That photo is of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, designed and built to cary astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station. It’s going for its first crewed test flight to the ISS on May 1st.
It’s also years behind schedule, billions over budget, and SpaceX has already been doing this for four years, despite being regarded as the whimsical backup contract when NASA signed both companies up for the job over a decade ago.
But the problems with Starliner appear to have spread into other parts of the company.
“I resigned from Boeing because of their DEI indoctrination. How about you stop pushing DEI and pronouns?!? You guys act like you build vacuum cleaners. Live and die on SPI/CPI [schedule performance index/cost performance index]. Building/Maintaining aircraft is a human activity. Treat your mechanics and engineers with the respect they have earned with their skill sets. Stop focusing on indoctrination. The suits need to be fired! #Boeingkills #Boeing #DEIkills If it’s Boeing, I’m not going!”
I’ve repeated the text from his X account just in case something happens to it – or him, as was the case recently with another Boeing quality control expert and whistleblower:
It’s been almost a month since Boeing whistleblower John Barnett was found dead in a car outside of his hotel in Charlotte, South Carolina. He died of a single gunshot wound to the head and was found with a pistol in his hand. Authorities tentatively attributed the death to suicide. But friends and family members, along with some investigators are raising doubts about that explanation. Barnett had been in the midst of testifying as part of a lawsuit against Boeing over safety shortcomings at their production facilities. A close friend recounted a disturbing conversation earlier this year when he said that he could potentially wind up dead because of his whistleblowing activities and that if anything happened to him it would not be suicide.
It’s been noted for some time now that the 1997 merger with the smaller McDonnell Douglas company turned out to be a reverse takeover, Boeing’s poisoned chalice. After the merger the bean-counters took over, gutting Boeing’s management teams of engineers and putting accountants into those roles. Maximizing profit took precedence over quality. It worked, for a while as profits rose, but now….
Boeing CEO David Calhoun will step down from the embattled plane maker at the end of the year as part of a broad management shakeup after a series of mishaps at one of America’s iconic manufacturers. Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing’s commercial airplanes unit, will retire immediately. Stephanie Pope, the company’s chief operating officer for less than three months, has taken over leadership of the key division.
Now that’s a bloodbath at senior corporate level. But when you realise that Calhoun had already been bought in after the series of Boeing 737 Max crashes and quality control problems with the new 787 Dreamliner had caused deliveries to be stopped, and has clearly failed to improve things, you have to wonder how a new CEO and other senior executives can do better.
These problems are now deeply embedded in the company.
But what choice did they have when you read stories like this:
Since the Alaska Airlines incident, travel search engine Kayak has observed a significant shift in user behavior, reporting a staggering 15-fold increase in the usage of its aircraft filter in January. The data highlights a heightened desire to know the exact model of aircraft prior to booking their flights.
When something like this spreads out into the public, in the form of actual consumer behaviour changing, it’s awfully hard to turn that around.
No Minister 
I read a lot of aviation books but have read nothing on the Boeing McDonnell Douglas (MD) Merger.
MD was a good manufacturing aircraft company of long standing, who had a long line of piston engined aircraft that were reliable and safe. Like a few others they missed the start of the jet age, and then the start of the wide body age. The DC-8 and DcC-10 were superb aircraft in their own right.
The DC-10 had a couple of issues with a cargo door design but no one complained about aircraft build quality. The F4 Phantom, one of the greatest fighter planes of all time was manufactured in great numbers by MD.
I think the merger claim is an urban myth perpetrated by Boeing to hide their own on going short comings.
If they stuck all these so called accountants from MD in key positions that was a board call, not a reverse takeover. It was also a board call to move manufacturing of certain lines to North Carolina. Dumb in hindsight as what history of aircraft manufacturing was ever in that state.? Where were all Boeings trained staff, and systems, back in Seattle.
Dumb too that they moved corporate HQ to Chicago to take advantage of some tax break. That moved management away from the manufacturing plant., dumb, dumb, and dumber!
Boeing was a lot bigger than MD. In my view the errors lay with plain and simple bad management by Boeing who had got fat and complacent. After all the 747 nearly flushed them down the dunny too, rescued by defense contracts no doubt.
As Airbus management state the whole affair is bad for the industry, you need robust competition and customer belief in the finished product. After all Airbus have made some bad decisions in aircraft design and safety, they recovered with the passage of time.
Not really, it’s all come from Boeing insiders twenty years ago before these problems appeared, especially from lower-level engineers like the two mentioned in my post who are now going after the DIE culture inside Boeing, which is just another example of the trend-following stupidity of too many modern executives (see BudLight, ESG investing, Luxon,….)
Here’s a 2019 article from The Atlantic that describes what happening, starting at the top:
And then…
Diversity is like a disease that shows no symptoms at first. The assumption of the progressives is that diversity is a good idea, but its only a theory, an ideology. What if, diversity is death? And their progression is the rigorous progress of cancer.