Nearly 23 years ago:
‘A Boeing aerospace engineer presented a controversial white paper in 2001 at an internal technical symposium. The engineer, John Hart-Smith, warned colleagues of the risks of the subcontracting strategy, especially if Boeing outsourced too much work and didn’t provide sufficient on-site quality and technical support to its suppliers.
“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers,” Hart-Smith wrote. “These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight.”’
“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers”
Software connection: this is known as SLA Inversion [1], the phenomena that you can never be more reliable than your least reliable component. There are ways to get around it, but they involve having multiple redundant but independent paths to achieving a successful result. This is difficult for structural components of an aircraft because each redundant mechanism adds weight and decreases performance & fuel economy.
It's somewhat shocking to me that there are no redundant failsafes to something as critical (and potentially error-prone) as a loose bolt in a door plug, though. Or maybe there were and we'll see compound errors in the final FAA report, which will definitely be interesting to read.
> This is difficult for structural components of an aircraft because each redundant mechanism adds weight and decreases performance & fuel economy.
All structural (and other flight critical) components in an airliner are redundant. And yes, they add weight, decrease performance, and increase fuel consumption.
As for the door, it is also redundant. We'll have to wait and see to find out what the exact cause was before finding a solution.
The obviously loose bolts are certainly a problem. The process should be one mechanic installs the bolts, then an inspector inspects it and signs off on it.
If you watch "Aviation Disasters" (I watch all of them) there's always multiple causes for each accident, and multiple fixes. One crash happened because a maintenance worker taped over the redundant sensors so the airplane could be cleaned, and forgot to remove the tape. The inspection to ensure the tape was removed also failed.
Famously, the 'swiss cheese' model [0, critical article] - every layer has holes, so layers of safety are required to reduce the chances of holes lining up (leading to a failure dropping though - and resulting in an accident).
I’m genuinely curious how you would consider the door (plug) redundant. What else is keeping things (e.g., the mobile phone that fell to the ground) inside the airplane?
> It's somewhat shocking to me that there are no redundant failsafes to something as critical (and potentially error-prone) as a loose bolt in a door plug, though.
There were warning lights going off suggesting a depressurisation was going to occur, but these were broadly ignored (though flights were restricted to shorter routes).
Not quite a fail safe but also not an ideal response.
That's not what those lights mean. The warning was for a malfunction of one of the triple-redundant pressure control systems.
> Homendy said investigators have learned that before the Friday flight, the “auto-depressurization” warning light came on during or after three previous flights, at least one time while the aircraft was in the air, and once while it was on the ground. Each time, the light was checked out, and Alaska Airlines reported the light turning on was a “benign” issue.
Homendy's remarks were obviously wrong and premature (sadly expected of the "chair" who is an administrator, not the qualified engineer.) The Alaska Air 1282 plane experience 3 different warnings. The system is "semi" triple redundant in that there is a primary system, a secondary system, and a manual system. In this case, the primary system was "failing", and the plane switched over to the secondary system. Alaska has not explained itself here.
However, the most obvious speculation, is that the plane was leaking (badly) and the primary system was probably keeping up with the leak (which is why the problem was intermittent.) But that primary system was likely have to "run all the time" (because it had to keep up with the leak) - and one of two (or both) things likely happened. Either sometimes it could NOT keep up (based on elevation, pressure, and temperature variations), or else the pressure pump was actually overheating (from constantly having to run to keep up with the leak), and occasionally failing. When this happened, the plane control systems would automatically switch to the secondary pump, and light the WARNING LAMP. Given that the problem happened twice in the prior 3 days, the problem was getting worse.
AlaskaAir's response was totally inappropriate, and NOT safety focused. They did not ROOT CAUSE the issue, HOPED it was the lamp, or lamp electricals, replaced those parts, and called it good. And the 4th time was the charm, when the plug failed entirely, there having been 3 prior warnings of an issue in pressurization. In my opinion, inexcusable, and the reason I am no longer flying on AlaskaAir. Though I would further speculate that Boeing's inspection procedure instructions probably do not include inspecting the exit door seals, the door plug seal, or the rear pressure cone. Inspecting those things would be much more expensive than just checking the warning light, and the pump operation. (The pressure pumps operating just fine, and the LAMP just fine as well.)
So Homendy's statement is almost certainly expected to be shown to be misplaced and premature. I was incredibly surprised that she made the statement.
> That's why every critical thing in an airplane is redundant
I'm not sure how to understand that claim. Do the emergency doors/door plugs have two bolts? Three bolts? Ten bolts?
If the manufacturer and/or the operator is not capable of making sure that all the bolts are always appropriately tightened, what is that claim actually worth?
> One crash happened because a maintenance worker taped over the redundant sensors so the airplane could be cleaned, and forgot to remove the tape. The inspection to ensure the tape was removed also failed
So from that we learn that failures can stack, just like like redundancies?
> Do the emergency doors/door plugs have two bolts? Three bolts? Ten bolts?
I don't know the design. But I'm sure it is not one where one bolt failing will cause the door to come off.
> If the manufacturer and/or the operator is not capable of making sure that all the bolts are always appropriately tightened, what is that claim actually worth?
The process also has to be redundant. One mechanic tightens the bolts, and an inspector checks it and signs off on it. If there are loose bolts shipped, then the inspector has some 'splaining to do.
> So from that we learn that failures can stack, just like like redundancies?
Zipper failures are not supposed to happen. Any crash is the result of an unexpected zipper failure. The whole airline system is extremely complex, and finding every potential zipper failure is nigh impossible, though everyone involved tries to anticipate every scenario. When a zipper failure happens, then each event in the zipper is corrected.
This is how airline travel, an inherently dangerous activity, has become so incredibly safe.
> This is how airline travel, an inherently dangerous activity, has become so incredibly safe
Indeed. The tragedy with Boeing though is that they seem to have greatly regressed when it comes to safety. We all thought planes plunging down to the ground, doors getting ripped off of the fuselage were a thing of the past but they have reappeared.
Doesn't that feel just a little awkward, to first claim "every critical thing in an airplane is redundant", yet when asked for specifics to have to resort to saying you "don't know the design"?
FWIW, I'm sure aircraft are safe. At least, "safe enough" [usually].
Yet we all know they're built by humans working for corporations, and we also know both humans and corporations are sometimes flawed.
> Zipper failures are not supposed to happen
Right. Every so often they do, though, don't they?
One can keep the door shut, yes. It is kind of a weird system. The plug is actually "held in" by the plug stops in the frame (12 of them). The plug stops align with 12 mating stop-mating-pins and contact (on the plug, e.g. "door"). The way the plug gets into that position is "interesting". It tilts up from the bottom on the two lower hinges. Then it is lifted "up" so that each plug contact point and pin rises "above" the corresponding door stop. Then the door is pushed "in", so that those same contact points are now in a plane "hehind" the door frame stops. Then the door is lowered down, so the pins align with the stops. Normally air pressure would keep the door's pins and contacts aligned with the stops. But on the ground, when there is no pressure, the door needs to be secured from "upward movement". Its really, backward movement (push-in to release the pins from the stops, AND THEN upward movement, so that the pins and contacts then clear the door frame stops. Then in a control removal, the door is pulled out from the top, the pins and contact clearing the frame contacts, and hanging in the air on the hinges, and some straps. Then the door is supported, the straps removed, and the door lowered, or totally removed.
The job of the 4 bolts is to "hold" the already placed and aligned pins/contacts that are in contact with the door frame stop brackets, in the "outward direct contact position. These bolts also serve to prevent the door from translating "upswards as well." The pins also prevent upward alignment, but they are not as strong, they are really for alignment. The contact point bracket (with a pin in the center), and the door frame stop bracket really hold the door against air pressure.
The bolts keep the door from pushing back into the plane (on the ground, with no air pressure), and also present the door from "sliding up" such that the door contacts and the frame contacts would not longer contact.
The alignment and door plug placement (for insertion, and removal) is aided by guide tracks on the panel, and guide track rollers that are mounted to the door frame.
On flight 1282, the door plug's roller tracks were described as badly damaged.
Any one of the door plug "retention" bolts properly torqued would have been adequate to hold the contacts with pins, in position. Any two (one top, one bottom), properly torqued would have been adequate to prevent roller track damage from vibration, door weight, in flight turbulence induced vibration. All four provide dual redundancy. (Two diagonals, or two, one up, one down.) While the NTSB has been totally silent thus far, it seems that the bolts were likely missing in their entirety, or all 4 bolts were so loose, that the bolts backed out until missing, or only one or two "lose" bolts remained. The bolts don't work if there are not tightened to torque spec for holding the door plug contacts in place against the door frame stops.
