Re: The title was too long.
"You really think out of the 171,000 employees, they're all careless, cost-focused jokers?"
No, but I think it's near impossible to sort the chaff from the wheat in-situ. There's too much rot, too many bad apples to turn things around as is. There's not enough people who don't put there foot down when it comes to compliance or safety issues. Down from the work floor up into (upper) management.
"Boeing is not doomed and will (eventually) be fixed. There's a clear problem of compliance sometimes taking second place to speed and cost, that is entirely resolvable, albeit slow and time consuming to do so."
Read up on what is going on in nearly every single production line. 777 and 787 have very very similar cultural problems. There are structural, ongoing quality issues in nearly every single production line that Boeing is currently operating. The leaked information on what happened internally at Boeing with the accident door plug is exemplary of the sort of skullduggery where a MULTIPLE quality hit (incorrect/out of spec rivets, damaged door seal, rivets initially "fixed" by painting over them) should have led to a line stop and a quality audit at Spirit. Yet apparently Spirit employees thought it OK to initially just paint over out of spec rivets instead of replacing them and a work order in the Boeing quality management/tracking system was never made for opening the plug after the damaged seal was discovered. And it's unclear at this time at what point the damaged seal was found. A while back a big issue was workers leaving rubbish inside fuel tanks, the 787 early on suffered from battery fires because apparently they never even performed basic QC audits at the supplier, nor bothered to inspect the battery systems before installation. The 777X is several years behind schedule as as late as last year suffered from problems in it's flight control systems and there's reports they still don't have a handle on some of the quality issues they were having with the carbon composite layups for the wings.
There's so many layers of people at Boeing where it's obvious they think getting the aircraft to the next station on time is more important than getting it there 100% correct that you can't just fix that with a simple memo. There's too many people with the wrong mindset. Even if you get the right persons in upper management positions you have to somehow get that attitude to permeate to the rest of the tens of thousands of employees and there WILL be too many resisting such a change or unwilling to change their way of working. Weeding them out and firing them is near impossible and as such I consider fixing the companies attitude to safety and compliance in situ near impossible. The problem also isn't compliance or finances. The problem is a fundamental lack of the correct mindset when it comes to safety and delivering high quality work in an aerospace company. Compliance follows pretty much automatically from such a mindset.