CNN's go to aviation guy is Pete Muntean. Not sure how much they pay this dude to pop up on their programs when there's an aviation issue...but it's too much.
But hey, he's got some GA experience. So who else we gonna learn from.
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Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 Decompression
- Thread starter Ken_gone_flying
- Start date
But hey, he's got some GA experience. So who else we gonna learn from.
Pete is actually a great guy and frankly far more knowledgeable many professional commentators in the field - he’s literally grown up surrounded by aviation:
Nancy Lynn - Wikipedia
A Son Mourns His Stunt-Pilot Mother
Nancy Lynn Died After Her Stunt Plane Crashed Last Month
www.cbsnews.com
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Yeah, you're correct. I think I was thinking of a different dude on there who they always bring on. My apologies to Pete!Pete is actually a great guy and frankly far more knowledgeable many professional commentators in the field - he’s literally grown up surrounded by aviation:
Nancy Lynn - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
A Son Mourns His Stunt-Pilot Mother
Nancy Lynn Died After Her Stunt Plane Crashed Last Month
No need to apologize - I’m obviously biased cause I know the guy, but I also happen to think he’s trying to portray aviation well given the hard left (lol) and right lateral limits inherent in his job. Trust me: all of us pilots that know him give him crap for being a CNN talking head now!
I saw one Tiktok video of the cabin where the girl says to a fellow passenger, "I thought we were gonna die," to which the other girl responds, "Me too." It probably happened so fast that it "would" have panicked a lot of people but then people quickly realized the plane wasn't crashing or anything and so remained mostly calm.
I watched a documentary that said basically the problem is that back during the 20th century, Boeing had very little to virtually no competition in the big passenger aircraft, so the culture was dominated by the engineers who would build world-class planes. But then as Airbus and other competitors began entering the market, the management recognized that the company couldn't just build great planes, costs be damned, but now had to implement some controls on the process.
The problem is that they went way overboard with it, with the idea of do more with less, make things more efficient, which only works to a point, and their upper management seeming to become more financial-dominated and also very far away. For example, how they thought they would be able to greatly reduce costs and save money by outsourcing the manufacture of all the parts (well far more of them anyhow) for the 787 Dreamliner (which backfired big-time). This is bean counter thinking. To an accountant and/or finance person, this will work, but to someone with any decent manufacturing knowledge or experience, they likely would have been far more skeptical. I am not saying the accountants or finance people are stupid at all, but such thinking by executives in a far away headquarters who likely don't know much about manufacturing is a recipe for disaster.
I mean a jumbo jet is basically a gigantic super complex LEGO Technic set with thousands and thousands of parts where you have to manufacture all the parts and they then all must fit together, and they're going to outsource the majority of that (!), and to manufacturers all over the planet (!!). I mean just from my own experience working in a machine shop, I could see that is likely a bad idea. For one, cheaper shops and contract manufacturers will often produce substandard parts. So you need to go with more reputable (and hence costly) companies. Boeing went with the cheaper ones, and as a result, parts were low quality and wouldn't fit together, causing all manner of delays and cost overruns. To maintain tight aerospace tolerances requires dedicated, skilled workers with good quality machines (i.e. more costly) and many of these overseas shops in particular lacked these.
