Boeing Company Research Articles

Research and analysis of airline supply chain risk management-- Take Boeing Company as an example

In today’s business environment, supply chain risk management is becoming more and more important for the strategic position of airlines. As a highly complex organizational structure, the airline supply chain faces multiple challenges and potential risks that may negatively impact its operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and profitability. Therefore, a deep understanding of the key elements and practical experience of an airline’s supply chain risk management is essential to enhance its competitiveness. This paper aims to comprehensively explore the overview and core elements of airline supply chain risk management. Firstly, it clearly defines and introduces the characteristics of supply chain risk, as well as the main risk types faced by airline supply chain. Then, it delves into the key elements of airline supply chain risk management, including supply chain visibility and information sharing, supplier selection and evaluation, and inventory management and logistics planning. Then, a series of successful experiences of airline supply chain risk management are introduced, and methods of using advanced technologies and tools to mitigate supply chain risk are discussed.

Analyzing the Interplay of Incentive Pay and Governance in the Boeing 737 MAX Incident: Implications for Corporate Structure and Ethics

This study delves into the relationship between incentive-based compensation models and corporate governance, focusing on the Boeing 737 MAX incident as a critical case study. It thoroughly examines data from annual reports of Boeing Company (2007–2014) and the proxy statements issued between 2008 and 2015 (Boeing Company, 2008–2015), highlighting the impact of incentive-driven decisions, particularly by Boeing’s CEO. Post-2011, the CEO’s compensation, heavily linked to a risk reduction strategy, saw a substantial increase. This strategy received backing from a compensation committee, members of which shared the CEO’s General Electric background, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest. The research emphasizes the urgent need to reassess corporate governance norms, focusing on executive pay structures and the independence of corporate boards. The Boeing 737 MAX incident starkly warns of the dangers and ethical issues associated with misaligned incentive frameworks. The study calls for reforms to ensure corporate decisions are ethically responsible and in harmony with long-term, sustainable business practices.

Exploring Supply Chain Disruptions at Walmart and the Boeing Company: When Saying “I’m Sorry” Is Not Enough”

This chapter explored the salient themes emerging as disruptions in the supply chain management at Walmart and the Boeing Company. It examined how both companies have responded to highly publicized disruptions in their supply chains, compromising customer satisfaction. Thousands of complaints against Walmart could be classified as: 1) Profiling (allegations of theft, race-based refusal of services, locking up goods); 2) Damaged goods; 3) Billing issues; 4) Delivery problems / Missing goods; 5) Communication barriers due to delayed, inconsistent, or incoherent messages; and 6) Employee complaints. Walmart’s typical response was an apology, a courtesy gift card, or to settle lawsuits. In the case of Boeing, investigations unveiled deception in business practices which resulted in inaccurate information being shared with regulating agencies as well as poor coordination of repair efforts, lack of documentation, ineffective communication, or neglect. Boeing’s problems led to catastrophic failures, for which Boeing has paid billions of dollars in damages and agreed to strict monitoring.

Market Structure and Governance of the Boeing Company

Market Structure and Governance of the Boeing Company

Conceptual assessment of the fuel efficiency of passenger aircraft with the transition to composite wings

One of the success indicators for any new aircraft is its fuel efficiency, influencing both range and cost-effectiveness, as fuel costs amount to 30% of direct operating costs. Based on the analysis of take-off mass response to design changes, a solution to the basic-type aircraft improvement in terms of fuel efficiency is considered. The feature of proposed redesigning is the use of a higher aspect- ratio of an airfoil allowing for fuel efficiency to be increased by reducing the induced drag. Two solutions are considered to substantiate this approach. The first one is the transition to composite wing structures, which will allow for a high aspect ratio of an airfoil without losing rigidity. The second one is the application (if necessary) of devices, reducing the wingspan, caused by the airport restrictions. The methodology for assessing the mass of composite wings based on the universal weight formula by V.A. Komarov which was specified by applying an integral factor considering the features of mass distribution in the structure, the structural adaptation of structure elements and their strength performance, has been proposed. To simplify the arrangement of aircraft with large-span wings in the available airport layout, the application of folding wingtips was considered. The principal analysis of the wingtip swiveling unit structure was performed. The assessment of the folding device effect upon the mass of a passenger aircraft was completed. The proposed approach was verified based on the Boeing company of B777 aircraft family. The numerical analysis of the composite wing application for the IL-96, Tu-214 and SSJ-100 was performed, and the winglet use effect on the MC-21 aircraft was studied.

