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> Here's the bit I used to tease my Boeing employed friend about:

Is it really "Boeing" anymore or more MD?

One hypothesis around the 787 problems I heard was that post-acquisition, all the MD people ended up in important positions (reverse take-over a la Apple and NeXT)

So when the Dreamliner program came a long it was developed under MD's more business-y thinking (outsource risk) instead of Boeing's engineering thinking (learn in-house). Then they had to put together a ten thousand piece jigsaw from hundreds of suppliers with varying tolerances.




> MD's more business-y thinking (outsource risk)

MD was/is a defense contractor first and foremost and the most important thing about defense aerospace is spreading the grift over as many congressional districts as possible. This makes total sense when your clients are 100% political. It makes zero sense otherwise.

Notice SpaceX can build big rockets on the cheap and keep a schedule? Yeah because they do everything in one place unlike NaSA and it's contractors that have to spread everything all over.


> Notice SpaceX can [..] keep a schedule?

They cannot. Your statement is actually kinda funny, since "elon time" is its own meme and ULA uses "Schedule Certainty" as one of the main talking points to distinguish themselves from SpaceX (see [0] as an example of the ULA CEO doing exactly that on the SpaceX subreddit)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/aqbnza/spacex_prote...


> They cannot.

You mean compared to NaSA and it's aerospace contractors? Cause that's what matters.


You are not wrong. They even changed the Boeing logo to sneak the MD logo in (and now it looks stupid).

I believe it was also said after the fact that the process for the 787 was a huge mistake and they'd never build a plane like that again.

Silver lining I suppose.




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