Boeing Just Fired Its CEO
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg is out after disastrous year, CNN
“A spacecraft the company is building to ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station also malfunctioned last week during its first-ever trip to space. The uncrewed test flight, which came after years of delays and setbacks, was intended to be the final major test before it was finally ready to fly humans. The company has also been roundly criticized by federal oversight officials over billion-dollar cost overruns and missed deadlines with another NASA contract: to build the Space Launch System, a massive rocket that the space agency wants to use to return humans to the moon. Boeing still has a strong balance sheet, and its stock is up marginally this year despite all of its setbacks. But questions about the company’s leadership grew louder as the company’s missteps added up.”
– Bridenstine Calls B.S. On Boeing Exploration Upper Stage Claim, earlier post
– Boeing’s 737/Starliner/SLS Problem Strategy: Blame The Media, earlier post
– More Fake SLS News From Boeing, earlier post
Dennis Muilenburg has spent his entire career at Boeing starting as an intern. This shows the problems are rooted in the culture of the Boeing Corporation. Firing him isn’t going to fix it unless he is replaced from someone outside the culture with a mandate to replace it with a new one.
Agreed. Part of the problem is that HQ is nowhere near the rest of the company (i.e. development and manufacturing). There is likely a huge disconnect between those departments (that actually, you know, do things) and upper management.
Yes, moving the headquarters out of Seattle was a bad decision. Putting finance in charge is another classic mistake as the focus should be on research, design and production.
I understood the HQ move was to get HQ closer to a capital and finance centre. I also accept that that is “kool aid”.
McDonell Douglas HQ was in St Louis, right? And I haven’t checked, but I’d think most of the Apollo related work was in So. Cal. That seemed to work ok…
Except for the Apollo 1 fire and what was found to be the cause and poor design, plus the idiocy of the non-quick-opening hatch and conducting a pure oxygen test at 14.7psi OVER ambient pressure!
As far as I know, Douglas didn’t have anything to do with the Apollo command and service modules. They did the Saturn V upper stage, but the CSM was North American Aviation (which merged with Rockwell, which merged with Boeing.)
The Mercury and Gemini capsules were built in St. Louis by McDonnell were it’s HQ was. The McDonell-Douglas merger was after those programs ended. The Apollo capsule was built in Downey CA by North American. Downey was its HQ.
Yes, I checked after I posted, and hadn’t had time to followup up. Re McDonnell Douglas, the merger wasn’t until 1967 (I thought it was earlier), so well after the S-IVB design and engineering had been done by Douglas (with HQ and manufacturing in So Cal). According to wikipedia, Douglas agreed to the merger due to quality and cash flow problems, and trouble with DC-10 development. Connecting with another thread of discussion on this site…
Sort of in my backyard, I grew up in Huntington Beach where they made the S-IVB, although I never got to go to the factory. But I did get to go with a friend of mine with his father who worked in aerospace to an open house event in Seal Beach where I saw an S-II stage up close that was in production. Wish I knew which one it was but I have no way to date when I was there. The building where they built the S-II stage is still there by the way, although in 2015 they finally removed the iconic crane that was on top of the roof. Supposedly the days are numbered for the building also.
It was a real shock when the mighty Douglas Aircraft was facing possible bankruptcy. Partly due to the success of the DC-9 which was mismanaged as they overspent building a new factory to handle the demand. Combined with unfortunate timing as they got price-gouged on everything due to the inflated prices on anything aviation related caused by the Vietnam war. And yes spending money on DC-10 development.
Interesting you talk about So. Cal back in the days, I remember as a young boy touring one of the big aerospace companies of my mom’s friend’s brother in El Segundo. Went up to a room on top that controls a big radio telescope, impressive space age consoles with high tech nixie tube digital displays. There was a night where Disneyland had a special evening for aerospace employees and friends could go on rides unlimited. The entire region revolved around aerospace. Besides the big companies, there were zillions of subcontractors. You could feel how the region booming with govt spending, also when budgets were cut. Looking back a lot of ambitious goals, gets me thinking of how programs were managed then compared to now. Seems there were more small programs where project managers could hone their skills before taking on big ones. Even with huge cutbacks there was considerable infrastructure to design and build the Shuttle and the SSME engines. Seems these days much of it is a shell exception SpaceX.
Speaking of Douglas, I met an engineer that worked for the company starting in early 1960s. He said DC-9s were lined up on the tarmac with no engines because these were consumed by the military in Vietnam, Douglas was going broke so they had to merge with McDonnell. He also said Douglas Jr. had a suite on top of the building where he entertain airline executives with the best drinks and movie stars. McDonnell people from a dry state got rid of the liquor bar and the Douglas people were not happy with that.
I can’t see this getting any better. Muilenburg was replaced by a Blackstone private equity guy who is the board chairman.
Actually, Calhoun is perhaps the right person. I posted NYTimes link elsewhere in this thread detailing his background.
As I posted over on the clock error story, Muilenburg’s firing is just a Band-Aid and the culture at Boeing is obviously broken. It is going to take a housecleaning to fix it.
