Items appearing to be of sentimental or keepsake value will be retained for one month. If you have question, please ask us.Ĭemetery staff will immediately remove items deemed inappropriate or unsafe. To maintain the dignity of the cemetery, commemorative items, balloons, pinwheels, glass or breakable items, votive lights, statues, shepherd's hooks are not allowed. Permanent plantings, statues, vigil lights, breakable objects and similar items are not permitted on the graves. For example, items incorporating beads or wires may become entangled in mowers or other equipment and cause injury. Mowers and trimmers can cause unseen items to become dangerous projectiles. When placing floral items, please do not use glass containers, rocks, wire or other objects that could cause injury to cemetery staff or visitors. Once the blooms are spent or damaged, they are removed. Cemetery visitors are free to use the containers located in receptacles placed throughout the grounds. We welcome fresh-cut flowers throughout the year and provide flower containers for gravesite display. We ask for your understanding and cooperation with our efforts. But readers may find themselves haunted by the question of whether a global company will in the future choose a long-term solution that requires time and substantial investments over a risky, short-term fix that pleases Wall Street.The intent of our floral guidelines is to ensure that we maintain the cemetery with the dignity befitting a National Shrine. On the one hand, the Max, with fixes to its software and new requirements for pilot training, is back in the air the FAA has also apparently tightened its regulatory approach. What’s more, it demonstrates that the problems leading to the Boeing crashes may not yet be solved. And yet even with these shortcomings, Robison’s book is a page-turner. At the same time, the dizzying complexity of Boeing (with more than 140,000 employees) and of a commercial jetliner (with about 600,000 parts) means it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of characters and their work details. I worry this may leave readers who lack an engineering or aerospace background more confused rather than less. While Robison does an able job of illuminating the implications of the 737’s flaws, his technical explanations of the MCAS software and the plane’s operational system - a small part of his narrative, but a crucial one - are opaque. ![]() ![]() A case in point: The year of the Lion Air crash, Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief executive and chairman, took home $31 million in pay and performance bonuses. But all were focused on reducing costs, circumventing workers’ unions and reaping the rewards that came with boosting revenue. A succession of new executives who had been schooled at the knee of Jack Welch at General Electric took charge. Parts for new planes, such as the 787, were outsourced to smaller (and cheaper) suppliers, sometimes resulting in disastrous delays. Corporate directives soon championed cost-cutting and shareholder value above all else. He makes a persuasive case that the McDonnell Douglas insurgency, likened by one observer to “assassins” who overtook Boeing’s “Boy Scouts,” essentially changed the course of Boeing. Robison points to Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas, in 1997, as a moment when the Seattle manufacturer, organized more around engineering excellence than quarterly financial gains, was transformed by a group of executives with an unrelenting focus on the bottom line. As young airlines grew up in Africa and Asia to serve new customers on local routes, they turned to the cheap and unadorned 737 as a sensible choice.Īll the while another force was pushing Boeing in a dangerous direction: Its corporate culture had become increasingly mercenary. Even as Boeing upgraded the 737 design in subsequent years with more seats and bigger engines (and a fix for a faulty rudder design), the aircraft’s simplicity, in its cabin as well as its cockpit controls, remained a signature feature. And so the plane that one executive likened to an old pickup truck - ugly and unsophisticated, but also reliable - in time became an institution. Southwest, in fact, made the 737 the only model in a huge, fungible fleet that allowed any of its crew to fly any of its aircraft. “The need to keep expenses down,” Robison explains, “forced compromises, decisions that would one day hamstring Boeing’s attempts to shoehorn in more sophisticated technology.” But for decades those cheap 737s proved popular, especially for carriers like Southwest Airlines, which wanted affordable aircraft for budget fliers. Designed in haste in the mid-1960s as a workhorse for shorter routes, the plane was built for airline customers who sought value and simplicity. ![]() At the start, there was nothing obviously wrong with the 737.
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