Management 101: Sometimes You Should Let The Experts Speak
It’s safe to conclude that the Boeing 737 Max 8 has a significant design flaw considering that two have crashed under similar circumstances in the last five months. Pilots have been complaining about both the plane and the inadequate training they receive to fly it. After an Ethiopian Airlines flight recently went down killing all 157 aboard, the global consensus was to ground the jetliner until it was proven safe. But in the United States, things were more . . . er . . . convoluted.
First, no doubt horrified at televised images of a second of his company’s airplanes smoldering in ruins, Boeing CEO Denis A. Muilenberg leaped into action and called U.S. President Donald J. Trump to beg the latter “pretty please” to not ground the 737 Max 8. Perhaps Muilenberg contemplated first letting his engineers figure out why they keep dropping out of the sky. If so, he must have been quickly assured by underlings that the doomed planes were only carrying passengers and not something important, like bags of company cash. Another 737 Max 8 going down is one thing. The stock price plummeting? That’s catastrophic.
Meanwhile, the final arbiter on whether the planes should be grounded somehow wound up being Trump himself, who did eventually issue an Executive Order banning the 737 Max 8 from operating in U.S. airspace. Trump had already made clear that he knows nothing about aviation when he bemoaned in a tweet that planes are too complicated for pilots to understand. It is surprising that the Executive Order didn’t also direct the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to enact regulations requiring all aircraft to have fewer buttons and more feathers. Birds don’t crash.
Until now, key regulatory decisions concerning commercial aviation, like banning certain aircraft from operating in the national airspace, have always been made by and attributed directly to the FAA. It may nominally be the president’s call as the top executive branch official, but particularly in highly technical areas like aeronautics even the most ineffective heads of state invariably let those with expertise make (and potentially be blamed for) the call. The FAA for years has been the world-leader in aircraft safety. True, the agency’s reliability has been in question since industry-friendly regulatory changes were enacted during the George W. Bush administration. Moreover, the FAA doesn’t currently have a permanent administrator; the last guy nominated by the president happened to be Donald Trump’s personal pilot who had no business running a Domino’s Pizza franchise much less a large federal bureaucracy. Still, when questions as to the safe and proper functioning of a highly-sophisticated piece of machinery arise, FAA expertise seems key to protecting the public and reassuring all that safety is the paramount concern with respect to civil aviation(thus protecting both the industry and its passengers). In this case, Trump made it clear that he was calling the shots.
(Also absent from the process was Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, who Trump must keep as a hostage in the White House basement in case her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, steps out of line. Chao reportedly also occasionally babysits Eric Trump.)
To recap, in the wake of two deadly disasters over a five-month span involving the 737 Max 8, (1) Boeing’s CEO responded by asking the U.S. president to protect his planes from being grounded, (2) Trump tweeted that planes were too complicated to be flown by pilots, (3) the currently leaderless FAA, the once-global standard-bearer on aviation safety, stayed silent while 40 other countries took action, and (4) Trump finally issued an Executive Order at least giving the appearance that he made the decision unilaterally.
Anyone have the number for Amtrak?
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