The shop I work at has a fairly good reputation and we even make some parts for SpaceX. Just last week, SpaceX called up and said another one of their contractors really dropped the ball in terms of their parts, and they are coming Wednesday to inspect us because they want their parts. So they came and apparently it went extremely well and they were very impressed with the facility and will be giving us more business. But I mean the amount of screwups I have seen/heard about in terms of other companies fouling up parts, my own company fouling up occasionally, engineers who can't make a print right and so the machinist doesn't know quite how the engineer wants the part made, mistakes that happen due to imperial vs metric conversions for dimensions (America vs rest of the world), etc...only management who didn't know any better could have thought all that outsourcing for a jumbo jet would work. Then there's the issue of how they treat their own workforce and the fact that they actively ignore safety issues as well (such as the MCAS on the Max)
I totally agree with the fact that you can't just toss out experienced personnel for people off the street. For example, engineers have to know what is called "Design for Manufacturability and Assembly," also divided into "Design for Manufacturability" and "Design for Assembly," which is a field/fields unto itself and also requires experience. The old way of engineering was the "wall toss" method, whereby the engineer designs the part, "tosses it over the wall" to the manufacturing people to make, who then will find problems and toss it back and the process repeats. Individual companies created their own DFMA methodologies to negate this, but there was no universal such method, until starting in around the 1960s, it got developed by researchers into a universally applicable methodology that has since been used very successfully. Many freshly graduated mechanical engineers have little training in it though, or are even unaware of it, and so are only educated to design parts for function. They then must learn the hard way that parts must be designed for both function and manufacturability and assembly. Parts also must be designed to be part of assemblies, as opposed to standalone. All of this is also the thing that derails a lot of would-be inventors trying to get a product made, they never took into account that their new widget, while functionally good, is bad from a manufacturing standpoint. It takes experienced and skilled engineers to be able to design parts like this, that are functionally good, manufacturable, and easy to assemble, both the parts themselves, and then to be part of larger assemblies. Then it takes skilled manufacturers, like machinists, with good quality machines, to make said parts.
So it is foolish to think one can both get rid of highly experienced engineers and then rely on cheap subcontractors to make all the parts designed by the lesser-skilled engineers, and all for something as complex as a jumbo jet.
They had plenty of domestic competition through the 70's and before Airbus, particularly from Douglas. From things I've read and a few folks who worked at Boeing the 'merger' with McDonnell Douglas where MD's management largely 'took over' the C-suite post-merger exacerbated some longstanding issues and created more in the process. The zeal for profits and focus on increasing shareholder value seems to have taken priority over making planes, exemplified to me by the decision to divest themselves of actually making 737 airframes to concentrate on final assembly (which they now are looking to reverse).
Wall Street quickly gets addicted to the efficiencies crack, and lean six sigma (or whatever the cool kids are getting certified in these days) can only go so far before it compromises the product, which is what I think has happened here: Trading decades of reputation for quarters of shareholder profit.
Yes, I forgot about the merger but that also was part of it. The great irony is that the best way to increase shareholder value and profits is to focus on the long term, i.e. make a solid product, and the profits will follow. But Wall Street gets addicted to its quarterly share price increases.
to be fair, "investors" (whoever the F "investors" actually are?) don't give 1 F about the product, or even the long term viability of company X. They are gambling, and that is their mentality. They also think they are smarter than everyone else because they have the dollars to "invest". It isn't a good combination.
Tangent...this same sort of thing is happening with the railroads. Wall Street focuses on operating ratio, or ratio of money spent to income, over total revenue. Railroads are shedding routes and tonnage to improve the ratio, and are of course neglecting investment in the future.
Meanwhile, the country wants to move freight to rail because it is way more energy efficient. Orders of magnitude. Interesting tension.
Yeah, it’s bad. I live in a state that was built on rail (KS). I know several guys with history working on rail/trains. They all say the industry is horrible to work in. Two of my neighbors who were rail engineers have left the area in the last 4 years. Another guy quit and joined the aviation industry. He loves it.
I've always wondered what the hiring process was for rail engineers. Are they internal hires after gaining requisite experience? Probably more analogous to a merchant marine captain, than an airline pilot in my mind? Maybe I'm way off...
I think I had read something of them doing crew swaps in BFE, and that it was not ideal or conducive to family life. You've probably got some better insight.
No idea how they get hired. I’ll ask one of my friends about it the next time I see him.
When I was in the National Guard one of my soldiers was a railroad engineer. In his case he was hired as an “engineer candidate,” and worked first in a yard learning about trains and the trade, then on short haul car transfers, then to a full sized locomotive. The whole process was about 10 months. In his case he really loved the work but this was in the late 1990’s so I’m sure things have changed.