The most recent incident was caused by Renton, not Spirit.

The attitude has been, "if in doubt, ship it out".

Chicken or egg. The origin of the incident was Spirit-made fuselage defects that had to be repaired at Renton.

It sounds like there's a lot of finger pointing between Spirit and Boeing any time anything goes wrong. Bringing Spirit in house will at least stop the turf wars.

Mesfin Tasew, CEO of Ethiopian Group, speaks with CNN's Richard Quest about Ethiopian's order of 20 Boeing 777-9's.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/busin...i-business.cnn

Tasew notes that Ethiopian has been operating Boeing aircraft since 1945, and intends to continue doing so (at its inception in 1945, Ethiopian flew DC-3's, bringing in Convairs and DC-6's later, and operated Boeing products starting in 1959--technically, as McDonnel Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997, and the DC-3 is Boeing's stepchild by marriage). Ethiopian intends to continue buying Boeing products, despite the 737 Max saga, and in fact ordered 20 737 Max and 11 787-9's last November. The current order of 8 777-9's, with an option for 12 more, shows that even an airline with experienced a hull loss on the Max isn't deterred from pressing forward with Boeing.

This is a C suite and above problem. Compromise driven by focus on short term profit for shareholders. Capitalism is not so perfect. This is the source of Boeing's and most publically traded companies' woes.

I'm not sure. I used to drive by the Machinist Union building in Everett and I was always taken aback a little by the life sized statues.

https://i.ibb.co/k1R2bgj/IMG-7165.jpg

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination anti-union, but I always thought it might have been better sort of rejoicing and taking pride in the thought that you were building the finest aircraft in the world rather than that you wanted to stick it to the company.

https://i.ibb.co/k1R2bgj/IMG-7165.jpg

Call me old-fashioned perhaps, but leaving stray tools and other FOD in the aircraft isn't something you ought to have to even be a machinist to understand it's something you shouldn't do.certainly more important than starting fires in burn barrels.

If not for work stoppages, how do you see a union gaining leverage?

I just don't understand how you can be wrong on every issue.

All of the employees were under tremendous pressure to ramp up production rates. It was THE objective for 2024 and the MAX line. You couldn't possibly try to pin this on the workers. This was a cultural problem from the start.

You are right. Leaving fod and tools in enclosed aircraft spaces is a cultural problem. No machinist I know would consider it acceptable. Yet the Air Force TWICE stopped accepting KC-46s from the plant three blocks away from these statues because it did happen. This isn't rocket science. A high school shop student would know better than that.

To be fair, Boeing isn't really operating in a free market since they are essentially an arm of the government.

I completely agree that the C-suite has been the primary problem crippling Boeing. Capitalism is fixing the problem as Boeing’s business units have been struggling relative to their competitors (Airbus, SpaceX, Lockheed, etc.). If Boeing doesn’t fix its issues, capitalism will put it out of business. Unfortunately, it sucks to watch a titan of our economy slowly die due to completely preventable problems.