Boeing 7*7: the saga continues…

[PakledHostage]

10 hours ago, monophonic said:

Mayhaps. I think among other things Boeing acquired this "open door policy" with McDonnell Douglas. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_96

And yet the DC10 is, today, regarded as a "brick sh*thouse", structurally. It's extensive use of titanium finger doublers makes it much more fatigue resistant than any of the Boeing or Airbus designs and Airbus still to this day even uses basically the same engine pylon design as the DC10s much maligned engine pylons. The DC10 is more of an example of how an otherwise great airplane can have its reputation tanked by bad maintenance and, subsequently, by people who don't know what they are talking about than an example of a bad airplane. There's a reason you see so many of them flying in cargo operations.

P.S. Before someone says "buh buh buh but!" about the Turkish Airlines flight 981 crash: That was the result of Turkish Airlines mechanics screwing up a mod to the door latch that was mandated after the AA96 incident. (Their error made it easier for the door to be closed improperly, rather than harder, as was intended). And the ensuing AD that mandated installation of blowout panels between the passenger cabin and cargo hold affected all widebody aircraft of the day, from B747s to L1011s to A300s to DC10s. The cargo door failure on Turkish Airlines revealed a design flaw in all widebody types, not just the DC10.

[PakledHostage]

You know, the media loves to portray the aviation industry as some sort of "heros and villains saga", but that's short sighted and stupid. I have spent most of my engineering career in the industry.  And while I grew disillusioned and cynical towards the end, feeling like I was being held hostage by a bunch of Pakleds, the people in the industry are by and large conscientious and good. They are people though. They make mistakes. Pilots make mistakes, mechanics make mistakes, engineers make mistakes, management makes mistakes. But the system, as a whole, is designed to catch those mistakes before they become catastrophic. It does an extremely good job of that. You're far safer riding on a commercial flight than you are driving on the highway. That's not a coincidence. Even in the Alaska Airlines 1282 case, engineering design, pilot training, ATC procedures, etc. came together to yield an outcome where nobody got seriously hurt. That makes it a success story. Should it have happened? No. Given that it did happen isn't it great that nobody got hurt? The backups and backups for backups worked. The industry learned a valuable lesson, and the mistakes are being corrected. That's what's supposed to happen. During my time in the industry, we celebrated the aircraft that we sent to the desert to be turned into beer cans. It was our job to safely get them to that point in their life cycle. Sending them off meant we'd done so.

Edited January 24 by PakledHostage
Fixed a couple of typos and missing words

[tater]

 

[kerbiloid]

Gremlins.

They had been forgotten, they are trying to remind of them. In space, in air.
They want some more respect and attention. So, they screw the bolts, screw the valves. They kinda say: "You screw us, we'll unscrew you!"

Also, Boeing should check, if somebody feeds a mogwai after the midnight, or makes it wet.

Edited January 25 by kerbiloid

[Nuke]

go home boeing, youre drunk. no dont fly. oh poo....

Edited January 25 by Nuke

[CBase]

I am not sure I want to fly on Boeing planes anymore. Most recent information from an internal source:

https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962

(you have to scroll for part 2).

Quote

In a healthy production system, this would be a “belt and suspenders” sort of check, but the 737 production system is quite far from healthy, its a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen. As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high....

 

[monophonic]

12 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

They are people though. They make mistakes. Pilots make mistakes, mechanics make mistakes, engineers make mistakes, management makes mistakes. But the system, as a whole, is designed to catch those mistakes before they become catastrophic. It does an extremely good job of that.

It is starting to look like Boeing's management has been making some very big mistakes, in my eyes. And the system is catching up to them finally, I hope. The MCAS issue certainly wasn't caught before catastrophe. It may have been the "keep your seat belt on at all times" rule that was the last line of defence that prevented fatalities in this case. A bit too close for comfort for me.

