For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeings core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it, says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone.
Sorscher has warned Boeing management for decades now of the catastrophic effects of the brain drain inflicted by its war on brilliance. He says McDonnell Douglas managers published a statistical analysis in 1997 gauging productivity against the average seniority of managers across various programs that found that greener workforces were substantially less productive, which he found to be a mirror image of a kind of rule of thumb within Boeing that held that every Boeing employee takes four years to become fully productive. But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparisons sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt. The typical engineer or machinist assigned to the task of fixing Boeings 20,000 problems has never known a Boeing that wasnt a five-alarm dumpster fire.
Theres a terrifying visual representation of this: the satellite view of the Moses Lake Municipal Airport in an arid stretch of Washington east of Seattle, or the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, where hundreds of Boeing 737 MAXes sit in abandoned parking lots waiting for someone to fix them so they can finally be delivered. Meanwhile, pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate, criminal investigations are under way, and another in a long line of stock-conscious CEOs is stepping down. Boeings largest union, the Machinists, is trying to snag a board seat because, in the words of its local president, we have to save this company from itself.
SPEEA has demanded, understandably, that the board choose an aerospace engineer as its next CEO. But there are few signs that will happen: None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GEs Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.
By now you know what became of Swampy: He was found dead a few weeks ago with a gunshot wound to his right temple, apparently self-inflicted, on what was meant to be the third day of a three-day deposition in his whistleblower case against his former employer; his amended complaint, which his lawyer released last week, is the basis for much of this story.
It is worth noting here that Swampys former co-workers universally refuse to believe that their old colleague killed himself. One former co-worker who was terrified of speaking publicly went out of their way to tell me that they werent suicidal. If I show up dead anytime soon, even if its a car accident or something, Im a safe driver, please be on the lookout for foul play. Swampys wife Diane, who worked at Boeing for 28 years, died of brain cancer at age 60 in late 2022.
Discussing Swampys death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, I dont think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys. Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? Its a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere, he replied. More importantly, he added, there is a principle in American law that there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony. Lets say you rob a bank and while traveling at high speed in the getaway you run down a pedestrian and kill them. Thats second-degree murder at the very least.