How Boeing Lost Its Way

Writing by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation led by Max Moser
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster

[Wendoverproductions]

Two notes:
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.

[sirsmokeefortwence]

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

[SephirothsBIade]

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.

[TrainerAQ]

Boeing went as far as to kill the Whistleblower

[robderiche]

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.

[DoctorCrescentMoon]

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

[TheElloatmatt]

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

[hippiekansasgirl]

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 ❤

[Inuyasha]

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).

[kabutopusu]

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.

[MindHunger]

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.

[DarknessUnresolved]

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.

[soopahsoopah]

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.

[Timbeon]

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.

[feeberizer]

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.

[qaitalamashi]

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

[zpecialist]

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

[valhyman]

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.

[jonjohnson]

A “clean sheet” design instead of the 737MAX series would suffer the same sort of catastrophic failures because the problem isn't engineering, it's management.

[kenwhitfield]

Great job reporting this story. I worked there for 18 years where I saw the decline of Boeing from the inside. Then, I started my second career piloting 737s and the A320 on the outside of the manufacturing realm. The contrasts are telling, as you have pointed out. From the king of commercial aircraft makers, to what still exists of a 100 year legacy of success, it has been both incredible and devastating to watch Boeing fall from grace in the aerospace manufacturing business.

It is not just the 737 and 787 that have been troubling. The company that designed and built key parts of the B-2 and F-22 stealth aircraft, major parts of the Saturn 5 Apollo moon rocket and have most recently suffered problems with the CST-100 Starliner space capsule also. These problems highlight systemic problems with program management that Boeing was once infamous as the class of the whole world for always building the best possible aerospace products. All of which made everyone very proud to be a part of a family of employees. By focusing first on the customers and then on providing employees everything they needed to build the best products, not only was success possible, it was inevitable. Profitability was all but guaranteed and backed up by thousands of orders for first class products. Boeing though, has been gravely injured by two major market changes that I would describe as failures to properly manage its business to build on its legacy of excellence in aerospace manufacturing. The first is the response to what should have been recognized as the inevitable growth a strong competitor building clean sheet of paper airplanes. And second, the aerospace consolidation that eventually culminated in the merger with the nearly bankrupt McDonnell/Douglas. While arrogance caused Boeing to lose focus on what the customer wanted, corporate greed led to the mismanagement of the industry consolidation when the notion that managing a near industry monopoly resulted in surplusing way too much of the expertise both within the original company and at the acquired businesses. The notion of “too big to fail” has resulted in the drive to cater to Wall Street demands for perpetual profitability instead of attention to its customers. Accountants took over a company where design engineers once guided the business. Cost cutting became the order of the day, in place of how best to manage the critical assets needed to build and sell the world’s best commercial, military and space products. The original Boeing once separated the commercial aircraft business from the military business purposely because the two types of customers functioned in often diametrically opposed ways. Cost-plus contracts are very different from civilian customer contracts where Boeing had to pay directly for delays, cost overruns and for the consequences of accidents. McDonnell/Douglas (McD), in its heyday, was a majority-military contractor beholden to the government for most of its profits. While Boeing was the exact opposite, with its commercial business overwhelming its military business. Most of the other companies acquired over the years were also military focused. Merging the disparate cultures of Boeing and McD has been troubling ever since the 1997 merger, with the first decade afterwards resulting in a number of notable corporate management shakeups. I would argue that losing one of its key up and coming managers to Ford Motor Company is emblematic of the brain drain that began with the merger with McD. Change is always difficult to deal with. But, losing the mentors of the corporate culture that guided Boeing through its “If it ain’t Boeing, I’m not going” days into whatever is chosen to describe the company today has resulted in a crisis management culture, and is largely what has caused the crisis of confidence and competence that is in full display today.