Opinion: Time to put Boeing’s engineers back in charge

And yet today, the once-sterling reputation of what used to be the world’s biggest commercial planemaker is in tatters. Boeing hasn’t come up with a new aircraft design since the 787 in 2004 – its big plan to counter the meteoric rise of archrival Airbus’ A320neo was not to start from the ground up, but to just “do the 737 again, but more” – more passenger space, new larger engines, and that’s your lot barring a few tweaks here and there.

The result? A near-unmitigated disaster. The 737 MAX family has become synonymous with high-profile catastrophes, with two MAX 8s nosediving in the span of less than half a year from 2018-2019, and then a door plug blowing out mid-flight on an Alaska Airlines MAX 9 in January this year – an incident in which, miraculously, nobody was seriously hurt; luck which may not be repeated next time something like this happens (and “something like this” does keep happening, despite Boeing’s increasingly strident protestations that it won’t let these somethings keep happening).

Meanwhile, with Airbus poised to eat even more of its lunch, what is Boeing proposing to do to counter the threat of bigger and better A350s?

The 777X! Which is, of course, “the 777 again, but more” – more passenger space, new larger engines, and that’s your lot barring a few tweaks here and there.

Heaven help us.

The fact is, Boeing’s formerly spectacular engineering culture, which was at the centre of the company for more than half a century, is now on life support – replaced by a merciless culture of cost-cutting and outsourcing, all in the name of shovelling as much profit as possible into the pockets of shareholders.

Ever since the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, which put most of the smaller company’s executives in charge of Boeing rather than the other way around – the joke at the time being that McDonnell Douglas “bought Boeing with Boeing’s own money” – the obsessive profit-driven culture of McDonnell Douglas has supplanted Boeing’s previous culture of quality, safety, and engineering excellence.

Where once the company was run by people who knew how to make planes, now it’s in the hands of financiers and bean counters who know how to make money and make it at the expense of everything else: product quality, aircraft safety, industrial relations, customer relations, and even relations with its suppliers, who Boeing has been squeezing for more than 10 years under its notorious “Partnering for Success” program.

This, by the way, includes Spirit AeroSystems, the trouble-plagued supplier that was responsible for the door plug that unexpectedly ventilated Alaska’s MAX 9. Spirit was once Boeing’s plant in Wichita, Kansas, before the planemaker sold it off to an investment firm in 2005. Since then, Spirit has developed an unsavoury reputation for half-measures and corner-cutting, with one employee filing a complaint in federal court alleging the company has been systematically covering up “widespread and sustained quality failures”.

Of course, the failings at Spirit don’t exist in a vacuum. The company has been incentivised to make parts cheap and quick, with little room for good, or else Boeing will take its business (vital for Spirit’s survival) elsewhere. As with so many other aspects of Boeing’s current culture, “good” has, lamentably, fallen by the wayside.

There’s no room for innovation at Boeing anymore – not when just endlessly rehashing old designs will make the bottom line look better in the next quarter. There’s no chance of another new plane as revolutionary as the 747 rolling off the production line at Everett while the current gang are in charge – even the 787 Dreamliner, which, credit where it’s due, is a phenomenal aircraft, is good in spite of Boeing rather than because of it, given most of its parts are, again, outsourced (and let’s not forget, the Dreamliner is still the last actually new plane Boeing has dreamed up in 20 years).

But while all the bean-counters are slapping themselves on the back because the line’s gone up a little more this quarter than it did last quarter, they’re not contemplating that a plane falling out of the sky due to manufacturing defects is a sure-fire way to make the line go down with it – because why should they? That is, after all, next quarter’s problem.

It’s time for airlines and regulators to demand better of Boeing – and time for Boeing to demand better of itself. It’s time for Boeing to put actual engineers back in the pilot’s seat and restore the quality-driven culture that saw it command the skies for more than five decades.

The stakes are too high, and the status quo is too broken, to do anything else.