So, yes, this assembly did in fact have typical critical system redundancy. And it hard warnings on the pressurization system on whole (many possible causes). While Boeing or supplier (or probably BOTH), and the FAA all failed in new plane inspection, AlaskaAir failed with the pressurization warnings. (3 prior faults.) Extremely disappointing how the entire manufacturing chain, and operational chain BOTH failed here for this event to occur.
Really, cannot call this event an accident. An accident is something like the torque wrench being mis-calibrated. (Though that is still a manufacturing or maintenance fail.) But in this case, supplier fail, Boeing fail, FAA fail, AlaskaAir (3 times fail). Pretty despicable really.
No. The bolts don’t hold the door/plug against the pressure. There are 12 stops and brackets, separate from the bolts, that take the pressurization load and transfer it to the airframe. The bolts are there to simply prevent the door from translating upwards from behind the stops (as it would when opened as a real door).
The bolts could be missing and it could take some time (vibration, landings etc.) for the plug to work its way upwards from behind the stops.
You've got that 100% backwards. The 12 stops stop the door from moving inward, the only thing that stops the plug from moving outward is the bolts. See the widely circulated drawing of how that plug is constructed, I think you have inside and outside mixed up.
Sorry you couldn't be more wrong here. The parent post describes this correctly.
The door rests on the stops (on the inside) which transfer 100% of the pressurization load (from the inside out) into the fuselage. The stops look to be welded or part of the structure. There is no need to prevent movement inward because the force under pressurization is in the opposite direction! This door is apparently a 20 year old design, used on the legacy pre-MAX 737, it was not conceived by idiots.
The bolts don't carry this load at all. Their purpose is to keep the door from sliding upwards vertically up and over the stops.
The operation of the door for maintenance e.g. like opening a window for ventilation, the bolts are removed, the door is then lifted upwards with the help of springs, sliding past the stops and pops out. There looks to be a small strap to help keep it propped open.
Likely the presence of any one of the four bolts that restricts vertical movement would have prevented this, at least until it was discovered at a maintenance checkup.
It's possible the door was sitting on the stops with no bolts and enough landings happened inducing vertical loads to cause it to gradually slip out of place. Similar to how you can hold a mattress on top of your car with friction and your hand for a period of time, it just takes one gust of wind in the right direction and the rest is history.
The drawing is from the inside of the plane. If it had been the other way around the door could have never gotten past the stops. And since it is from the inside that means that the stops themselves (which are stops, so they're not bolted into the door, just into the fuselage, the plug door is just resting against them) can't hold the door against the fuselage pressure any more than you can push on a rope. For that you need those bolts, they are the elements that provide the tensile strength counteracting the pressure in the cabin. That's also why the bolts coming loose led to pressurization warnings. If there had been no bolts the whole plug door would have come out immediately. The stops ensure that the door sits flush with the outside of the aircraft and it's the bolts that pull the plug door against the stops.
I'm going off what the NTSB said, you're citing Reddit and developing your own interpretation of a diagram you do not understand.
When you pull the door closed, the stops on the door are ABOVE and BEHIND the ones on the fuselage. The door then slides DOWN to lock it into place. So under pressure the tabs on the door push AGAINST the ones on the fuselage. The bolts prevent the vertical motion to unlatch the door and do not carry any pressurization load.
> they are the elements that provide the tensile strength counteracting the pressure in the cabin.
There are NO bolts here carrying tensile loads, shear loads only.
I'm going by the construction drawing which is 100% unambiguous and not a bunch of words. Reddit has nothing to do with it, that's just one place where this Boeing sourced drawing can be found.
The NTSB comment is just about the fitting guides not about the stops, and yes, they stop the door from moving upwards. There are no bolts through the stops and they do not mesh into any part of the door as far as I am aware, nor does the drawing show anything that they can slot into, it's just a bit of pressure. If it isn't the bolts providing the tension then it would have to be some other mechanism but none is apparent on the drawing. I'm sure the bolts will also stop the door from moving vertically, just as much as they stop if from moving laterally, the key bit is that if they do not engage that the door can slide up and outward and into the airstream on the side of the plane, which is a formidable force. After that it is just a matter of time before the door will escape.
The big question for me is whether all of the bolts had to come loose before the door escaped or whether it was enough for one or two of the four that were loose to come out to do start a feedback loop (door goes off a bit, more air, more vibration and so on). I also wonder if they'll be able to recover the bolts from inside the airframe or whether they've been lost.
> I'll accept your retraction anytime. :)
This is the sort of dumb comment that you may want to take elsewhere.
It is 100% possible that my reading of that construction drawing is wrong, but you haven't shown where or how it is wrong, just that the NTSB person said something that is either incompatible with the drawing or that there is a discrepancy between my understanding of the drawing and reality. If you want me to progress in my understanding you'll have to explain, not demand because nothing the NTSB officer said helps with that understanding other than to contradict, which is a good indication that I'm wrong but not how I am wrong. All she talks about is 'matching circles' but those run in a different direction than against pressure so I really don't see how that matches the drawing. It's possible the stops hook over the corresponding parts in the plug but that's not readily apparent from the drawing at all.
You can clearly see the "stop fittings" on the door are on the INSIDE and rest on the ones connected to the airframe, preventing outward movement.
When the door opens, it slides up along those two black cylindrical things at the bottom, the stops move past the matching ones on the fuselage, and it hinges outward.
> It's not a construction drawing, it's a cartoon showing the door in the open position and you are assuming (incorrectly) the operation of the door.
Fair enough.
> This will be my last comment on this topic because this argument is fruitless and you seem unable to see it any other way.
That's a wrong assumption on your end, it's just that I prefer to go by actual evidence rather than a bunch of unsourced claims no matter who makes them.
> This is a high res photo of an installed door plug:
So, finally something useful: the stops apparently hook over the brackets bolted to the airframe, that wasn't obvious from the drawing but I suspected it might be the case (see other comment). So pressurizing the aircraft will provide some holding force (the friction on the stops) even if all of the bolts would be missing or had come loose at any point after assembly.
You’re wrong. The stops take the pressure load, that’s why there are 12 of them and they are beefy. The bolts simply keep the door behind the stops, that’s why only 4 bolts are needed for that.
That's possible, but saying it is so will need to come with an explanation of how I'm wrong and how your view matches the construction drawing that I linked because I think that drawing is kind of important, going on the assumption that it really shows the situation in the aircraft. Either there is some trick to the installation process that isn't readily apparent or some other detail that I'm missing.
No, I won’t provide such an explanation or attempt to convince you any further. It’s not “my view” it’s just how it works. Plenty of videos and photos online demonstrating how the door works, you can easily go find them and convince yourself.
When the door plug is installed, the stop pads on the plug pass the stop pads on the plane and then the door is shifted vertically to align them, with the pads on the plug on the inside of the pads on the plane.
Instead of arguing about it, maybe consider which way the pressure is pushing during various phases of operation and decide how you would design the thing if the highest forces push outward...
> When the door plug is installed, the stop pads on the plug pass the stop pads on the plane and then the door is shifted vertically to align them, with the pads on the plug on the inside of the pads on the plane.
Indeed, picture provided by another poster above shows that is exactly how it works.
And I covered that eventuality in another comment:
> It's possible the stops hook over the corresponding parts in the plug but that's not readily apparent from the drawing at all.
I'd be really surprised if it was just one loose bolt that would allow this to happen, but I don't know. It would be hard to believe they were that stupid, so I'd rather not assume.
I'm not a structural engineer or anything, but I don't see how a single missing bolt would allow this to happen. It would have to be at least the two upper retaining bolts, neither of which were particularly picky about torque and both of which had cotter pins on castle nuts, ideally.
In my humble, ignorant opinion, this. You heard it here on the Internet. :)
Last I heard, though, none of the 4 main bolts were recovered, and they were going to do lab tests to try to determine if they were present to begin with.
When I test-drove my 1980 Datsun, the owner had just been working on the brakes. As I drove with him through the neighborhood, I kept hearing a clunk. I thought it was the transmission. Then at about 40mph, the rear driver's side wheel detached and went flying past my door. The rear of the car skidded on the axle until I managed to get it to a stop.
Turns out the guy's family had come over right as he was tightening the lugnuts and he forgot to finish them. Maybe only one was properly tightened.
He'd wanted $5k for it, but I offered him $2800 as we retrieved the wheel and he accepted.
Right but that's not a single fastener. A single missing wheel bolt or lug nut is not a catastrophic problem. If all of them are loose or missing that can be a problem.
I mean, there's a reason there aren't just two. The other ones aren't just for backup but to reduce the stress on each other. So if you have a situation where you think you only needed two, but only one is tight, the other one shears off. In that case, it's one bolt that broke because one other one wasn't tight.
