Comment by CoastalCoder
14 hours ago
> it's not like owning 10 billion dollars of Treasury bonds would have prevented a door plug blowout
I doubt today's announcement is any kind of endorsement by the company about its past foolishness.
I think the assumption here is that, in the past, more money should have been dedicated to ensuring high airplane reliability instead of company profits. And if that had been done, the door plug blowout wouldn't have happened.
P.S.: I'll call it how I see it: it wasn't merely foolishness, it was evil. They prioritized their own profits over the public safety with which they were entrusted.
I find it interesting how people tend to reduce everything to money, as if it is a solution to everything. Not all problems are financial problems that can be fixed with more funds. It matters how you spend those funds.
One of the big problems with Boeing is that they had two parallel quality systems with imperfect and overlapping reporting. I'm sure they could have spent twice as much and had four overlapping quality systems, but I'm not confident that would improve reliability opposed to reduce it.
If the solution to everything was money, companies like wework, quibi, or theranos would just need more investment.
Not everything is a money problem
In case you're getting that from my GP post, let me clarify.
I believe that in this particular situation, Boeing intentionally cut some safety corners to improve their profitability:
1) Pushed their airplane production rate so high that many of their workers didn't believe they were producing safe airplanes.
2) Took various steps to convince the FAA to allow the 737 MAX to fly with the same type rating as other 737s, despite it being pretty clear to outsiders that MCAS warranted additional training.
3) Fired QA staff / whistle-blowers for raising legitimate concerns.
4) Chose to not halt production to address safety concerns that had been raised.
I'm arguing that every one of those choices was ultimately made to maximize Boeing profits.
Certainly there are some situations where money can't magically fix a problem. But in my judgement this isn't one of them.
I come at it more from the angle of quality culture. I have been in big companies and small ones, and my experience is that quality is a function of engineering culture and structure, not funding.
Similarly, very few companies intentionally cut corners and trade quality risk for profit. Instead, they become bad at understanding, managing, and communicating quality risk. It is a type of governance problem, but a much more nuanced one than simple greed. Afterall, quality is a tool to ensure profits. Instead, I think it often a story of bad hiring, botched policy changes, and slow decay of organizational competency. Often times, this is the direct result of trying to throw dumb money at a problem.