I've worked with Boeing spaceflight engineers, and several acquaintances of mine have worked for Boeing aviation. I have never seen or heard of any Boeing-branded organization putting out a single well-organized, quality piece of engineering or IT infrastructure since I entered the job market in 2017. From what I can tell, it's practically a state department at this point.
Painful to read “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
I don't think so - no. There's no turning back the clock here. Prior to the "big change" Boeing was one of the last survivors of the huge industrial boom that followed world war 2.
It's difficult to overstate how gigantic that boom was in the aerospace field and how unique the industry it created in the US was.
So many aerospace related companies, all competing with each other, all continually improving the aircraft technology, engineering best practices, manufacturing practices, corporate structure and governance, and everything else associated with aircraft manufacture so they produced the best product.
The competition produced some incredible advances and some unique corporations (like Boeing was) that functioned in a way not before seen (and not presently continued) for an American corporation. Basically, an engineering firm that as sort of side business produced airplanes.
The problem was, of course, that the boom couldn't last - as other countries rebuilt their industries, the US was no longer the only game in town. For a long time, the US dominated aerospace because not only did this unique industry exist here but also because we had a huge head start.
Eventually, though, through mismanagement and delusions about why the US was in the lead, that lead was squandered, companies were sold out, consolidated, and markets shrank as regulation caused aircraft manufacturing to be a more specialized industry.
Boeing was one of the last firms that retained the focus on engineering from that post war boom time. Now that it's changed, to change it back would require a new generation of employees to make a conscious effort to do so, to replicate what happened during the post war boom.
Actually, the US was one of the first to crack down on the bribes and corruption part. I think that the law that can get you in trouble for bribing a foreign government official arose out of fighter jet sales to a European country.
> you're asking somebody who entered the job market in 2017 and worked in one division which was not aviation how Boeing should be broken up?
Yup! In my experience, the guys in Chicago have zero clue how their technical teams work and so where a schism could be debilitating versus not noticeable.
The B52 first flew in 1952; the 737 in 1967. Both are still in the air. With lifetimes like that, who can blame them? Someone needs to hold that data while the product is in use.
Imagine the costs of not having the data for planes still being flown. Missing manuals, tech specs, testing procedures, etc. for some strange part that was manufactured 40 years ago, with completely different people, tooling and processes.
I believe the cost of missing data is much larger than keeping an archival storage, we have been doing archiving for a long, long time as a species.
Besides, what's important is that the benefit outweighs the cost. If the cost is required to stay in business, then it's probably important enough to incur. Remember: someone's going to be paying that cost and it's clearly worthwhile to them.
They discuss the dramatic increase in the need for titanium parts around 18 minutes into the first video. https://youtu.be/lapFQl6RezA?t=1090
When aluminum and carbon are in direct contact, galvanic corrosion is an issue. The only way they could make a plane with carbon fiber wings, fuselage, and empennage, was to replace most metallic elements with titanium. The final 787 is 15% titanium by weight.
Titanium is tough to work with, and I can see how problems would arise when you redesign what must be thousands of parts.
Specialized used to make a bike out of coated carbon tubes glued into Aluminum lugs using the same manufacturing process that the aerospace industry used. The Allez.
Beautiful bike, I had one, but it suffered from two problems: it was overly flexible and if you got a nick in the coating on the fiber or water got into the lugs, you'd get the GC issue.
Of course, their marketing claimed they 'solved' the issue...
Cadex made a similar bike, I rode it for years and never had any issues and I'm also not aware of any issues with that model. I wonder what the differences in processes and/or materials were.
> The only way they could make a plane with carbon fiber wings, fuselage, and empennage, was to replace most metallic elements with titanium.
That's not really true: galvanic corrosion can be stopped if you simply anodize the aluminum parts. There is no titanium required to do this. This is a common practice when working with carbon fiber.
Yes, but that was about the quality of the assembly of the plane, particularly with 787s coming from the Boeing plant in South Carolina (which was until recently one of two plants that assembled the 787 - now however it's the only one). This article is about unnamed parts (whatever they may be) coming from an unnamed supplier (whoever it may be), but not related to the actual quality of Boeing's work (except maybe the quality control of the parts of course).
The Al Jazerra doc covered the problems assembling the airframes _because the parts used to make the fuselage were defective_ They were cut by hand because the manufacturer never assembled the CNC machine.
I'm reminded of the Chinese guy who paid two million yuan for a hit, and then the hit man kept half and outsourced it, and that guy kept half and outsourced it, down to five levels deep, and finally the guy at the very bottom faked the murder, got caught, and the whole chain got rolled up.
That's basically Boeing.
Somewhere is a hut and parts are being made on a dirt floor in a half-assed way - or at least the modern equivalent of that. This supports an enormous pyramid of managers, business process outsourcers, accountants, lobbyists, and executives. Meanwhile, real engineers are holding their head crying at what happened to their company.
I used to work for that company at the bottom. Naively I thought we were the only bottom feeder. The company would use up the tool budget on useless things, then ended up hand working everything.
