The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a technological marvel. It’s built largely of carbon-fibre composites rather than aluminum, which makes it significantly lighter than other planes. Its braking, pressurization, and air-conditioning systems are run not by hydraulics but by electricity from lithium-ion batteries. It uses twenty per cent less fuel than its peers, and so is cheaper to run, yet it also manages to have higher ceilings and larger windows. It is, in other words, one of the coolest planes in the air. Or, rather, on the ground: regulators around the world have grounded all fifty Dreamliners after battery fires in two planes, and Ray LaHood, the Transportation Secretary, has declared that the Dreamliner will not fly again in the U.S. until regulators are “a thousand per cent sure” of its safety. And this is just the latest in a long series of Dreamliner problems, which delayed the plane’s début for more than three years and cost Boeing billions of dollars in cost overruns. The Dreamliner was supposed to become famous for its revolutionary design. Instead, it’s become an object lesson in how not to build an airplane.
To understand why, you need to go back to 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. Technically, Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. But, as Richard Aboulafia, a noted industry analyst with the Teal Group, told me, “McDonnell Douglas in effect acquired Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas executives became key players in the new company, and the McDonnell Douglas culture, averse to risk and obsessed with cost-cutting, weakened Boeing’s historical commitment to making big investments in new products. Aboulafia says, “After the merger, there was a real battle over the future of the company, between the engineers and the finance and sales guys.” The nerds may have been running the show in Silicon Valley, but at Boeing they were increasingly marginalized by the bean counters.
Under these conditions, getting the company to commit to a major project like the Dreamliner took some doing. “Some of the board of directors would rather have spent money on a walk-in humidor for shareholders than on a new plane,” Aboulafia says. So the Dreamliner’s advocates came up with a development strategy that was supposed to be cheaper and quicker than the traditional approach: outsourcing. And Boeing didn’t outsource just the manufacturing of parts; it turned over the design, the engineering, and the manufacture of entire sections of the plane to some fifty “strategic partners.” Boeing itself ended up building less than forty per cent of the plane.
This strategy was trumpeted as a reinvention of manufacturing. But while the finance guys loved it—since it meant that Boeing had to put up less money—it was a huge headache for the engineers. In a fascinating study of the process, two U.C.L.A. researchers, Christopher Tang and Joshua Zimmerman, show how challenging it was for Boeing to work with fifty different partners. The more complex a supply chain, the more chances there are for something to go wrong, and Boeing had far less control than it would have if more of the operation had been in-house. Delays became endemic, and, instead of costing less, the project went billions over budget. In 2011, Jim Albaugh, who took over the program in 2009, said, “We spent a lot more money in trying to recover than we ever would have spent if we’d tried to keep the key technologies closer to home.” And the missed deadlines created other issues. Determined to get the Dreamliners to customers quickly, Boeing built many of them while still waiting for the F.A.A. to certify the plane to fly; then it had to go back and retrofit the planes in line with the F.A.A.’s requirements. “If the saying is check twice and build once, this was more like build twice and check once,” Aboulafia said to me. “With all the time and cost pressures, it was an alchemist’s recipe for trouble.”
In a different time, none of this might have mattered much. As plenty of people have pointed out, “teething problems” have, historically, been common in new planes. The 747’s engines were notoriously temperamental, the DC-10’s cargo doors were a major safety issue, and a number of Lockheed L-188s had wings shear off in flight. By those standards, you might think the Dreamliner’s battery issues are minor. The problem for Boeing is that those standards don’t apply anymore. The expectations of both customers and regulators are much higher, because, these days, so many products work well from the start. Automobiles, major appliances, televisions: a quality revolution in the past few decades has made products more reliable and durable than ever before. So our tolerance for failure is lower.
The same is true when it comes to airline safety. In the past, the F.A.A. was remarkably hesitant to take planes out of service. The problems with the DC-10 were well known to regulators for years before a 1979 crash forced them to ground the plane. But, again, those standards no longer apply. In the nineteen-seventies, after all, airplane crashes occurred with disturbing regularity. Today, they are extraordinarily rare; there hasn’t been a fatal airliner crash in the United States in almost four years. The safer we get, the safer we expect to be, so the performance bar keeps rising. And this, ultimately, is why the decision to give other companies responsibility for the Dreamliner now looks misguided. Boeing is in a business where the margin of error is small. It shouldn’t have chosen a business model where the chance of making a serious mistake was so large. ♦
