More Boeing Bad News

[PHXPhlyer]

BOAC:
I thought the same but didn't go there.

PP

[Boac]

No fear!

[G-CPTN]

It appears the capsule burnt too much fuel as it fired its engines, leaving an insufficient supply to complete its planned mission.

[Boac]

BBC confirms it was an MCAS issue - and I bet they didn't put it in Rosies' FCOM.

"Boeing astronaut ship stalls in orbit"

[PHXPhlyer]

Dummies

Rosie was over-qualified for this mission. They should have used 7 dummies from Boeing's C-Suite. They are more qualified!

PP

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Well, I agree the C-suite needs a rocket up its collective @ss.

[PHXPhlyer]

MCAS

Boeing can now broaden the use of MCAS to spacecraft and maybe liscense it to other manufacturers. That would be another revenue stream to offset Max loses.

PP

[barkingmad]

Obviously a BA management “pilot”, departed with ‘Sword’ minimum fuel and got caught out?!

[OFSO]

Seemingly the software got 'confused' with the attitude, the capsule thought it was somewhere it wasn't, and expended all the on-board propellent in trying to fix a problem that wasn't there. If an incorrect interpretation of attitude sounds familiar, it's because it is. Wonder who wrote the software ? Couple of guys in India on a dollar fifty an hour ?

[Boac]

Maybe the wrong time of the month for Rosie?

[Rwy in Sight]

Who is Rosie?

The guys in India is not the problem. The dollar fifty an hour is but then again you pay peanuts you get monkey. This applies to the whole chain from suppliers to the customers in all industries and some ones it is is even worst ratio to Boeing.

[G-CPTN]

Who is Rosie?

Rosie the riveter

[PHXPhlyer]

RiS:
Rosie is the name of the dummy in the capsule.

PP

[Mrs Ex-Ascot]

Yet more bad news; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/marke ... ahead.html

[PHXPhlyer]

Maybe Good News For Boeing?

Muilenburg resigns!

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/23/business ... index.html

PP

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Won't work.
New CEO David Calhoun is another f#cking accountant.
They just don't get it.

[Boac]

"Muilenburg resigns!" - fired?

[PHXPhlyer]

More Muilenburg Back Story (from WSJ via TOP)
By Andrew Tangel,
Alison Sider and
Andy Pasztor
Dec. 22, 2019 7:52 pm ET

After the grounding of Boeing Co. BA -1.65% ’s 737 MAX jet dragged on through the summer, Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO, decided to seek some advice.

In 2017, Oscar Munoz, the chief of United Airlines Holdings Inc., had faced his own public backlash after police dragged a bloodied passenger off a flight. Boeing was under fire from industry officials and victims’ families who thought its response to two crashes of its newest plane was similarly tone-deaf.

Show more warmth, Mr. Munoz told the 55-year-old CEO during a visit in the airline chief’s office inside Chicago’s Willis Tower, according to United officials. After all, Mr. Munoz told him, 346 people perished on Boeing’s planes.

Since the dual crashes, Boeing has fumbled its response, treating the disasters more like typical accidents, repeatedly minimizing its own technical and design mistakes and underestimating the backlash from regulators, customers and the flying public.

At the center is Mr. Muilenburg who appeared to rely too heavily on data and legal advice to make decisions as he sought to find what went wrong, communicate and get Boeing’s plane flying again. His choices failed to resolve—and sometimes exacerbated—friction with regulators and airlines, indicating that until recently he may not have fully grasped the severity of the challenges confronting him.

Turbulent Tenure
Boeing shares surged during CEO Dennis Muilenburg's tenure, with its market value peaking above $250 billion just days before the second crash of a 737 MAX.


He has prioritized getting the MAX back aloft while struggling with the complexities of politics and public relations, technical hurdles and restoring passenger confidence. He finally conceded mistakes after declining to acknowledge flaws in a flight-control system implicated in both accidents.

With the grounding set to last at least a year, Mr. Muilenburg and his supporters now say his approach is evolving. He went from ardently defending Boeing to belatedly acknowledging mistakes, seeking input from customers, apologizing and meeting with grieving families. He has begun talking publicly about Boeing’s newfound humility. “We’ve been humbled by these two accidents,” Mr. Muilenburg said in an interview last week. “We’re making changes to our company, and I’m changing as a leader as well.”

Mr. Muilenburg is still left with a deepening crisis. His repeated assurances of the plane’s safety have failed to win regulators’ approval. A string of Boeing’s optimistic predictions for when regulators would certify the aircraft for flying haven’t panned out and have indeed antagonized air-safety regulators world-wide.


Boeing, the largest U.S. manufacturing exporter, is suspending MAX production starting January. The production suspension, which prompted President Trump to call Mr. Muilenburg, has big implications for Boeing’s vast network of suppliers and their employees—and the American economy. U.S. industry officials don’t expect the Federal Aviation Administration to lift its flight ban until at least February.

Making matters worse, Boeing this month botched a space capsule’s long-awaited test flight—it went into the wrong orbit—raising fresh questions about management’s ability to pull off big feats.

