Episode 179: The Boeing 777X

We're going.

We're going.

It's, you know, the workflow is happening.

It's a lot of casting.

We're casting the pod, folks.

Like a big, like fisherman casting a net.

Fishers of men.

Yeah,

casters of pod.

Casters of pod,

oh, you casters of pod.

Hello, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he and him.

And we have a guest.

Hello.

My name is Maya Ventura.

My pronouns are it and she.

Cis people be a little easy about the it, but that's just how it goes.

You probably know me from nothing because I am somebody who has parlayed a parasocial relationship into appearing on a podcast, and it's quite cool.

Very successfully, because

it was just a strong pitch of

seconds already.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, we had to do less work, which is to say, almost none.

And we had a very clickbaity title, which is, we could put like the really like YouTube bait thumbnail up here with all of us, you know, making the Mr.

Beast face and going,

you know, why this plane means that America can't build planes anymore.

Also, the second

Maya to have been on this podcast to use it pronouns.

This is true.

How are you keeping track of this?

I also do this, actually.

Yeah, no, only I'm pretty sure only Mayas have used it pronouns on this podcast.

With studying this here, there's a correlation.

I got a big spreadsheet of all the pronouns.

Master pronoun choose

right next to the podcast ideas masterless.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

I'm tracking the trends.

We're going to see what gender is doing in this country.

We'll be tracking it very closely.

I can see you from the wrong spreadsheet and we do a four-hour episode on the pronouns they and them.

Oh, God.

Oh, no.

I assume we'd be in favor.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

No, but we're going to, we're going to.

But I do like the idea of four hours on just pronouns.

No, the discourse will get confusing.

Oh, yeah.

I would assume.

We as a country are on like our several million of pronoun discourse.

So like a podcast wouldn't really be that hard of a sell.

That's a good point.

I say we as a country, but also the UK.

So everybody.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

What if we did a podcast about gender?

Whoa.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, there's your gender.

Yeah, we just assign it to you.

There you go.

Yeah, same time.

I have a predictive model that says this is your gender.

This is actually the same predictive model that determines which mayor to do next on No Gods, No Mares.

Oh, yeah.

The Mentaculous.

Well, the problem is when

the predictive model assigns the mayor the wrong gender.

You hate to see it.

Yeah, it happened with the Rudy Giuliani episode.

We've moved past it.

Sorry, the model is right.

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

Anyway,

assume a perfectly spherical gender.

Assume a perfectly spherical Rudy Giuliati.

What we see on the screen here is the new Triple Seven Twitter.

Of course.

You can look at pictures of it.

Very difficult to see it in real life.

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

Fantastic.

The plane that killed Boeing or will kill Boeing before Boeing kills us.

One of several planes that killed Boeing.

To be fair, the plane killing Boeing is really an act of self-defense, considering what Boeing does to whistleblowers.

And passengers.

Yep.

But before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news.

Oh, this is a terrific Chiron.

So, yeah.

Holy shit, what is going on?

I don't know.

I don't know.

For a while, I thought we were all just going to die.

And now it seems like maybe

we're not going to die for a minute until we do die again.

Have you seen the euthanasia coaster?

The roller coaster that at some point down like snaps your neck several times and then

the lift hill is too steep.

Yeah.

Well, even so, that's that's kind of like that's how I'm feeling with the with the markets, you know?

Yeah, the uh the we don't know what the tariffs are anymore or how long they're gonna last.

It's gonna be really funny because

now maybe I don't know.

I have the times open

the last uh the last um whatchamacallit uh episode we recorded was right after the tariffs were put in and that hasn't come out yet so now we're reporting on we have no fucking clue what's going on anymore guys one of the worst combinations of like lag between episode recording and release and news cycle speed so many things happen

yeah it's it's tragic we still i'm still pretty bullish on the power grid going down i think they're going to fuck it up that bad.

I'll buy that.

I don't know.

I mean, extrapolating from that, it's only a matter of time.

But like, I genuinely have no idea at this point.

And I've learned to kind of, Trump has taught me Buddha nature.

I've learned that

my desires

are hindering me.

My sort of like, my needs are impermanent.

I don't actually need a new graphics card.

And not only that, but I should embrace uncertainty and not, and sort of like, I should, you know, just allow that, allow it to wash over me.

You know, it's a buyer's market, maybe?

Question mark, question mark, question mark.

So, yeah, I guess that what's happened is there's been a 90-day pause on the tariffs to some extent.

Maybe.

To what extent, no one actually knows.

My other understanding is no one actually knows how to collect the tariffs.

So the collections haven't actually happened.

They're trying to reimburse some, which I guess just means not

doing that.

And I'm just like, at this point, all I can say is that the price of the Patreon feed is now reciprocal with the tariffs, but there are a number of exceptions.

And so the Patreon doesn't currently cost $2,000 a month, but in 90 days it might, unless you meet the number of criteria.

Who's to say?

We might have, you know, something stupid happen to the dollar.

There's some bullshit happening in the bond markets that I don't understand.

There's

what's the other one?

Okay, so most of the tariffs have been suspended, except the tariffs on China, which have been increased to, I don't know, 100 and something percent.

145?

Yeah, functionally, it may as well be.

That will be the wrong answer by the time this comes out.

It might be the wrong answer now.

Yeah.

And I mean, the other fun thing is

trying to charge like a million dollars for each time a Chinese built or flagged or crewed ships in a U.S.

port, which is like as if you are damstrong enough by the Jones Acts.

That's that's really good.

That's for the uh, that that's that's for the ships that are compliant with the Chinese Jones Act.

Um,

I mean, you're gonna have to start doing like that one uh seafood company and running everything that comes into the U.S.

over like 45 meters of technically Canadian Canadian railroad in order to

just got rid of that.

I miss it already.

I love a regulatory loophole and I'm sure that they'll find others.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the way this is going to affect business, I think just people are going to stop importing things for a while.

I know a lot of containers are just being sent back to China.

I know that

the one thing I saw a press release from was Rapido Trains.

They do a bunch of nice HO scale model trains.

They're all made in China.

And they were like, yeah, we think these tariffs are going to disappear pretty soon.

So we're just not importing anything until

they disappear.

We're waiting until the bond markets whack Trump over the head enough with a big two by four.

I mean, this is the thing.

They can't just get rid of him like they did Liz Truss.

At least I don't think they can.

I don't know if the bond markets have shooters like that.

You could invoke whatever, the 25th Amendment.

Yeah.

Yeah, whatever it is.

One of the later amendments.

Yeah,

I don't know.

But

it just, it's all insane.

It's all completely unpredictable.

And

my favorite detail, my favorite detail was I saw a Vox pop.

I saw an interview with a guy who got, I think, maybe maximally screwed by the tariffs just in a like a short-term bets situation because he bought a new iPhone sort of panic buying before the tariffs came in, the day before the smartphones were exempted from the tariffs.

Oh, right.

Yeah, they did exempt a bunch of consumer electronics from the tariffs, which, you know, is

sure, great, fine.

What about all the other stuff that comes from China?

Yeah, not everything that comes from China is like a smartphone.

You know, there's like industrial equipment and shit.

You don't need clothes.

You don't need shoes.

You don't need industrial equipment or anything.

Yeah,

you definitely definitely don't need spare parts for industrial equipment you already have.

The thing is, Trump knows what his constituency is, which is gamers and posters.

And so, obviously, the price of graphics card or smartphone cannot go up.

Yeah, I was going to say, well, I found out about this because it was in the mechanical keyboard.

community because they don't have to seen this yes keycaps and switches under like certain specific definitions and it was very funny especially since i just switched to like a rubber dome keyboard because i'm not sure that would be really nice if the company that i uh was supposedly shipping me my keycaps last year ever bothered to do that.

Clearly, an early victim of the tariffs, I guess.

Here's the thing is, like, I deal with a lot, I know a lot of like retro-tech hobbyists and like the iPod parts scene specifically.

Like, nobody's getting the parts that they buy just because the Chinese companies, even though they're now exempt from the tariffs, just don't want to bother.

President Trump.

I was just about to buy an old.

oh man.

President Donald J.

Trump, I am willing to like praise you to the extent that you do what I want, just like anyone.

Please authorize drone strikes on

wait, no, I can't say that.

Please

please, please, please consider investigating the use of like all necessary federal responses against Aloha KB for their fucking biotech and firearm keycaps.

Because Because I really wanted them and I ordered them like fucking five years ago and they just didn't.

They've never shipped the fucking things.

So

I need my retro iPad iPod, please, because my Shenling M0 broke and I need a new digital audio player and I really want a nice iPod with a Bluetooth mod, please, Donald Trump.

This is the thing though.

You know, on the one hand, Ross, what do you want from the tariffs?

What do I want from the tariffs?

Use a tariff Santa.

Wow, he comes down the chimney and hands you a huge bill.

And you still have to give him milk and cookies.

A single lump of coal and then charges you $3,000.

The problem with this situation is either we have...

an insane economic collapse and all get cholera because water systems stop working because there's no spare parts.

Or Congress removes the president and then J.D.

Vance becomes president.

And

third option.

That is very.

I don't know which is worse.

Third option: national reunification, salvation government under General Mark Milley.

Yeah, all right.

What a random show.

Yeah, I'm sure you're all excited for the pro-woke junta.

I'll take a woke military coup i oh yeah

sure who gives a sure yeah it's just the the you know the new president comes on tv in uniform and is like all right four things thing number one politics is over no more voting thing number two the war in ukraine continues forever thing number three mandatory pronouns thing number four donald trump has been

you can't say that they're gonna yell at us and like

i you can't i i was listening to the bonus episode on Catholicism with my parents because I thought my dad would find it funny.

And I did really like Devin being like, I've been, listen, I've been, I've been playing pretty offhandedly with the

bonus episode, but you absolutely cannot say that.

So thank you, Devin, for making my mom laugh at me.

Yeah, thank you for saving us from ourselves so often.

Yes.

So, yeah.

Fucked.

Fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked.

Here to say,

you know, this is a piece of news.

We don't know what's happening anymore, folks and neither do you dickhead and neither do you we're all we're all completely out of touch with uh everything uh and that's fine and so is everyone else yeah they're not they're not calling it a black billowing cloud anymore they're calling it the airborne toxic event oh great band we're all floating uh in uncertainty

in a sort of comforting black toxic cloud

i will say it is nice to wake up and read a headline that's like

donald trump Trump hates everybody rather than just Donald Trump hates trans people.

That's true.

That's true.

It has been a pleasant shift to share in the misery that I have been experiencing non-stop for the past four months.

Yeah, no pronouns, but also no iPhones.

Again,

playermods.com.

If anyone on the Patreon wants to buy me this two terabytes of the 3,000 milliamp hour battery, please?

I'll take that.

It's 849 US dollars somehow.

The Aloha KB firearm keycaps looked really, really good, and then they just never shipped them

to blow up the three gorges damn.

No choice.

No option.

I just wanted a new mouse wheel for my nice mouse.

I can get you a new mouse wheel, but I have to wear the Terraf Santa hat.

I mean, like,

the MAGA Santa really rolls off the tongue.

The MAGA hat already is the same color as a Santa hat.

So if you just, like, embossed

like a Make America Grace again on the front of the Santa Santa hat.

Oh, God.

Let me.

This probably exists, yeah.

MAGA Santa hat.

Yeah, and auto-completed.

Yeah, it exists.

Oh, God.

Oh, that's one of the worst things I ever thought of in my life.

Thank you.

Speaking of worst things in other news.

I didn't mean it when I said blow up the three gorges damn.

If anything, like yes, she did.

Yes, she did.

I

feel shiplift and everything there.

I feel happiest when I'm lighting my American cigarettes with my Chinese matches.

Like, I just support, you know, both sides and doing whatever they're doing so long as it doesn't inconvenience me in any way.

Speaking of inconveniences,

a bunch of nodes of distribution and something.

It's a borderless network of transport and supply.

Yes.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But so, yeah speaking of uh the the british steel making industry is kind of just over at this point um yeah because what happened to you well we we had one remaining set of blast furnaces left uh which are these in scunthorpe um because we closed integrated steel mill yeah as opposed to mini mills that you know only pussies have this is a this is a the like last big big steel works that we have that still makes uh like virgin steel

like doesn't have any, like as many imperfections in it, isn't recycled steel because we closed the second last one in Port Talbot.

And that one just closed and like 2,000 people lost their jobs.

This one, the government stepped in at the last minute, except maybe too late at the last minute, because it's seeming like they're going to

renationalize British steel.

And, you know, that's great news for the next five-year plan and all the rest of it, you know.

Yes.

But chocolate rations are going up.

yeah exactly um but the problem is that uh so this uh this steel works was owned by uh like a chinese uh parent corporation that uh had basically realized that this is a completely uneconomical industry to be doing in the uk because electricity is really really expensive um and it's quite difficult to build things the and these are like old blast furnaces that have been running since the 50s um

they don't have uh there's no coal there's no iron.

There is coal, but they don't mine it anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, so they stopped ordering

the stuff that you need to keep the blast furnaces going, the coal and the

iron.

And in fact, actively started selling off some of the stock of them.

And so the government is now like

sort of forced their way in to they haven't renationalized yet, but to make them keep the furnaces on, but it may just be too late.

And

exactly how bad is it to have to restart a blast furnace is not a question I know the answer to, but much like how long is the transplant list?

I feel like it's a question that if you're asking, you're not in a good place in the, you know, in the first place.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would hazard a guess it's at least a couple of weeks.

The transplant list?

No,

the transplant list, I assume, is much longer than

starting the blast furnace.

You know, there's that, you got to do a lot of stuff when you're trying to start up a furnace that's that hot and that big, just so it doesn't like you know, accumulate moisture and then explode.

So, yeah, so we are like the taxpayer now, I guess, is losing 700,000 pounds a day on the steelworks.

Just because, like I say, it's uh their electricity bill went up like 120 million dollars, 120 million pounds last year.

