Will Boeing become the next McDonnell Douglas?

https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/airc ... 14355e8b04

Having worked at Boeing as an engineer, I must say I can agree with a lot of the statements here. Corporate and engineering culture really went down after the merger. I really wish we can go back to the day when Boeing was still an engineer-led organization.

A common saying is that when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the McDD bought Boeing and made Boeing pay for it since with the distribution of stocks, McDD still ended up being majority stakeholder.

https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/aircraft-propulsion/opinion-will-boeing-become-next-mcdonnell-douglas?elq2=ea67b8013334473283f1df14355e8b04

Having worked at Boeing as an engineer, I must say I can agree with a lot of the statements here. Corporate and engineering culture really went down after the merger. I really wish we can go back to the day when Boeing was still an engineer-led organization.

A common saying is that when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the McDD bought Boeing and made Boeing pay for it since with the distribution of stocks, McDD still ended up being majority stakeholder.

thanks for the article, I have to say this is not my area of expertise. But I had heard of the "reverse hostile takeover" of MCAIR over Boeing a few times before.

as an outsider it looks like theyre just trying to redo the same thing all over. I admire their restraint in not naming the F-15EX the F-15Max or the block III SH the F/A-187. they just seem obseessed with wringing the last bit of performance out of the old designs, some of them inhereted and its just the same thing with their civil airline as well.



they should be killing it with this, who even needs engineering

I saw the thread title and came to say what you guys already alluded to. Boeing can't "become" the next McDD because it already IS McDD and has been since the 90s.

I saw the thread title and came to say what you guys already alluded to. Boeing can't "become" the next McDD because it already IS McDD and has been since the 90s.

Also in regards to my last post, I'm not trying to upset the gods of diversity (praise be upon them) I am simply pointing out what happens to organizations who puts that thing they were good at as a secondary concern to something else, anything else. the primary thing suffers. in some cases that is alright when they have a "cushion" and some ground to lose. but when things get tight...

well, my old mantra I learned when I was just 16 strike again:

What gets the job done is good, what gets in the way is bad.

F-187 and F-15MAXX are catchy phrases!

I saw the thread title and came to say what you guys already alluded to. Boeing can't "become" the next McDD because it already IS McDD and has been since the 90s.

So again, this is word from some of the old time engineers passed on to younguns like me, so take it for what it's worth. Back in the day, Boeing CEOs generally came from an engineering background, but in the 90s with the McDD merger, the CEO tended to be more from a management or finance background without as much appreciation for engineering.

I really wonder just how long it will take to undo the damage. I really hope the NMA gets re-launched.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/20 ... r-tuesday/

Some say that even as the name disappeared, the McDonnell Douglas finance-first culture survived the 1997 merger, eclipsing Boeing’s engineering-first culture.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... gs/602188/

For about 80 years, Boeing basically functioned as an association of engineers. Its executives held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety as a mother tongue. Finance wasn’t a primary language. Even Boeing’s bean counters didn’t act the part. As late as the mid-’90s, the company’s chief financial officer had minimal contact with Wall Street and answered colleagues’ requests for basic financial data with a curt “Tell them not to worry.”

By the time I visited the company—for Fortune, in 2000—that had begun to change. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas—so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant. “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money,” went the joke around Seattle. Condit was still in charge, yes, and told me to ignore the talk that somebody had “captured” him and was holding him “hostage” in his own office. But Stonecipher was cutting a Dick Cheney–like figure, blasting the company’s engineers as “arrogant” and spouting Harry Trumanisms (“I don’t give ’em hell; I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell”) when they shot back that he was the problem.

Summarizes what’s wrong with the company after the merger. We had a really good reputation before the merger.

We had a really good reputation before the merger.

"If it's not a Boeing, I'm not going." - Me talking about air travel prior to the 737 Max fiasco. Full disclosure, I flew on 737 Max a few times, the first time was the airframes first commercial flight. It had that "new car" smell. Most comfortable flight I've ever had (I have never flown in a Boeing or Airbus widebody).

I actually never even flew in a Boeing 787, but I've had plenty of 737NG experience since those were the workhorse of Southwest Airlines.

The infamous Darleen Druyun scandal in the 2000s resulted in the current KC-46 fiasco and also the awarding of SDB to Boeing. She was already under investigation in 2000 for speeding up payments to McDonnell Douglas in 1993 but still got on Boeing in 2002 or so.

During the merger between Boeing & McDonnell Douglass.

How the eff did the Bean Counters end up taking over?

a 2/3 stock equivalency for the McDD stock (for every 3 McDD shares you had you get 2 Boing shares) let to the majority shareholders of post merge Boeing being the McDD execs.