Boeing at X-Roads?

[BlankBox]

The Boeing Problem won’t be resolved until real consequences are visited personally on the top executives and the directors. A return to the culture of engineering excellence and reduction of subcontracting may be too much to ask from a company so invested in this business model. But it needs to happen, or more deadly incidents will occur.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeings-challenges-cant-be-fixed-without-a-culture-change/
OR
https://archive.is/CFJGq

[Big Pistons Forever]

There is one number that really tells it all. Boeing spent 40 BILLION DOLLARS on stock buy backs since 2010. If that money that had been spent on production QA and new product R & D we would not be having this discussion, however that money was spent solely to juice the stock price and resulted in outside bonuses to the C suite executives. It is almost unbelievable the damage Jack Welch did to American business.

I don't see any way ever Boeing comes back. Even if all the bean counter short term thinkers are purged it is probably too late. Boeing does not have the financial resources to invest in future airframes. The 737 is a dead end, selling only because the Airbus booked up to 2027. The 21 Billion dollar fall out of the MAX debacle means the even if they build 5000 of them they still won't be profitable especially because they can only be moved at a substantial discount. The disastrous and continuing production problems with the 787 also ensure it will never be profitable and the 777X is floundering with so many own goals on certification issues the FAA is at the stage that they won't take Boeings word on the design of the cockpit pen holders. let alone the major aircraft systems.

I think sooner rather than later you will see Boeing split into Boeing Commercial and Boeing Military and Space. Boeing Commercial will immediately go into Chapter 11 and be restructured into much smaller company with probably only the 737 and KC 46 production lines remaining with in service support to existing airframes.

In any case If there is another crash that can be directly attributable to a Boeing design or manufacturing flaw then I think the company is immediately done.

[Pugilistic Animus]

I would figure also that they won't let it happen and it's extremely important to maintain a duopoly...Airbus can't be a sole manufacturer
...or...can they?

[jethro15]

If there is another crash that can be directly attributable to a Boeing design or manufacturing flaw then I think the company is immediately done.
I wonder how many people reading that, without responding, are thinking spot on!.
​​​​​​​

[GrahamO]

Of course Boeing wont go - the US military has too much invested with them for DoD to permit the company to fail.

[grizzled]

I think sooner rather than later you will see Boeing split into Boeing Commercial and Boeing Military and Space.

GrahamO, did you read what BPF wrote?

[etudiant]

I would figure also that they won't let it happen and it's extremely important to maintain a duopoly...Airbus can't be a sole manufacturer
...or...can they?
The Chinese will be quite willing to step in to replace Boeing as a competing civil aircraft supplier to Airbus.

[Bksmithca]

The Chinese will be quite willing to step in to replace Boeing as a competing civil aircraft supplier to Airbus.
etudiant, give the US's view of China might not be an easy path.

[alserire]

Cracked windshield on a 787 caused an Egypt Air from Cairo to New York to divert to DUB today. Passengers still there afaik.

They are in real trouble.

[compressor stall]

Cracked windshield on a 787 caused an Egypt Air from Cairo to New York to divert to DUB today. Passengers still there afaik.

They are in real trouble.
one cracked windscreen is not evidence of a manufacturer’s malaise.
(unless it was a systemic manufacturing fault).

[MechEngr]

Every make gets cracked windshields, but only Boeing has a Google Alert search by every news agency looking to pile on.

Remember this: "Co-Pilot Sucked Out Plane Window After Airbus Windshield Shatters at 32,000 Feet" from Time, MAY 15, 2018 https://time.com/5277625/sichuan-airlines-airbus-a319-windshield-shatters/ Good news - they held onto the co-pilot.

Follow-up: "EASA to order Airbus windshield checks after Sichuan A319 blow-out in 2018" 3 March 2021 https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/easa-to-order-airbus-windshield-checks-after-sichuan-a319-blow-out-in-2018/142714.article which certainly seems that every Airbus A319 might lose a windshield at any moment.
external water vapour probably infiltrated the windshield’s seal, as a result of damage, and over time affected the insulation of electrical wiring located at the bottom edge.
So unexpected that a plane would be exposed to water.

"Cracked windshield after takeoff. Iberia Airbus A330-300 returned to Miami." Apr 27, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOA4sC22KGc

"Curious Cracks: When 14 Planes Suffered Windshield Damage In One Afternoon At Denver Airport" including one A319-100. Blamed on a combination of abrasive dirt and extreme cold allowed damage to the windshield to be an initiator for thermal expansion failure due to windshield heaters. JAN 31, 2023 https://simpleflying.com/denver-airport-14-windshield-cracks-on-afternoon-history/
---
Notice that zero coverage was ever given to the first MCAS actuation? Not the crash, the flight the day before the crash that had the same plane, same defect, different crew, and made a 90 minute safe flight. Nor was there any comparative analysis of the progress of the 3 flights. Why? Sovereign immunity meant that the only money target was Boeing so Boeing became the sole pinata to beat cash out of.

It isn't clear what new plane Boeing would have developed. The 737 MAX met industry demand for a 737 compatible design because airlines don't want to set up a new maintenance system, all new parts, all new mechanic training, all new pilot training, all new supply chains.

Boeing systems engineers simply failed to ask, what if pilots ignore the increasing trim loads and attempt to muscle the plane instead of using the trim switches?

Would $40B have ensured that a similar situation would not exist at all? AF447 showed that pilots won't act correctly, but that was answered by the demand by Airbus for better pilot handling training.

Proposing a so called "clean sheet" design (the one most likely to create a really bad problem) might have been seen as risky enough for the board to replace the CEO and start the buyback anyway. Better money you can have right now than money you might have, if you don't get undercut by a competitor. I am in favor of returning to the days when companies were prohibited from buying back their stock. Thanks Reagan for letting them manipulate the market.

Airbus spent a huge amount of money on the A380, clean sheet for a new market. Will be lucky to break even on production cost, will never recoup development cost. Oh, look: "In total, the A380 program cost an estimated €30 billion ($33.9 billion) — and most of that money came from European taxpayers." https://www.dw.com/en/airbus-a380-the-end-of-a-multibillion-dollar-dream/ Must be nice not to have to shoulder development costs.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Boeing systems engineers simply failed to ask, what if pilots ignore the increasing trim loads and attempt to muscle the plane instead of using the trim switches?
.

I have to say I saw red with that statement. Your statement may be true for the original MCAS but it is manifestly untrue for the production software that literally gave seconds for the crew to recognize and respond to the failure before the BS designed for the 707 in 1957 manual trim system became immovable. Then after it was obvious the airplane had a problem with MCAS 7 days after the Lion Air crash the bean counters and lawyers tried to finesse the issue for months until the next crash. The Airbus is a good design but it is now almost 40 years old. Boeing had a chance to design a truly next generation narrow body that would have established it as the segment leader. Instead they did the cheap, nasty fast route to update a design this 63 year first flew on when he was 9. That plus the 757 replacement would have crushed Airbus for the nest 25 years. That is what 40 Billion dollars would have bought, a future for Boeing. The stock buybacks instead enriched a few and terminally impoverished the company

[krismiler]

Boeing has trashed its reputation, previously they were an engineering company which built aircraft that set the standard other manufacturers measured themselves against. The last good aircraft they built was the B777, you rarely heard of any problems with the design and its safety record is exceptional.

Then cost cutting, do it cheaper rather than better, outsource and nice big bonuses for the executives became the new focus. We've seen the results with the B737 MAX and all the B787 issues since its introduction. If Boeing don't get it right with the B777X they will be in a lot of difficulty, there were already problems back in 2019 when a door failed during a stress test and ruptured the fuselage. This type is already facing design issues before quality control comes into question.

The B737 is a corpse warmed up and urgently needs replacing with a clean sheet design to compete with and ideally surpass the A320 and C919. However this will require a lead time of many years and billions of dollars in investment. Get this wrong and the new duopoly will be Airbus and Comac. No one trusts Boeing anymore and if the big operators book out Airbus production and the lead time is too long, it may well persuade other airlines to give the C919 a chance. Whilst the Chinese aircraft isn't yet as capable as the A320, if you don't need extremes of range and payload it could well be suitable. Government back financing with an attractive price and a few discreet "donations" could see it entering the mass market.

[MechEngr]

"Your statement may be true for the original MCAS but it is manifestly untrue for the production software that literally gave seconds for the crew to recognize and respond to the failure before the BS designed for the 707 in 1957 manual trim system became immovable. "

Red the view may be, but the trim switch under the left thumb of the guy in the left seat always functioned. I suppose the switch in the right seat is also under the left thumb. The first crew and second captain managed with zero difficulty; some roller-coaster, but not deadly.

On top of that every flight had far more than seconds (1-5) to deal with the trim loads. I saw red when "The pilots followed the emergency AD exactly" was not in the FDR, at all.

No airline wanted a competitor to the 737 from Boeing. Here's what happens when a company tries that.
The customers say "Is this going to be all new?"
"Yes"
"Then cancel my current orders and I'll wait for the new plane to come out, or maybe I'll just go to Airbus and see what they have if I have to start over."
or they say
"Since I have one common platform for my airline, I will have to toss all of them in the garbage or have incompatible planes and incompatible pilots? Can't you just make the 737 better?"

[BFSGrad]

Fear not! Boeing ain’t going anywhere as it clearly falls into the category of too big to fail. The USG has a long history of corporate bail-outs. The only question is what form it would take.

The more relevant question is whether the USG is too big to fail. $1.8T in deficit spending in 2023; $34T in national debt and climbing rapidly; entitlement program insolvency looming. Us Yanks are up to our earlobes in financial shizzle.

A lesser question is how long can the Dave Calhoun/Stan Deal clown show endure? They’ve been at it for over 4 years. Is there a case to be made that they’re turning things around?

[megan]

Since I have one common platform for my airline, I will have to toss all of them in the garbage or have incompatible planes and incompatible pilots? Can't you just make the 737 betterIn the late thirties all the airlines had pretty much one common platform - the DC-3, things have moved on, if Southwest wants commonality they could purchase the same variant 737 that they have since they don't want extra training involved.

[sangiovese.]

Airbus have cracked windscreens too. I’ve had them in both a 787 and a 330. Nothing to see here

[alserire]

Airbus have cracked windscreens too. I’ve had them in both a 787 and a 330. Nothing to see here

In the court of public opinion you’re telling me it’s not one more thing they don’t need?

And it’s public opinion that counts here.

[GrahamO]

GrahamO, did you read what BPF wrote?

Yes and as each part feeds off he other the suggestion makes no sense. A split would irreperably harm Boeing defence so it'll never happen.

Too many folks dreaming about the impossible.

[45989]

Airbus spent a huge amount of money on the A380, clean sheet for a new market. Will be lucky to break even on production cost, will never recoup development cost. Oh, look: "In total, the A380 program cost an estimated €30 billion ($33.9 billion) — and most of that money came from European taxpayers." https://www.dw.com/en/airbus-a380-the-end-of-a-multibillion-dollar-dream/ Must be nice not to have to shoulder development costs.

I think you will find much of Boeing R+D was/is via military spending( ie using taxpayers money).

[Local Variation]

No airline wanted a competitor to the 737 from Boeing. Here's what happens when a company tries that.
The customers say "Is this going to be all new?"
"Yes"
"Then cancel my current orders and I'll wait for the new plane to come out, or maybe I'll just go to Airbus and see what they have if I have to start over."
or they say
"Since I have one common platform for my airline, I will have to toss all of them in the garbage or have incompatible planes and incompatible pilots? Can't you just make the 737 better?"

And conversely legacy Airbus customers are a genuine sales target for Boeing. With long overdue exciting and brand new clean burn single aisle technology.

You simply can not keep squeezing pips out the same lemon. Otherwise you will always get what you’ve always got.

Boeing needs organic revenue growth.

Pure revenue growth is a measurement of new products to new (not existing) customers. And investors are very hot these days on product vitality within overall revenues. Where is all that coming from today in Seattle?

[TURIN]

Airbus spent a huge amount of money on the A380, clean sheet for a new market. Will be lucky to break even on production cost, will never recoup development cost. Oh, look: "In total, the A380 program cost an estimated €30 billion ($33.9 billion) — and most of that money came from European taxpayers." https://www.dw.com/en/airbus-a380-the-end-of-a-multibillion-dollar-dream/ Must be nice not to have to shoulder development costs.


I think you will find much of Boeing R+D was/is via military spending( ie using taxpayers money).
You beat me to it.
In addition the Boeing Starliner space capsule is a mess. Years behind schedule. Paid for by the public purse.

[MechEngr]

You beat me to it.
In addition the Boeing Starliner space capsule is a mess. Years behind schedule. Paid for by the public purse.

Sure - back in 1950s the development of jet powered aircraft was paid for by all governments, but there hasn't been a direct government subsidy to Boeing to develop a civilian aircraft for non-government use.