Um,

and uh, it just

it it's it's this strange thing where we know on a headline basis or politicians seem to know on a headline basis that um it's you need some kind of steel making capacity right but have never invested anything in trying to maintain it or like i

i mean having a whole country without an integrated steel mill is embarrassing um you know that's that's just the long and short of it there it's like you know and you'll have no domestic steel production.

I'm

exactly right.

If you have no domestic steel production, that is embarrassing.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, you're third world now.

Yeah.

I mean, like,

I understand the deal is that we'll keep recycling steel

because they were trying to like move them from these blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces, which are a bit sort of like less carbon-y.

Yeah, well, that's again, because you're only recycling and you just add lots of electricity to scrap steel and you get new steel out of it,

you know, and a lot of sparks.

Big spark factory.

Yes, exactly.

That's true.

But yeah, so this is, this is maybe like the kind of capstone on a, you know, 160-year industrial legacy.

And, you know, it's cool if they are able to preserve the jobs.

I den know long-term about that.

And it's also striking that they intervened in this way to do this, but in Port Talbot, the last steel mill that shut down, which is in Wales,

you know, neither the Welsh government nor the UK government were that fast.

And, you know, like 2,000 people lost their jobs.

So I don't know.

It's real bad.

And I feel like this is all like a series of deep structural like wounds that are all kind of like, have all sort of combined to get us to this point.

Yeah.

And if you don't have steel, how are you going to fix the structure?

Well, structure,

yeah, exactly.

Yeah, how are you going to get all of the guys like hammering on the big I-beam to make the communism if you can't even make an I-beam anymore?

That's a good point, that's a good point.

Like, you know, none of us are going to have those building communism jobs if there's no steel to build communism out of.

It's the basic resource of communism.

I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump's tariffs are going to bring the steel industry back

everywhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What you want from Tariff Santa is a global steel industry thing.

I mean, it's also like just the kind of reciprocal of the Chinese steel industry doing very well and having, you know, therefore it's very easy to get a lot of cheap steel.

You just have to ship it from China.

Not just China, you know,

but places where it is cheap to make,

whereas it's very expensive here.

And so we're just kind of.

They've done this amazing thing in China that we don't really like to do in the West, which is every once in a while they go through and modernize the facility.

We don't even have to

we just turn them into apartment buildings and tourist tourist attractions here.

Yeah, exactly as opposed to or just running the same shit from 1950 for 70 years.

Oh, sure, yeah.

That's that that last one is the British way.

And specifically, like uh, this this thing of trying to get them to uh move to these electric arc furnaces,

the government was like, Okay, you're gonna get two of these furnaces, right?

Um, one in Scunthorpe, where the plant is now, uh, one in Teesside, um, and then we're gonna give you 500 million pounds to do that.

When the owners were like, this will cost 1.25 billion.

Um, and then they did just didn't get planning permission for one of them anyway.

So, uh, yeah, it's it's it's actually kind of illegal to build anything.

Um, so

you know, uh, that's why we need um

abundance, I guess.

Maybe, maybe everybody can have podcast jobs.

Maybe we can all, you know,

those are for me.

Those are for me.

You could have a little electric arc furnace in your backyard.

Yeah.

Right.

Right next to your

back nuke.

What?

We're upgrading everyone's electrical service to like 11 kilovolts.

Texas ain't having this business.

I love to just just stand near an electrical outlet and just get like arc flash vaporized instantly.

Just two boot prints on the floor, just scorch marks.

We are upgrading everybody's electrical capacity on the electrical glitter that is going to collapse.

Yeah.

I just, I, I feel like you need special gloves to access the breaker panel in your own house now.

I just feel like more and more Britain's economy is a game of workers and resources that has gone horribly wrong.

Yes.

Yep.

It's

going to have to shut down the steel mill.

Oh, shit.

We got too many people.

I can't afford to import the electronics anymore.

What we need to do...

Wait, shit.

I was going to do a joke about how I always play workers and resources, which is you just...

run like an oil field until you have more money than you know what to do with so that you can just do everything else because the oil industry runs without needing to move workers around and i don't understand how to do that So I just, I fuck up on all other parts of the map that's subsidized by an oil industry that runs itself.

That's what Britain did with North Sea oil.

Yeah.

We just did that.

It is a workers and resources game.

And Norway figured it out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The thing is, like, I come from like western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio.

Um, sorry to harsh the Philadelphia, but um, the whole everybody loses their jobs and the government doesn't have anything to do about it.

Is like that's the stories I've been hearing for my entire life because people just people just never stop talking about it.

And, you know, they voted for Donald Trump to bring their steel jobs back 40 years later.

So hopefully,

with any luck, the British people will get a Donald Trump of their own to destroy the British Empire finally.

Oh, yeah.

It'd be really funny to try and do all of the tariffs and to stuff, but we just don't have the economic power of the U.S.

We just, it'll be like Argentina.

We just bankrupt ourselves by being like, yeah, you know, 500% tariffs on China.

China does not notice.

Yes, but then you would get special White House visits.

Like, I don't actually know how his name was pronounced.

Mile.

Maybe Bukele.

Yeah.

No, that's Al Sarah.

Javier Mile.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, that's the, he's the prison guy.

Mile is the economics guy.

Yeah.

Well, in many ways, they're both the economics guy and both the prison guy.

Sure.

Yeah.

So I read about that from a guy called Michelle Foucault.

In many ways, a steel mill is like a prison, though.

Yeah, for real.

It's true.

So anyway, the lesson here is export oil.

I guess so.

Yeah.

I think the lesson here is split the atom, but to be honest, we don't even bother doing that.

I understand you can make money off of that if you import the raw uranium ore and then you build the factory, the various factories, and then you export the finished uranium fuel.

I've never tried it in the game, but you know,

I've heard it works pretty good.

You got to invest some research in first, though.

This is the dynamic.

This is the sort of dramaturgical dyad between me and you, right?

Is that you're a workers and resources level brain, and I'm a Tropico 4 level brain.

That's the kind of economics I'm capable of digesting.

I think that was the goddamn news.

That's right.

So, first, we must ask: what is Boeing?

I don't know.

Yeah.

I've seen this plane recently.

It's quite nice.

Paint the engines burgundy.

Yes.

That's one more sentence said by a sane person.

I mean, even if you didn't paint them at this point, they were like polished metal, which looks a lot better than carbon fiber.

No, not carbon fiber.

This is a flying conversation pit, and I love it so so much.

Oh, yeah.

This is Boeing 707.

Boeing is the company that makes some of the airplanes that you may fly around in.

They used to be headquartered in Seattle.

They aren't anymore.

We'll discuss that later.

I stand by the Comet episode.

No matter how many people it killed,

de Havilland was robbed.

It should have been us.

You should be flying on a plane named after some kind of astronomical phenomenon.

It should kill you and you should feel good about it.

Well, we have at least one of those things.

Yeah, yeah, but it's always kind of an imitation, you know?

Like, it's

it's not, it doesn't have the lunch pail kind of like meat and potatoes killing you that, you know, you used to have.

Anyway, so Boeing started.

I didn't put any notes down here.

I'm just going from memory.

Would you say you're Boeing from memory?

Boeing from memory, yeah.

Boeing from memory.

Thank you, Bio.

Thank you.

Take a drink, folks.

You're winging it, would you say?

Wow.

No, I wouldn't say that.

Get the gun out.

They started making airplanes before World War II.

They sort of got lucky eventually because they were headquartered in Seattle.

Seattle has a lot of cheap electricity from hydropower from the Columbia River, which meant a lot of aluminum factories set up up there because you got to use a lot of electricity to make aluminum.

Boom.

You can make great airplanes out of that because it's really light.

Boeing sort of with their 707, they really create like the modern, the first modern airliner.

And, you know, they've

iterated on the concept ever since.

You know, and they had, you know, eventually where we, you know, through a very long process of consolidation, we wind up with.

the current situation we're in today, which is, you know, you want an airliner, you get a Boeing or an Airbus or maybe an Embrera.

But I don't think

that's that's on the small end of the market, there's more people.

Big end, nah, just the two.

So, yeah, that's that's my very brief, incoherent history of Boeing.

That seemed pretty coherent to me.

Yeah, that's just about right.

They did the 707 and then they did the 747, and everything else has been some form of slot, pretty much.

Yeah,

just like you know, pressing the button to crank out another slight variation of the you know the 707 i'd love to defend the 757 but every time i've been on one it's just been the most horrendously bumpy flight i've ever been on this has also been true for me i still

if i if i'm booking a flight i'm usually booking a flight to seattle and if i fly through atlanta you'll sometimes get like a 757 and like that is exciting to me And it's bad when a 757 is the most exciting thing that an American airline can give me.

What's the tiny, tiny, tiny one, the little miniature Boeing?

Because that's kind of low-key my favorite.

That's a few things.

The 747 SP we talked about.

The 717?

I don't even know.

This is the thing.

I don't know my Boeing family at all.

You get a really tiny 737.

You could, but you haven't been able to do that for quite a few years now.

I don't know.

It is a 737.

That's the one that I I like.

The 737-100, technically?

Yeah.

They have not been built for 50 years.

Wow.

Well, you know, Nova lives in a different dimension than the rest of us.

I haven't flown in a long time

because of the transgender scans.

I was going to say because of woke, and then I realized it was the exact opposite of that.

It's because you're woke.

So it is true.

Because of woke.

That's true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the good news is I got my passport back and

I have the yearn to travel again properly.

So we'll see how long that lasts until it gets like trauma blasted out of me at some airport security somewhere.

Oh, no.

Got to go take the Euro star.

I don't know what security they do that.

Anyway,

what's secure?

What's your style?

Oh, fuck yeah.

That sucks.

Yeah, see, Amtrak is nice because they just let me walk on the train without anything at all.

They don't give a shit.

They have not checked my ticket the last couple times.

I don't know.

They don't think that's a good thing.

All right.

Anyway, that's a Boeing.

Here are more Boeings.

Here are more Boeings.

Oh, look, back when

paint liveries used to be, or plane liveries, there we go, used to be cool and good.

I feel real bad on this one for people who just listen to the podcast and start looking at the slides because give us that YouTube engagement nerds.

I mean, I like a livery,

but my problem as ever is

every airline designed a good livery in like 1965.

And then they made, this is something that I'm actually like socially conservative about is they designed a good livery once and then they kept changing it and making it worse.

And they should like, it's, it's always the thing where they're like, oh, we've introduced this like a special fun bonus PR activity.

We've gone, we've gone to like a throwback thing.

And it's like, if it's so good and fun, why didn't you keep it?

I would say the railroads also did something similar.

I think most stuff did something similar.

Like, you know, back when you could produce like a big graphic design book, like a corporate identity book, you know, you don't have that anymore.

You know, people put a lot of thought into the design of these things.

And now it's kind of like, I don't know, put a vinyl wrap of

swoosh or something on there.

Yeah, this, you know, you know what it is mostly that I think could fix all of this is if you went back to the kind of livery that gives the plane the kind of like black nose cone,

that would be a big deal for me because all of the ones that i like have that and now it's just like oh the stripes just like terminate there or whatever and yeah

as i mentioned earlier we need to go back to pacific southwest airlines thought big smile on the front big black nose like a friendly dog yep yep yep the plane should be more like a dog i don't i don't know why this is controversial it shouldn't be anyway I think this part is for Maya.

Yes.

So this is the regular Triple Seven, which is where we're going to get started today.

These four were like four of the original launch customers for it.

I only chose them because they're for the slide because I think the liveries look nice.

All of these were, you know, 1960s through 1980s and 90s logos, or liveries rather.

So, you know, lost art.

People tend to think I'm crazy about the United one,

but I stand by it.

The United one is good.

Yeah.

Yes.

I think a plane that is not just white is something that we've lost sight of.

And, you know, they don't do the bare aluminum either because planes are made out of too many things now.

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, like, people used to do this with cars as well.

And then,

like, people started thinking about resale value, much like airport, much like air, fucking hell, much like airlines did.

And so everything just became like white or silver

in a really generic way.

And it's like people used to have cars that came painted from the factory in colors other than white or silver.

Yes, red.

So my friend June, who's been on the podcast, got courtesy towed yesterday.

And I had to help her because she parked in a space and then that space, they did construction there.

So they moved her car to next location.

And I had to help her find it yesterday.

And I was just astonished, like trying to look at all the damn cars in the city.

There's like three kinds of car and like three colors of car these days.

It's all a crossover and they all hate you.

Cars suck now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, it's cheaper than ever and you can get more power than ever.

No, no, worries power words.

Shut the fuck up.

No, they're all they all look the same.

They're all identical.

They're white.

They're gray or they're black.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, it, it, car design now is so like

mono, like just monoculture in a way that's really grim and depressing.

Generic.

It's awful.

It's awful.

Anyway, it took about like an hour and a half of searching, but we found it.

Jesus.

And it was parked in a spot that was scheduled to be courtesy towed the next day.

Just getting your car sequentially express kidnapped.

Yeah.

Well, people have had like their cars impounded after being courtesy towed.

And then they have to go to court.

And the court says, fuck you.

We don't know that you didn't park it there.

Right.

Sure.

Sure.

Private towing is fascism, et cetera, et cetera.

I believe that.

I mean, there is one company making a car that looks different.

I believe it's called the Cybertruck.

Oh, it sure does look different.

It do look different.

That's true.

Different.

Parentheses, derogatory.

Anyway, this United livery is called, they call it the Battleship Gray, which is funny to me because the word battleship really pisses off my wife in particular.

And that's the only reason I find it funny.

Next slide.

So the Triple Seven started sometime in the mid-1980s to fill sort of a gap that existed in the Boeing product line because they had the 7.57 and the 767.

And, you know, those were both doing pretty well.

But like, if you wanted anything bigger than that, you had to get the 7.47.

Like, those are expensive, right?

Like, a lot of people doing like sort of like car salesman hard sell stuff and being like, yeah, a lot of airlines find themselves kind of intimidated about the prospect of owning a plane this cool

um so are you a bad enough there to rescue the seven

i don't think anybody's rescuing boeing or the 747 anymore

uh they initially started as like these trijet designs um which is another lost art of ours um

you know that has the

people but it sure is so good oh sure but like that that was that was just mcdonnell douglas's fault right Like,

the engine itself, except on United 232, which was another, we call that a callback.

