Boeing hired two corporate VP's out of the auto industry in about 2018 or 2019.  One to head engineering, one was out of quality.  Neither one had any apparent idea about how an airplane is engineered or built.

The engineering VP planned to fix the engineering personnel shortage by moving engineers around to fill slots.  He had no idea about the specialization required; engineers is engineers, stick 'em in front of a tube (and I suspect he wanted to use some of that auto design software for sizing).  The quality guy wanted to add metrics that apply when zillions of individual widgets are made.  I don't how many months passed before he got into a shop other than walking through on a gawking tour.

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Designated Engineering Representatives

A partner in an airplane and I were getting signed off for banner towing one day.  The gal from the FSDO had a noob along.  When he was looking at my partners certificates we heard him whisper, "what is a Cv-440 and a Cv-880?"

My buddy got a chuckle.

After our demonstrations, the examiner told us we both would have to repeat for every airplane we planned to use for tugs.  Both of us had piles of glider tows already, and she knew it.  Another flying partner from college days always rescheduled his part 135 check rides if she was on the calendar.
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That was another curious relationship.

McAir was nearly viewed as a Navy contractor and the notion that the Air Force hated McAir was widely spread.  I never heard anyone give a single example for a reason, I'll guess it was either F-4 or F-15 related, or possibly an axe to grind with JS McDonnell.

In any case, the Air Force was treated with extra soft kid gloves and everyone was on tip toes to avoid any possibility of an offense, intended or not.  That leads to leaving out the icky truths that need to be passed on sooner than later.  An example of the ridiculous relation showed up on transparencies and powerpoint slides later - any image of a fighter had to show the airplane in a nose up trajectory as that is positive (the airplane isn't about to crash).

Do you know the part of the flight envelope where winglets reduce induced drag, or have any idea about the speed range where they are effective?

It's during cruise, which is generally the longest portion of a flight, and the range of best speeds is narrow.

Winglets work exactly the same as extending the wings and adding a "clipped" wing tip that sweeps into the trailing edge along a more or less elliptical leading edge.  Don't use them if there are no span limitations.

Review Masak and Maughmer for their contributions.  The first raked or swept tip was probably used by an American glider pilot on his sailplane; he had a sense about the basic reason it should work, and modified his glider to find out.  I'll have to dig around in my memory for a name, I can't recall it now.

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By eliminating core departments, there is no check and balance on training, experience, methods, uniformity, or technical ability.  What results is technical chaos; new hires are assigned to a program and basically told, "go to work".  The lucky ones get a lead that is capable and gives a damn, and that is getting more rare.  The technical prowess of leads is declining as they come up out of that system and the gray heads leave, and some of those aren't retiring, they're going to other companies.

There is a practice that any manager can manage any group, so it's increasingly likely that a specialist will work for a manager with literally no clue about whether the analysis work is correct, let alone sufficient.  When I left there was one manager assigned to moving people around in that division; his background was design, so he had not the foggiest notion of strength or fatigue work.  Someone else moved staff in each of the other divisions and there was very little cross movement, further isolating the analysts from each other.

The F-18 program and both of the commercial programs I worked have a nasty habit of producing what I labeled "analysis looking analysis".  What that means is that it looks okay thumbing through, but won't stand up to scrutiny of the details, especially idealizations in hand analysis and generally more so in finite element work.  In the case of the F-18, it's the press of time, schedule and keeping the exec's bonuses intact is always the most important factor.

Discipline in my groups meant that understanding how the structure, mechanism, or subsystem functioned, and the analyst had to articulate that information; it's impossible to analyze a structure unless we know how it functions.  It also meant free body diagrams were required.  That stuff is hard work for a young analyst and they generally won't do it unless forced.  Part of that is caused the modern use of finite element analysis as a crutch, a crutch they don't understand except to apply some loads and hope it works out.  Over constraint is common in order get a stable model with no care about whether the interfaces are remotely similar to the airplane, all that matters is that the deflections are small enough that the model doesn't jump off the screen and the fringe plots are pretty.  I always checked NASTRAN models used for analysis for a bail out card, a convenient and unethical method to hide problems in a model.  Sizing with von Mises stresses since most of them don't know the difference but they heard somewhere that is the place to start.  I mistakenly assumed every ME and AE undergrad was receiving finite element theory training until the last couple of years when I started asking.  That means they have no idea what goes on behind the data entry.  Analysis looking analysis, but it was (generally) fast.
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Yes.

The old McAir culture did not suit Boeing's way, and the echoes of the old guard from JS McDonnell and the guys that stuck with him in the early 50's still rung too loud (that group retired in the ~1980 to ~1995 time frame).  They're dead now, that old culture is almost dead, and life support is not coming.

The big turn occurred when the employee structure was changed to a manager class and a worker class.  Many good to great leaders did not become managers, and the impact was immediate.  Hell, I didn't have a real title when I left, just a few numbers that identified who I was, where I was on the tree (most of the time), and what I did (more or less, it was so broad as to be meaningless).

I thought design reviews at subcontractors were fun.  Certainly a chance to get away that was worthwhile.

I'll probably never forget one at LM in Orlando for the Countermine Systems project.  The presentation was wired tight, and they had a real chief engineer.  There were not a bunch of hangers on sitting in the back surfing on a laptop as can be found in St. Louis.  If the presenter could not answer a question, generally the chief engineer had an answer, and if not, had one at the end of the next break.

They weren't perfect, I questioned a fringe plot used to "size" a lug in the fuzing for killing a dart that did not explode, and that lug failed during a shot the following week.  But they fixed the problem instead of trying to explain it away as a unicorn.

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