Speculation: if none of the 4 bolts were tightened, the bolts may have vibrated loose one by one. The door blew out when the last bolt fell out.
Or the wrong bolts were used - bolts that were not strong enough.
Or the particular batch of bolts used were not heat treated, making them not strong enough. (You can't tell if a bolt is heat treated by looking at it.)
Unlike you I have less than no background in this, most especially in aero, but if the faults were as basic as you've described, that would be not failure but outright engineering negligence.
It's not engineering negligence. It's the process that is supposed to implement the design.
That said, it's also a goal of engineering to make the process easier. One such technique is to design things in patterns. Then, if something doesn't fit the pattern, attention is easily drawn to it to investigate the problem. Design things so that when they look right, they are right. For example, look at the line of rivets holding an assembly together. They should form a nice neat pattern.
I try to write software the same way. I lay out the code in patterns. Anything that looks out of place in the pattern draws attention as being a mistake.
> It's the process that is supposed to implement the design
Not sure I understand, are you saying that this is a failure not of engineering but of processes? In that, the original engineering was sound but somebody took shortcuts in the implementation? Or do you mean something else?
Airbus was a masterstoke of international politics as much as it was of technology in that it involved a high level of international cooperation that was completely successful. (Compare that to the corruption-driven procurement that left Superphenix with broken steam turbines)
Boeing’s outsourcing plan was quite similar in that it discouraged many countries that might have been able to enter the competition for airliners, say Japan, from doing so. Japan very well might have decided to subsidize and otherwise help domestic manufacturers but didn’t feel they had to because they made the tail of the Dreamliner.
From the same article: ‘Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury, in a June interview, said the plane maker faces similar risks with its own suppliers—many of which Boeing shares. But he said Airbus has largely been able to avoid major problems with its quality-assurance approach.
“We are quite intrusive on what suppliers are doing,” Faury said. “We always have to remain very prudent and very humble—you don’t know what could hit you tomorrow.”’
…
‘When it [Spirit] needed to ramp back up, not only did Spirit have fewer people on site, the company had lost years of expertise. There were fewer experienced mechanics, but also fewer experts who could inspect the quality of their work.
…
Boeing’s demands for lower prices left Spirit strapped for cash as managers panicked over meeting increasingly demanding deadlines. Boeing routinely had employees on the ground in Wichita and conducted audits of the supplier.’
Leadership issue from Boeing : Completely disparaging and underestimating the deep skills
of manufacturing and engineering through-and-through.
What was Boeing even auditing? And guess who’s left holding the bag of awfulness?
Can confirm. I worked as Airbus' tier 1 supplier and they were even accompanying us to manage our own supplier, which in hind-sight, ensured that things like this didn't happen.
The way the project was structured, it was in the interest of everyone to succeed since everyone paid for their own development cost and only made money when the planes were sold. Not the easiest client to work for mind you - I've been told that many companies flat out refuse to work with them, but again, thinking back, I think that's what made the project a success, although extremely stressful.
Some customers you can't afford to have and some you can't afford to lose, especially not the ones that help you to perform at (or even above, by educating you) your potential.
Yep - certainly lessons learned through painful experiences.
Supply chain management is incredibly challenging and it's interesting to see one school of thought moving away to vertical integration as an alternative solution and another doing just as well with suppliers (Airbus, Apple, ASML, etc).
this applies to an entire national economy, Silicon Valley was successful due to having hardware and software right next to each other, same thing for US manufacturing in general when we were a powerhouse.
We then let our government get bribed by Wall Street to allow outsourcing everything for a few decades of short term profit. Now China has the manufacturing ecosystem that allows them to innovate more efficiently
Yup. Speaking as an embedded engineer, outsourcing at least some manufacturing to China (or other Far East empires) is often the only road to profitability with modern hardware. Doing so significantly impacts the momentum that can be achieved.
Both/neither, I would suggest. Offloading manufacturing reduces risk, but requires you to have better oversight in other areas before actually shipping.
From what I've seen, businesses will often hire someone with specific experience dealing with Chinese manufacturers in their specific vertical, for example PCBs/electronics, tooling like injection molds, or textiles.
There is something to what you say, but the continued success of both Apple Silicon and Nvidia processors seems completely opposed to your statement. How do you reconcile those two things?
The cost is a near-monopoly, as the level of strong-arming required is only possible if the loss of business—from shoddy, corner-cutting work—is otherwise catastrophic to the outsourced supplier.
Example: You mention NVidia as a success—and they are—but reliable middle-tier builders like EVGa simply could not remain in business in the graphics card business.
Eventually only NVidia will be supplying their own GPUs and cards.
This in turn significantly drives-up the cost of hiring good local talent if the need ever arises; as TSMC discovered when setting up shop in the US.
How is China's economy doing? Also, the US economy is running near full capacity; what would you have the US move offshore in order to bring manufacturing onshore? Or would you allow more immigration and foreign investment?
The US economy is running at full capacity, but it could be that the some part (20-30-40%) capacity is being used in absolutely poor performance areas.
Basically. If you brought back manufacturing to some parts of America it would likely lead to economic growth. Instead we have the offshoring to cheaper countries.
One reason: Our ability to prototype, build out ideas, and in general innovate is more complicated and less scalable.
The fastest international delivery isn’t comparable to driving 30 minutes to shop for the parts needed for some wild idea (etc.), but that market no longer exists in the US.
In addition to delays, that makes R&D more specialized and therefore more expensive; not to mention the local loss of expertise by the sellers of the components.
Just trying to build some Arduino ideas: I’m looking at $$, planning, and days of shipping. No opportunity to try something out on the spur of the moment.
Our ability to prototype, build out ideas, and in general innovate is more complicated and less scalable.
It's also predicated on people that are intimately familiar with the underlying manufacturing. Lose the manufacturing, and in a generation you're left only with people who know the current designs but lack the knowledge and experience essential to continue innovating.
Exactly as you say: when you no longer have 30-minute access to experimental parts and in-depth advice, your ability to innovate suffers.
Yeah the MAX itself isn't as much of a problem as the outsourcing.
Spirit is a financial tire fire. They've had zero gross margin since the pandemic and they're now burning through half their revenue in interest payments on top of that. Boeing is offloading those losses onto them in order to juice up their own profits. Boeing should probably just be forced to reacquire them.
Clarification for anyone who is as confused as I was: Spirit Aerosystems, not Spirit Airlines. Spirit Aerosystems is the subcontractor that made the door plug. It was spun out of Boeing in 2005 and still has tight employee connections. Spirit Airlines has no connection to Boeing; they actually run an all-Airbus fleet.
There is another effect, if the dependency is strong enough suppliers can intentionally lower the quality to force Boeing to buy them out with much greater profits than they would have made from continuing as a normal supplier. Thus suppliers have an strong incentive to lower quality to unsafe levels and Boeing has a strong incentive to not do anything about it.
Hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure one could go back and read thousands of these internal technical symposium papers criticizing X or Y or Z, and most of those turned out to be unwarranted.
The 'hindsight is 20/20' comment only works when someone points out the problems after the fact. When someone mentions it before it happens the correct comment is 'they were right and we should have listened to them'.
Yet another example of not just the inability, but the unwillingness to engage in managerial accounting.
These companies primarily focused on financial accounting and even use EPITDA as an internal metric. They do not consider the true costs, such as, people dying or being traumatized by the use of their products. They do not think about the costs of such decisions 20 years into the future. These executives are motivated primarily by their performance with regards to their own personal shares.
Quarterly reports are the rear view mirror. Making projections into the future is the road ahead of you. A focus on short term goals leads blown out windows and aircraft falling from the skies.
This is how the tech industry is managed as well. It is not “enshitification”, it is rather corporate incentive structures and a general level of incompetence. Pure tragedy, the hero CEO brings his own downfall upon himself with only the audience capable of understanding the reasons why.
I believe what he's pointing out is prioritizing identity politics over experience is a problem, especially in certain industries. Agree or disagree with his statement as you see fit, but at least represent it properly.
I know you're being sarcastic, but responding seriously to Elon: Spirit Aerosystems is the subcontractor that installed the window panel incorrectly. Boeing spun them off due to all the MBAs in the C-suite (most of whom are white and have the dangly bits and probably commit sexual harassment against their female employees as is traditional in business). Ever since 2020 Spirit Aero has had 0% gross margins and now their debt service every quart is half of their sales on top of that. Boeing has clearly driven them into the ground to try to spice up the BA stock price. The end game is probably to drive them into bankruptcy and reacquire them for $1 or get them a government bailout or something. I have no idea who is buying SPR at $27 these days, seems like a sure way to lose all your money. This has nothing to do with "diversity hires" and everything to do with the MBA management culture in the United States. What Elon is doing is the modern evolution of race baiting to distract from the actual issues.
