Boeing Acquires Spirit AeroSystems, While Boeing's 'Starliner' Unit Gets a New VP (yahoo.com) 35
Spirit Aerosystems builds aircraft components, including fuselages and flight deck sections for Boeing, according to Wikipedia. But now Boeing is set to acquire Spirit AeroSystems.
The aviation blog called Aviation Source News says the price tag was $4.7 billion, and opines that Boeing's move signals "a renewed focus on quality and supply chain stability" as Boeing "addresses lingering concerns surrounding its 737 program." Spirit's recent struggles with quality control and production delays have had a fallout effect for Boeing... By integrating Spirit's operations, Boeing can implement more stringent oversight and ensure consistent manufacturing processes. This move is a direct response to past quality lapses that have plagued the company and damaged its reputation. Beyond quality control, the acquisition also offers Boeing greater control over its supply chain. By bringing a key supplier in-house, Boeing can streamline production, improve coordination, and reduce the risk of future disruptions...
Spirit AeroSystems also supplies parts to Airbus, Boeing's main competitor. To address this, a separate agreement is being negotiated for Airbus to acquire Spirit's Airbus-related business. This strategic move ensures that Airbus maintains control over its own supply chain and prevents Boeing from gaining undue influence over its competitor's production.
Meanwhile, the vice president leading Boeing's Starliner spacecraft unit "has left his role in the program and been replaced by the company's International Space Station program manager, John Mulholland," Reuters reports, citing a Boeing spokesperson. In its first test mission last summer flying astronauts, Starliner was forced by NASA to leave its crew aboard the ISS and return empty in September over problems with its propulsion system. A panel of senior NASA officials in August had voted to have a Crew Dragon capsule from Elon Musk's SpaceX bring them back instead, deeming Starliner too risky for the astronauts.
Paul Hill, a veteran NASA flight director and member of the agency's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during a quarterly panel meeting on Thursday that NASA and Boeing continue to investigate Starliner's propulsion system. A Boeing spokesperson said on Thursday that the company and NASA have not yet determined what Starliner's next mission will look like, such as whether it will need to repeat its crewed flight test before receiving NASA certification for routine flights.
The aviation blog called Aviation Source News says the price tag was $4.7 billion, and opines that Boeing's move signals "a renewed focus on quality and supply chain stability" as Boeing "addresses lingering concerns surrounding its 737 program." Spirit's recent struggles with quality control and production delays have had a fallout effect for Boeing... By integrating Spirit's operations, Boeing can implement more stringent oversight and ensure consistent manufacturing processes. This move is a direct response to past quality lapses that have plagued the company and damaged its reputation. Beyond quality control, the acquisition also offers Boeing greater control over its supply chain. By bringing a key supplier in-house, Boeing can streamline production, improve coordination, and reduce the risk of future disruptions...
Spirit AeroSystems also supplies parts to Airbus, Boeing's main competitor. To address this, a separate agreement is being negotiated for Airbus to acquire Spirit's Airbus-related business. This strategic move ensures that Airbus maintains control over its own supply chain and prevents Boeing from gaining undue influence over its competitor's production.
Meanwhile, the vice president leading Boeing's Starliner spacecraft unit "has left his role in the program and been replaced by the company's International Space Station program manager, John Mulholland," Reuters reports, citing a Boeing spokesperson. In its first test mission last summer flying astronauts, Starliner was forced by NASA to leave its crew aboard the ISS and return empty in September over problems with its propulsion system. A panel of senior NASA officials in August had voted to have a Crew Dragon capsule from Elon Musk's SpaceX bring them back instead, deeming Starliner too risky for the astronauts.
Paul Hill, a veteran NASA flight director and member of the agency's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during a quarterly panel meeting on Thursday that NASA and Boeing continue to investigate Starliner's propulsion system. A Boeing spokesperson said on Thursday that the company and NASA have not yet determined what Starliner's next mission will look like, such as whether it will need to repeat its crewed flight test before receiving NASA certification for routine flights.
But the good news is.. (Score:3)
that the last couple of planes that went down, weren't built by Boeing.
Happy Flying! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Happy Flying! (Score:5, Funny)
The good news is Boeing is building the new Air Force One and the orange one is complaining that its taking too long. So this may have a positive outcome.
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This story was about Boeing, not Donald Trump...
Which branch is in charge of enforcing antitrust law? Who is in charge of that branch? Seems like that guy might want to take a look at...
Oh.
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Isn't the point of a scapegoat to kill the goat instead of yourself? That sort of shell/front company is like a fuse that blows protecting the main company from the consequences of their actions.
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According to someone who claimed to be a whistleblower, one of the reasons that the NTSB was easily able to determine that the door plug was not bolted to that 737 in the Alaska Airlines incident is due to the trail of evidence left behind by the systems Boeing and Spirit used to process work orders. This acquisition will likely make those systems unnecessary, which will reduce the trail of evidence available for future incidents.
Ummm, no. The reports are that the evidence for the door plug problem has nothing to do with Spirit. The installation problem occurred at the Boeing plant (Spirit had nothing to do with this) and it was Boeing records that show the plugs removed and never reinstalled [seattletimes.com].
