reputational distress

Boeing and American legacy behemoths

Today’s news that the Boeing Starliner, already years behind schedule, is stuck at the International Space Station with a problem relating to helium comes at a pretty awful time for the aerospace behemoth. The proud company which only a decade ago ruled global aviation production is on its heels as the failures of various physical parts of aircraft over the past six months. Those problems cascaded from two disasters, in Indonesia and Ethiopia, with its 737 Super Max aircraft several years ago when pilots were unable to master a particularly delicate but well-known maneuver crucial to operating the planes. More recently, reports that the company’s efforts at cost savings resulted outsourcing which allowed fake titanium being a construction material further shook confidence. Boeing, the master of the skies, has looked more like a company stumbling at every turn.

The Starliner has been a project in conjunction with NASA to assure a commercial option to government-only produced transportation into space. In theory, it appears logical that this company, born a century ago in Seattle on the promise of aviation excellence and innovation, would be the partner for the U.S. Government space agency as it seeks to return us to space. However, technical challenges retarded the process. At the same time, completely independent efforts by Elon Musk’s SpaceX system sprinted ahead.

Even before the blown out doors, loose sides of planes, fake titanium, and other woes, Boeing seemed crippled in its ability to recapture the magic that made the company the envy of Airbus in Europe. Chinese efforts to build an indigenous aviation capability would free the PRC from the possible clutches of yet another foreign—read U.S.-corporation—became a stepping stone to producing its own planes, then to coming an alternative global source for aviation. In short, others became trying to emulate Boeing’s incredible successes so they became potential competitors.

But Boeing’s problems were not brand new in January 2024. Perhaps Boeing was mired in its own glory. Maybe it never quite recovered its gusto by relocating from the beautiful Pacific Northwest to the ‘collar counties’ surrounding Chicago. Was it that Boeing increasingly relied on MBAs rather than engineers as the focus of the organisation? Did they simply become too successful, thus too confident in their abilities to overcome any and all issues? Something else? Is this merely coincidental trauma after a century of so much success? Or is none of this what we are really seeing since aeroplanes and rockets are bloody complex systems? Are we just beating up on these companies because we have an expectation of ‘never fail’?

For those whose relatives perished in the Super Max crashes, nothing will ever bring back their loved ones. Those people are furious and detest Boeing’s actions of any sort short of never ending remorse, it would seem. It is understandable that for them discussing anything other than a perfect record to protect human life is out of the question. Their presence at a recent Senate bipartisan skewering of Boeing’s CEO Dave Calhoun made clear that Boeing will forever be condemned on these disasters, regardless of the cause. Calhoun acknowledged the company’s errors but questions raised by whistleblowers made clear the company chose not to address probable issues, like poor quality parts, before the accidents. Why didn’t the company take those concerns more seriously? The death of one of the whistleblowers earlier this spring certainly did not come at a good time for the company, either.

What we do know is that Boeing and a number of other ‘legacy’ companies have had painful experiences over the past twenty years. That does not necessarily mean these companies are on the verge of collapse or shuttering. It does mean, however, these organisations with long, deep successes that created what seemed untouchable reputations now have tarnished reputations by actions they did or did not take. Ford, long the industry leader in automotive technology in the United States, and the other domestic car producers underwent similar crises of confidence in their reputation over the past forty years. In short, some of our most well-known companies have seen their reputations besmirched by doubts about quality and corporate culture. It’s a pretty long list, actually, of companies no longer trusted because they were previously big successes.

This all occurs as the aforementioned SpaceX has had relative receent success with some of its launches after years of intensive effort. Jeff Bezos of Amazon has also been working on independent space efforts under his Blue Origen project. Two new megaowners on vanity projects, in the eyes of some, while others see them as private sector rivals to failing government efforts via Boeing.

But the comparison getting many people’s attention is the coincidence of Boeing’s woes with China’s national space program landing on the dark side of the moon. Anything highlighting Chinese techniological success exacerbates anxieties for fear of concomittant military applications. The recognition that Beijing systematically nursed its space program over the past twenty-five years to the point it could successfully retrieve space rocks illustrates a capacity to challenge U.S. supremacy in yet another field we once dominanted with absolutely no possible opposition.

The anxieties, however, are deeper than that. As China is modernising its military, building a successful space capacity, and Xi Jinping proclaims his intentions to engage with the world while building domestic capacity, America’s physical infrastructure, air traffic control system, and overall modernisation capacity appears to many citizens as stuck rather than the envy of the world. Fifty years ago, that envy was on full display as we completed major projects in a variety of fields ranging from highway development to supercomputers to spacecraft to the snazziest, most sought after autos to military modernisation to pretty much anything industry could provide. We were the kings and queens to whom everyone looked for the future. In the eyes of those claiming we now fail and are weak, the failure is profound.