You know what scares me about this assessment? The NASA example. And I’m still not clear on what ‘kind’ of NASA was left after the ‘housecleaning’ that occurred after several Apollo 1/STS events.
Yes, I know, they were disparate events. NASA is widely criticized as overly risk-obsessive. Is this true, and is it a result of ‘housecleaning’? There are other examples, of course, and I am much closer to Monday quarterback than to an informed observer.
I wonder if these very large organizations can be captured by public sentiment, to the detriment of any primary mission? Is NASA ‘better’ now? And will ‘housecleaning’ rob Boeing of necessary vitality?
FWIW, I believe all of his time/experience was on the defense side of the house (so it wasn’t even Boeing until ’97) with no BCA exposure until he was named CEO-in-waiting.
David Calhoun appears to be an excellent choice; according to the NYTimes, he’s widely respected and very capable.
Mr. Muilenburg’s bone-headed approach to the FAA is inexplicable, in many ways; but in one way precisely exemplifies corporate attitudes towards captured regulators.
Mr. Muilenburg treated FAA, it seems, as a department of Boeing, carefully controlling information, and in some cases apparently hiding some data. ‘Bone headed’ is about the only description.
And yet, I sympathize. My career has been plagued by regulators ‘thoughtfully’ pleading to let them be ‘part of the process’, which would lead to better projects. It does not, I assure you. By and large, these regulators are troublesome gadflies.
I have been successful, in the main, by playing by the book, knowing the development codes better than they do, but never ever holding back data. It is suicide, as we see, that can result in very late denials on the project timeline which pisses the clients off, is expensive, and can result in (ahem) unpaid invoices.
In short: clients experiencing a denial would correctly turn their gaze at me, asking “Why didn’t you know?” They are right. The consultant and Mr. Muilenburg should have known how to work the system. No excuses here.
(And, allowing me an aside, the Boeing/FAA relationship is directly attributable to the incessant right-wing noise about ‘getting government out of the way’, a policy, largely implemented by constant budget cuts to remove ‘too much dead wood!’ that has resulted in tainted lettuce, millions of dead birds, and, now, two crashed airplanes).
I’ll have to disagree with you about Calhoun. The NYT has never done a good job covering this. The New Republic has a much better background coverage in a September 18, 2019 article. Calhoun is another Jackie Welch protege.
This was not a good year for Boeing. As I stated in a message in a previous article, I am sure Boeing’s management is eager to get off to a fresh start in 2020.
It won’t be a “fresh start” until engineering regains its prime focus status.
I guess making money is more important than making airplanes or space capsules that work. What if they have to scrap all the 737Maxes, like VW did with the TDI Diesels?
They won’t have to scrap them as there is nothing wrong with the airplanes. Boeing stopped production only because they have built a back log of planes and the FAA has not given them permission yet to start deliveries again. There is no reason to believe they won’t but the FAA is under scrutiny also for being complicit in the problem so they are taking their time and dotting every i before they release the airplanes.
There may be nothing wrong (or unfixable) with the 737 MAX. But that was also true of the DC-10. But think about what the AA191 accident did to McDonnell Douglas. That was all poor maintenance practices on the part of the operator and (if memory serves) against the advice of the vendor. But DC-10 sales never really recovered.
DC-10 was not that comparable I don’t think. Yes the grounding was and I remember the similar impact it had on airlines that had to scramble to find other airplanes to fill in. But the DC-10 was always a complicated airplane financially and by 1979 when the Chicago crash occurred it was already starting to get dated, especially with new large efficient twinjets like the 767 coming on line in the early 1980’s, making tri-jets like the 727, DC-10 and L-1011 less appealing to airlines because of the higher engine costs. The MD-11 showed some promise but it didn’t last all that long at least not the passenger version.
737 meanwhile continues to be a workhorse aircraft for a large number of airlines, providing a lot of flexibility at a low cost. 737 Max continues to be in the news only because it is still not flying. Once it resumes it will be like the 787 battery fires it won’t take all that long for it to fade from the news.
I’m not so confident. I’ve heard a LOT of folks say they’ll never fly a 737 MAX again, regardless of supposed fixes.
People say a lot of things. I wonder what percentage of people who say that will actually book a less convenient and more expensive flight to avoid a particular airplane. I’m sure some will even though that borders on being superstitious. But I still think the effect won’t be long lasting. Southwest had a nearly flawless record for decades, then one person got killed in a horrific inflight accident that was in the news daily and Southwest lost a huge amount of business as many people stopped flying them. But it was short lived and they continue to be profitable.
I take your point and agree. I can’t help though: remember ValueJet? AirFlorida? Both killed by crashes (or renamed).
(Bonus! Anybody remember the hero of AirFlorida Flight 90, Lenny Skutnick? And no fair using Google!)
Small low cost airlines that were already on shaky ground financially. And in in the case of ValueJet already a reputation for safety violations. Also it is a lot easier for the public to avoid an airline than to avoid an aircraft type, although the major airlines tend to withstand high publicity crashes pretty well.
I’m guessing Lenny was the guy who dove into the icy Potomac to save the fight attendant.
