I was struck by this comment that Calhoun made during an interview with CNBC this week: “We build really large, very sophisticated equipment with unbelievable tolerances and precision every step of the way. In the post-Max crisis, we went to work on it. We have been tackling nonconformances here and there. Again, unrelated to safety but we tackle them one at a time. That’s how you build a quality management system. And you engineer the answers. You don’t culture the answers, you engineer them. And then the culture goes with it.”
On the one hand, sure, Boeing isn’t going to fix the manufacturing problems with the Max by singing “Kumbaya” in a conference room. On the other, this thinking strikes me as incredibly backward and reactive. How many more manufacturing glitches have to happen before Boeing’s culture is fixed? Is this the best way to reshape a company responsible for building planes that ferry millions of passengers around the world — one loose bolt and oblong fastener hole at a time?
And always remember this egregious response:
“The 737 Max is as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies,” Boeing said in a November 2018 statement after a Max jet operated by Indonesian carrier Lion Air crashed the previous month, killing all 189 people on board. A second Max jet — this one operated by Ethiopian Airlines — crashed several months later, killing all 157 people on board. Even in April 2019, with the Max grounded across the globe and mounting scrutiny over how much regulators and pilots really knew about the flight-control software system linked to both crashes, Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO at the time, blamed “a chain of events” in a video message that came off as more corporate than sympathetic.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning that Boeing reached a $200 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 to resolve allegations that the company and Muilenburg made misleading statements about the safety of Max jets and the factors contributing to the crashes. The company didn’t admit or deny any of the SEC’s findings. Calhoun, who took over for Muilenburg in 2020, has been on Boeing’s board since 2009.
Why would they say no to that? Even at the time the second MAX 8 crashed, the fatal incident rate was about 4 per million flights. It's only gone down from there, obviously, and that was only the...
Why would they say no to that? Even at the time the second MAX 8 crashed, the fatal incident rate was about 4 per million flights. It's only gone down from there, obviously, and that was only the rate for the MAX 8, not including the 7, 9, or 10, or the variants thereof. Assuming you fly every single day, that's one crash every 685 years, and those crashes only happened because of developing countries' cost-cutting measures (or how Boeing enabled those measures, as Boeing obviously had the vast majority of the blame) and they would not have happened on planes flown in developed countries.
My point is that what Boeing has done is totally unacceptable, but that doesn't mean these planes are horrifying death traps. They are still waaaaay safer than driving.
And always remember this egregious response:
Why would they say no to that? Even at the time the second MAX 8 crashed, the fatal incident rate was about 4 per million flights. It's only gone down from there, obviously, and that was only the rate for the MAX 8, not including the 7, 9, or 10, or the variants thereof. Assuming you fly every single day, that's one crash every 685 years, and those crashes only happened because of developing countries' cost-cutting measures (or how Boeing enabled those measures, as Boeing obviously had the vast majority of the blame) and they would not have happened on planes flown in developed countries.
My point is that what Boeing has done is totally unacceptable, but that doesn't mean these planes are horrifying death traps. They are still waaaaay safer than driving.
Knowing that still might not help. The most persuasive liars convince themselves they are speaking truth.