What’s happening at Boeing? Source describes alienation of the people who love building planes

by WorldTribune Staff, April 9, 2024

“DEI strikes again. A Boeing 737-800 airplane SWA3695 had to make an emergency landing after the plane began to FALL APART!,” conservative commentator Lauren Witzke noted in a new Telegram post.

On April 7, the Boeing 737-800 took off from Denver and climbed to 10,000 feet when the cowling of the right engine detached. The Houston-bound flight returned to Denver for an emergency landing.

Witzke added a “message from a licensed Aircraft Line Mechanic for a major carrier for almost 40 years that I felt I needed to share with you:”

The message:

The latest SWA engine cowling coming off in flight was most likely caused by some sort of engine maintenance being performed & the cowling latches being left unlatched or improperly latched. The mechanics should’ve double checked each other’s work (second set of eyes) and one of the flight crew should’ve done a pre-flight walk-around after maintenance was complete and the logbook signed off by the mechanic.

There are currently many new-hires at all major airlines and yes many because of DEI. My fellow work-mates and I have found many problems before flights on early morning originators, due to inexperience and lack of focus.

This job requires extreme focus and constant recurrent training.

These mishaps are very upsetting to us all that are 100% dedicated to our profession and to the safety of our passengers.

Recent months have seen embarrassing maintenance failures, including a door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight.

What is happening at Boeing?

A Boeing insider told the City Journal’s Christopher Rufo in a report published on April 3: “At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.”

The insider continued: “In 2018, the first 737 MAX crash that happened, that was an engineering failure. We built a single-point failure in a system that should have no single-point failures. Then a second crash followed. A company cannot survive two crashes from a single aircraft type. Then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress, defended the engineering, defended the work—and that protected the workforce, but it also prodded the board and stoked public fear, which resulted in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.

“So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is all outsiders. The current CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO whom he brought in. And we have a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. The head of our commercial-airplanes unit in Seattle, who was fired last week, was one of the last engineers in the executive council.

“The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The head of HR lives in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.

“In this business, the workforce knows if you love the thing you are building or if it’s just another set of assets to you. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most important story of all. There is no visible center of the company, and people are wondering what they are connected to.”

Then there is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The DEI narrative, the insider told Rufo, “is a very real thing, and, at Boeing, DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power. DEI is the drop you put in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture and was tied to compensation. Every HR email is: ‘Inclusion makes us better.’ This kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.”

The insider added: “If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it’s a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.

“The radicalization of HR doesn’t hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they’re making a large profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring policies. Because they are paying 30 percent or 40 percent more than the competition in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the ‘DEI tax’ and still find top people.

“But this can be catastrophic in lower-margin or legacy companies. You are playing musical chairs, and if you do the same things that Google is doing, you are going to end up with the bottom 20 percent of the preferred population.”


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