Sometimes books are better in retrospect than in the moment. I read Peter Robison’s Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing when it came out and wasn’t impressed, but it’s been on my mind all the time these days, for obvious reasons. It was also referenced quite heavily in a John Oliver piece on Boeing a month or so ago, but I can’t link to the clips since I live in Canada.
This article about Boeing found me today and it’s eye-opening. It profiles a quality manager named John “Swampy” Barnett, who’d worked at Boeing for over 25 years, and was pushed out for being a nuisance for doing things like reporting dangerous work behaviour (his job).
Here’s the nut of it:
in early 2017 Swampy happened upon a printout of a list of 49 “Quality Managers to Fire.” The name John Barnett was number one. Swampy decided to go on a medical leave of absence, which turned into early retirement on March 1. He called a labor lawyer he knew from a colleague’s case, and together they began the seemingly unending process of filing an aviation whistleblower complaint detailing his seven years at the Charleston plant. It made him sick to think that the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch the stock price nearly triple once more during the two years after he left the company.
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nation’s reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.
The Peter Robison book is a good read, and will make a lot of this stuff feel sadly inevitable. The company was run like a family business until the merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, and that’s when the professional managers and consultants came in, chasing quarterly results over quality products. Blame McKinsey and Jack Welch, maybe. Much like housing, the stock market, and private equity funds, the financialization of Boeing might be the thing that ruins it entirely. It’s hard to imagine the brand surviving this without enormous changes, maybe in the ownership, the name or at least the entire board and leadership of the company.
The article ends with something that feels needlessly speculative and conspiracy-minded, but it’s a tragic story in so many different ways.