WSJ: Boeing's Fuselage Factory 'Plagued' by Production Problems and Quality Lapses (msn.com) 78
"Long before the harrowing Alaska Airlines blowout on January 5, there were concerns within Boeing about the way the aerospace giant was building its planes," reports the Wall Street Journal.
There's been issues with various models — like "misdrilled holes, loose rudder bolts, and this month's MAX 9 door-plug blowout" — but many can be traced back to the outsourcing Boeing and other aerospace companies adopted more than 20 years ago where key pieces are built elsewhere and then assembled at Boeing. And the Journal reports that the door-plug was built at a factory that Boeing owned until 2005, now run by Spirit AeroSystems, that "has been plagued by production problems and quality lapses since Boeing ceded so much responsibility for its work... " Spirit is the sole supplier of the fuselages used in many Boeing jets, including the Alaska plane that made the emergency landing. It is heavily dependent on Boeing for revenue, and the two companies have battled for years over costs and quality issues. The earlier MAX grounding and Covid-19 pandemic sapped Spirit's finances, and the company slashed thousands of jobs, leaving it short-handed when demand bounced back. Some Spirit employees said production problems were common and internal complaints about quality were ignored. In a given month, at a production rate of two fuselages a day, there are 10 million holes that need to be filled with some combination of bolts, fasteners and rivets. "We have planes all over the world that have issues that nobody has found because of the pressure Spirit has put on employees to get the job done so fast," said Cornell Beard, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers chapter representing workers at Spirit's Wichita factory... Alaska Airlines and United Airlines say they have found loose hardware on other MAX 9 jets they have checked, suggesting that problems go beyond one plane...
The company, which had 15,900 workers in four U.S. factories at the end of 2019, laid off thousands of people in Wichita at the height of the pandemic. When it needed to ramp back up, not only did Spirit have fewer people on site, the company had lost years of expertise. There were fewer experienced mechanics, but also fewer experts who could inspect the quality of their work. [Spirit CEO Pat Shanahan ] said the quick production ramp-up and the earlier MAX grounding left the company short of experienced workers. "When you have disruption, you have instability," he said...
For more than a decade, Spirit and Boeing battled over costs, quality and the pace of production. Boeing's demands for lower prices left Spirit strapped for cash as managers panicked over meeting increasingly demanding deadlines. Boeing routinely had employees on the ground in Wichita and conducted audits of the supplier. The result, some current and former employees say: a factory where workers rush to meet unrealistic quotas and where pointing out problems is discouraged if not punished. Increasingly, they say, planes have been leaving Wichita with so-called escapements, or undetected defects. "It is known at Spirit that if you make too much noise and cause too much trouble, you will be moved," said Joshua Dean, a former Spirit quality auditor who says he was fired after flagging misdrilled holes in fuselages. "It doesn't mean you completely disregard stuff, but they don't want you to find everything and write it up." His account is included in a shareholder lawsuit filed in December against Spirit that alleges the company failed to disclose costly defects.
A Spirit spokesman said the company strongly disagrees with the assertions and intends to defend against the suit...
After being laid off during the pandemic shutdown, Dean returned to Spirit in May 2021. By then, he said, the company had lost many of its most experienced mechanics and auditors. Spirit already was under more intense scrutiny from Boeing. The jet maker placed Spirit on a so-called probation, in which the company more closely scrutinized the supplier's work. To get off probation, Spirit needed to reduce the number of defects on the line. At one point, Dean said, the company threw a pizza party for employees to celebrate a drop in the number of defects reported. Chatter at the party turned to how everyone knew that the defect numbers were down only because people were reporting fewer problems.
On the Spirit factory floor, some machinists building planes say their concerns about quality rarely get conveyed to more senior managers, and that quality inspectors fear retaliation if they point out too many problems. Union representatives complained to leaders last fall that the company removed inspectors from line jobs and replaced them with contract workers after they flagged multiple defects.