Boeing’s string of missteps is fueling speculation among airline, government and other industry officials about how long Mr. Muilenburg can keep his job. Boeing’s board stripped him of his dual role as chairman earlier this year.

After the failed space mission, Boeing’s new chairman, Dave Calhoun, on Friday stood by earlier televised comments backing Mr. Muilenburg. A Boeing spokesman said Sunday Mr. Calhoun stands by his endorsement.

Mr. Muilenburg, an engineer by training, came to lead Boeing after a long stint in the aerospace giant’s defense business that deals with governments rather than consumer-facing airlines.

People who have worked with him describe him as a linear thinker better suited at delivering bullet points than connecting with people.

The first 737 MAX crashed in Indonesia in October 2018. In March, Mr. Muilenburg was at his Chicago-area home when a Boeing operations center called overnight to alert him of the second crash, in Ethiopia, said a senior Boeing official.

Mr. Muilenburg and his team discussed whether to let the MAX keep flying or recommend grounding it, said people familiar with the discussions.

A flood of concern was cresting world-wide, and some in the FAA urged a more drastic response. Mr. Muilenburg and senior FAA officials opted to wait. Despite early reports showing possible similarities in some aspects of the two crashes, other data suggested sharp differences. That information proved wrong.


Boeing sought to allay concerns by saying the FAA planned to approve a “software enhancement” to a flight-control system known as MCAS no later than April that would make “already safe aircraft even safer.” Mr. Muilenburg expressed confidence in the MAX’s safety during a phone call with Mr. Trump, said a person familiar with the conversation.

“It’s important that we take action based on data and information,” Mr. Muilenburg said in the interview, of those discussions, defending his decision not to call for grounding immediately. Emergence of new data showing similarities with the first MAX crash “ultimately led to the right decision, and one that we fully supported.”

New satellite data suggesting a possible MCAS misfire similar to the first accident cinched the argument. The FAA become the last of the regulators to ban flights.

Mr. Muilenburg said little publicly in the following weeks. In late April, he assured Wall Street analysts there was “no technical slip” in the system’s certification, speaking narrowly about how Boeing won initial FAA approval. “It was done the right way,” Mr. Muilenburg said in the interview.

“It was done to the process.”
United CEO Oscar Munoz told the Boeing CEO to show more warmth. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Bloomberg News

But he acknowledged no Boeing flaws at the time. He later noted, at a press conference that month, that pilots in the accidents didn’t follow all emergency procedures

He began to learn more about the MAX’s design problems as he made more frequent trips to the Seattle area, where the company manufactures the plane. He discovered Boeing engineers had based their MCAS designs with a fatal flaw and a longstanding assumption that pilots would respond to a malfunction as they would to a similar cockpit emergency. They didn’t take into account how confusing such an emergency could prove, making it difficult for pilots to respond quickly.

“That’s where we made the mistake,” Mr. Muilenburg said in the interview. “These design assumptions are no longer correct.”

Mr. Muilenburg also learned of a related error, one his Seattle colleagues had known since 2017: Certain cockpit alerts on the MAX weren’t working as intended—or expected by the FAA and airlines—on all of the aircraft.

Due to a software error, they were activated only as part of an optional package. After the 2018 crash, Boeing told the FAA and Southwest Airlines Co. , its largest MAX buyer, about the mistake, but Mr. Muilenburg didn’t learn about the mixup until after the March crash, according to the senior Boeing official and people briefed on the timeline.

Boeing released public statements correcting the record and Mr. Muilenburg later conceded communications lapses. He later launched a restructuring of the company’s Seattle-based engineering and safety departments to give him more direct oversight.

[PHXPhlyer]

Back Story (Part 2)

Growing impatience

By June, the MAX crisis cast a pall over the Paris Air Show, where Boeing traditionally showcases airliner deals. This time, scores of its best-selling plane were piling up in storage and Boeing officials instead touted how they were adding safeguards to the MAX.

Mr. Muilenburg made few public appearances but had a private meeting with his counterpart at the FAA, acting administrator Dan Elwell, people familiar with the meeting said. The two met inside the back of a parked military plane, not at Boeing’s base at the show, these people said.

Mr. Elwell asked Muilenburg that Boeing slow down its talk of progress, giving the FAA space to exercise scrutiny, these people said. The agency needed to be seen as independent.

FAA officials had grown impatient with Boeing’s optimism about putting the MAX back in service. The regulator was taking a reputation hit after delegating its authority to Boeing for years, and the crisis was fueling questions on Capitol Hill about its coziness with the company. The FAA was working with foreign regulators to lift their MAX grounding together.

“You’re right,” Mr. Muilenburg said, according to the people familiar with the meeting. “We’re not going to push.”

Yet Boeing continued to provide public estimates of the MAX’s return to flight, further irritating the FAA.

Mr. Muilenburg said in the interview Boeing considered it necessary to telegraph such information to suppliers. “We haven’t always been accurate on that,” Mr. Muilenburg said. “But ultimately no matter what I say, in terms of the baseline calendar, the regulators will determine the timeline.”


