Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

by Peter Robison

Alongside the newly cutthroat airlines, it was getting harder for Boeing to escape the fact that Airbus was a real threat. A mid-1990s internal analysis came to the unthinkable conclusion that Airbus, a consortium of European manufacturers it had always derided as a glorified jobs program, actually had a cost advantage over Boeing. Its factories produced planes 12 percent to 15 percent cheaper than Boeing’s, the study reported. Ironically, this was in part because of rigid labor laws in Europe, which made layoffs more expensive and, in places like Germany, forced the involvement of labor unions in management decisions. As a consequence, Airbus was quicker to adopt automated machinery, but also more likely to train and develop its workers rather than to fire them. Condit and his predecessor as CEO, Frank Shrontz, looked to Japan for answers, sending executives to study the lean manufacturing techniques of companies like Toyota and Hitachi. These managers came back to Boeing and implemented ideas they’d learned about there, involving workers in commonsense solutions like creating cutouts for tools at every workbench so it was easy to see if one was missing.