Boeing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns airplanes the place you go to say I'll get some reading done before watching Nine episodes of The Office you've already seen and landing in Tucson planes make many of us nervous even though commercial air travel is the safest form of mass transportation but accidents do happen and there was one recently that got a lot of attention passengers are sharing their terrifying experience on board an Alaskan Airlines plane that lost a door plug during flights what was supposed to be a short trip from Portland to Ontario California for Garrett Cunningham turned

out to be one of the most frightening experiences of his life a gush of of air I look to my left and part of the plane is gone my brain couldn't compute what I was looking at yeah of course it couldn't our minds filter out things that shouldn't make sense mine for instance refuses to acknowledge that tomatoes are fruits or that the shoe Bill isn't extinct does that really look like something that should exist at the same time as the iPad I think not now thankfully that flight landed safely with only a few injuries but

experts say that that was mostly luck for one thing if someone had been sitting in the window seat with their seat belt off they could have been sucked out of the plane and second this happened just after takeoff but if they'd been at cruising altitude injuries might have been catastrophic and that plane was almost new it had been delivered by the manufacturer Boeing around 2 months earlier and that's too soon for a sneaker to fall apart let alone a multi-million dollar aircraft now Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun was quick to take responsibility saying Boeing is accountable

but when pressed on exactly what had taken place had an odd response how did an unsafe airplane fly in the first place because a quality Escape occurred can you qu Escape occur what is a quality Escape I think that's the description of what people are finding in their inspections um uh anything that could potentially contribute to an accident what quality didn't escape a part of the plane did that's a terrible answer when you asked how an unsafe plane flew in the first place we need more information than essentially the plane was unsafe yeah everybody knows

that there's a hole in the side of it and the exact nature of the Escape is pretty alarming given that according to the preliminary investigation four bolts that were supposed to keep the door plug in place were missing and when Alaska checked their other max9 planes they found loose bolts on many of them the next day the FAA announced that every Boeing 7379 Max with a plug door would be grounded until they were inspected which is a bit of a relief and honestly kind of a fun image i' like to imagine Stern FAA inspectors going

up to each plane and saying you are grounded Missy no inflight TV for a month and yes planes are girls cuz think about it they always have snacks and constantly say leaving right now and then don't move for another 15 minutes case closed it's beginning to feel like this might be a much broader issue within Boeing because it comes on the heels of a years long string of alarming incidents from fires on board to a pair of massive crashes that were blamed on flawed Boeing planes and just this week the FAA issued a stunning order

to the company the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing 90 days now to come up with a plan to address safety issues this comes after a report released on Monday found employees did not understand their role in safety and they feared retaliation for raising safety related concerns uh those are big problems when you've got a factory that is making Jets yeah of course although to be fair workers being unable to raise safety concerns is a big problem in a factory that makes anything no one wants grocery stores selling Captain Crunch oops all rat poison and all

of this is striking for a company that genuinely used to be seen as one of the greatest in America and that's still one of the country's largest exporters so if a company this big and this important seems to be this troubled tonight let's talk about Boeing and let's start with the fact the Boeing used to be synonymous with quality and craftsmanship it was founded by William Boeing in 1916 and over the years it built nearly 100,000 planes for the Allied Forces the first stage of the Satin five rocket and Air Force One but they're best

known for revolutionizing commercial aviation in 1967 Boeing introduced the 737 have made over 10,000 of them since and the company's success rests heavily on its well-earned reputation for excellence like in this video from an annual shareholder meeting the first step in making a difference is believing you can we make the impossible happen on a regular basis so it can be done you you just have to think of a new way to do it let's just do it right whatever it is quality safety environment do it right and make it something that you can be proud

of I wanted to develop products that had a global reach and a global impact and I'm doing it [Music] now I mean that sounds pretty good we do the impossible great love the impossible let's just do it right yes let's Wrong Feels Like a bad way to do it I want to develop a globally impactful product and I did good for you you're a little too close to the camera but in general I am on board in fact Boe had such a great reputation for safety among Pilots there was even a common saying if it

ain't Boe I ain't going which the company put on T-shirts lanyards and mugs that you can still buy on their website all perfect gifts for someone who loves branded merch and does not love following the news and that Stellar reputation has been credited to the company's engineer centered open culture William Boeing himself once said after noticing some shoddy workmanship on his production line that he would close up shop rather than send out work of this kind and one project leader in the 80s and early 90s is remembered for saying no secrets and the only thing

