Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 was forced to make an emergency landing in Portland after a large piece of the new 737 MAX 9 plane blew off while it was flying at around 16,000 feet. Luckily, no passenger was seated near the blown-out panel, which left a huge hole in the side of the plane.
In inspections of other planes after the incident, United Airlines has found a slew of installation issues, including loose bolts, in its 737 MAX 9 jets.
The downfall of Boeing is something that financial writer Porter Stansberry, the founder of MarketWise, has been warning about for a long time, with a post he wrote in January 2020 bearing the headline "COMING SOON: THE BOEING COLLAPSE."
According to Stansberry, the company has been embracing more bad ideas than any other firm for the last two decades, changing its culture away from a focus on engineering to corporate concerns.
He points to Boeing’s Chief Operating Officer, Stephanie Pope, as an example of what’s going wrong there. Her qualifications are somewhat surprising for someone who holds such a high role in a major firm: a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Southwest Missouri State University and an MBA from Lindenwood University, a small school that is ranked #121 out of 167 regional universities in the Midwest.
Pope has no engineering background, but Stansberry suggests there is another reason she was placed in charge of the operations at a leading global aerospace engineering corporation: She is the executive sponsor of a group known as Boeing’s Women Inspiring Leadership, which is focused on “increasing gender diversity awareness.”
Boeing’s downfall has been so spectacular that there is even a documentary about it, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which was aired on Netflix and criticizes the company’s new corporate leadership and their shift from focusing on quality and safety to profitability.
Go woke, go broke
X owner and Tesla head Elon Musk took Boeing to task on the social media platform over a filing indicating the company changed its incentive plan in 2022, shifting away from giving its executives bonuses based on employee and passenger safety and instead handing out bonuses for hitting diversity, equity and inclusion goals and climate targets.
Writing on X, he said: “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.”
The filing states: “While our 2021 design incorporated operational performance in the areas of product safety, employee safety and quality, for 2022 we will add two other focus areas critical to our long-range business plan: climate and diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&l).”
This is supported by their “Global Equity, Diversity & Inclusion 2023 Report,” which states that in 2022, “for the first time in our company’s history, we tied incentive compensation to inclusion.”
The report states that they hit their goal of having “diverse interview slates for at least 90% of manager and executive openings”; they raised the target to 92.5% for 2023.
Musk then shared a news story about the Alaska Airlines flight and added: “People will die due to DEI.”
This is a classic example of the “go woke, go broke” phenomenon that so many American companies have been experiencing recently. For example, Anheuser-Busch saw its market value plummet by $6 billion after it used trans advocate Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson, while Nike saw its shares drop dramatically after running an ad with Colin Kaepernick, a controversial athlete who took a knee during the U.S. national anthem.
What’s happening at Boeing underscores everything that can go wrong when people are hired or promoted based on their race, sex and other diversity-related criteria rather than their competency. Planes are literally falling out of the sky, and countless lives are in danger.
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