Also, the prediction that somehow bringing Spirit back into the enterprise will surely destroy tracking records is absurd and shows absolute ignorance of airliner parts (but then you also didn't know about the facts of this case). All parts hav
That didn't last (Score:2)
Boeing spun off Spirit Aerosystems 20 years ago. Seems kinda pointless now.
Re:That didn't last (Score:5, Interesting)
Boeing has been playing the game of "oops, outsourcing to external suppliers didnt work out the way we wanted it to" since the 787 debacle kicked off in 2007 - they ended up having to buy most of the suppliers for that program because they couldn't control quality, but even since doing that they have still had fundamental quality issues with many aspects of the 787 supply line.
Boeing saw the model that Airbus was using, and wanted to move to it - they failed.
Re:That didn't last (Score:5, Insightful)
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Cost and quality have inverse relationship, and since most US trained MBAs work to decrease costs in order to increase revenue for quarterly numbers, quality should be expected to decrease
It does not really matter with consumer goods, since Americans are easily induced to purchase new goods every few years, but with things like airplanes...
Re:That didn't last (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that's not what you intended to say.
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Thank you Ed and pjt33 for catching my error. Yes, I should have said a direct relationship
Furthermore, I would like to point to clear cases of enforced quality via government consent decree, which forces compliance to safety standards in order to enforce the public good, and can incur considerable cost. And, which business work to avoid by abiding to regulatory standards
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Yeah, the key difference is that Airbus is not outsourcing to get the lowest costs. They are doing it for purely political reasons.
Not purely political, politics, like cost, is a factor. If it were purely political then you'd have a similar situation to Boeing where quality has gone down the toilet. Airbus are considering quality as well as cost and politics, any sane company would be doing the same, focusing solely on one factor is the sign that a company's leadership is far from sane.
And political considerations aren't what Americans expect... Faury isn't worried about pleasing government officials, he's concerned with government
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Yeah, a better headline would be "Boeing re-absorbs Spirit Aerosystems".
It is interesting that, somewhere in that 20 year period of independence, Spirit managed to pick up some of Airbus' work.
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Only by acquisition - Spirit bought companies that did some manufacturing for Airbus.
There never was a point to it. (Score:5, Insightful)
When a corporation grows to become dominant in its industry (as Boeing did in the USA) and then management announces that business units are being spun-off, it should ALWAYS be a flashing red light to share holders that the management proposing it is incompetent. In nearly every such instance, the unit being spun off has been profitable in the first place, which is why it existed at all, and yet the current management is having troubles and wants to drop it. Before any board ever approves such a maneuver, the board should call in its CEO and other top officers for a mini inquisition. They need to explain to the board why THEY are not able to run something properly that they or their predecessors previously DID run successfully.
Spirit was probably originally spun-off from Boeing as a way of ditching some unionized workers. Boeing, after all, was going to continue using the unit... so it was not a leftover no-longer needed relic of the propeller age or some such thing. Now we all see Boeing re-absorbing the unit, so it's plain for all to see that the previous managers who unloaded it were incompetent. Somebody needs to go back and look at the golden parachutes they may have been given.
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Boeing spun off Spirit Aerosystems 20 years ago. Seems kinda pointless now.
Well, they wanted to be 'lean', basically Boeing was supposed to become an office in a skyscraper that managed and coordinated armies of subcontractors. Since then the Chinese have shown that vertical integration beats the crap out of 'lean' and Airbus is quite a bit ahead of Boeing in vertical integration simply because they never got drunk on the 'lean' Kool Aid like Boeing did.
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For anyone who doesn't know... (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone who doesn't know, Spirit is just Boeing's Wichita division that it spun off in 2005. Arm's length? What's that?
Re:For anyone who doesn't know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Boeing's original cunning plan [blackadderquotes.com] was to spin off and/or outsource all the low margin, labor (union) intensive tasks to the hoi polloi while maintaining an elite rump of Boeing monikered program managers and system engineers since that was where the greatest profit margins were to be found. Another fine legacy of the McDonnell Douglas merger. What could go wrong?
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Any word on the business plan for Starliner? (Score:2)
I can understand going to market with a product more expensive than the competition. If you are offering more or better in some way that can be a winning play.
But 10x the cost? For an obsolete and shaky feature set? What the hell does Starliner offer that SpaceX doesn't deliver?
This never seems to be talked about but it seems that the whole purpose and business plan of Starliner is for the U.S. taxpayer to pay for it. Instead of putting their heads together to produce something that is better -- o
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They "plan the crap" out of things before being allowed to take step 1. Then, step "N" turns out not to work out as planned because reality sets in, and then the overruns and revisions start. The time between the analysis and the execution is very long, so there's a
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An alternative to SpaceX.
I know everyone likes to think about SpaceX being the golden child, but even if they are and continue to be, they are still a single point of failure - if something happens which grounds the Dragon capsule or the Falcon rockets for extended periods of time, theres no alternative.
Exactly the same reason why it makes sense for other countries to develop their own boosters, even if they cost more than SpaceX does - because