Dreamliner Delayed Again: McNerney's Continued Troubles At Boeing

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal described the new delays in its 787 Dreamliner. I last wrote about this continuing problem here, last April.

Interestingly, nowhere in Wednesday's article was any mention of Boeing's CEO, Jim McNerney. Yet, this latest setback seems to continue the company's woeful failures of management in its most visible, bet-the-company project.

You'd think McNerney would be at least addressing it personally, if not in public. As I noted in the earlier post, McNerney hasn't exactly left a trail of successes in his prior positions. And Alan Mulally, although having his hands full at Ford, is probably feeling that his erstwhile senior management is getting its just desserts for passing him over for a guy who never ran something so complex as an airplane maker.

This latest snafu on the Dreamliner involves the improbable widespread use of the wrong special fasteners on dozens of parts fabricated by the many subcontractors for the plane spread around the globe. According to the Journal's article,

"Boeing's Ms. Leach said engineers traced the latest problem to "specifications that weren't specific enough.""

You cannot make this stuff up, can you?

Wouldn't you have guessed that Boeing would have its own quality control employees in a few pilot subcontractor plants to supervise the entire process? This sounds like an overall failure of program management at Boeing. If this process was allowed to continue in this manner for so long, what does that say about the capabilities and effectiveness of Boeing's middle- and senior-management?

Thanks to this latest delay, and the little matter of Boeing's recent strike, the first Dreamliners aren't expected to be ready for delivery until 2010.

Any guesses as to how many more of these delays Boeing can take before McNerney is asked to take the fall for them?