Looks like MBAs doing a CYA and throwing the Engs under the bus.
Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over.
I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.
I know that there was a Boeing sub with a doc repository
whose internal address was "TheBlameThrower". It had the explicit purpose of nailing specific people for saying specific things. So throwing people under transmissions is something of a company sport, with points awarded for distance and style.
Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.
Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from <s>who knows where</s> - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.
In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.
Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.
[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.
Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over.
I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.