Analysis of the Investment Value of three American companies in Industrial Sector

Industrial stocks are stocks issued by industrial enterprises that produce non-consumer materials. Industries producing non-consumer data generally include extractive industry, manufacturing industry, electric power industry, gas industry and so on. The stocks issued by these industrial enterprises that produce non-consumer materials are called industrial stocks. Industrial stocks have a long history in United States. As early as 1900, industrial stocks became the majority of American stocks. In the same year that the United States overtook Britain as the country with the biggest economy in the world. Even today, more than a hundred years later, industrial stocks still play an important role in the U.S. economy and offer great investment value. In this article, three industrial stocks are selected and analyzed in different investing aspects, which can provide reference for the investors who are interested in industrial stocks. Three companies are the Boeing Company (BA), General Electric Company (GE), Ford Motor Company (F). The results show that BA is most risky and F is most profitable.

Current Situation Analysis and Future Outlook of Boeing Co.

Boeing Company is the leading aerospace company in contemporary times. As a result of pandemics recently, the global aviation industry has been severely impacted, and the operational risks faced by Boeing have also expanded. Based on the business strategy and profit model of Boeing Company in recent years, this paper analyzes the dangers that the Boeing Company has experienced in its operations and growth from the standpoint of the interaction between its resources, operations, and financial data over the last three years, in order to forecast its future growth.

A Convergence of Science and Art: Simpson-Middleman Paintings Featured in Boeing Advertisements from the 1950s

By 1956, the Newark, New Jersey–based, art team of Marshall S. Simpson (1900–1958) and Roslynn E. Middleman (1929–2003) had produced a large and important series of abstract paintings that depicted various interpretations of space and the night sky. Eleven of these works were featured in employment advertisements placed over the next two years by the Boeing Airplane Company (now the Boeing Company) in Scientific American and elsewhere. Signed “Simpson-Middleman,” the paintings combined science, mathematics, and art into a single medium. Only one of the original works used by Boeing can now be located. This article tells for the first time the story of the unusual Simpson-Middleman art collaboration and the Boeing ad campaign, then documents in an illustrated checklist their paintings with related captions used in each of the seventeen Scientific American advertisements that incorporated them.

Letters to the Editor

Software Safety vs Software Reliability
 While looking back through Vol. 56, No. 1 (Summer 2020) of Journal of System Safety, I finally took the time to read Nathaniel Ozarin’s article “Lessons Learned in a Complex Software Safety Program.” The article is quite interesting and thought provoking, comparing what actually occurs while implementing a system safety program to the idealized descriptions found in documents such as MIL-STD-882, JSSSEH and AOP-52. While I found the article interesting and informative, I noted that the author consistently characterizes the “software safety problem” as a “reliability” problem, focused on finding and preventing “failures” and ensuring high “reliability.”
 Some Thoughts on the Probabilistic Criteria for Ensuring Safe Airplane-System Designs
 We have been employed in the risk sciences for a total of 86 years, including 62 years in reliability engineering and safety engineering positions at The Boeing Company. For many of those years, Yellman was the designated “Risk-Analysis Focal” (person) for Boeing’s 707, 727, 737 and 757 airplane models. For several decades, the United States government has published the same criteria, created by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), intended to ensure that the systems on large (transport-category) aircraft have been designed to be safe [Refs. 1 and 2]. But we believe that the criteria have failed to prevent certain aircraft accidents, and we think that the reasons for that should be better understood. We hope that this discussion will contribute to a better understanding by examining the part potentially played in those accidents by the FAA’s criteria that are defined probabilistically.

Multimodel Integration for Fuel-Related Aircraft Emission Estimation on Boeing 777

This paper proposes an individual aircraft emission estimation method that uses a multimodel approach based on the widely accepted Base of Aircraft Data model. With the identification of the influences, the baseline aircraft model was enhanced by an atmospheric model, which merges an airport database with Version 2 of the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications program, and adjusted for near-ground atmospheric effects, altering the respective model and creating the Prandtl and Ekman layers. Further refinement is given by an aircraft- and temperature- matching function to tailor the fuel consumption to that of a Boeing 777. Due to the significant dependency of emissions on the thrust and fuel burn, this model portion was validated with a flight data recorder extracted from 133 highly diverse flights performed on the Boeing-777-type aircraft. The resulting model proves to be highly capable of estimating the aircraft’s fuel consumption in the validation files with an interquartile range of 3.00 t around the slightly underestimating mean of . Based on the promising fuel consumption results, the model is reinforced through literature research for the introduction of primary constituents, namely, carbon dioxide, water, and sulfur dioxide. Additionally, secondary constituents like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons are implemented using The Boeing Company’s Fuel Flow Method2.