The Boeing experience raises doubts about our dominance in the future. Whatever the reason that Boeing is currently in crisis—and it likely is a confluence of reasons as few things any organisation are uni-causal, we are focusing on the failures which is the American way of demanding improvement. At least it has been over our history.

Are things really that terrible? Please don’t think I am excusing the more than four hundred deaths caused by the Super Max crashes as those are horrible numbers but the spate of scary incidents over the past several months also show the remarkable training of our aircraft crews. We all remember Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger and his crew’s ‘miracle on the Hudson’ in January 2009 when the Airbus A320 they were flying landed on the Hudson River west of Manhattan without a single death. We ought also think about the skills it took to land each and every one of the planes recently afflicted with blowouts. In the hands of lesser pilots and cabin crew, the panic alone could have resulted in many more problems, if not scores of deaths. Any single loss is real but things could be far worse.

Most Boeing planes and Chevrolet cars operate safely and effectively day in and day out. It’s seductive to forget that because we don’t focus on the systems within which planes operate. Sullenberger had to have an Airbus (which has had its own problems so Boeing doesn’t have a monopoly on them) that was solid but he needed a crew in the cockpit with him and in the cabin who had drilled and drilled and drilled for emergencies rather than for easy flights. Automobile companies look for flaws all the time as successes in building a new Cadillac is far less dangerous for them than the mistakes in the process. The U.S. armed forces practice their skills in an on-going environment to leave as little to chance as possible so that, in a conflict with China or anyone else, people go on auto-focus to the do the right thing rather than having to think through what that might be. No, it’s not possible to plan for everything but you’d be amazed (or at least I have been) at how thoroughly they do seem to cover possibilities.

Additionally, the federal regulators were too cozy with Boeing during its glory years but are likely, if they still exist in years ahead, to scrutinise the company to a high degree because of these known mistakes. Regulation may be a beaucratic nightmare but it serves a purpose: capitalism without it does not always address things through competition, regardless of claims to the contrary. Sometimes the public demands a more rapid response by companies driven to respond under governmental pressure. Regulators following details in a company matter.

China isn’t known for that sort of attention to detail. Sure, we know that China’s education does things by rote as it’s a reason many students don’t know how to think about new problems. the other side of the coin is that challenging authority to ask more, not fewer, questions is decidedly frowned upon. This is, regardless of Xi’s proclamations to the contrary, a deeply risk averse culture. Preferences today are for the Party, with its closed decision-making, to be the driving force in society on everything so how would a whistleblower or mid-level staffer in an aviation company push for changes in a dangerous design if he were threatened with Party sanctions. It would not occur.

Whatever our problems, we don’t tend to be risk averse in our large companies who have grown into industry leaders. Perhaps becoming risk averse for financial reasons is part of their current challenges but I am only wondering.

None of this is to say that the Starliner problem of getting the astronauts off of the International Space Station safely is going to be easy or quick. None of these changes, sadly, are likely to be immediate but they are likely to occur—or Boeing will die over the long run. I am confident Boeing and NASA will put as much brain power available against solving the problem. They may fail as that occurs at times but the engineering successes of the past century are remarkable—and taken far too easily for granted. Engineering, like so many fields, requires teamwork, willingness to expend resources, and creativity rather than passivity.

We are in a period when many Americans feel such frustration about the state of our nation yet they ought experience profound awe at our many successes as well. we need think through why we have failures and successes. It’s easy to see only the negatives, such as missing a connection in Charlotte because American Airlines took so long to traverse the tarmac to reach the gate but there likely was a reason meriting that action. Not always but probably.

Perhaps what most plagues us is our own reputational assessments. We are so accustomed to success that we never expect anything else. That is a wonderful aspiration but is it realistic? I suspect it definitely creates a great deal of reputational distress. The real question is whether we as a nation or those companies can shake off the distress to renew their innovation to create further ingenious outcomes?

Thank you for reading Actions Create Consequences. I welcome any rebuttals or queries on this or any column. I also hope you will circulate this if you find it of value.

Thanks especially to those who subscribe financially as it means the motivation to me daily to offer some thoughts about actions and consequences.

I offer a photograph from the Crystal Bridges Museum where they have Stella, one of André Harvey’s amazing lost-wax method sculptures. She is a beauty as is the Museum itself.

Stay cool, be well, and do be safe. FIN

Bill Chappell and Joel Rose, ‘Whistleblower Joshua Dean who raised concerns about boeing jets, dies at 45’, npr.org, 2 May 2024, retrieved at https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248693512/boeing-whistleblower-josh-dean-dead

‘Captain Sully’s Minute-by-Minute Description of the Miracle on the Hudson’, Youtube.com, 2019, retrieved at

Christian Davenport, ‘Astonauts’ Delayed Return Reflects High Stakes for Boeing, Space Station’, WashingtonPost.com, 25 June 2024, retrieved at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/25/starliner-nasa-boeing-space-station/