[StrandedonEarth]

4 hours ago, monophonic said:

It is starting to look like Boeing's management has been making some very big mistakes, in my eyes. And the system is catching up to them finally, I hope. The MCAS issue certainly wasn't caught before catastrophe. It may have been the "keep your seat belt on at all times" rule that was the last line of defence that prevented fatalities in this case. A bit too close for comfort for me.

Luckily, in this instance, the last slice of swiss cheese held....

(Original in spoiler, which I couldn't resist modifying into the above image)

Spoiler

Not that I changed much

 

Edited January 25 by StrandedonEarth

[PakledHostage]

4 hours ago, monophonic said:

It is starting to look like Boeing's management has been making some very big mistakes, in my eyes. And the system is catching up to them finally, I hope. 

I am not going to make excuses for Boeing. That wasn't the intent of my post. My post was intended to point out that the people in the industry generally aren't a bunch of "Mr Burns" types, with an array of evil plans. Neither the MCAS nor the door plug issue should have happened, that is clear. But let's not over-simplify those problems (or their solutions) either. 

[tater]

Take this with as many grains of salt as you find necessary:

https://viewfromthewing.com/boeing-whistleblower-production-line-has-enormous-volume-of-defects-bolts-on-max-9-werent-installed/

Quote

Current Boeing employee here – I will save you waiting two years for the NTSB report to come out and give it to you for free: the reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeings own records. It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.

…With that out of the way… why did the left hand (LH) mid-exit door plug blow off of the 737-9 registered as N704AL? Simple- as has been covered in a number of articles and videos across aviation channels, there are 4 bolts that prevent the mid-exit door plug from sliding up off of the door stop fittings that take the actual pressurization loads in flight, and these 4 bolts were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane, our own records reflect this.

 

[darthgently]

23 minutes ago, tater said:

Take this with as many grains of salt as you find necessary:

https://viewfromthewing.com/boeing-whistleblower-production-line-has-enormous-volume-of-defects-bolts-on-max-9-werent-installed/

 

No bolts at all.  That would make double checking their torque at assembly time problematic

[tater]

33 minutes ago, darthgently said:

No bolts at all.  That would make double checking their torque at assembly time problematic

I think no bolts has been the default thought for many since the beginning. It was a brand new aircraft, bolts or cotter pins wearing through from vibration (I'd wager all of them would need to fail) in a plane delivered in October is not plausible.

The 4 bolts in question are not even torqued I think, they are held in place with pins and castelated nuts.

Edited January 26 by tater

[StrandedonEarth]

That whirring  sound you're hearing are all the shareholders selling off their Boeing stocks before all the penalties and lawsuit settlements hit...

[StrandedonEarth]

Oh geez, read the whole article, yeah, not flying Boing (deliberate sic) again, not that I plan to fly anytime soon. Dang bean-counters gut everything. The comments are equally damning about MBA "leadership" culture.  Another excerpt from the article:

Quote

Because there are so many problems with the Spirit build in the 737, Spirit has teams on site in Renton performing warranty work for all of their shoddy quality, and this SAT promptly gets shunted into their queue as a warranty item. Lots of bickering ensues in the SAT messages, and it takes a bit for Spirit to get to the work package. Once they have finished, they send it back to a Boeing QA for final acceptance, but then Malicious Stupid Happens! The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating (with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they *just painted over the defects*. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”.

Painted over defective rivets? Seriously? There needs to be jail time.

Edit: speaking of bean-counters, and I apologize for going off-topic on a tangent, but a franchise I worked for got bought by a group with no experience in the industry, with a shady CFO who misled the group about the seasonal nature of the industry and ran it into bankruptcy. The intention was to sell off the pieces at an overall profit. Luckily the original owner bought the plant back, although the franchiser was also prepared to buy the plant rather than let it close, because at the time we were just that good. To sum up, bean counters should have little authority in operations in any industry, let alone one where quality is a life-or-death issue.