that will make me rip off your head and down your neck is withholding information and I'm sorry but that should be the mug you want a shift merch that's how you do it but it's pretty clear that we're a long way from that culture today and most observers will trace the shift back to this pivotal event a major announcement today in the world of Aviation Boeing and McDonald Douglas today announced they would joined together to form the world's largest aircraft manufacturer this is I believe a an historic moment in aviation and Aerospace yeah the sky

boys got business married Boeing merged with McDonald Douglas who were primarily known for military planes and had a lousy reputation for commercial airliners most notably the dc10 which had multiple accidents resulting in over 1100 passenger fatalities and look was merging with the McDonald Douglas Aerospace Manufacturing Corporation SL murder Emporium that Boeing CEO's worst decision probably not because he also and this is true married his first cousin so the last decision I'd ask this guy to make is who it's a good idea to couple up with and while Boeing was the acquirer in the partnership it

soon became clear that the McDonald Douglas culture which was much more Cutthroat and profit driven was going to become dominant early on the McDonald Douglas management team even gave their Boeing counterparts a plaque featuring an Economist magazine cover about the challenges of corporate merges which sounds benign until you see that the actual cover was this picture of two camels and McDonald Douglas exec added the line who's on top and setting aside the weirdness of gifting your co-workers camel porn it begs the the question what was going on at the economist back then spare a thought

for the employee who dreamt of doing business journalism only to find themselves digging through photos of horned up camel banging in the dirt a year after the merger was finalized boing announced a new stock buyback program taking company money that could have gone to making planes and using it to inflate stock prices instead and even mechanics at the company noticed the culture shift there is a m major campaign launched called Share value and the idea was that they wanted everybody to be aware of the stock price and they wanted everybody working together to increase the

stock value even the technical meetings everything revolved around boing stock prices yeah that's not reassuring because that's not where you want their priorities focused no wants to get on a plane and he good afternoon this is your captain speaking we had a few technical problems but our maintenance crew is has assured us that the stock price is still holding strong so let's get this big metal tube full of you and your loved ones up into the sky shall we and the culture change was solidified by the decision to relocate the corporate headquarters from Seattle where

their commercial planes were actually designed and built 2,000 miles away to Chicago because as their CEO put it when the headquarters is located in proximity to a principal business the Corporate Center is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations and yeah it should be you're essentially saying hey we're going to be making big business decisions over here so we don't need to be bothered with you nerds and you're keeping planes in the air now CEO Phil conit soon left the company amid a Contracting Scandal and was replaced by Harry Stoner the former CEO of McDonald Douglas

he was an aggressive Cost Cutter who pushed boing's management to play tougher with its Workforce and to introduce the slogan less family more team which frankly would have been great advice for Phil Condit when he was choosing a romantic partner less Family Phil you want to be a team but like not one that's related by blood but the problems with the whole stock price first approach soon became apparent during the production of the 787 Dreamliner it was a new lighter plane the Boeing announced in 2004 but Stone Cipher drastically cut the R&D budget you know

the money for creating the plane even as the company authorized large stock BuyBacks and dividends for investors under his plans the Dreamliner would be de developed for less than half of what their previous new plane had cost Bo also sought savings by Outsourcing production to about 50 suppliers each of whom was responsible for managing its own subcontractor so basically the plan was for boing to create the plane the same way someone creates a gingerbread house from a kit essentially assembling a bunch of pieces other people made leading to a finished product that structurally speaking was

always going to be a mess and years later Boeing itself produced a promotional video that admitted that plan was a Fasco executing a project of such complexity proved to be more than some suppliers could handle wrinkles were found in the composite skins from one supplier Fasteners were incorrectly secured on sections of the tail there were gaps between units that were supposed to fit tightly together we had our partners and then they had Partners who had partners and the different cultures and the communication uh was very challenging and added a lot of complexity you know it's

never a great sign when you're talking about the manufacturing process for a plane the same way a doomed open thropple talks about their private life we had our partners and then they had Partners who had partners and communication was very challenging and added a lot of complexity and long story short now we all have chlamidia and on top of that Stone Cipher was forced to resign in the wake of an affair with a Boeing VP and was replaced by the company's third CEO in as many years Jim McNerney who if anything accelerated the cost cutting

but despite all the setbacks from Outsourcing Boeing managed to roll out the dream liner on time in an elaborate ceremony in 2007 except there was one small catch we were all inside the factory with artificial lighting big stage Tom brocca huge screens then they open the doors of this giant assembly Bay and en rolls this beautiful beautiful aircraft we learned that the whole thing was a sham beautiful isn't it absolutely beautiful I realized the doors were made of plywood this plan that we were admiring was completely a shell inside what I realized walking around it

is that you could you know look up in the wheel well and you could see daylight wow what a historic moment so exciting to see the unveiling of the first airplane made entirely out of plywood and lies the plane was supposed to take its first test flight within two months of that launch but unsurprisingly that didn't happen in fact the Dreamliner didn't carry commercial passengers for years finally delivering planes three years late and $25 billion over budget and almost immediately there were problems multiple planes had fires on board including two in Boston and Japan within

