Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has “Enormous Volume Of Defects” Bolts On MAX 9 Weren’t Installed::A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the aircraft. The takeaway appears to be that outsourced plane components have so many problems when they show up at the production line that Boeing’s quality control staff can’t keep up with them all.
Bean counter who ordered cuts on QC probably failed upward
You’d think corporations would learn from these types of failures. But no, not as long as endless growth is the overall plan. The yes men will keep cutting corners at the expense of safety and quality.
So far they’ve learned the benefit far outweighs the cost
Especially if you can get a new job before something goes wrong. Get an upper management job, strip the metaphorical walls of copper to “cut costs”, and use that on your CV to get a C-suite job somewhere else.
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Boeing cut roughly 800 quality engineers from their staff in favor of “technology”.
“Some of you will die, but, that’s ok with us as long as we appease our capitalistic overlords” -Boeing
One source of many: https://www.heraldnet.com/business/boeing-revamps-quality-control-more-high-tech-fewer-humans/
Apparently that program failed by their own metrics and they abandoned it.
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It was Mentor Pilot video on Boeing, he mentioned they had some fancy automated QA system they pissed a load of money up the wall on, and in the end they still had to spend just as much on rework and it was scrapped.
I’ve no idea if they hired new QA people after, but even if they did it wouldn’t be the same people back, what with their “brilliant” idea of shedding expensive, experienced staff in Washington and replacing them with cheaper inexperienced hires in South Carolina
Oh no. What a surprise¡
“Our QC never finds any major issues, if we cut budget here, here and here we can increase EBIDTA, yada yada MOAR PROFITS since our processes are perfect anyway!”
- The bean counter
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For anyone interested what happened (according to some anonymous whistle-blower):
They had to remove the door plug to replace damaged pressure seal but didn’t want to run QA on the plug after installing it back so they didn’t mark it as ‘removed’ in the tracking system, they simply treated it as door that were “opened”. Parts were missed when inserting the plug, QA didn’t check because it wasn’t in the system, plane was delivered to the client. The rest is history.
There’ s a lot of backstory to it but that’s the direct cause. Supposedly.
To be fair, the defects SHOULD be found in the production line, but not in the finished product.
In something like a commercial airliner you can’t afford to just catch the mistakes. You have to prevent them.
In a commercial production line, there are part defects, engineering defects, assembly defects, testing defects, tool defects, etc.
Tens of thousands of parts. Thousands of employees (some new hires). Hundreds of vendors.
You will never prevent all defects, but you should be able to discover them before finishing production.
A lot of these wont even be discovered until they are assembled and it fails a test or inspection point.
Absolutely 0.0000000000 defects is impossible.
However, as an engineers, it’s troubling to hear Boeing say things like “well we added a few more inspection points”. Lack of inspection is a contributing cause but it’s not the root cause.
Finding errors at the factory is great and a great way to go out of business (both due to increased cost, as well as eventual escapes)
Yes, but you can’t inspect quality into a product; you have to build it into the product.
Years ago, some American auto executives toured a Toyota factory to learn from them. After the tour, one of them said, “Those sneaky Japanese, they didn’t show us their rework area.” What he didn’t know was that unlike American factories, there was no rework area. Everything was assembled correctly the first time, and any worker had the right to stop the assembly line at any time to fix a problem. It’s far easier than finding and fixing a defect that is buried deep in a finished product.
Damn. Use some punctuation. Every word capitalized doesn’t help parsing it.
Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has “Enormous Volume Of Defects.” Bolts On MAX 9 Weren’t Installed.
Thank you!
If true, Boeing will cease to exist in a few years for the amount they are about to be sued.
Boeing is a defense contract darling, so they can never die.
Though, the commercial arm of Boeing could get broken off and sold to another airline if this gets any worse.
The names will be changed to protect the guilty.
Unfortunately, the US government will protect them despite all this, I’m afraid.
You know, I’d be perfectly fine if they nationalized the company for as long as it takes to restore a deep and unshakable sense of “you do not fuck with QA” to Boeing.
Their current board and corporate leadership should be prosecuted for criminal negligence for allowing it to get this bad after the MCAS crashes, and moreover after they publicly committed to drastically improving QA and general safety policies following those crashes.
The US government will disolve the FAA before they nationalize any industry.
I’m not talking about the whole industry. Boeing is a single company.
It appears that nationalizing the company and taking 100% of the profit drive out of the loop until after a healthy safety culture has been re-established, would be the only way forward. But consequences? For top level management? That wouldn’t even happen in Western Europe - much less in the US.
What’s a couple thousand dead “plebs” compared to the pain and suffering that a CEO like Muilenburg, or Calhoun would experience from even an immediate termination of contract without bonuses, god forbid they’d have to face an actual sentence in a criminal trial.
“Time for a multi billion dollar defence contract” -congress.
sadly, this is exactly what I suspect would happen.
What’s his nuts saying he changed Boeing so it was run like a business instead of an engineering firm is precisely where things were guaranteed to go to shit. Wasn’t a matter of if, only when.
Time to start arresting people at the top and work your way down. Also Pete Buttigieg needs to answer why it has taken so long for the grounding of the 737 Max 9.
FAA grounded them the day after the incident
Sorry, thought they only ground Alaskan airlines ones.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of Mayor Pete by any stretch of the imagination, but they were quick to ground these.
People who know more than me have pointed out that the the hole in the fuselage and the plug found on the ground don’t show the kind of damage you’d expect if the bolts were present and secure.
So them being absent entirely is consistent with the publicly available evidence.
oh boy, so reposting of that comment has now become actual news articles. Oh boy, this will blow up.
here someone reposted it in full on lemmy incl the source: https://lemmy.nowsci.com/comment/4930362