Edited January 26 by StrandedonEarth

[PakledHostage]

2 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Oh geez, read the whole article, yeah, not flying Boing (deliberate sic) again, not that I plan to fly anytime soon. Dang bean-counters gut everything. The comments are equally damning about MBA "leadership" culture.  Another excerpt from the article:

 

I'm going to trot out my naivete again: How does this happen on the ground, on the factory floor? We once had a competitor's airplane in our hangar while it was being fixed by an Airbus AOG team. It was winter,  and in the interest of overall collective aviation safety, we allowed Airbus and the competitor to use our space so the work could be done properly. (Competitor airlines collaborating on maintenance isn't uncommon,  because we're all ultimately working towards the same goal.) Our CEO saw the airplane there and had a total meltdown rage fit, complete with contorted face and spittle flying out of his mouth, but the airplane stayed in the hangar for a bunch more days until it was fixed. Everyone just ignored the guy's demand that we kick them out. That's the climate I knew. How has the laziness and corner cutting seeped down from those bean counters to the floor? Something's not right.

[kerbiloid]

A while later. Boeing spaceplane.

Spoiler

 

[darthgently]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

A while later. Boeing spaceplane.

  Hide contents

 

All Your Bolts Are Belong To Us

[PakledHostage]

I wrote my last post in the middle of the night (insomnia sucks), and having thought about it since then,  I think the bit quoted by @StrandedonEarth may be a bit unfair to Boeing.  Clearly Boeing has a responsibility to ensure that the parts that their suppliers provide to them conform to the design, but it sounds from the quote like they are doing that. If Spirit is being deceitful by painting over bad rivets to hide them, that's on Spirit, and good on Boeing's QA for noticing. 

We also have to remember that the people assembling parts at a fab shop like Spirit generally aren't licensed aircraft mechanics. They'd be people off the street with only the bare minimum skill set to do the job (probably much of that obtained through on-the-job training). I am generalizing, but I have to wonder how much most of them really care about aviation?

The professionalism I experienced in my colleagues in fleet management at the airline where I worked,  on the other hand, was mostly born out of a love of aviation and a talent to get that far in the organization.  The mechanics in the team were the best in the company.  It was their job to provide troubleshooting guidance to the line mechanics.  The chief pilots weren't directly in the fleet management team but fleet management and flight ops worked closely enough together that we were on a first-name basis with them. The engineers had all studied aeronautical or mechanical engineering and were there because they liked airplanes. So it was a much different environment than at an outfit like Spirit.

That said, it would be Boeing's responsibility to install the parts that it gets from Spirit correctly.  I don't know if these plug doors are sub-assemblies of a larger fuselage section that's also made by Spirit, or if the plug doors are something that Boeing mechanics install themselves. Either way their processes would need to monitor and ensure that all parts of all assemblies conform to the design. It sounds like Boeing's QA mostly does that, but stuff is somehow still falling through the cracks. The question then is "why?". Are they understaffed and overwhelmed by a flood of poor workmanship by their supplier? Are they jaded and don't care anymore? Something else? I can't know. But we can rest assured that the high profile of this event will yield changes.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

The question then is "why?".

I would think that, ideally, each assembly station would have a cart or similar with all the items to be installed at that station.  Ideally, each part, right down to the bolts, would have a place on the cart.  Maybe insets into a foam liner fitting each and every part.  The inside of each inset is dayglow red or similar so any missing parts stand out.  And the assembler should have zero parts, like bolts, left over.   The carts would be populated by someone then inspected by another set of eyes.  Then, after assembly, the actual completed assembly and the hopefully empty cart would also be inspected by another set of eyes.  There is no reason well trained AI couldn't be involved in these inspections;  especially in the cart population inspection and post assembly cart check.