The Effects of Tablet-Based Electronic Grading on Airline Evaluator Performance

ABSTRACT Objective: This experimental study assessed the effects of an Apple iPad (Apple and iPad are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries) grading instrument on airline evaluator performance. Background: Extant research exploring the effects of grading formats on evaluator performance focused on pen and paper modalities. This research investigated how a contemporary iPad-based grading format affected airline evaluator performance. Method: Forty-five evaluators from a major U.S. airline graded a Boeing 767 (Boeing is a wordmark of The Boeing Company, registered in the U.S. and other countries) flight crew experiencing an engine failure during takeoff. Three grading formats were used: pen and paper, a paper-based equivalent of the iPad grading format designed to replicate the function of the iPad, and the iPad. The effects of the grading formats were measured using the following dependent variables: recorded technical criteria, recorded non-technical criteria, and correlation and inter-rater agreement with a referent score. Results: Members of the iPad paper-based equivalent and iPad groups recorded significantly more technical and non-technical criteria compared to participants using pen and paper (p < .001). Members of the iPad paper-based equivalent and iPad groups had significantly higher correlation (p = .01) and inter-rater agreement levels (p < .01) compared to participants using pen and paper. Conclusion: The results of the study failed to support the iPad as a superior grading format. Research outcomes suggested structured grading may be a more important factor in predicting airline evaluator performance than the type of grading format used.

Structural Response of a Stitched Composite Hybrid Wing Body Center Section

Hybrid wing body is a fuel-efficient aircraft configuration where the pressurized center section is confined by almost-flat panels jointed at right angles. The combination of internal pressure and in-plane loads imparts cyclic large out-of-plane deformations to the noncircular fuselage. These repeated pressure loads would lead to separation between the skin and flanges and delaminations in traditional layered composite structure. To address this challenge, researchers at NASA and The Boeing Company selected the Pultruded Rod Stitched Efficient Unitized Structure (PRSEUS) concept, an integrally stiffened panel design that is stitched together and designed to maintain residual-load-carrying capabilities under a variety of damage scenarios. Analytical and experimental results of the structural response of an all-composite 80%-scale hybrid wing body center section are presented herein. Internal pressure and mechanical loads representative of flight loads and certification requirements were imparted to the pristine and damaged structure. The pristine structure, the structure with barely visible impact damage, and the structure with discrete source damage all supported design ultimate load and displayed significant nonlinear response. Based on comparison with the test data, the finite element analysis performed before testing accurately predicted deformations, strains, and onset of localized buckling for the load cases considered.

Boeing 737-800 and MAX 8 Critical Factor Simulation

Boeing 737 is one of the most widely used aircraft in hundreds of airlines around the world. The Boeing Company introduced the new modified series of the 737 family Boeing 737 MAX series in 2015 and the Boeing 737 MAX 8 entered the commercial service in 2016. The MAX 8 is a state of the art aircraft that is more computerized and modified using the application of improved aerodynamics and safety systems. But since the crashes of Lion Air JT610 and Ethiopian Airlines ET302 which were operated with Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, the global MAX 8 fleet became grounded officially due to safety reasons. The investigations said the activation of the MCAS (A safety system) played major roles in both crashes. In this research, the other factors except for the MCAS which are, take-off angles, stall angle and stall times, and V1 &V2 speeds of the MAX8 were simulated and compared with its predecessor Boeing 737-800 using the Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

Numerical and experimental study of the drilling of multi-stacks made of titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V: interface and burr behavior

Machining and especially drilling of multi-stacks is a challenge task. In fact, drilling of multi-layers generates several damages such as burr at the hole exit and the decohesion of the interface of the layers. It is important to note that the decohesion phenomenon favors the accumulation of the chips at the interface of the layers. In this case, it will not be possible to use the automated system (such as robots) for drilling and fastening in the aeronautical field. This work gives focuses on the numerical and an experimental study during drilling of a multi-stack made of titanium alloy (Ti/Ti), which is usually encountered during the assembly of the aircraft door at Boeing Company. The impact of the machining parameters on the thrust force, responsible of the decohesion of the layers as well as the burr size, has been investigated experimentally and numerically. The proposed model is based on the behavior law of Johnson-Cook for the titanium parts and the cohesive zone for the interface. The main experimental and numerical results have shown that the feed rate and the thickness of the bottom layer have a great influence on the size of the decohesion zone. However, the burr at the hole exit is strongly influenced by the feed rate.