9 days of each other which investigations link to a defective battery made by a subcontractor that Boeing had never audited so the FAA grounded the Dreamliner the first time it had grounded an airplane model since the mcdonal Douglas dc10 in 1979 again making it pretty clear that the wrong attitude had prevailed after the merger basically the wrong camel came out on top and investigations revealed that even people people building the Dreamliner were worried about its safety in 2014 aler released hidden camera footage of a worker at a Dreamliner plant asking fellow employees a pretty pointed

question did you fly one um no you won't fly on one did you fly on one of these planes did you fly on one of these probably not I would one of these ples you wouldn't why wouldn't you huh why wouldn't you because I see the quality vide going down around here did you fly one of these yeah it's sketchy sketchy I probably would but I mean I a death too it's true out of 15 workers he asked 10 said they wouldn't fly on that plane and honestly that last guy is almost worse because if

I had to pick between a plane that two-thirds of workers refuse to get on and one that would only be ridden by death wish Dave I'd pick the former every time but while the Dreamliner had its problems at least it never had a fatal accident but that cannot be said for Boeing's next plane the 737 Max in 2011 as Boeing was rolling out the Dreamliner its main competitor Airbus was unveiling the A320 Neo a fuel efficient update of their already popular A320 planes and it was a wild success Boeing caught completely off guard quickly announced

a new fuel efficient plane it hadn't even engineered yet the 737 Max they wanted to get it out of the door as quickly and as cheaply as possible McNerney even had a catchphrase More For Less which became the company's driving theme as it embarked on the Max and all the while under McNerney and his successor as CEO Dennis mullenberg boing continued to sign off on massive stock BuyBacks from 2014 to 2018 Boeing diverted 92% of its operating cash flow to dividends and share BuyBacks to benefit investors far exceeding the money that it spent on R&D

for new planes workers on the production line for the max described a process that valued speed over safety and one a military veteran worried that Corners were being cut what words would you use to describe that Factory at that point dangerous um unnecessary Tak an unnecessary risk he says he urged the Boeing manager to shut down the factory for a few weeks to straighten things out and what was his reaction to that and he said um you know we can't shut down and and then I kind of got mad and said you know I've seen

military operations shut down for a lot less what was his reply to that something I'll never forget he said um he said well the military is not a profit Mak organization wow what a response because in a way you're right the military isn't a profit-driven culture but they do have pretty famously a very high appetite for death and dest ruction so if someone who worked there is going who slow down a bit that seems like something that should give you pause so the max was rushed through design and production and with tragic consequences on October

29th 2018 a Lion Air flight Bound for Indonesia carrying 189 people including three children disappeared from radar just minutes after takeoff and was found to have crashed into the water no one on board survived investigations later revealed that the plane's safety had been compromised by a series of shortsighted decisions Boeing had made starting with the fact that to save money Boeing decided it wasn't going to build a new plane it was just going to rapidly modify its existing 737 model giving it new much bigger engines but that brought some significant complications because these engines are

bigger they had to be positioned further forward and higher up on the wings and so Boeing was worried about the plane getting into uh too much of a nose up and then the plane could stall so if it starts to pitch up mcast was designed to help the pilot level the plane out yeah they added a system called mcass or maneuvering characteristics augmentation system very basically when the plane came close to a situation in which it might stall mcass would in technical terms swivel the horizontal tail fin to lift the tail up and push the

nose down or in non-technical terms make the go face down ass up but there was a fatal flaw mcass which again could push a plane's nose down on its own could be activated by a single sensor the angle of AAG sensors protruded out of either side the fuselage near the cockpit if a happy birthday myar balloon gets stuck on that vein it becomes unreliable but believe it or not we hit balloons we hit H Birds uh and all of these things uh are not uncommon it's true the whole system could be compromised by a balloon

a testament to how problematic it is to use a single sensor and yet another reason to hate balloons think about it they're exhausting to inflate they scare the out of you when they pop and uninflated they just look like a pile of clown condoms balloons are terrible but it gets worse cuz Boeing didn't tell Pilots about mcass cuz remember they decided to market the plane 2 Airlines as a money saver and a massive selling point was that the max wouldn't require Pilots to be retrained in a flight simulator that that's a pretty big expense for

