[Jeff Higgins]

The hits keep coming... "We", the engineering staff as a whole, first began raising concerns about the new direction we saw the company embarking upon in about the late 1990's. All of our concerns fell upon deaf ears. We were labeled as stuck in our ways, resistant to change, unable to "think outside the box". We would reply with "you have to know what is inside that box before you can understand the impacts of the changes you are pushing". All to no avail.

It was (and still is) a race to the bottom. Find the cheapest possible supplier who can provide the cheapest possible components. Offload, offload, offload. Then those to whom we had offloaded offloaded again, sometimes several suppliers deep. We lost track of who was building what. Then, even worse, we offloaded design responsibility. To companies that then offloaded portions of that as well. Then we didn't even know who was designing what.

As if things could not get any worse, then suppliers starting defaulting on their contracts, paying the fines to get out before our cost demands drove them under. Well, ok then, we'll find another supplier - give us your designs, and we'll part company. Not so fast - these are no longer Boeing's designs, they are the suppliers designs. We had to start over with someone else, often several "someone elses" because so many suppliers decided it was cheaper to bail out and pay the penalties than it was to continue.

The end result was a number of 787's dubbed as "the teenagers". About the first 15-18 meant for customer delivery after the first couple of flight and static test aircraft. We were not allowed (by the FAA) to sell those aircraft. For the simple reason that we could not tell them who built what. The documentation was so completely garbled and untraceable because of the constantly changing suppliers that we had lost track. We spent years removing and replacing untraceable parts. As far as I know most sit undelivered to this day.

This worked out for us in AOG as it turned out we had some "practice airplanes". When I designed new repair or maintenance equipment, we could actually try it out on a live bird before we had to travel with it. What a windfall for us, we never had that opportunity before. It was usually "best guess" and then modify and fit in the field in many cases. But what a hell of a way to be provided that opportunity...

I retired seven years ago. I loved my job and still miss it and the people with whom I was privileged to work. But I don't miss the company. Oh, I miss what it was when I started, a veritable playground for engineers, but I do not miss what it has become. What it has become is a large part of why I retired early.