Two key quotes from the article:
There's been issues with various models — like "misdrilled holes, loose rudder bolts, and this month's MAX 9 door-plug blowout" — but many can be traced back to the outsourcing Boeing and other aerospace companies adopted more than 20 years ago where key pieces are built elsewhere and then assembled at Boeing. And the Journal reports that the door-plug was built at a factory that Boeing owned until 2005, now run by Spirit AeroSystems, that "has been plagued by production problems and quality lapses since Boeing ceded so much responsibility for its work... " Spirit is the sole supplier of the fuselages used in many Boeing jets, including the Alaska plane that made the emergency landing. It is heavily dependent on Boeing for revenue, and the two companies have battled for years over costs and quality issues. The earlier MAX grounding and Covid-19 pandemic sapped Spirit's finances, and the company slashed thousands of jobs, leaving it short-handed when demand bounced back. Some Spirit employees said production problems were common and internal complaints about quality were ignored. In a given month, at a production rate of two fuselages a day, there are 10 million holes that need to be filled with some combination of bolts, fasteners and rivets. "We have planes all over the world that have issues that nobody has found because of the pressure Spirit has put on employees to get the job done so fast," said Cornell Beard, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers chapter representing workers at Spirit's Wichita factory... Alaska Airlines and United Airlines say they have found loose hardware on other MAX 9 jets they have checked, suggesting that problems go beyond one plane...
The company, which had 15,900 workers in four U.S. factories at the end of 2019, laid off thousands of people in Wichita at the height of the pandemic. When it needed to ramp back up, not only did Spirit have fewer people on site, the company had lost years of expertise. There were fewer experienced mechanics, but also fewer experts who could inspect the quality of their work. [Spirit CEO Pat Shanahan ] said the quick production ramp-up and the earlier MAX grounding left the company short of experienced workers. "When you have disruption, you have instability," he said...
For more than a decade, Spirit and Boeing battled over costs, quality and the pace of production. Boeing's demands for lower prices left Spirit strapped for cash as managers panicked over meeting increasingly demanding deadlines. Boeing routinely had employees on the ground in Wichita and conducted audits of the supplier. The result, some current and former employees say: a factory where workers rush to meet unrealistic quotas and where pointing out problems is discouraged if not punished. Increasingly, they say, planes have been leaving Wichita with so-called escapements, or undetected defects. "It is known at Spirit that if you make too much noise and cause too much trouble, you will be moved," said Joshua Dean, a former Spirit quality auditor who says he was fired after flagging misdrilled holes in fuselages. "It doesn't mean you completely disregard stuff, but they don't want you to find everything and write it up." His account is included in a shareholder lawsuit filed in December against Spirit that alleges the company failed to disclose costly defects.
A Spirit spokesman said the company strongly disagrees with the assertions and intends to defend against the suit...
After being laid off during the pandemic shutdown, Dean returned to Spirit in May 2021. By then, he said, the company had lost many of its most experienced mechanics and auditors. Spirit already was under more intense scrutiny from Boeing. The jet maker placed Spirit on a so-called probation, in which the company more closely scrutinized the supplier's work. To get off probation, Spirit needed to reduce the number of defects on the line. At one point, Dean said, the company threw a pizza party for employees to celebrate a drop in the number of defects reported. Chatter at the party turned to how everyone knew that the defect numbers were down only because people were reporting fewer problems.
On the Spirit factory floor, some machinists building planes say their concerns about quality rarely get conveyed to more senior managers, and that quality inspectors fear retaliation if they point out too many problems. Union representatives complained to leaders last fall that the company removed inspectors from line jobs and replaced them with contract workers after they flagged multiple defects.
Two key quotes from the article:
- "As some problems on both the 787 and 737 were traced back to Spirit, Boeing executives said in 2023 that the plane maker would be ratcheting up oversight of the supplier it once owned."
- New FAA chief Mike Whitaker said "Whatever's happened over the previous years — because this has been going on for years — has not worked." When it comes to what caused last week's in-flight incident, "All indications are it's manufacturing."
Remote work (Score:2)
They had better move all those execs back from Chicago.
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They haven't been in Chicago for a couple of years. Try Arlington, Virginia. They made the move to get closer to their customer, i.e. the Pentagon. Boeing doesn't see itself as a commercial airline manufacturer anymore. To see where that leads to, look at the fortunes of Douglas Aircraft under McDonnell Douglas.
