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Boeing was still promising end of year FAA certification for 737 Max as recently as early December. Around that time, they had a spokesperson on CNBC who was as
by jefe_ 7y ago
Boeing was still promising end of year FAA certification for 737 Max as recently as early December. Around that time, they had a spokesperson on CNBC who was asked directly how the outstanding steps (which indicated February at the earliest) aligned with their end of year statements and the position was essentially, 'we've been saying end of year and end of year could still happen.'
When your brand is suffering a crisis of confidence, you don't rebuild it by missing deadlines and dodging reality. The amount of hubris it takes to be so flippant in these circumstances is indicative of a deeply flawed corporate culture, and that falls at the feet of the CEO.
Also, how do you allow Starliner mission to occur without 100% confidence in ability of mission to be executed flawlessly? There are certainly complexities, but it almost seems like they passed the point when they could have quietly bumped the launch, and ended up in a literal PR gamble.
- mihaaly 7y agoI am still a bit puzzled how cheerful some people seem about a product that was unable to fulfill its purpose: Starliner getting to its intended destination. Seems like they cheer that it stayed in one piece at least. Not too promising.
- rossdavidh 7y agoWell it did turn out better than the 737 MAX in that no one died...
- hoorayimhelping 7y ago>I am still a bit puzzled how cheerful some people seem about a product that was unable to fulfill its purpose: Starliner getting to its intended destination. Calling a space capsule a product and treating it like some kind of tech product launch and framing it's success that way is weird. It's a spacecraft and the mission was meant to test its capabilities and get data about it during an actual orbital flight, then go from there. The reason everyone is trying to be so cheerful and optimistic is because it was a partial success - the capsule stayed together and landed, which were part of its mission parameters. But (clearly) the public perception of this mission is that it failed because it didn't get to the ISS, so I imagine people are trying to be cheerful to remind people that they're not upset cause they didn't fail, they just didn't fully succeed. I'm no fan of Boeing or how they've handled 787 MAX or ULA or Starliner or their relationship with NASA, but calling this not too promising is a bit unfair.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoIt failed for essentially trivial reasons. Which suggests there are issues with the procedures that should eliminate those failures, and that similar failure modes are possible. That's why it's not encouraging - and why it's not at all unfair to be scathing.
- CamperBob2 7y agoWe launched the ISS over 20 years ago. If you look 20 years down the road from Kitty Hawk, we had already built tens of thousands of manned aircraft and fought a world war with them at that point in time. Apparently, 20 years of progress and "promise" ain't what it used to be.
- ericd 7y agoI think it's because it's a lot easier to go fast when there are huge potential rewards (winning a World War) and you're willing to accept fatalities (war). The rewards here are much more nebulous, and we're not willing to accept fatalities. So we go slow and careful.
- sidlls 7y agoI’m not at all puzzled that a bunch of people commenting in a hacker forum don’t understand very much about engineering like this. Astronautical and aeronautical engineering are difficult. The fact that we’ve been in space 50-odd years doesn’t mean we’ve perfected anything to the point where we should expect a flawless mission on the first go even for something like this.
- mlyle 7y agoBecause it's a test that showed a large number of things went right, and otherwise didn't meet overall objectives for a small, trivial reason. That is, the amount of project surface that it increased confidence in is as great or greater than the amount it called into question.
- linuxftw 7y ago> 'we've been saying end of year and end of year could still happen.' Deliberately false and misleading statements that should be prosecuted by the SEC.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI filed an SEC complaint, own a single share of Boeing to have standing. Hopefully something comes of it.
- sokoloff 7y agoUsername checks out.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago“If not me, then who?” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cattlemansgold 7y agoThe Starliner mission was a test. You wouldn't have 100% confidence that a test would be executed flawlessly. The purpose of the test is to find flaws in the system, and that's exactly what they did.
- philwelch 7y agoDoing the tests is fine, but Boeing is acting as though the tests were successful when they were not. Between this and the parachute issues from the pad abort test, I think actually approving Starliner for crewed use would constitute normalization of deviance. This is historically how astronauts die.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoThey were partially successful, which is a realistic goal. Few things work flawlessly the first or second go, even rocket science. I'm not sure why you're being so binary here. It's also why it wasn't manned, they have to test to work out the kinks. Overall Starliner was a bigger success than not.
- philwelch 7y agoI’m not saying to cancel the thing altogether, just maybe run some more unmanned tests first to make sure.
- jonplackett 7y agoReminds me of the news coverage of SpaceX’s first landing attempts, where they crashed into the barge and exploded and everyone was like “it’s a failure, it will never work”. Yeah but so much went right. I think it’s just the (well deserved) media narrative Boeing is in now. When you kill hundreds of people and then pretend it wasn’t your fault, you get what’s coming to you.
- khuey 7y agoThe obvious difference is that SpaceX's landings were secondary objectives and something that nobody had ever done before. Getting in the proper orbit to the ISS was a primary objective for Starliner and something we've been doing for 20 years.
- jonplackett 7y agoI think there were just waiting to fire him right before Christmas
- turtlecloud 7y agonah they were planning for Hanukkah
- jgalt212 7y ago> When your brand is suffering a crisis of confidence, you don't rebuild it by missing deadlines and dodging reality. has worked for Elon, and now his stock is trading at an all time high. $420
- adrianmonk 7y agoAt this point, management probably cannot get good information about the state of projects. When a company creates a culture of sweeping problems under the rug, and then tries to go back and change that, it creates an impossible situation for people at all levels of the hierarchy. Where management once told people it was OK to hide things from them, now they've changed the rules and are telling them, hey, show us all the things we told you we didn't want to know about. First of all, when you're told this, you have no way of knowing if they really mean it. Are they saying, hey, actually show us the dirt so we can deal with it? Or are they saying, hey, show us the dirt WINK WINK, but we want the answer to be that nothing too bad happened because that's the easy way out? (In other words, you have to judge whether they've had a sincere change of heart or you're playing a new phase of the same game as before.) But even if you really believe them, now you have a difficult calculation to make. Maybe you will reveal some dirt and they will say, wait a second, we meant for you to hide dirt, but not dirt that was that bad, and that's your fault, and you were supposed to know that. And now you're in trouble for telling the truth. Unless management offers you complete immunity (if that's even possible), you still have a reason to keep hiding stuff to protect yourself. TLDR, if your organization made sure everybody's closets are full of skeletons, then you're going to have a hard time getting people to open those closet doors.
- mlyle 7y agoThis is a brilliant bit of insight.
- ljm 7y agoThis is why whistleblower protections are so important. Without a radical re-org, there will still be enough management within the company that prefers to cover things up. They might well have been hired for that skill.
- jussij 7y agoThe other side of this coin is it not good enough to just identify problems. There is also the need for an organisation wide culture built on processes, procedures and channels that then enables the company to quickly and efficiently find solutions to these kind of problems. When a company for a long time has being building a culture of ignoring problems, the effort required to rebuild that problem solving culture is massive. It is not helped by the fact that the individuals holding the power at the different levels within the organisation tend to be the ones who oversaw the demise of that engineering culture in the first place.
- WalterBright 7y ago> how do you allow Starliner mission to occur without 100% confidence in ability of mission to be executed flawlessly? What space program with new hardware has ever executed 100% flawlessly?
- stjohnswarts 7y agoIt really is a shame that it takes the deaths of hundreds to even budge the needle on getting back to being an engineering company rather than profit is #1 company and quality a distant 3rd. They should be ashamed to not have started from scratch on a new optimized plane design because they literally sell their planes for DECADES and almost have a captive market. Quarterly earnings focused governance killed those people as surely as faulty design.