an airline as it takes Pilots out of the air for multiple days Boeing was worried that if they emphasized mcass as something new it might require more training so it told Airlines and Regulators that the max was so similar to the old 737 simulator training wouldn't be necessary and that is something even the mother of one of the Lion Air Pilots whose flight crashed thought was a bit weird at the time I said you haven't had a simulator training how can you go for Max and it is a more powerful engine so without a simulator

how will you manage he said mom I've been given round training they have given me a training on iPad I said what an iPad that is wild it is bad enough that iPads are replacing half the staff at Panera breit it is worse when they're replacing practical training for dangerous jobs Boeing gave Pilots a 2hour iPad training course that never once mentioned mcass what's more it wasn't in the manual at all unless you count the glossery which defined the term but didn't explain what it did and it turned out that a faulty mcast activation was

what had doomed that Lion Air flight and when American Airlines Pilots met with Boeing Executives after the crash and angrily pointed out no no one had been told about mcast the answer they got was ridiculous these guys didn't even know the damn system was on the airplane nor did anybody else we try not to overload the crews with information it's unnecessary I would think that there would be a priority on putting things explanations of things that could kill you exactly how is information about a system that could crash the plane unnecessary it's not all Froot

Loops are the same flavor or identical twins don't have the same fingerprints or if you give a mirror to a dolphin they'll admire their own genitals all of that is good information but unnecessary for a pilot to know but we put some software on the plane that might try and murder you feels important in the aftermath of the crash Boeing told us airline pilot that they'd have a software fix for mcass ready within about 6 weeks and the max was allowed to keep flying but they didn't the only thing they accomplished in those six weeks

were and you're never going to believe this authoriz ing a record $20 billion of stock BuyBacks so clearly they were concerned about safety specifically the safety of their stock price and so a little over four months after the crash while Boeing was still working on its six week software fix Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 a 737 maxjet crashed after mcass activated erroneously again killing everyone on board and by that point those Pilots knew what mcass was but they still weren't able to correct its erroneous activation in time 3 days later the FAA finally grounded the max

but only after all these countries had first it was grounded for almost two years until Boeing developed ways to make mcass less error prone and easier to override and a damning congressional investigation later revealed internal messages showing that Boeing knew how dangerous mcass was throughout the plane's development in 2012 one of Boeing's own test pilots had failed to recover from mcass activating in a flight s simulator a situation that he described as catastrophic and some of the messages between Boeing Employees were damning hundreds of emails and instant messages show employees mocking the FAA the company

and problems with the airplane one writing this airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys that's pretty bad although part of me wish is that he kept going there they're designed by clowns who are supervised by monkeys who report to caffeinated toddlers who overseen by a bunch of floppy puppies were monitored by a wasted bachelorette party whose boss is just a large inflatable tubean so at this point you might reasonbly be asking where the are The Regulators should the FAA have caught this before people died and given that the answer to

that is definitely yes what happened well the agency relied heavily on Boeing Employees to vouch for the Maxi safety because they lacked the ability to effectively analyze much of what Boeing shared about their new plane one employee even said he thought a presentation for Regulators was like dogs watching TV because they didn't understand what they were seeing and I really hope that's not true I hope dogs do understand what they're watching on TV otherwise I did those deep Dives on squirrels breathing out of a up little nose and poodle anuses for no reason at all

and incredibly much of the oversight was being done by Boeing itself for five decades uh manufacturers like Boeing were allowed to use what they call FAA designated inspectors first to certify that the planes were airworthy in the beginning and then on the assembly line to inspect each plane as it went down went down the line here's the problem those FAA inspectors were employed by Boeing there's a conflict of interest there of course there is Boeing was paying Boeing Employees to regulate Boeing it's the most incestuous relationship we've seen in this story so far which is

saying something cuz remember this guy was his first cousin and while this system of self-regulation has been in place for decades it was supercharged from 2005 onwards after Boeing successfully lobbied to reduce government oversight of airplane designs basically allowing it to regulate itself even more and unsurprisingly several of these Boeing employed representatives of the FAA have said they faced heavy pressure from managers to limit safety analysis and testing so the company could meet its schedule and keep down costs at every point along the way the FAA either delegated responsibility to Boeing or gave them the

