Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

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Integrityrespec said:

Boeing will either fix it, get bought up or go bankrupt. It's the way capitalism works. This is just a sign of our times, standards and expectations are not held to high accord. The result is shit. Nobody wants to be held to he standard, nobody was to enforce it.

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Integrityrespec said:

Boeing will either fix it, get bought up or go bankrupt. It's the way capitalism works. This is just a sign of our times, standards and expectations are not held to high accord. The result is shit. Nobody wants to be held to he standard, nobody was to enforce it.

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beefheart said:

Fantastic article about the shit show that Boeing has become. When they bought out the failing (for a good reason) McDonnel Douglass and installed their management to run the place is when they failed. Boeing used to be about engineers and quality work, a company run by engineers with a strong union. Then it became all about cost cutting, outsourcing, getting the stock price to go up, innovation and quality employees left, or were fired for inconveniently calling out quality control issues. Everything they have done since then has been garbage, the 787, the 737-Max, the Starliner manned space capsule. Meanwhile, Airbus innovates and is eating Boeing's lunch.

Suicide Mission

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

prospect.org

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beefheart said:

Fantastic article about the shit show that Boeing has become. When they bought out the failing (for a good reason) McDonnel Douglass and installed their management to run the place is when they failed. Boeing used to be about engineers and quality work, a company run by engineers with a strong union. Then it became all about cost cutting, outsourcing, getting the stock price to go up, innovation and quality employees left, or were fired for inconveniently calling out quality control issues. Everything they have done since then has been garbage, the 787, the 737-Max, the Starliner manned space capsule. Meanwhile, Airbus innovates and is eating Boeing's lunch.

Suicide Mission

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

prospect.org

Click to expand...

Diving Mullah said:

Boeing, in fact, had an admirable work culture where quality was prioritized over profit. They adhered to a zero-defect policy, striving for perfection in their manufacturing processes. Unfortunately, McDonald Douglas, a fellow aircraft manufacturer, had a less than stellar reputation due to a high incidence of crashes.

Upon their merger, many of Boeing’s top executives either retired or were let go. This led to McDonald Douglas’s ‘profit at all costs’ mentality taking precedence. The 737 Max is a prime example of how a culture driven purely by profit can result in subpar products."

Diving Mullah

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Integrityrespec said:

Boeing will either fix it, get bought up or go bankrupt. It's the way capitalism works. This is just a sign of our times, standards and expectations are not held to high accord. The result is shit. Nobody wants to be held to he standard, nobody was to enforce it.

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Checkerboard Strangler said:

From what I can gather they're doing the same thing Stellantis did to all the guys at Chrysler who knew how to build bulletproof engines and transmissions.
Their powertrains are still very high performance to be sure, but now they are also temperamental and delicate, and they didn't use to be.

I've owned MoPar vehicles since I was nineteen years old and I'm sixty-seven now.
I admit that Chrysler products squeaked and rattled, and stuff like window cranks would break, and switches would stop switching, but the sound of the "Highland Park Hummingbird" assured me that if I stomped on the gas pedal
ten or twenty times and turned the key, I'd get results.

View attachment 67502387

I've put two or even three hundred thousand miles on MoPar engines and transmissions with just regular routine oil changes and maintenance.
It wasn't even a worry, it was a fact, that you could not destroy a Chrysler engine or transmission without intentionally sabotaging them.
Stellantis has done to Chrysler what AMF did to Harley-Davidson. They are bleeding it dry for private equity vultures and they are convinced that having a captive audience
for repairs is going to assure the longevity of the brand name even if the brand name cars develop catastrophic engine and trans failures left and right.

That is precisely what spelled the death knell for British built Ford products, and eventually, nearly ALL British built automobiles altogether.

PS: That nickname, Highland Park Hummingbird, is given to the unique SOUND of a Chrysler starter from the old days.
It had a distinctive and peculiar sounding whine that every motorhead recognizes instantly.

Boeing? Sounds like they think they have a captive audience too.
Sounds like Boeing is beginning to circle the drain.

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Lord Tammerlain said:

I expect the owners are doing just that. Very little investment in new products, engines or transmissions. Yet raking in record profits.

Eventually to sell all but Ram, Jeep and Peugeot/Citroën off

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Checkerboard Strangler said:

Au contraire...the Pentastar 3.6L V6 is drastically different and quite new. And it packs a wallop for its size.
But where the old Chrysler would have used good judgment and discretion in choice of materials, Stellantis is carving a nickel saved here, a dime there, with zero regard for durability.

Case in point, the plastic oil cooler which sits in the hottest spot in the engine, under the plastic intake and between the cylinder heads.
I don't care if an intake is plastic, worst that can happen is it cracks, the engine runs like crap and you replace the intake.
If the OIL COOLER cracks, which it will, you lose coolant AND oil and the engine eats itself very quickly.

Chrysler OEM plastic oil cooler in BLACK, Dorman upgraded unit in ALUMINUM.

View attachment 67502391

We installed a Dorman aluminum unit preemptively because we love the way our van drives and handles and we want to keep it for a while!
Eight hundred dollars is cheap compared to eight THOUSAND for a new engine.

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Lord Tammerlain said:

The 3.6 Pentastar has been around since 2011, updated over time of course.

The hemi around 2004

The 2.4 L tigershark around 2007


It's newest engine is the 3 L inline 6 Hurricane. Introduced about 1.5 years ago and will be the top engine in the ram 1500 for 2025 when the hemi is discontinued.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the Magnum, Challenger, and classic Mopars from the late 60s. I drove a 1982 Dodge Aries from the age of 16 to 25 or so. The Ram has the best interior of all full size pickups but it did not invest much over the last 10 years. Nissan really is the only one who did less investment

Only Toyota has been slower to update to new engines ( which it has a lot in the last 3 years) which may impact its reputation for reliable long lasting engines

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