It was another episode

of the,

except in, like, two specific cases.

The design itself has not killed anybody.

It was mostly there for her.

Excepting these two cases.

That's a lot of flights that went successfully.

Yeah.

Yeah, no one ever talks about when the planes don't crash.

Count the rings.

Look, I've flown on the max twice now.

I was fine.

Yeah, I'm sure you had a bully good time.

I didn't.

You were there.

I got to fly the max before they grounded them all.

That's really exhilarating to know in hindsight.

Yeah, the third engine was mostly a regulatory thing.

The FAA didn't want to let planes with two engines fly over an ocean.

This is pretty much all there is to it.

By the time the mid-60s rolled around, it wasn't actually planes, could get across.

Jet engines were reliable enough that they could cross an ocean with two engines.

It was fine.

But

the Carter and the Reagan FAAs said something to the respects of

no way in hell I will let a twin airliner cross the Atlantic Ocean, which is a really strange thing to have such an aggressive opinion on.

It's very dangerous.

I was going to say.

Okay.

It's one of those common sense things, right?

It's like, if you, what if you lose like both engines and then the opening of Bioshock happens to you?

Right.

I believe that's also why the Sella Express is restricted from using its tilting mechanism where it'd be most useful.

Or some similar insane decision.

It's so funny to me that

you can actually find examples of regulatory overreach or whatever if you bother to look, but

it's never the ones that conservatives worry about.

They're too busy like hunting down pronouns.

Yeah, they're trying to figure out a way to make child labor come back.

Right.

I looked this up.

It was, it was the, it was Reagan's FAA director who said, quote, it'll be a cold day in hell before I let twins fly over water routes, close quote, which is really funny because he cared a lot about safety in that respect, but did not care about it in terms of air traffic control, which is why, of course, they did the

Reagan FAA ruined air traffic control unions in this country.

Yes.

The final, as Hunter Thompson said,

the final dirty victory of management over labor when they broke the PATCO strike.

Well, and the thing is, like the

PATCO and the unions in general reacted so weakly to it that like it's what that's like why the White House is just saying they can end collective bargaining for all federal employees because they point at this precedent and go, look, they're not going to fight back too hard.

And like, they might be right about that, but it's bullshit.

Yes.

So I have a lot of opinions about labor, but that's a different podcast episode, I think.

So by

where was I here?

Yeah.

So these were the two of the first designs.

In the mid-80s, the FAA starts entertaining the idea of letting planes fly over water with two engines.

They eventually decide to, they call it ETOPS, E-T-O-P-S extended range

with an engine something.

It stands for engines turn or passengers swim.

Yes.

I was also going to say that.

Detail.

We've all heard the one joke about this.

So

by the time that they come out with that, Boeing ditches these designs entirely because they don't need to anymore.

Next slide, please.

I like having a TA-like person.

Next slide for me.

It's quite nice.

McDonnell Douglas had already started building one with three engines by this point, so they just said fuck it and kept doing it.

That was the MD-11.

It didn't do too well for a lot of reasons, but like you can probably guess the one because I think I just said it.

They used these for cargo for a while longer, didn't they?

They still do, actually.

Might just be in the US.

UPS and FedEx love them, but oh, yeah.

Because they got more power.

And they're cheap.

That's the more important thing there, yeah.

So like by

the later 80s, like every airline, every major airline has like a fleet of DC-10s or TriStars that are now very old and they would like to retire and get something nicer.

So there are two planes in the U.S.

that get shopped around for that.

One is the MD-11, pictured at the bottom right here, but also the

original 777, pictured at the top left.

Airbus also tries to shop the AP-30 around.

That doesn't really go anywhere.

People are still big on like,

you know, die by wire.

Every French person has great American

muscle plane.

Can't corner.

However,

on a prepped surface, this thing could really scream.

So

one thing to remember, one thing that's important about the MD-11 specifically was that a lot of its various designs and systems were both wildly cost-cut and outsourced extensively.

And the end result of that is the reason a lot of people give for why McDonnell Douglas gave up on making, well, commercial aircraft, but also gave up being a company.

Oh, dear.

Yeah.

Now,

they didn't go out of business.

That's going to be important later, as is the outsourcing part.

That's going to be very important later.

The MD-11, which I'm going to talk about for a minute because it is important, even though it may not sound like it.

I'm just going to talk about how bad it is.

Just a series, I show a slide about kicking the absolute shit out of this tri-jet here.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which is funny, which is a shame because I really like it.

It's really cute, but like,

stuck as a plane.

Yes.

American Airlines was one of the not they weren't a launch customer, but they bought them fairly early on because McDonnell Douglas told them it could fly from Dallas to Hong Kong non-stop.

That's odd.

That feels like a lie.

Well, it was.

They found that out immediately.

Oh, yes.

All right, I can't, I actually can't do it.

How did you find out?

Oh, well, it never showed up.

It's in the ocean.

We could see it from here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or just like every,

the entire like

sort of like passenger compartment of the flight coming out of Dallas, just throwing their 10-gallon hats on the ground.

And

they find out they're not going to make it.

We used to be Super Bowl champions.

The last time the Dallas Cowboys won a Super Bowl, my wife was not yet born.

So, yeah,

go, Eagles.

Go Birds.

In fairness, they were cooking with the throwing your hat on the ground to indicate your displeasure thing.

But then you got to pick up your own hat and dust it off, which sucks.

Where do you divert to?

That's what I want to know.

I don't like that nervous laughter is our answer to that.

It's like a bunch of

like Dallas business people landing in Usurisk.

What entire nation?

It's a disputed island between Japan and Russia.

So they go to McDonnell Douglas to ask what the hell, because the plane doesn't do what they promised.

McDonnell Douglas puts them on what they call,

I swear to God, I'm reading this from the documentation, they call it a performance improvement plan.

Like an employee?

Like you put an employee on that that is i've been pimped fuck you yeah

just like calling the plane into a mandatory meeting what would you say you do here

and the response is just a high-pitched jet engine one

the response is not fly to hong kong

I can't do high-pitched jet engine, but I can do R2D2, and I apologize to anyone who had to hear that.

So them and the engine manufacturer, who I did not write down, and I assume is probably General Electric, but I'm not sure off the top of my head.

Whole Motors Inc.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is buy not Rolls-Royce, buy twice.

So they

said they went back, they took like a year and a half.

They went back to American Airlines and told them that they had fixed the plane and said that to all their customers, but it still couldn't fly to Hong Kong.

So American just gives up and sells them all to FedEx for probably half what they paid for them like five years prior.

They got to have like a lemon law or something.

Yeah.

Lemon law for my big-ass plane, yeah.

Cash for clonkers.

1877 cars for planes.

So this was 1995.

So these were like brand new planes.

And to get a brand new plane converted directly to a cargo jet, that's that's not a good sign for your business if you are doing nothing but cargo aircraft it's also important to remember about boeing

um so in designing the triple seven boeing just started fresh completely and they came up with this twin engine design which the airline with a group of major airlines had input on i don't have the list in front of me but like the three major legacy american carriers were on there uh british airways was on there there was a couple of others functionally i'm i'm envisioning an airline version of like the um

the sort of like priests scene from Hail Caesar.

Right.

Trying to get all these different guys to agree on the nature of the airplane.

Families meeting for the mob, I think is what we're looking at here.

I'm imagining to make a sort of

airplanes release.

Sort of airline common turn.

All right, I fuck with the phrase airline common turn.

I just want to be on after the revolution.

I want to be on that.

Yeah.

It was the three of the major American airlines, the three that still exist, but like they weren't the only ones at the time, corporate mergers.

I pulled the list up: all Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines, American Delta United, Qantas, British, and Cathay Pacific.

So that's what?

The U.S., Japan, Britain, Australia, and Hong Kong, who are the major superpowers of the world.

Yes, Air Canada gets left in the cold.

It's true.

You guys are heard of Fire Eyes, but not for you.

They were in the cold to start out with.

It's Canada.

I died.

You're so cute.

Boeing tells them the design by like 1991-ish.

United immediately orders a shit ton of them.

American also does because they're really pissed off about the MD-11s.

Delta also gets it.

It's really hard to underestimate how mad they were that they got sold a plane.

This MD-11 revenge game, basically.

There are two companies that make planes at this point.

Nobody had heard of Airbus yet.

Right.

Except for.

I just got to use the bathroom.

I'm sorry.

I drank three cans of liquid.

So

I have five drinks in front of me.

So it's fine.

You amazed me, Maya.

All right.

But yeah, these were for me the like,

what the fuck is a kilometer years.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think by this point, the only airline.

I actually wrote about this and it's in the notes.

yeah, Airbus starts shopping the AP30 around like 1990 or so.

Uh, the only, I think, like, the only major American airline that had bought Airbuses by this point was like American trialed the A300s for a while, they didn't like them too much, so they didn't order more of them, but they flew them until like 2009.

Why does this plane keep calling me the R Slur?

They should have thought about that.

Northwest Airlines was, I think, the only other airline that bought a bunch of Airbus aircraft because they had like the oldest fleet in the country at that point.

Mostly DC-10s were the issue here.

So they bought a bunch of A320s initially, but they also bought a bunch of A330s.

Understandable to be like, we're new and modern if previous to that your Northwestern flight had been, we kick you out of a C-47, like it's D-Day.

It's funny, actually, because

they bought the new Airbuses, but they didn't get rid of most of their older planes until the 2000s.

And even then,

just like I could see daylight through the floor.

Even then, they kept a lot of them until they got bought by Delta, which is why

the DC-9s were built in the 70s and early 80s.

And I got to fly on one in like 2015,

which was a slightly fucked experience.

It was the most bare bones plane experience you can imagine, but it was interesting.

It was loud as hell.

I don't even remember where I was flying.

I just remember the plane was really loud.

Yeah, you started out being able to remember with that.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah.

Northwest bought some of them.

US Air

also bought a bunch of A330s.

Yeah, A330s, but that was mostly because Airbus gave them a good deal because they didn't didn't have a long-haul fleet at that point and they wanted to get a customer.

Um, I don't know any of the details of that.

I'm considering calling this kind of an educated guess, but like I could talk a lot about U.S.

airways, mostly because I hate them because I'm from Pittsburgh.

But

in any case,

see if I could, I could talk about that for a while.

And if I keep thinking, I'm going to get mad, so I'm going to move on.

The design of the plane you see at the top left was done by 1993, and they built it and finished it

April 9th, 1994,

which was almost 31 years ago, like four days ago, I guess.

Yeah, they created, they did it.

They created the perfect aircraft.

Yeah, they did.

They did actually create the perfect aircraft with this one.

It's the other ones, the other derivatives that are a problem.

It first flies in June, and they give it to a customer on May 15th, 1995, which the first airline that flies them is United.

It sort of becomes the flagship of United's fleet and also sort of like the American fleet.

Like the 747 was still out, but by this point it was kind of dwindling because we were gradually moving away from planes that big.

And as a matter of fact, they had actually gotten permission from the government to fly even longer than the original ETOPS specification.

ETOPS 180 was designed for with the triple seven in mind and all the new planes they built were certified with that.

The MD-11s weren't so that was not great for anybody.

Sorry, I'm just kicking the shit out of the MD-11 still.

It deserves it.

You deserve it.

You're the best.

McDonnell Douglas deserves it at least.

That's true.

In 97, Boeing launches the 777-200 extended range, which is just the same version of the original plane that can fly longer.

They also do the 777-300, which is longer and has more people in it.

And

by,

I use the end of the millennium as the standpoint here.

We're going to go back in time a couple of years.

It'll make sense.

By the end of the millennium, Boeing delivered 261 777s and had another 177 they were building.

over a million total flight hours, like a 99% dispatch reliability.

This was this was the perfect plane.

This seems like it's going well.

Right.

I was going to say, like, so what I do have a question because I don't really know anything about commercial aviation other than I hate flying.

Sure.

What's the average, like, not order size, but like, I understand there are variants, but like it sounded like they had about 400 planes either delivered or sort of like in the in the oven.

Yeah.

And that's, is that normal?

Is that a lot?

Is that a little?

That, that is, well, for a longer haul aircraft like that nowadays, that would be considered.

That would be considered a reasonable amount of total overall planes, orders, and deliveries.

Right.

It's kind of a low amount of orders compared to like modern long-haul aircraft, but that's because everybody got worse at building planes, not because of anything else.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing that I want to say here is that, at least to the best of my knowledge,

there has never been a fatal accident on a triple seven attributable to like a mechanical failure.

Other than MH370.

We don't know what happened there.

Yes,

They should print that on the outside of the plane so I'm less nervous getting on one.

In

the MH370 bit.

This is God's own airplane.

This is the greatest commercial airplane ever.

You hate planes.

Yeah.

Well, no, you like an S1011.

You're like, this is the solution to the problem of plane.

Yeah, what if you just made the plane really good?

Okay, yeah, but here's the thing.

You would still refuse to fly on it, but

I'll spend more time reading the Alpha when I see a triple C.

Yeah, but you're never happy flying, is what I mean.

So, like,

because it's usually like eight hours transatlantic and miserable.

I was going to say,

my girlfriend once flew a triple seven from like Newark, New Jersey, to I think Shanghai and got diverted.

Jesus fucking Christ, that sucks.

Well, no, got diverted to the middle of nowhere, freezing Canada.

Gardner?

Not

Gander.

Goose Bay.

Gander.

Okay, so we're up there.

Yeah.

Yeah, Goose Bay.

This is a funny story because this is just a funny story that she likes to tell.

But like Canadian immigration wasn't open at the airport, so nobody could actually go anywhere.

The crew timed out.

Basically,

they all had to stand around negative five degrees for like 20 hours or some figure like that.

And it's, but like, it didn't kill anybody.

Yeah, so

it's not the plane that doesn't inconvenience you.

Yeah.

Here's the, yeah, yeah, here's the thing, right?