This pressure to prioritize profits over quality was felt throughout Boeing’s supply chain, including at its offshoot, Spirit. Mustafa Erdem Sakinç, an economist who studied Boeing’s corporate strategies, told us in an email, “Cost-cutting was the single major reason behind selling commercial aircraft-parts operations to . . . the new entity named Spirit Aerosystems.”
Sakinç explained that “Spirit AeroSystems introduced its own cost-cutting strategy, even harsher than Boeing’s,” largely centered around cutting labor costs. "Boeing took advantage of Spirit’s weaker union and more cutthroat business tactics by further squeezing their supplier to do faster, cheaper work."
In a 2007 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, two years after they were founded, Spirit executives explained that they “hired 1,300 fewer people than the predecessor had employed” and implemented less favorable union contracts which “provided for wage reductions of 10%,” among other profit-motivated measures.
Sorscher explained that Boeing took advantage of Spirit’s weaker union and more cutthroat business tactics by further squeezing their supplier to do faster, cheaper work. “You couldn’t screw over your own employees like you could screw over your supplier’s employees,” Sorscher said.
In a federal securities lawsuit that we reported on Monday, some of Spirit’s former employees alleged that production defects came from Spirit’s “failure to hire sufficient personnel to deliver quality products at the rates demanded by Spirit and its customers including Boeing.”
The suit identified many serious production issues including “out-of-calibration torque wrenches” that mechanics were using, and “defects such as the routine presence of foreign object debris (‘FOD’) in Spirit products, missing fasteners, peeling paint, and poor skin quality.”
The complaint concluded that “such constant quality failures resulted in part from Spirit’s culture which prioritized production numbers and short-term financial outcomes over product quality.”
Boeing may attempt to distance itself from Spirit in the wake of recent revelations. When asked previously about the lawsuit, Boeing spokesperson David Sidman told us, “We defer to Spirit for any comment.”
But the two companies remain closely intertwined. According to Spirit’s SEC filings from 2022, the company’s “business depends largely on sales of components for a single aircraft program, the B737.” Sixty percent of Spirit’s revenue that year came from Boeing, according to the company’s annual report. Spirit’s new CEO Patrick Shanahan also previously worked at Boeing for more than thirty years, and Spirit’s senior vice president Terry George previously served as Boeing’s manager on the 737 program.
The problem at Boeing is a sort of cultural decay in which safety and quality have been lost. Musk isn't wrong that changing their promotion criteria from safety/quality to safety/quality/climate/diversity is going to inevitably reduce the safety/quality dimensions. That's the whole point of changing the incentives - to cause a refocusing onto those other topics.
Some people will probably deny this, and claim that it's all additive. If your employees were 100% focused on safety and quality before, then adding more stuff just means they're now 200% as focused and nothing has to lose out. This is obviously incorrect.
The real question here is not whether climate/diversity focus over quality is bad because it obviously is. The question is whether it's a symptom or a cause of their culture issues.
This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take from this debacle, especially as Musk’s own manufacturing lines are putting out complete garbage for very similar actual reasons as Boeing: excessive financialization exerting pressure on the engineering process.
> excessive financialization exerting pressure on the engineering process.
This is a quasi-Marxist analysis. All of Boeing and Tesla's competitors are exposed to the same "financialization", whatever that is, yet it's Boeing with the problem. Tesla meanwhile has focused on developing and shipping cutting or bleeding edge tech, their quality issues aren't due to management but because the thing they're trying to do is inherently very difficult.
You can argue they shouldn't have shipped their autopilot features, but not that it has defects due to bad manufacturing practice. The defects are due to it being a hard and new problem. Making sure bits of the plane don't fall off mid-flight is though not due to pushing the tech boundary, it's the opposite, the 737 MAX exists specifically to avoid introducing anything new.
1. I wasn’t referring to Autopilot. I was referring to e.g. panel gaps, which is a very solved problem.
2. Financialization is a specific term. Look it up if you don’t know what it means. Here’s a hint: “Calhoun [Boeing CEO] has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.”
What’s the path for an accountant to end up leading an aerospace engineering firm? That’s the effect of financialization.
Compare to Airbus: “Guillaume began his career in 1992 as a flight-test engineer for the Eurocopter Tiger helicopter in the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA).”
Toyota’s CEO: mechanical engineer.
Subject to the same external pressures maybe, yet some companies somehow didn’t end up ruled by an accountant. You can have every company subject to a bull market yet some do better than others. It’s not very confusing.
So you argue it's not a cause but an effect. Fine, whatever. It's still a major problem, isn't it.
But: the MDD merger was 25 years ago. Boeing wasn't considered to be in dire quality straits until the MCAS disaster, which is recent. Maybe the people with "shreds of industry knowledge" are missing what's actually going wrong there, perhaps for ideological reasons? It wouldn't be the first time people have suddenly developed selective blindness over catastrophic decision making by "diverse" people. See the Harvard debacle for one in just the last few weeks.
I think we can safely say that promoting people because they hired lots of black women, over the head of someone who focused on safety, will yield poor safety outcomes regardless of whether the stupid decision making is ultimately traceable to a merger 25 years ago or not.
Culture changes take ages, and aerospace a very, very slow moving industry.
Diversity, and whatever right eing talking point non-sence people spit out, has nothing to do with any of the issues at Boeing. Or at any other company.
Sad that people actually believe that nonsense. Especially coming from a decidedly non"woke" manly man guy like Musk, who is also on record deprioritizing safety, and who's cars and facotories are as bad as it get nowadays outside of sweat shops.
The MCAS is what brought Boeing issues into the zeitgeist, but I was aware of issues at Boeing ~ 18 years ago from friends who had worked there and Al Jazeera did a great investigation ~ 9 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os). Boeing used to be the gold standard and as someone who researches such gold standards it was disheartening to see them give that up. But that happened very slowly and started a long time ago.
Clearly diluting focus away from safety is an issue for whatever the reason especially when the safety of airplanes is declining. This should also be taken in context that many aspects of manufacturing have improved greatly over the past 20 years so even if everything else stayed the same the general safety should have been greatly improved. So the drag on safety by the culture is bad enough to overcome these 'free' gains and end up with even less safe planes should highlight just how bad that effect is.
“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.”
That is not only wrong for the wrong reasons but wrong in and of itself. You and Musk and the cacophony of right wing commentators attempting to shoehorn this week’s thing to be outraged by exhaust a lot of people. I’m only semi-surprised that (your?) group isn’t blaming Boeing’s failures on trans people participating in the “wrong” gender of sports.
Readers: this is the sort of engagement and dialogue you want to avoid if you’re arguing in good faith. This person is asking me to prove the negative. As the person making or supporting the claim, the onus is on them to support the claim they’re making, which is something like “DEI led to decreased safety” or something. I don’t blame them, if they’re arguing in good faith, for attempting to shift this because as far as I can tell there is zero evidence supporting this claim.
Additionally, I can tell from their comments elsewhere in the post that they’re definitely not arguing in good faith so this is likely an (pretty bad) attempt to just waste my time. If I were to engage in good they would certainly just post some nonsense or keep asking questions like “How is it wrong?” or “Why?”
I get the impression you don't realize this, but you subtly shifted what you're claiming to try and avoid the fact that you're in the wrong.
Original claim: they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety
What you're now saying: the claim they’re making, which is something like “DEI led to decreased safety” or something
Read again - the claim is that they have prioritized DEI hiring over safety, a claim amply backed up by Boeing's own statements which are very proud of this fact. Employees who were once told to focus on safety and quality exclusively are now told this is no longer their only priority, and now they must focus on recruiting racial minorities and women as well.
There isn't yet hard evidence this policy has led to a concrete safety problem, which is the claim you're now rejecting. But nobody said it had. Only that it's very, very likely to.
>These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight.
This quotation isn't technically true. There are actual costs that do vanish depending on who you contract to. This is completely independent of quality. They are orthogonal.
The sacrifice is characterized as a guaranteed drop in quality if costs are lowered. No. When you sub contract quality is just harder to control. You are rolling the dice. But depending on the sub contractor there can even be an increase in quality along with a cost drop.
For example: iPhones. Subcontracted to china. But pretty high quality. Of course apple had to move over qc to china but there was still overall an up in quality with a cost drop.
You can't find a counter point on your own so instead of building a conclusion based off of evidence you call out to others to provide you with evidence so you can support your desired conclusion.
