In 1997, Boeing merged with one of their competitors, the McDonnell Douglas Airplane company. Many analysts believe that this is the point where Boeing started to head downhill, although signs of it would not reveal themselves until later.
The reason that this is often termed the turning point in Boeing’s history is that many employees described it as a shift from the primarily engineering morals of the early Boeing company to the business ambitions of the new Boeing company. Instead of focusing directly on engineering and indirectly on profits, Boeing quickly became a company whose real primary objective was to make money.
The biggest evidence supporting this theory is the remarkable differences in company structure before and after the merger. Before the merger, engineers reined supreme and the board was primarily formed of engineers and previous pilots. After the merger, businesspeople were put in charge, a phase out that led to the situation today, where not a single engineer serves on the board for Boeing.
Not only that, however, Boeing employees started complaining about being pushed towards unrealistic goals by higher members in the Boeing bureaucracy. In this way, although Boeing’s stated goals remained the same, much of the company’s soul disappeared.
While the consequences of this did not make themselves clear for over a decade, the 2018 and 2019 crashes of their 737 max program, as well as an investigation over leaked emails from employees placed Boeing in the global spotlight and portrayed Boeing for the first time as a failure instead of an engineering powerhouse. An investigation of these crashes exposed Boeing’s monetary ambitions when it was revealed that several engineers called the program “a joke” or complained to each other about the infeasibility of getting the Boeing 737 max project done in the time that the business oriented heads wanted it.
As an aspiring engineer myself, I can tell you that engineers either do really high quality work slowly and expensively or more obtuse work quickly and cheaply. Boeing moved away from high quality towards quick and cheap, causing an overlook of details in both the software and hardware engineering of the Boeing 737 max.
Boeing’s history is a perfect example of what happens when companies let go of their morals and pursue money: somebody always gets hurt and in this case it was nearly 350 people who lost their lives. Despite learning this lesson, we see these giant corporations staring down the same path. Facebook, Google, Twitter and others don’t care about the lives that they hurt, only the money that they make and are just now starting to become the center of a global movement against this exploitation.
Slowly, Boeing is rebuilding their reputation through a new CEO, a restructuring of the board and a comprehensive review of company policy and a redistribution of morality. Only time will tell whether or not this is successful.
Whether or not we as citizens want to or should take action against these giant companies is up to each individual, but in order to foster real change, we all need to recognize first that many of the largest corporations today are in fact hurting us to make profit. Acknowledgment and activism from the bottom up is the only way to inflict change and we must, because who knows?
The next failure from a company might cost a thousand lives, or even a hundred thousand. Boeing’s failures shook the aviation community, but it must awaken us all.