Thread by @moetkacik

Would Boeing murder a whistleblower? Before this month I'd have said it depends. I didn't think Boeing would kill a middle manager who never worked on the 737 Max & left in 2017.

What surprised me was how many more informed observers felt Boeing...might
prospect.org/infrastructure…

"I don't think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys," said a longtime exec.

He told me to open Maps & find the airport 180 miles east of the 737 factory where Boeing stores "finished" jets that are too fucked to deliver. "The engines alone are worth billions."

Airlines won't accept the 737s until Boeing fixes their problems. As the dead whistleblower's lawsuit explains, jets coming off Boeing assembly lines have a lot

Bosses pressured workers to push 787s out with 100s of dangerous defects even after the FAA grounded 787s in 2013

After the 737 Max crashes, the FAA realized Swampy's 787 plant in South Carolina was perhaps even more dysfunctional than Renton. Boeing halted deliveries in 2020 for nearly 2 years after a QA found approx 40 gazillion flaws. Aviation Week heroically mapped the most significant:

So no shit: building airplanes is complicated. I feel dirty even tweeting about it, it's so complex. But Boeing's problem is not: it's the same jargon-infatuated dumbshit MBAs that ru(i)n everything else in this country, like former CEO Jim McNerney, who paid himself $250 million

Like most vain, narcissistic MBAs, McNerney could not stand people who didn't pretend to not be smarter than him. He set about purging them all, on grounds of either being "assholes" or because he believed "experience" was "overvalued."

Newsflash: experience is undervalued. A Boeing mgr actually proved this in a 67-page 1997 analysis of unprofitable programs. As it turned out, the ability of a workforce to move efficiently enough to profitably build planes was almost entirely a product of the worker seniority

But Boeing didn't listen. Instead Boeing moved its 787 plant to South Carolina, where they hired fast food workers to build 787s & there were no experienced aerospace workers whatsoever to challenge bosses like the one who told Swampy that "knowledge" was holding him back.

I talked to forensic pathologist @BobPfalzgraf about Swampy's mysterious "suicide." He sympathized with Swampy and his coroner, saying medical examiners are under tremendous pressure not to rule police custody deaths "homicides" & outsource suicide cases to pathology assistants

@BobPfalzgraf I called FBI criminal profiler James Fitzgerald. "If the goal was to stop him from testifying, it sounds like they failed. But sometimes the goal is to send a message to anyone else who might be thinking of doing what he did." He wanted to see the note jamesrfitzgerald.com/category/podca…

"I would hope the police are interviewing [Swampy's former boss] right now," added @BobPfalzgraf

As @matthewstoller pointed out here, if there's one thing we've learned about Boeing, it's that it "does not deserve the benefit of the doubt"

Swampy's coworkers don't seem to think so. He was "high on life", one pointed out.
Another to whom I spoke on the phone for several hours repeatedly told me they weren't suicidal, and that Swampy was not the first "outspoken" Boeing employee to die mysteriously in recent years

The numbers tell the story of a company that has done everything it can to alienate loyal veterans. The avg 737 worker has been there 5 years. The % of workers with 5 years or less has doubled. 100s of long-timers with an average 23 years at Boeing retired early in 2022.

Aaaand, the guy every single respectable media outlet has nominated to replace Boeing's current CEO sociopath David Calhoun is...

Larry Culp, a Harvard Business School alumnus who currently helms fucking GE! Because the kind of inimitable genius required to "sell off assets & pay down debt" is obviously what this moment calls for

at any rate, if you want to know what happens when the guy who used to run the (improbably not defunct) nielsen television ratings company gets appointed to run the company that builds fucking airplanes, the wholly predictable (except for the possible assassintion part) story is here prospect.org/infrastructure…