What isn’t to be ignored IMO is the reported background situation at Renton against which the rivet repairs took place. As we know, the 714AL rivets issue was identified end of August '24 and the first “repair” (overpainting the rivets) took place on 7 Sept. Finally, the rivets were redone properly on 19 Sept.
The background situation at that very same time I’m referring to is about the massive and no doubt frantic additional activity at Renton, following the August '24 discovery of the elongated 737 Max bulkhead holes. Apart from some 40 airframes at Spirit Wichita, there was a massive 220 737’s at Renton (in most cases nearly completed aircraft, like 714AL), most of them requiring inspection of about half of about 1000 holes, plus re-fastening the suspect but OK ones and re-drilling the out-of-specs holes. There was mentioning of "eight repair lines" and "armies of people" involved. See source below.
So, I’m not mentioning these background circumstances as an excuse for what happened (and what apparently didn’t) with the rivet repair and the opening and closing of 714AL’s plug, but it could explain a certain pressure on the teams involved.
Regards
===
Source:
Court case documents in a class action against Spirit, Case 1:23-cv-03722-PAE Document 25 Filed 12/19/23 (
https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...t-aero-systems), quote Boeing CFO Brian West as interviewed by Jefferies LLC analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu on 7 Sept ’24 at Jefferies Industrial Conference:
"It is the aft pressure bulkhead section of the airplane. We know how to fix it, but it’s early in the rework process and the rework hours will likely be higher and the cycle time longer than the vertical fin NOE [notice of escapement], we had earlier in the summer. This is different. It’s a bit more complicated, it’s more involved. There’s hundreds of holes that get inspected. There’s an X-ray inspection process step that’s required, and it’s a very critical part of the airplane. So we have to make sure we do this right and we will.
It will impact about 75% of the 220 airplanes that were inventory – at inventory as the – as of the end of the second quarter. So it’s large.
In terms of our focus with our supplier, it is a 100% the most important thing we’re working on right now. We’ve got literally armies of people from Boeing and the supplier working on this issue."
The same court documents quote Spirit CEO at the time, Tom Gentille, interviewed on the same occasion as West:
"What we have to do is about 1,000 holes in the aft pressure bulkhead, 500 of them are machine-enabled, so could be suspect. So we X-ray all of those and then we look to see on the X-ray could they be suspect. And if they are, what we do is drill out the fastener, inspect the hole. If there’s no issue with the hole and often there isn’t, we just put in the same-sized fastener.
If there is an oblong hole, what we do is we oversize it, drill it out again so it’s a little bit bigger, and then put it in a larger fastener. So we expect to be done with the repairs of the units in our factory by the end of November.
Now, for Boeing, it may take a little bit longer because they have, in many cases, completed aircraft. The 250, there’s maybe 65% or 70% of those that could require inspection and repair.
We set up essentially a separate factory across the street where we’re going to have eight repair lines and we’ll do X-ray on two of those and then repair on six."