In this day and age of online booking, I knew the exact type of plane I’d very likely be flying on when I bought my tickets. It was as easy as clicking on the “details” link when choosing a flight. We flew on Boeing 737-800 aircraft.
When I said easy vs. hard I was referring to the general public, in most (not all) situations people have a choice of airlines so in my Southwest example when people were afraid of flying on Southwest they simply booked flights on other airlines. Whereas I don’t think the general public is as likely to drill down during bookings looking for the type of aircraft used on all segments of their selected flight. Some will but I think most won’t, and again only for a limited time after the Max goes back into service. And most probably won’t even know when the Max is back in service other than it will I’m sure make the news the first day or two then it will be out of the news.
That’s all about how the accidents are handled. If people lose confidence in the company or the product, it can be catastrophic for business. That’s why replacing Mr. Muilenburg is so important for Boeing. It’s also why I’m not sure Mr. Calhoun is a good choice as the replacement. The simply fact that’s he’s been on the board of directors for ten years limits his ability to restore public confidence.
The 737 MAX have different engines that are not in the same location as the standard 737 thus altering the CG and aerodynamics. The reason why it has MCAS is to let the software account for those differences so it the 373 MAX will handle like the standard 737. Without MCAS it’s a 737 in name only and would require a new FAA certification.
That is not my understanding of MCAS, it is not something used all the time, only in high angle of attack situations where the forward location of the engines can cause the nose to pitch up more than a standard 737. I heard one 737 pilot say these situations are not common.
Pilots could have been trained in the handling difference in high angle of attack situations, but that would have meant a different type rating. To keep the same type rating Boeing installed MCAS (previously used on the KC-46 tanker). The two crashes occurred when MCAS kicked in when it shouldn’t have due to erroneous data, which at the time was single source data not redundant. And the pilots had no indication of the malfunction or a way to override MCAS even if they had known that was what was causing their control problem. By the way KC-46 MCAS can be overridden simply by the pilots moving the control stick against it. The way it was implemented in 737 MAX the pilots could not disengage MCAS and it kept fighting against them.
These issues have been highly scrutinized over the past few months by the aviation community and to my knowledge there are no objections to the 737 MAX design in general, the whole issue was that Boeing completely botched the installation of MCAS and made it worse by telling virtually no one that it even existed, and not providing pilots awareness of the system or a way to override it. If the corrected version is still considered unsafe that will make the news I’m sure, but I am not expecting that to happen.
A lot of people think this way. The obvious counter though, might be Apple.
This is a company driven by design. Engineers are not unvalued but they do not drive the ship. In my business I design a new community. My civil engineering skills are capable, but I am not a civil engineer; they frequently help shape the project, but they do not drive it.
This argument isn’t really useful, in my experience. There are many input sources. This is why Apple’s new office has the form that it does. In spacecraft, I wonder how the scientist/engineer relationship functions, and where any tension might be.
Agreed Apple’s products are primarily driven by design. But since their products cost more, people also expect Apple’s stylish products to “just work”. They pay a premium for their products to “just work” and when they don’t, their customers are not happy.
Apple gets slammed mightily when they make an engineering screw-up in order to achieve some design goal. For example, the MacBook Pro’s “butterly” keyboard that helped make it a super thin laptop. Other screw ups might not be directly related to design (like the battery problems in the iPhone 6s), but they still get slammed by their customers when something bad happens to an entire line of one of their products.
Boeing is going through this very thing with the 737 MAX’s fatally flawed MCAS system. Apple is just lucky that faulty keyboards and batteries don’t directly kill people. When people’s lives are on the line, quality assurance and quality control need to be a priority.
Apt comparisons. Like the butterfly, MCAS is actually a minuscule part of a quite complex system.
MCAS is not fatally flawed. I realize by saying that it sounds like I have not picked up a newspaper in the last several months but I’m just stating the facts as I know them. It was the original implementation of MCAS that was flawed and led to two fatal accidents. And the list of implementation mistakes is long.
Any system will fail if given wrong data, and for some reason Boeing decided that MCAS only needed data from one Angle of Attack sensor not both, creating a single failure point for a system that has full control authority which is very dangerous. They provided an indicator light that is supposed to come on if the two AOA sensors are in disagreement, however there was a software bug that caused this light not to come on unless the airline had purchased an optional AOA indicator in the flight display. As it turns out only 20% of the fleet had this optional indicator. Boeing engineers became aware of this in 2017 but a software update was not planned until the next major update in 2020.
Even if the light had come on pilots wouldn’t have known that this meant the possibility of inadvertent MCAS activation, because prior to the first accident pilots weren’t even told that MCAS even existed. After the first crash they were given some basic information about it but not the training needed to deal with an MCAS problem.
They have now updated the Flight Control Computer software to prevent the MCAS system from activating when it should not. And pilots are receiving extensive simulator training on how to deal with the problem should it occur again although that should now be a rare or non-existent situation. Pilots have reported that when following the procedure they are able to retain control of the aircraft. If Boeing had done all of this in the beginning there would not have been a problem, that is where they are fully deserving of the condemnation for their actions that they are now receiving.