As months ticked by, Mr. Muilenburg hadn’t had contact with families of victims from either crash. Bob Clifford, a Chicago lawyer suing the plane maker in the Ethiopian case, suggested to Boeing officials that they meet with relatives to discuss how to spend $50 million it planned to donate—to no avail, Mr. Clifford said.

Mr. Muilenburg said he had wanted to meet them earlier but didn’t want to make them uncomfortable. “I tried to put myself in their position,” he said in the interview. “What would it be like? I’d want to have some time to grieve.”

By fall, Boeing faced a new problem: European regulators wanted their own check of the FAA’s MAX safety approvals, which would inevitably lead to more delays.

Boeing executives were bracing for U.S. lawmakers to call Mr. Muilenburg to testify and ask about whom he had held accountable, said a person familiar with their thinking. No one at Boeing had been singled out.


Boeing officials had also been debating what to do with potentially damning information found during the company’s document-gathering for the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into whether Boeing misled the FAA or airlines, said a person familiar with the discussions.

In instant messages between two Boeing pilots in late 2016, Mark Forkner, who was in charge of winning FAA approval for aircraft manuals and training, suggested he “basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)” after encountering problems with the MCAS system in a simulator.

Mr. Forkner’s lawyer declined to comment Sunday but has said his client was referring to problems with the simulator, not the MAX.

Boeing passed the messages to prosecutors in February but decided against telling its own regulator, people familiar with the matter said.
Disclosing them to the FAA wouldn’t be appropriate, because the agency was subject to the same probe, Boeing lawyers reasoned, and Mr. Forkner’s government counterpart was a likely witness, one of these people said.

As congressional hearings drew near, Boeing lawyers decided the company had to turn over the documents to the House Transportation Committee, and notified the Department of Transportation, the FAA’s parent agency. The belated disclosure inflamed Boeing’s relationship with the FAA, angering Steve Dickson, the FAA’s newly installed boss, people close to the agency said.
‘Forcing my hand’

In a call with Mr. Muilenburg after the House panel released the chats, Mr. Dickson told the CEO that Boeing’s withholding the documents would effectively invite stricter regulation, people familiar with the conversation said.

“You’re forcing my hand,” Mr. Dickson told Mr. Muilenburg, according to one of these people.

Mr. Muilenburg later told a Senate committee he relied on his legal counsel to provide it to the appropriate authorities and didn’t recall a specific conversation about which authorities to give it to. He told the committee he later apologized to Mr. Dickson over how Boeing disclosed it to the FAA.

To prepare for his October congressional testimony, Mr. Muilenburg held mock sessions including with Boeing’s general counsel Brett Gerry, who played a committee chairman, said a person familiar with the preparation. Government-affairs chief Tim Keating and spokesman Gordon Johndroe joined the sessions.

They asked Mr. Muilenburg tough questions, including whether he had focused on profit at the expense of safety. Mr. Muilenburg expressed surprised at the tone, another person familiar with the sessions. Questions also addressed Boeing’s mistakes.

Ahead of the hearings, Mr. Muilenburg requested to meet with Bayihe Demissie, who lives in Ethiopia and was in Chicago—his wife was a flight attendant on the Ethiopian flight. It was the CEO’s first meeting with a victim’s relative.

Mr. Demissie said he told Mr. Muilenburg he didn’t know how to be a single father to his young son. “I never pictured this life,” he recalled telling the CEO. He questioned why Mr. Muilenburg had taken so long to reach out. The CEO told him “We cannot let your wife be forgotten,” said a person familiar with the meeting.

Days later in Washington, D.C., Mr. Muilenburg met with a group of crash victims’ relatives and tried explaining Boeing’s decisions. “Every time you turn around Boeing seems to be shooting themselves in the foot,” said Mr. Clifford. “I think they’re trying to correct that.”

Mr. Muilenburg said meeting the families was a “stark and difficult reminder of the importance” of Boeing’s work. “It’s changed me forever.”

During hearings, Mr. Muilenburg struggled to defend his credibility and, at times, to respond to direct questions. He said he apologized for not turning over Mr. Forkner’s messages to the FAA earlier.

Lawmakers demanded to know about Boeing’s decisions in creating the flight-control system. Some asked why he hadn’t resigned.

U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), alluding to Mr. Forkner’s emails, asked: “You’re not trying to Jedi mind-trick us here today on this committee?”

“Congresswoman,” he said, “I’m telling you the truth.”
Boeing further upset its relationship with the FAA soon after, saying in November it expected the MAX ban to lift a month later and training approval to come in January.

The FAA’s Mr. Dickson wrote an internal Nov. 14 memo, which the Journal reviewed, saying the FAA wouldn’t work by any schedule and separately signaled the FAA wouldn’t allow the MAX to fly again until 2020.

He called Mr. Muilenburg to a meeting in Washington, D.C., and chided him for the perceived pressure.

Write to Andrew Tangel at l333333, Alison Sider at 333333

END Chopped out images and captions

PP

[PHXPhlyer]

FIRED

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/busi ... e=Homepage

PP