I noticed that India landed a spacecraft on the Moon for 1/20th the cost of a US mission.
They’re obviously not contracting with Boeing.
intercst
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Here’s Firstpost, an India centric YouTube channel, reporting on ISRO and the Chandrayaan 3 lander.
Yay India!
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is the space agency of India.
ralph
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Or using US labor.
DB2
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Neither is Boeing. One of the problems with the 737 Max was that they outsourced the writing of the flight control software to India. That’s the Jack Welch-trained MBA way.
intercst
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Interesting about outsourcing coding to India.
I have a backburner idea with one of my partners. We will explore it at some point with our CIO partner. He can price it out. He is Indian. The first two of us agree this can not be outsourced to India. There is plenty of talent in the US.
Our problem is the Indian software industry is now mature and in need of new ideas. If we have a valuable idea we would lose control of the idea.
For Boeing to use Indian techs is a mistake in a different way. The costs of the better techs have risen. India once a lower cost provider has all sorts of different qualities of coders. If you want cheaper you get what you pay for in India.
In other words mission critical coding can be done in the US or India but at a higher price. It will be the same price today. The Indians are not shy.
In my partnership’s case we would have to offer Americans stock options to hold onto the coders.
Well maybe, but the bigger issue is that they promised the airlines that no pilot flight training would be necessary, and then lied to the FAA saying the same thing. Software or not, the plane handles quite differently than the prior 737 series, and the removal of a redundant air speed indicator was not something any of the software coders in India had anything to do with.
Boeing, unsurprisingly, is pointing many fingers in every direction except where they belong.
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Yep, I’d love to see Boeing execs shut up and put up instead of make ar$es of themselves looking for excuses. It is sickening because we all remember the glory of honest engineering. It is missing as the bean counters wont ever be responsible.
BTW how can the bean counters be responsible at an engineering firm? What the heck do they know? By the time they know it so many of their decisions are crap.
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“JCs” usually point fingers and create excuses. Living as I do in the “Big Three’s” front yard, I have spent decades listening to the “JCs” blame all their problems on either the union, or the government, or the Japanese. It is never, ever, a matter of the “JCs” making a poor decision.
As for Boeing, it isn’t just a matter of cheap and nasty engineering on the 73. Quality control at the 78 plant in South Carolina was so bad that the FAA had to step in and do QC itself, because it found that Boeing could not be trusted to do the job.
Steve
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When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, somehow McDonnell Douglas executives filled most of the top management slots at the combined company. They also brought the Jack Welch-style management ethic of reducing the head count and subcontracting everything. The B787 Dreamliner was the first test of this new management strategy. A longtime Boeing manufacturing engineer wrote a 50 page letter to management that read like a PhD dissertation, outlining all the things that could go wrong. Regrettably, ignorance and innumeracy ruled.
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You mean they were full of themselves MBAs.
Not so much “full of themselves” but more concerned with filling their pockets, while hoping the consequences do not arrive until they are retired and someone else has to deal with them.
Recall, the leader of the drive to Welchism, McNerney, retired in 2015. The first 73 Max to fall out of the sky crashed in 2018. In 2020, the FAA started investigating a decade long record of poor quality control at the 78 plant. McNerney grabbed his loot and got out in the nick of time.
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