Starliner isn't a commercial aircraft; Boeing has taken around $1B in development write-downs for it.

[West Coast]

In the court of public opinion you’re telling me it’s not one more thing they don’t need?

And it’s public opinion that counts here.

Yet gobs of Boeings are still being sold, they are being filled with gobs of passengers with short term memory of MCAS and soon of doors popping off. Regulators and CEOs are who Boeing fears, not passengers who constitute the court of public opinion as soon they will purchase tickets based off cost, convenience and availability not whether it’s a Boeing, an Airbus or a Tupolev.

[Less Hair]

Sure - back in 1950s the development of jet powered aircraft was paid for by all governments, but there hasn't been a direct government subsidy to Boeing to develop a civilian aircraft for non-government use.

Starliner isn't a commercial aircraft; Boeing has taken around $1B in development write-downs for it.

Didn't Boeing receive public support like serious tax reductions in Washington State and subsidies in South Carolina for the new factory? And didn't Boeing use Japanese and Italian public support for 787 contributions?

[Discorde]

It's probably been asked before but why didn't Boeing re-engine the 757 to compete with the A320 family rather than tweak the 737? Then there would have been no need for MCAS.

If it's a question of minimising training costs for airlines operating 737 fleets, why not arrange dual rating 737/757 for pilots? It worked well for 757/767 pilots even though these types had different handling characteristics.

[pattern_is_full]

It's probably been asked before but why didn't Boeing re-engine the 757 to compete with the A320 family rather than tweak the 737? Then there would have been no need for MCAS.

If it's a question of minimising training costs for airlines operating 737 fleets, why not arrange dual rating 737/757 for pilots? It worked well for 757/767 pilots even though these types had different handling characteristics.

Yes - I asked that also.

A retired Boeing engineer here (tdracer) explained (my very rough summary) that the 757 was designed in and for a different economy (the 1980s). A very expensive aircraft to build and buy (although efficient with relatively low operating costs), in an era with no narrow-body competition from Airbus (yet). Once production ended in 2004, all the jigs and other dedicated production equipment were disposed of. So no economically-rational way to revive it when Boeing needed to compete with the A321neo.

With luck, he will be along to correct my "interpretation" of his words, where needed.

[45989]

Sure - back in 1950s the development of jet powered aircraft was paid for by all governments, but there hasn't been a direct government subsidy to Boeing to develop a civilian aircraft for non-government use.

Point taken . However remember the tanker competition that Boeing lost before you start throwing stones! ...........................

[JanetFlight]

The main problem and also a constant headache for airliners still operating the 757 its the lack of proper uld's // containers for cargo hold, quite the opposite of even smaller airbuses, (pax config) ... Presently I'm not 100 sure about it, I must confess, but some years ago all 757 holds were bulk free luggage, no uld devices, except for those freighter built/modified on purpose for cargo carriers.
So no need to do any reengine neo à lá Airbus for a plane still using philosophies of last century...

[tdracer]

Yes - I asked that also.

A retired Boeing engineer here (tdracer) explained (my very rough summary) that the 757 was designed in and for a different economy (the 1980s). A very expensive aircraft to build and buy (although efficient with relatively low operating costs), in an era with no narrow-body competition from Airbus (yet). Once production ended in 2004, all the jigs and other dedicated production equipment were disposed of. So no economically-rational way to revive it when Boeing needed to compete with the A321neo.

With luck, he will be along to correct my "interpretation" of his words, where needed.
That's pretty accurate pattern... With the introduction of the 737-900 (Next Generation), it could do nearly everything a 757 could do (except for range), and cost much less to buy. When Boeing made the decision to pull the plug on the 757, orders had dried up and the rate was down to one/month (while production officially ended in 2004, the decision was made in the aftermath of 9/11 - long lead parts mean it takes a couple years to wind down a production line). Since the 757 required a dedicated assembly line, that meant a huge amount of overhead to build one aircraft per month, while the 737 rate was approaching one aircraft per day - spreading that factory overhead cost over a much larger number of aircraft.
The other problem for the 757 was that it had a huge wing - fine for the 180-220 passenger market, but trying to shrink it down for the 150-180 passenger market would have meant carrying far more wing than you needed - more weight, more drag, more costs (that's why 'shrinks' seldom work, while stretches usually do).

In the 2010 time-frame, Boeing was working on a new, clean sheet of paper replacement for the 737 (I had friends that were working it). But Airbus pretty much caught Boeing off-guard when they launched the A320 NEO. A new clean sheet design would have taken years longer to reach the market - then years more to bring the production rate up to the 40-50/month rate that the 737 and A320 series were at. It would have meant conceding nearly the entire single aisle market to Airbus for the better part of 10 year, while the 737 MAX could reach the market shortly after the NEO and the 737 rate was already in the 40-50/month range. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight and the MAX fiasco, going with an all-new aircraft looks a lot better, but at the time the MAX was launched, it seemed like the best option.

[BlankBox]

Like father... like son...

https://www.airguide.info/boeing-737-max-supplier-spirit-aerosystem-ignored-warnings-lead-to-safety-concerns-and-legal-woes/

[TheFiddler]

but at the time the MAX was launched, it seemed like the best option.

All your posts on this forum are spot on. I've flown 76/75 and now 73. The -800 is a compromise too far. We're flying 50 year old kit made to fit the modern day. The Max is just taking the p**s.

The A320 is now nearly 40 years old. If Boeing started a clean sheet design in 10 years they could be selling the most amazing aircraft.
But the Max is just a disaster.

[compressor stall]

It would have meant conceding nearly the entire single aisle market to Airbus for the better part of 10 year,

and that with hindsight would have been the best option. Now they’d be the market leader in the sector with a new narrow body selling against the NEO A320 - which underneath is not young. But a hell of a lot younger than the 73.

[PAXboy]

When listing those who have failed Boeing, it's customers and their pasengers, don't forget:

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/2000x1205/boeing_fail_9a4c40d4e0d08f55b4500aa7d65abce784df9042.jpg

[West Coast]

All your posts on this forum are spot on. I've flown 76/75 and now 73. The -800 is a compromise too far. We're flying 50 year old kit made to fit the modern day. The Max is just taking the p**s.

The A320 is now nearly 40 years old. If Boeing started a clean sheet design in 10 years they could be selling the most amazing aircraft.
But the Max is just a disaster.

Disaster, yup MCAS associated crashes were disasters. That said, Boeing has a backlog of thousands of Max 737s, don’t lose sight of its popularity with the people who buy airplanes.

[MechEngr]

When listing those who have failed Boeing, it's customers and their pasengers, don't forget:
<picture of Stonecipher>

Can there be an unlike button for that guy? Sanford Mc. did them no favors either.

[Big Pistons Forever]

So MechEngr, explain to me how Boeing has a future, because I just don’t see it. This is not a wind up I am genuinely interested in the question. A failed Boeing would be a terrible shame

[West Coast]

So MechEngr, explain to me how Boeing has a future, because I just don’t see it. This is not a wind up I am genuinely interested in the question. A failed Boeing would be a terrible shame


You’re aware of the enormous backlog of Max orders? Over 4000 as of 3rd quarter of last year. That’s just the Max let alone the rest of the aircraft they sell.

[Big Pistons Forever]

You’re aware of the enormous backlog of Max orders? Over 4000 as of 3rd quarter of last year. That’s just the Max let alone the rest of the aircraft they sell.

Yes, I am aware as I am aware that the financial resources of the company continues to deteriorate as the costs of the MAX debacle and the continuing 787 production Fu*k ups weigh down the company.

[fdr]

Point taken . However remember the tanker competition that Boeing lost before you start throwing stones! ...........................

But, Boeing then won the competition by throwing their dummy out of the cot.

[fdr]

That's pretty accurate pattern... With the introduction of the 737-900 (Next Generation), it could do nearly everything a 757 could do (except for range), and cost much less to buy. When Boeing made the decision to pull the plug on the 757, orders had dried up and the rate was down to one/month (while production officially ended in 2004, the decision was made in the aftermath of 9/11 - long lead parts mean it takes a couple years to wind down a production line). Since the 757 required a dedicated assembly line, that meant a huge amount of overhead to build one aircraft per month, while the 737 rate was approaching one aircraft per day - spreading that factory overhead cost over a much larger number of aircraft.
The other problem for the 757 was that it had a huge wing - fine for the 180-220 passenger market, but trying to shrink it down for the 150-180 passenger market would have meant carrying far more wing than you needed - more weight, more drag, more costs (that's why 'shrinks' seldom work, while stretches usually do).

In the 2010 time-frame, Boeing was working on a new, clean sheet of paper replacement for the 737 (I had friends that were working it). But Airbus pretty much caught Boeing off-guard when they launched the A320 NEO. A new clean sheet design would have taken years longer to reach the market - then years more to bring the production rate up to the 40-50/month rate that the 737 and A320 series were at. It would have meant conceding nearly the entire single aisle market to Airbus for the better part of 10 year, while the 737 MAX could reach the market shortly after the NEO and the 737 rate was already in the 40-50/month range. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight and the MAX fiasco, going with an all-new aircraft looks a lot better, but at the time the MAX was launched, it seemed like the best option.

The B737 is not one of may favourite Boeings, I prefer their ring in, the MD95 PT17 Stearman, and almost everything else they have built before the B737, but I've owned a B737, and it did what we needed it to. The fundamental aircraft is OK, the coin flip side of "old" is "established". The MAX was a shocker, and that followed 20+ years of alarming trends in the move from an engineering centric company that on occasions had issues that everyone in the industry faces, to one going out of its way to place weak links in the production chain. The MAX was still an aberration IMHO, but it arose from making a decision to considerably alter an existing design, which is reasonable, and then a discovery of an issue that really should have been determined far earlier as being a consequence of the design. The process of repurposing a system, while frugal and arguably elegant at the time, was ill conceived given a cursory at best assessment of the consequences of that expediency. There are a number of people at TBC that had the competency to circumvent this issue ever arising, some have retired in the period of economic rationality that Stonecipher introduced. I would have preferred an aerodynamic fix to an aerodynamic issue. The historical THS drive stall issue and the acceptance of the 6-flags solution, forgotten over time remains an irritant. Systems wise, the plane is as subject to service difficulties as any other, thats what planes do, they teach us about design.

The MAX will resolve it's issues, and we can hope that someday TBC will substantively change their board, the C level management and everyone else that has allowed the decay of the company since the mid 90's. The minor inconvenient truth in that is, the shareholders are the ones that drive the companies event horizon, and no one ever holds the shareholders to account for bitching on one hand over the mis-steps of the company and then bitching about their dividend and share price, which drive the event horizon to being suitable for "10-second Tom's" wonderment. The companies lawyers who were involved with the debacle over the QA Inspector firings in the early 2000's on their reporting component fabrication that can only considered to be fraudulent by a supplier to Boeing, with the company and US Govts response being to attack the QAI's, and then never rectify the findings of those inspection reports, those involved from the company side, they own the MAX, KC46, B787 and the rest of the sordid mess that has grown from obsequience towards the beancounters.

[Chesty Morgan]

You’re aware of the enormous backlog of Max orders? Over 4000 as of 3rd quarter of last year. That’s just the Max let alone the rest of the aircraft they sell.
Hmmm, but how many could it have been...?

[waito]

You’re aware of the enormous backlog of Max orders? Over 4000 as of 3rd quarter of last year. That’s just the Max let alone the rest of the aircraft they sell.
It doesn't help the company if they can't deliver them, every other month.
It doesn't help the company if they lose money despite.
It doesn't help the company that almost all their models 737,787, 777-X have major issues.

[PAXboy]

This from Reuters By Valerie Insinna, Tim Hepher and David Shepardson
January 7, 20244:21 PM GMTUpdated 15 days ago
Spirit Aero made blowout part but Boeing has key role (https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spirit-aero-made-blowout-part-boeing-has-key-role-sources-2024-01-07/)

As part of the production process, Spirit builds fuselages for 737s and sends them by train with the special door assembly “semi-rigged,” one of the people said.
“They are fitted but not completed," the person said.

At its Renton, Washington, plant, Boeing typically removes the pop-out, or non-functioning, door and uses the gap to load interiors. Then, the part is put back and the installation in completed. Finally, the hull is pressurized to 150% to make sure everything is working correctly, the person said.

The process means that finding out where any flaw was introduced during assembly may not be clear-cut, said the sources, who asked not to be named as details of the probe are confidential.

[GlobalNav]

Boeing WAS at a crossroads, years ago, they have gone a long way down the wrong road and there's neither room nor will for a U-turn.

[JapanHanuma]

Airbus have cracked windscreens too. I’ve had them in both a 787 and a 330. Nothing to see here

But weren't there two Boeing airplanes with cracked winddcreens in recent weeks. There was another one in Japan too.

