Terror in the skies? Let’s talk about Boeing.

If you're flying United to Cabo on a Boeing jet, how worried should you be? And how well are journalists answering that question?

Photo credit: Smithsonian Channel.

Over the last 20 years, exactly one passenger has died from a mechanical failure on a major commercial flight in the US. You could take 10 flights a day and live long enough to be a candidate for US President and still be more likely to die from asphyxiating on a peanut. 

Now, have things gotten worse recently? Kind of. But likely not for the reasons you might think. 

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Bias & Disclosures: I’ve flown a lot in the last few years and think old Boeings suck. I also did like a day of work once on a project involving Boom Supersonic, though not directly and I only bring them up in passing here.

Corrections: As always, we reward corrections. See something wrong, misleading, or unfair? Use our anonymous Typeform or drop a comment in this post’s dispute doc.

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The Big Picture

One thing about COVID is that how we responded to it broke a lot of industries. I don’t say that to get into whether each policy response was net good or bad. But just in general terms, few businesses are set up to contract or expand that rapidly in their staffing — and especially not the airline industry. 

This is relevant here in two ways:

1. Lots of airplane mechanics were laid off in 2020, many of whom never returned (especially the most experienced ones). Compounding this, the normal incoming wave of graduates was interrupted. It was also uncertain if demand would fully bounce back, or how quickly.

2. Now imagine this same dynamic applied to every other company in the industry, where re-staffing fast enough is impossible to do without quality issues. 

Even the best system is going to crack in the face of extreme enough demand variance! We can still judge, but we have to judge with that in mind. 

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Boeing vs. Airbus

Two companies oversee production of virtually all of the world’s large commercial aircraft. One of them, Boeing, is primarily based in the US and gets a lot of domestic coverage. If you’ve been reading the headlines lately, you might imagine that Boeing is a late-stage capitalist zombie intent on making shoddy death machines. But is it? 

I want to highlight two short paragraphs from this illuminating thread (also here) that lists out comparable recent issues with Airbus planes while contextualizing both:

It’s almost as if someone is choosing what you hear & what you don’t based on how worked up they can get you & how much advertising they can generate.

Don’t let them. They will sensationalize stuff that people who work in this industry consider mundane – in part, because they don’t know better & because they are counting on you not knowing, either.

Airplanes experience non-critical failures every day, which has always been true, and will to some degree always remain true. The mainstream press usually pays this little mind, which is fine because it isn’t news. Western air travel is built atop thoughtful redundancies and emergency protocols, which is why even when bad things happen the safety stats remain incredibly strong. 

So how should journalists write about it? I want to highlight two examples, both from the NYT, that illustrate two very different approaches.

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The Good

This NYT piece was about United Airlines more than Boeing directly, but was a refreshing read.

• It acknowledged the recent headlines and resulting anxieties

• It neatly summarized the eight incidents from the last two weeks (five Boeing, three Airbus)

• It put these incidents in their larger context (ie. no real rise or need for concern)

• It recapped how and when regulators investigate said incidents

Excellent work! It directly responded to an issue the public has urgent questions about, in a concise and non-sensationalized way. Love to see it. 

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The Not So Good

(Note that this piece was from the NYT’s Opinion section. But while we thus obviously have to make certain allowances here for subjectivity, the NYT says “the same standard for facts” applies as in the newsroom.)

I want to focus on the closing paragraphs, on safety vs. efficiency at Boeing:

What happens if a company instead focuses more on what it could get away with in terms of cost-cutting?

That’s how we get to a world where audits alone will not have “worked well enough.” The missing bolts may have caused the door to blow out, but it’s the missing corporate ethos that we should examine to understand the root cause.

So a few things. First, as we’ll soon get to, cost-cutting isn’t at issue with Boeing’s self-audits. Second, this sets aside COVID and its effect on quality virtually everywhere. Most importantly though, fingering a “missing corporate ethos” is a strong value judgment. While this might be within the allowable window of subjectivity if there’s good evidence underneath, is there? And against which baselines?