[StrandedonEarth]

@PakledHostage, @darthgently, did you read the linked article? Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has "Enormous Volume Of Defects" Bolts On MAX 9 Weren't Installed - View from the Wing . It explains exactly how the bolts went uninstalled (they were installed, then removed, but never recorded as removed, so QA didn't re-inspect). It's a great article on the internal workings of Boeing, and the comments below the article are especially critical of replacing engineers in top positions with MBA's (and hiring the former CEO  from McDonnell-Douglas) whose only concern is profit, not quality.

But yeah, any factory (in any industry) with as many defects as Spirit was putting out should/would be shut down for intense retraining, along with heads rolling. That's what would have happened to us if we failed audits that badly.

Edited January 26 by StrandedonEarth

[PakledHostage]

Yes, thank you @StrandedonEarth for the link. What I was trying to get at in my long winded post (which I intended as context) was "why?". Why are these errors happening on the factory floor? I once read a great book titled "They Called it Pilot Error". It asks why otherwise rational people would go fly into a mountain or pull the wings off their airplane in a spiral dive. Just dismissing those errors as "pilot error" also dismisses important understanding of what lead to the person making the error.  Similarly,  why are these errors happening at Boeing? Are they understaffed and overwhelmed? Are they jaded and don't care anymore? Are they getting pressure from above to cut corners? Or something else? Just as most pilots don't wake up in the morning and think "I'm going to fly into that mountain", it is reasonable to assume that these people are motivated to do a good job but can't for some reason.  Why is that?

[darthgently]

54 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

@PakledHostage, @darthgently, did you read the linked article? Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has "Enormous Volume Of Defects" Bolts On MAX 9 Weren't Installed - View from the Wing . It explains exactly how the bolts went uninstalled (they were installed, then removed, but never recorded as removed, so QA didn't re-inspect). It's a great article on the internal workings of Boeing, and the comments below the article are especially critical of replacing engineers in top positions with MBA's (and hiring the former CEO  from McDonnell-Douglas) whose only concern is profit, not quality.

But yeah, any factory (in any industry) with as many defects as Spirit was putting out should/would be shut down for intense retraining, along with heads rolling. That's what would have happened to us if we failed audits that badly.

Yeah, I read that and watched the vid tater posted Wednesday after I posted that.  I'm running way behind this story; should have shut up.  The idea that there would even be an inspection difference between "opening" the plug and "removing" the plug when opening is identical to removing is very janky.  Almost like the distinction was conjured up in order to avoid an inspection.  Or so it could appear, which doesn't look good

Edited January 26 by darthgently

[StrandedonEarth]

12 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

Are they getting pressure from above to cut corners?

2 minutes ago, darthgently said:

The idea that there would even be an inspection difference between "opening" the plug and "removing" the plug when opening is identical to removing is very janky.  Almost like the distinction was conjured up in order to avoid an inspection.

It all comes down to the bean counters calling the shots, and they are probably coming down on people who rack up extra expenses in the form of extra man-hours doing "unnecessary" inspections, making people hesitant to do what is actually necessary. What's going on at Spirit is less clear, but if the facility is being run on the cheap then the grunts are probably underpaid and don't care, and it costs too much to fire them and train new ones. Or they do get fired and the replacements are no better. They get what they're paying for.

[PakledHostage]

Just now, darthgently said:

I'm running way behind this story; should have shut up.  

I wouldn't say that. Your ideas were interesting.  Aviation is a weird industry because it's mired in processes and bureaucracy that are hard to change, but it also has a way of incrementally improving - usually after something bad happens and then the industry and regulators get together and figure out how to stop such a thing from happening again.  I am certain that changes will arise out of this. I hope it isn't just a knee jerk reaction to media pressure, but a meaningful change. From my own experience participating in those types of regulatory rule making processes,  it probably won't be knee jerk. ...It will be tedious and boring, but it won't be knee jerk.

[Shpaget]

The first group of Alaska Airlines 737s return to service. They expect to finish all the inspections by the end of the week.

https://news.alaskaair.com/alaska-airlines/operations/as-1282/