The thing about Boeing is it seems easier to just make sure the door doesn’t fly off mid flight than it does to retaliate against whistle blowers. You need a whole shadowy apparatus for that, for the other you just need like, a bolt
Refusing to allow my imagination to engage with the question "what is Boeing hiding that's worse than doors flying off airplanes" as a form of self care
Because bolts are an old, stagnant, fixed technology. Hardly any movement in decades. Shadowy apparatuses are opportunities for growth and innovation you can sell to investors looking for the next big thing. I hear Boeing is incorporating AI into their shadowy apparatuses
with AI, they can even analyze employee communications and other data to predict who might become whistleblowers. this is known in the biz as a "whistlesucker" system
I relate to this as a production and quality engineer.
I’ll bet someone here is flying risk flags and it’s malpractice not to respond to that.
If a production engineer is too cautious, fire em, fine. But if they’re there, this is a major part of what we’re for
I have an added layer of frustration toward Boeing because I guarantee they got here by trampling people with similar careers to mine, and there are no doubt a dozen of my colleagues shouting “this is what happens”
I think Boeing corporate has completely ruined the middle management (those who hire/fire, those who set success criteria). Changes just at the CEO level will not necessarily clean out this deeper, now-hardwired-in problem in the engineering/quality apparatus.
It certainly won’t. This isn’t a problem fixed by a CEO. It’s a problem fixed by engineers and middle management. The CEO’s role in this is to listen to them.
It's demoralizing to watch a century of hard lessons and carefully managed expertise be casually ripped apart by b school wastrels.
But casual jet setting is destroying our future so... It's hard to root for Boeing getting their shit together.
this is like the time the prison system spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting an inmate in court who had requested something that costs, like, 5-10 bucks
"Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X.
"If the cost of hiring a hitman is less than X, it's going to be a bad day for the whistleblower's loved ones."
You’d be surprised. My *relative status redacted* used to be a regular in an East-End pub which was also frequented by some underworld types. When my *redacted* was complaining about her landlord fucking her over one of the regulars took her aside and said ‘for £5k that landlord could disappear.’
She did not take him up on this offer, obviously, but we were all extremely surprised at what a low amount of money it would have taken. Admittedly, this was approx. 20 years ago but still…
You underestimate the potential loss in profits from grounding an entire line of aircraft for vital repairs.
Plus the hitman option can scare other whistleblowers, causing a long term positive outcome for the corporations.
And waste the money on the extra bolt for each and every aircraft during this fiscal quarter, when we could just hire a hitman in a later fiscal quarter instead?
Someone else will probably be in charge by then, and it can be their problem to deal with.
See, bolts come out of the manufacturing budget, which market forces necessitate us reining in, while violent retaliation comes out of our goon budget, who work on retainer and really just goes to waste if not used to their potential
One excerpt from a whistleblower is that faulty bolts were thrown in the faulty bolt bucket. The pressure to finish the job of inserting the bolts would often fall into the next shift (because of a new high-grade bolt shortage) and the next shift would be ordered to use the bolts from the bucket.
Well... A torque wrench and a quality control guy that you don't constantly try to fuck with.
But probably just one or two QCs with a torque wrench and a flashlight could do it
According to the expert analysis of Lockheed beancounters, it's much cheaper to build a shadowy apparatus when a professional hit costs like $400k with only 80 psychopath and pr hours and a single bolt in a commercial jetliner needs 4000 engineer hours of study at a cost of $50 million dollars.
Nah because the door flying off is because of decades old systemic issues they don't want to be investigated. The door flying off is just the lid on the genie's lamp and Boeing doesn't want you to know just how bad things really are.
