Boeing 737 Max
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, August 21, 2026 17:40
VIEWED: 21693
PAGE 20 of 22
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quality control ain't what it used to be!
SECOND: You handle that by inspecting the product while the subcontractor makes it. If you wait until the product is in its final form before inspecting, you will never get better than whatever the lackadaisical subcontractor feels is good enough, even if it is no good at all.
No kidding! But the problem is, when you're assembling a plane in Indonesia, from parts made in a bunch of small sub-sub contractors in India, Vietnam, Philippines, and Bangladesh ... you gonna send 400 inspectors to all those facilities?
Just looking at cars, Ford Mustang example. Last we looked ... Engines made in Spain. Transmissions made in Mexico. Who knows where the wiring harnesses and instrument panels was made. Parts sent to China and Bangladesh for chroming. Heat treatment of valve springs?
Given GLOBAL supply chain ... same part could be made in three different countries, for example... quality control has gone to shit.
And everything that was written about corporate culture? So true!
And it could be said of any large technical-centric business, from software operating systems, applications, servers, and cyber security; to the military industrial complex which designs, builds, and maintains weapons for profit, not for war. Could add big pharma, tool-makers, and food suppliers to that list.
It's not so important if your towels are thin and your jeans have uneven hems, but there are areas where you should insist on good quality, and some areas where it's literally a matter of life and death.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:From a much longer article I saw this morning:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No kidding! But the problem is, when you're assembling a plane in Indonesia, from parts made in a bunch of small sub-sub contractors in India, Vietnam, Philippines, and Bangladesh ... you gonna send 400 inspectors to all those facilities?
China Manufacturing and Its Potential Costs
Bill Haskell | January 16, 2024 7:00 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2024/01/china-manufacturing-and-its-potentia
l-costs
Nick Dewhurst of Boothroyd Dewhurst has some data on what it may cost you to move manufacturing of a product overseas. In the pie chart above, part costs represent 72% of a product, overhead is 24%, and labor only 4%.
It’s rare to see an OEM in the U.S. today questioning the presumed logic of lower-cost manufacturing in China. They say . . . “Can’t beat those labor rates. My competitors are all doing it, and I have to stay competitive.”
AB: Labor is not the big cost it is made out to be. The percentage of it in a product has been steadily decreasing over the years. Labor is not the enemy. Doing stupid things is by far the enemy. This article touches on one of them . . . sourcing.
The fervor to go to China is a bit similar to those in the stock market shortly before the dot-com bubble burst.
A few voices have risen above the cacophony, however, pointing out that perhaps this lemming-like exodus to China has not been fully examined from a cost perspective. Business analysts such as Boston Consulting Group and Aberdeen Group are uncovering both the risks of outsourcing and the limited view most U.S. manufacturers have about what it costs them to produce their products.
AB: I was with Ingersoll Engineers a smaller consulting firm. Not an engineer, just a supply chain person who handled many different products.
Nicholas P. Dewhurst, executive VP for Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc. (BDI), and David Meeker, a consultant with Neoteric Product Development, published a study recently (“Improved Product Design Practices Would Make U.S. Manufacturing More Cost Effective – A Case to Consider Before Outsourcing to China”) examining some of the hidden costs of outsourcing that U.S. manufacturers may not be taking into account.
Boothroyd Dewhurst develops and implements design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) software. Dewhurst, an experienced project engineer, spends most of his time working with U.S. companies to make DFMA part of their product development process. He says:
“I ran into several clients who wanted to eliminate domestic manufacturing entirely in favor of outsourcing to China. But when I asked them about the real cost of producing, shipping, and distributing the products, they didn’t have an answer. It was clear they hadn’t done the math or thought it through.”
Dewhurst also saw that companies were not taking the time to understand the potential for cost savings during the design of their products.