The piece linked out to three sources to undergird its case:

1. A CNBC interview with the head of the FAA, who predictably deferred real comment until the end of the current audit process, but who added (at 2:26) that “you can assume we haven’t found anything that has caused us to take immediate action”, nor any “red flags” that would merit “a further stand-down”. While he did say (as the piece quotes) that the current auditing system “hasn’t worked well enough”, that’s a much softer judgment.

2. A report on a minor issue flagged by a Boeing supplier, which only illustrated that the employee reporting system there is working exactly as intended!

3. Another NYT opinion piece that sketched a partial history of Boeing’s reorganization in the 90s and subsequent shift to focusing on cost control, though without much curiosity as to why, nor what the alternatives were. It also recounted the pre-COVID issues with the 737 Max, which are more relevant.

They’re particularly relevant because Boeing lost tens of billions of dollars on those issues. One question one might ask is “ok, did they learn nothing from that?” Serious concerns were identified, and Boeing was called on to make deep adjustments.

Let’s look at how those went.

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The Official Verdicts

One of the main issues raised re: the 737 Max fiasco was Boeing’s use of an internal team of 1,000+ people for self-auditing on the FAA’s behalf. Last month, an FAA-appointed panel released a 50-page report on their review of this team’s restructuring and overall approach to safety. I wouldn’t say it was glowing! But the picture you get is of a large and sprawling organization having to staff up quickly and having mixed success in getting full alignment on an in-flux and complex quality control regime. Real progress, if not enough. Definitely things to work on! But note this from pg 25:

Boeing has provided sufficient facilities, physical resources, and support personnel for [auditing team unit members] to perform delegated functions.

They then go on to say that lingering performance issues are in large part due to the exodus of more senior staff during and after COVID. Which you’d expect! They also mention the downsides of Boeing haven gotten so dispersed, which is fair, but also a reality for virtually all large and complex manufacturers. Boeing didn’t invent globalization! Nor could they have refused to join it! The report overall recommended a list of sensible fixes, which Boeing is now responsible to respond to. Good! 

While the FAA hasn’t yet released the findings of their newer audit (begun when that door flew off in January), a limited summary was leaked to the NYT. Apparently Boeing passed 56/89 of the component audits. This could be bad, though it’s difficult to tell. The only Boeing-specific violations mentioned are a bit mundane, like the order in which work was done and whether tools were being tracked properly. While six engineers apparently scored a combined 58% on a procedures quiz (we don’t know the questions), it’s one thing to follow a checklist and another to know it from memory. Failing somewhat at the second doesn’t necessarily imply the first. It’s certainly possible that this audit will come back ugly. But we also have the head of the FAA saying that they hadn’t found anything yet that merited immediate action. So there's at least a floor on how bad. 

I have no personal position on whether Boeing is terrible or just sort of generically underwhelming. Even if just the latter, it’s good that these audits are happening to further tighten up operations. But we don’t need to get ahead of the FAA here! They know all eyes are on them. We’ll know more when we know more. For now their only indication is that they haven’t found any red flags we need to actively worry about.

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A PS

Zooming out, one structural issue is that Boeing is “basically a state-funded company” (linking for just the subsidies lists in paras 7-10). If you’re going to prop up a 107 year-old company while calcifying barriers to effective competition, you may not love the outcome! To the degree that Boeing does actually suck, it’s in part because they have one real competitor, with deep regulatory capture at home. When companies in a duopoly are insulated from market forces for long enough, they rarely stay great. We don’t need them to be ethos-less and terrible to want something better.

More inspections are good, sure. But the long-term answer is to also accelerate new Boeings. Look what hungry startups like Boom are doing! If the US wants to throw subsidies around, they should also underwrite a lot more milestone-based prizes for new entrants that innovate and execute. Subsidies are for incubation, not life support. But which major newspaper is out there making this distinction well?  

Bottom line: You don’t really need to worry about getting back from Cabo alive. But while an informed call to your local rep is good civics and will help, where can you turn to know what to push for?

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