Boeing Boeing, gone: How Boeing Tried to Kill a Great Airplane—and Got Outplayed

[Denizen]

In the Trump era Boeing has become wrong-headed and is perpetually making bad decisions while protected by the tariff walls Trump is creating.

Playing dirty politics and dirty business has become fashionable during the Trump era.

Honesty, ethics, and technology have been banished from Industry as the Trump protective tariff wall shields American CEOs from the consequences of unethical and financially bad business decisions.

Trump's MAGA slogan is causing America to regress backward.

Boeing is a victim of Donald Trump.

How Boeing Tried to Kill a Great Airplane—and Got Outplayed

How Boeing Tried to Kill a Great Airplane—and Got Outplayed
The mindset that created the 737-MAX fiasco has cost America’s once unbeatable company its world-class status. Instead of innovating, it played dirty. Enter the A220.

Clive Irving
Updated 10.08.19 12:23PM ET / Published 10.08.19 5:05AM ET

As soon as Boeing’s top management understood what they were looking at they didn’t like it.

Another company had produced a paragon of an airplane and they had nothing to match it. And so Boeing decided it had to do as much harm to that airplane’s chances as it could—most of all, to stop any American airline from buying it.

The company was Bombardier, based in Canada. The airplane was the Bombardier C Series, a single-aisle jet that, in several versions, could seat between 100 and 150 passengers.

What was striking about the C Series was that the Canadians had combined the most advanced technologies available into an airplane that was, as a result, a generation ahead of any similar size model.

Airlines would love it because its engines were so efficient that it was cheaper to operate than any rival. On domestic routes it could make as many as 11 flights in a day, with a turnaround time at gates of 35 minutes. Passengers would love it because the cabin was quiet, the seats not cramped, the air quality noticeably better, and baggage space generous.

But creating the C Series had pushed Bombardier to the edge financially, costing around $5.5 billion to bring it to a first flight in March 2015. Like most technologically ambitious programs, this one had busted its budget and was not meeting its delivery deadlines. And its engines, made by America’s Pratt & Whitney, were equally venturesome and late because of glitches.

Nonetheless, when airlines checked it out they were impressed. So was Boeing’s chief rival, Airbus. At the 2015 Paris Air Show, Airbus’s chief salesman, John Leahy, not known for being kind to competitors, took a look at it and conceded that the C Series was “a nice little airplane.”

Delta Air Lines agreed. In April 2016, it was the first American airline to order it, for domestic routes, 75 of the first and smallest version, with options on later and larger versions.


Boeing went ballistic. It accused Bombardier of “dumping” the jets to Delta by selling each airplane at $14 million below production costs.

Boeing’s formidable Washington lobbying machine swung into action. Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO, had already cozied up to President Trump by agreeing to cut the costs of the future Air Force One jets. In September 2017, the Commerce Department announced a killing blow to Bombardier, imposing a 300 percent duty on every C Series sold in the U.S.

...

And it’s not as though the bean-counting regime has proved effective. As well as the 737-MAX grounding, that has so far cost Boeing around $8 billion, two other programs are dogged by problems.
In 2011 Boeing won a contract to replace the Air Force’s aging fleet of in-flight refueling tankers with the KC-46, a conversion of the 767 airliner. Originally this contract was awarded to a consortium of Northrop Grumman and Airbus, but a blitz of lobbying by Boeing reversed that choice.

The KC-46 has been so crippled by problems that the Air Force says it will be three or four more years before it can perform its mission. It is withholding $28 million from every tanker it receives until the problems are fixed. This September the airplanes so far delivered were rendered useless because their other role, carrying cargo and passengers, was suspended because of an unsafe cargo locking mechanism.
In the meantime, the Airbus tanker that was rejected by the Pentagon is now fully operational with air forces in Europe, the Middle East, and Australia.

Then there is the 777X, an update of Boeing’s highly successful big twin-jet. Airlines have ordered 500 of these, but the first flight has been delayed by at least a year, partly because of problems with its General Electric engines, but also with the airplane: It recently failed a certification test when a cargo door blew out.
Boeing provides no end of a lesson in how a great company can lose its moxie because of an indecent lust for short-term gain. It used to be the classic American can-do company. Now it can’t do anything right. ...

 

[Baz Ares]

Boeing is the Doper's greatest welfare gobmint tit sucker of our dimes.
We have nukes, no one will land freely on U.S. lands. But we need to spend some 400B to
keep the DOPers happy.

 

[22lcidw]

Boeing is suffering from all of the forced quotas on it for decades. Program after program is overdue and way beyond cost and problems are slow to fix. Being qualified is not the same as being the best. Having less people with the ability to fix issues is tantamount to death in a competitive world. Meanwhile in China they are laughing at us. Beech Nut Baby Food for all!

 

[Denizen]

Boeing is suffering from all of the forced quotas on it for decades. Program after program is overdue and way beyond cost and problems are slow to fix. Being qualified is not the same as being the best. Having less people with the ability to fix issues is tantamount to death in a competitive world. Meanwhile in China they are laughing at us. Beech Nut Baby Food for all!

Perhaps Boeing has gone beyond economies of scale and is now experiencing diseconomies of scale.

It really looks like they have lost the plot.

 

[pknopp]

Boeing is the perfect example of putting "shareholder value" ahead of everything else including safety and while Trump exemplifies that thinking, what Boeing did far pre-dates Trump. All of this was going on under Obama also.

 

[harmonica]

there's never been any failed companies before Trump????!!!!
hahahahahahahahah IDIOCY