Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

I think what is most clear, to all of us, is that none of the companies for whom we worked (or still work) are what they once were. They have all lost something over the course of the last couple of decades. The truly pioneering spirit, the real "gee wiz" nature that attracted guys like me is a thing of the past. What a shame...

For sure, we all yearn for the good old days. As much as I hate to admit it, I am one of the “gray beards” these days telling these young guys what it was like to do drawings “on the board” back in the day. With a pencil. We - all of us - did great things back then. I get a lump in my throat when I watch an old Shuttle launch video because I lived the grind of making that happen on a daily basis.

All of these companies were great and full of great people who did crap no one had ever done before. That’s just what we did every day.

And it was fun.

My hat is off to all you guys.

[Fast Freddy 944]

If it's not Boeing I'm not going.

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by IROC

For sure, we all yearn for the good old days. As much as I hate to admit it, I am one of the “gray beards” these days telling these young guys what it was like to do drawings “on the board” back in the day. With a pencil. We - all of us - did great things back then. I get a lump in my throat when I watch an old Shuttle launch video because I lived the grind of making that happen on a daily basis.

All of these companies were great and full of great people who did crap no one had ever done before. That’s just what we did every day.

And it was fun.

My hat is off to all you guys.

Heh heh... I still had my big green tilting drafting table sitting behind me in my double size cubicle the day I retired. None of my managers dared take it away. I was still doing revisions of what we called "board" drawings until the day I retired. The "younguns" didn't want to have anything to do with them, and there was really no point in trying to teach them. Their approach, even on minor revisions, was to simply redraw the whole damn thing in our CAD system of choice (CATIA V5 by then). I loved siting down at my drafting table and breaking out my "kit". I found it relaxing, like pulling on a pair of old slippers. The young "kids" would gather around me like the apes around the monolith in 2001, sometimes even daring to touch one of my triangles or, if really brave, one of my French curves...

I bet that table was gone shortly after I was.

[Superman]

Though I am not an engineer, I did take a drafting class and LOVED it. The "spacial relations" part of aptitude tests, where you see a flat image and imagine what it will look like when folded/assembled to 3D, was a blast.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

Heh heh... I still had my big green tilting drafting table sitting behind me in my double size cubicle the day I retired.

I still have a copy of the first drawing I ever did. July 1989. Here's part of the "EO" (Engineering Order):

[3rd_gear_Ted]

Name the program that got you in the door?

Rockwell Autonetics - MX Missile Guidance & Control, Thank you R. Reagan

Programs come & go, functions never change, off to Corporate I.T. I went & stayed 30 yrs.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by 3rd_gear_Ted

Name the program that got you in the door?

Spacelab. 41 Shuttle missions were devoted this program. I was hired during the ramp-up after Challenger. The first flight after Challenger was a Spacelab mission (Astro-1).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacelab

[Jeff Higgins]

I hired in as a back fill on the 747 program when the 767 was getting started. May 5th, 1980.

[astrochex]

Douglas Aircraft Company, December 6, 1986, advanced design, military transport aircraft.

[Jeff Higgins]

My gig was always tooling. I started on the 747 42 and 46 section (the fuselage barrel sections immediately behind the cockpit to the leading edge, then immediately behind the trailing edge to the leading edge of the empennage). I was working on the Floor Assembly Jigs (FAJ's) on which these were manufactured.

From there I went into the Interiors division. There I designed all of the forming tools for complex contour interior parts, like the sidewall and ceiling panels, along with the stowage bin doors. Steam heated mold dies in which we over crushed the nomex honeycomb cores while forming these composite sandwich panels. I'm proud to say that to this very day, every Boeing aircraft on which you can still fly, has all of those three panels produced on tooling of my design. Even 787, even though I was long gone from Interiors by then.

The last half of my career was spent in AOG Tool Engineering. "At home in my spare time", when there was not AOG work, Interiors tapped me for 787. In AOG (Aircraft on Ground) I designed maintenance and repair tooling, both for incident repair and heavy maintenance. Things like slings for removing the vertical fin, entire empennage, engines, engine struts, control surfaces, etc.

The most fun, though, was all of our in-situ machine tooling. For example, the aft main landing gear pivot mount, the one from which the assembly swings when it retracts, is a large bronze bushing pressed into a beam spanning from the rear spar to the center bulkhead. These things wear out, like any "suspension bushing". The AMM - Aircraft Maintenance Manual - has a procedure for removing that entire beam, placing it on a vertical mill, pressing out the old bushing, re-machining the hole oversize to remove corrosion, and replacing the bushing then boring it to final I.D. It's a lot of work to get that beam out and put it back in...

So, wouldn't it be cool if we could just do all of the required work right up there in the wheel well? Imagine the time saved. So, that's what I did. Designed the bushing removal and installation and machining equipment that we use right there in the wheel well. Fun stuff.

Then I got to travel the world either with Boeing AOG teams, or on my own, to show folks how to use my equipment. Nothing better when mechanics are unboxing the equipment and scratching their heads, wondering "what in the hell was that guy thinking" than to have that guy - me - right there with them. That was the really fun stuff.

[zakthor]

Wonder if any of you remember a plane I saw...

When I was a kid I took a private tour of the 747 assembly from Joe Sutter. Was right after st helens blew. We walked around the interior of a 747 being built for saudi arabia. Aside from all the technical aparatus that I was too young to appreciate we spent some time marveling at the woodwork in that plane. There was a table upstairs that had some large number of different wood species. Everything was done in house because it had to meet aviation weight and material requirements. There was also some custom tiling pattern in the kitchen that Joe thought looked pretty swanky but the designs all looked pretty corporate to my 12 year old eyes.

