“They talk of a ‘kill the messenger’ culture has established itself inside the program, where the push to move ahead and show marked progress is often in conflict with requiring the often uncomfortable task of ensuring that ‘power’ has ‘truth’ in its hands to make good decisions and communicate progress outwardly.”

This pretty much says it all. This reflects the organisational disease known as ‘Group Think’, pure and simple.

Group Think is one of the ways “that individually very smart people can, collectively, make really very dumb decisions”.

A professional colleague based in Seattle reckons the rot started when Boeing ‘acquired’ McDonnell Douglas (MDac).

Turns out it was a reverse takeover with many of the MDac management types getting senior positions in the Boeing hierarchy.

Moving Boeing HQ to Chicago was one of the outcomes, supposedly to rid the group of the Seattle vs Long Beach/St Louis rivalry.

According to my colleague, this is when Boeing mastered the art of ‘a total indifference to reality’. See http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-190209-1.html

Actually, the word that he used was a tad stronger and is often associated with burning britches.

I think the rot started when Boeing moved HQ from Seattle to Chicago, so that top management was isolated from the company’s bread-and-butter and its corporate history. There seems to have been too much management by buzzword in the 787, with good marketing-speak being mistaken for what was actually possible or sensible.

I hope the composite-airliner concept *is* workable, as otherwise Airbus is heading up a blind alley with the A350 – instead of one screwed-up airliner manufacturer, both will be affected. Forced into it by pressure from its customers.

The US aerospace industry has form on this: (1) the Boeing 2707 SST. Announced with great fanfare to use a titanium airframe so it could go Mach 3 instead of the Concorde’s Mach 2. Scrapped after total redesign due to enormous expense after cruelling orders for Concorde. Helped discredit SSTs in general. (2) the “Orient Express” of the Reagan government. Turned out to be a bluff, much money wasted in other projects (eg Hotol) from other nations thinking that the US had mastered both SSTO and scramjets to make it work. Both SSTO and scramjets still struggling to regain credibility.