[PAXboy]

'AirGuide' reports: By Brian Davidson| January 11th, 2024
Boeing 737 Max Supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, Ignored Warnings Leading to Safety Concerns and Legal Woes
Workers at a key Boeing supplier raised alarms about defects in aircraft components, but their concerns were reportedly overlooked, leading to a series of safety issues and a federal lawsuit. Just weeks prior to an alarming incident where a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight, workers at Spirit AeroSystems, the part’s manufacturer, had warned of safety risks.

Documents filed in federal court allege that former employees at Spirit AeroSystems, which manufactured the faulty door plug, had repeatedly alerted company officials about safety issues and were instructed to falsify records. These warnings came less than a month before over 150 Boeing aircraft were grounded due to a catastrophic failure.

The lawsuit accuses Spirit of systematic quality-control problems, under-reporting defects, and retaliating against whistleblowers. This situation underscores broader concerns about outsourced aerospace manufacturing and the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) regulatory effectiveness.
After any major catastrophe, it usually turns out that enginners, or regular staff, had warned of the problem. Think about the Challenger disaster in the USA (1986) and the King's Cross fire in the UK (1987) as but two examples.

[West Coast]

Hmmm, but how many could it have been...?

Reasonable question that warrants a separate discussion. With over 4000 orders on the books, the aircraft is successful.

[PAXboy]

Yes it is successful. But the entire MAX / MCAS control issue could (largely) have been prevented - if Boeing had agreed to own up to the crew training required for it. They chose not to cause this problem for their clients - for well documented reasons. They also appear not to have tested the software sufficiently in the real world. That would have shown up how little time there was to react to an unknown problem.
I sit to be corrected.

[kiwi grey]

Airbus have cracked windscreens too. I’ve had them in both a 787 and a 330. Nothing to see here
But weren't there two Boeing airplanes with cracked winddcreens in recent weeks. There was another one in Japan too.
And two more in the last two days, according to the AvHerald:

Incident: Egypt B789 over Atlantic on Jan 20th 2024, cracked windshield (https://avherald.com/h?article=513f624d&opt=0)
Incident: Biman B789 near Dhaka on Jan 20th 2024, cracked windshield (https://avherald.com/h?article=513fe425&opt=0)

I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a real and possibly fundamental problem with the B878 windscreen. Is there a design issue with the transparency itself, or a production issue? Is there a design issue with the window frame, or a production issue? Is there an installation process design issue?
I wonder how long before the NTSB or the FAA begins to investigate what seems to me to be an unaccountably high frequency of B787 windscreen failures

[tdracer]

And two more in the last two days, according to the AvHerald:

Incident: Egypt B789 over Atlantic on Jan 20th 2024, cracked windshield (https://avherald.com/h?article=513f624d&opt=0)
Incident: Biman B789 near Dhaka on Jan 20th 2024, cracked windshield (https://avherald.com/h?article=513fe425&opt=0)

I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a real and possibly fundamental problem with the B878 windscreen. Is there a design issue with the transparency itself, or a production issue? Is there a design issue with the window frame, or a production issue? Is there an installation process design issue?
I wonder how long before the NTSB or the FAA begins to investigate what seems to me to be an unaccountably high frequency of B787 windscreen failures
You also have to consider that - right now - the press is all over anything Boeing related like ants on honey. I've seen headlines to the effect of "More Boeing Woes" incidents such as the Atlas 747-8 engine failure (news item, engines occasionally fail). Sometimes things break - and there are continued airworthiness standards that require operators report all those items.
As others have noted, windshield cracks are not particularly uncommon - you need to look at events over a much longer time period than one week to determine if there is a generic issue or a statistical fluke.

[MechEngr]

I found that 14 aircraft windshields cracked on one day's departures from Denver, attributed to winds driving small grit into windows and particularly low temps. Feb 2007 for the curious. The first was an Airbus A319-100.

[Bbtengineer]

That's pretty accurate pattern... With the introduction of the 737-900 (Next Generation), it could do nearly everything a 757 could do (except for range), and cost much less to buy. When Boeing made the decision to pull the plug on the 757, orders had dried up and the rate was down to one/month (while production officially ended in 2004, the decision was made in the aftermath of 9/11 - long lead parts mean it takes a couple years to wind down a production line). Since the 757 required a dedicated assembly line, that meant a huge amount of overhead to build one aircraft per month, while the 737 rate was approaching one aircraft per day - spreading that factory overhead cost over a much larger number of aircraft.
The other problem for the 757 was that it had a huge wing - fine for the 180-220 passenger market, but trying to shrink it down for the 150-180 passenger market would have meant carrying far more wing than you needed - more weight, more drag, more costs (that's why 'shrinks' seldom work, while stretches usually do).

In the 2010 time-frame, Boeing was working on a new, clean sheet of paper replacement for the 737 (I had friends that were working it). But Airbus pretty much caught Boeing off-guard when they launched the A320 NEO. A new clean sheet design would have taken years longer to reach the market - then years more to bring the production rate up to the 40-50/month rate that the 737 and A320 series were at. It would have meant conceding nearly the entire single aisle market to Airbus for the better part of 10 year, while the 737 MAX could reach the market shortly after the NEO and the 737 rate was already in the 40-50/month range. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight and the MAX fiasco, going with an all-new aircraft looks a lot better, but at the time the MAX was launched, it seemed like the best option.

I don’t think the issue is that they built the stopgap aircraft.

I see parallels with AMD versus Intel, different industry but similarities given hugely complex engineering product with very long lead times.

The issue doesn’t seem to be that they chose an incremental design to allow them survive as far as the clean sheet design, the issue seems to be that they made such a hash of the incremental design.

I don’t want to try to re-litigate what the failure of a couple of pitot tubes did to that strategy, or over-subservience to the Southwest effect, but come on.

You can choose a cheaper design, but what you can’t then do on top of that is also cheap out on the cheaper design.

[fdr]

But weren't there two Boeing airplanes with cracked winddcreens in recent weeks. There was another one in Japan too.
Windscreens crack, thats what they do. Occasionally they don't. When you but a new window, the manufacturer in my case requires they install the windscreen, and they will not guarantee they do not crack the screen during the install.

"Crack happens".

Boeings , Airbus, etc, no substantial difference.

[fdr]

I found that 14 aircraft windshields cracked on one day's departures from Denver, attributed to winds driving small grit into windows and particularly low temps. Feb 2007 for the curious. The first was an Airbus A319-100.

er... you aren't involved in PPG sales I hope! :}

That is an impressive cluster. I would think that thermal shock was more a problem, not clear how grit that isn't high velocity boulder (Colorado) size... what failure mode would that be. PPG would be pleased though.

[West Coast]

er... you aren't involved in PPG sales I hope! :}

That is an impressive cluster. I would think that thermal shock was more a problem, not clear how grit that isn't high velocity boulder (Colorado) size... what failure mode would that be. PPG would be pleased though.

I recall that day. Received an ACARS message to divert as no one at the time could figure out what was causing the issues.

[flymesome]

"Your statement may be true for the original MCAS but it is manifestly untrue for the production software that literally gave seconds for the crew to recognize and respond to the failure before the BS designed for the 707 in 1957 manual trim system became immovable. "

Red the view may be, but the trim switch under the left thumb of the guy in the left seat always functioned. I suppose the switch in the right seat is also under the left thumb. The first crew and second captain managed with zero difficulty; some roller-coaster, but not deadly.

On top of that every flight had far more than seconds (1-5) to deal with the trim loads. I saw red when "The pilots followed the emergency AD exactly" was not in the FDR, at all.

No airline wanted a competitor to the 737 from Boeing. Here's what happens when a company tries that.
The customers say "Is this going to be all new?"
"Yes"
"Then cancel my current orders and I'll wait for the new plane to come out, or maybe I'll just go to Airbus and see what they have if I have to start over."
or they say
"Since I have one common platform for my airline, I will have to toss all of them in the garbage or have incompatible planes and incompatible pilots? Can't you just make the 737 better?"

You guys have missed a very crucial part of those hull losses that the initial mover of them were faulty angle of attack sensors which were only one on each fuselage. It might sound as the MCAS was the main culprit but that's not entirely correct. It doesn't draw the bigger picture.

[MechEngr]

I don't know a certain path for Boeing. Obviously in this case they need to deal with their internal reporting on the factory floor and be even less trusting of Spirit, but that leads to other problems.

Had the ET-302 reporting accurately represented how the situation developed following the preliminary report on Lion Air, they would not now be buried under an avalanche of blame.

Clearly this manufacturing issue is all on Boeing and they deserve a beating for it; blaming them for the actions of an airline that knew of a design defect but took no measures to cope?

The CEO needs to put his desk on the factory floor of Renton for the next 6 months. As unpleasant as it might be, probably a weekly factory walkaround invite to Dominic and buy 30 minute info-mercials in the Seattle market talking with the floor workers and inspectors about how work is going. These need to be unscripted without a single marketing person within a mile of the building, not even a slick intro. If they think the plant isn't a good backdrop? I'd say that is a sign it needs to be dealt with.

[Piper_Driver]

United Air Lines, one of Boeing's biggest customers is now sounding the alarm.

UAL CEO on Boeing issues (https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/united-expects-boeing-jets-grounded-121114386.html)

[OldnGrounded]

United pulls plans for Boeing’s biggest 737 Max jet, after Max 9 groundings prove to be ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/united-pulls-plans-for-boeings-biggest-737-max-jet-after-max-9-groundings-prove-to-be-straw-that-broke-the-camels-back-35b82591)

United Airlines Holdings Inc. on Tuesday said it was rethinking its longer-term plans for Boeing’s biggest 737 Max jet, the Max 10, after the government’s grounding of dozens of Max 9s this month raised questions over whether the aircraft maker could still deliver planes on time.

United Chief Executive Scott Kirby said during the airline’s earnings call on Tuesday that it wasn’t canceling its orders for the Max 10. But he said the airline was taking the jet “out of our internal plans.”

“We’ll be working on what that means exactly with Boeing,” he said. “But Boeing is not going to be able to meet their contractual deliveries on at least many of those airplanes.”

More (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/united-pulls-plans-for-boeings-biggest-737-max-jet-after-max-9-groundings-prove-to-be-straw-that-broke-the-camels-back-35b82591)

[remi]

United pulls plans for Boeing’s biggest 737 Max jet, after Max 9 groundings prove to be ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/united-pulls-plans-for-boeings-biggest-737-max-jet-after-max-9-groundings-prove-to-be-straw-that-broke-the-camels-back-35b82591)

United Airlines Holdings Inc. on Tuesday said it was rethinking its longer-term plans for Boeing’s biggest 737 Max jet, the Max 10, after the government’s grounding of dozens of Max 9s this month raised questions over whether the aircraft maker could still deliver planes on time.

United Chief Executive Scott Kirby said during the airline’s earnings call on Tuesday that it wasn’t canceling its orders for the Max 10. But he said the airline was taking the jet “out of our internal plans.”

“We’ll be working on what that means exactly with Boeing,” he said. “But Boeing is not going to be able to meet their contractual deliveries on at least many of those airplanes.”

More (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/united-pulls-plans-for-boeings-biggest-737-max-jet-after-max-9-groundings-prove-to-be-straw-that-broke-the-camels-back-35b82591)
You would think that after a couple decades of conspicuous quality and safety failures in both civilian and military aerospace, along with a practice of adding of years going on a decade+ of delays to multiple programs, and catastrophic multiple billion dollar losing underbids that are still bleeding even more money, something would have changed in a major way.

One wonders if Northrop is thinking that "Northrop + Boom in civil aviation" might be extended to "plain old Northrop in civil aviation." After all, if Boeing starts today to sort out its Gordian knot of quality, safety, planning, contractual, and financial problems, it will be at least ten years down the road when a happy path emerges. That's long enough for a domestic competitor who isn't LockMart to go from a design to metal in the air. Or maybe Bombardier or Embraer takes a go at the midsize market. If Boeing can make a plane longer and add engines with bigger fans, why can't Canada or Brazil do that too?

One wonders if the Boeing board talks about these strategic things, or just about what remaining dollars they can squeeze out before the share price runs into a brick wall.

How does it happen that America's premier (and, formerly, the world's premier) commercial airframe manufacturer sets itself on a path into the wilderness, and 27 years later, no one is looking for the way back? Is it really as simple as a room full of financial elite are sucking out all the money they can from the former US #1 export industry, and aside from that they don't care?

[MarineEngineer]

Korean Air managed a complete turnaround in its cockpit crew resource management. I don't know how long it took, starting in about 1999, but KA went from one of the worst to one of the best airlines. So Boeing has to do something similar in short time if it is to survive.

[Mr Good Cat]

I don't know a certain path for Boeing. Obviously in this case they need to deal with their internal reporting on the factory floor and be even less trusting of Spirit, but that leads to other problems.