Talent and Innovation, Effects of the „Supersonic Management” in the Boeing Company

Boeing is the greatest company from the aerospace field with an expansion in 70 countries. The Boeing Company has three vectors of influence in the “galaxy of the businesses”, namely: the first vector with the target in the merchandising of the jetliners; the second vector with the action in defense, space and security systems and the third vector with the “fingerprint” in the supply of services. The diagnostic analysis of the Boeing Company shows that she is a firm with economic performance, because the top management inserts in research, in each year, more than 3 billlions of dollars.

NLRB's New Rules for Determining the Appropriateness of Microunits

As we noted in last month's issue of Management Report, the National Labor Relations Board recently clarified its test for determining when the Board will accept a “microunit” as an appropriate group to organize within an employer's larger workforce. The ruling stopped the International Association of Machinists, which has been trying for years to organize the more than 2,700 workers at a Boeing plant in South Carolina, from representing a microunit of fewer than 200 technicians who are part of the workforce (The Boeing Company, 368 NLRB No. 67 (2019)). This article discusses the Board's new three‐prong test for whether a proposed microunit is appropriate.

Improving supply chain management process using design structure matrix based cross‐functional analysis

AbstractThis paper introduces a process improvement study for a supply chain management (SCM) system of an aircraft manufacturer by using the design structure matrix (DSM). A high‐level model for the overall SCM process has been set up. Information and operation interfacing between critical tasks (CTs) belonging to adjacent steps of the high‐level models are expressed and analyzed using the DSM. The interface values (IVs), which represent the extent of risk exposure of the interfaces, are computed. The IVs associated with DSM cells are used to identify high‐impact cross‐functional areas of the system. The gray areas, which present opportunities for improvements in the system performance, are found after an in‐depth gap analysis of the identified high‐impact areas. Finally, the measures that can address the gaps in the gray areas and improve the system process are developed. The results and insights obtained from a process improvement case study on SCM of the Boeing Company are discussed.

Comparison of sonic boom propagation models with measurements above the Earth’s turbulent boundary layer

NASA conducted the Sonic Booms in Atmospheric Turbulence (SonicBAT) overflight campaign at Armstrong Flight Research Center in 2016 and Kennedy Space Center in 2017. The sonic booms were generated by F-18 aircraft flying at nearly constant altitudes and at nearly constant, supersonic speeds. Although the primary objective of the campaign was to investigate the effects of turbulence on the propagation of sonic booms from the aircraft, a subset of the SonicBAT datasets can be used to validate sonic boom propagation models. This dataset is obtained from the recording using a microphone mounted at a wingtip of a TG-14 glider flying above the Earth's turbulent boundary layer. With this dataset, effects due to turbulence and ground impedance, which are still poorly understood, are effectively eliminated. Consequently, comparison is made between measurements and models which only account for the nonlinear and absorption effects. Such models are obtained using NASA's PCBoom sonic boom propagation code, which has recently been updated to incorporate the full wind effects and improve the code's accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, near-field signatures of the aircraft using PCBoom’s near-field approximant are also compared with those generated by The Boeing Company using computational fluid dynamics.

An interview with Sam C. Saunders

AbstractSam C. Saunders, the son of Elizabeth Cundiff and Winston E. Saunders, was born in Richland, OR, on February 24, 1931. The family moved to La Grande, OR, in 1944, where Sam completed high school and two years at Eastern Oregon College. He then received the BSc degree in Mathematics from the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, in 1952, and he attended the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, receiving a PhD degree under Z. W. Birnbaum. After graduating, he accepted employment at the Boeing Company in its Mathematical Services Unit and, in 1972, a position as a Full Professor at Washington State University, Pullman, WA, from which he retired in 1996.

Development of treatment media for advanced stormwater treatment at an industrial site

Abstract The Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) occupies about 2,850 acres and is located in Ventura County, California. The site is jointly owned by the Boeing Company and the federal government (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration administers the federal portion of the property). Much of the site was historically used as a rocket engine testing and energy research facility from 1949 to 1998. The site stormwater discharges are permitted by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board through an individual industrial NPDES permit that includes numeric effluent limits for a wide range of constituents, including dioxins and metals. A large portion of the site uses distributed source stormwater controls with natural treatment systems utilizing chemically active media. As part of this approach, extensive research was conducted to develop a robust media for use in these controls to meet the discharge objectives. This paper describes the development of the media and its characteristics.