Peter Robison > Quotes

“The tax rate on upper brackets of income fell from 70 percent to 50 percent (and later to 33 percent), causing a 9 percent drop in federal revenue in two years.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Some of the very people who ran McDonnell Douglas into the ground resurrected the same penny-pinching policies that sank their old company. Borrowing a page from another flawed idol, Jack Welch’s General Electric, they executed what today might be called the standard corporate playbook: anti-union, regulation-light, outsourcing-heavy. But pro-handout, at least when it comes to tax breaks and lucrative government contracts.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Even the newest military planes had checklists that appeared on touch screens. If a hydraulic pump failed, a message would pop up showing specific actions the pilot should take. On the 737, a light showing “low hydraulic pressure” might illuminate with no further explanation. Pilots would have to rely on memory or turn to their paper handbook. “Training issue,” the Boeing executive responded to Reed, in rejecting such changes. If Boeing had been building a brand- new plane, it would have been required to have the electronic checklist. But because the MAX was being examined as an amendment to the original type certificate awarded in 1967, managers could pursue an exception. The MAX was actually the thirteenth version of the plane, counting all the variants along the way— the official application would call it an update of the 737- 100,”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“The acquisition of McDonnell Douglas a year earlier had brought hordes of cutthroat managers, trained in the win-at-all-costs ways of defense contracting, into Boeing’s more professorial ranks in the misty Puget Sound. A federal mediator who refereed a strike by Boeing engineers two years later described the merger privately as “hunter killer assassins” meeting Boy Scouts.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“By the count of a former Boeing executive who scoured incident reports for a congressional committee, one in twenty-five MAX planes experienced some sort of safety issue in the months after they were delivered.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“This shift in the balance of power between Boeing and the FAA was the culmination of a decades- long war for influence, one embedded in the very nature of a place sometimes derided as “the tombstone agency” because it only seemed to act swiftly when people were dead.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Boeing at the time had a towering reputation for customer service, a share of the jetliner market that surpassed 70 percent, and a stock that had been the Dow’s best performing for a decade. “The Seattle Airplane Company was probably the most honest, reputable, best company you would ever work for,” said Gordon Bethune, who was a customer training executive and division chief at Boeing from 1988 to 1994 before leaving for Continental. Soon after he joined the airline, it placed”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“a dozen industrial executives in the country who earned more than $1 million in 1978. (Adjusted for inflation, his pay was equivalent to $5 million in 2019—less than a quarter of the average CEO compensation of $21.3 million that year.)”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Boeing had sought to keep cost data out of the hands of rank-and-file engineers, to keep the information from compromising their designs; now the opposite was true. Boeing wanted them all to make decisions with the cold eye of a Jack Welch or a Harry Stonecipher. After finishing the course, engineers were meant to “understand, God, that program has to be produceable, I can’t put every bell and whistle on it,” said Boeing’s vice president of learning, Steve Mercer, the former deputy at Crotonville.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“The Clinton administration downsized federal agencies and introduced market-based performance metrics as part of what it called “reinventing government.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“That consensus was just starting to fray when Milton Friedman, the Reaganites’ favorite economist, argued what was then still the contrarian viewpoint in the New York Times Magazine in 1970: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Airbus, a consortium of European manufacturers it had always derided as a glorified jobs program, actually had a cost advantage over Boeing. Its factories produced planes 12 percent to 15 percent cheaper than Boeing’s, the study reported. Ironically, this was in part because of rigid labor laws in Europe, which made layoffs more expensive and, in places like Germany, forced the involvement of labor unions in management decisions. As a consequence, Airbus was quicker to adopt automated machinery, but also more likely to train and develop its workers rather than to fire them.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Her biggest clients were transportation companies. She helped plan their PR campaigns, write white papers, and set up “Astroturf” organizations to give corporate messaging the appearance of grassroots support. A”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Once ruled by engineers who thumbed their noses at Wall Street, Boeing had reinvented itself into one of the most shareholder-friendly creatures of the market. It celebrated managers for cost cutting, co-opted regulators with heaps of money, and pressured suppliers with Walmart-style tactics.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“It emerged that Douglas engineers had known the design was vulnerable to a catastrophic failure, and indeed, two years earlier, a near disaster had ensued on a flight over Windsor, Ontario, which also lost a cargo door. The pilot had been able to land the plane in that case. Instead of fixing the issue immediately, McDonnell Douglas had convinced the FAA to let it add a support plate over time to the doors—a “gentlemen’s agreement” revealed in the congressional hearings. Records at Douglas showed that the support plate had been added to the Turkish Airlines plane, when it had not. Three company inspectors had signed off on the nonexistent fix.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Michaelis asked if any alert would tell them when the sensors had failed. “On your airplane, yes,” Sinnett answered. Without mentioning that Boeing had botched the software implementation on other planes, he explained that American had purchased the optional angle-of-attack indicator, which Lion Air had not. Had it been Michaelis’s plane, a little flag notice would have popped up alerting him to disagreement between the AoA vanes, and mechanics would have fixed the sensor on the ground. “So you would not have taken the airplane,” he said.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Rather than investing in new aircraft, Boeing’s leaders poured more than $30 billion of cash into stock buybacks during the MAX’s development, enriching shareholders and ultimately themselves. Muilenburg made more than $100 million as CEO, and he left with an additional $60 million golden parachute.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“In just a few years, his headline would read as prophecy: “Boeing Will Pay High Price for McNerney’s Mistake of Treating Aviation Like It Was Any Other Industry.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“When Fortune interviewed Collins in 2000, he was already starting to rethink the idea. “If in fact there’s a reverse takeover, with the McDonnell ethos permeating Boeing, then Boeing is doomed to mediocrity,” he said. “There’s one thing that made Boeing really great all the way along. They always understood that they were an engineering-driven company, not a financially driven company. If they’re no longer honoring that as their central mission, then over time they’ll just become another company.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“staffers in the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service concluded there might be fifteen more MAX crashes without a software fix, based on the future size of the fleet, the hours of anticipated flight, and a rough estimate that one in every hundred pilots might have trouble handling the rare sensor failure.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“In rejecting the safety enhancement, managers twice cited concerns about the “cost and potential (pilot) training impact.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“All stem at least in part from the failed belief that corporations will police themselves and shower us in riches if they’re just left alone to do so (and are lightly taxed all the while).”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“People have to die before Boeing will change things,”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

“Agriculture Department in 2019 quietly cut the number of inspectors in pork plants by more than half. Finding defects—feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders—was mostly left to the companies themselves, much in the way that the FAA relied on Boeing’s own employees to ensure aircraft safety.”
― Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing