Boeing's Lost Bolts Reveals an Even Larger Leadership Crisis for America

Where do the Unions come into play on worker quality and performance issues? Do they protect workers who have had repeating quality, performance and attendance issues? Leaving retaining bolts out of critical structure is negligence and must also be addressed by the Union.

Affirmative and DEI. What is happending to Boeing is America's future.

The merger with McDonnell-Douglas (1997) has proved to be a big problem. The Engineers used to steer Boeing. Now they are reaping the problems that plagued McDonnell-Douglas by letting the bean-counters control the company. (Remember the DC-10 debacle of the 1970's?) The move of corporate headquarters to Chicago was the red-flag that things had taken a turn for the worse.
The whole Aviation Industry is DEI, (if you want to keep your job), so yes, that plays a big part in why work ethic, and pride of workmanship is fast dissappearing, everywhere.

For those who say its just the top tier management's greed that is the cause not the line workers, I think that is a narrow, too narrow view. Look at our work force today. We have a President that is totally out of control, what an example. I would agree we have a keen leadership problem, but it starts at the White House, where did you think large grants and defense money comes from in the first place? It speaks to the rot caused by a corrupt socialist system in which people are promoted first on time and grade and not quality as if it's entitled like Biden claiming he has the most experience and is best qualified for the job but in most recent polls as much as 86% of the American public believe he is demented incompetent. To suppose in doesn't filter down to the assembly line?

It is horrible to see how a reputable company like Boeing went down. ED

Boeing's problems cannot be blamed on one thing or even a few things. It is a combination of societal changes. One of those is the way younger people view work. I see it everyday. They will not give up any more time than required (and sometimes not even that). When I started working after college two decades ago, I would stay late if needed to finish a project. I would do it over until I was sure it was the best work product I could produce. They are rather unapologetic about it. That is fine, I suppose. But it is taking things backwards. Nothing inspiring or high quality has ever come from doing the bare minimum. You might get a serviceable product or result, but it will never be an excellent result.

The Boeing issues have nothing to do with American workers, DEI or outsourcing to other companies. This is pure and simple corporate greed. US companies are more concerned managing stock price and exec bonuses than investing in their business to develop quality products. A good analysis is here.

Boeing is like any modern corp, they figured out it's easier to bribe and lobby Washington to get what you want rather than hard work and good products. Wall Street encourages it. As far as Boeing they are done in the commercial airline section long term, they have $40bn in debt, 737 problems up the wazoo, a huge QC/QA problem to solve and no cash to design new planes. Meanwhile Airbus is already working on the next gen of aircraft. Boeing will end up being a gov military and space contractor hooked on pork projects

There is a problem. Why are the aircraft manufacturers subcontracting work on aircraft components to China? I would have thought this was a sure fire loss of aircraft technology?

The cause is obvious: nation's pride has receded against other more 'attractive' atomic prides in the consciense and in the eyes of pupils, students, educators, civilians . Thus people are getting used to feel not responsible therefore not accountable to state. Which results in general decline.

The dedication to work ethics in the US has been in decline for quite some time now, several decades. The decline has increased drastically during the past 10 years as our nation's youth enters the work force. The youth in our country have become privileged through their parents allowing them to sit around playing video games instead of working. They have become a "receiving" generation rather than a "giving" generation.

It's easy for me to point to the 1970s-1980s for a decline in managerial proficiency probably due to the quest for increasing short-term profits at the expense of otherwise continued development, even if with the many unknowns from the restoration of Europe and the emerging other countries around the World.

Yes, the above is a lengthy sentence, but it encapsulates well, I think, the situation here after the recovery from WWII and its attendant Cold War expense. As I viewed things from being inside the ever expanding semiconductor field, times were great for us, but other industries experienced a great reshuffling due to the many other factors present.

What escapes notice is still, and was then, a certain development in understanding people, or I should say a misunderstanding of people's abilities. To wit, management went to a set criteria, qualifications, rather than past accomplishments or the innate abilities of people who excel when given an opportunity to do such. "Qualification" criteria destroyed our country's ability to use available talent, because the formulations of management never understood the intangibles present in regular people which are greater than any one realizes.

Its a fair question to ask. Slapdash workmanship may be an aspect of the Millennial++ generation. However, we should not discount the possibility of straightforward sabotage. To undermine western manufacturers in this way might be relatively simple, cheap.

The woke "revolution" in its victorious march arrives at Boeing too. Next NASA? So we leave the technology, quality production to the Chinese.

The prevailing DEI ideology is an open invitation to mediocrity. We are on the road to civilizational suicide.

Could it possibly be cases of duplicity or acts of industrial sabotage? Boeing has been a hallmark in the aviation industry for years and has been a benchmark for American manufacturers. Many proud machinists and mechanics would proudly say they took part in that trade. Now, not so much. This is a sad day for American business, both at home and abroad.

