Coming to grips with a changed old friend: McBoeing
For a certain generation of Northwest airplane geeks, Boeing's recent troubles hit especially hard. The easiest thing may be to just call the company what it has become: McDonnell Douglas.
Boeing
In my tweens, entire weekends were spent building plastic jetliner models to be hung "in flight" from my bedroom ceiling. To kids like me, Boeing used to be the coolest thing around. It built amazing planes, each a pioneering gamble, every one better than before. They sometimes took awhile to become commercial successes but they always flew and always worked well.
The apotheosis of my Boeing adulation was a pilgrimage to the Boeing Surplus Store in Kent, where it was possible — this was a very good day — to talk Mom into hauling home an entire bank of seats salvaged from a 707 "Intercontinental" for our basement TV room, complete with functional ashtrays, seat belts and tray tables.
Boeing was like a local version of NASA during the heyday of Apollo — all whirring magnetic tape reels, punch cards and modest-but-confident, rock-solid technical experts. At its "core competency" of building things that fly in the sky, Boeing simply did not make mistakes. (Boats that fly? Not so much.) In those days Boeing's brilliance was all the cooler because it was powered by guys like our friends' dads — engineers we knew from the neighborhood who sported slide rules and pocket protectors in full force.
All of which makes Boeing's recent spectacle of management and program failures especially painful to watch. Alas, it is time to say out loud what we local airplane dorks have been thinking for years. Boeing has finally, irrefutably become the thing that we loathed and found most pitiable in our youth: McDonnell Douglas.
With the recent announcement of a second delay and billion-dollar write-down in the 747-8 program, not to mention the long running cruel hoax that has become the 787 Dreamliner launch schedule, it's hard not to wince at what seems to be a potent mix of managerial and engineering incompetence at the top.
The old Boeing embodied stout Northwest qualities. The company was strong, capable, and above all else relied on technical achievement as the ultimate arena of success or failure. The stock price came and went, profits materialized in good times, and once in a while it was necessary to "bet the company" on research and development to continue aviation's advancement.
Imagine the creation of the 747 in the late 1960s. Invented from a blank sheet of paper — on paper! — and forged into flyable reality in about 29 months, including the task of building the world's largest building in Everett as a factory. Today, the delays in the 787 Dreamliner project threaten to dwarf the entire project development time of the 747.
What happened? The merger with McDonnell Douglas is what happened. Industry analysts like Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group have been chronicling the changed ways of the post-merger Boeing company as far back as 2003. And judging from his reports from the front lines, none of this should now be a surprise.
According to Aboulafia, "McDonnell Douglas effectively used Boeing’s money to buy Boeing. This resulted in a struggle between a faction that wanted to invest in Boeing’s future (basically the legacy Boeing crowd) and a faction that wanted to invest in Boeing’s shareholders (basically the McDonnell Douglas leadership). ... The future investment faction won, but at a price: The McDonnell Douglas zombie bit them before it died, ... the new Boeing also disempowered the company’s engineers, turning its back on a decades-old management culture that didn’t always produce profits but did always produce great planes. Instead, it embraced McDonnell Douglas’s culture of leadership by money people. This disconnect between engineers and finance executives would explain why bad news wasn’t communicated upstairs."
Boeing's old Northwest home gave it a certain insularity from the fevers of the East — certainly the fevers of Wall Street — that enabled Boeing to put the planes and engineers first for so many years. Once McDonnell Douglas swept the executive suites and packed up for Chicago, the corporate-culture handwriting was on the wall.
What's the prescription for fixing any of this? Short of spinning off Boeing Commercial Airplanes and moving it back to Seattle, bringing back the old culture ("paging Alan Mulally") and some of its leadership (all of this being extremely unlikely), the most realistic thing for all of us fans of the Old Boeing to do is use a new filter when evaluating anything Boeing does or says it will do: "What would McDonnell Douglas do?" Will McBoeing try to move as much production as possible to union-free South Carolina? Of course it will. Will McBoeing attempt to extract as many concessions as possible from local and state governments under the ruse of keeping jobs here in the Northwest? Of course it will. Will those concession do anything to change the outcome? Of course not.
For that matter, will the 787 keep its wings on any better than DC-10s kept on their cargo doors or engines? At this point, who really knows. Perhaps it will simply be as successful as the MD-11 was.
Boeing's current management culture is something quite foreign to old-school Boeing folks. Now, sadly, for the first time previously unheard words float in the air around the company, its managers, and its products: design flaw.
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Comments:
Posted Wed, Oct 14, 7:03 a.m. Inappropriate
Spot on.
'taint the old Boeing, furshure.
Posted Wed, Oct 14, 10:09 a.m. Inappropriate
Could be worse. Could have merged with British Leyland.
Posted Wed, Oct 14, 12:09 p.m. Inappropriate
Some used to call it the Lazy B, but they did produce the best. Now once again wall street has trashed another good US company with Short Term Profits First. Hopefully wall street will not be so fickle as to walk away when capital runs out next February and we see the company once again lay off work force to finance R & D...
