Now it’s The Atlantic’s turn to feed my Boeing obsession. Unlike the other articles on Boeing that I’ve linked to, The Atlantic’s Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing looks at the early history of Boeing and what it was like when its founder, Bill Boeing was still running things.
A single story serves as a précis of how things were. One day Boeing made one of his frequent trips to the shop floor, which was next door to his office. While there, he discovered an improperly cut wooden wing rib. He threw it on floor and stomped it to pieces declaring he would sooner close the shop than ship something like that.
Those days are, of course, long gone. The first thing the finance suits did when they took over was to move the corporate headquarter to Chicago. There would be no more casual trips to the shop floor. In fact, management did everything they could to make sure there was no shop floor at all. They outsourced as much of the design and fabrication as they could. Boeing’s only manufacturing role was to assemble the parts their suppliers provided.
That ended exactly the way you’d think it would. Management was warned by their engineers of the problems that would ensue. They, of course, ignored the warnings with the result of crashed aircraft, 346 deaths, and door panels blown out in flight. It turns out you can’t successfully manufacture things with accounting tricks. The stock price may rise but the planes fall out of the sky.
It used to be that you had to be a bit of a nerd to have anything but a passing awareness of Boeing. Now, thanks to articles like the Atlantic’s and the others I’ve mentioned previously, almost everyone knows about them. That knowledge has had consequences. One of those consequences is that their CEO has had to call it quits. Another is that more and more people are refusing to fly on Boeing aircraft.