Had the ET-302 reporting accurately represented how the situation developed following the preliminary report on Lion Air, they would not now be buried under an avalanche of blame.

Clearly this manufacturing issue is all on Boeing and they deserve a beating for it; blaming them for the actions of an airline that knew of a design defect but took no measures to cope?

The CEO needs to put his desk on the factory floor of Renton for the next 6 months. As unpleasant as it might be, probably a weekly factory walkaround invite to Dominic and buy 30 minute info-mercials in the Seattle market talking with the floor workers and inspectors about how work is going. These need to be unscripted without a single marketing person within a mile of the building, not even a slick intro. If they think the plant isn't a good backdrop? I'd say that is a sign it needs to be dealt with.

This is ironic, as when the great Alan Mullally took over in the 90s, one of the first things he did was put managers closer to the shop floor so they had first hand experience of any issues.

Clearly all Mullally's hard work was undone by the next leadership. Shame.

[WillowRun 6-3]

The CEO reportedly is visiting the U.S. Senate offices today of some of the heavyweights on the Aviation Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee. Certainly these anticipated conversations within the power structure can be expected to solve things - or provoke strong improvement at least - without delay.

(Sarcasm at no extra charge.)

[ScandinavianInterest]

It may be a good idea to look into this in a broader, more long term view.
Boeing has a serious backlog on their delivery of the MAX. It has, due to quality issues gone from bad to worse. The bank is unhappy and the customers are unhappy. There is an enormous pressure on the production line to ramp up. Delivery is the king. There will, independently of the number of 'tick boxes' and QA procedures always been and gray area between reporting or not. The total focus of 'getting the stuff out the door' has just moved this gray area window. This is the real problem they are phasing now. Filling in more 'tick boxes' on more forms and more procedures will not solve the problem. You will have to focus on quality and reward it, not delivery. That is a change of culture.

[Bergerie1]

It's not the Senate he should be visiting but the shop floor. 'Management by walking about' has a lot to recommend it! The people who do the job usually know far more about what is really happening than the managers in the executive offices.

[krismiler]

Boeing need to bring production back in house instead of outsourcing to the cheapest bidder and they need to employ people who take pride in their work instead of those who don’t give a damn because their hourly rate is so low. Focus on making it better, rather than making it cheaper. Profits and bonuses for the executives may be lower but at least the company will still be around.

[viewfromtheramp]

Boeing has trashed its reputation, previously they were an engineering company which built aircraft that set the standard other manufacturers measured themselves against. The last good aircraft they built was the B777, you rarely heard of any problems with the design and its safety record is exceptional.

Then cost cutting, do it cheaper rather than better, outsource and nice big bonuses for the executives became the new focus. We've seen the results with the B737 MAX and all the B787 issues since its introduction. If Boeing don't get it right with the B777X they will be in a lot of difficulty, there were already problems back in 2019 when a door failed during a stress test and ruptured the fuselage. This type is already facing design issues before quality control comes into question.

The B737 is a corpse warmed up and urgently needs replacing with a clean sheet design to compete with and ideally surpass the A320 and C919. However this will require a lead time of many years and billions of dollars in investment. Get this wrong and the new duopoly will be Airbus and Comac. No one trusts Boeing anymore and if the big operators book out Airbus production and the lead time is too long, it may well persuade other airlines to give the C919 a chance. Whilst the Chinese aircraft isn't yet as capable as the A320, if you don't need extremes of range and payload it could well be suitable. Government back financing with an attractive price and a few discreet "donations" could see it entering the mass market.
100% agree with the statement on the B777. I used to work with this aircraft on the ground and in 6.5 years of operation on a daily flight to our Station we did not have a single aircraft related AOG. Remarkable. Also agree that Boeing risk letting COMAC in. The future duopoly maybe Airbus and Comac on the commercial side. Another 737 Max crash (regardless of cause) will seal it's fate forever. Had the DC10 operated in today's social media environment it too would have failed in all likelihood.

[Lord Bracken]

The 737 MAX met industry demand for a 737 compatible design because airlines don't want to set up a new maintenance system, all new parts, all new mechanic training, all new pilot training, all new supply chains.

The MAX was rushed out because AA in particular was looking very closely at the NEO which would require them to have changed all of the things you state...it was more like the industry demand was "we want a new aircraft and the only game in town is the NEO so what have you got?"

Boeing (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/world/europe/US-EU-Airbus-Boeing.html) faced an unthinkable defection in the spring of 2011. American Airlines, an exclusive Boeing customer for more than a decade, was ready to place an order for hundreds of new, fuel-efficient jets from the world’s other major aircraft manufacturer, Airbus (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/world/europe/US-EU-Airbus-Boeing.html).

The chief executive of American called Boeing’s leader, W. James McNerney Jr., to say a deal was close. If Boeing wanted the business, it would need to move aggressively, the airline executive, Gerard Arpey, told Mr. McNerney.

To win over American, Boeing ditched the idea of developing a new passenger plane, which would take a decade. Instead, it decided to update its workhorse 737, promising the plane would be done in six years.

The 737 Max (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/business/boeing-737-max-faa.html) was born roughly three months later.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html

[PAXboy]

There is no better a remedy than walking the floor. I have read recently of a UK boss (Marks & Spencer I think) encouraging others to walk the floor. If you ask the people at the 'coal face' they will tell you - especially if there is no HR around! Yes, some workers will try to pull the wool over your eyes - but only a few. If you ask enough people, you will find out what is happening.

As we all know, Boeing moved their production facility to another state to gain cash from the state and city. BUT it removed the 'big boys' from the men who do the real work. I have seen how, when a man is promoted to have the word 'director' or even a larger word, on the door of his private office - that he forgets how he used to pull the wool over the eyes of those above him.

[Peristatos]

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-not-spirit-mis-installed-piece-that-blew-off-alaska-max-9-jet/

“The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records,” the whistleblower wrote. “It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.”

[WillowRun 6-3]

Boeing need to bring production back in house instead of outsourcing to the cheapest bidder and they need to employ people who take pride in their work instead of those who don’t give a damn because their hourly rate is so low. Focus on making it better, rather than making it cheaper. Profits and bonuses for the executives may be lower but at least the company will still be around.

Walking the floor, while important, cannot possibly be enough. "Pride in their work" - yes - instilled and motivated from an early age. But now I've gone and raised the sorry state of the educational system in the U.S., the deadweight on quality teaching (and academic and career advising) by the monopolistic teacher unions.

I am not anti-union in this viewpoint. To the contrary, among my closest friends is a journeyman Ironworker - and if you don't already understand the strength of that labor organization, I don't know what to say. I'll try, though, with this anecdote. An applicant for Ironworkin' shows up at the yard where skills have to be demonstrated. "Show me how you weld", my friend would say. Within about 10 seconds, if it wasn't good enough, "Get out of here." There is no nonsense, none.

It's correct that I do elevate, or tend to elevate, the late Wm. "Wimpy" Winpisinger to up on a pedestal. But that's who Boeing, to restore to its bygone, sadly bygone days of engineering excellence and engineering preeminence, needs to be walking the floor. I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but not really. Because we all know or should know that even well-intentioned execs - and this probably excludes most of 'em since the merger - still aren't enough to motivate and set the example for the people "on the floor". The career tracks are just too different, too very different. Give me a Wimpy 2.0, and I'll voluntarily suspend my Law License, and go sign up to say "Boeing Builds Airplanes"...... and now, so do I.

[Uplinker]

You would think that after a couple decades of conspicuous quality and safety failures.............

One wonders if the Boeing board talks about these strategic things, or just about what remaining dollars they can squeeze out before the share price runs into a brick wall............Is it really as simple as a room full of financial elite are sucking out all the money they can from the former US #1 export industry, and aside from that they don't care?


I think your last sentence is what is happening, and all I can think is that the rich super elite are draining society of money for their own ends, and sod the rest of us. In one manager's generation, they can have a very comfortable life, and the disasters they leave behind won't materially affect them in their own lifetimes.


This is ironic, as when the great Alan Mullally took over in the 90s, one of the first things he did was put managers closer to the shop floor so they had first hand experience of any issues.......


As did Kelly Johnson of Lockheed years before that. Any engineer could walk into the office to ask about a component, any manager could walk onto the production line or the drawing office to observe and talk about the practicalities.


And that is the way to do it. once you separate managers and workers, it becomes us and them, the proles and the elite, which never works as well as everyone all working together towards a common aim.

[Asturias56]

You finish up like the British Motor Industry in the 70's - a friend was being shown round a British Leyland Factory in the Midlands as part of a job interview - "whats down there?" "Oh we don't want to go down there - they'e animals" said in a loud voice by the management - she didn't take the job

[SLF3]

I think your last sentence is what is happening, and all I can think is that the rich super elite are draining society of money for their own ends, and sod the rest of us. In one manager's generation, they can have a very comfortable life, and the disasters they leave behind won't materially affect them in their own lifetimes.





As did Kelly Johnson of Lockheed years before that. Any engineer could walk into the office to ask about a component, any manager could walk onto the production line or the drawing office to observe and talk about the practicalities.


And that is the way to do it. once you separate managers and workers, it becomes us and them, the proles and the elite, which never works as well as everyone all working together towards a common aim.

my son did a one year industrial placement in a company with two production sites in the same town. Roughly the same size and similar products. At one there was a shared canteen for all the work force, and people mixed. The other had one for the plebs and one for the peasants. One had good industrial relations and ran like clockwork. The other struggled. One guess which did better.

[639]

my son did a one year industrial placement in a company with two production sites in the same town. Roughly the same size and similar products. At one there was a shared canteen for all the work force, and people mixed. The other had one for the plebs and one for the peasants. One had good industrial relations and ran like clockwork. The other struggled. One guess which did better.

Think I get you're intended meaning, but plebs and peasants as disparate from each other?

[waito]

whistleblower posts are very interesting.

one of the aspects IMHO (only?} does apply for any enterprises recently.

a chaos of tools, information flows, parallel digitization and alternative "fact based" infostream for management aside from (KPI's and dashboards).

so even if there's an initially robust and clear process, that can take an negative impact.

Dangerous. In this case literally.

[Asturias56]

West Coast - can you clear some space in your inbox and PM me?

[JG1]

Boeing kept normalizing deviations to stay in the game whilst cutting costs (not paying the price for staying in the game). Like a man tiptoeing further out on the high diving board above an empty pool. Now they are paying the price and it's a lot more costly than it would have been had they played properly.

But it's not just Boeing. Aviation as an industry, led by the low cost carriers, is doing the exact same thing in almost all areas. How many levels of deviation has your company normalised?

[Big Pistons Forever]

Boeing is another case study in what happens when senior managers know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

One more fatal crash of a MAX or indeed any other in production model with any nexus to a Boeing design, engineering, or production failure and the company is done. It is sad that the Boeing C Suite doesn’t seem to realize that they are at a go big or go home moment when it comes to a top to bottom company reorganization.

[tdracer]

This is ironic, as when the great Alan Mullally took over in the 90s, one of the first things he did was put managers closer to the shop floor so they had first hand experience of any issues.

Clearly all Mullally's hard work was undone by the next leadership. Shame.
Wonder if there is any chance that Boeing could lure Mullally out of retirement for a few years to get the ship righted and back on-course...
Making Condit the CEO instead of Mullally back in about 1995 was perhaps the biggest mistake - every misstep traces back to that (particularly the focus on 'shareholder value' and the merger with MacDac).

[remi]

my son did a one year industrial placement in a company with two production sites in the same town. Roughly the same size and similar products. At one there was a shared canteen for all the work force, and people mixed. The other had one for the plebs and one for the peasants. One had good industrial relations and ran like clockwork. The other struggled. One guess which did better.
Once upon a time I taught freelance programming classes. One of my clients was Daimler-Chrysler (... once upon a time!).

One of the prominent signs in the entry area was next to an elevator door. It read:

"EXECUTIVE DINING ROOM"

Wonder if there is any chance that Boeing could lure Mullally out of retirement for a few years to get the ship righted and back on-course...
Making Condit the CEO instead of Mullally back in about 1995 was perhaps the biggest mistake - every misstep traces back to that (particularly the focus on 'shareholder value' and the merger with MacDac).

The way they say it is:

"McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's own money."

But seriously, there must be people at Northrop, Embraer, GD, Textron, and/or Bombardier looking at Boeing, knowing it will be broken for at least another 10 years, and thinking that this is a once in an industry opportunity to get into the business.

[JPJP]

This is ironic, as when the great Alan Mullally took over in the 90s, one of the first things he did was put managers closer to the shop floor so they had first hand experience of any issues.

Clearly all Mullally's hard work was undone by the next leadership. Shame.

The Wall Street Journal (accidentally) examined the leadership habits of Boeings absentee executive class. The only way they could be further from the shop floor would be by firing themselves into a permanent orbit in a Boeing Starliner. The orbit being permanent due to Boeings inability to install timekeeping equipment that works properly.

https://archive.ph/Tb1dP

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-ceo-private-jets-return-to-office-9bee2035?mod=business_lead_pos1

[MechEngr]

I would be surprised if any engines would be available for a startup, which would have to take airplane contracts from Airbus as well as Boeing. China started their program in 2008 and were certified by China in 2022; it uses CFM International LEAP engines, like Boeing and Airbus.

The better chance (and good luck with that) would be to develop a new engine and build a plane for it.

[Uplinker]

Boeing is another case study in what happens when senior managers know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

One more fatal crash of a MAX or indeed any other in production model with any nexus to a Boeing design, engineering, or production failure and the company is done. It is sad that the Boeing C Suite doesn’t seem to realize that they are at a go big or go home moment when it comes to a top to bottom company reorganization.

(assuming 'C Suite' are the managers); They probably do know but don't care. They will have paid off their mortgages and filled up their pensions to the max, (no pun intended). So if Boeing collapses tomorrow, it's not going to affect them.

[OldnGrounded]

We'll have to see the details of the approved instructions to know how clear the path to getting the MAX 9's off the ground will be.

FAA halts Boeing 737 Max production expansion, but clears path to return Max 9 to service (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/24/boeing-737-max-faa-halts-production-expansion-oks-inspection-instructions.html)

The Federal Aviation Administration said it would halt any Boeing 737 Max production expansion.
The FAA also cleared 737 Max 9 inspection instructions, paving the way for the planes to be ungrounded.

[remi]

(assuming 'C Suite' are the managers); They probably do know but don't care. They will have paid off their mortgages and filled up their pensions to the max, (no pun intended). So if Boeing collapses tomorrow, it's not going to affect them.
"C-suite" generally refers to "C-level" people, that is, the ones with three letter titles starting in "C" and ending in "O," like "CPO," Chief Partying Officer.

[remi]

I would be surprised if any engines would be available for a startup, which would have to take airplane contracts from Airbus as well as Boeing. China started their program in 2008 and were certified by China in 2022; it uses CFM International LEAP engines, like Boeing and Airbus.

The better chance (and good luck with that) would be to develop a new engine and build a plane for it.
Building a new clean sheet engine is way harder than a clean sheet airframe.

Maybe GE would like to have a new customer for a subsonic adaptive cycle engine that could be in production in 5-10 years.

Or maybe Northrop wants to go big and add an existing engine manufacturer and subsonic airframe to its tentative plans with Boom.

If you ask me, this is a unique opportunity for biz and regional jet manufacturers to get into the short haul market with a fuselage designed less than 45 years ago.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Recent reporting has highlighted the fact that the QA system at Spirit is different than the one Boeing uses. One potential implication of this difference is that different documentation with respect to “opening” a door plug vs “removing” a door plug meant that a QC inspection was missed.

Furthermore, there is reporting that post delivery repairs were done on the door frame after the fuselage was delivered to correct issues with frame rivets and a loose rubber door seal. Apparently there is now a permanent Spirit work force in Seattle to correct problems with Spirit produced airframe components.

The story just keeps getting worse and worse for Boeing.

But not to worry I was just reading the latest report on Boeing’s response to the recent “quality escape”

They are going to have a ONE DAY safety stand down !

WOW bold action that will undoubtedly sort the problem once and for all 🙄

[remi]

I wonder how many people reading that, without responding, are thinking spot on!.
​​​​​​​
Boeing is absolutely too big to fail but I could see the gummint approving an acquisition by Textron or Northrop or GE. Not LockMart though hell no

[RickNRoll]

Isn't GE where they got the bad culture from?

[SRMman]

Airbus spent a huge amount of money on the A380, clean sheet for a new market. Will be lucky to break even on production cost, will never recoup development cost. Oh, look: "In total, the A380 program cost an estimated €30 billion ($33.9 billion) — and most of that money came from European taxpayers." https://www.dw.com/en/airbus-a380-the-end-of-a-multibillion-dollar-dream/ Must be nice not to have to shoulder development costs.

Hmmm, I don’t think so.

The A380 development costs were apparently €9.5 billion, and following your link - or this link: https://www.dw.com/en/airbus-a380-the-end-of-a-multibillion-dollar-dream/a-60124995 we come to the section "Money down the Drain?". In there is a link: https://www.dw.com/en/german-taxpayers-may-lose-out-over-airbus-a380-loan/a-47769831 entitled "German taxpayers may lose on A380 loan". I've also highlighted two key words, ‘may’ and ‘loan’. The article was written nearly 5 years ago.

So just to be clear, I'd dispute DW's statement that "most of the A380 program costs of €30 billion came from European taxpayers", without mentioning the money was loans. Part of the program estimated costs, back in 2000, were obtained from loans (i.e. repayable) from France, Germany and UK of €3.5 billion, as well as refundable advances of €5.9 billion. The large majority of these loans had been repaid by 2019, with a relatively small amount (€600 million) in dispute at that time.

Airbus DID shoulder the majority of the A380 development and program costs

[Cleared Visual]

I would figure also that they won't let it happen and it's extremely important to maintain a duopoly...Airbus can't be a sole manufacturer
...or...can they?

Wishful thinking, but if that happened, is it conceivable that Lockheed, perhaps with some kind of subsidy, would see a viable opportunity to have another shot at the airliner market?

[remi]

Wishful thinking, but if that happened, is it conceivable that Lockheed, perhaps with some kind of subsidy, would see a viable opportunity to have another shot at the airliner market?
As far as I know, of the major defense aerospace contractors, LockMart is the only one manufacturing no civilian aircraft or jet engines:
Textron: Cessna, Bell
GD: Gulfstream
Northrop: partnership with Boom
GE, RTX: engines
But I may be missing something.

Textron and GD should imo seriously consider entering the narrow body market. Maybe team with Embraer or Bombardier. And I would think watching Boeing slowly drown has got to have folks at Boom and Northrop thinking bigger.

[tdracer]

Wishful thinking, but if that happened, is it conceivable that Lockheed, perhaps with some kind of subsidy, would see a viable opportunity to have another shot at the airliner market?
Not if they have a decent memory...
Commercial jet aircraft was an unmitigated financial disaster for Lockheed - they literally lost money on every one they sold. The L1011 was a fine aircraft, but it bankrupted the company requiring a large (at the time) bailout from the US Government.
The day after Lockheed announced they were pulling the plug on the L1011, their stock price soared.
For a more recent example of how hard it is to enter the commercial jetliner market and actually make money doing it, look no further than Bombardier and the C-Series - not only did they have to give the program away to remain solvent, it basically killed their regional jetliner program.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Regarding Bombardier and its asset sales including the C-Series (per tdracer), this SLF/atty called Montreal home during those events. The sense of loss among the aerospace commentators and cognescenti in the city and QC generally was nearly tangible. I can only guess wildly at how traumatic reaction to a similar sort of failure would be if a company in the U.S. tried to enter this market, but failed.

Before betting on any of the other aerospace manufacturers succeeding if they tried this market on the premise that BCA will fail (or as some here contend "has already failed"), would it not be the case that sufficiently wise Strategy decisions would be needed for substantial capital investment to materialize? Perhaps the insistent push toward net-zero would open avenues for successful new strategies, but isn't there still much skepticism in the engineering communities of relevance about the feasibility of the long-term aspirational goal set by the ICAO Assembly - especially regarding SAF at realistic quantities and the other new propulsion systems bandied about as if their technology will be available in just a few years? Boeing's difficulties have increasingly become traumatic but they've been starkly visible for all to see for . . . pick your example of decline of engineering excellence and fill in the blank. If a new Strategy was readily available, there has been plenty of time for it to have been recognized and shopped for investment.

Second, People. There are workforce components in various locales with the necessary skills, recency or currency with assembly techniques and all the other disciplines of relevance, just waiting to be hired by some new entrant? Maybe there are but the generalized slide of the American workforce - accelerated by the beancounters' devotion to ROI and share price - makes this poster skeptical.

Third, issues of Process (getting corporate leadership and Boards to understand the strategy and then commiting to the initiative) would be, if not herculean, still very heavy lifting. Fourth, what about Resources? - do any of the supposed willing potential new entrants have capital and debt structures sufficient to fund this sort of massive new aircraft (and/or powerplant) initiative? I mean, and not to pick on that bird, but don't Messrs. Pratt and Whitney have some other place where they're devoting lots of attention (the engine inspections etc.)?

Finally in my set of five objections to seeing a new entrant as of course, obviously realistic and feasible, is Integrity. What got BCA into its sorry state? Do you recall the unspeakably shallow, hollow look worn by the then-CEO as he testified on Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the MAX accidents? Well, is it clear beyond doubt or question that any of the other companies are not in the throes of the beancounters too?

I'm not advocating against any enterprise and I'd be happy to see information showing my doubts and negative assertions proved incorrect.

(Credit for the rubric, Strategy, People, Process, Resources, and Integrity to a true gentleman who shall remain nameless here, except to say his career featured being PASC at least three times. (Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed)

[EDLB]

If Boeing does no start soon a single aisle carbon plane with modern cockpit and a gear which allows for modern high bypass engines, they will be toast. Look what the legacy problems of airbus are and make it better. Hire a new Joe Sutter and keep the accountants out until the plane is certified.

Dreaming is still allowed and it was the dreams of people in the mid last century which made Boeing successful.

[GlobalNav]

If Boeing does no start soon a single aisle carbon plane with modern cockpit and a gear which allows for modern high bypass engines, they will be toast. Look what the legacy problems of airbus are and make it better. Hire a new Joe Sutter and keep the accountants out until the plane is certified.

Dreaming is still allowed and it was the dreams of people in the mid last century which made Boeing successful.
Before they start dreaming too much, I think they need to wake up. I wonder whether the honchos will get out of the PR mode and truly into safety and engineering. Their main problem is not about having the right product to sell, it's actually building it properly. Now I'm dreaming, but there are still some in the company that know how to spell those things. Long ago they downsized QA/QC, engineering and the like, now it's time to downsize the executive offices.

[Big Pistons Forever]

I think the magnitude of the door "Quality Escape" is a lot larger than has been reported. It seems to me it was a product of a profound failure of the QA processes in the entire Boeing production supple and assembly chain. It sounds like there is going to be a full audit of Boeing and the results could have far reaching consequences for the future of the company. This like going to the doctor with a mole on your skin and finding out you have Stage 4 skin cancer,

[remi]

Before they start dreaming too much, I think they need to wake up. I wonder whether the honchos will get out of the PR mode and truly into safety and engineering. Their main problem is not about having the right product to sell, it's actually building it properly. Now I'm dreaming, but there are still some in the company that know how to spell those things. Long ago they downsized QA/QC, engineering and the like, now it's time to downsize the executive offices.
You're begging the question here with your assumption that Boeing is an aviation company. Boeing is a sophisticated liquidation operation and has been since their last two new aircraft were cancelled.

Boeing will keep making its 1967 model refrigerators with refrigerator manufacturing processes until they don't make money any longer. At some point they will sell their defense business (or give it away, as it makes a huge negative profit, so now might be good) and will give away their share of the space business (a huge mismatch at this point). Then Boeing the cash cow will have no more milk to give and will be given a captive bolt stun and skinned for cheap leather and ground up for utility meat. I give it 10-15 years but their orders may dry up faster than that.

This is what they are doing. They are stripping Boeing for parts as surely as any Gordon Gekko in the 1980s, slowly and much more competently, but still as inevitably as someone on warfarin with a stomach ulcer. Believe them when you see them doing it and telling you they are doing it.

You folks with Boeing pensions, don't plan to have them in 10 years, or less. Call your lawyers now.

[GlobalNav]

You're begging the question here with your assumption that Boeing is an aviation company. Boeing is a sophisticated liquidation operation and has been since their last two new aircraft were cancelled.

Boeing will keep making its 1967 model refrigerators with refrigerator manufacturing processes until they don't make money any longer. At some point they will sell their defense business (or give it away, as it makes a huge negative profit, so now might be good) and will give away their share of the space business (a huge mismatch at this point). Then Boeing the cash cow will have no more milk to give and will be given a captive bolt stun and skinned for cheap leather and ground up for utility meat. I give it 10-15 years but their orders may dry up faster than that.

This is what they are doing. They are stripping Boeing for parts as surely as any Gordon Gekko in the 1980s, slowly and much more competently, but still as inevitably as someone on warfarin with a stomach ulcer. Believe them when you see them doing it and telling you they are doing it.

You folks with Boeing pensions, don't plan to have them in 10 years, or less. Call your lawyers now.

Sadly, I live in the town with families that grew and prospered with Boeing. I've been privileged to work with some the most competent and honest engineers, world-class, and know that so many folks in the company are still highly competent and professional. To see what has been happening with the company as a whole by the highest ranks over the last 2-3 decades is tragic. But I don't see a reverse. A slight correction in direction is not enough, let alone a verbal executive commitment to that effect. It reminds me of what's happening in Washington DC, the entire culture is selfish, short-term, careerism.

