[avalys]

These articles are getting a little tiresome. Private enterprise is about competition and cost reduction. That’s what drives improvement, innovation, and efficiency, and it’s what differentiates private enterprise from government spending, which is about justifying why things need to be so expensive.

Yes, Boeing was too aggressive about reducing cost to compete with Airbus and they need some major reform because hundreds of people are dead. But let’s not forget that this drive towards cost reduction is what still allows you today fly across the country in perfect safety for $300. All these people saying “Of course Boeing should have designed a totally new plane from scratch with quadruple-redundant systems, only the most experienced factory workers to build it, all parts made out of unicorn tears for safety’s sake, etc.” have a misguided view of how engineering is done.

Perfectly reasonable decisions by Boeing to try to reduce costs for their customers and passengers are now being characterized negatively, merely because they are intended to reduce cost. People don’t seem to realize that it’s easy to build an expensive airplane - the hard part of engineering is not always choosing the easy, expensive option.

[gregoriol]

You probably are a developer, but engineering in life critical fields can't be reduced to cost efficiency.

[avalys]

I’m a developer and a pilot. I understand that cost is not the only factor. My frustration is, the attitude in the media today is to report negatively on every single instance they can find of Boeing trying to reduce costs as if that is a sin in itself, when it’s actually the most fundamental driver of improvement in the entire economy!

[mattrp]

I sympathize with your view that the media tends to lump things together in a gross and unfair way. However we happen to be talking about a company with a culture that apparently sees nothing wrong with openly trashing the faa’s certification process while another division spends $22B of taxpayer money on an unflyable space launch system. One kind of wonders if they care about the American public at all.

[jschwartzi]

While I would agree with you in general, I hope in this case you can see how Boeing’s judgement can be called into question based on the terrible decisions they’ve made contemporary to the 777X development. And these are decisions that have cost lives. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume they’re just cheaping out and don’t really care about passenger safety when they have a track record of cheaping out and not considering passenger safety on the 737 MAX.

[kortilla]

The 737 MAX issue wasn’t Boeing cheaping our though. It was Boeing trying to avoid recertification so it was a drop in for existing 737 customers. In other words, Boeing was trying to target the airlines that cheap out and did something stupid to get there.

This wasn’t a quality problem. This is was a failure to recognize (or willful hiding) the importance of training pilots on MCAS.

[jschwartzi]

Boeing knowingly misrepresented the handling characteristics of the 737 MAX rather than risk losing money by building a new airframe to accommodate larger engines. That’s definitionally cheaping out. Rather than starting a development program and taking the business risk, potentially costing money, they chose to instead risk the lives of passengers by fixing an aerodynamic problem in software. For money. This calls into question their integrity as a company.

[kortilla]

No, it’s not cheaping out, it’s just trying to target a very specific market. It’s targeting cheap customers. Boeing had no problem paying whatever the costs to actually make the thing compatible with the 737. You’re right that it’s still a violation of integrity, but it’s not being cheap by cutting their own costs inappropriately.

[salawat]

Boeing isn't getting trashed because they're reducing costs, they're getting trashed because of how they are reducing costs.

Winning means jack shit if you're cheating or transmuting The cost into something that doesn't reflect on the balance scorekeeping..

[texasbigdata]

It's hard emotionally. Most of us buy close to the cheapest flight right? Almost exclusively? Like it's a commodity service in a capital intensive industry which cyclical patterns of bankruptcy. I knew a guy at BCG/McKinsey/Bain who only did airline consulting and it seems like a particular tough industry even if fuel costs didnt move all over the place.

At the same time obviously no one wants to cut a corner and cause danger.

Boeing is probably scared of Airbus and vice versa.

Its probably just a challenging environment.

[apta]

If tickets weren't cheap, people would just be flying less, and it would be relegated to things like business trips and what not. Low prices should never be the end goal at the expense of things like safety. However, capitalism says otherwise.

[kortilla]

You probably aren’t an engineer, but reducing materials and simplifying design while ensuring you haven’t compromised things structurally is effectively the reason 95% of engineers exist.

[thenewnewguy]

> Yes, Boeing was too aggressive about reducing cost to compete with Airbus and they need some major reform because hundreds of people are dead. But ...

"Yes, Boeing killed hundreds of people due to their negligence, but think of the cost savings!"

[Edman274]

This sounds like Cave Johnson from Portal 2.

"All these spheres are made of asbestos, by the way. Keeps out the rats. Let us know if you feel a shortness of breath, a persistent dry cough, or your heart stopping. Because that's not part of the test: that's asbestos. Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of 44.6 years, so if you're 30 or older, you're laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into a calculator, it makes a happy face."

[mattrp]

It wasn’t perfectly reasonable to have a non redundant sensor that could have life threatening consequences if it failed.... and to also make the sensor failure alarm optional equipment doesn’t sound very reasonable to me either. It’s not about using software to compensate for the loss of aerodynamics... it’s about cheating the process so they wouldn’t have to put the design through a detailed review that could have eliminated this whole debacle in the first place.

[wavefunction]

>they need some major reform because hundreds of people are dead

>allows you today fly across the country in perfect safety

Perfect seems to be a poor choice of words here.

[tomc1985]

Most of us are questioning these supposedly "perfectly reasonable" decisions. There is a line and Boeing crossed it.