Posted Wed, Oct 14, 1:48 p.m. Inappropriate
Boeing, in its pure pre-MacDonnel-Douglas phase was discretely aided by the federal government in (as I recall) about 1973-72 because of misreading the market for airliners. The 747 would probably have bankrupted the company without the military contracts that (again, as I recall) were accelerated. Then I remember some Boeing aircraft (747?) whose tail fell off in Japan sometime in the 1980s. I say this not to discount your argument, it's probably good; Boeing has done some great things but, for example, the Stratocruiser was a failure, especially when compared to the Douglas aircraft it was competing with (DC 4 and DC 6, I believe). I don't see any reason to disrespect the DC-10.
A company that makes great airplanes has to make a profit. Mercedes Benz and Toyota make profits don't they (usually)? it's not a sign of abandonment of principal.
Posted Wed, Oct 14, 4:57 p.m. Inappropriate
Matt,
I think you have some valid arguments, but I'm inclined to agree with Kieth. Major programs for commercial aircraft have a history of ending commercial airplane divisions, some even perfectly good airplanes like Lockheed's L1011 ended commercial production. While that airframe fully met expectations and was a proven workhorse for many decades, it drove Lockheed into being a defense contractor only.
The DC-10 was a very good plane, like the L1011, as were the DC-9-30 through 95s. Airplane manufacturers, Boeing included, have plenty of disasters and accidents that don't speak to the competence of their engineers and aren't a sufficient argument for their having dropped the ball.
McDonnell Douglas itself was brought down by the MD-11 not being able to meet payload and range targets for passenger airlines, the JSF bid failure only put the nail in its coffin. Corvair (880 and 990), DeHavilland (Comet), Vickers (VC10) to name just a few others who shuttered or severely curtailed their commercial programs as a result of those planes.
That McDonnell sought a merger with Boeing is no surprise, but the fact that McDonnell brought an overwhelming number of managers to the merged Boeing and began dismantling the corporate culture merits some awe. The failures of both Condit and Stonecipher are noteworthy. But as Kieth said businesses are in business to serve customers and then ultimately shareholders. The 787 may indeed turn out to be Boeing's MD-11. If true there will be wholesale change at the company and perhaps even a dismantling. Even Air Force K67 and C17 orders would not be able to stop that tide. That change could in the end be good for Boeing, if not we'll be flying more Airbuses, Bombardiers and Embraers.
Posted Wed, Oct 14, 7:51 p.m. Inappropriate
It was a deathtrap. They fell out of the skies like autumn leaves. Isn't that reason enough?
Posted Thu, Oct 15, 7:31 a.m. Inappropriate
I remember reading back in 1989 when Harry C. Stonecipher purposed his idea of outsourcing everything but the finale assembly of McDonnell Douglas's Commercial Division along with JIT, just in time, and Lean. By 1995 he had lost control of his scheduling, production and quality. Thus the sale of McDonnell Douglas. What really did Boeing want? NASA / Space which Boeing had been a big sub contractor to.
When Harry C. Stonecipher came to Boeing and later ended up running Boeing he let it be known he wanted to continue what he did at McDonnell Douglas figuring he would be more successful because Boeing had more money to throw at it. This is the cause of Boeing's down fall and yes it has turned from an Aerospace Engineering Company to a Stock Market commodity! What a shame!!!!
Posted Thu, Oct 15, 7:40 a.m. Inappropriate
Tails falling off, door flying off...unfortunately these types of events are too common to the pre let's-test-the-crap-out-of-the-product-before-release mentality of those days. How many of your newer airplanes of the industry have these catastrophic failures? That's indicative of a general improvement to the industry.
Getting back to the point of the article, though- let's be honest: management made the wrong decisions to share design, assembly (and risk) with companies abroad in trade for their buy in to the product. An idea that looked good maybe on a 5-star bar napkin at the time- little thought was probabaly given to the long-term implications to outsourcing Boeing's core competency. Management has grabbed hold of the proverbial mad dog's ears, so they're hosed. You can't cut off ties, you'll be bit and the longer you hold on- the worse things will get. There's no dispute this was a bad decision and more importantly it is the reason for Boeing's woes.
Posted Thu, Oct 15, 8:50 a.m. Inappropriate
Just to set the record straight.......The tail that "fell off", did not fall off! It departed the aircraft due to a failure of a field repair of the aft cabin pressure dome, resulting in a massive and rapid pressurization of the normally unpressurized aft fuselage, not due to a design flaw! Maintenance.
The cargo door that departed was improperly closed by ground handling personel. The door required manual closing because the automatic closing system required repairs that that had not yet been performed. Again - Maintenace.
Posted Thu, Oct 15, 9:32 a.m. Inappropriate
Boeing seems to have made its bed with the 787 and must now, as they say, sleep in it. However, there is a follow-on plane coming. It's rumored to me a wide body craft seen as a replacement for the 747/777. It will be a blended-wing design, which is the ultimate object of the carbon fiber technology pioneered in the 787. Boeing has the opportunity, with this new machine, to outsource less and keep better control over production. Will they take that opportunity? That plane, not the 787, will decide the ultimate fate of the company.
Posted Wed, Oct 28, 9:47 a.m. Inappropriate
So the name changed...get over it...time to move along now. Boeing still builds and designs American airplanes..and I never "loathed" McDonnell Douglas, 'cause I had the plastic versions of the F-4 Phantom, F-15 Eagle and the F/A-18 Hornet hanging from my ceiling.
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