Most amazing thing I saw were that they had so many of these huge drafting rooms full of special tables and all these lights on armatures. I was a weekend and the rooms were dim so looked really mysterious.

[dar636]

The Raisbeck Group, Seattle WA 1979. Rockwell Sabreliner wing modifications, Lear Jet drag reduction modifications. Airframe and Powerplant mechanic.

[herr_oberst]

Originally Posted by IROC

I took drafting in High School and College, too, and I loved it.
If I hadn't fallen into printing I probably would have been a draftsman; I was pretty good at it and I liked getting better and challenging myself to learn more.
I spent a ton of extra effort on my lettering, and I developed a very architectural style that I thought was totally avant garde and cool. My instructors always told me that I'd never get away with that as a corporate draftsman.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

My gig was always tooling.

I did tooling also. I started off in MGSE for Spacelab for about 9 years, but in later life designed all of the tooling for the GMD Payload Avionics Module (booster avionics module + kill vehicle) integration. I did all of this tooling design to Boeing tooling drawing standards (like the multi-detail, 12-zone drawing formats, tool use instructions, etc.). I have some of those drawings also... Notes like welding per D33028-1, tool use instruction placards per D33181-27...

Crazy.

I started with McDonnell Douglas on May 8, 1989 and worked as a design engineer on:

Spacelab
International Space Station (Node 1 and a bunch of misc stuff like the ill-fated Spares Warehouse)
Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD)
Avenger
Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense
Advanced Tactical Laser
SLAM-RAAM
High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator

Plus miscellaneous projects like satellites, etc. I was the lead engineer on a thing called the LMC. A payload carrier designed to use wasted space at the back of the payload bay. It was unique in that it did not use a keel trunnion. It's the white structure spanning the back of the payload bay in this pic:

[Ralph3.]

June 1978, 727 final assembly mechanic, Renton, WA. Attended an unpaid electrician training program, which main purpose seemed to be to make sure you would show up everyday. Got hired and on my first my new boss told me "I have too many electricians, how would you like to be a mechanic?" So I was a mechanic....

[Scott Douglas]

While I was building satellites not airplanes, I did have a chance to see a shuttle up close and personal one day early in my career.

I signed off on a lot of sat drawings as the MFG Eng'r. Can't talk about most of them but the ones I can are TDRSS (both first gen and second gen) and Directv.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by Ralph3.

June 1978, 727 final assembly mechanic, Renton, WA. Attended an unpaid electrician training program, which main purpose seemed to be to make sure you would show up everyday. Got hired and on my first my new boss told me "I have too many electricians, how would you like to be a mechanic?" So I was a mechanic....

There is so much to that story that is just perfect.

1978.

[3rd_gear_Ted]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

There is so much to that story that is just perfect.

1978.

Right then you became an "84 day wonder".
Translation; Wonder if he'll make it to 8 weeks to become a perm?

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by 3rd_gear_Ted

Right then you became an "84 day wonder".
Translation; Wonder if he'll make it to 8 weeks to become a perm?

That was kind of the cycle in those days, worse for mechanics than for engineers.

I remember in the mid '80's Boeing had lured a significant number of engineers from MD. Laid them off in less than a year, after they had moved up from California. A group of them filed a class action suit and actually won. Not sure what the settlement was, but it sure sent some reverberations through the industry.

The late '90's and early '00's were rather tumultuous in the industry, to say the least. Boeing went to the same well and laid off a bunch of people, this time a good number of engineers. I remember guys I worked with being gone for a couple of years. Boeing eventually hired them back but, in an amazing feat of corporate ineptitude, laid most of them off again in about nine months. Un-freaking-believable. I think that incident alone served to knock a lot of the sheen off of working for Boeing for a lot of young engineers.

I signed some form of "intellectual property" agreement on my way out on retirement. They apparently make even the engineers whom they lay off sign these kinds of agreements. There have been lawsuits won there as well. The argument went something like my value in the job market is based purely upon my knowledge and expertise. You just told me that it is no longer of any value to you. As long as I'm not walking out with computer discs, or written materials, whatever I've retained in my little head is mine.

Way back when, when there were still separate Aerospace companies, it was a common practice to "do the aerospace tour". It was almost inevitable that when one was laying off, others were hiring. I knew a lot of guys who did that, running down to California to land jobs at MD and others. It not only served to soften the blow, it also afforded those guys the opportunity to gain some valuable experience. The big industry consolidation we see today dramatically lessened anyone's ability to do that.

Coupled with the big giants' reluctance to take risks on new programs, I have to think that makes it harder to attract young engineers. My son never even considered Boeing. The fact that I told him I would beat him about the head and shoulders if he did might have had something to do with it...

[IROC]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

Way back when, when there were still separate Aerospace companies, it was a common practice to "do the aerospace tour". It was almost inevitable that when one was laying off, others were hiring. I knew a lot of guys who did that, running down to California to land jobs at MD and others. It not only served to soften the blow, it also afforded those guys the opportunity to gain some valuable experience. The big industry consolidation we see today dramatically lessened anyone's ability to do that.

This was common in Huntsville since ALL of the aerospace companies were right there in one city. And...they were all essentially government contractors so they were at the mercy of government funding. Layoffs were common, so it was equally common for people to move from company to company.

I walked in to work one day around 1990 or 1991 and half of McDonnell Douglas - Huntsville was laid off in one day. 450 people out the door when AFE was cancelled.