Eventually, Boeing management will probably decide it is cheaper to just buy planes from Airbus with the word "Boeing" conspicuously engraved on various components.

American management style is to focus on marketing as the source of all revenue to be exalted. Engineering, design and manufacturing are expenses to be minimized and controlled.

Right now, Boeing management is looking hard to find reasonable manufacturing scapegoats and when they do, heads will roll. Clearly, management had no involvement.

Gives you that warm, fuzzy and safe feeling doesn't it?

Why would an airline buy an Airbus, or a Boeing branded Airbus with Boeing markup?

> Why would an airline buy an Airbus

Because they're the best planes available?

> or a Boeing branded Airbus with Boeing markup?

Because the Boeing markup is less than the US import tariff?

People do strange things, like buying John-Deere-badged excavators manufactured by Hitachi, or JD-badged dozers manufactured by Liebherr.

Or JD-badged lawnmowers built by MTD.

They’re already buying an Airbus branded Bombardier with an Airbus markup so why not?

Because they have no choice. There are currently 2 aircraft companies in the world that make commercial jets: Boeing and Airbus (we'll ignore Comac for now). If Airbus somehow bought up all of Boeing's manufacturing facilities and capability, leaving Boeing as just a re-badger, then airlines would have no choice but to buy an Airbus that either has an Airbus badge or a Boeing badge.

In a word ---- marketing.

For the same reason people currently buy "American" autos (and planes) built from parts sourced around the world.

In American management culture, marketing is the knee jerk solution to any problem and the holy grail from which all revenue is gifted. They are true believers in the "magic" of being able to "game" people into making decisions based on something other than logic.

This same culture explains how/why the internet we have today is built around privacy invasion and (wait for it) ... marketing.

> Boeing management is looking hard to find reasonable manufacturing scapegoats

Bit like when the two planes fell out of the sky and the third world pilots were blamed / strongly hinted at as being inferior

There was some truth to that. The 737 MAX is a hot aircraft (a light airframe with new powerful engines) that could quickly get away from you. Most US pilots come from the military and are typically top notch. Third world pilots to be quite honest, don't measure up in all areas.

This is what happens when the people who build the world we all live in are contravened by people who think they run the world we all live in.

See also early (1960s) CAD/CAM saving a Boeing project in https://inria.hal.science/hal-01526813/document

> “I just can’t get the wing data to match the body data, and time is no longer on my side.” “Show us your wing data. Hey where did you get this stuff?” “From the body project.” “But they’ve given you old data; you’ve been trying to fit an old wing onto a new body.” (The best time to make a design change is before you’ve actually built the thing!) An hour later life was restored and the 727 became a single numerical entity.

Blaming "outsourcing" sounds like passing the buck.

The MCAS software debacle and penny pinching walk-back on the MCAS remediations shows that the rot has set in within Boeing.

I don't think this will change until Boeing's compensation committee cuts pay and bonuses for their execs. Even then they'll just move on to the next corporate job and the new execs will negotiate bonuses based on improving metrics which can be gamed.

In the mean time airlines are stuck with Boeing planes (at least part of) the public thinks of as ticking time-bombs. Some (many? most?) are stuck with planes that they've sunk a fair bit of cash into. Or, more likely, the airlines' corporate parents own a company that owns planes that leases them back to the operating airline for tax reasons. And while that might seem to reduce pressure on the carriers, it's unlikely their corporate parents will want to walk away from that investment.

The last time we had a problem with the 737-900 MAX's, Alaska started flying Airbusses. This time my monthly SEA -> SJC flight is on an Embraer. This can't be good for anyone (except Airbus and Embraer.)

Maybe it's time for corporate America to get serious and only pay the c-suite bigbux if they don't destroy the company.

Embraer isn't competition for Boeing or Airbus; they only make very small regional jets, nothing even close to the size of a 737 let alone one of the larger jets.

A lot of people blame the current toxic culture on the McDonnell Douglas merger that happened in the late 90s.

One of the reasons that merger needed to happen though, was that Boeing didn't know how to be profitable in a non-government regulated market (post deregulation of the airlines).

It's easy to make well engineered planes when the government has a hand in guaranteeing you good profit margins and you don't have to worry too much about costs.

Can someone explain why the tiny risk of death associated with Boeing's safety issues matters at all compared with the far greater risks that we take for granted (driving, etc.)?

I don't get it. It seems like we all make riskier tradeoffs whenever we buy a used car instead of a newer, safer one, or when we buy a slightly less safe new car instead of the safest new car. By not spending more on a safer vehicle, we're saying that we're willing to trade a certain amount of savings for a certain amount of risk.

How much more are we willing to spend to make aviation safer, when it's already so much safer than driving?

One argument I've seen on HN is that most car accident deaths are preventable by a responsible driver, while passengers have no control.

Ok, even if 99% of car accident deaths were preventable, that leaves 1% that are unpreventable. 1% of the ~35,000 car accident deaths in the US each year = 350.

Compare that to ~zero commercial aviation deaths/year in the US over the last decade or so. Source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics....

If we include Boeings 737 MAX overseas deaths, that adds ~350 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

Which doesn't seem to change the picture.

You want KFC for dinner.

Down the street are 2 different KFCs.

One uses oil that sometimes, a very small percentage of the time, will instantly kill you. The other does not. They arrived at using the riskier oil because it saves them 5c a day and it makes the books look better.

Are you really asking why anyone would even bother differentiating these two because the drive to the KFC carries more risk?

Why would you as a consumer want to fly on something with an ever worsening safety record?

Why would you as an airline want the bad press, loss of revenue, and loss of reputation associated with a safety incident?

If the danger KFC is closer and chance of instant oil death is low enough, I would go to that one.

And to answer your second question, I would fly on the airplane with the worsening safety record if its other characteristics made up for it (price, timing, etc).

Why would an airline want the bad press, reputation effects, etc? That's a circular question to mine. My question was: why do people care so much about this minuscule increase in a minuscule risk? I agree that the game theory of such caring about caring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest) makes sense, but I still wonder why HN readers care about it as individuals, not as Boeing execs.

That would be very foolish because the tiny, known chance of death may just be the tip of the iceberg.

because a plane falling out of the air has much larger potential for distruction than car running into another.

Because its easier to regulate 30,000 planes owned by a few dozen airlines made by a handful of manufacturers, than it is to regulate over a billion cars owned and maintainted by hundreds of millions of drivers and made by hudreds of manufacturers.

Boeing delivered planes with loose bolts. If you bought a car with loose wheel bolts you would be upset. Cars are a much larger industry than aeroplanes and instead of “groundings” they have “recalls”, sometimes in the millions.

Right, sorry for the poor choice of words. I agree with the groundings, I'm just surprised by the enormous response in the popular press and HN.

> One argument I've seen on HN is that most car accident deaths are preventable by a responsible driver,

A false argument that keeps getting pushed in the US despite being false.

You are right but the solution is not to say 'Boeing is fine' but rather, the way driving is treated is fucking batshit insane crazy.

Because people are emotional and don't respond to statistics like that. 2 planes crashed over a single, critical software usability defect. Now Boeing is a complete trash company and is doing many things wrong. Airbus is perfect and does nothing wrong. With such a small sample size, it could very well be that Airbus is much worse than Boeing. But that's just not how people will perceive it. These businesses know that and know they need absolute perfection.

There are many news articles about Boeing's shoddy manufacturing quality out there, that have nothing to do with software, and they already got many times in trouble with the regulators for it.

As long as you're comparing cars and air travel, I'll point out that the aviation industry lies with statistics when they present the numbers.

When comparing safety within aviation, they talk about deaths per departure.

When comparing safety between aviation and cars, they suddenly change their metric and talk about deaths per mile, making aviation look much better.

I'm not saying aviation is worse than cars if you do a fair comparison; I haven't done the math. Maybe it's still better. But still they are fudging things in their own favor.

per departure comparison makes sense if the risks are concentrated in things that are 1:1 with departures. https://accidentstats.airbus.com/statistics/accident-by-flig...

Comparing different operators within aviation, using a rate per departure makes sense I think.

I just love how we can have a critical study about a failure that could have possibly led to the death of dozens if not 100+ people, a failure in something as routine and critical as flying in an airplane, and the article is behind a paywall.

We're getting very close to the point where the combination of the competency crisis and the greed crisis are going to start causing more people to think twice about doing things that were once common, like flying commercial.

Personally, I cancelled my flight later this month and am going to start getting in the habit of doing long road trips again.

Just-as-if-not-more dangerous? Maybe, but at least I have a higher chance of my fate being in my own hands (swerving out of the way of an oncoming truck vs being sucked out from a fuselage plug failing).

More inconvenient? Yep, don't care.

More expensive? Maybe, don't care.

Ken Thompson in the most recent Sharp Tech podcast also talked about the management style of Boeing after their merger with McDonnell Douglas. They mentioned that when Boeing's HQ was still in Chicago, their CEO boasted that the HQ was thousands miles away from Seattle so that the management didn't have to get involved in day-to-day operations. This is just staggering how arrogant Boeing's the executives could be. Contrasting this with how old Boeing worked, how old Lockheed worked, how Elon Musk worked. No wonder Boeing has been in decline. It's just sad that so many talented engineers are stuck in this monopoly, when they could've leave the company and build something groundbreaking. For that matter, I feel extremely lucky that the IT industry have had a bustling culture of startups, so corrupted companies can die and new companies can innovate. I also feel extremely sad that how aviation industry has become complacent and ossified. I also worry that the US's industries are going the British way, as how British government forced their auto industry to consolidate many years ago, ending up destroying their the entire auto industry.

A parallel discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38978705

Indeed years - Al Jazeera 2014 documentary / exposé:

https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?si=YdVyOoYTNKkPBn6w