[Uplinker]

@remi +1

There are still some very good companies, but some managers of other companies no longer concentrate on making a 'thing' and having pride in making the best 'thing' they can; instead they concentrate on making money.

In doing so, the 'thing' - be that an airliner or a lawnmower or a service - is made progressively cheaper and cheaper, and by cheaper and cheaper workers, (by which I mean the workers are treated and paid more cheaply).

In their millionaire's club, someone came up with this wheeze - why bother with all the effort and complication of research and design to improve the 'thing' and make a better 'thing', when you can take huge amounts of money out of the company and put it into your own bank account or pension ? Doing it that way, you will have a personal fortune in 5 or 10 years instead of 30 or 40 years.

e,g, a bonus of hundreds of thousands (or millions) paid to the CEO, so there is not now the money to support a staff canteen, which gets closed, and we all have to make our own sandwiches every day to bring to work.

I have been made redundant twice from long, and very long, lived and successful airlines that became insolvent because they had been mismanaged and asset stripped in recent years. Airlines that previously had had very good reputations, high standards and good customer relationships. Both gone owing to bad management.

There are still some very good companies. Boeing was fantastic, once upon a time. But look at them now. What happened ?

[Arran]

100% agree with the statement on the B777. I used to work with this aircraft on the ground and in 6.5 years of operation on a daily flight to our Station we did not have a single aircraft related AOG. Remarkable. Also agree that Boeing risk letting COMAC in. The future duopoly maybe Airbus and Comac on the commercial side. Another 737 Max crash (regardless of cause) will seal it's fate forever. Had the DC10 operated in today's social media environment it too would have failed in all likelihood.

Sadly, I feel it's likely the bean counters at Boeing would view that as a negative rather than a positive and prime focus as an area of cost reduction, saying "clearly the aircraft must be over-engineered".

[remi]

100% agree with the statement on the B777. I used to work with this aircraft on the ground and in 6.5 years of operation on a daily flight to our Station we did not have a single aircraft related AOG. Remarkable. Also agree that Boeing risk letting COMAC in. The future duopoly maybe Airbus and Comac on the commercial side. Another 737 Max crash (regardless of cause) will seal it's fate forever. Had the DC10 operated in today's social media environment it too would have failed in all likelihood.
The US government will have nothing to do with turbine engine technology transfer to PRC. It's bad enough that Russia figured out how to build pretty good jet engines. Fortunately the tribal knowledge needed for turbine engine manufacture exists in people and tooling, not on paper. Should PRC somehow manage to create a high quality clone of an American (or European) engine anyway through IP theft and exhaustive effort, I suspect the US would sanction any buyers.

As far as putting Western engines on Chinese fuselages goes, that will continue to be just fine.

I'm confident someone in America can design world beating airliners. Boeing can't anymore though. Will the US exit the airliner business? If Boeing management has its way, yes, it will.

[remi]

@remi +1

There are still some very good companies, but some managers of other companies no longer concentrate on making a 'thing' and having pride in making the best 'thing' they can; instead they concentrate on making money.

In doing so, the 'thing' - be that an airliner or a lawnmower or a service - is made progressively cheaper and cheaper, and by cheaper and cheaper workers, (by which I mean the workers are treated and paid more cheaply).

In their millionaire's club, someone came up with this wheeze - why bother with all the effort and complication of research and design to improve the 'thing' and make a better 'thing', when you can take huge amounts of money out of the company and put it into your own bank account or pension ? Doing it that way, you will have a personal fortune in 5 or 10 years instead of 30 or 40 years.

.......
This is what happened, infamously, with Martin Skreli, "pharma bro." He and his fellow commercial pirates found unique assets (orphaned drugs with a sole manufacturer) and engaged in as much rent-seeking as possible and nothing else.

Boeing's management is now rent-seeking with the 737, as it seems unlikely/impossible that there will be any further significant improvements to the aircraft, nor any new midsize design. The goal is to milk the 737 until people are only buying Airbus, then do likewise with 777 and 787.

[PAXboy]

Unfortunately, across the last 30+ years - this is what numerous corporates have done. This is not just in the USA as the UK has followed slavishly behind. I was working for an American Merchant Bank in the late 80s, on a visit to HQ I was told about Outsourcing. I did not like it and could not have imagined where it was going. It was certainly evidence of the top of the slope.

Making directors pay dependent on company profits must have seemed like a good idea at the time ... if only they had put a ten year hold on their bonus. Keep their funds in escrow until the results have played out completely.

[Big Pistons Forever]

This is what happened, infamously, with Martin Skreli, "pharma bro." He and his fellow commercial pirates found unique assets (orphaned drugs with a sole manufacturer) and engaged in as much rent-seeking as possible and nothing else.

Boeing's management is now rent-seeking with the 737, as it seems unlikely/impossible that there will be any further significant improvements to the aircraft, nor any new midsize design. The goal is to milk the 737 until people are only buying Airbus, then do likewise with 777 and 787.

Sadly I think you are right. If it is not there already Boeing must be close to the point of no return.

[Peter47]

Its what happens when a company becomes too large to fail. Do you think that the U.S. will let its only major civil airline manufacturer go down? I wonder if you could rule out Chapter 10 at some stage though? The paradox is that if you run a company solely for shareholders the shareholders (ot at least the long term one, there's the rub) the shareholders can end up loosing out.

[OldnGrounded]

Its what happens when a company becomes too large to fail. Do you think that the U.S. will let its only major civil airline manufacturer go down? I wonder if you could rule out Chapter 10 at some stage though? The paradox is that if you run a company solely for shareholders the shareholders (ot at least the long term one, there's the rub) the shareholders can end up loosing out.

No, the US probably won't let Boeing fail, but it's hard to see how it might coerce the kind of change that will be necessary to make BCA the sort of company it once was and ought to be again.

Permitting/requiring the FAA to engage in rigorous regulation and enforcement, and giving it the requisite resources would go a long way, but half the members of Congress represent a political tendency that hates and resists government regulation and is dedicated to limiting expenditures. And investors/shareholders who live for quarterly earnings would likely rebel violently if cash flow and/or growth were substantially limited.

BTW, Chapter 10 went away a long time ago. The elements that survive are incorporated into Chapter 11.

[safetypee]

Boeing have a credibility gap between them and their investors, them and the FAA, and Government.

This in part, appears to a result of a complacent belief in past excellence and world leadership, and being commercially too big to fail in a leading world economy. They forgot that safety risks can match any commercial risk, and that grandfather rights don't rule just because you wrote the rule.

Similar features are appearing amongst the other participants; the FAA's worldwide credibility, and in some aspects of government - political strategies. The 'me first', my company, my country, may fail to appreciate that these views can also result in me-first-over-the-cliff in a rapidly changing world.
( This issue is by no means unique to the US, but as yet not apparent, or significant in other countries / industries; a time delay or active mitigation? )

The specific 737 Max issues relate to a misjudgement in recognising and adapting to change, blinkered by past success - both Boeing and FAA. The belief that past standards would be sufficient for an old design in a new worldly context, except that change has been rapid and with significant impact due to technology and safety advances. And change continues.

Boeing and FAA have not kept pace with changes requiring higher standards. Perhaps hindered by lack of government support, but now all parties face the problem of how to catchup in a situation where the pace of change continues to accelerate. More importantly, and in parallel, the challenge to restore credibility.

A new aircraft type is not a solution, just a small contribution to wider national issues.
There may not be a unique solution; first understand the current situation and the context of change, not expecting to control safety via regulation or quality inspection, which are both after-the-fact reactive strategies.
An uncertain future requires a new way of thinking, proactive; but what that might be has yet to emerge - fit for purpose.
At least recognising worldly aviation trends and being prepared for further change, and not to forget that we will be surprised by the uncertain future; the new normal.

[Big Pistons Forever]

The damage done by Boeing is not confined to the US. Transport Canada accepted the MAX certification date provided by Boeing under a FAA - TC bilateral certification agreement. They felt they were badly burned and then very unimpressed when Boeing fought hard to kill a requirement that was to require an easy way to cancel an MCAS generated spurious stick shaker activation. The Canadian airline WestJet has ordered the MAX 10 but TC is not going to rubber stamp the certification of this variant. It is going to get a very close look by the TC aircraft certification folks, and I don't think they are going like what they find when they start digging.

[remi]

Its what happens when a company becomes too large to fail. Do you think that the U.S. will let its only major civil airline manufacturer go down? I wonder if you could rule out Chapter 10 at some stage though? The paradox is that if you run a company solely for shareholders the shareholders (ot at least the long term one, there's the rub) the shareholders can end up loosing out.
The problem though is that Boeing is being managed to fail, as profitably as possible.

There are no meaningful new aircraft in the queue. Even the 787-3 was axed. They're going with what they have until it won't sell profitably any longer.

Boeing tanked in 2019 and seems to be struggling to break even since. I don't see what they are going to do to grow again, especially given this most recent fiasco, and the lack of any new aircraft anywhere in the pipeline.

The US government can't fix a company that is unprepared to manufacture desirable products in the future.

I don't know what can be done but I think spinning off or selling their defense business is probably inevitable. The US government will probably encourage that as the company continues to bleed money and demonstrate ongoing quality issues and other signs of ill health.

[remi]

The damage done by Boeing is not confined to the US. Transport Canada accepted the MAX certification date provided by Boeing under a FAA - TC bilateral certification agreement. They felt they were badly burned and then very unimpressed when Boeing fought hard to kill a requirement that was to require an easy way to cancel an MCAS generated spurious stick shaker activation. The Canadian airline WestJet has ordered the MAX 10 but TC is not going to rubber stamp the certification of this variant. It is going to get a very close look by the TC aircraft certification folks, and I don't think they are going like what they find when they start digging.
If I had to guess right now I'd give the MAX 10 even odds of never being sold.

Does Boeing still have an EICAS waiver for the max 7 and 10? One wonders if FAA will revisit this given that the certification schedules have probably incurred at least another 6-12 month delay. The last waiver was supposed to expire in September 2023 and idk what has happened since.

[Less Hair]

The quality control issues must be solvable? More staff and time and less pressure. The strategy adjustment might be trickier but wouldn't their big investors be responsible for strategy and senior management?

[tdracer]

If I had to guess right now I'd give the MAX 10 even odds of never being sold.

Does Boeing still have an EICAS waiver for the max 7 and 10? One wonders if FAA will revisit this given that the certification schedules have probably incurred at least another 6-12 month delay. The last waiver was supposed to expire in September 2023 and idk what has happened since.
Congress extended the EICAS waiver for the MAX 10 (and I presume the 7 but I've not paid attention to that).
The 777X is essentially a new aircraft - very, very little is being carried over from the legacy 777 other than the fuselage diameter (even the fuselage structure is being changed to increase the interior diameter - should make the 10 across seating in steerage a little more tolerable). The 787-3 was dropped because it wasn't selling. As I've outlined before, 'shrinks' don't often work because you're still carrying a lot of extra weight and drag you don't need - so I don't hold that against them. The 777-300ER was a game changer, can the 777X pull off the same? Many of the delays in the 777X program have little to do with program itself - much of it was due to the diversion of resources to solve the MAX crisis as well as the MAX and 787 production issues - and don't forget COVID.

The real question is what will Boeing do when the 777X is certified and in-service. Back in the early 2000's, we joked that Boeing was turning into 'derivatives are us' - all Condit and Stonecypher were interested in was soaking the existing line for all it was worth - no investment in new products. It was a big breakthrough when the 787 was launched (I'd like to think that the Boeing engineer's strike in 2000 had something to do with that - upper management discovered to their dismay that engineering really was essential to the business). Unfortunately they used the MacDac model for the 787 development and that turned the program into a massive :mad:-up. Will they be willing to make the needed investment in a new program to replace the 737 with a proper new aircraft, or will it revert back to the 'derivatives are us' mode?

[Less Hair]

The newly built composite wing center at Everett seems to indicate they had plans to build a lot more big CFRP wings recently? Wasn't this a "new era" investment?

[remi]

Congress extended the EICAS waiver for the MAX 10 (and I presume the 7 but I've not paid attention to that).
The 777X is essentially a new aircraft - very, very little is being carried over from the legacy 777 other than the fuselage diameter (even the fuselage structure is being changed to increase the interior diameter - should make the 10 across seating in steerage a little more tolerable). The 787-3 was dropped because it wasn't selling. As I've outlined before, 'shrinks' don't often work because you're still carrying a lot of extra weight and drag you don't need - so I don't hold that against them. The 777-300ER was a game changer, can the 777X pull off the same? Many of the delays in the 777X program have little to do with program itself - much of it was due to the diversion of resources to solve the MAX crisis as well as the MAX and 787 production issues - and don't forget COVID.

