Boeing says it can’t make money with fixed-price contracts

Comments

• Pat_Riot@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fuck you Boeing. You fuckers have stacked cash hand over fist for fucking decades milking the fucking government and the American people like goddamn cattle. The endless growth has to end. The endless greed has got to end.

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  • pdxfed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Flying Blind is a spectacular book, as much about the financial engineering that doomed GM and Boeing and many others took as their compass;, the safety and quality just the inevitable cost of cutting corners.

    penguinrandomhouse.com/…/flying-blind-by-peter-ro…

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• Uniquitous@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Jeez, if you can’t make money off of defense industry contracts, you should probably just hang it up.

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  • AbidanYre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They can, they just use cost-plus contacts so they make money no matter how far off schedule or budget they end up.

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    • Uniquitous@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I was under the impression that those sweetheart deals were getting hard to come by, but I don’t work bids.

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• agitatedpotato@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So either you suck at forecasting your own production, or you suck at production enough to not hit your forecast? And you want other people to pay you more because you don’t have a good handle on your buisness?

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  • there1snospoon@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    As an employee at a production facility in the US, don’t think Boeing is unique in that regard.

    These companies have gotten too big to work without exploiting their employees or inflating costs.

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    • agitatedpotato@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This problem could be solved even with a co-op structure even withing a free market. If ten workers in a co op produce $100 bucks of extra money, they all get ten and as long as any new hires can carey their weight so everyone still gets ten bucks bonus, they will hire them. Ones companies get big enough to have diminishing returns, like a new employee could only produce 5 bucks of surplus, then hiring that person would make everyone have a smaller piece of the pie. If the pie all goes to one person they can keep adding workers until the worker doesn’t produce any surplus over the cost.

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  • krayj@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t think they suck at forecasting…I think they are probably exceptional at forecasting but willfully lie about project costs when submitting bids for projects in order to come under the competition and win the contract. There doesn’t seem to be any penalties for this, so why would they stop?

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    • Whiskey_iicarus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That happens all the time. I went through several government contracts where a company would come and under bid the current contract by a significant amount, win the bid, offer the current contractors 3/4 of what they were being paid and fill in the rest with new hires. There is no continuity between contracts so unless a bunch of the old contractors took a pay cut to stay on they would come in and start from scratch with all new processes and procedures and absolutely slow down productivity for all those they were supposed to be providing support.

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  • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If they’re anything like other DOD contractors they make empty promises and straight up lies to get bids on contracts that they can’t deliver on time on. They know they will fail these timelines but it makes them look good for that quarter so it doesn’t matter to them.

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  • jimbolauski@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The forecasts for FFP projects have competitive forces pushing them down. Many times they will underbid to win than hope everything goes perfect or they can find a way to weasel out of it.

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• Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Then perish.

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  • SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Oh, very good Worf. Eat any good books lately?

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    • Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I recently consumed a copy of Martok’s Enchiridion of Klingon Fashion. It was tasteful.

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• SeaJ@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It sounds like Boeing is shit at forecasting. Maybe how better analysts.

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• w2qw@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That’s the point

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• silencioso@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Neeeext

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• RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Zombies? In my capitalism?

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• njm1314@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I bet there are some other airplane makers that can.

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  Boeing released its third-quarter results on Wednesday, and there were promising numbers showing increasing revenues and narrowing losses as the multinational corporation continues its economic recovery.

  This division, which includes missile production for the military and space activities such as satellites and the Starliner spacecraft, lost $1.7 billion during the first three quarters of this year.

  Notably, the pair pinned the blame for performance by its defense and space division, referred to internally as BDS, on fixed-price contracts.

  Boeing has been developing Starliner for more than a decade and is running six years behind its original goal of flying crew to the International Space Station for NASA in 2017.

  As it has sought to compete with SpaceX on a purely fixed-price contract for crew transport, Boeing has reported more than $1 billion in losses to date and still has yet to fly its first astronaut mission.

  After an issue was discovered with the soft links in Starliner’s parachute design this summer, Boeing has had to work with Airborne to strengthen the main canopy suspension lines.

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  The original article contains 662 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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