“OEMs are drawn to China by the lure of reduced manufacturing costs via extremely low labor rates. But it is a given that most of the cost of a product is fixed during design, so the best time to find cost reductions is during the design stage, not during manufacturing. Yet most products are moved offshore without any such considerations.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Why Europe’s mixed economy produces safer planes than America
By Harold Meyerson | January 18, 2024
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-01-18-airbus-advan
tage/
In the wake of the midair blowout of a door on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 earlier this month, the lead that Airbus has taken over Boeing in the manufacture and sales of the world’s commercial aircraft has, not surprisingly, grown. It’s actually been growing for some time: Last year, Airbus delivered 735 new planes to airlines and leasing companies, The New York Times reported, while Boeing delivered just 528. Airbus had an order backlog of 8,600 new planes, against Boeing’s 5,626. This month’s blowout reinforced the public’s—and consequently, the airlines’—doubts about Boeing’s commitment to safety, which soared after two disastrous crashes of its 737s in 2018 and 2019.
“What used to be a duopoly” in the manufacture of commercial aircraft, Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory told the Times, “has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing.”
The long descent of Boeing has now become the subject of widespread analysis in the mainstream media. A story last Saturday in The Wall Street Journal began with an account of one Boeing engineer’s white paper in 2001 that warned against the company’s new commitment to outsourcing production of key parts of the aircraft it assembled. But continuing to produce the parts in-house, with the work done by Boeing’s very experienced and unionized workforce, cut no mustard with Wall Street and the company’s new-model CEOs, who no longer came to their posts from careers in production, but rather from the financial side of the industry. In 2005, the company sold its Wichita plant to a private equity firm that slashed costs before unloading the plant to Spirit AeroSystems, which has become notorious for its deficient quality inspection practices.
But this fish stunk from the head. Boeing continually objected to what it said were Spirit’s high costs and inability to meet deadlines. As the workers on the shop floor and their union repeatedly noted, this led to rushed production and deficient oversight. Workers—members of the International Association of Machinists—had “great quality and safety concerns,” one union representative wrote to union leaders, but their concerns were routinely ignored by senior management, the Journal reported.
So how are work practices at Airbus different from those at Boeing? I’m not arguing that Airbus provides a panacea for 21st-century production; a chunk of their own production, for instance, is outsourced as well. But consider, for starters, who actually owns the two companies. Airbus’s four largest shareholders, in order, are the government of France, the government of Germany, the Capital Research and Management Company, and the government of Spain. Boeing’s four largest shareholders, in order, are The Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust Company, and State Street Corporation (a bank and asset manager). In other words, Airbus’s largest shareholders are mainly politically accountable governments that must pay heed to such public concerns as air safety; Boeing’s are entirely investors in business for profits.
Moreover, as the merger of German, French, and Spanish companies, Airbus production is centered in nations where workers historically and currently have more power than their U.S. counterparts. Forty-six thousand of Airbus’s roughly 130,000 employees work in the company’s German factories, where workers, by law, routinely discuss production and safety issues with managers in works councils. In the U.S., the Machinists are a union in which workers do have voice and power by American standards, but lack mechanisms like works councils through which management must take at least some heed of their concerns.
In sum, Airbus’s clear leadership over Boeing in matters of flight safety stem in good measure from their differences in ownership and worker power—that is, from the European model of mitigating laissez-faire capitalism
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says
By Dominic Gates | Jan. 24, 2024 at 6:04 am
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-not-spir
it-mis-installed-piece-that-blew-off-alaska-max-9-jet/
It was clear soon after the incident that the plug must have been mis-installed.
When the cabin is pressurized, six small stop fittings on either side of the plug press against corresponding stop pads on the door frame.
The only way for the plug to have blown out is if it moved up, so that the twelve stop fittings were no longer aligned with the twelve stop pads — which is how the plug is opened for maintenance.
Four key bolts that prevent such upward movement in flight could not have been in place.
The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.”
NTSB investigators already publicly raised the possibility that the bolts had not been installed.
The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.
The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.
It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.
Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.”
If that account of what happened is indeed fully documented in Boeing’s system it should be readily verified by the investigation.
The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB.
The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website.
https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspe
ction-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962
At the end of his second online post, the whistleblower asks “So, where are the bolts?” then offers a guess:
“Probably sitting forgotten and unlabeled … on a work-in-progress bench. Unless someone already tossed them in the scrap bin to tidy up.”
https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspe
ction-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509963
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Alaska Airlines resumes flying Boeing 737 Max 9 plane after door plug blowout
By Meredith Deliso | January 26, 2024, 6:45 PM
The service return comes two days after the Federal Aviation Administration released final instructions to airlines to begin conducting inspections of their 737 Max 9 planes.