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Thats easy. Mcdonald Douglas screwed up got bought out by Boeing who kept all the execs. Those execs set up Mcdonalds Douglas culture in Boeings Exec team. Which moved them away first from engineers to chucago and once that shopl out a few loose stragglers moved to arlington to shake the rest out.
Now Boeing looks like Mcdonald Douglas with all the same quality issues and handling.
What i havent seen yet is the next Boeing.
Re: Remote work (Score:3)
Subcontracting / Outsourcing is hard. The more complex the product, the harder it is. Physical product and IT alike.
You need a smart team from all over the business just to write the contract. And you need to have a lot of Subject Matter Experts to validate the finished product. You also need a big team to manage the communication with the supplier. Just subcontracting does not absolve you of responsibility to manage the supplier and deliverables. You need to keep core business knowledge in-house.
Sounds lik
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Sorry, your comments do not help to bolster your idea that MBAs are a 'good thing'. Very, very rarely have many of us found that the decisions made by MBAs are in any way good for the long-term benefit to a company. Being blunt, the best-run companies are led (CEO) by someone who's core competency is in the industry that the company serves. When the MBAs take over, that's when profit overtakes product and the company starts to fail.
In this case - outsourcing generally only makes sense when a) you need te
"it was just one off freak accident" didn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blame where it belongs. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That offshore to India is a myth. The relevant investigation documentation describes how the software design modification was made in the USA in accordance with the Boeing specification. There is even a design compliance matrix that was done to validate that the design was in conformity with the Boeing specification. Boeing was fully at fault on that.
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I still don't understand one thing. The second-level subcontractor (the Indian one) cannot be "lazy", they have to deliver reports about what they did. So either the Indian contractor lied in the reports and made up the validation data, or Collins Rockwell did not specify properly what they wanted (the more likely hypothesis by Occam's razor). In the second case, result would have been the same if Collins Rockwell had done it internally (in the case they did not specify exactly what they wanted).
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So now they seem to go for "it's all a subcontractors fault"? I wonder what the next excuse is.
On the Spirit factory floor, some machinists building planes say their concerns about quality rarely get conveyed to more senior managers, and that quality inspectors fear retaliation if they point out too many problems.
If quality problems actually exist on the subcontractors floor, then I'd say it's pretty damn obvious who you should be blaming.
Spirit shouldn't have reduced it's QA standards. Plain and simple. Don't give a shit who's applying the pressure to do so otherwise either. Your reputation is either worth something, or it isn't.
When you're responsible for QA and have an unreasonable customer (Boeing) and you have management demanding financial results, you'll assume something is fine rather than verify it. The good QA people will quit when forced to work in this environment, but Spirit and Boeing can find others who don't have the same affinity for QA. It's really sad. Boeing was once a great company built by engineers and run by engineers. Boeing has lost it's way and unfortunately there isn't another company ready to pick up th
Re: Airbus (Score:3)
Do fill us in on all the recent airbus crashes due to poor manufacturing and/or software.
Re:Blame where it belongs. (Score:4, Insightful)
So now they seem to go for "it's all a subcontractors fault"? I wonder what the next excuse is.
On the Spirit factory floor, some machinists building planes say their concerns about quality rarely get conveyed to more senior managers, and that quality inspectors fear retaliation if they point out too many problems.
If quality problems actually exist on the subcontractors floor, then I'd say it's pretty damn obvious who you should be blaming.
Spirit shouldn't have reduced it's QA standards. Plain and simple. Don't give a shit who's applying the pressure to do so otherwise either. Your reputation is either worth something, or it isn't.
In the end is doesn't matter if it is Spirit's fault, it ends up being Boeing's fault, since they are meant to have final oversight over their contractors. Boeing should at least have periodic spot checks of parts coming from a subcontractor.
Right now Boeing has been failing at QA in both the air and space sectors, so this sounds more like a cultural issues stemming from the top?
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If quality problems actually exist on the subcontractors floor, then I'd say it's pretty damn obvious who you should be blaming.
The guy who decided to outsource!
