Boeing Moving HQ to Washington D.C.
 

According to NPR Boeing just announced its moving its HQ to Washington D.C.

NPR Story

I guess it makes sense in their minds....

[Mods move as required]

Skylimey

They might as well exit the commercial airframe business and concentrate on government contracts. Plus, didn't the tax breaks from Illinois just expire?

The future of the company has been set, and that future is McDonnall Douglas.

They've haven't been doing so hot on their government contracts as of late either. KC-46, Air Force One, Starliner, etc.

Obviously, they need to get even further from the engineers. The focus on engineering was the root cause of the success of the 707, 727, 737 [original], 747, 757, 767 and 777 [original]].

Financial engineering produced the 787, MAX, 747-8 and 777X,

The path to a successful future is clear. /s

It would be sad if this was just the death throes of a dying company. But it seems to be representative of something much deeper in our society.

Chicago is a swamp, business-wise. DC area is full of high tech and developing fast. Seattle might have been a good idea, but DC is still going to be an improvement over Chicago.

Easier to BS the government, yes?

From the NPR story:

Shouldn't that be "Boeing took over two years to admit, identify, check, test, verify and get certification of the design changes that should been done before the MAX was placed in service."

Or have I strayed off topic?

For sound decision making processes in that biz it takes engineering and less MBA and Politics background. So they further moved away more into the later. Politics works only so long as the stuff does not fall out of the sky. I assume that some corks popped at Airbus.

If they only had moved to Charleston.

So after moving close to the NE stock exchanges and money now it is the government orders they target? What does this move mean for commercial airplanes? Out of fashion?

It also takes them closer to the FAA and lawmakers/influencers related to civil aviation. Much easier to have a couple of Senators in for a few drinks in DC that Chicago or Seattle

Re some of the posts above ...

On April 27th 2022 the Boeing stock dropped 15 dollars, and 40 million shares moved ownership (normal day 6-12 million shares traded)... just after the most recent Boeing financial report came out... reason for that appears to be mainly a billions of dollar size loss in the Defense segment. And it is clear that Boeing and US DoD are not happy co-campers the last few years. On the financial side the 787 program was said to be never to be able to make a profit, and after that came corona/covid. Which means they have a lot to do. Losing your safety culture means it will take at least 10 years to get that back, at least if you acknowledge that and go to work on that full power (which till now seems not to be the case).

From a program and technical point of view moving far away from engineering and manufacturing is never a good idea (and this especially so in aerospace) and should be noted as a fundamental strategic weakness of an organization. The complexity of aerospace and the tight system integration requires as much close contact as possible.
Having been involved in putting people closer together in both aerospace and defense over the years, it was interesting to find that I could use scientific research on the subject.

So if you move your HQ to another location you MUST either sell much more, or make (margin) or find (funding) much more money to compensate for that weakness. But even then, you will find fundamental weaknesses in both the product and the global supply chain that are hard or even impossible to get out. Even if you exactly know where and what the issue is.

In this context an article linked in that NPR story makes interesting reading .. 737 Max crash victims' families aim to reopen Boeing's deferred prosecution agreement
https://text.npr.org/1096075522 By David SchaperTuesday, May 3, 2022

In one of the posts on the MAX it was suggested that a criminal investigation into Boeing and Boeing executives would exclude Boeing from US DoD contracts. If the victims families action would put Boeing back under the criminal light ... then a strategic option could be to split the civil and the defense segment of Boeing into two separate companies, with the civil HQ back to engineering/manufacturing and the defense HQ in Washington DC.
We are a long way from that of course but might be an interesting contemplation ;-)

As ugly as TBC's behavior has been, they are still a major part of the defence of the west, and that is not going to go away easily, but that is possible. As far as airline business goes, we may have a bit of a hiatus on the return to business as normal, if ever.

They move next door to the Pentagon. Right across the street.

Throughout the pandemic we have observed, and have been told to observe, how group video conferences and other tech methods enable physical proximity and location to hold much less relevance or importance. But some here are seeming to go back in time.

Of course, this SLF/attorney does not dispute that closeness, in a variety of ways, of management to engineering and engineers as well as manufacturing, is critically important in aerospace and especially after the MAX debacles. But at the same time, heaps of derision have been unloaded on Boeing's board - deservedly - for its various abdications and greedy missteps, if not worse. Getting the board and top management away from Seattle might be a better move.... provided there also will be offices just below the org-chart level of corporate hq located next door to Seattle - and Charleston.

And hey, I never liked that building on the river downtown in Windy, and WR here, not sorry at all to see it go. Walked past it on my way to serving the almighty Billable Hour many times.

Chicago was a poor choice on so many levels. They really should move their HQ to the “Big Red Barn” and remember why Boeing became a great corporation to begin with.

Spot on!!! They are so distracted on so many levels that nothing is working right. At some point you have to look at your past, identify what worked, and return to it.

Perhaps Boeing senior management finally decided that the violent crime rate in Chicago was unacceptable, much like Amazon did when it pulled its employees out of downtown Seattle.