The Boeing just-so story
The latest Boeing uproar belies the potted story line. Instead of bringing shame by abandoning the glories of American manufacturing, in its 787 factory Boeing was inventing new manufacturing to build airliners from carbon fibers rather than traditional aluminum. A whistleblowing engineer testifies that in fitting together these planes, Boeing departed from its estimated tolerances and force limits as it struggled to gain experience in assembling carbon-fiber airliners.
Boeing says the resulting fuselages will stand three times their expected 30-year-life of multiple daily takeoffs and landings. Unless the company fudged its own data and studies to reach this conclusion, this is the kind of decision we pay Boeing to make. One could also envision an innovative journalism in which facts and narrative don’t proceed independently.
Exactly the same themes being used today to disparage Boeing were used two decades ago to disparage its decision not to build a 747 successor. Making and mating aluminum fuselage sections is an established, perhaps obsolescing, discipline. Boeing has since become a more complicated company.
Its decision 20 years ago to spin off its 737 fuselage plant, now said to reek of controversy, was actually a sensible way to focus management and shareholders on this narrow art. In fact, no fatal accidents have stemmed from the 737 factory’s well-aired travails. Two fatal 737 MAX crashes are down to Boeing’s software design.
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