[ptmcc]

787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs trying to run an engineering and development program with all the worst business & management practices, and the results show.

Such a shame because the 777 program in the 90s was an excellent program to model the 787 after, but Boeing threw it all away to agitate the union, penny pinch everything, and outsource all that expertise to the lowest bidder.

Ultimately it ended up costing more to build a worse product with a long tail of severe post-launch quality and design issues.

[hinkley]

Airplane programs at Boeing are siloed. They build up a little company to run the program and then retire bits of it once production is looming. There's no guarantee that any sanity found on one program will translate to another. Or insanity.

This is why I said in another response that if Everett loses the 787 but gains 777 orders it may be bad news for the people on the 787 line but neutral news for the state. They could lay off 20,000 people, hire 12,000 of them back, and hire 8,000 new people or folks furloughed from some other program.

ETA:

> 787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs

I mentioned cynicism elsewhere. You may be right, but I always thought of it more as a Captain Ahab maneuver, where the unions are Moby Dick.

(As a child I did not know that the speech at the end of Wrath of Khan was from Moby Dick. That scene is much darker once you understand that a scholar has chosen these as his final words, knowing damned well how it ends. He will make the gesture anyway, even if the 'whale' survives.)