This is the case for like every aviation geek out there is that you, you love the plane, but you don't like to fly on it.

Yeah, I will say I actually had one of the only pleasant transatlantic flights on a triple seven because I was booked in a row that had no one else in it.

Oh, I've done that, yeah.

And I'm just like, oh, you know, I don't have actually, I'm turning my webcam on just for this.

Oh, God.

Oh, yeah.

Hey, Twitz, bring me two martinis.

Well, no, I was too young to drink, unfortunately.

Oh, funny, I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

But what I did do was I read Catch 22 cover to cover for the first time.

Oh, you had a good flight.

That was a really good flight.

It was also during the daytime.

There was no turbulence.

It was fantastic.

It's a rare flight experience these days.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've only flown a Triple Seven from like Toronto to Tokyo, which is kind of a weird route.

But it was rather smooth.

And the

pre-landing snack was cup noodle.

So ultimately, I'm not complaining about that.

That sounds pretty good.

Yeah, it was pretty good.

I mean, like, 13-hour time difference is fucking crazy, but that's a different problem.

That sounds like it's hooks.

Yeah, it did.

But the cup noodle sounds like way better than the standard airline fare.

Yeah, yeah.

This was Air Canada.

So, like, we're obviously

still in North America.

We're out of the U.S.

and are like worst airlines on Earth, but we are still in North America.

Yeah, they take away the poutine.

They give you the cup noodle.

It's about right, actually.

So basically, basically, the triple seven was a very good plane, and the MD-11 was very comfortable for customers, but the airlines hated it.

Yeah,

so the previous slide, like patting the triple seven on the nose and like bopping the MD-11 with a newspaper.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Spraying it with the spray bottle.

And also then the MD-11 like killed a bunch of people with the Swiss air flight, which was considered a mechanical disaster until we found out it was the in-flight entertainment system, system, which Boeing didn't build.

But the what?

I mean, not to kind of like preempt a future episode.

This is watch the wings fall off.

Yeah, this is the terror that I have.

It's like,

I'm going to select the wrong movie, and one of the engines drops off.

I will give as brief a rundown on this as I can.

So, Swiss.

Okay, so say no more.

Say no more.

That's the future episode.

Dev, if you could just like play some mood music over that for a second.

Thank you so much.

I can come back for that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so the MD-11 was considered kind of a failure for a lot of reasons.

That was one of them, even though it turned out to kind of be fake, but whatever.

At least in terms of McDonnell Douglas's problem, I said Boeing earlier.

That was wrong.

How dare you?

Oh, execution.

Sorry, Maya.

That's okay.

That's okay.

That's okay.

That's okay because that's a good segue.

Next slide, please.

Oh, no.

1997, McDonnell Douglas has a commercial airline or airplane division that is failing and a defense division that is absolutely fucking massive from every from every respect.

And this is the thing.

If you're kind of in the civilian airliner business and the

military aircraft business, and your tagline for both is, we'll kill you.

That's only going to work if there's a sales pitch for one of them.

It's true, yeah.

Um, Boeing was on a bit of a corporate buyout for you by this point.

Uh, they're like, I will, I will have the McDonnell Douglas will kill you t-shirt on sale by the time this goes out.

Yeah, let me know.

I, I, I, uh, I can help you commission that.

I don't know if it's commissioning if it's us doing it, but yeah, well, no, I would like to commission a little illustration of an MD-11 with the like uh third engine just flying off the you know

i was gonna say i i did i've done shirt designs for you guys i could do that but i can't make the plane explode unfortunately

uh boeing has fucking billions of dollars and don't aren't sure what to do with it so they just start buying out everybody yeah meet me when i start buying planes because i'm bored yep

They buy North American aviation from Rockwell.

That's mostly a defense company.

I think it was entirely a defense company by this point, actually.

This is the bit where they kill all of the beloved names that were last heard of when your great-grandpa was flying against a Japanese carrier air group.

Where you're like, oh man, not Chance Vought or whatever.

And to be clear, I love that shit.

But

this is this is just like

the Macy's of airplanes.

It's true, actually.

Yeah,

if you have to use a sentence like airplane is what you could call an institution.

We might be struggling a bit here.

Oh my god.

You summon McDonnell Douglas to dying.

Do I want?

We'll kill you.

It's just a real like Apollo 13, like a motherfucker with the shirt sleeves and the pocket protector and the crew cut being like, we'll kill you.

Then I'll walk home directly in a straight line.

I like the Macy's metaphor, actually.

That's pretty funny because

you have one of the Philadelphia department stores that got bought up by them completely, but also they did that to Kaufman's on this side of the estate.

So it's relatable to both of the Pennsylvanian experiences.

Oh, yeah.

And then, you know, Wanamakers was, you know, when they were under United department stores, at least they let them keep the brand.

And then Macy's came in and was like, no, fuck you.

Yeah, they did.

A couple of weeks ago, they closed down

the Center City store.

And who knows what's going to happen to the organ.

Anyway.

uh,

yeah, so Boeing buys North American, they also decide to buy McDonnell Douglas,

um,

which

and you know, this is this gave them like a not a monopoly, but it gave them a pretty powerful foothold in the defense, like a controlling interest in defense contracts.

I don't appreciate that they've lined up the two planes then side by side, they should be facing each other like they're like kissing.

Oh, yeah, that's true, actually, yeah.

So the

yeah, they have a large, not monopoly, but close to it on defense aircraft.

The only other major contractor is like Lockheed Martin,

which

not as big at this point in history.

Anyway,

but they have a skunk works in Boeing, doesn't it?

That's true.

Yeah.

They also did the Blackbird, which makes them much cooler than anything Boeing could ever be.

We don't even know what part of Boeing smells bad.

Yeah.

I have been to the main assembly, assembly, to the assembly plant in Everett.

I can assure you that it does smell, that it smells bad there.

Actually, okay, I'm going to brief sidetrack because I mentioned that, but my favorite part of that tour was the tour guide at one point is showing us the 7.6 assembly line or what of it, or what there is of it.

And our tour guide, who is like this,

who is this.

Who is this transgender twink holding a can of

monster?

Oh, yeah.

I love Washington.

Points to an aircraft on the assembly line and says that it's bound for Air China.

Then I look at it and it has the China Airlines logo on the side of it.

Which is, you know, that's a geopolitical problem who just started there.

Yeah.

Ah, one of them.

Yeah.

Boeing does support the one China policy.

It's just not going to say which one.

Good enough.

Yeah.

It was, they actually had an exhibit in the little, in their like head house for guests that was like Boeing in China 50-year anniversary.

and it had like the red, the red stars graphics, and everything.

It was incredible, it was a little weird.

Um,

so the board of directors of the merged uh Boeing McDonnell Douglas Company was largely largely consisted of the McDonnell Douglas board at this after this.

Um, and

once 2003 comes around, they would actually replace the CEO of Boeing with the CEO, former CEO of McDonnell Douglas.

The master plan: make a bad airplane, yeah, and then

like a a grub, like a worm, like a like a like a sort of like cordyceps, you infiltrate the more successful company.

Yeah.

Yeah, now I understand that all y'all have been making very good airplanes here, but

have you considered making bad airplanes?

So this is the point that most people point to for when Boeing starts getting bad is when they move from Seattle to Chicago, which was 2001.

And now they're in Crystal City, right?

Yeah, not yet, but they will be.

Oh, crap.

God, no one should be there.

Just demolish the neighborhood, put the Potomac Yard back up.

Yes.

Straight down.

I wrote an article about this, which is where the idea for the slide deck came from.

But

Boeing moving to be very close to the Pentagon is very on brand.

Yeah.

Also interesting from a business standpoint because like, I'm going to talk about this in a minute, but like, their commercial business, their commercial business now is interesting to look at.

As a matter of fact, I have this written in the notes here because it's relevant now.

Because in the year 2000, the commercial, Boeing commercial airplanes, their portfolio was the 737 Classic and Next Generation.

They made both of them.

Those are the 300, 400, 500, and 600, 700, 800 variants.

They're very common.

They got to give them names.

It's giving me a headache.

They're very common.

If you've flown Southwest, you know what a triple you know what a 737 next gen looks like yeah they had the 7.47 which was on the 400 variant by this point uh they had the 7.57 and the 7.67 and the triple seven and they were still building md11s uh just the freighters and they were building the 717

which was

which was known as the the mcdonnell douglas md95

when it was being developed, but then Boeing bought out the company and most people thought they were going to kill the project because it

it fills the same market.

And he says the 737, they didn't, and I don't think we really know why.

Why have one when I could have two?

It seems like, you know, if I want, if I were an airline and I needed some airplanes, I could go to Boeing and I could get a wide variety of different aircraft, which were all very good.

Yes, you could go to Boeing and you could buy a Boeing, or you could go to Boeing and buy a McDonnell Douglas.

So, you know, that's

a

a wide variety.

Show me the bad planes.

Yeah, actually, can I get a bad plane?

Oh, sure.

Can you show me to the bad side of the lot?

Yeah.

What can I do to put you in a McDonnell Douglas today?

The 717.

I'm going to buy it right off the lot.

Boeing has kind of done that before, but regardless.

Well,

the 737 MAX, where they had all of them parked like a fucking car dealership lot, as quite famously seen in pictures, and also later in the slideshow that I forgot I included there.

Yeah, the 717, I don't know why it existed.

Delta loves them.

I kind of like flying on them because I like the t-tail, you know, the ones with the engines at the back.

They're loud, but they're fun.

They can stall in exciting ways.

They can.

That's true.

There was that one regional flight that the two regional pilots took up to 50,000 feet,

like a jackass stunt, and then crashed it.

Just

flying with either of you sounds like a nightmare because as we're about to get on, I'm craning my neck to read the reassuring text.

And then one of you claps me on the shoulder and goes, hey, did you know that this can stall in an entirely new way?

Well, that last one I was talking about didn't kill any passengers, just the two pilots, which just kind of...

That was like a ferrying flight, right?

And they were, um, they were just like, oh, let's see what it can do.

I believe they literally said that actually.

Oh, brutal.

It was a CRJ.

So, if you ever, so it was also a tiny plane.

So, additional suffering there.

You are dying in the smallest plane imaginable.

I don't want to do that.

It was like the one that flipped over, the Delta one that flipped over in Toronto earlier this year, but like even smaller because it was an older one.

Um,

okay, that's the end of the McDonnell Douglas slide.

So, next slide.

Starting in, back to the triple seven specifically,

starting in 1997, they would start designing what they called the second generation of triple seven models, which were the, they wanted to extend the range of the 200, or they, they wanted to extend the range of both of them, basically.

The code name for this project was the triple seven-X, which is not to be confused with the triple seven X that is the main subject of this slideshow.

This is a different different X.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Here on X, the everything plane.

It's true.

They were also building the 747-X and the MD-11-X had been in development.

I don't know.

There's a bit of an Elon Musk thing going on here.

I don't quite understand it.

It stands for exciting ways to die.

It's true.

These planes were fine, though.

You probably were not going to die on it.

Shut up.

Shut the hell up.

The 777-300X, which became the 300 ER, which you're looking at now, thank God.

They launched that in 2000.

They launched the Dash 200 LR long range in 2005.

I don't actually quite know why they called it that off the top of my head.

ER is extended range and LR is

LR is long range.

I don't know the difference, though.

Well, is it like an EP versus an LP?

I mean, that's the only thing I could really

think of.

And I forget which one is longer.

An LP is longer, yeah.

The LP, yeah, an LP is like a is usually like a full 12-inch album.

Ah, okay.

Um,

I'm actually going to look this up real quick on the range because I'm vaguely curious.

Okay, so the triple seven, so the 200 ER extended range can go 7,065 nautical miles, which is uh 8,130 miles.

Um, there's a kilometers number as well, that's not important.

That's not real.

It's not a real measurement.

Yeah.

The long range one can go 8,555 nautical miles or 9,845 miles.

So, yeah, the long range is longer than the extended range.

I'm not sure.

I don't know.

I'm quite confused here.

And I'm the one that wrote the slides.

That feels like about as long as I need to go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think I need to go longer than that.

Yeah, because this is what this, I'm trying to remember.

I think this is what Singapore Airlines used for their like 28-hour routes for directly to the U.S., which they don't fly anymore.

Yeah, that sounds like hell.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, they don't fly it anymore for a good reason.

Also, it was very expensive because why wouldn't it be?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

These second-generation aircraft are also perfectly normal planes with no major issues and were popular with the airlines loved them as well.

Can't say anything bad about them.

They have a the code name was very stupid, but otherwise that's pretty much it.

By the time the 200LR enters service, though, it's still a 10-year-old design.

So, you know, they got to get started working on

the replacement for them, by which I mean a derivative because Boeing doesn't build anything new anymore.

Right, yes.

With the exception of the next slide, which was to replace the 767 and also try and claw back the market share they had lost to the A330 very rapidly.

Even in the U.S., notably, but also in Europe.

You know, U.S.

Airways and Northwest were both major airlines by this point.

And the A330, you could train their crews on the cockpit of an A320, and they could also use the cockpit of an A330.

It saved money for everybody.

So suddenly, the Europeans are rather popular with airlines in the U.S., with the exception of those that want to preserve their American-only heritage, which at the time was a concerning amount of them, like trying to think.

In the mid-2000s, United, Delta,

Alaska, and American, except for one type of plane, were all Boeing only because they were in the U.S.

And we have civic pride here.

Yes.

This is true.

I mean, you know, there's nothing we love more than a monopoly.

It's true.

American.

Yeah, it's patriotic to be a,

what's that called?

A corporate corporatocracy.

Whatever they show.

Yeah, whatever they ran in the Nouveau Estad in Portugal.

Corporatist.

Yeah, sure.

Hey, don't be sassy.

To be fair, we also bought most of our regional jets from Canada, so it was

more like a NAFTA corporatocracy than what, you know, that the 51st state.

That's true.

I shouldn't even say that.

No.

Oh, God, the pain.

So to replace the 7.5 and 7.6 and try to beat the shit out of the A330, they do the 7.87.

They launched that in 2003.