The real question is what will Boeing do when the 777X is certified and in-service. Back in the early 2000's, we joked that Boeing was turning into 'derivatives are us' - all Condit and Stonecypher were interested in was soaking the existing line for all it was worth - no investment in new products. It was a big breakthrough when the 787 was launched (I'd like to think that the Boeing engineer's strike in 2000 had something to do with that - upper management discovered to their dismay that engineering really was essential to the business). Unfortunately they used the MacDac model for the 787 development and that turned the program into a massive :mad:-up. Will they be willing to make the needed investment in a new program to replace the 737 with a proper new aircraft, or will it revert back to the 'derivatives are us' mode?
I'm only aware of the first extension by Congress. Was there another one (or two)? I think at this point we would have to be on Extension #3.

I feel like wings could be stretched or un-stretched to a couple different sizes depending on the airframe, but certification might be onerous. Then again, given Boeing's reluctance to publicize changes that should cause more involved certification, maybe they could have different size wings without telling anyone.

The 737 is dead ended unless someone can figure out a way to mount the next engines, which will presumably have even larger fans, above the wings. Horizontal stab probably won't like that though. If it were possible to have longer gear and an actual gear bay with a door, that would have happened by the time of the NG. Basically I think the 737 is obsolescent and EoL soon. All hail Airbus and tiny overhead bins.

[Winemaker]

All this is and has been giving me stomach aches since the McDonnell Douglas fiasco. My father was a Boeing engineer back in the 60's; we moved to Huntsville for the space program and I eventually returned to Seattle for most of my grown life. To see what has transpired and to see all the warning signs that were ignored just pains me.

I was hired by Boeing at one point but turned down the job when my employer made me a better offer (I actually received a Christmas bonus check not having worked a day, which I returned; I still have a copy); this was a great company with great employees who cared about what they were doing. I hope but doubt they can recover - management needs to lose their golden parachutes and be fired but that ain't gonna happen.

The move of corporate to Chicago then to Washington says it all. They'd be wise IMHO to return to Everett, beg forgiveness and rediscover their roots. Too bad that won't happen.

[remi]

All this is and has been giving me stomach aches since the McDonnell Douglas fiasco. My father was a Boeing engineer back in the 60's; we moved to Huntsville for the space program and I eventually returned to Seattle for most of my grown life. To see what has transpired and to see all the warning signs that were ignored just pains me.

I was hired by Boeing at one point but turned down the job when my employer made me a better offer (I actually received a Christmas bonus check not having worked a day, which I returned; I still have a copy); this was a great company with great employees who cared about what they were doing. I hope but doubt they can recover - management needs to lose their golden parachutes and be fired but that ain't gonna happen.

The move of corporate to Chicago then to Washington says it all. They'd be wise IMHO to return to Everett, beg forgiveness and rediscover their roots. Too bad that won't happen.
The funny thing is that McDonnell Douglas was an "okay" defense contractor.

As a civil aviation designer, well, they designed a widebody with a variety of single points of very plausible failure, some of which did, and a successor with a tiny empennage that required the highest landing speed of any subsonic commercial aircraft along with no way to determine whether you landed or bounced. They never got the complete commercial aviation mindset. However, I think most people would agree that generally the DC-9 series was a good and highly reliable performer as long as you greased the jack screws and didn't chuck too much wing ice into the engines. DC-10 not so much. The KC-10 had a pretty good record, though, I think?

I haven't read much about the rationale for the merger in a couple decades. It seems like McAir and Boeing fused well on some programs e.g. Longbow and Chinook, possibly because manufacturing stayed put and so did most of the personnel. But Boeing's new(ish) military programs have been disastrous.

I don't understand why this particular hybrid cross had to be created though. The principle of hybrid vigor has been completely inverted into hybrid weakness. You thought you were getting the Borg "best of all worlds" and oh hey that went the other way.

Is there some reason that the 717 wasn't chosen for a lightweight fuselage redesign? At least it seems plausible that it could be re-engined with "big ol' fans." If there was a whole fuselage redesign it could also get an oval cabin. Idk, the possibility of that is probably utterly dead for 20 years though.

[pattern_is_full]

......I haven't read much about the rationale for the merger in a couple decades. It seems like McAir and Boeing fused well on some programs e.g. Longbow and Chinook, possibly because manufacturing stayed put and so did most of the personnel. But Boeing's new(ish) military programs have been disastrous......

I don't understand why this particular hybrid cross had to be created though. The principle of hybrid vigor has been completely inverted into hybrid weakness. You thought you were getting the Borg "best of all worlds" and oh hey that went the other way.

I always thought it was "The Last Supper"......

Short version, if the link can't be read: Clinton's Defense Dept. invited the heads of the aerospace defense contractors to a dinner in 1993, where it was strongly suggested that the end of the Cold War ("Peace Dividend") would require a leaner industry (and fewer CEO salaries). Resulting rapidly in the combinations of Northrop & Grumman, Boeing & Rockwell (and then MD), and Lockheed & Martin.

Combined with the fact that the B/MD merger was partly a stock swap - leaving McDonnell's Stonecipher and John McDonnell as the largest shareholders in the combine, even though technically Boeing was buying McDonnell. MD's bean-counters outplayed Boeing's engineers - not for the last time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1997/07/04/how-a-dinner-led-to-a-feeding-frenzy/13961ba2-5908-4992-8335-c3c087cdebc6/

[Less Hair]

Another important factor might have been the joint strike fighter competition. Boeing had great hopes that it could win this huge business with MD's help.

[WillowRun 6-3]

A few objections to factoring into the discussion on this thread the assertions in the 1997 article linked into the thread by pattern-etc. (I don't mean folks shouldn't read it and consider it - instead for the reasons to follow, it's much more static noise than signal.)

1. It is abundantly clear today that "Clinton's DoD" was extremely short-sighted, and even blind in many respects, in formulating a strategically forecast scenario of a so-called "peace dividend", first of all, and then advising consolidation. (I'm taking the assertions in the article, with regard to the meeting and what was said to the contractors, at face value - a huge leap of faith - only because by now the article isn't either a rumour or news story; further, whether the meeting and its advisories in fact caused the consolidation decisions . . . but hey, this isn't scholarly research, a/k/a pendamatic or something.)

Technological advances were going to happen, if for no other reason people (in one category) and cultures (in another) seek better lives and security, and more prosperity. And systems of government and economic systems as well were going to come into conflict. To think, let alone act upon, the notion that the apparent end of the Cold War would mean a massive downshift in the needs, the imperatives, of national security and national defense strategies globally, can best be called naive. (By globally, I mean only the spherically shaped object you see in a classroom "globe" - they're about the size of an ordinary basketball, and have absolutely nothing to do with "globalists", "globalization" or various half-insane conspiracy theories about how things Really Work. Global is an adjective which refers to things of a given nature being true, being the case, all over the world.)

Perhaps some will say "but Ike and his Farewell!!. . . M-I-C." Yes, there is a complex formed by the Armed Forces and the major defense production entities. This isn't a history pro-seminar so folks can derive for themselves what Ike meant; imo his MIC segment (and address overall) very obviously was not meant to be taken at literal face value, rather than as a prompt, or rubric, for thinking on a symbolic and hence strategic level. But in any event, what actually occurred was a rise of technological advance, and continued competition between systems of countries, polities, economies, regions, cultures. "And/or" between all of those; "both/and" between them too, as suits the reader. Point here is, the article proceeds from the weak and in fact wrong-headed buy-in to the so-called Peace Dividend.

2. How do we know it really is wrong-headed? Look at what happened in fact. Technological advance factually has occurred rapidly enough so that the punditry class is exhausting itself reciting the letters "A" and "I" endlessly and breathlessly, and of course we're racing the PRC and its ruling Party. Perhaps folks might have a look at the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States - its Final Report - and ask, looking back to the dinner meeting supposedly reported upon in the article, were even just a large measure of the strategic developments noted in the Report unforeseeable? IMO the strategic developments were almost entirely foreseeable. And look at what Peace Dividend thinking did to, oh I don't know, one of the most prominent if not the most prominent world-wide symbols of the Cold War era. That is, the obscenely grossly over-costly Space Launch System, compared to Falcon space launch vehicles from SpaceX. By the way, from a free markets, free people, free enterprise system business organization. Same analysis for information technology, telecommunications, space applications.

3. Northrup Grumman didn't get bought up, as anybody should know. In fact, per Defense News, the top five U.S. defense contractors for 2023 are LockheedMartin (63.3); RTX (39.6); NorthrupGrumman (32.4); Boeing (30.8); and Gen Dynamics (30.4) [figures are billiions of defense dollars].

4. Cynicism about corporate affairs, especially transactions, appears too easily to spread insidiously and lead to overbroad conclusions and analysis. There obviously were massive consolidations, and without getting into specific case studies, this SLF/attorney is not asserting that none of them were driven by greed. Still, Boeing is a separate case - too big, too sordid, too tragic. And that's why I've gone all polemic-pedantic here, because the linked article isn't really healthy for this discussion, I mean, imo.

[fdr]

I'm only aware of the first extension by Congress. Was there another one (or two)? I think at this point we would have to be on Extension #3.

I feel like wings could be stretched or un-stretched to a couple different sizes depending on the airframe, but certification might be onerous. Then again, given Boeing's reluctance to publicize changes that should cause more involved certification, maybe they could have different size wings without telling anyone.

The 737 is dead ended unless someone can figure out a way to mount the next engines, which will presumably have even larger fans, above the wings. Horizontal stab probably won't like that though. If it were possible to have longer gear and an actual gear bay with a door, that would have happened by the time of the NG. Basically I think the 737 is obsolescent and EoL soon. All hail Airbus and tiny overhead bins.

Not necessarily.

I've been flying a modified turbofan engine for a while, demonstrated it to the OEM, and the change in the performance of the fan only modification is:

For equal N1%, 44% more thrust at sea level, ISA+18C (550' PA) for 1% lower fuel flow, and 20C lower EGT(T5).

At cruise altitude, the effect is a bit better, I have demonstrated 53% higher Net thrust, for slightly lower fuel flows. The aircraft in this case is also around 5,000' higher than the normal MCT limit case for the relatively high speed that it was demo'd at. The outcome there was an instantaneous SAR that was 36% higher than the standard aircraft.

On this engine, we can in fact run it at higher total thrust, however, that is an oddity, the fan bearing and fan frame happen to also have been installed in higher rated engines, so we can bump up the thrust. As they are my engines, I run them instead at the normal rating. For a thrust level that is equivalent to rated thrust, with a target of 97.5% N1, the standard engine has a FF of 1730 and an EGT of 883C. The modified engine is videoed in a demo that we did for the OEM giving more thrust, at 88.5%, a FF of 1230 and an EGT of 793C. That EGT has a known (thanks, OEM) over-read of 26C, so the actual EGT at the DEEC is 767C. We use this video as it was also taken by the observer of the OEM. (It has an easter egg in it as well)

None of this should be possible, there are constraints that exist in turbo machinery that are taken to be absolute. I happened to find a way around some of those. :}

A similar effect is employed on the work on propellers that some of you may be aware that we have been doing for many years, trying to resolve the materials problem which is really really difficult. We resolved that, but having already shown in a test cell that a JT15D could get around 30% more thrust within the same fuel flows and EGT, and RPM limits, I've spent my time resolving the design and materials issues to do this trick and to demonstrate it. My company is starting a JV on a major T/prop transport prop, and we are also doing the turbo fan as an STC. The mod is a field modification to the engine "on the wing", it takes my engineers around 1-hour to mod an engine, bigger is easier (don't have to grease their shoulders to fit into tight places). This mod is not applicable to F-110's or 407's etc; we are only applicable to BPR of 2.3 and above, the bigger the better outcome so far which follows the math.

So, to the position that the B737 is the end of the road, I think that should be the case for other reasons, but the uprating of the existing engines could be done, without altering the fan diameter but it needs the fan bearing to be upgraded in most cases, and the fan frame to be re rated. For the STCs that we are working on at present, we are not intending to increase the TO thrust, we are just dropping the fuel flows commensurate with the RPM operating at about 10% lower than your standard values, and EGT follows obediently. A current discussion with the regulator is whether we are obliged to give a time limit for the TO and GA thrust cases, as they occur at lower RPM, fuel flow, EGT and stress than the normal MCT level. A potential benefit is we are able to have more than 30% greater climb thrust at all altitudes, and maintain TO thrust rating up to around 9000'PA at ISA +15C. The initial STCs are intended to be minimum operational change, and as the outcome is about 1/3rd better fuel reduction than the standard engines being produced today, we are aiming at making a difference early rather than gaining 100% optimisation. On the demonstrator, we are able to climb over 5000' higher than the planning case, and to operate up to MMO instead of LRC at those altitudes. Clarkson would be impressed.






https://youtu.be/PNt12O7wFNA

We have just arranged 2 CFM56 engines to run in a calibrated test cell in the next couple of months, and a loaner jet to do the aircraft integration STC. Some are much easier than others... We are completely privately funded at present, we are prepared to do specific types as JVs with some parties, but not so many.