> The defect was found as the planemaker grapples with other problems in its 787 that have caused it to cut production and halt deliveries since May.
From Boeing management's long-term perspective, the upside to the current downturn is that it provides them an excuse to shift more production from their unionized Washington factory to their non-unionized South Carolina factory. (Anybody know if 787 production has now--or will be--moved entirely to South Carolina?)
Notably, most 787 quality problems have been with their South Carolina factory, which has less expertise and less ability to push back against the unreasonable management demands that result in shortcuts and defects. Some customers were even stipulating Washington built planes. But of course Boeing management couldn't care less about their quality problems. Presumably their gamble is that with Washington out of the equation, the defect rates will silently become status quo and then people won't complain as much.
It would be entirely unsurprising if this management culture bleeds through its suppliers, assuming it hasn't already. Major f'up? Terminate the contract to appease everybody, and sign a new contract with a virgin outfit. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The 787 uses additively manufactured titanium parts. I think they are part of the bracket that holds the engine on the wing(?), Norsk describes them as "structural, load-bearing components". Could be those since that is where it would be most critical. Or not, this is just speculation.
The company did not name the supplier, nor did it identify the part, although the Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the defect involved certain titanium parts that are weaker than they should be.
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It would seem that we would need to know what kind of part this is if we want to continue flying and trusting Boeing. Is it a part in the kitchen of the plane or a more critical holding the jet engines. It would seem this might be a critical part as it is titanium.
While I agree that Boeing should tell us which specific part it is, they are making the claim that it’s not an “immediate flight safety concern”. The fact that their PR team felt the need to include the word “immediate” indicates to me it’s more important than a kitchen part, but that whatever it is likely has redundant systems that can handle a failure of this part.
I do think Boeing is being a little too tight lipped on this. I think a decade ago, many would have let the questions end at Boeing’s statement, but their trust has really been harmed over the last 10 years, and I’d like them to provide more information.
> "While our investigation is ongoing, we have determined that this does not present an immediate safety of flight concern for the active in-service fleet," a company spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
>>It would seem that we would need to know what kind of part this is if we want to continue flying and trusting Boeing.
>While I agree that Boeing should tell us which specific part it is,
In general, it's bad business etiquette to publicly name & shame defects/mistakes made by business partners or company employees. Whether a supplier messed up a titanium part or a Facebook employee misconfigured a router, you don't call out their names in public.
Yes, it's understandable we readers would want to know all the dirty details but Boeing giving us that may also have the opposite effect: less safety instead of more.
In this case, it was the supplier that notified Boeing about the defect. If Boeing publicly outed that supplier to the press, that adds perverse incentives for the supplier (and other suppliers) to not notify airplane manufacturers in the future which creates unsafe planes.
On the other hand, it's probably good if Boeing privately notifies the FAA inspectors so they are alerted to it. Maybe they already shared that information.
Raw materials should be quality inspected. It was a big deal when we had 150 rolls of copper strip fail the QC testing. I worked inbound inspection for three summers at Andrew Corporation. We checked everything before it was stocked on our shelves. I remember asking why do we have to have to check the threads on boxes of Cap Screws from external supplies. The answer I was given is that when a technition is 150ft in the air mounting waveguides, he needs to know that the stupid screws will work the first time.
That's not how it works in aerospace. Certification is there to ensure quality control throughout the chain, but you still need to do your own quality control at every step to ensure that what you produce will be within spec. You can't just rely on the certification of your source materials.
In addition to what other commenters have said about not throwing your vendors under the bus this kind of hand wringing is why they don't trust the public with the more specific info.
If they tell you that the some part will wear out 5% faster on the planes with out of spec parts then every two-bit who took an engineering class once upon a time will be writing medium posts and creating youtube analysis videos with clickbait titles that overblow things and make it look like the world is ending when in reality it just means that the plane operators will have to inspect the part more and the end of life operators will have to replace it more.
From the Pinto to the 737 MAX the lesson that the public has repeatedly taught corporate America is that when there is a problem the narrative matters more than reality and it is to their best advantage to control it as much as they possibly can and because there are big bucks at stake they learn the lesson and do just that.
> the 737 MAX the lesson that the public has repeatedly taught corporate America is that when there is a problem the narrative matters more than reality
What did we sow with the 737 MAX disaster. Are you saying the public behaved inappropriately in their reactions to the MAX? That feels like it’s really sweeping the very legitimate problems under the rug and blaming the public for reacting to those problems.
It’s not like the public was reacting to hyperbolic engineering theories related to MCAS. Two planes crashed because of the system’s failure and the lack of notification and training to airlines and pilots.
I’m curious what you see as the public’s failing in this regard?
The Pinto an the MAX are drastic preventable failures that took the lives of passengers. If your take away from these failures is that the American public is somehow at fault for blowing things out of proportion you have come to the wrong conclusion.