Alaska confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that it planned to return some of its 737 MAX-9 aircraft back to the skies on Friday following a thorough inspection.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/alaska-airlines-resumes-flying-boeing-737-ma
x-9/story?id=106723983
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The fall of Boeing has been decades in the making
Jan 31, 2024, 10:05am EST
https://www.vox.com/money/24052245/boeing-corporate-culture-737-airpla
ne-safety-door-plug
Consumers have little choice when it comes to plane manufacturers: It’s pretty much Boeing or Airbus. There are currently over 10,000 Boeing commercial planes in service, and over 13,600 Airbuses.
Until the deadly Max crashes, the FAA allowed Boeing, like other aircraft manufacturers, to “self-certify” that their planes met air safety rules because the FAA doesn’t have the staff to do all the certifications itself. After the agency grounded some Max planes for a flaw in the de-icing system, Boeing asked for an exemption because engine disintegration would be “extremely improbable.”
Weak enforcement of regulation means that Boeing isn’t held accountable to the degree that it should. “The mantra in Washington for years has been ‘starve the beast, big government bad,’” says Aboulafia. “Sometimes you kind of need that [big government], whether it’s monitoring drinking water or keeping the air travel system safe.”
Boeing’s biggest defect? Corporate culture.
Experts say that the root of Boeing’s present troubles is a longstanding culture issue. Over the years, the company’s top decision-makers went from detail-oriented engineers to slick suits with MBAs.
“You’ve got a management team that doesn’t seem terribly concerned with their core business in building aircraft,” says Aboulafia.
There’s one name that keeps popping up when people talk about Boeing’s cultural downslide: Jack Welch, the legendary — and infamous — executive who helmed the conglomerate General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Welch was known for ushering in a sea change of “lean” management that ruthlessly made cuts in both manufacturing processes and the workforce, all in the service of pumping up stock prices. His leadership style included firing the worst-performing 10 percent of GE staff every year; he reportedly laid off over 250,000 people during his tenure. He inspired an entire generation of business leaders, and this Welchian GE philosophy was eventually brought over to Boeing.
In Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, journalist Peter Robison describes an environment where safety concerns were concealed or downplayed, in part to be faster and cheaper than Airbus, the former underdog that overtook Boeing as the biggest commercial aircraft manufacturer in the world in 2019.
While lean management was the name of the game for Boeing’s rank-and-file, in the past decade the company’s executives spent over $43 billion buying back their own stocks and paying out nearly $22 billion in profits to shareholders. By buying back shares and removing them from the public market, the individual value of a share automatically rises even though nothing about the company’s operations has changed.
Those billions represent cash that could have been reinvested in developing the next line of Boeing planes or hiring more quality inspectors. Former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who led the company during the deadly Max crashes, reportedly received an exit package of $62 million.
Boeing’s strategy to continually shrink costs doesn’t appear to have paid off. The company hasn’t turned an annual profit in the past five years. Airbus is selling more planes, and recent headlines about Boeing are putting a halo over Airbus’s comparative reputation. In January alone, Boeing lost $35 billion in market value as its stock price fell. https://www.google.com/search?q=total+stockmarket+value+of+boeing
In the aftermath of the fatal Max crashes, the grounding of the planes cost Boeing about $20 billion. It paid another $200 million in a legal settlement in which its shareholders claimed it had made misleading statements about the Max planes. It lost billions more from canceled orders. “The big criticism is that they’re solely focused on finance, but they’re not even good at that,” says Aboulafia.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pa
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Suicide Mission
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
By Maureen Tkacik | March 28, 2024
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-
mission-boeing/
Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
-----
A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”
-----
In early 2017 John Barnett happened upon a printout of a list of 49 “Quality Managers to Fire.” The name John Barnett was number one. He decided to go on a medical leave of absence, which turned into early retirement on March 1. He called a labor lawyer he knew from a colleague’s case, and together they began the seemingly unending process of filing an aviation whistleblower complaint detailing his seven years at the Charleston plant. It made him sick to think that the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch the stock price nearly triple once more during the two years after he left the company.
