Passing the buck

Ten years ago, Boeing started farming out development of complete subsystems to subcontractors. The aerospace company’s management told their senior engineers that, since building airplanes had become mainstream, external, lower-qualified engineers could deliver the designs cheaper and faster than in-house development teams. A few years later, a lot of these senior engineers have been laid off, causing a huge brain drain in systems knowledge at Boeing.

Years of cumulative knowledge and experience about how to build airplanes walked out the door. Instead, unskilled teams, with a horizon of only their own subsystem, did the work to the best of their abilities. The headcount of central departments at Boeing, like the team that designed cockpits, was cut in half. As basic system-level knowledge on how to build airplanes was lost, this allowed for wrong decisions on reliability to be taken: avoiding single-point failures using doubly or triply redundant subsystems wasn’t implemented in functions where it was badly needed.

Dennis Muilenburg spotted these problems when he became CEO of Boeing in 2015 and started to reverse the trend of farming out subsystem development. Too bad he was too late.