It's pictured here in the last good airline livery.

Air China.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's just like because they designed it once and it was good and they stuck with it.

That's how communism works.

That's right.

Yeah.

They've never had to rewrite Das Kapital.

I know.

No.

Marx did, in fact, consider this.

Yeah.

No, that's always what happens when you read the books.

It's like, oh, no, Marx did think of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Boeing 777X, it's in there.

So the fucking moon in the sky?

Nah, that's in there, too.

Hang on.

I got to clean my glasses.

Okay, we're good.

Whenever they announce this, by the time they announced the 787, the CEO of Boeing is the old CEO of McDonnell Douglas that oversaw the MD-11 development.

So

Boeing management tells engineering to build it for less than 40% of the cost it took to develop the triple seven and target construction costs at like 60% of what it costs to build the triple seven.

So, you listen, guys,

I know you guys built the perfect airplane, God's own airplane.

I was sucked, though.

The pinnacle achievement of human civilization, but could you do it a lot cheaper?

This is this is very like Soviet decision-making, you know, to respond to the good thing by being like, well, it's very expensive.

It's very expensive to do this well.

What if we did it really bad?

Bad and cheap.

Hell yeah.

Could do an episode on Soviet airliners.

Actually, that would be an interesting one.

That would be a fun one.

You've talked about the 144, the Concorde knocked off before, if I remember right.

Yes.

Yeah.

Very, yeah.

That was only like a couple slides, though, probably do a whole one on that, yeah,

you could do a lot of the a lot of the Russian planes you can, um, which is which is funny because you know, aeroflot is like we're going to an all-Russian fleet in five years whenever they have one Russian plane in their fleet right now.

It's very funny.

I was about to say, yeah, those uh, the Illusion is not making too many planes right now, I understand.

Yes, and uh, I don't think Antonov is gonna work with them

Antonov mostly needs to work with themselves and stop getting executives arrested for not flying the big boy out.

Well, they can't.

They blew it up.

Well, yeah, but

they didn't fly it out beforehand.

And

the Ukrainian government was very unhappy about this.

I don't quite know.

I think everyone was unhappy about it.

Well, yes, but

the Ukrainian government arrested them for it.

I'm not quite sure of the details there.

It seems a little strange, but it was a cool plane.

Somebody deserves to be punished for that.

I need to know more about this now.

Yeah, yeah,

this is very interesting.

Okay, they have three Russian planes in their fleet right now, but none of them are long.

They have two

Yakovlev aircraft, and they have ordered some of the Tupolevs that the North Koreans fly.

I think only like Cubana has a Soviet-wide body at this point.

I think that's true.

They have,

what was it, the IL-96 and 86 were like the, those were the big Soviet designs.

Cubana has the 96, but I think that one's technically Russian.

Yeah, because it was 1992.

But it was a Soviet design.

Anyway, it doesn't matter.

It's a plane that also isn't very good.

Yeah, it's like four engines, right?

Yes.

Yeah, they didn't have E-Taps in the Soviet Union.

It looks like a

S-Ops and Soviet parliament stands for engines turn or pilots shot.

Anyway,

back to my topic.

So

they cut the costs of the

design and construction costs of the 787.

It gets delayed 787.

It gets delayed a bunch of times.

It was considered like a long and ridiculous delay at the time.

Not really anymore in hindsight.

and I mean, the whenever these planes did finally start existing, it was like 2011, and they were mostly fine, except they would catch fire sometimes, but nobody died.

It was only it only ever happened on the ground.

Um, that was an okay plane at the time.

Um, so once they launched that, management takes a step back and realizes, oh, this A320 thing has started to become a bit of a major problem.

Yes, um,

that's very, very popular with airlines in the U.S.

And they had also announced the re-engine version, the A320 Neo family.

You know, the A321 NEO is like what Delta sticks me on every time I need to fly to Seattle now.

It's kind of a boring aircraft.

I don't like it too much.

I also don't like it very much.

Yeah, it's not the worst thing in the world.

Every time I've gotten on one, the Seatback Entertainment has had I Saw the TV Glow, and I've watched it, I think, every time.

God.

I genuinely can't imagine watching that movie more than once.

When I'm on an airplane, I always watch the same movie, which is airplane.

That's true.

This is reasonable.

Yeah.

So

the A320 Neo family is quickly like the quickest selling airliner of all time, period.

We're in about 2011 by this point.

Those are projected to start flying like in the mid to late 2010s.

Eventually, they wake up after American Airlines places an order for like a billion of them.

And they're like, oh shit,

that's our best company.

We can't do that.

So then they start working on a re-engine version of the 737, which takes us to the next slide.

That was, of course, the 737 MAX.

Yes.

Plane that needs no introduction.

This is always a confusing one because you would think, okay, maybe you at least start.

with the newer airframe, the 757.

And no, no, we're just going to do another 737, guys.

Yes.

You know,

just because it's like

a million years old.

They really wanted to make a well, there's your problem episode.

And they did.

And who could blame them?

Yeah.

Just because people who were, when this airframe was designed, there were still people who were alive who shook the hands of Ism Bard Kingdom Brunel.

It's probably not accurate, but

there's Brunel looking at this and it's like, where do you keep the giant lengths of chain?

Where's the coal bunker?

Sure it to me.

So, the 737 Max pictured here,

don't ask why they're all lined up like that,

goes very well for them and is never the center of controversy ever again.

There's never been a problem with a 737 episode 13, baby.

Yeah, I was going to say, which is why it's been on, it was on one of the first episodes of this podcast.

I believe that was episode 12A.

12A, that's right.

That was like six years ago now.

So, yeah.

So after they introduced, after they create God's greatest 737 that will never do any wrong,

which I'm not going to spend any time on because I could for a long time, but I'm not going to.

After they do that, their executives come together and realize, oh, we're also getting our asses beat by the A350,

the wide-body sort of triple seven competitive Airbus aircraft,

which you know, it had been, that had been like announced, trying to think, I think it had been announced in like 2006.

and most and they had gotten and like the triple seven had narrowed down to very few orders by this point whereas the a350s were getting ordered by like hotcakes sorry I'm like it's yeah it's like live by wire now it's true yeah sorry I had to I had to look up the table yeah

get your airplanes airplanes here

get them on a stick this is

so if you look at the development of new aircraft it will they will usually be unveiled at like the Dubai air show and they will usually and they will usually be and usually like Boeing or Airbus executives will be like flanked by CEOs of like Emirates and everybody who is ordering a shit ton of these.

I hate when I order an airplane at the ballpark and they throw me the airplane and it enters a Fugoid cycle and lands on somebody's lap like two rows down.

It's true.

He's there with the CEO of Turkish Airlines and also Eric Adams.

The A350 is a plane I don't have much to say about.

They replaced the old interfluge A310s that became the German Air Force One.

So I'm a little annoyed about that, but otherwise it's fine.

It was so cool that German Air Force One was full of rats and was built by communists.

That's genuinely true.

It was called Conrad Adenauer, and it was full of rats.

It had rats.

There were rats in there.

And Merkel was like, Why are there rats in my plane?

Please get the rats out of my plane.

And they're like, we cannot.

This was something that we got from the East Germans.

Yeah,

Interfluge wanted to stop buying Soviet aircraft with the softening of relations and all.

So they bought the A310 and got two of them and then ceased to exist like a year later.

There's a lesson there, isn't there, about revisionism.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

What they should have done is put cats on the airplane.

Oh, I love cats.

That would have taken care of the rats.

That's true.

And then, then, maybe you get like a cat problem, but that's fine.

You know, that's just

great to have a cat problem.

Yeah, exactly.

Fuck you.

Get on German Air Force One and you're like, Where does it smell like cat in here?

Why is everything covered in cat fur?

There's cats all over the plane.

Yeah, they're not going to chew through the wiring.

It's fine.

That's true.

No, they might.

Toby's real stupid.

Oh, my God.

He took a shit on top of the autopilot controls.

So, yeah, after the 737 MAX launches, the executives have to go back.

So they put their greatest minds together.

And in 2013, they had come up with, next slide, the next generation of the 777, instead of anything actually new,

was the 777X.

Well, it was the 7779X and the Triple 78X.

I think these people just like less as a numbers at this point.

Like, you built a composite aircraft.

just iterate on that.

I, I don't know, we're going to go back to a 20-year-old airframe.

I don't know why they've done a kind of like faux, like Junkers corrugated fuselage thing here.

This is that's just like the regular Boeing livery now, which is ugly as shit, but I don't really know.

It's supposed to evoke real American manufacturing, like the Bud Company.

Evokes patriotic American Hugo Yunkers.

Say what you want about Bud, but they didn't build the Horizon rail cars.

Yeah, that's true.

That was Pullman Standard.

And

I should have put that in the goddamn news.

Oh, shit.

But yeah,

whatchamacallit.

Yeah, all those Bud cars are still going.

Where are the Boeing planes?

That's right, in a boneyard.

Maybe if they did try corrugating them for real.

I don't know.

You put some stainless steel fluting on the outside of the plane.

This is my, it's it's a new thing.

Make the thing more rigid, but also corrugate it.

Yes.

So

they announced this.

They like sort of soft launch this in 2013 or so.

It doesn't get formally announced until like 2015.

It's written on there, September 2015.

Notably, this is because, as far as I can tell, it took them two years to find a company to order them.

Just like

we gotta, we gotta find some kind of rube willing to buy our stupid aircraft and into the room walks.

Hey, guys, what if you wanted an old plane, but it was new?

It's like a throwback, except, you know, bad.

It's true.

You pay the price of like a fully new aircraft, but for an old design.

There are actually some really funny names in the list of people that ordered this, but it's relevant later, so I'm not going to say it now.

Rubia number one, though.

hunter yes yes the germans are the first ones um

i'm honestly not really sure why but then again they still fly the 747 and i'm honestly not really sure why so just pre and post reunification both both like both germany's and the reunified germany all making really weird aircraft purchasing decisions yeah yeah they still fly the a380 even which is i want to i was going to say very strange for a european airline but british air no british airways does but they're not a European airline.

No, I can say that.

Because of Brexit, yes,

but eliminated from the continent.

Sorry, I can't remember.

Air France might still fly some more, but I'm not going to make fun of the French right now.

That's something for later.

So they announced the launch order with Lufthansa, and they promised that they'll reveal more at the Dubai Air Show.

I didn't realize I'd written that down earlier whenever I said that earlier, but

hi, it's Justin.

Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

Uh, people are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

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Back to the show.

They had introduced the aircraft in 2013, but it did take them like two years to find somebody to buy it, to order it.

That's brutal.

Yeah.

Please, somebody.

Anybody?

You guys have heard of

this new airline.

We're calling it

Neo.

Neoab.

Well,

back

whenever we first got ant like anti-monopoly laws before that uh boeing and united airlines were the same company um you can't do that anymore you can't do that anymore in this country um and notably of course united did not buy this plane oh that's brutal

um

that this was this was like the 30s uh they also had the United Technical Corporation, the one with the weird logo.

Anyway.

Oh, good, the UTC.

So by 2015, they have

something in terms of like a timeline, and they have these renderings.

All of them are in like this red livery that I've shown you.

None of them are actually painted in that for some reason.

That's a better one.

I kind of like the red.

Yeah, I mean, it's better than the blue that they eventually use, which is like the standard Boeing one, but I don't know.

It's weird.

They use the red on the 77, I want to say on the 747, I'm not sure.

Like the 747-8.

So

they're showing this two airlines.

This form you can see here.

I can't draw around it, but it's from the Paris Air Show

that year.

They are handing this out to industry dipshits, anybody who really wanted one.

Please buy our plane.

So by this point,

they're looking to introduce this plane in 2020.

Sure.

After a mere seven years.

Yes.

Yeah.

We'll come back to that.

Hang on, Bryn's calling me.

One second.

Okay.

Now it's just the two of us.

Cool.

Keep going.

Yeah, sure.

Sure.

They show off.

They show this off.

It's the finalized design they start showing off around late 2015, early 2016-ish.

It is specifically designed to compete with the A350.

It can also be long enough to compete with the 747, which is.

Yeah, and it just comes in any length you want.

You want it just like the tail butting right up against the back of the wings, we can do that.

Yes.

You want it like a mile long?

We can do that too.

aerodynamics never heard of them so that it's actually funny because it was kind of it's kind of it was too big of an airplane in its original design and as a result it had to have it it was classified with like all of the the 747 and the a380 in planes that need like extended facilities and hangars

um they would come up with a novel solution for this which is on the next slide so i won't spoil it especially since i can't switch slides i'm back it was about golf oh hell yeah i was being called about fucking golf.

Incredible.

Phenomenal.

And it's truly insane.

What did I miss when I was out for those 30-second?

The triple 7X is a variable length from three feet long to infinity.

Yes.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

All right.

That fucks.

All right.

I like it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Big accordion playing.

It just like extends out like the bellows on an old camera.

Yeah.

And it makes that noise, too.

Oh, that's crazy how it does that.

I got to get one of them cameras that does the

bellowing.

I'm sick like this now.

I only shoot the cheapest film cameras you can imagine, so that would be an interesting departure from form.

Uh, so, anyways, this is this is as far as Boeing is concerned, this is uh triple seven X, the everything plane.

Oh, God.

Wow.

We were really leading up to that one.

Um, so, anyways, it's designed to compete with the A350, which is obviously never going to do because the A350 has about a decade-ahead start.

And also, the 7

to replace the 747s, which it's also never going to do because that's stupid.

Like,

it's a one-story aircraft, but it's really long.

It's not super great in terms of like maintenance and things because you have to build it with the wings, and you have to build it off the ground.

It looks like it's having a tail strike in the image that they're using.

This also is not the longest one.

This is the triple seven nine.

Jesus Christ.

You know, they should.

Clearly, what they should do is start to segment it into like flexible, you know, different airplanes and just chain them all together.

Yeah, no, yeah, exactly.

Like a bendy plane.

Yeah.

Or just like a train in the sky.

What is

a plane, but a yeah.

Yeah, sky train.

That's uh, yeah.

That's what the C47?

Anyway, yeah.

They, um,

so they, the, the really long one, the triple seven 10, uh, X10, 10X, Jesus fuck.

Um,

listen, I'm not doing that.

I'm losing the ability to count at this point.

So these are, I need, I really need them to do a new plane.

Um,

they're they're they're not going to build that unless any, unless there's interest in it.

Uh, zero orders have been placed for it so far.

Doing it as like a crowd-funded, like a kick-starting my Boeing.

Oh, that'll be the, uh, that'll, when we get really big and we can afford a, you know, a big jet like fucking Iron Maiden, we'll get a triple seven ten.

Uh, one airline, like in the future, uh, Singapore tells them that they might be interested, but I think Boeing tells them that they're not just gonna build it for the one airline, so they just kind of don't order it.

Um, I also don't really know why Singapore airlines would want them.

It's kind of a pity order.

Maybe they have height restrictions at the airport.

No, because they fly.

Singapore has the A380 still, I think.

I might be wrong about that.

They hate them if they still have them, but they might.

Yeah, they do.

So

whatever that is.

When the Dubai air show comes around, which is November 2015,

Boeing announces orders from Emirates, who orders 150,

Qatar Airways, who orders 50, and Ethiod.

Ethiod, I'm never really been been sure how to pronounce that.

They ordered 25, and several other airlines ordered smaller ones.

You'll notice that all of those are like Middle Eastern Gulf Coast operators,

famously very responsible with their money.

This will continue to be important.

You gotta recycle the Petra dollar somehow.

This is a plain equivalent of a Gucci belt.

Yeah, actually, that's where I'm eventually going with this.

So

we'll get there.

But they only ordered, there was a total of 259 plane orders, which are from every airline, which is almost like a normal amount for an airliner being launched.

But somehow, because of how expensive they were, this was the most expensive deal for airliner orders in history.

totaling, well, yeah, $95 billion at retail price.

And it seemed like Boeing wasn't really

wasn't cutting any deals for buying more more than a few of them, which is not a good way to do business in this industry because, like, you know, Airbus got their foothold in the U.S.

by offering deals to American carriers, and suddenly, shit, now everybody flies the funny Airbus planes everywhere.

Um,

being a rigid manufacturer who builds your planes to the spec that nobody wants and refuses to compromise on the price of them is not a great position to be in.

We'll never surrender to the woke Airbus mob.

One of the lovely.

Every time you say this, I add another pronoun to the plan.

That's what the instead of the Arsler land the cockpit.

I'm going to have acknowledgement to light up the engines now.

Instead of calling you the Arsler, the cockpit calls you some sort of pronoun, esoteric pronoun.

Yeah.

It calls you cis.

One of the not launch customers, but early customers was the official airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran because it was 2015 and they could do that.

Ah, a little bit of a thought, you know.

Oh, yeah, yeah,

the COA was kicking off.

This was the Obama era.

Things were

cool.

And somebody just somewhere decided that Iran could buy planes again, and then they couldn't.

This order is.

Just the entire history of U.S.-Iran relations since the revolution is just a series of rug pulls on each side.

No, you hang up.

Just like, oh, no, you don't.

Fuck you, buddy.

I couldn't remember how many Iran Air bought, but it was very funny.

I tried to include a picture of one of them in the Iran Air livery in the slide, but nobody ever seemed to have actually mocked that up, which is a shame.

They ordered 15 of them, which is a lot considering how expensive they were.

I was about to say, I feel like Iran Air is not necessarily in great financial

situation, yeah.

Okay, that year they ordered 50 737 MAXs, 15 regular triple sevens, and 15 of these guys.

Wow.

Jesus.

Obviously, none of those were ever delivered.

Oh, of course.

Wow.

A typical American reliability.

They never formally canceled that order, but I don't think it's on the books anymore, as funny as it would be to be including that in the order number.

So next slide.

We're going to fix relations with Iran before they finish developing the aircraft.

It'll be the, yeah, the

friendship bridge.

It'll just be the friendship

triple seven.

Yes.

Yes.

So they, sometime in 2016, they changed the design to include

this the folding wingtip, which you can see here, this

pointy thing.

I've read a fair amount about this aircraft, and I'm not super certain what the aerodynamic purpose is.

I thought it was so they could fit it in existing gates.

Yeah, this is okay.

I did say this a minute ago.

Yes, the triple 7X was too big that it had to be at like 747 and A380 gates.

Ooh, she thick.

But if they did, but yes, if they did this, it didn't, they could fold the wing ticks up and it wingtips up, and it would actually fit at a gate or a hangar and things, which seems like a bit of a cheat.

I feel like you shouldn't be able to do that with an aircraft.

I don't know.

Well, listen,

it's what they say in NASCAR: you ain't cheating, you ain't trying, right?

Yeah, of course,

obviously.

So, yeah, the A350 has the regular folded wingtip types, the nice ones that sort of generally lift up

the principles of aerodynamics and so forth.

I'm not really the mindset that went into this is baffling to me because it means that it is another part that will be very expensive to maintain because it is a mechanically operated bit of the plane.

Yes,

I don't know, I genuinely cannot get my head around this, but like bendy wing, bendy wing, who says no to a bendy wing, it's true, just an entire company with ADHD, just like when I when I gotta put a bendy wing on the plane because I'm bored.

That's true, and I want a bendy wing, and I want it to be two stories, and I want to be purple, and I want it to be

cookies when you take off.

It's an airline that used to do that in the U.S., but they don't anymore, presumably because of woke or something.

Yeah, it's terrible.

Nazis.

By this point in time, Boeing was sort of trying to introduce the most technologically advanced long-haul airplane, and they're also doing literally everything in their power to cut the production costs of it.

How does this go for them?

We'll get there.

Okay.

They're also included.

They also build a system to automate the insertion of rivets into the

fuselages.

This is mainly to circumvent union labor.

Matter of fact, it's entirely to circumvent union labor.

Of course.

Yes.

Also, that sounds like something that's damn near impossible to do.

I have good news for you because they shut it down in 2019.

Turned out it was impossible to do.

Boeing is like one of the great anti-union warriors of this country in terms of stuff that we do for industry.

That's why they built Boeing, South Carolina, which cannot build planes to save its life.

Good.

Fuck you.

No,

that's the problem with the 787.

They built them all in South Carolina now, and the quality assurance is so bad that Boeing actually cannot self-certify that they're airworthy.

The FAA has to do it for them.

Crap.

Is that plant still non-union?

Yes.

Wow.

As far as I'm aware, I would have figured they would have managed to unionize it by now.

South Carolina, I mean, they picked South Carolina because it's

the least unionized state in the union.

And that makes sense.

They have been very aggressive in targeting union organizers

in this plant.

Like

they've been,

the IAM has taken taken them in front of the NLRB like a couple times about it.

Um,

but, and like, Boeing has made them withdraw complaints in order to ratify a new contract.

It's it's all fucked in every sense, Jesus, right?

Um, so yeah, they we don't build 787s anymore because we wanted to use non-union labor, and it turns out they're not very good at it,

yes, yeah.

Um, so yeah, this is this is this is the result of woke is the foundation of American society

Keeps the wings attached to the plane.

The 737 MAXs were union built, so it's not

we don't want to get too we don't want to get too aggressive.

Insufficiently woke unions.

It's true.

We developed the IWW.

We need to remember everyone in the what?

How woke was the guy who designed the MCAS system?

That's the real question.

Okay.

Well, that was outsourced, so actually probably non-union.

Oh, yeah.

Well, where's your problem?

Hey, that's the name of the show.

Good work, everybody.

Yeah,

I can finally wrap it up.

It's all been leading up to this.

Chuckling shark.

Glad to be here for the last episode of Well, There's Your Problem.

Just kidding, we have three Greg dickheads.

So

they start production

sort of somewhere around like 2017, 18-ish, just in sort of like assembling the first prototypes.

Um, this goes up until about 2019.

They build the first, they roll out the first aircraft in March.

Um,

they were still telling Luftansa that they would get it by the summer of 2020.

Uh-huh.

Now,

there's the obvious thing here, but also I want to maintain that the 787 was rolled out in June of 2007, and the first airline got theirs in 2011.

Okay.

So

you ordered those.

Gonna do it in a third of the time.

It's gonna be fine.

You know why?

There's no unions in the way.

Well, they were building this in Everett, which is still union.

But with the automated non-union rivet inserters.

So

I need a union rivet inserter.

We have those.

They're called machinists.

That's what they call me.

I'll show you my rivet insertion.

Oh my.

Don't sigh at that.

That was good.

So anyways, they roll this plane out.

It is three days after the second 737 MAX crash.

So they did it with...

That sucks.

They did it with not the greatest amount of fanfare in the world, which is fair.

I think that's called tech.

I'm not really sure.

No one noticed this.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, it wasn't me.

I mean, that was, I mean, that was the defense Boeing had at the time, but like.

He was the shaggy defense.

What was that?

It's just we outsourced this sorry no it was about it was the pilot error was initially what they blamed it was the shaggy defense

sure sure sure sure for both of them the ethiopian and the lion era yeah but yeah though that was man that was a up time but um that's brutal

uh july of 2019 rolls around and boeing tells folks that the first flight isn't going to happen until 2020.

uh they blame the engine manufacturers which is ge general electric for this it wasn't me

um they they tell airlines that they're still going to get their planes by the end of 2020.

No.

Unlikely.

I mean, everybody in 2020 had a lot of stuff going on that kind of distracted them, you know, especially airlines.

So, well, they didn't know that was going to happen yet.

That's that is.

Yeah.

Or did they?

My God, it was airlines all along.

It's engineering a global pandemic to distract from your shitty airplane.

That's true.

Genius.

So September 2019 rolls around.

And on September 5th of that year, September 5th, 2019, Boeing and the FAA were working together and conducting one of the standard tests that they need for certification called the ultimate load test.

It's just ensuring that the airframe can actually handle what it has been engineered to handle, the absolute maximum load pressure.

Yeah, I imagine the way that this works is you get a bunch of test pilots in there throwing like heavy boxes and free weights and stuff around,

trying to open the doors.

Yeah, big ones.

Yeah, a bunch of

what else?

You do like a Western saloon brawl in the back.

We're going to have

a zero gravity test plane, too.

Yeah.

You're going to have some like comical spherical bombs go off in there.

You're going to have some,

I don't know.

Yeah, the saloon brawl, actually, I think should be a test.

It's true.

Well, it's good to know because then you can test what bullet holes do to the fuselage when it's under pressure.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Overturning the bar, shoving the catering cart into someone's face, you know,

rolling it down the aisle.

So on the topic of what the aircraft does when it's under pressure.

so

in the middle of this test, if you go to the next slide, please,

this is fine.

Yes.

It looks good.

Well, okay.

At 99% of the ultimate load, it did this, which is just short of what they would have needed to pass the test.

It's not supposed to look like that, obviously.

Because what it is, is a guy got like punched through the plate glass window off the plane.

Yeah.

After the, after the bar top got knocked over, chilling all the drinks.

So

for reference, how did Mongo do this?

For reference, the original triple seven went up to 105%.

The 787 had gone up to about 101%, and then they released the pressure because they didn't want the airframe to crack because it's made of composites and therefore tends to release dusts that you don't really want whenever it does that.

Yes.

Notably, the triple 7X is also made of composites.

So something to consider.

Everybody in there, besides a bunch of kind of like Tennessee whiskey, also got lungs full of asbestos.

Yes.

All right.

Just like the Bud Company, where you know, every

railroad car gave a shot welder in exotic cancer.

That's why they lasted so long.

They absorbed the souls of the men who worked on them.

God.

So

yeah, when they get to 99%, which to be clear is not the percentage that they needed to be, that was 100.

That's one lower.

Yes.

That's one lower.

A

crack develops

somewhere around the center line of the underside of the fuselage where the wings intersected, which causes the fuselage to rapidly rupture.

Crack travels upwards to a passenger door and blows it out entirely in sort of an explosive decompression scenario.

Except they were on the ground, but it was pressurized.

So it was an explosive decompression scenario.

As far as we're aware, Wiford Dolphined at zero feet altitude.

Yeah.

As far as we're aware, the door did fly out violently in the test hangar.

I don't know.

I don't think it would have caused any damage because.

Okay, to anything other than the airframe, but

I would assume the test stand is situated situated in such a way that no one's going to get murdered if the plane fails

catastrophically.

Yeah.

The Seattle Times

does not actually report this for a couple of weeks afterwards, and they get this picture,

which is the best quality I could find of it.

Not sure why it's so low resolution.

To look like that, yes.

Yeah, correct.

Again, you should at least get to 100% ultimate load before this happens.

Hopefully, 100% is pretty close.

Yeah.

Well, this is

a for effort.

Well, actually, the Seattle Times theorized that the FAA was going to take the same approach and pass them for it anyway.

As long as Boeing could show that they had fixed the problem on paper, which, of course, on paper, it said it could withstand this much to begin with.

So I'm not.

Wow.

On paper, the same thing the plane was apparently made of.

Same sweep.

By the end of October,

various setbacks, mainly this one, but like a lot of other production problems, meant that the prospects for getting the aircraft like flight certified were pretty grim.

Their projected delivery date at this point was 2022, which is a little more realistic than 2020.

It's just also wildly unrealistic because, again, five-year gap from the first flight to the delivery of the 787, which was a much smoother process.

Now, ultimate load here, I would assume is

the normal load that would be expected on the aircraft plus quite a robust factor of six yes yeah 50 50

50 yes that's 100 100

that's yeah i'm a civil engineer i'm used to like uh two or three i

150 of regular maximum load yes sorry i forgot this was an engineering podcast and didn't write that number down

um also by the end of 2019 I did write this down here.

Also, at the end of 2019, they shut down the automated rivet insertion scab system,

uh, which is which was like two years old at this point, not even.

Um, well done, assholes.

They sort of quickly discovered that it didn't actually put the rivets in good, took two years for that, not really certain.

Some kind of Boeing John Henry trying to outdo the automated rivet machine, going to town on the rivets.

Yeah,

um, they're passing out and dying.

and saying, Well, actually, we can only use the planes he made, um, because the rivet machine does otherwise these are shaking apart, yeah, yeah, bad for you.

Uh, so yeah, so this wasn't great.

This was a big production setback and a big PR setback because, of course,

you know, there's some nuances there as to ultimate load versus practic versus what would actually be practically what an aircraft's practical load would be.

But, like, you have a picture of the plane having basically exploded.

That's not really good press for anybody.

Yes,

So this wasn't great.

But next slide.

2020 rolls around.

They're looking for a new Boeing.

I was looking for a clean slate.

They're looking to move on from the 737 MAX failures because they were fixing it.

And also to be prepared for a busy summer 2020 travel season.

Oh, yeah.

I was feeling great in like, you know, when 2020 rolled around, I was like, this is going to be my year.

I'm going to do great.

This is going to be fantastic.

No.

Actually,

yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, the Halcyon days of early 2020.

Yeah, of like up until like, you know, the middle of January.

It's like thinking about the halcyon days of 2016.

Unfortunately, this was pretty short-lived because January 18th, the Senate committee that is investigating the 737 MAX issues releases a set of emails from Boeing employees.

In one of them, they complain that the company is using the same sparse distributor and software development team that was doing stuff for the Max program and on an even tighter production schedule.

Now, this was mostly in this case of the 737, this was mostly for flight simulators.

It's not really clear what they were doing for the triple seven, but like

the outsourcer, the contractor that made 737 Max parts, not a great company to be.

Oh, no.

Especially in 2020.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Boeing comes out very quickly and says that there's nothing to worry about because the the 777X does.

Oh, yeah, you love that response.

Triple 7X does not have the MCAS system.

It's good to know.

It's fine.

Don't worry about it.

The gas flight has always been like this.

Nobody had that.

Nobody had said anything about the MCAS system specifically.

The plane's fine.

Don't worry about it.

It doesn't have MCAS.

Shut up.

You shut up.

You shut up.

Why are you worrying?

Stop worrying.

The plane's going to be fine.

Says that on the outside instead of the thing that it should say.

The plane is fine.

we haven't crashed any of them yet yeah we've never left one up there that's true they have not they have not crashed any of the triple seven x's yet

it's fine don't worry

uh january 25th comes around and at uh 10 09 pacific daylight time

uh in a rare instance of that not being a bad harbinger on this podcast uh the plane actually takes off for the first time that's what that's what this picture is uh from i want to say the airport boeing's airport and manufacturing facility in Everett specifically.

I have been there.

It's an interesting place.

It is where you will see all of these aircraft lined up, ready to never go into service.

They build a second plane, which flies on April 30th.

They build a third one, which flies on August 3rd.

This is the most productive that the airplane has been to date and since then.

Not really any major setbacks for the 777X program that year, which is admittedly kind of a reprieve considering between the 7.37 MAX and COVID, they had lost $11.9 billion that year.

Oh.

And of course,

a lot of corporate analysts will say that the 737 MAX was probably the most expensive corporate blunder in history because it probably, in direct and indirect costs, probably cost them somewhere north of $60 billion.

That's crazy.

Jesus God.

I think I read that.

I think that was a Business Insider article.

It was not a great time to be Boeing.

It's still not a great time to be Boeing.

I'm not going to go bankrupt.

You're Boeing to lose subscriber.

Now, Boeing would lose $11.9 billion this year,

which is, of course, a very ridiculous amount of money exacerbated by the 737 MAX and the 777X.

So, of course, they're obviously never going to do it again, except in 2024 when they lost $11.8 billion.

Oh, my God.

We could run it better than they're doing.

Put us on the Boeing board.

You are going to build hostile takeover.

I could probably build an airplane.

How hard can it be?

How hard can it be?

You are an engineer.

Greg, shut up.

Now, granted, a lot of that last year was probably because of the extended work stoppage, but like there was an easy solution for that.

It was ratify a better contract.

Yeah.

Or propose a better contract.

Well, it's weird that, you know, they've done all this cost cutting in order to create an aircraft, which is much more expensive.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

that's a really good point, actually.

It's,

you know, sometimes you get what you pay for.

They have cost cuts to build a more expensive airplane while still losing billions of dollars every year.

And that I think that's genuinely something, a level of incompetence to aspire to in the corporate world.

That's efficient allocation of resources.

When I was in college, I took a class on value engineering.

Oh, no.

And in fact, fact, they gave me a certificate afterwards.

And all I could think through the whole class was,

oh, gee, this is going to cost a lot of money a long time from now.

So, you know, it's just like, oh, God, I don't want to make this decision.

I want to spend more money.

I like spending money.

Let me spend the money now so I don't have to spend a little bit of time.

So I'm not being sued into oblivion right 30 years from now.

Right, right, right, right, right.

In

2021,

somewhere in January, in whatever the quarterly earnings call,

Boeing tells investors that it won't be ready until late 2023.

They blame this on the pandemic, which,

you know, whatever.

I don't care if it's valid or not.

It's just kind of a rotating excuse wheel.

It's quite funny to look at.

Just like

roll a D20 to generate excuses.

Is this a serious uncommanded pitch event?

That's the next bullet point, yes.

I mean, listen, that could be

it wasn't MCAS

on

June 27th, 2021.

The Seattle Times reports on a letter that was written to Boeing by the Federal Aviation Administration on May 13th and had been subsequently leaked to them.

Sometime in late December 2020, on a test flight, the aircraft experienced a quote: serious, uncontrolled,

fuck, serious, uncommanded pitch event, close quote, which means either the plane went up or down without anybody telling it to do that.

They said that they complained about that.

They complained about a few other issues that they didn't give enough detail, but we don't know anything about them as the public, which is nice to think about.

They also talk about a general, quote, lack of design maturity.

Listen, the airplane at this point the airframe is only about 30 years old and i'm about the same age and yeah sometimes i feel like you know maybe i'm not all there so you know

um they the faa basically tells them that they're not going to certify that there's no way they're going to certify that aircraft until mid to late 2023 They won't even let FAA officials on test flights until Boeing has done something to fix it.

I don't think it was specific as to what it was.

This basically means that by the Boeing timeline, the first delivery would be in 2024.

I can't find anywhere that Boeing ever said anything about this letter being publicly released.

Incredible.

Didn't happen.

Not real.

That was photoshopped.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, I don't even know what to think about that.

You know, they're just kind of building a plane for themselves at this point on their own timeline.

Hey, anyone want to buy my plane?

It's cold self-care.

My brand new 30-year-old plane.

So now that we're in 2021, next slide, I actually want to take a little bit of a step back and talk about Boeing commercial airplanes as an ongoing concern.

In 2000, they made

the many different types of plane: the two McDonnell Douglas aircraft, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7.

Before 2011, they stopped making the MD-11, 717, the 757, and the 747400.

In 2011, they were making the two kinds of 737, the new 747 model, the 7.6, 77, and 7.8.

So after this, the last passenger set, last passenger 767, visible at the top right there,

was delivered.

So they stopped making those in 2014, leaving just the freighters and the military versions.

The last passenger 747 was delivered to Korean Air in 2017 and their livery that still looks great.

Then they actually killed it in the time that between me writing these slides and today, they made it bad.

Did they just change it?

Holy shit.

Yeah.

They've got a whole new brand.

It's ugly.

That's awful.

They made it minimal with lines as opposed to colors.

It's still blue, so they get that, but it's bad.

And then they even discontinued the Friday versions of the 747 in 2023.

So they don't make that plane anymore.

They're going to build the new Air Force Ones out of the used ones, but that's going to be it for the 747.

That makes sense to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This was

a headline a few months ago that they were going to work with Elon to speed up the timeline on that.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Incredible.

Yeah.

Let's use one of the starships and then just explode.

Yeah.

Hopefully, the whole thing goes up like the fear bunker.

I mean, I could not think of a greater

sort of iconographic end to

the century of American prosperity than the American-made aircraft blowing up with Donald Trump in it.

That would be just a kind of like

one moment, but for America.

Yes.

That was a woke birch tree.

It depends on who gets left behind that day.

And suddenly we have Sean Duffy, President of the United States.

I saw designates at Survivor.

Well,

to be fair, that will probably be the third Trump term.

So there'll be a new cabinet by that point.

Sorry.

The last passenger 737 Next Generation was delivered in 2019.

The last passenger 777, the original one, was built and delivered to Aeroflot in 2021, pictured here in a livery that's also quite ugly.

So Boeing builds

Boeing essentially builds two passenger aircraft now.

They build the 737 MAX and the 787.

And like I said, they can't build the 787 anymore because they keep building them wrong.

I love American manufacturing.

It's coming back, I hear.

I think the tariffs might help.

Tariff Santa is going to fix it.

It's also notable that the tariff thing only sort of affects Airbus because they build A320s in Alabama now.

So

the decade of America, the new century of American manufacturing does also apply to Airbus, who was a proud American company who was also anti-union, annoyingly,

which is why they're in Alabama of all places.

I was about to say, didn't

a couple instances of like folks trying to build plants in the deep south and like just being astonished that like oh no one can read here

yeah that boeing south carolina and airbus mobile

those are the two of them

um although boat mobile is uh outpost of civilization in alabama i would say that

um notably of course airbus mobile um is on track to build more planes this year than not than Boeing has built non-737s the past two years.

Oh, God.

That's obviously a rosy estimate of theirs, but still, though, that's a great American manufacturing company, Airbus.

So, basically,

by the time 2021 rolls around, they build two commercial airliners and a couple more freighters and a shit ton of military derivatives thereof.

And they also stopped making several more of those since then.

Anyways, 2021,

you are Boeing commercial airplanes.

your parent company has lost $12 billion last year.

All of your development money is in on the Triple 7X.

They just can't get this thing to, they just can't fix this thing.

You would hope that airlines would be absolutely champing at the bid to purchase them.

Next slide.

Sounds like a great plan.

Let me take 400, yeah.

On the left, you'll see orders and deliveries of the Airbus A350 totaling 1,363.

On the right, you'll see the Triple Seven totaling 515.

Not great, not great for anybody.

Not great, not terrible, but not great.

Yeah, um,

I'd like to get in.

I would actually like to get in on these orders a little bit more in detail, but I would also like to point out that 515 orders was where the A350 was at in 2010, and that plane launched in 2007.

That was three years.

It has taken them 12 years to scrape together 515 777 X orders.

Of those 515, 205 are for Emirates, 94 are for Qatar, 25 are for Ethiod, 324 are for airlines either in Dubai or Qatar.

Qatar.

Never figured out the pronunciation.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

Thank you to Rube Airlines.

Yes.

Please give us

waving hand.

Yeah, just buy me some planes.

Just keep recycling the Petra dollars.

Come on.

Well, it's a Petra dollar recycling and it's also

a bribe, right?

Like, you're not buying these because you really care that much about your airline airline business.

You'll find somewhere for them.

And, like, hopefully, they don't nosedive and kill a bunch of people.

But, like, mostly, it's like, you know, even if they do,

it's a backhander to

American manufacturing.

Yeah.

Two orders are for Silkway West Airline, which is an airline in Azerbaijan that is mostly known for illegally transporting munitions to do genocide.

So that's an interesting one to keep on.

Just a cargo hold being gently kissed by crates and crates of Kalashnikov.

Basically, at this point,

they have built a ridiculous, ridiculously expensive airline.

It is, as far as I can tell, the most serious airliner ever produced.

And I use the word serious to exclude the A380, which was kind of always a shit post that they also sold a bunch of to Middle Eastern Airlines.

The A350 does the things that the airlines actually want, and it's quite a bit cheaper.

I don't know the per-unit cost.

I would not be surprised if it was close to two-thirds.

But I thought it was 60% cheaper to build.

That's what the executive said.

It was going to be 60% cheaper.

And why would they lie?

Indeed.

Yeah.

I thought that's what the executive said to do.

Well, to be fair,

60% cheaper to build, excuse me, doesn't necessarily mean the unit price is going to be lower.

They could just be aiming for really high profit margins on this thing.

That's true.

That's true.

What if, yeah, they actually build these for like $40 each.

If they sell one, they are out of the money problems.

That's all they need to do.

They need to sell one plane

and build one plane successfully.

Boeing can't really stop losing money at this point.

And

we're still a couple of years ago at this point.

So

that's great.

I will say that these order numbers are for the current year,

but I actually don't think there's been any triple 7X orders in the past year.

So so that might not actually be particularly relevant um it is also notable that zero airlines in the United States have bought them oh

okay

poorly passenger freighter or otherwise they they nobody wants them period um

yeah nobody wants them like United really likes the seven eights

American really wants to like the 7.8s, but they are

but they won't they can't get them delivered because they can't build the seven eights anymore um so they i i think they probably kick the tires on the a350 in a coupon within the next five years uh delta fucking loves the airbus stuff they genuinely don't want to touch the boings anymore ow ow

what hold on what no i got a weird cramp in my footing and time yeah like needs to flash up the uh no that's all good we just need to flash up the uh the thing ahead of time that's like uh photosensitive epilepsy can strike at any time and also remember to like get up and drink water and walk around for a bit every couple of hours.

This is true, this is true.

Um,

one of the things that's frustrating about this, as an airline passenger, I do prefer Boeings because the windows are bigger.

This is true, yeah.

I, I said, What do you need the big window for to see all the land you have stolen?

No, I need to see uh why you need a big window to see men

because we would support this because we are the worker option obviously yeah

um this is true and it's this is true especially because i sit in the aisle seat typically so i like to you know see it's better to easier to see out there but uh of the most of the airlines that have purchased this are airlines with either very strange fleet configurations or airlines with too much money uh which covers most of the middle eastern airlines we've talked about it also covers singapore airlines um

Korean Air and Lufthansa are both airlines that have weird configurations.

British Airways has ordered like 50 of them, which is a.

I would kind of want to make fun of Britain for it, but we make the plane.

So I'm not

sure what direction I can take.

What are we in this for?

But you did buy the plane at least.

So that part's on you.

No, I'm not saying we're not.