benefit of the doubt which hopefully they will never do again because Boeing like so many American companies seems to be coasting on a reputation it built up over decades even as it squanders it quarter by quarter and if you're thinking hey John don't you work for a Prestige company that got taken over and had the name Max slapped on its signature product hey I don't know what you're talking about the situation is completely different new business daddy is so mad at us all the time so what now well the truth is Boeing's not going out

of business anytime soon it's one of just two major commercial airplane manufacturers in the world so we don't need them to disappear we need them to get better the key question is can they fundamentally change well thanks in part to pressure from the families who lost loved ones in those crashes Congress did passed by partisan legislation rolling back some of Boeing's ability to oversee its own planes and it's encouraging that the FAA is now insisting Boeing come up with a plan to address safety in 90 days though we'll see what that brings and Boeing will

say it knows that it's made mistakes in the past but that under the leadership of their CEO Dave Calhoun You Know M quality Escape they are approaching the challenges they currently face with a new spirit of accountability and complete transparency but it's really hard to trust that given that Calhoun served on Boeing's board since 2009 through many of the worst decisions you've seen tonight and there's also the fact that 737 Max 8 and 9 planes are still flying despite an FAA directive last August highlighting a serious new issue warning that if pilots on the max

used an engine anti-icing system what One Pilot described to us as the equivalent of a car's back windshield defogger in dry air for more than 5 minutes it could shatter the engine's housing causing a hazard to window passengers decompression and potential loss of control of the airplane and while Calhoun claims he's very confident they'll have a fix which is such great news in the meantime Boeing is asking Pilots once more to be the last line of defense one that we spoke to even sent us a photo of this Post-It note he uses in his cockpit

to remind him to turn off the anti-icing system along with an iPhone timer and that is too much pressure for a Post-It note they shouldn't be the last line of defense against plane crashes they should be the the last line of defense against Sheila from marketing eating your chabani out of the work fridge Boeing whistleblowers who want this company to get better have repeatedly said it won't change until it has new leadership and Boeing may not be able to Coast on its reputation much longer as demonstrated by the fact that on booking sites like kayak

you can use this menu to select specific Boeing models and exclude them from your flight search they've actually moved that filter up the page following a spike in usage and you know things are bad when the general public is getting this knowledgeable about specific play models look it is pretty clear something has to change at Boeing and it has to be at the top of that company because if you are truly too big to fail that should mean that you are big enough to spend the time and resources required to fix the culture that you

have destroyed and in the meantime the very least you can do is advertise the kind of company you are in a much more accurate way at Boeing we make the impossible happen on a regular basis at Boeing we take pride in our work at Boeing we sorry can can you back the uh camera up a little bit really close at Boeing we I'm sorry it's ve it feels very tight at Boeing we believe the first step in making a difference is believing you can and I'm not talking about any difference I'm talking about a positive

difference in share price the share price needs to go up and stay up like our planes do almost all of the time since it's founding Boeing's been built on quality safety and trust and then we thought let's try something new I joined Boeing because I wanted to invent things no one ever dreamed of and they told me if I wanted to do that what I needed was to invent a time machine to 1992 I did tell him that and I think the joke landed like our planes do almost all of the time whatever it is

we do at Boeing let's do it right or let's do it close enough to right that no one can tell the difference from the outside and then everyone will just keep their mouth shut the engineers don't always agree with our business decisions and we encourage them to speak up and when they do I usually say what I can't hear you our offices are so far from Seattle airplane design is about Precision Care attention to detail and then someone telling you to work so quickly you make the whole thing vulnerable to a balloon we like to

cultivate a profit-driven philosophy here at Boeing and we've got the camel porn to prove it who's on top we are look man I'm doing what I can I try to report everything I see to the FAA see that there's a boat missing here so I'm going to report it at Boeing we oh hold on on get a text yeah yeah wait you work for the FAA yeah I do the faa's job but I actually work for Boeing it's super allowed it's super allowed oh apparently there's a bolt missing it's fine do you even know how

many bolts there are on an airplane too many you lose one or two that's surrounding error the boys on the factory floor call me Usain cuz I'm all about the ball also because I work really fast like scary fast like people should be scared about how fast I work is it okay if I take these home quality is at the Forefront of everything we do at Boeing and sometimes it's so far in front that it escapes whoops quality come back get back here you I'm not sure I'd want to get on one of these planes

oh I definitely wouldn't get own one I I would yeah but that's different because you have the a Death Wish thing yeah the the Death Wish thing mhm we're Bo and we're focused on the important things raising stock prices increasing stock prices making stock prices bigger or elevating stock prices delivering value to shareholders at any and all human cost boing we went to business school get on our [Applause] plane