A more charitable read of the question could be: GP reads a compelling argument about a topic they have little expertise in, and are curious if there are dissenting opinions.
We can also talk about how much to trust comments on hacker news generally, but multiple data points from any quality of source are better than one.
This is true. I'm assuming disagreement in general because my post has negative karma.
I therefore think it's more realistic to assume that he disagrees. But you're right I could be wrong.
Anyway my comment was very general. And I offered a anecdotal counter point. Falsification only needs a single piece of evidence as proof.
A single example of a sub contractor who is both cheap and high quality will falsify the general quotation here. There is literally no stronger argument in existence. So not surprised that people can't find a counter point as what I offered is literal proof.
Other then dismissing the quality of iPhones coming out of china, At best one can counter by changing the topic of the debate. You could say that in general there's a trend of lower quality associated with lower cost and that while it's not strictly true, it could be generally true. But that's not the argument.
In fact on that topic i am not making such a strong claim that it isn't true. For that topic I literally don't know.
My guess of what may have happened reading between the lines is - Boeing originally possibly instructed Spirit to loosely fit the plug and not secure it because they planned to remove it to fit out the interiors. In this case Boeing would be accountable to secure the plug door after the interior is done to the right specs
Somewhere down the line, Boeing possibly decided not to remove the plug and instead just load interiors through the bigger openings only. They possibly either did not document this change and think through implications and instructions changes for Spirit to secure the door plug instead or did so but Spirit possibly missed. So the bunch of planes may have been delivered with loose plugs that Alaska and United found.
All the implications of outsourcing without sufficient supervision and hand-offs made in the parent point would have a bad effect. The question FAA is probably asking is if Boeing or Spirit has deviated from documented production practice in this area, have they deviated in other areas.
Still fascinating how presciently Matt Stoller nailed the issue 5 years ago:
Let’s start by admiring the company that was Boeing, so we can know what has been lost. As one journalist put it in 2000, “Boeing has always been less a business than an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.”
Instead of grounding one model for one issue they should be asking questions about wtf is going on at boeing wrt safety culture.
And same question can be asked about the FAA frankly. If Boeing engineers are saying they refuse to fly on these planes how is the FAA granting rights to self-certify?!? Are these people permanently high?
One peculiar thing about frameworks within which state agencies operate, unless they are pure authoritarian vehicles to “make it so” for pretty much anything a power figure asks, is that they have a ruleset within which they operate. They can do no less, but they can also do no more, even if the spirit of the issue calls for it.
So you can make them do more by initiating a legislative process, complete with campaigning and lobbying, which is quite expensive and time-sucking for your average Joe Concerned Frequent Flyer Kowalski.
On the other hand, your friendly neighborhood Seattle company that makes planes can do just the same, except that they can afford to retain lobbyists, their board members are well connected, their C-suite play golf and have dinners with the right people. And they have power to push rules such that will make FAA’s reach effectively toothless, and do it quickly if need be.
That of course assuming that corruption in the FAA itself does not exist and that they indeed are doing what they can.
Giving Boeing a pass just increases the blast radius to the airline industry and consumers. The management at Boeing putting in place an incentive structure counter to safety and engineering should be removed and replaced with people who can enable a return to an engineering and safety culture.
Make Boeing management face the music and contain the blast radius to those who have lead poorly.
Because they are a major military contractor. In fact the Boeing we know today was formed by a merger between the failing McDonnell-Douglas and then-successful Boeing — a merger basically forced by the DoD because MCD’s military contracting was too important to them. The management of the resulting company mostly came from MCD.
Makes one wonder if the military and space sides of the business are also suffering quality problems or not.
In the years since, manufacturing problems have emerged[1] not only in the 737 but at other factories where Boeing makes its 787 Dreamliner, a U.S. military refueling tanker and Air Force One replacement jets[2], as well as at some of its key suppliers.
I find it more weird when Lockheed, CSC etc contract to run non-military programs for the USG. Whatever your opinion of military matters, I think it’s a bad idea to have a company whose main objective is killing people manage a program designed to, say, keep people from starving to death.
I didn’t know Lockheed did that; do you have any sources? I’ve seen similar things (for instance, defense contractors also make mail trucks for the Postal Service), and the main reason for that is because doing business with the government is a big enough pain in the ass that it becomes a core competency in and of itself.
Incidentally Sodexo—the cafeteria company—also has military contracts to run mess halls on military bases. So they are technically also a defense contractor. This isn’t surprising because they run cafeterias in hospitals and schools and prisons so they are also good at doing business with the government.
Should split the companies and let the commercial arm sink or swim.
It won’t happen because lobbying and been one of the big two is good for soft power so Boeing will be allowed to kill people as long as it stays under a certain rate.
The space side of the business is a huge mess—Starliner was supposed to go into operation around the same time as Crew Dragon but got delayed by multiple issues.
Also, Boeing’s status as a major military contractor is slipping. They have lost multiple contract bids in recent decades. As a consequence of losing the JSF competition they have also put a lot of lobbying and PR effort into attacking the F-35 in an attempt to drum up more business for the Super Hornet; this didn’t work out and Super Hornet production is set to end next year.
Maybe that's an unconventional take. But in my mind, the situation is the result of 'instantaneous' incentives in companies. I.e. CEOs and managers are rewarded when the stock price rises and are never penalised if things fall apart in a few years time. Hence, the motivation to save costs and financialise the company. By the time you start to see the results of this the CEO already left on his/her golden parachute. In my mind, the financial incentives need to be based on performance in 5 years or 10 years.
Probably because they know Boeing is a problem and they want the public and politicians to clearly know they are a problem to get momentum on legislation to force them to behave.
At this point I'm starting to agree we should severely limit or outright ban stock-based or near-term performance based compensation.
"Sorry kids, this is why we can't have nice things!"
I'm not sure that this by itself would help. The root issue is the double-edged sword of liquidity. If you have the ability to "take the money and run", it creates a strong incentive to do things which increase the amount of money you can take now, and then offload the consequences onto problems that will surface long after you have run. Cash is actually worse than stock, because you literally get the money now and have no incentive and no mechanism to see it increase in value later. Much of the reason for stock-based compensation is to align incentives between the executive and shareholders so that their time horizon at least encompasses their vesting period.
To really fix the problem, you need to destroy liquidity for decision-makers. Basically make it unprofitable to switch companies or retire, so that a.) they are forced to stay with the company and live with the consequences of their decisions and b.) they don't gain anything from short-term revenue bumps anyway. This was sorta the system that was in place in the 1950s & 1960s, where the top marginal tax rate was 90% so the government took all your money above a certain max anyway, and as a result companies invested in seniority-based perks like more vacation time, private jet use, employer-funded health insurance, etc. But this...destroys liquidity, which makes the companies and economic system less resilient to outside changes. This is what happened to U.S. industry in the 1970s, when they found they were uncompetitive with new Japanese firms, or to the housing market today, where we've built a system that offered great suburban living to Boomers but now can't adapt to the incoming Millennial population.
On one level these are both imposed rules (ie regulation), but this is an approach I haven’t heard before and I like it. It would also help a fleet of other problems, like underfunded public institutions and infrastructure.
That's a great analysis, maybe in the first suggestion, instead of force someone being at the same company, there could be a law that will be a crime doing this behaviour.
> At this point I'm starting to agree we should severely limit or outright ban stock-based or near-term performance based compensation.
If Boeing employee compensation takes a hit, they will lose good engineers to Meta, Google, and TikTok which already probably pay 3X. You want safer planes? Help bid their stock up so that it attracts good engineers.
This is the problem with public companies. Boeing stock value should be determined by safety, by FAA, and by actual passengers, not by some armchair investors who don't even fly on their planes.
Actually there's more crossover than you might think, but at an earlier point in the education process.
One of my coworkers at the first startup I worked at out of college was an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer. He was re-training as a software engineer for quant hedge funds (at a salary lower than what I got), because aeronautical engineering didn't pay enough to support a family in the Boston area. Jumped ship for an actual quant hedge fund during my tenure there, for 3x the pay. Then the financial crisis hit and I have no idea what became of him.
I think this is a pretty common story for the personality type that goes on to become software engineers. If it were the 70s/80s, when both defense and commercial aviation were hot, they would've gone into aviation. Many actually do go into aviation as their second career, eg. John Carmack, Phil Greenspun, or Sebastian Thrun. But the money has been in software from 2000-2020, and so that is where the smart engineers go.
I got a MSc in Controls Systems, spent over a decade getting crap pay for highly technical and extremely stressful work, then made a conscious decision to go to the bottom of the software Eng ladder and climb my way up.
Ended up getting 3-4x the pay for 3-4x less stress.
> > At this point I'm starting to agree we should severely limit or outright ban stock-based or near-term performance based compensation.
> If Boeing employee compensation takes a hit, they will lose good engineers to Meta, Google, and TikTok which already probably pay 3X. You want safer planes? Help bid their stock up so that it attracts good engineers.
First, those are entirely different industries and skills, and the companies you mentioned all are doing layoffs so a steady paycheck at Boeing might be looking pretty good. More fundamentally, however, nobody said compensation would go away without being replaced but rather that it’d be restructured to avoid the incentive to juice short-term share prices. This would have little effect on Boeing engineers who are not given enough stock for that to be a huge deal but it’d have a big impact on the managers who have been making so many bad calls: if getting paid in cash means the financial engineers don’t find working there appealing and they’re replaced by real engineers, that’d be a net win for the company and the flying public.
Did you just list two companies which had some of the most comprehensive layoffs this year and a third Chinese private firm for clearance-based US engineers (generally stereotyped as uptight and/or establishment types) to move to?
You seem to be stuck in a weird news bubble / or some kind of layoff echo chamber. Google had a 6-7% layoff 12 months ago, and has been hiring steadily, almost aggressively since then.
All of the big tech companies are going to have a risk of layoffs for a while: the Wall Street activist crowd is looking to cash out and those companies which have guaranteed income like ads will look great in the short term with lower costs on the same income stream. It’ll take time for the drawbacks to manifest, and often that stage will lead to more layoffs when they decide to get out of a particular business they’ve let themselves fall behind in.
The story is about a company with 180,000+ employees laying off hundreds, less than one one-thousandth. What does that mean? It would be like a company with an $1.8 billion budget losing < $1.8 million on something.
It means anyone considering working there has to think about how directly their work connects to one of the big strategic goals and assess the odds that they’ll be next. That certainly doesn’t mean nobody should take a job there but it adds to the absurdity of someone suggesting Google and Boeing are in a hiring competition given how different those jobs are.
That’s only true if everything is determined at random. In real life, new hires are usually more at risk than people who’ve been around long enough to have a track record and allies. More importantly, layoffs also tend to involve shifts in business priorities which is why I mentioned needing to think about goals – it might be that 0.1% of the total staff are being laid off, but that doesn’t help you if it’s your entire project.
And your odds might be better, depending on the project, etc. The average is less than 0.1% - some better, some worse. If > 999 out of 1,000 aren't good enough odds for you, where will you work?
Lots of people dream of that kind of job security.
These things are often not uniformly distributed. Most of the recent layoffs affected teams within Google Assistant, many of which lost more than half of their headcount.
So if you were in Google Assistant, your chance of being laid off was much higher.
Of course, you could counter with, "just don't join Google Assistant lmao", but it's not clear to an outsider what the fortunes of various teams will be. Heck, it's often not even clear to the VPs running those very teams, to say nothing of the rank and file engineers there.
Many many many companies have had layoffs in 2023, and more are already on the chopping block for 2024. A lot of people i talk to regularly, including myself, have been laid off in the last 6-7 months.
Google is not the only company in the world. You can even search here on HN for layoff discussions, which have spiked in the past year.
The government continues to fail because a certain segment of Congress consistently works to hamstring and defund important regulatory arms of government. They then point to the failure of government (which they caused) as evidence that more funding should be cut.
It is the government's job to ensure that private companies don't sacrifice safety in the pursuit of short-term gains. Humans are extremely shortsighted by nature and the free market will always choose the short term over the long term without intervention.
In a very broad sense, just like large enterprises are "us", the government is also "us". These are different ways that we organize to achieve our aims.
As I see it, government continuing to fail can be seen as us continuing to fail. If I stop waiting for us to fix our problems, I'm giving up on us, which I'm fighting not to do.
> Government continues to fail. Let’s stop waiting for it to fix our problems
It continues to fail since your government adopted the policy of less government is better as an ideology, then a whole section of your political class completely embraced it and decided to hamstring government powers to sabotage it and let private companies take over.
There are other governments in the world which suffer much less from this, even though the USA successfully exported this ideology no other country went so deep into this stupidity.
Now you experience the side-effects of the Nixon/Reagan eras biting your asses, and since a large part of your society doesn't have much of a grasp of history and its consequences we end up with a large cohort believing that government = bad a priori.
Bad government is bad, but bad government happened by design, not because government is naturally bad. Government in democratic countries is what the people and society under it makes of it, your society decided to make it bad by voting believing in lies from the past 40 years.
They were seen reacting way too late in the MCAS debacle, to the point other countries were pondering re-evaluating the trust-by-default position the FAA has.
The FAA must be seen to react decisively to keep their trust. This way, they keep carrying enough weight to declare the airplanes safe again later.
Not emotional, passionate. Don't forget, everyone in civil aviation spent their lives since decades worrying about safety. And then comes Boeing and fucks that all over twice.
Bad news for Boeing so, the FAA seems to be rather pissed. And rightly so.
> The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 Max to service.
One reading-between-the-lines: "We believe we now have the upper hand, the public attention, to shake enough budget out of Congress that in future we can have a reasonable fraction of safety inspectors reporting to us rather than Boeing. At least until public interest moves on to its next big question, such as speculating on Taylor Swift's sexual orientation."
I can see it already in my company. Many of the newer engineers don't even have basic language skills. Reading their design documents is an exercise in divination. This has repeatedly resulted in delays and costly miscommunications between partnering teams.
We need a national push to raise the quality of our educational institutions from grade school through university. And we need to re-focus the curriculum on the subjects of greatest importance: reading, writing, math, and science.
Likewise the 757, which current Boeing management scrapped when market trends were against it, but is now the plane they want -- so instead they're trying to cheap out with 737 retreads.
You cannot avoid mistakes every now and then. At least it had no particular safety issue and is quite a reliable aircraft, and they still made money with it. This is nothing like the issues Boeing is facing.
Obviously the 757 is in the same class as the neos, but they could never have competed with them. Either Boeing continued selling ever more efficient 737s or they risked losing the entire segment to Airbus.
My favourite commercial flight was on a 787, that was one comfortable plane to fly on (they pressurise to a lower altitude than anything else I’d flown commercial) but every other flight I’ve got in the top ten was airbus.
Given the choice though I’d fly on an airbus with lower passenger comfort than any recent Boeing.
I never used to look at what aircraft it was but now I do and I avoid Boeing, that’s a strategic failure, don’t make customers think is a good rule.
Would that even be possible? How long time would it take them to complete a completely new design? And then how long time from the design is finished until they can start delivering planes?
The whole reason the 737 Max series exists is to avoid having to start over. By maintaining "backwards compatibility" type approval with the regular 737 then the existing massive pool of 737 pilots can jump straight in it and start flying.
I always thought that was the most idiotic part that the FAA accepted. Like, I get that there has to be leeway for similar configurations of the same plane so they don't have to go through the process for each. But it's been so clearly abused that it's ridiculous now.
However even within the same type rating you may have additional training or restrictions. For instance the FAA prohibited Southwest from using the same pilots across three generations of 737 (Classic, NG, MAX), so Southwest ditched the Classics when they bought the MAX.
A big advantage Airbus has is their more modern designs are full fly-by-wire, so they're able to more practically compensate for the handling characteristics in software.
As far as I know (not a pilot or aeronautics engineer) MCAS was more or less an attempt to do the same to a non-fly-by-wire plane, and we see how that turned out...
The picture is just to show how far the plane has deviated from its original design on a colinear (e.g. same price/size target among the new generation) scale. If you want more depth into the pains Boeing goes to not trigger a "new design" recertification, there are plenty of articles on it released during the initial Boeing MAX MCAS forced crashed saga, such as ArsTechnica's series of articles.
Since the MAX program was created specifically to avoid going through a full certification process, I'd say they're going to triple down. On the spectrum of MAX shenanigans, a hole blowing open in the fuselage barely ranks. The plane didn't even crash this time! And it is not yet clear that Boeing intentionally deceived the regulators; they might have paid Spirit to do it.
It's great that the FAA is looking into this. Who is looking into FAA, though? Is this another case of institutional capture?
Using a trusted and proven design (eg: 737 NG) is fine and even beneficial. In fact, reusing older designs in and of itself is fine.
The problem is Boeing clearly doesn't know how to manufacture good aircraft anymore. Whether it's a rehash or clean sheet design, the result won't change until Boeing is run through the washing machine.
Except it’s been so heavily altered that they had to use software (MCAS) to correct for the flight characteristics induced by the larger engines. And we all know how that worked out.
Yes but this is not a huge problem with the airframe itself. The tendencies without MCAS are fine. The pilots just need to be trained for them.
The problem was that airlines want to skimp on the training.
The same thing happened with the engine management. Boeing doesn't want to introduce an engine warning system because it would mean pilots have to be retrained. A lot of these barriers aren't part of the physical design but the industry as a whole being extremely wary of training. Probably as a result of cheap low-cost carriers emerging.
Not saying Boeing is a great manufacturer but it's not the only issue at play.
> ([0], scroll to bottom) Following publication, an FAA spokesman on January 11 provided the additional statement regarding Administrator Dickson’s comments around Boeing’s selected path for meeting Federal Aviation Regulations for the original implementation of MCAS on the 737 Max. The Air Current sought and received comment from the FAA in advance of publication and that is reflected in the story above. We provide the latest response in full:
> The fact of the matter is that the FAA — and the other authorities — determined during a 20-month review that MCAS was a necessary part of the flight control system. We all reviewed and approved the changes to the system as part of the recent certification.
> This is directly addressed in the 100-plus page report [1]
that was filed with the Airworthiness Directive. We made it clear that the aircraft would not have been compliant with the stick force and G requirements and higher angle-of-attack without MCAS or some other type of mechanism. The FAA does not tell applicants how to design planes, so the choice to develop MCAS was an engineering decision on the part of Boeing. The FAA’s role is to evaluate and approve proposed designs against the regulatory requirements.
I’ve just finished reading Flying Blind by Peter Robison (recommended elsewhere on HN recently), which had engineers arguing that the plane’s flight characteristics in extremis were not acceptable, and that the correct fix was by physical redesign, not software.
Another point the book made was that since nearly every other modern aircraft has far more advanced avionics, it causes the issue of pilots who are used to computers handling a lot of tasks suddenly having to do that themselves. This is probably not as much an issue with carriers who solely use 737s, like Southwest, but I can definitely see the issue otherwise.
737 MAX flies just fine so long they are manufactured properly and we stop pretending it's a 737 NG with pilots trained as such.
Y'all think 737 MAX as an airframe can't fly safely, and that's straight retarded. I sincerely believe Boeing should face bankruptcy from their many recent failings, including 737 MAX, but even I will still say 737 MAX are fine birds so long as common sense is applied.
I can only speak from experience with software, but several times I've been in projects trapped with implementations that take months to incrementally update and then seen clean sheet implementations blow them out of the water in a matter of weeks.
In one case I saw an implementation of a radio system that met 100% of the technical requirement that a staff engineer wrote as a side project in six weeks. The corporate implementation couldn't meet the spec, had taken 2 years and was being developed by scores of engineers.
Interestingly the corporate implementation was supplied to the customer, caused a huge reputational dent and was ulitimately scrapped... while the staff engineer was dismissed!
>I've been in projects trapped with implementations that take months to incrementally update and then seen clean sheet implementations blow them out of the water in a matter of weeks.
737 might be at point where redoing it from scratch might be sensible. You can only iterate from same starting point that is over 50 year old design so long.
At certain point starting from new will make more sense. And it might be now.
The problem is that 737 design requires significant redoing to make it inherently safer (either structural redesign, or switch to Fly-By-Wire), with all options involving significant certification hurdles.
At some point the question becomes if there aren't bigger wins possible with new airframe.
Or at least resurrecting 757 and maybe making a shortened version.
And it mostly comes down to Boeing being unwilling to invest in a new design so they can keep getting grandfathered into the approval process since all iterations are "the same plane". Something that probably directly led to recent events.
Yes. It is possible to check everything.
We've been manufacturing now for centuries. There are absolutely techniques, methodologies, organizational structures, all to prevent this.
That this is happening is purely cost cutting. Accountants balancing lives against pennies. Just like automakers would do calculations to determine the cost of installing seat belts against potential lawsuits. Nobody cares about lives, it was simply a calculation based on potential lawsuits.
Notice, it is totally possible to check everything. There was never a problem with our ability to prevent deaths, it was just too expensive. Because lives are actually cheap. MOLOCH.
They're not balancing lives against pennies. They're just not thinking about it. That's the mistake you're making: you're implying a plan because a plan means there's control. But that's not how it works: someone said "hey it would be cheaper if we could just not do this" - someone probably said "well this double check is necessary because bad things could happen". They were dismissed with the twofer of "that check never finds any faults" or my personal favorite "that won't happen" (no justification given).
No one in Boeing has a spreadsheet of expected aircraft crash rates versus dollars earned on manufacturing and turned the dial till they got a nice peak. They just plain didn't think about the potential consequences.
Industrial tools manufacturers have the same issues. Sometimes it ends in breaking that hurt both people and the tool, but sometimes it's even more dumb: 'hey, this part is under a lot of friction, has to be replaced after each maintenance cycle, let's buy almost the same at half the cost, the maintenance will be 20% cheaper'. How it end up: the tool require faster maintenance cycle, and in the end, without taking into account maintenance technicians salaries, it ends up 30% more expensive (which isn't an issue for new tools, but quite a big one for tools under initial maintenance contracts)
Right, you are correct. Corporations have adapted and don't make such blatant calculations anymore. With seat belts, or gas tanks, in 70's. There were actual actuaries that did the exact calculations, what would manufacturing cost, what percentage of accidents would result in lawsuits, what are estimated payouts. And they actually did the math to balance cost to produce to lives.
But they got into a lot of trouble that they were doing those calculations.
Now it is more subtle, everyone has budgets to hit, there are deadlines, production quotas. And with Just In Time Manufacturing, and local 'ownership'. Some Blackbelt consultant convinces the local managers to 'optimize'. And of course, they start cutting corners. No real calculation, just constant pressure to cut.
Sorry, I could've been clearer, I understood the reference, I wanted to know what they meant by signing off like that. I took an inference that seemed unusual and perhaps mistaken, so I wanted clarification.
In the Moloch essay, there are several examples of 'capitalism' or 'libertarianism' that make the point that there is such a constant drive to cut costs, that humans will destroy themselves. And this drive is "Moloch", we are it, and also subject to it.
So to me Boeing is just another example in a long line of corporations just doing what corporations do, cut costs, no matter what the impact.
It sounds too blatant, who would consciously want to kill people to save a few pennies.
But what actually happens is just organizational, everyone has a budget to hit, there are layers and layers of middle managers that are getting squeezed, and they start cutting corners. No single corner seems that bad. But it is a constant slow progression towards disaster.
A thousand cuts. Some 'common joe manager' that has a kid in collage, a mortgage, and his boss is breathing down his neck, so he cuts a corner. -- But the problem is, everyone has a boss, no one is free, the entire organization/system is the beast, but we also comprise the beast.
Depends how deep they go on the root cause analysis. If the manufacturing flaw was in turn caused by management flaws, then yes, that’s an underlying issue that has the potential to taint everything above it.
Well, looking at another part of the organization distant enough that top management (the C-suite) is pretty much all they have in common: They had massive quality problems on their space capsule (Starliner). (They launched the first test flight without having ever done an intgrated test of the software in expected mission time -- which led to the computers being so confused immediately after launch that it blew most of the thruster propellant. That led to an urgent hunt for software bugs elsewhere, with the capsule already in orbit -- which found another nasty bug which was even worse.)
This is in addition to numerous other quality control issues on airliners -- several other well-publicized issues on the 737-MAX itself, bric-a-brac left in tanks on 767 tankers, quality control issues at the plant producing 787s.
You don’t see any possibility that the unprecedented in modern times failure of the 737 MAX might have caused anyone in the FAA leadership or Congress to reconsider their relationship? Some might see the language in this memo as evidence of that.
The DC-10 cargo door issue was unprecedented in its time, and the first failure was smoothed over with a phone call from the CEO to the FAA, instead of an airworthiness directive. The plane wasn’t grounded until the second incident killed all aboard.
I am glad for the AD in this case, and hope the FAA casts as watchful an eye over Boeing that we are all hoping they will, but shortcuts have happened before.
And the FAA director at the time was selected specifically as a person who would be more willing to play ball with the business, and had such marching orders from President.
Similar thing happened during Bush Jr's administration.
Yes - I'd like to think that we've learned better but that was in the late 1970s and we are suspiciously around the time where the people who had direct experience would have retired or been on the way out, similar to how a lot anti-vax recruits were too young to have lived memory of just how many kids things like polio harmed.
It sometimes seems like we need the engineering equivalent of what Germany does with Holocaust education to remind everyone of how past disasters were preventable, and usually caused by multiple people deciding not to act on early warning signs.
The 787 and A380 are still the best planes (in terms of comfort, at least) on the market. It makes my 12 hour flights between HK and the UK way more bearable.
I give boeing a pretty hard time, but the 787 is great. It's far more comfortable than pretty much anything else out there. The windows alone make the experience better.
That’s the tragedy of all this: they’re not completely failing to have good ideas, but the willingness to cut corners on safety mean everyone has to question what’s lurking beneath the surface. They would have sold a ton of aircraft anyway, but someone figured their bonus would be huge if they could make the profit margin a few percentage points higher.
> where it lost a “plug” type passenger door and additional discrepancies
Whoa. That's a pretty big bomb that the FAA just threw there. "We've just begun and what we've already found was so bad we're grounding the airplane."
I suspect that means the quality system governing the handoff from the subcontractor to Boeing is completely broken. It could mean that the way Boeing is monitoring quality from all subcontractors on that airplane is fundamentally flawed.
It's going to be a long way back for Boeing.
Operators of the 737 Max 9 are going to need to find some financing to pay their costs on these airplanes until Boeing makes them whole.
There's no fixing the 737 MAX because it was engineered and manufactured in a business culture incompatible with excellence and safety. The problem is aircraft are capital assets are compelled to quickly reenter service for economic reasons with a few fixes around the periphery when thorough and proper inspection and retrofitting more involved than a multiyear maintenance check.
> "This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again."
I agree that this statement is unusually direct, but I find it noteworthy that they use the word "incident". According to ICAO, one of the criteria for an accident, not an incident, is when "the aircraft sustains significant damage or structural failure", which is the case here.
In aviation lingo, "accident" is more serious than "serious incident" which is more serious than "incident".
Accident is a plane crash, dead people, etc.
Serious Incident is one that was dangerously close to moving into becoming an accident.
Incident is pretty much everyday thing and usually you investigate it yourself and self report. Includes even things like front wheel turning 90 degrees during taxiing resulting in broken front wheel assembly.
I have been against the 737 max since it came out.
You have a proven safe reliable design in the 737.
Then you bolt on engines it was never designed to use.
It changes the flight dynamics of the plane, which needs to then be monitored and "corrected" with special software.
Changing dynamics with different engines could cause all kinds of unforeseen issues with fuselage integrity, different stresses, airflows, etc.
How do we know bolts dont loosen due to different stresses from different types of engines? The whole dynamics of the plane is suspect.
Then you bolt on engines it was never designed to use.
Congrats you've described the overwhelming majority of 737s ever built, as only the first 1,100 or so (around 9% to date) were built with the JT8D. Or you've described none of the 737s ever built if you consider that any airliner was designed for whatever engines it was installed with.
My neighbor is retired from Boeing. Started on factory floor, fresh out of the Navy. Was a troubleshooter/inspector for years. He stays on top of all the Boeing news. He has A LOT to say about MD's execs destroying Boeing's obsessive culture of engineering and quality.
As of two days ago, his current understanding is the plugs are removed and reinstalled when the interiors are installed. Meaning it could have been mfg correctly (in Wichita, KS) and then reinstalled incorrectly (Renton, WA?).
He isn't yet clear about who was responsible for what. Like how this could have been missed by the multiple inspections.
Heresay, so take it or leave it. Just repeating what he tells me. I've encouraged him to comment, but he's not that kind of person.
There are some photos of the installed plug out there.
Basically a bunch (4 really large, 4+ smaller, IIRC) bolts that connect the plug to brackets on the fuselage. The big bolts have castle nuts and cotter pins, the smaller bolts don’t appear to have retention devices.
In one of the photos (I believe it was a United 737) those bolts appeared loose. Again, all what I remember seeing in photos, so YMMV.
The real door probably uses the same brackets and basic attachment points, as it’s designed to be retrofitted after delivery should the operator decide to increase seat count.
IIRC there's essentially a door assembly that supports opening once, so it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of normal door assembly, that fits into the same mounting points as the plug door but also has components that enable opening it.
"Southwest told FOX Business that the Max 8 and Max 7 models in their existing fleet do not have the exit-door plug like the one involved in the Alaska Airlines incident on Jan. 5. Overall, its fleet and operation are unaffected."
The title does clearly talk about Max 9, so the Max 8 and 7 are irrelevant (the max 9 is longer, hence the possibility of needing an actual door for high density setups).
The title should still clarify that it's only max 9s with a plug door but as far as I understand that should be pretty much all 9s in the US: the additional exit is only needed in the densest configurations which are only used by ULCC, 85% of the global MAX9 fleet has a plug.
Yes, but FAA is not willing to pro-actively inspect the entire plane, at least 3-5 random ones should be inspected, maye also offer something so Boeing employees have the guts to speak up
> Boeing must provide instructions to operators for inspections and maintenance. Boeing offered an initial version of instructions yesterday which they are now revising because of feedback received in response.
Is this something we could get our hands on? I'm super curious as to what the instructions contain, is it a mere "tighten the screws" or something a lot more severe?
Working under the assumption Boeing had sent a copy to the FAA (maybe also NTSB?) and that it would be FOIA-able, I started filling out a FOIA request through MuckRock, but they've changed their model and are charging a small fee ($20 per 4 requests). Which does sound like a fair price, but ultimately I decided not to do it.
So, if you or anyone else want to pick up the torch, here's how I was planning to scope the request:
Any and all instructions for the inspection and/or maintenance of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft received by the FAA between January 6th, 2024 and January 13th, 2024.
The necessary legal incantations are contained in the template MuckRock provides.
But in all honesty I bet the easiest way to get a copy is to check in with the aerospace media/blogosphere every few days until someone publishes a copy.
Boeing's slow and gradual deterioration somewhat poetically mirrors a similar trend in the entire country of USA as well. Once a pinnacle of engineering and innovation, 50 years ahead of everyone else in all respects, now revealing inner rot that has been building up for decades unseen.
What was the last war that USA decisively won? When did an astronaut go to orbit in an American rocket? (SpaceX is the exception that proves the rule). What can USA manufacture at greater scale, with better quality, for cheaper cost than anyone else in the world? Does the median American have access to the best quality of life and Healthcare? What about education?
In the US, the major executive departments have Inspectors General who serve as a check on the department itself.* The Department of Transportation's OIG would be responsible for such an investigation of the FAA.
It wouldn't surprise me if the FAA's handling around granting Boeing's self certification license to them is investigated.
Were they? I thought boeing was self certifying elements of the MAX like the door plugs, do you have something showing the FAA inspected the door plugs?
Everything I'm reading says the FAA is moving to divorce the certification process from Boeing to a third party as a consequence of this event where Boeing demonstrated they couldn't even certify the little things. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/12/1224444590/boeing-faa-737-max...
And that's my point about your comment coming across like it's in bad faith. Usually people throw out questions with implied inflammatory answers as a lazy way to incite argument, and then those questions either continue or are seasoned with false information ("the problems were signed off") when someone takes the bait. Then the OP tends to write off the bad faith perception claiming they're trying to engage sincerely. There's a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
---
Given how the FAA responded so far, honestly it could go either way whether they're investigated for it by the DOT OIG. If there is an investigation, it'd likely just be around this self certification process, not necessarily the whole org. And it looks like the FAA is moving quickly to demonstrate that they're not asleep at the wheel.
You're making a distinction I'm not, whether they signed off on it directly or indirectly, thanks for pointing that out. I don't really see the difference as that important though, in the end it's their procedures that are meant to safeguard against this, and they failed. Believe it or not, I have no motivation to incite an argument or anything of the such, why not simply assume I'm mis-informed but in good faith, and correct me ? Anyway thank you for the details about the DOT etc, that's what I was asking for.
I would dispute that I am trolling or starting arguments here. There's that time I was rude because that article hit a spot I've contended with repeatedly when training juniors (and possibly some alcohol was involved) - but apart from that, I would appreciate any pointers as to why you'd conclude I'm in bad faith. This is very unconducive to interesting conversation and I would like to work on that.
I'm not USA citizen and IANAL, but any federal investigation department has the power to do it, also a federal legislative, so the congress could do it too.
My point is that it was their job to catch this before the plane was commercially used. While I expect no one to be perfect, I do expect some introspection as to why this went through the cracks. Why is this unreasonable ?
A lot of focus on Boeing and its systemic issues with subcontracting and cost cutting. Does Airbus suffer from similar issues or problems with corporate culture?
Talk is cheap. How much credibility does the FAA really have at this point? Are they doing their job or rubber stamping planes to fly when Boeing says they’re ready?
At this point they seem as useful as Tesla’s board.
This is a weird comment to make in response to them doing something Boeing very much does not want them to do. It’s like going to someone at the gym and asking when they’re going to get serious about their fitness, rather than last week when they were eating Doritos on the couch.
“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers,” Hart-Smith wrote. “These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight.”’
https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-manufacturing-7...