What Happened to McDonnell Douglas?

Richard N

Richard N

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Sandy Munro is a management consultant paid by manufactures evaluate their products and recommend how they can be improved. There are many videos of his work on cars, but this is the first video he has done on his work for McDonnell Douglas. It might help explain why Boeing keeps stumbling today.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0U9llcuaXA
 
I had a few friends and colleagues working on C-17 and commercial programs at Douglas in Long Beach and after in my opinion, the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger vs. a Boeing purchase of McAir/Douglas. Douglas was not doing well at the time, no new designs, a greedy union/union workforce and a real failure in implementing the TQM process, they completely just eliminated a layer of management, you may remember people getting nailed for sabotage on the MD-11 program as an example, cutting and damaging wire/cable bundles. So I think Boeing made the mistake of having Douglas leadership infiltrating the Boeing executive branch hierarchy, look at Boeing now, need I say more. The old McAir in St Louis seemed to have their act together and were much easier to work with, especially on the engineering side.
I will watch the video, looks good but the above were actual accounts and inputs from friends and colleagues who worked there.
 
I had a number of friends who went to Long Beach from St. Louis to work on the C-17 - best way to describe the mission was to go out and bolster the effort and get the aircraft at least closer to being on schedule. All said it was culture shock and they were not talking about the California lifestyle. Then again, I guess they were in a way.

Mr. Mac wanted to get into the airliner business and saw this merger (was it really a merger?) as the way to do it. The St. Louis mindset was pure military - contracts, extras being submitted to the Navy or Air Force, etc. to get the job done. Cost of development as a whole was borne by the service branch they were building for. For Douglas, those costs were covered by Douglas until the product was ordered by the airline and delivered. A whole different cash flow and the two cultures never did blend or come to some sort of balance. an example is the Twin DC-10 - if McDonnell Douglas had taken that development in hand and taken it to the market, I feel that Airbus would not have take such a bite of the overall market with the A300 and later A310 and not become what they are today. The Twin DC-10 would have had a lot of commonality with the DC-10 as we know it and airlines would have seen cost savings as a result. I wonder if would have even stemmed some of Boeing's growth and the later development of the 767 and beyond.

Enjoy the Day! Mark
 
Did the DC-10 hatch blow / collapsing bulk-head / nose-dive prove the last straw ??

I've heard talk about 'The DC-10 Lesson', but each such seems to refer to a different failure mode...

The hatch that could be mis-latched, showing OK when wasn't, the rear bulk-head lacking pressure relief, the control lines all vulnerable to floor distortion...

Um, I think I missed several...
 
Nik said:
Did the DC-10 hatch blow / collapsing bulk-head / nose-dive prove the last straw ??

I've heard talk about 'The DC-10 Lesson', but each such seems to refer to a different failure mode...

The hatch that could be mis-latched, showing OK when wasn't, the rear bulk-head lacking pressure relief, the control lines all vulnerable to floor distortion...

Um, I think I missed several...
Click to expand...
Running all the lines of the DC-10 multiple redundant hydraulic system closely grouped together in the center engine's nacelle where they could all be taken out by a single uncontained turbine failure.

I attended a presentation given by the captain of the Souix City, Iowa crash, who with his crew managed to save a significant number of their passengers lives in a DC-10 with almost no hydraulic pressure and the help of another pilot who happened to be onboard and differentially controlled the throttles to deliver pitch and yaw control. Unknown to the crew, when the turbine section left, it cut a hole in the right side of the center nacelle. Air entering the front of the nacelle pushed out the right side hole generating a thrust that pushed the tail to the left causing the nose to go right and down and they had to fight the plane all the way down to something slightly less than a totally fatal crash.

Unfortunately, there are more.
 
Don't want to go off-topic, but maintenance folks I knew and worked with at the former Northwest Airlines really liked their DC-10-30's and were great to work on. Had a simple flap drive system, the primary flight control actuators based upon a common configuration and it flew well. Other than having the issue of three hydro systems ran together in the tail, was not a bad aircraft. The C-9 another, very good aircraft.
 
mkellytx said:
Indeed, I‘ve also heard the variation that MDD bought Boeing and Boeing paid for it…
Click to expand...
I think everyone is paying for it.


Edit: which is tragic. I remember Boeing being held up as an paragon of good management and management culture. To the point that it was used in business schools as an exemplar of how to do it. And now that culture is gone Boeing is just another company with a short term profit seeking mentality and almost no thought to long term viability.
 
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