My Dad reported to Jack Welch in his later years. I have some correspondence from Welch in the family archives.
Dad graduated from Valparaiso University with a mechanical engineering degree, and spent nearly his whole career with GE.
As things went, he became a sales engineer for GE, with frequent trips to Dayton, Scehectady, Singapore, and many other places.
As a youth I saw Ira Magaziner come to our home to spend an evening or two. Dad died in 1992, so would never have seen the merger mentioned here. His chief area of focus was hermetic motors. Brief case, slide rule, and table-lined paper. He worked hard, and I had nice suburban homes growing up.
Who wrote this article, a middle schooler?
Sounds exactly like Raytheon-Hughes. God knows what happened with United Technologies.
Boeing is a high-profile, Washington DC-highly-influenced-and-controlled company.
They likely suffer from the cancer of politically-inspired wokeism, DEI, political pandering, Wall-street money grubbing, and Fed.gov insider-crony corruption, which infects most once-great American institutions.
Boeing’s problem is that its focus on quality was replaced by corporate fascism as its business model. Buying politicians like Lindsey Graham and Nimrata Haley became more important than building high quality aircraft. THE END.
“Shareholder value” should not be the only consideration for a corporate merger, if the company is proud of that they do and want to keep it that way. A board of directors has the longest term value and respect of the company to consider, not just what would satisfy Wall Street immediately.
It is amazing how many experts there are on this thread, all seeming to have inside and thorough knowledge of exactly what “ails Boeing.” A bit of perspective:
Boeing is not “ruined.” The tragic crashes of two 737s a few years ago were due to one software issue plus inadequate pilot training. In other words, they could have been avoided. In fact, the crash of one of those planes was actually avoided the day before, because a third pilot in the cockpit knew what to do. The
The door plug was definitely Boeing’s fault. That was a one-off, unfortunate incident. But the other recent incidents were caused by human error or poor maintenance. That is the responsibility of the airlines, not Boeing’s.
In the long haul, Boeing will do just fine. Having worked there for 32 years as an electrical engineer, I worked with dozens and dozens of great people, and I can think of just one (a contractor) who I felt was incapable of doing their job. In addition, Boeing has thousands of planes in the pipeline: as of May 2023, 4,634 of all models to be exact. And at any point in time there are thousands of Boeing airplanes plying the skies worldwide. If you compare the negative incidents on these airplanes with what happens to cars, it is not even close. Air travel is much safer. Why? Because the testing airplanes go through to ensure safety at certification are incredible rigorous.
So is Boeing “ruined”? Not even close. They will go through some difficult times as most big companies do. But they will continue to make great, safe, fuel-efficent, comfortable airplanes. Really.
AVIATION PING!......................