Boeing moving headquarters from Chicago to DC
Rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic: Boeing today announced that it is moving its headquarters from Chicago to Washington, DC, so as to place its corporate executives closer to key federal officials.
Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders. Rival defense contractors including General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are already based in the D.C. area. Company executives would also be near the Federal Aviation Administration, which certifies Boeing passenger and cargo planes.
Gee, for more than a half century Boeing was based entirely in Seattle, and somehow got lots of federal contracts and built great airplanes and spacecraft. It moved to Chicago in 2001 to be more centrally located, but instead put its top managers distant from its actual manufacturing and design headquarters. The result has not been very cheerful.
Now Boeing is moving even farther from Seattle, just so its executives can hobnob with politicians, go to fancy cocktail parties, and figure out easier who to pay off with political donations. Who cares if the actual design and manufacturing work continues to be shoddy and poorly supervised? What really counts is getting contracts to build bad stuff that either doesn’t work or is delivered late and overbudget for our corrupt federal government.
As proof, see this other story today: Starliner’s protective window cover falls off during capsule move to VAB.
From CBS space reporter Bill Harwood:
During the rollover to pad 41, as the Starliner neared the Vehicle Assembly Building, a protective window cover somehow fell off the capsule and tumbled to the road.
You can see video of this absurdity at the link. As this was not actually part of the capsule but a protective cover, it appears no damage to Starliner occurred. That it occurred at all however once again tells us of the serious quality control problems at the company.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic: Boeing today announced that it is moving its headquarters from Chicago to Washington, DC, so as to place its corporate executives closer to key federal officials.
Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders. Rival defense contractors including General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are already based in the D.C. area. Company executives would also be near the Federal Aviation Administration, which certifies Boeing passenger and cargo planes.
Gee, for more than a half century Boeing was based entirely in Seattle, and somehow got lots of federal contracts and built great airplanes and spacecraft. It moved to Chicago in 2001 to be more centrally located, but instead put its top managers distant from its actual manufacturing and design headquarters. The result has not been very cheerful.
Now Boeing is moving even farther from Seattle, just so its executives can hobnob with politicians, go to fancy cocktail parties, and figure out easier who to pay off with political donations. Who cares if the actual design and manufacturing work continues to be shoddy and poorly supervised? What really counts is getting contracts to build bad stuff that either doesn’t work or is delivered late and overbudget for our corrupt federal government.
As proof, see this other story today: Starliner’s protective window cover falls off during capsule move to VAB.
From CBS space reporter Bill Harwood:
During the rollover to pad 41, as the Starliner neared the Vehicle Assembly Building, a protective window cover somehow fell off the capsule and tumbled to the road.
You can see video of this absurdity at the link. As this was not actually part of the capsule but a protective cover, it appears no damage to Starliner occurred. That it occurred at all however once again tells us of the serious quality control problems at the company.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Also important for when military customers from other nations visit to be near the people that approve and congress that helps finance.
At this stage, any astronaut willing to ride Starliner to orbit should be taken off the flight roster for suspected insanity. :D
OT: the pro FAA delay gang on space twitter now say super heavy will make a considerable amount more noise than SpaceX estimated in its PEA filing. The noise even gets louder as the rocket clears the tower, so sound and blast barriers are not able to mitigate the noise.
https://twitter.com/ESGhound/status/1522263917631836161
V-Man, that was the literal definition of Catch-22. You had to be insane to fly those missions. But if you asked to be taken off the missions, you were sane, and then you had to fly them.
Good luck to Boeing… they’ll need it. Anything less than a successful mission and they’ll be looked at as a second rate aerospace company.
“What It Was Like To Live At Versailles”
https://youtu.be/qrKysG9aiic
9:40
The story in Seattle is that prior to Boeing’s purchase of McDonnell Douglas in 1997 Boeing was a well-run manufacturing company, and MD was a dying company run by political bureaucrats. For some reason after Boeing purchased MD the MD executives took over all the top positions at Boeing and the culture changed for the worse.
James Street:
I did contract work for Boeing during that time, and can confirm that people were mystified that the weaker company subsumed the stronger.
Boeing’s flight East is not good. They want to be close to the center of power of a dead empire. I once wanted to work for Boeing; but working with them cured me of the desire.
JS,
What you mention seems to happen a lot. It seems the politically adept people have a will to power and that culture eventually dominates. It is probably something to do with human nature.
This is why it is so interesting for me to watch an “unstoppable” techie insert himself in to a politically charged corporate culture. I wish him all the luck but history isn’t kind to these efforts.
Test
Being in Seattle puts the execs in the wrong time zone for doing business with DC. Maybe the execs did not like having to be at work at 6:00 AM for a 9:00 AM conference call on the east coast.
Also, Boeing have manufacturing in places like South Carolina. Also, it have parts suppliers all over the world.
Boeing HQ moved to Chicago because Obama was elected. Clearly pandering.
Growing up in the Northwest, all of us engineering students wanted to get a job with Boeing, especially during the time of the 777. Then we would hear stories of layoffs and how they shut down the Spokane plant a couple years after Speaker Tom Foley was defeated in ’94. People complained about the HQ moving to Chicago. The unions had an uproar about moving some of the manufacturing to South Carolina, a right to work state. There was the shenanigans over the next generation air-tanker project as well.
There were the problems with the 787 and the 737-Max. There was special tax deals with the state of Washington and Boeing that were finally removed last year. Now the HQ is going to D.C., I guess it was expensive to fly to there or fly the D.C. flunkies to Chicago all the time. Kind of a new low.
Boeing is now a shadow of what it use to be in my opinion.
If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going – NOT anymore.
It just goes to show that welfare, corporate or otherwise, is ultimately not good for the recipient.
Boeing moved its bean-counting executives from Seattle to Chicago to isolate them so that Engineering executives could proceed with manufacturing aircraft. Let the bean-counters go to Wash DC. Gives the folks in Seattle more leeway to build aircraft.
For documentation here is an article in The Atlantic about Boeing’s purchase of McDonnell Douglas.
The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/
Scuttlebutt has it that prior to the “acquisition” of MD, Boeing was widely perceived to be evolving world class systems design methods. But Boeing honcho Phil Condit figured MD’s git ‘er done cowboy approach would be faster and save money, so Boeing adopted many of MD’s core systems and methods. Recall that MD was the company that put three astronauts in a capsule full of electronic circuitry and pure oxygen…
Meanwhile Airbus is expanding in Mobile Alabama. Come to Alabama, Elon. There is a massive stainless steel plant not far from Mobile…shipyards….
A retired Boeing facility manager told me, years ago, they planned to relocate HQ because of the developing North Korean missile threat. I thought he was kidding.
Yeah, see the Import-Export bank – it’s mostly subsidies for foreign Boeing sales. But Airbus does it too.
McDonnell-Douglas over-expanded in the eighties – too many acquisitions. And then the capital required to certify the MD-11 drove it into the ground. Boeing picked up the good bits and now we have a lack of competition and a gigantic corporate sugar-daddy for ex-politicians and retired military officers.
Here is a charming story on aviation
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/yep-that-s-a-ww-ii-era-bomber-engine-in-this-man-s-garage-in-london-ont-1.6559564