How Boeing Lost Its Way

Two notes: 1) This level of detail would never have been possible without our collaboration with the Air Current. To dive even deeper into the subject, be sure to read their years of reporting on it at theaircurrent.com/ 2) As many of you noticed, we had a sloppy error in the ad-read—the B-2 was actually built by Northrop Grumman. This was just a pure mix-up in a section that, honestly, doesn’t get as much attention as the video itself. Apologies for this.

"Boeing or I'm not going" has turned into "Boeing? I'm not going."

Who knew replacing Engineers with people that know nothing but cutting costs would make things go badly?

Boeing went as far as to kill the Whistleblower

I’ll wager my non-existent pension that the C suite execs who orchestrated this nosedive all had happy landings thanks to their golden parachutes.

This is not just a Boeing problem. Its happening to nearly every major company because they put too high a value on shareholders and profit, at the cost of what fundamentally made their products possible.

“Boeing is trying to be a Michelin Star kitchen with a fast food mindset.” -Wendover Productions 2024

This was absolutely fascinating! My 87-year-old father summed it up like this: "Boeing let the MBAs and the shareholders take over the company, and they ran it into the ground." I will definitely share this video with him.

This video and these comments hurt my heart. I was an engineer at Boeing for 25 years until they union-busted us and moved our plant to OKC. I was so proud to say I worked there for almost all of them. To see their standard for excellence be so far in the rear view mirror just tears at my ❤

It all went downhill for Boeing after the McDonnell Douglas merger, really. Boeing went from an engineer run company to an investor run company after the merger, which ended up with Boeing being 'profit first safety second' sadly.

I've worked in engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing. I can tell you that when you start to incessantly financially squeeze your Tier 2 systems suppliers, you create an intensely adversarial relationship. To appear to meet costs the most experienced/expensive engineers - the ones who know everything - are laid off. Eventually the supplier becomes indifferent which leads to quality issues.

My dad worked assembly (mainly riveting) in the Wichita Boeing plant during some of their peak, through the plant being sold to Onex, and then to Spirit (or maybe it was that Onex owned Spirit, memory is foggy). It was wild to hear you talk about the problems with Spirit and remember back to my dad coming home from work, exhausted, complaining about how they had to scrap a fuselage skin because some idiot up the line screwed up drilling the holes so bad they were ovals and the rivets would slip right through. Then it turned into "Yea, we should have scrapped the skin, but then they just shoved out of spec washer shims behind the holes and told us to buck the rivets anyway." He retired right around the Dreamliner fiasco (don't remember if it was before or after) because of another massive issue on the line: Letting experienced workers go so they could higher inexperienced greenhorns at much lower salary. They kept trying to get him to keep crawling into the plane, despite his back problems and age, and then also train new hires (Many of which were super unqualified even for manual labor. Lots of weed/meth smoking on lunch breaks in trucks, according to my dad).

When I was growing up in Seattle, my family rode the Boeing roller coaster. Long time residents know what that is: the constant cycle of hirings and layoffs by the company. My father was always trying to get employed there, but it was always temporary as Boeing constantly expanded and contracted its workforce. So one year, we’d move into some nice new tract house in the suburbs, live well, and take advantage of all the benefits: vaccinations, regular check-ups, and lots and lots of dental appointments. The next year, Dad would get laid off, have to take jobs pumping gas, or reading water meters, or doing custodial work (or multiple combinations of the above to make ends meet), we’d move again into some shabby rathole, and no more visits to the dentist or doctor. It really sucked being at their mercy for the basics.

Cooper Lund put it best on Bluesky- "Boeing's problems really started when they went from a company that primarily makes airplanes to a company that primarily makes shareholder value," which kind of summarizes the current state of the global economy as a whole.

Boeing's decline started after CEO T. A. Wilson, an engineer, stepped down in 1986 and the board chose Frank Schrontz, an accountant, to take his place. The atmosphere quickly became toxic because the focus was now on the bottom line rather than the quality of the product. The synergistic environment I'd enjoyed since 1978 quickly disappeared. I left in 1991 and friends who had stayed would always tell me the work atmosphere on both the Aerospace and Aircraft side was "pissy". Even my father who had worked their since 1958 agreed the company had changed for the worse.

It wasn't mentioned, but a total of 346 people were killed in the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes on Oct. 29th 2018, and March 10, 2019, respectively.

“Boeing is trying to be a Michelin Star kitchen with a fast food mindset.” - 10/10 quote

"You know that company that we bought because they were going under? Yeah, lets do exactly what they did because it worked out so well the first time"

they fired the engineers and put genius mba bean counters in charge

The video below this video was "boeing whistleblower found dead" .. interesting