out as many cans and can ends as they could. Housekeeping was something that you only did when you just couldn't stand the mess.

Somebody way up high finally realized that that wasn't the way to gain and keep customers. It took a while to turn that ship, but the turn was worth it. When the people running and maintaining the machines (and especially their supervisors) finally learned to see that the only thing going out the door that counted was product that the customer would not reject, they saw QC as an extra set of eyes. Customers started bragging to their competitors about how great their lines ran with our cans, and we kept having to add capacity and hire new people.

Oh. One more thing. We didn't need a union and got paid about 50% more than the people competing with us because we were that much more efficient once we got it dialed in. It became a great place to work and there was almost zero turnover.

 

Only difference. Boeing gambled with people's lives.