Boeing's and America's corporate culture has been taken over by business school graduates whose priority is profit rather than quality.
Boeing is now being run by an accountant while formerly it was managed by engineers.
This is a prescription for failure.
In fact the entire US government is largely run by lawyers, similarly to most Western governments, in contrast, the Chinese government dominated by engineers and scientists, largely recruited by Xi, often called technocrats.
In industry, and also government, the future of industries such as the Aircraft Industry, of which Boeing is a prominent part, will likely depend on a dramatic change in leadership from the failed policies of the business managers maximizing profits at the expense of safety, to management focused on quality.
The board of Boeing is likely more responsible than anyone for the failures and need to be replaced with high quality people acquainted with and accountable for quality management.
The age of gargantuan salaries and enormous stock options needs to end with responsible management and focusing on employee performance, otherwise the American aircraft industry will lose out to better performers from overseas, as well it should.
In this industry, excellence must be the standard, the alternative being failure.
The issue with events such as the missing bolts for the door plug goes beyond simple assembly line operations.
It should be investigated by the FBI, since human life, in fact the entire aircraft, crew and passengers were jeopardized.
Was this simply negligence, itself a potential catastrophe, or something else more sinister?
Aircraft manufacturing needs to move to higher standards of those utilized in the space engineering since quality controls need to be instituted for every part, since counterfeit parts, of lesser quality and cost will be substituted for high quality, more expensive parts if there is any opportunity for it to happen.
Parts, even fasteners, need to be followed from manufacture to assembly to make sure counterfeit parts aren't being used.
It's a constant problem and needs constant, close supervision.

My brother worked at Boeing for decades and was in a front row seat to watch it's decline; When Boeing was merged with another airplane manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, the management fired all of the superb Boeing engineers and then proceeded to job shop out the design and engineering of Boeing planes and often "things just didn't add up, or fit" Added to this degrading of the product, the federal oversight of quality of production was turned over to the company itself as has been the case in the pharmaceutical companies and other key industries. To fix these problems, the CEO and all the current officers of Boeing responsible for firing the best engineers in the world and outsourcing quality with little to no oversight need to be fired. Then a massive in-house Boeing training of US engineers, tool and die makers, machinists and others needs to happen as our US education system fails to produce students proficient in math and the engineering sciences. Bottom line: the real problem was greed and ignorance; put the two together and you have disasters.

That's what happens when they hire based on race, gender and sexual orientation, rather than competence.

It's a slippery slope of political correctness we trod here in America. I was fired decades ago from a job as an airline pilot because I warned of the dangers of hiring women as pilots. Not too long after I left, a female pilot crashed an airplane in Charlotte NC, killing herself, the copilot and 19 passengers shortly after takeoff. The FAA blamed it on mechanical issues. Now the industry is turning Federal Aviation regulations completely on their head and hiring every kind of sexual deviant imaginable across the board, since America can no longer define what a woman or her proper role is. The FAR's specifically state that a candidate for an Air Transport Certificate must be of good moral character. We are a long long way from that here in America.

You cannot have consistent quality control in a NWO Global economy. This includes Boeing to washing machines to automobiles, and even to vital medications. We've lost our manufacturing prowess and quality control. America needs to make its own products entirely in this country. It CAN be done. If we continue with a global parts manufacturing system, we will continue to fail, and make sub-par machinery and electronics that will put more lives in jeopardy.

As far back as I can remember, and that's at least 50 years, Boeing was the blue chip stock of the airlines. It was to aviation what General Motors used to be to the auto industry. It's hard to believe what has happened to this once icon of the aviation industry.

This is what happens when corporations focus hiring on melanin levels and sexual proclivities, rather than education and practical experience (aka MERIT)! Quality goes down the "crapper". "Checking the boxes" because some get their knickers in a twist, rather than get the education and earn the positions is the fast track to ruin!

The question I hear is, "has DEI replaced meritocracy and skill set development in American manufacturing?"
If it has, there is only one direction quality will take, and with it, the rest of America.

As an electrical engineer, I worked for Boeing on the Minuteman ICBM project, inertial guidance systems for American aerospace companies developing fighter aircraft, Apollo Moon Landing project. The common thread I found running through these projects was patriotism, pride in America. Today, that pride has disappeared and has been replaced by the social gods that this country has now considered more important. Boeing has been and in my opinion, still produces a very fine product that is as good as Airbus. Their quality problems could be corrected easily if they had management that really wanted it corrected.

It is apparent that when you have a "leader" like Biden who does not care about the USA and a Democrat party in power that only cares about its "big guys" and keeping power and amassing wealth for them that the workers and middle class will lose pride and lose desire to be great. We need Pres. Trump to be great again. We need him to help us to care again. We need him to make us forget what president biden (capital letter left off on purpose) has done to the USA.

I'm still stuck on the fact that anyone would build a pressure vessel with superfluous large openings and that the closures for any large openings did not close from the inside. Is it innocent stupidity or saving a nickel that such "flexibility" might permit, or is it frankly criminal stupidity fueled by DEI in some form?