Dateline: July 27 2034
Earlier today, Wall Street woke up to a shock, and we can just imagine how many investment bankers and fund managers choked on their morning coffee.
Boeing, an icon of the skies and a central pillar in many US military projects, halted trading this morning after almost 120 years. The suspension comes after yet another airline had enough and decided it was cheaper to replace their full fleet of Boeing aeroplanes than wait for another FAA grounding to be cleared.
Walter Croft, CEO of Gamma Airlines, explained their position in very clear language: “Our ability to provide our customers with safe, reliable, and cost-effective flights is paramount. If that means reconfiguring our fleet to only use one aeroplane manufacturer, so be it!”
But Croft and Gamma Airlines have options, as we have seen at last week’s Farnborough International Air Show. At Comac’s pavilion, the line of CEOs of major airlines looking to see what China’s challenge to Boeing and Airbus could offer has grown year after year.
For some, Boeing’s decision did not come as a surprise. The venerable company has struggled with quality issues for a long time, culminating in some spectacularly public failures; two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019; in 2024, first a door fell off another jetliner mid-flight, followed by an astronomical escalation (pun intended) when two astronauts became stranded on the International Space Station for months, due to issues with their Starliner capsule.
Investigations showed that not only was quality management lacking across the whole Boeing company, but the corporate culture left much to be desired as well. Several quality enhancing initiatives were introduced after the 737 MAX debacle but didn’t seem to be able to change the trajectory. There were more delivery delays and quality issues in the late 2020s, prompting Nasa to reallocate critical Artemis Programme contracts to SpaceX and ESA, further hastening Boeing’s fall from grace.
After the morning shock, early lunchtime rumours are that GE Aerospace have put in a bid, with the intention of acquiring Boeing and selling off its military and space businesses. Investors will be watching this development with bated breath.
Boeing, involved in everything from civilian aircraft, fighter jets, missiles and space missions, assumed that they were too big to fail and too well protected by US legislators. But when toxic work culture comes up against customer sentiment, all bets are off.
First published in Mindbullets July 25 2024
When technology fails to fail
Critical system failures that don’t trigger corrective action cause disasters
Dateline: March 21 2016
Yet another airliner has fallen out of the sky without warning. And the reason is fail-safe systems that fail to alert the pilots to the real problem when they fail.
If that sounds a little confusing, that’s exactly what human operators experience, when autonomous systems default to manual control — the ultimate fallback when there are critical failures.
Even double-redundant systems can be completely taken out by, say, a solar flare, or a huge electromagnetic pulse; something as simple as a direct lightning strike can do it. When that happens, the human backup needs to be completely in sync with the current status of the system, whether it’s a driverless car negotiating a tricky curve, or a jet on autopilot.
Part of the problem is, we’ve come to trust and rely on automated systems to such an extent, that we’re completely taken by surprise — and confused — when they don’t work as expected. After all, they hardly ever go wrong. But when they do, we’re often at a loss.
When things are running smoothly, as they do 99.9% of the time — that’s our service level guarantee — we become complacent. We know we can always take over in the event of a disaster, but if we never have to, how well are we prepared for that one-in-a-million failure? Our training needs to change.
In fact, the perfect automated system is one that employs fuzzy logic, and trips out occasionally, to keep us on our toes. This is one situation in which zero defect is actually too little of a bad thing. We need a bit of unpredictability to keep the humans sharp.
Technology that never fails is not ideal — it creates the ultimate disaster when it does.
- First published on Mindbullets on January 8 2015
• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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