Because, depressingly, the stock market is correct.
Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop flying because of it? Not many. Throw in the lucrative military connections and you’ve got yourself a sure bet.
I think that many of the managers honestly didn’t understand where the quality and safety came from. They probably thought that they could just coast and the quality would continue.
As a counterpoint, I work at very large financial firm in technology and in general, the 20+ year veterans who’ve been here forever are terrible. They are hidebound in their actions, years behind in industry best practices and they maintain little fiefdoms simply because of their intimate knowledge of the banks arcane and idiosyncratic policies. The place would be better of without the bulk of them.
That is to say we are the complete opposite of what Boeing was. But the most charitable interpretation you could offer the Boeing management is that they thought they were in the situation of my company rather than the situation they actually had.
You're being too generous. Boeing actively retaliated against people raising safety concerns. That's not the action of people who didn't know any better.
People won't stop flying until they do - or at least stop flying on Boeing aircraft. And if airlines can't make a profit on a Boeing aircraft flight, there won't be any more Boeing aircraft flights.
I don't know whether the point where the market for Boeing aircraft travel is one disaster away or ten disasters away, but it is out there. When it comes, people won't stop flying, but they will fly less, and it will cost more. It can happen.
Objectivly speaking flying with Boeing is still safe. People like us think news about planes and crashes are big but they really arent.
Most people dont have the faintest idea of who makes planes, and what plane models exist or how save they are.
And there isn't any system to activly avoid certain planes even if you wanted too.
Sure at some point with enough failures this can happen. But this is unlikely. Most Boeing plans are already built and are already flying and they are mostly very safe. They are flight proven.
Boeing wont interduce a truely new model for the next 10 years.
And after that, such a plane would need to comply to very strict regulation and it would take a long time for that plane to be built in large numbers.
So practically speaking the scenrio you suggest is impossible.
People aren't rational. Particularly in very large groups.
If a half-dozen (or whatever the magic number ends up being to set the zeigeist on fire) of Boeing aircraft suffer fatal or near-fatal accidents in the near future, everyone will suddenly know who makes which planes, and there will be systems to make sure you don't fly Boeing.
And while I think such a scenario is unlikely, it's hardly impossible. The real driver would be a combination of years of Boeing's own neglect coming together with margin-cutting airlines (you'd think they be extra safety conscious now, but any large organization is its own worst enemy), and any other of dozens of factors that could add up to push aircraft travel in an unsafe direction.
Or to put it another way, my intuition is that air travel (particularly in the US) has been very safe for a very long time, because it has operated with a very large safety margin. There are any number of perverse incentives to cut that safety margin, and it is largely possible to get away with cutting corners because of how deep the margin is. But if you keep cutting, eventually you run out of margin - and the sorts of people who do that sort of cutting can easily have have no idea how much margin there really is, or how much is actually needed to keep operating safely. So eventually things get to the point where you're not operating safely anymore, and then you can get multiple bad outcomes in a short period of time.
> And while I think such a scenario is unlikely, it's hardly impossible.
Witch is why I said 'practically'.
> So eventually things get to the point where you're not operating safely anymore, and then you can get multiple bad outcomes in a short period of time.
I'm not getting on a Boeing plane again. More on principle than fear of my life. And yeah, I'm probably in a group that is not statistically important.
Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop flying because of it? Not many. Throw in the lucrative military connections and you’ve got yourself a sure bet.