> “In a rush to address the bottlenecks in production, Boeing hit problems, putting pieces together with excessive force to make them appear that the gaps don’t exist even though they exist,” Sam Salehpour said in a Senate hearing. “The gap didn’t actually go away, and this may result in premature fatigue failure. Effectively, they are putting out defective airplanes.”

Quite shocking allegation, not only because of the potential issue it can create but also that is the kind of issue that will only be encountered after a long time. It will shorten the lifetime of an airframe but probably not enough for the buck to stop with the management who decided to move ahead with forcing workers to do shoddy work, it will take a decade or two to materialise and by then most of top leadership will have moved on after collecting fat paychecks.

Disgusting, it feels more and more that those are quite calculated moves and not only pure greed getting in the way, greed is just the fuel but the actions taken to pursue it seem to be calculated enough to also pass the buck to whomever inherit leadership in the future.

I sincerely hope that more comes out of the shadows, Boeing might still have a chance if it can clean the slate: get the government involved to investigate, find the culprits, use it as a showcase on how to not run a business and perhaps in a decade or two there might be a new Boeing that adheres to the values of the old Boeing. Because the current state is pitiful, and if letting it go under the rug might become foreboding of how other American large enterprises that were once respected lose their edge.

If the USA really wants to keep up with China then it needs to tame its corporations self-imploding through their own greedy actions, if in 50 years American companies aren't well respected due to issues like Boeing brought unto themselves there will be major consequences to USA's power overall. It's already started, keeping this ball rolling shouldn't be an option.