It's a relationship.

It's true.

All Nepon Airways and Japan has bought them, but they are in a bizarre relationship where they cannot stop giving Boeing money for some reason.

Air Air India also bought some.

It's also kind of strange.

I'm not really sure why.

Yeah,

there are no zero American carriers, only the two European carriers.

And I'm counting British Airways in that.

Ethiopian has some.

Cargo Lux has some, the cargo airline.

This is also sounding better and better, I think.

This is good, right?

This is true.

So, of course,

so they can't seem to sell them to any airlines, which is great.

Even whenever production, even whenever development and manufacturing is going well.

Next slide, please.

In early, this is a picture of an engine.

We'll get up to something to do with that.

Early 2022, Boeing tells investors that the plane is delayed again, this time to 2025, which is the current year.

Wow.

That means it'll probably come out this year, right?

Yeah, dummy.

Yeah.

In October of 2022, Boeing experiences what they call a technical issue.

It's an uncommanded stock price pitch event.

They attribute that to one of the aircraft's engines.

They don't really elaborate,

but they suspend test flights as a result.

Oh, that's how you know it's going well.

Yes.

They don't really clarify when they restart test flights, and I can't really find any information on it.

I probably could if I wanted to look through flight logs enough, but I honestly don't.

The best as far as I can tell is like early 2023.

That is actually the only thing that happens in 2023.

It's otherwise fine.

They just keep flying it on test flights over and over again and not getting it certified.

None of them crash, so that part's good.

2024,

Boeing is still telling airlines that it'll be delivered by 2025.

Luftansa is telling investors that they think it'll be like 2027 at the earliest.

In August of 2024, they take a test flight from Washington to Hawaii,

where they give a routine maintenance inspection,

which reveals a crack on the thrust link of the engine, which is circled here.

It's the big piece of titanium that actually transfers the thrust from the engines to the airframes.

Boeing initially dismisses this as just a trivial issue for the one singular test airplane, although the fact that it was on both engines means, as far as I can tell, means that that's...

obviously false to begin with.

They promise to replace it on that airplane and inspect the rest of the fleet in short order.

They do that the following week, where they find cracks in the thrust links on every single airframe that they have built to the sport.

That has to be done.

Hell yeah.

That sounds.

Titanium is a metal.

If there's a crack in the thrust, titanium is a metal.

Justin Rozak, you heard it here first, folks.

Listen, listen, listen.

It's ductile.

It shouldn't be cracking in the first place under any kind of normal load.

So

they ground the whole program again and they sort of blame it on the engine design, which is a tacit way to pass blame with a General Electric.

Problem is they built the thrust link.

So, you know.

Oops.

Whoopsie daisy.

So, you know, that's great.

So this is August of 2024.

What comes up next is not directly related to the Prolane, but it's not great.

Next slide, please.

Every single IAM machinist that is building the 777X is now on strike as of September 13th, having rejected the proposed contract given to them with 94.6% of the vote, which is not where you want to be in terms of negotiating these things.

Maybe you should give them a better offer.

Yes.

On October 8th, all negotiations between

Machinist Union and Boeing break down completely and they walk away from the table.

Boeing files a complaint with

the NLRB about this for some reason.

I'm not really sure why.

I think

the best descriptor I can come up with

for it would be whining

on like a corporate level.

Doesn't matter.

It doesn't go anywhere.

That's all they got these days.

Yes.

On October 12th, the CEO of Boeing had announced a 10% cut in their total workforce,

laying off 10% of all workers company-wide, union and non-union to my understanding and of course in at the bottom of that statement is buried a delay of the triple seven X project to 2026

any day now yes any day now damn

on October 14th

the see the president of Emirates

which is of course again the largest customer of the triple seven X

and buys a lot of planes from Boeing in general, goes to Business Insider with a statement of how pissed off he is at Boeing management.

Nice.

Which is not

where you want to be as a company to have your biggest customer for the project be very mad at you

and talk about how

nobody could ever trust delivery timeline your company ever gives ever again.

Interestingly, I don't think they actually reduced the order after that.

He just kind of wanted to be mad online, which is fair.

You can do that.

Yeah, nah, we all love to do that.

Especially if you're a CEO nowadays.

It is, in fact, in vogue to be a CEO and very mad online.

This is true.

So, yeah, not great for them.

IAM and Boeing eventually ratify a new contract on November 1st, which they do with 59% support from union workers, which isn't a great number if you are a union or management.

This is true.

Yeah, that is.

Not so good.

You're better off if you have like a side numbers.

Yes.

That's what you prefer to have.

Yep.

So this strike lasts, this work stoppage and strike lasts about two months.

It costs Boeing about $10 billion.

Fuck me.

Good.

So again, with the they cannot stop losing money.

They eventually fix the engine, the thrust link problem.

I wrote the engine thrust doohickey, which is kind of fair.

That's what it looks like to me.

They are flying test flights again by mid-January of this past year, so four months ago, or whenever it is.

I accidentally saw the first test flight.

It was in the Costco parking lot, which is just short of Boeing Field in Seattle.

Myself and my girlfriend were both very stunned and pointed and laughed at it.

So it's a large aircraft.

It's impressive to see.

It just also is a bad aircraft.

I like that.

Yes.

Boeing

later in January tells Lufthansa that they should expect delivery in 2026.

Luftansa, of course, previously had projected 2027.

I believe by now they're probably projecting 2028.

Oh, it's never coming.

Ha, this fucking slaps.

Yep.

So,

yeah.

Everybody, including Emberts, this time, is pretty skeptical of that.

That's where we are today.

Boeing makes two commercial airplanes.

They are the 737 company, pretty much specifically at this point.

They're moving their headquarters to the Pentagon.

I suspect at this point they only give a shit about defense contracts, especially now that they're going to be able to get a lot more defense contracts.

It's going to be interesting when Airbus has a global monopoly on passenger planes.

I don't think it's a true thing.

Much safer, though, because of the wokeness.

But yeah, that's where we are today.

The plane is supposed to come out in 2026 or 2027 or 2028, depending on who you ask.

Great.

I love when a plane is in development, hell.

Yeah, me too.

yeah it's like new doom exactly

it's it's confusing and infuriating when does the dark ages come out soon may 15th i'm so it refers to a paucity of sources rather than a period of intellectual decline i was also going to say that i know

i uh my my bet is that boeing is out of the is just out of the industry by like the late the 2030 probably

like not just with this plane my guess is that they either they spin off the 737 into its own company and just take defense money.

It refers to a paucity of airplanes, not a

well, and also an intellectual decline.

Let's get real here.

So, yeah, there's no number for what the triple seven program has cost them in total.

A lot.

My like random off the back of my ass number is probably somewhere in the 20 billion mark, especially because they keep taking tax penalties whenever they delay it more.

It's all McDonnell Douglas's fault.

Genuinely, this is what most people think.

This is what McDonnell Douglas has wrought.

We're going to wind up in a situation where it's impossible to build airplanes.

The intercity buses have all sold themselves off into oblivion.

Or maybe Alfa Romeo would get it up.

And then Trump privatizes Amtrak,

and then no one's going to be able to go anywhere anymore.

They are going to impose 15-minute cities because it will be impossible to get 15 minutes away from your house.

That's all that I have.

It's a great company with a great legacy.

And I'm saying that very tongue-in-cheek.

All right, we want to move on to

safety turd.

Wow, what do we learn?

This plane's never coming, bro.

If it's Boeing, you ain't going.

You ain't going.

But if it's a tall Douglas, we're going to kill you.

I will work on the shirts.

Like once an episode now, I generate a bit that I can turn into a shirt.

We'll put a link in the description for this.

This is where you can buy them.

This is excellent.

I can buy that one.

All right.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Oh, he's sleeping.

Shake hands with danger.

No, I got stressed out because someone's in my backyard doing something.

Again, why?

I don't know.

There's a drill going, I think.

Looking for your nuclear weapons.

I know, right?

Well,

it's not mine.

Ahoy, November, Justin, Liam, and various guest hosts.

Correct.

Yeah, no.

Guest host plural is slightly questionable if you wanted to nitpick something.

But

today's story involves a rusty pickup truck, a 1930s tractor, a forklift, a bunch of World War II veterans, child labor, some ropes, a military cargo net, a couple of old mattresses, and most importantly, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

Hell yeah.

What do you call an act like that?

The aristocrats.

Yeah, hey, I'm on it.

As a teenager, I volunteered as an apprentice mechanic at a local aviation museum.

Oh, no.

On this particular day, our task was to remove the vertical stabilizer from a Boeing B-29 Superfortress that was slated to be restored.

The all-volunteer staff included myself, two other high schoolers, and five WW2 veterans.

When was this?

Because how old are these men?

That's a good question.

I think that's revealed later.

Okay.

Being the most athletic and nimble of the crew, my role was to use various ladders to jerry-rig a cargo net borrowed from a local military unit around the top of of the stabilizer, then to attach some ropes to it, and then attach those ropes at one end to an antique tractor, usually used for mowing the outdoor display area of the museum, and to a heavy-duty pickup truck at the other end.

They're gonna tear it apart like by lashing it to horses.

Yeah.

The idea was that I would remove the bolts on one side of the stabilizer and loosen the bolts on the other side and have them act as a hinge.

The pickup truck would pull on the rope, and eventually, gravity would tilt the vertical stabilizer slowly down onto the horizontal stabilizer, which had used mattresses that I would position on top of it to act as cushioning.

The attached 1930s farm tractor at the other end would use its brakes, operated by a geriatric born in the 1920s, to control the descent.

Hell yeah, America's greatest generation.

We began this stupid mission, which in hindsight should have been done with a crane.

I feel like the phrase, we began this stupid mission attached to a B-29, not the first time.

Probably not even, not even the thousandth time.

At first, everything was going well.

I ascended a ladder, leaning against the right horizontal stabilizer with a bag of tools, and removed the rusty hardware from the vertical stabilizer attach points of the B-29.

Then scrambled down and climbed another ladder on the left stabilizer to position the mattresses we had forklifted up.

While I was stepping over the forklift tines, adjusting the mattresses without any fall restraining gear, with only one exit other than

jumping to my likely death,

pretty high up.

The dear old man's foot on the ancient tractor slipped off the brake.

Great.

Excellent.

Because he was in his 80s and it was an ancient tractor and the colossal tower of America's previous power started coming down really fast.

How do you ask someone to be the last person to get killed by a B-29 Superfortress?

I remember hearing the truck driver yelling, oh God, no.

Oh, Jesus.

I've read Randall Jarrell's poetry.

I know these things are powered by blood and you got to recharge them every now and again.

But like, seems unfair for it to be high schoolers.

At least high schoolers in the 80s.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Thankfully, I was an athletic 15-year-old at the time, so was able to park horse-tile flip myself off the stabilizer.

Somehow, I landed on a forklift as the massive sheet metal beast came down with a thump so big it shook an entire B-29, which weighs approximately 75,000 pounds.

Thankfully, I had positioned the mattresses in a way such that it was only lightly damaged and was later repaired by skilled sheet metal technicians.

Hit it with hammers, hit it with wooden mallets until it looks right again.

God bless you for having for the mattress positioning work there.

I was about to say, well, the good news is, you know, the tariffs are going to bring back this type of

skill set, you know?

Yeah,

specifically the 15-year-old part as well.

I climbed off the forklift, which saved me from a roughly 12-foot drop to the ground.

And after catching our breath, one old soldier said, Well, that was scary, but we still got the job done.

Let's continue.

So I again climbed aboard the weary bomber and removed the hardware on the other side, cut all the remaining wires and control cables.

I took the borrowed cargo net off and used the ropes and the net to kinky bondage style wrap the stabilizer to the forklift.

and we lifted the vertical stabilizer which was now a second horizontal uh position now okay yeah off of the b-29 and into a hangar where the wacky army of kids and geriatrics muscled it onto wooden sawhorses this is this is you you you had an apprentice job working for the boomers in fallout new vegas

I sometimes reflect on weird ways to be killed, and being killed by a World War II bomber 50 years after the end of World War II is admittedly pretty weird.

Can't argue with that.

I dearly enjoy your show and look forward to many future episodes.

All the best from Piper.

Good name to work with planes.

It's true.

Yes.

Thank you.

This is what happens when you work with Boeing airplanes.

I was going to say it's been a minute.

This has been a great day for Boeing aircraft in general here.

How do you say you are Boeing to die in German?

um anyway that was safety third

shake hands with danger our next episode will be on chernobyl i don't think we did any announcements about the tour uh there are still tickets available in new york city on the 29th and in philadelphia on the 4th yep i will i will regretfully not be there in person on account of i don't want to go to el salvador yes that is a

strong uh strong issue at the moment Yeah.

Um, does

anyone have any commercials before we go?

It says something about the worst of all possible worlds.

No, I copied that from an earlier episode.

Everyone knows I went on worst of all possible worlds to talk about falling down.

I've probably said that three times now because I've copied the slide three times.

Flying home in a straight line.

Yes.

I need to get tickets for the Philadelphia show and figure out a way to go.

We'll figure out a way to comp you.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Maya.

Thank you so much.

If the people want more Maya, where can they find more Maya?

You can find me at a lot of places.

The easiest way is to actually go to my website, the Maya Ventura Information Network.

That would be www.maya M-A-Y-A walk with me, walkwith.me, M-E.

That is a David Lynch reference.

Oh, yeah.

So if you need to know how to spell any of that, just look up the Twin Peaks film.

You can find me on X the Everything app,

777X the Everything plane under the same username without the dots.

You can find me on Blue Sky at the same username with the dot because it's weird federated systems.

You can find me in print, hopefully, by the time this comes out.

You go buy 2600 magazine, which is available at most Barnes and Noble's.

I write a substack, which is how I got here because I wrote an article about this.

Subscribe to my sub stack, please.

I am poor and with like money.

I think that's it.

All right.

Fantastic.

More

trip 777X than nothing plane.

That's true.

Oh, got their ass.

Yeah.

Wow.

All right.

I think you did it.

That was the podcast.

All right.

Good afternoon, everyone.