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Boeing Lays Off Only Guy Who Knows How To Keep Wings On Plane

https://www.theonion.com/boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-how-to-keep-wings-on-1819571668

CHICAGO—With the airline industry continuing to suffer under the ongoing recession, the Boeing Company was forced Monday to lay off Al Freedman, the only guy left at the corporation who knows how to keep wings from falling off planes. "We used to have a whole team of engineers who knew how to make the wings stay on,…

Boeing Lays Off Only Guy Who Knows How To Keep Wings On Plane

An oldie, but a goodie - in honor of the news with that Max model losing its Window at high altitudes.

It turns out engineering is important. Who could have known? /s

12 comments

OpenStars

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Fortunately this is The Onion and this would never never happen irl, right... RIGHT!?

Hey remember a few years ago when a good fraction of the most experienced pilots in the industry walked away from their cushy, heavily-seniority-privileged jobs, citing "safety" concerns in the airline industry? Sigh... good times, good times. :-D

guru_hippo

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I’m really curious to read more about this - can you help guide me to an article about it?

OpenStars

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I searched a bit but Google keeps pushing HARD to show more recent articles as exclusively as it can - even adding a number such as "2021" (with the quotation marks) does little to fight against that overwhelming trend. And DuckDuckGo somehow keeps showing content specifically for military rather than passenger aviation - maybe that search engine takes into account the location where the search originates?

In any case, articles about pilot shortages and concerns over aviation safety are ubiquitous and overwhelming in both number and severity of depressing content, so you will have no trouble learning about either matter, separately or conjoined. :-(

As for that specific event in the past though, it may have tied in particularly with the pandemic, so both acting as an extreme outlier and yet also somehow all the more representative of the industry as a whole, as it showcased the lengths that airlines were willing to go to in order to avoid spending money, at a time when they were under their highest stress.

guru_hippo

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I appreciate the effort, thanks for narrowing it down a bit!

OpenStars

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I find it funny that just since this conversation a few days ago, multiple events have occurred related to it, with doors literally falling off of planes & the like, and CEOs even having to admit fault. Those pilots were right to get out while they could, before planes start literally falling out of the sky:-(. Though enshittification is not just something that affects the internet and planes - e.g. look at how many train derailments we've seen in this past year as well. It reminds me of that one guy that got fired b/c he refused to play ball and artificially lower the recorded temperatures on the train wheels. He chose integrity over his career, and he was right... though he still needs to find a way to put food onto his table:-(.