If they had sufficient information to put people's mind at ease as you described above then the inherent failure is not providing it because it was entirely certain that everyone's mind is going to fill in the blanks with the worst possible thing that fits the bill and everyone's mental pictures is going to be of air frames disintegrating in the air. This was entirely predictable.
More likely the actual details haven't been communicated because it isn't nearly so reassuring. Let me speculate blindly...
It's a structural part the failure of which threatens the life of everyone on board the plane but rather than merely failing 5% faster it would never have passed spec in the first place and would if left alone have been found in the aftermath of hundreds of people hurtling to their fiery deaths and would tend to have started failing when the part failed halfway through its original expected lifespan.
It is only not an immediate threat to safety as 787s have only been around for 9 years and we still have literally single digit years before they would have started falling out of the sky so because they managed to discover this before falling planes took down the rest of their reputation they have time to strategize how they will take care of this in a way that simultaneously isn't ruinous to them or airlines.
This is like discovering your breaks don't work a half a mile before the edge of the cliff instead of 100 ft from it or having your appliance catch fire when you happen to be on hand to use your kitchen fire extinguisher.
They never should have moved substantial operations to a state full of complete idiots who can't be trusted to operate a toaster let alone build planes. THEY are reaping what they sowed.
That's pretty weasily wordy though, it is only immediate if it has just failed and then suddenly it is a safety risk? That's way too ambiguous for my taste, and given the state of trust with Boeing I think more transparency here would be better.
Even if it was some more critical part it could just mean that it has a lifetime of 10 years instead of 15 or 20. Or just needs to be checked more often so adding a bit to the maintenance costs until it is replaced. Worst case is that it is some really important part that is not designed to be changed during the lifetime of the plane making fixing it really hard (or impossible)
The FAA failed to issue an Air Worthiness directive until after both 737 Max crashes. We have to hope that’s fixed, but until there’s more evidence, the FAA’s failure to ground a plane doesn’t give me much comfort.
Bullshit. The FAA issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive a week and a half after the first crash, and grounded the entire 737 MAX fleet three days after the second.
“The Boeing 737 MAX passenger airliner was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 – longer in many jurisdictions – after 346 people died in two crashes, Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) resisted grounding the aircraft until March 13, 2019, when it received evidence of accident similarities. By then, 51 other regulators had already grounded the plane,[2] and by March 18, 2019, all 387 aircraft in service were grounded.”
It's very important to note that nobody grounded the plane before the second accident, so it's not like the FAA was standing alone in allowing the plane to fly after the first accident. They get criticized for taking three days to ground the plane after the second accident, but you could also argue that the other regulators had a knee-jerk reaction without sufficient data.
Fair point. Yes, the FAA’s real problem happened long before the grounding. It was really failure to require a re-certification of the design changes, and avoid a grounding incident, and the crashes, in the first place.
Bullshit. Their job was to check the design and make sure it doesnt have glaring flaws. If they did their job, and didn't hire part-time engineers who worked for boeing at the same time, 500 people would still be alive.
That has nothing to do with what I said or the comment I was responding to.
That being said, yes I think everyone agrees that the FAA was far too lax in the certification process. Doesn't change the fact that the post I replied to contained objectively false information that I corrected.
Is the final accident report out yet? I wonder if they are gonna blame the pilots for failing to handle a runaway trim situation regardless of what caused it (the infamous MCAS in this situation). It's a memory checklist item, they should have cut the electric trim motors and trimmed manually (assuming the plane hasn't gone in a deep dive at that point,the forces on the control surface would make it impossible to trim manually).
They're probably gonna blame the airlines, Boeing and the pilots. Planes don't crash unless damn near every party involved does something wrong. Boeing has a responsibility to not build hard to operate junk. Failing that the airlines have a responsibility to train the pilots on said junk. Failing that the pilots still have a responsibility to to understand how the junk works. They probably will minimize the blame on the pilots since both Boeing and the airlines were pretending that the new plane was the same as the old plane for regulatory compliance reasons and in light of that messaging you can't really expect people to learn about the differences themselves.
What they won't blame at all but probably deserves a mention is a long and expensive type certification process that provided the incentives for all the dominoes on the Boeing and airline side of things to line up the way they did. Nobody at Boeing or the airlines was attempting to achieve this outcome. They were trying to achieve a marginally better 737 within the bounds of the existing regulation.
You say "just" as if it wasn't important. I understand why you say that, but you clearly don't realise how much % of airplanes crash ends up being caused by maintenance skipping a beat. Shorter beats means a lot more skips.
If it is flight critical, Boeing has to publish official announcements through the FAA and EASA. If not, they don't any passengers don't have to worry too much.
How Boeing Lost Its Bearings: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
Out-Sourced Profits -- The Cornerstone Of Successful Subcontracting: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...
I've worked with Boeing spaceflight engineers, and several acquaintances of mine have worked for Boeing aviation. I have never seen or heard of any Boeing-branded organization putting out a single well-organized, quality piece of engineering or IT infrastructure since I entered the job market in 2017. From what I can tell, it's practically a state department at this point.