It usually doesn't work. And can't work. How can paying someone to do the work PLUS the subcontractors profits (and management overhead) be cheaper than just paying just your employees?
This works in two scenarios: When you can outsource the work to someone with a higher expertise who specializes in that. Won't save you money, but gives you access to expertise. Or if it is not enough work to set up your own department. Like when a small manufacturing company outsources accoun
Re:"it was just one off freak accident" didn't wor (Score:5, Insightful)
So now they seem to go for "it's all a subcontractors fault"? I wonder what the next excuse is.
The subcontractor issue is the fault of beancounters. It's the same old story.
1. The beancounters note that having internal employees is just too darn expensive.
2. The beancounters demand that the wonderful process of outsourcing is the cure for so many problems.
3. A whole lot of employees are laid off because it's their fault that they are two expensive.
4. The beancounters are hailed as genius heros. The stakeholders realize much profit.
5. In-house engineers have to fly back and forth to correct all of the problems the outsourced agencies have. Once upon a time they'd just stop by to consult with the worker in real time.
6. Disaster!
7. More Disaster!
8. The stakeholders are not pleased.
9. Assuming the place survives, they bring it back in house until a new crop of bean counters note that having internal employees is just too darn expensive. 10. rinse and repeat.
I've seen and lived this silly cycle over many years. People just don't learn.
Re:"it was just one off freak accident" didn't wor (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt the "beancounters" responsible are actual accountants, who are by in large, intelligent, sober, conscientious people who are seriously averse to making mistakes. It's morelikely the C-suite managers who will take home a big pay day for short term gains and be long gone when the consequences arrive.
Re:"it was just one off freak accident" didn't wor (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt the "beancounters" responsible are actual accountants, who are by in large, intelligent, sober, conscientious people who are seriously averse to making mistakes. It's morelikely the C-suite managers who will take home a big pay day for short term gains and be long gone when the consequences arrive.
My experience with Beancounters has been that they are intelligent, and conscientious. They aren't evil, maybe they just a bit more power than they should wield.
What they almost all are is people who have a narrow focus. They live in a world of numbers. They believe in a bottom line.
But their bottom line is very short term. And they often lack the understanding of human psychology.
So my experience is not untypical.
We always strive to get in at or under budget. The accountants will point out that it is possible to save some millions of dollars by outsourcing. They can even provide excel charts showing that. They show that man-hours will be reduced, possibly enabling us to terminate some of the (machinists in my case) And master machinists command a healthy salary. They show the great advantage of not as much overhead expenses.
So we outsource a lot of things. The accountants have made their case, and it's pretty compelling. I've been through about 4 of these cycles I describe next.
So it looks pretty good for a while. Then the loss of control becomes apparent. We are just another customer to the new source. Then parts come back poorly machined, or not even machined correctly. Back to rework. What was just a quick trip to the in-house machine shop and back becomes a multi-day trip to check on work and to hand out change orders. And sometimes big and expensive billets can be ruined. We had master machinists, they might have an apprentice leaning on the parts.
In the end, it cost more. The money was just shifted from some machinist pay and benefits to re-work, engineer and draftsman travel that had them spending a lot of time offsite, and delayed their other projects. And that part about being just another customer - bigger than some think, because when you ask to expedite something, sometimes the answer is no. And we missed deadlines too, because of all those issues.
So learning our lesson, we shift back to inhouse work.
Until the next cycle, when the bean counters show us how much money we can save by outsourcing. Rinse and repeat. I think the bole issue Boeing has is just one of the symptoms of the outsourcing issue. Boeing saved a lot of money - until they didn't, and they lost money. The 737 Max is a testament to that sort of thing.
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In a way accountants and finance types are like lawyers -- you absolutely need them, you really ought to listen to them, but you don't want to abdicate running your business to them.
Any lawyer can *always* find a reason not to do something, always find one more stipulation that need negotiation, so if there's something you don't want to do, your lawyer is a convenient excuse not to do it. I've seen it up close -- business owners who know they should do something like cash out but keep their lawyers finding
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In a way accountants and finance types are like lawyers -- you absolutely need them, you really ought to listen to them, but you don't want to abdicate running your business to them.
Any lawyer can *always* find a reason not to do something, always find one more stipulation that need negotiation, so if there's something you don't want to do, your lawyer is a convenient excuse not to do it. I've seen it up close -- business owners who know they should do something like cash out but keep their lawyers finding reasons to delay or unnecessarily complicate the deal. They blame the lawyers, but it's not the lawyer's fault, they're just doing what in effect there were asked to do: find another thing to negotiate.
The outsourcing thing is another example. When the bean counters figure out you can improve various financial metrics by doing it, their job is done. Management has to look at the bigger picture, and if management doesn't do its job, that's not the beancounters' fault.
Of course maybe the CEO is a former beancounter and still thinks like one. It doesn't matter what the CEO's background is, whether its finance, law, or sales, he has to transcend his old job, or you get bad decisions.
If the accountants were regular employees, your premise is okay. But in todays world, the CFO is at the same level as the CEO. So what happens ar the stakeholder's meeting when the CEO's presentation shows a radical difference from the CFO's? Who do you think the stakeholders are planning on listening to. The CEO who wants to keep the workers in house to maintain quality, or the CFO's concepts of saving half a billion dollars? And there can even be a hostile takeover if the CFO's brilliance is ignoredan
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So much this.
I've watched multiple big reputable companies sell off core functions, and then become basically a paper corporation that owns no capital assets nor many employees, merely slapping their label on the end product as if they made it (like they originally used to).
Of course, what they're doing is feeding off the inertia from decades of reputable previous business.
Re: "it was just one off freak accident" didn't wo (Score:2)
Sears Craftsman in a nutshell. Used to have great products and customer service. Then suddenly all their stuff stopped being made here, so their quality turned nonexistent along with their customer service. Shit product at a shit price with shitty customer service...and they said publicly that they weren't sure what happened.
Of course you aren't. You'd be amazed what you can "not see " if your really try hard enough.
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So now they seem to go for "it's all a subcontractors fault"? I wonder what the next excuse is.
Which only begs the question, why were subcontractors involved in the first place? To be replaceable once the shit hit the fan? Until then, everything was just groovy, am I right?
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This business used to be part of Boeing, and then some MBA came up with the glorious idea of separating this core functionality away from the main company. Wonderful idea. A double whammy then hit Spirit, firstly those two crashes (caused by a problem which had absolutely nothing to do with Spirit) and then Covid.
I can see a case for hiving part of the core business off to a wholly-owned subsidiary, but that's as far as it goes.
Re: "it was just one off freak accident" didn't wo (Score:1)
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This one does not work. There is one core rule in all subcontracting and outsourcing: The full responsibility stays with you. Both legally and morally.
Re:"it was just one off freak accident" didn't wor (Score:5, Insightful)
Tofu Dredging of American products.
This is how it happens, by outsourcing, and then the outsourcers outsource to even less knowledgeable workers who can't be held to better standards because they're literately not paid enough to care.
If you want a product to be solid, outsource only non-core work. Aeroplanes should be outsourcing things like seat cushions and entertainment systems, things that if they can source from multiple vendors or omit entirely from the aircraft, do not impact the safety, just comfort. (and before anyone goes "airplanes without seat cushions, don't give them ideas", I mean the actual seat assembly that isn't mounted to the aircraft. "Your seat can be used as a floatation device", not the assembly of it to the aircraft.)
There are buildings that are being made with styrofoam (you know, as though it was a movie prop) in China because of this kind of outsourcing. There's also steel and rebar that is less durable than plastic getting into the production stream's in China. The reason you can't trust outsourcing is because eventually quality control gets so poor that everyone is just passing the buck until it gets to the guy who doesn't know how to make the thing, and isn't given the budget to make it properly.
Sounds familiar to this story. Boeing divesting the factory and then demanding low costs without giving them the needed funding to operate with no defects. It's also likely that outsources to Spirit didn't know or didn't care enough to avoid making the defects and going "oh the client will take care of it"
Because I've seen this before. Outsources routinely produce poorer work because the management of the outsourcer doesn't allow the outsourcers to care or have any loyalty to the company they are doing the work for. They only care about meeting KPI's and if that means lying about doing things they said they did, they will do so if nobody is checking.
Re:"it was just one off freak accident" didn't wor (Score:5, Insightful)
Boeing sold the fuselage factory to private equity.
Knowing how private equity works, they probably squeezed the plant for all it was worth, loaded it with debt, and then took it public after massaging the books with short term fixes that probably crippled its ability to function profitably long term (like firing workers and then rehiring them as independent contractors).
Then Boeing treated them like a disposable supplier instead of a critical partner, and since Boeing was pretty much almost all of their business, they couldn't exactly say no to Boeing's terms.
And now Boeing is surprised they're getting substandard deliveries. I think what we should be surprised by is that nobody has died yet from these manufacturing issues (with the possible exception of the 737 MAX crashes, to the extent that manufacturing quality issues affected the single sensor that the defective by design MCAS system was relying on.)
I anticipate insurance costs to rise for airlines that rely on Boeing planes, which they will go back to Boeing with to negotiate for discounts on future planes. Boeing will publicly be contrite, but in their boardrooms, to preserve their profit margin and their fat executive bonuses, they will scheme future ways to try and pass their lumps onto other customers (like the federal government) and their suppliers.
Best case scenario at this point is the FAA revokes Boeing's ability to self-certify.
Re:"it was just one off freak accident" didn't wor (Score:4, Interesting)
So now they seem to go for "it's all a subcontractors fault"? I wonder what the next excuse is.
I'm sure Boeing will claim that, but it's definitely a Boeing problem.
There's two reasons to subcontract:
1) Because the subcontractor specializes in a way your internal teams can't.
2) Because you can pressure the subcontractor to cut costs in a way you can't pressure your own divisions.
Boeing subcontracted for reason #2. If they kept running the factory themselves then attempts to cut costs would have resulted in push back from managers in the factory who would argue they needed more time and staff to ensure quality.
But because Spirit ran the factory those managers didn't really have a way to go up against the Boeing bean counters, they were stuck talking to Spirit management who were stuck with the money that Boeing gave them.
Keep that up a few years and Spirit transforms into the quick and dirty subcontractor that Boeing forced it to be.
That doesn't mean you can't get top-quality from a sub-contractor, but you need to be prepared to pay for it.
A Modest Proposal ... (Score:2)
Spirit [AeroSystems] is the sole supplier of the fuselages used in many Boeing jets, ...
Spirit Arlines and Spirit AeroSystems merge into, say, "Spirit AirlineSystems" where passengers can build the planes themselves before boarding them. To help keep costs low, perhaps safety checks can be charged à la carte to those passengers, if they still feel they're needed, after building them ... :-)
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Spirit [AeroSystems] is the sole supplier of the fuselages used in many Boeing jets, ...
Spirit Arlines and Spirit AeroSystems merge into, say, "Spirit AirlineSystems" where passengers can build the planes themselves before boarding them. To help keep costs low, perhaps safety checks can be charged à la carte to those passengers, if they still feel they're needed, after building them ... :-)
IKEA Air?
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Last time I checked, Spirit Airlines currently uses only Airbus aircrafts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Ah yes, the evil unions, if only they weren't around everything would be great, I'm sure we'd be able to afford better bonuses if only the unions weren't forcing us to pay slightly above poverty levels, and somewhat lacklustre benefits and pensions!
Shit, if they didn't try to get around paying properly and providing proper benefits, we wouldn't be in this whole mess, eh?
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An Anonymous Coward with an agenda.
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Have you seen the crap being produced in SC?
This cultural rot goes beyond union issues.
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A strong union would be able to prevent "we don't report problems or we get fired".
Good, fast, cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
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Indeed. And sometimes you can only get one. That is why engineering companies need to be lead by engineers. Other people do not have that understanding and no idea what happens when you try to do engineering cheaper than possible. Business majors, generally have no understanding at all and a deep desire for money to make matters worse.
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Except Boeing was lead by an engineer until 2019.
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"An engineer" does not cut it either. You need to have a team of engineers doing the leading.
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I am pretty sure I can find more than just one engineer in leading positions at Boeing. Engineers can be shitty managers too. And there is also this: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/... [rationalwiki.org]
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I dunno. I don't think a formal background in engineering is either necessary nor sufficient, although it's sure to be helpful. You can find respected engineering companies run by non-engineers, and bad engineering companies run by people with a solid engineering background -- just look at OceanGate; Stockton Rush was a Princeton-trained engineer.
You expect an engineer to embrace realism, to respect the fact that there's a reality outside your plans, designs, and financial statements that gets ultimate v
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Managers Agree (Score:3)
Both managers at Boeing at Spirit agree that "Our asses have always looked a lot like holes in the ground, so that it is really, really challenging to tell the difference. We have had many trainings around this, but still the challenge remains."
"once Trump’s acting Pentagon chief" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Patrick Shanahan, once Trump’s acting Pentagon chief, is CEO of Spirit AeroSystems, the company at the center of Boeing’s latest air safety debacle."
https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com]
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Why has that been moderated "Troll"? It appears to be true.
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From a knowledge perspective (tomato is a fruit) it is true.
From a wisdom perspective (don't put tomato in a fruit salad) it's meant to mislead.
The idea that he is tied to Trump because he filled in at the Pentagon for six weeks is nonsensical.
That he's a 30-year Boeing veteran is what's relevant.
Especially because he said he didn't want to work for Trump and declined the SecDef position.
Does he also like pineapple pizza?
Re:"once Trump’s acting Pentagon chief" (Score:4, Interesting)
Shanahan resigned when his ties to his former employer Boeing were criticized and an old allegation of domestic violence was dug up. But he did voluntarily work for Trump and lobbied heavily to get confirmed.
“His reputation is, excuse my French, total asshole,” said a former Boeing lobbyist who overlapped with Shanahan for roughly a year before Trump nominated him to be deputy Defense secretary.
"five current and former Defense Department officials who have worked directly with Shanahan, both uniformed and civilian, say the acting secretary is too easily manipulated by an unpredictable White House."
https://www.politico.com/story... [politico.com]
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Best and brightest.
Management 101 (Score:2)
Contracting All the Way Down (Score:3)
With that said, scapegoating doesn't work for me. At the end of the day, it's Boeing's name on the aircraft. If Boeing doesn't want their reputation in the shitter, then clearly they need to monitor the work delivered by the contractors to make sure they're not stamping their own name on shit. It's extremely common for companies to contract out manufacturing and there are many companies that get it right, but the way they get it right is by performing their own quality control on the delivered parts and holding the contractors accountable.
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Scapegoating works fine for management.
They get the bonus and the problems are for the shareholders.
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This particular arrangment is particularly suspect -- you split your company and create a subsidiary that is wholly dependent upon you for survival.
Now in theory this allows you to create an entity whose production capacity can be more fully utilized, and indeed Spirit does some work on Airbus A350s. But it's still a creature of Boeing where stuff critical to Boeing happens off Boeing's books. If you had a psychpathic or narcissistic CEO that'd be a great way to create the illusion that Boeing was taking
"Concerns" you say (Score:2)
I don't think you know what that word means.
Let's see... (Score:2)
Manufacturing quality is fscked to make the numbers... check.
Systems are hacked because actually getting qualified people in place costs money.
They made the numbers though... Check
Gee any thoughts on what's common here?
"All indications are it's manufacturing." (Score:2)
All indications are it's management.
The important question! (Score:2)
Loose bolts not a management problem (Score:2)
When sloppy work like this is shipped it means that the workers take no pride in their work and just don't care. Boeing used to be the pride of America. Now it's turning into a dangerous joke.
Re: (Score:3)
McDonnell Douglas management destroyed Boeing (Score:1)
But the doing well with diversity hires (Score:2)
And that is what really matters.
2 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO0Di1ET8Zg
I must have missed something (Score:2)
ohknow (Score:2)
People who know (Score:2)
I have to believe there are people who know that they could have prevented the door plug blow out.
Union Boilerplate (Score:2)
because of the pressure Spirit has put on employees to get the job done so fast," said Cornell Beard, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers
So, you can pretty much discount anything said by any union president; this is boilerplate rhetoric.