Boeing: Turbulent times for US planemaker
The company has been under growing pressure since part of the fuselage blow off one of its 737 Max 9 jets mid-flight earlier this year. What explains the recent series of accidents?
Category
ЁЯЧЮ
NewsTranscript
00:00 A nightmare scenario as an aircraft loses one of its doors mid-flight.
00:06 But what looks like a Hollywood disaster movie was a real-life event on board an Alaska Airlines
00:12 Boeing 737 Max.
00:15 Its maker, once synonymous with innovation and reliability, finds itself at a crossroads.
00:21 It's way too long, I think, at this point.
00:24 The amount of time that this company has spent having problems exceeds the amount of time
00:30 that it spends not having problems.
00:32 Well, I think you had a disconnect between very senior management and the people who
00:38 actually build and design and create planes.
00:42 That situation probably began in the mid-2000s and then kept going in the 2010s.
00:50 These problems began years ago when Boeing started outsourcing production in the interests
00:55 of cost-cutting and efficiency.
00:58 Good news for stockholders, perhaps.
01:00 But for the company, it meant a seismic shift and a change in philosophy.
01:06 They used to do the manufacturing entirely.
01:12 And then they gradually got away from it.
01:15 Now they don't do much manufacturing at all.
01:18 They're an assembler.
01:19 Boeing decided that rather than grow itself ten times over to meet the ten times over
01:26 need for airplanes, ten times over, they subcontracted and offshored the work.
01:34 And global demand for aircraft continues to rise.
01:38 Airlines will need almost an additional 41,000 planes by 2042 to cover those needs.
01:45 Boeing suppliers are spread all over the world, a strategy employed to enhance production
01:50 capacity.
01:52 But many experts attribute the recent incidents to poor communication and supervision.
01:59 If you starve your suppliers, they don't have the resources needed to get the job done.
02:04 And again, managerial bandwidth, I'm not sure that senior executives at Boeing were spending
02:10 the time necessary with these suppliers to determine how healthy they were.
02:15 And Boeing knows it's hardly the sole option on the market.
02:21 You're seeing a market shift away from Boeing and towards Airbus.
02:26 Unless Boeing changes, Airbus is going to be number one for a very long time.
02:31 So basically for Airbus, it's just a question of ramping up to two thirds of the market,
02:37 then maybe 75 percent of the market.
02:40 United Airlines might be cancelling orders for the Boeing 737 MAX and switch to Airbus.
02:46 But with both manufacturers having full order books for the next 10 years, even if airlines
02:51 wanted to switch to Airbus, can they afford to go to the back of the queue?
02:55 They need to be able to look at some quick victories, like new orders, planes that work,
03:02 planes that don't fall out of the sky or have their doors blown out.
03:06 Boeing is currently benefiting from the market situation.
03:10 What's missing now is perhaps investing more care in the assembly of its airplanes.
03:15 (dramatic music)
03:17 (dramatic music)