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Why are Boeing whistleblowers suffering sudden unexplained deaths?
Is Sudden Whistleblower Death Syndrome a thing?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/2nd-boeing-whistleblower-fou
nd-dead-heres-a-timeline-of-the-companys-mounting-problems/ar-AA1o3bvZ
Joshua Dean died 1 May 2024. Following a 2-week sudden critical mystery infection. Age 45.
https://nypost.com/2024/05/02/us-news/second-boeing-whistleblower-dies
-suddenly-from-severe-infection/
John Barnett died in March - in the middle of his sworn deposition. What should we call that? How about "suicide" anyone?
https://www.newsweek.com/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblower-predicted-d
eath-scandal-1879548
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 Max crashes
May 14, 2024
Boeing has violated a 2021 agreement that shielded it from criminal prosecution after two 737 Max disasters left 346 people dead overseas, the Department of Justice told a federal judge in a court filing Tuesday.
Boeing acknowledged receiving notice of DOJ's decision and said it is planning to respond.
“We can confirm that we received a communication today from the Justice Department, stating that the Department has made a determination that we have not met our obligations under our 2021 deferred prosecution agreement, and requesting the company's response," Boeing told USA TODAY in a statement. “We believe that we have honored the terms of that agreement and look forward to the opportunity to respond to the Department on this issue.”
Government officials plan to meet May 31 with victims of the crash and directed Boeing to reply to the filing by June 13. The department will inform the court by July 7 how it plans to proceed, which could lead to criminal charges against the company.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-says-boeing-brea
ched-2021-deferred-prosecution-737-max-agreement-2024-05-14/
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/14/justice-department-says-boeing-breache
d-2021-agreement-that-shielded-it-from-criminal-charges-over-737-max-crashes.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How ordinary failure could have a seismic effect on industrial giant Boeing
By John Downer | July 16, 2024
John Downer is Associate Professor in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Bristol, and the author of "Rational Accidents."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240718-how-ordinary-failure-could
-have-a-seismic-effect-on-an-industrial-giant
Earlier this year, a Boeing aircraft's door plug fell out in flight – all because crucial bolts were missing. The incident shows why simple failures like this are often a sign of larger problems, says John Downer.
For a flight to be imperiled by a simple and preventable manufacturing or maintenance error is an anomaly with potentially far-reaching implications.
On 6 January, as Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 (a Boeing 737 Max 9) was climbing out of Portland, Oregon, a large section of the aircraft's structure, a fuselage door-plug, broke free in flight. With the plug gone, the cabin violently decompressed with a clamorous boom and gale that ripped headrests from their moorings. The mother of a teenage boy seated just in front of the rupture clung to him as his shirt was torn from his body and sucked into the void.
Nobody died in the harrowing incident, somewhat miraculously, but it was a very close call. If the seats directly next to the failed fuselage section had not been empty, or the seatbelt light had not been lit, the event could probably have been deadly.
Dangerous failures in modern jetliners are extremely uncommon events in general, but even in this context, the plug blowout looks unusual and concerning. Preliminary reports strongly indicate that its proximate cause was shockingly mundane: it seems that Boeing simply failed to secure the plug correctly. The errant door-plug was missing four crucial bolts when it was discovered in a residential neighborhood, and subsequent inspections have reportedly revealed improperly bolted plugs on other aircraft fuselages.
If the missing bolt theory is confirmed when the safety investigation concludes, then it will be the sheer ordinariness of the failure that sets it apart. When jetliners fail for mechanical reasons, those reasons tend to be much more complicated and interesting (at least from an engineering perspective) than missing bolts. For a flight to be imperiled by such a prosaic and eminently avoidable manufacturing or maintenance error is an anomaly with ominous implications.
To understand what I mean here, it helps to put the incident into context, and for that it helps to step back and think briefly about the inherent difficulties of making jetliners as reliable as we have come to expect.
Much More at https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240718-how-ordinary-failure-could
-have-a-seismic-effect-on-an-industrial-giant
Download the free book "Rational Accidents" from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Rational+Accidents
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME