What a deceitful headline, the upper management knows about the flaws, they've been in spin control since 2012. There have been whistleblowers, and no corrective action was taken.
There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media on this, and it was damning and that was done a decade ago. No one has been held to account for the systematic failures that were largely introduced as a result of upper management and propagated due to failures in process with the FAA. I'd like to see a corruption probe, and mandatory cool-off periods for regulators seeking to jump from regulation to working in the industry.
> There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media
As the name might suggest, Al Jazeera isn't a US media company. And despite being Qatari state owned, has mostly retained its editorial independence. It reminds me of what the BBC used to represent.
The Netflix documentary Downfall talked a little about it as well. It's absolutely cost cutting measures and horrendous engineering and QA across all of Boeing.
Absolutely agree.. And I don't think they needed to look very far to find flaws in that plane.. I probably shouldn't have been certified to start with. It's maybe not as bad as the MAX, but it ain't great either. Apparently they've made changes to the lightning strike protection systems in the wings, to decrease costs. And it's for the worse. Like removing insulation for lightning diffusers going straight through the fuel tanks. And let's not talk about the li-ion batteries..
> The agency now has more power to choose which Boeing employees represent the FAA’s interests, and there are new protections for them from undue pressure by company managers.
This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.
1) it is absolutely a problem, but...
2) to fix it, you'd have to pay federal FAA employeees as much as equally-skilled members of the private sector at Boeing, and that hasn't happened in a long time. My understanding is this system started because the FAA's best technical people kept leaving for Boeing and other private-sector employers.
>> even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
Yeah but after I read this:
>The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf.
I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.
> This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
This is what happens in the US when your company is in a regulated industry and has been found to be so far from best practices that the regulatory body shows up one day, says "We need x number of offices" and then takes over managing your firm until they are satisfied enough Corrective Action have been performed and enough Preventive Actions are in place to right the ship.
Solution: don't get into a regulated industry, and if you must, keep your house in order.
It does seem strange but, even including the 737 MAX disaster, air travel is safer today than it ever was. Since the 1960s, miles traveled increased tenfold while deaths (in absolute numbers) dropped by 90 %, for a combined 100-fold increase in safety.
The overlooked point is that the MCAS system had been in place and functioning for 10,000 hours +, with hundreds of pilots, and none of them even noticed MCAS existed.
If not for a brain dead design decision to not check for bad AOA data, we probably still would never have heard of MCAS.
I think it's more of the airliner version of the X-29. Yes, it can be made to fly, but only when controlled against normal aeronautic tendencies. In other words, unless you have compensating (automated) controls, the things would not fly as a conventional aircraft and would soon lose control and lift.
I would like a system where the airline had to declare the type of aircraft used on the flight at the time of booking. If at the time of departure the aircraft model actually use for the flight is different then the passenger must on request be repaid the entire value of the ticket.
This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust.
Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions.
Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence.
An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves.
Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.
I’ve flown three times since the 800 has been green lighted. I have very intentionally picked Airbus flights. I’ll never get on one of those Boeing jets.
Good thinking. Airbus planes are impervious to software glitches[1] and sensor failures[2] that result in catastrophic loss of control of the aircraft.
Better bring a gas mask[3] though. And bring one for the flight crew too in case they become incapacitated.
How much of this is to be expected anyway? I.e. in any sufficiently complicated system, you can never find all the flaws. Is there a particular reason to believe the 787 in particular has a disproportionate number of flaws given what it is?
The reasons I've heard is that after merging McDonald-Douglass, Boeing developed a culture of cost-cutting and gutting engineering, and it's only gotten worse over time.
That's what happens when your executives vindictively outsource important software to the cheapest devshop they can find.
You end up with a product being built by a team that by default has no sense of ownership.
Some passages in the article are suggestive that Boeing is being proactive about finding issues, even beyond what the FAA is making them do. It’s a welcome change and hopefully they remain serious about safety despite the pushback from customers who’re focused on cost and timelines.
It is what their PR staff identified would increase people's confidence if they published things saying it. That has nothing to do with anything actually happening in the factories, except more or less by accident.
Has anyone noticed the windows on these planes become very hot when dimmed? They don’t have regular blinds but instead include a gel which can be electrically dimmed. They aren’t hot enough to burn you but uncomfortable to touch.
I got to work on these windows a decade ago! They use basically the same chemistry as in auto-dimming rearview mirrors.
Feel your mirror sometime when you're driving in traffic at night on the interstate and it's been dimmed because of the vehicle following you for some time...it will be perfectly cold.
The electrochromic material between the panes goes through an oxidation/redox reaction in the presence of a voltage. In circuit, it functions something like a low-storage battery or capacitor. It does not have enough leakage current to cause it to get hot, that's just the effect of the sun on the plane.
My experience with regular windows on airplanes is that the shutters can get quite hot as well. The energy they absorb from the sun has to go somewhere — and it gets radiated away as heat.
Do they dim to a dark color? The shades can get warm but they're white and reflect a lot of energy. If the windows are dimming to a dark color it might just be the difference in how much sun they absorb vs. reflect. I wonder if it adds up enough to become a frustration for cabin temperature.
> In 2019, they detected gaps between sections of the Dreamliner’s fuselage that were slightly wider than specified in the FAA-approved designs. The gaps, about the width of a piece of paper, were wider than the manufacturing tolerance of 0.005 of an inch allowed under the approved design.
I feel like the article is really grasping at straws here, and I'd be willing to bet the author doesn't even comprehend how small this is. 0.005" is small. For the hardware-challenged: 0.005" is a typical manufacturing tolerance for a standard-spec PCB. Some of the Chinese board-houses that deal in high volume are higher than that[1]. The fact that they even found a gap this size on something the size of an airplane is amazing to me.
0.005 inch is indeed quite small, and a demanding tolerance indeed for carbon fiber composite construction. I trust that Boeing design engineers would have know full well that this tight tolerance would cost a lot of money, and would therefore specify it only if necessary. When the out of spec assemblies were discovered, Boeing could either use testing and analysis to show these gaps are OK or rework the aircraft to get them in spec. They chose the latter.
In short, just because 0.005 inch is a small number does not mean the article is grasping at straws. I routinely design mechanical assemblies where the difference between 0.005 inch and 0.010 inch is the difference between a comfortable factor of safety and guaranteed failure under design loads.
Even if the deviation has no effect, the fact remains that the design was not updated.
It's perfectly fine for manufacturing to say, "We can't meet this tolerance, are you sure it has to be this exact?" Then design engineering looks at it, decides it does not need to be that exact, and updates the tolerance.
It's not okay to just ship passenger airplanes that don't meet the build specs.
I don't see enough information in the text to help us out here. The say it is out of the tolerance band of presumably +/- 0.005". But they don't tell us how far out of tolerance it was. Was it, say 0.0055", or 0.060"? What was engineering purpose was driving that tolerance? I could see that a +/-0.005" tolerance is from the title block (common default on mechanical engineering drawings), and that this was a reference dimension and not a critical dimension. But yes, 0.005" on something 20 feet in diameter is pretty dang tight.
And for reference a sheet of bog-standard copy paper is right around 0.004".
I’m not expert enough to know if this is dangerous are not. But an aircraft is a combinatorial explosion of complexity. For example, innocuous sounding changes for the 737 Max caused several hundred deaths.
If the tolerance was indeed too strict I would expect Boeing to go through a engineering review and seek approval from the FAA.
People who work on assembly lines are really good at keeping the line moving. But I don’t want someone who’s perf bonus relies on pushing out aircraft determining on-the-fly if something that’s outside of the spec is safe or not…
And this isn’t a knock on blue collar labor, almost no one at Boeing has the knowledge to work through all the potential side effects like this.
What really matters is where that 5 thousandths is ... If it's in the wrong place, that could compromise all kinds of things. Maybe not immediately, but definitely down the road. Watch a few May Day Air disaster episodes, some of the most innocuous sounding things can cause a crash a decade down the line ...
[+] [-] dangle1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] than3|3 years ago|reply
There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media on this, and it was damning and that was done a decade ago. No one has been held to account for the systematic failures that were largely introduced as a result of upper management and propagated due to failures in process with the FAA. I'd like to see a corruption probe, and mandatory cool-off periods for regulators seeking to jump from regulation to working in the industry.
[+] [-] scoot|3 years ago|reply
As the name might suggest, Al Jazeera isn't a US media company. And despite being Qatari state owned, has mostly retained its editorial independence. It reminds me of what the BBC used to represent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera
[+] [-] chx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsibble|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fransje26|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
Yeah but after I read this:
>The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf.
I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.
[+] [-] CodeWriter23|3 years ago|reply
This is what happens in the US when your company is in a regulated industry and has been found to be so far from best practices that the regulatory body shows up one day, says "We need x number of offices" and then takes over managing your firm until they are satisfied enough Corrective Action have been performed and enough Preventive Actions are in place to right the ship.
Solution: don't get into a regulated industry, and if you must, keep your house in order.
[+] [-] IfOnlyYouKnew|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smadge|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiahura|3 years ago|reply
If not for a brain dead design decision to not check for bad AOA data, we probably still would never have heard of MCAS.
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marbex7|3 years ago|reply
This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust.
Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions.
Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence.
An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves.
Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] assttoasstmgr|3 years ago|reply
Better bring a gas mask[3] though. And bring one for the flight crew too in case they become incapacitated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
[3] https://viewfromthewing.com/is-airbus-doing-enough-to-stop-t...
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
I've no problem getting in a Boeing airplane. The 737NG, in particular, has one of the best (if not THE best) safety records in history.
[+] [-] muppetman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hef19898|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madsbuch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsimpson|3 years ago|reply
If someone squinted at Airbus with the same scrutiny, would they find similar problems?
[+] [-] nisten|3 years ago|reply
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-... https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...
[+] [-] ummonk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|3 years ago|reply
No, no, no, no! There is no „too much safety“ when we are talking about airplanes.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|3 years ago|reply
Feel your mirror sometime when you're driving in traffic at night on the interstate and it's been dimmed because of the vehicle following you for some time...it will be perfectly cold.
The electrochromic material between the panes goes through an oxidation/redox reaction in the presence of a voltage. In circuit, it functions something like a low-storage battery or capacitor. It does not have enough leakage current to cause it to get hot, that's just the effect of the sun on the plane.
[+] [-] BostonEnginerd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbiep|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inferiorhuman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] assttoasstmgr|3 years ago|reply
I feel like the article is really grasping at straws here, and I'd be willing to bet the author doesn't even comprehend how small this is. 0.005" is small. For the hardware-challenged: 0.005" is a typical manufacturing tolerance for a standard-spec PCB. Some of the Chinese board-houses that deal in high volume are higher than that[1]. The fact that they even found a gap this size on something the size of an airplane is amazing to me.
[1] https://www.pcbway.com/pcb_prototype/PCB_Manufacturing_toler...
[+] [-] quarterdime|3 years ago|reply
In short, just because 0.005 inch is a small number does not mean the article is grasping at straws. I routinely design mechanical assemblies where the difference between 0.005 inch and 0.010 inch is the difference between a comfortable factor of safety and guaranteed failure under design loads.
[+] [-] zardo|3 years ago|reply
It's perfectly fine for manufacturing to say, "We can't meet this tolerance, are you sure it has to be this exact?" Then design engineering looks at it, decides it does not need to be that exact, and updates the tolerance.
It's not okay to just ship passenger airplanes that don't meet the build specs.
[+] [-] jannyfer|3 years ago|reply
This below site/article seems to give the most technical description, although I know nothing about aircraft engineering.
https://www.key.aero/article/shims-thin-end-boeings-wedge
[+] [-] floxy|3 years ago|reply
And for reference a sheet of bog-standard copy paper is right around 0.004".
[+] [-] jdavis703|3 years ago|reply
If the tolerance was indeed too strict I would expect Boeing to go through a engineering review and seek approval from the FAA.
People who work on assembly lines are really good at keeping the line moving. But I don’t want someone who’s perf bonus relies on pushing out aircraft determining on-the-fly if something that’s outside of the spec is safe or not…
And this isn’t a knock on blue collar labor, almost no one at Boeing has the knowledge to work through all the potential side effects like this.
[+] [-] emeraldd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alliao|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] black_13|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pseingatl|3 years ago|reply