For the airlines, they don't have to take advantage of an STC that will reduce their fuel burns by around 1/3rd, but they may need to assess how their competitiveness goes with their neighbours. For the first few STCs, airlines are welcome as JV partners, they can make some cash flow from their competitors, that seems fair.

What will the CFM56, a 6 BPR engine achieve? It is an extension from what we have already tested, but what the mod achieves is shown below, and that suggests that it will give a better outcome than we achieve at a BPR of 2.7.

In every case we have run, the fan vibration reduces, steady strains naturally reduce, we are running at lower N1 and that also reduces N2, (fuel, EGT etc).

For info, you can PM me, or you can follow the YouTube site.

Gross thust total, Gross fan, Gross Core, and Net changes...

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/2000x1093/screenshot_2024_01_25_at_10_27_43_am_6fc08dcf14228369fdb701e 0b94615d9db229db9.png







What happens to the engine...
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1832x1162/screenshot_2024_01_25_at_10_44_19_am_ffc2d411a798c5dfcd22549 a01fc4700947c3dde.png










CFM estimates
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1794x1102/cfm56_3_analysis_d35ba551f79c8c91750920337dc8905697d52e15.pn g








TFE731 actual outcomes
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1692x1108/test_case_to_fdccc1386d541230cfdce88423be802802aa7be0.png

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1612x1118/test_fl400_cruise_spd_c60b191808b2954cdf72c830bb0fe630f773dc a5.png


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1972x1064/to_thrust_balance_10ac80332d7498e7980e703706ee99ca8cc32dea.p ng

[framer]

Thanks fdr. I’m excited to follow your progress on the YouTube channel. Amazing.

[twochai]

Amen!

[WillowRun 6-3]

Multiple news outlets reporting that Boeing has withdrawn its request for an exemption for the 737 MAX 7 relating to engine anti-icing system limitations.

[GlobalNav]

Multiple news outlets reporting that Boeing has withdrawn its request for an exemption for the 737 MAX 7 relating to engine anti-icing system limitations.
AvWeek has an informative article on the issue.
If I was FAA, I’d deny the request. Too many exemptions. Gaming the system.

[India Four Two]

Here's the background from Flight Global:

https://www.flightglobal.com/airframers/anti-ice-issue-prompts-boeing-to-seek-certification-exemptions-for-737-max-7/156098.article

You need to sign up, but it's free.

[remi]

The AWST article, free to read for a few more days:
https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/aircraft-propulsion/boeing-pulls-737-7-exemption-request-further-delaying

Boeing is withdrawing its request for a time-limited exemption (TLE) covering the current engine inlet de-icing system that, if granted, would have allowed the 737-7 to be certified with a known noncompliance under current regulatory standards. The decision likely pushes FAA certification of the smallest MAX variant into at least 2025.

more...

Boeing is expected to reveal more details about the 737-7 and its new certification timeline during its Jan. 31 annual earnings presentation for 2023. In November 2023, Boeing had asked the FAA for another 18 months to conclude development and certification of a new EAI system that complies with current standards. Before the latest decisions, certification of the -7 was expected for the beginning of 2024. If Boeing moves at its own expected speed, the aircraft can now be certified in the middle of 2025 at the earliest

In addition, EICAS is still waiting in the wings.

Then there's this. If MAX 10 is certificated in 2026, is 2029 really an appropriate time frame for these safety features?

https://airinsight.com/boeing-max-7-and-10-certification-deadline-gets-a-waiver/

Safety enhancements

While the waiver gives Boeing and the FAA more time to certify the two MAX models without the time pressure and need to include the engine indicating and crew alerting system (EICAS), the airframer still has some modifications to do on all MAX models. That’s because Congress included a condition that was set out in an amendment by Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell. Her November amendment calls for the retrofit to all MAX types of two systems to enhance systems no later than three years after the MAX 10 is certified.

The Omnibus Bill states on page 1926: “Beginning on the date that is 3 years after the date on which the Administrator issues a type certificate for the Boeing 737-10, no person may operate a Boeing 737 MAX aircraft unless (A) the type design for the aircraft includes safety enhancements approved by the Administrator; and (B) the aircraft was ‘‘(i) produced in conformance with such type design; or ‘‘(ii) altered in accordance with such 22 type design.” The two systems required under the Cantwell amendment include “(i) a synthetic enhanced angle-of-attack system; and ‘‘(ii) means to shut off stall warning and overspeed alerts.” The former system has been made compulsory on the MAX 10 by the European regulatory agency EASA in its conditions for the re-certification of the MAX set out in 2020. The stall warning and overspeed alert system is also on the MAX 10.

But things will be okay in the C-suite if 2023 was any indication:

Nevertheless, Calhoun did all right. He received $22.5 million in total compensation last year, 154 times the $145,000 salary of the median Boeing employee. In Friday’s filing, despite the necessity of that $7 million cut, the board expressed continued confidence in Calhoun’s leadership. Last month, it granted him shares — not contingent on company performance and worth $15 million at today’s price — that will vest in installments over the next three years.

[SRMman]

And a very pertinent comment to the AWST article:

”PALADIN
Tue, 01/30/2024 - 14:00
You absolutely nailed it Jens. It looks like it's up to the share holders to fix this. The big lesson for the nation is that the company that is too big to fail could take down hundreds of suppliers with it. Europe has spread risk world wide which makes Airbus semi immune to individual failures. U.S. government consolidation actions and lack of domestic competition helped create this blind Cyclops. Replacing accountants at the top, with engineers and purging the DEI culture, replaced with competency, are the only rational steps forward.”

[WillowRun 6-3]

I realize it's old news. But reading again that specific avionics or subsystem components were expressly iterated in Congressional legislation . . . Now, because of what has happened with the MAX variant - I mean the excursion taken by part of the fuselage separate from the rest of the aircraft. - as well as additional manufacturing problems that have been revealed (fastener holes, shims, for instance), I have a question.

Are there previous instances of Congress writing into law that certification cannot be granted unless specifically iterated avionics or subsystem components have been included? If so, what were they, and when?

[remi]

I realize it's old news. But reading again that specific avionics or subsystem components were expressly iterated in Congressional legislation . . . Now, because of what has happened with the MAX variant - I mean the excursion taken by part of the fuselage separate from the rest of the aircraft. - as well as additional manufacturing problems that have been revealed (fastener holes, shims, for instance), I have a question.

Are there previous instances of Congress writing into law that certification cannot be granted unless specifically iterated avionics or subsystem components have been included? If so, what were they, and when?
I think you have the sense reversed here. A change in law was required to give Boeing the waiver(s).

I'm sure that over the years countless such changes for specific regularly situations have been made. Low profile of course.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Boeing was the company that designed the and built the first 777 in about 4 years. Maybe it is time to say if you can build an entirely new wide body intercontinental airliner in 4 years it shouldn’t take the same amount of time to fix 737 systems that are not compliant with modern safety standards.

I think it is time to say enough. Boeing get your Shyte together. You have 2 years to get every new or in service MAX up to standard or they will be grounded. Maybe it will incentivize Boeing to invest in engineers instead of accountants and lobbyists.

[WillowRun 6-3]

I think you have the sense reversed here. A change in law was required to give Boeing the waiver(s).

I'm sure that over the years countless such changes for specific regularly situations have been made. Low profile of course.
No, I'm quite aware that the legislation allowed the waiver (and that the legislation resulted as part of Congressional activity in the aftermath of the two crashes).

What I asked is whether any other specific items of avionics or subsystems have been identified in legislation. If the instances are so many as to warrant referring to them as "countless", let's see some examples.

The closest comparative situation I could cite would be the "Special Conditions" included in the certification of the 787, with regard (for example) to the lithium-ion batteries. But of course those Special Conditions were authorized by the FAR (afaik) and in any event not specifically introduced to the certification process by Congressional legislation identifying them by name.

[tdracer]

Boeing was the company that designed the and built the first 777 in about 4 years. Maybe it is time to say if you can build an entirely new wide body intercontinental airliner in 4 years it shouldn’t take the same amount of time to fix 737 systems that are not compliant with modern safety standards.


That's not quite true. The 777 was certified 4 years after the program was launched. But work on what would become the 777 started years before that - with major design efforts being made while the 747-400 was still in development.

It takes time to get it right - I'd far rather see Boeing take a rational (slower) approach and get it right. Rushing something just to get it certified is what gave us MCAS...

[MechEngr]

I doubt that any additional time would have uncovered MCAS until an AoA sensor got the vane clipped off. More telling was that the subcontractor that was building the sensors which Boeing and Lion Air used had not been using a sufficient QA/QC process to ensure that miscalibration could never occur, added on the oddity that there was no post-installation confirmation step required of the maintainers to ensure the calibration on the plane was correct - a quality escape of itself. I never heard if the FAA shut down that company for a full investigation of all their work and procedures as they should have done.

That was the early warning the FAA should have taken, that subcontractors and repair work weren't properly managed.

[tdracer]

I doubt that any additional time would have uncovered MCAS until an AoA sensor got the vane clipped off.

A longer, more thorough review and vetting of the design may have pointed out the flaw in using a single sensor. The problem with MCAS was that in the rush to get things certified, no one considered the impact of a cascade of warnings and faults associated with a bad AoA sensor - overwhelming the flight crew and resulting in them failing to appreciate what was happening with the stab trim.

[Big Pistons Forever]

That's not quite true. The 777 was certified 4 years after the program was launched. But work on what would become the 777 started years before that - with major design efforts being made while the 747-400 was still in development.

It takes time to get it right - I'd far rather see Boeing take a rational (slower) approach and get it right. Rushing something just to get it certified is what gave us MCAS...


I hear what you are saying but ultimately it is Boeing’s choice as to how much resources they want to assign to fix the identified system problems. The resources assigned will largely drive the timeline. The problem is the fairly massive upfront cost of an all hands on deck, let’s make this right ! approach would impair short term profitability which impact C suite bonuses, so we know that will never happen.

I know I am massively naive but wouldn’t it be nice if Boeing for once under promised and over delivered.

[compressor stall]

What’s the motivation for the dogged continuance of the 737?

Southwest’s reported demands for no extra simulator sessions are part of the story.

What of the grandfathered standards of the 70’s does the design still exploit? Do the smaller doors = more passenger seating for example?

Highly likely a new design today will lose that edge, even when you put aside the design and testing costs.

[MechEngr]

A longer, more thorough review and vetting of the design may have pointed out the flaw in using a single sensor. The problem with MCAS was that in the rush to get things certified, no one considered the impact of a cascade of warnings and faults associated with a bad AoA sensor - overwhelming the flight crew and resulting in them failing to appreciate what was happening with the stab trim.
They had 30+ years to understand the effect of a false stall warning. No one inside or outside the company spotted that problem. No one considered that no one had made a useful definition of "runaway trim" in those same 30+ years, even though the switches provided to deal with it were there the entire time. 100 years would not have been enough to notice that pilots might not recognize runaway trim and would not realize what a false stall warning was like. We know that because Airbus was unable to communicate a similar problem with the pilots of AF447.

The problem wasn't in using a single sensor. The problem was that the system reporting that single sensor was unable to validate it. Had the SMYD system been properly designed the AoA sensor would have been invalidated, causing the back-up sensor to be used and no false stall warning issued. The Lion Air miscalibration was also not identified as a potential problem - if it had been then an on-aircraft verification would be required. The Ethiopian sudden move to 70 degrees should have seen that sensor taken out of the loop; a better design would have had a vane stop at 60 degrees AoA so that 70 would have indicated out-of-range. Again, 30+ years and no one noticed.
---
I find odd the calls for a massive new redesign effort for an entirely new airframe with hundreds of thousands to millions of fundamental decisions to be made by the same group that is having trouble with the thousands of new decisions they need to make about an existing product.

In IBM, when IBM meant something, they used to have a group called the Black Team. This was a core of independent reviewers with significant experience that was given the freedom to go where they wanted and investigate what they wanted. A bit like the Spanish Inquisition, but less physical torture. They questioned fundamental assumptions, examined processes, and ran roughshod over the unprepared. In the initial rise of Microsoft, Bill Gates performed that function with the OS and the applications teams. It requires people who are smart enough to do the entire design job, but simply don't have the hours to do so. The clear mission isn't to tear people to bits, but to make the product as perfect as possible. Passing an audit was seen as a positive accomplishment.

This process made IBM an industrial giant and a feared competitor. It took the US Government to cripple them enough to allow Microsoft to take their place.

[remi]

I doubt that any additional time would have uncovered MCAS until an AoA sensor got the vane clipped off. More telling was that the subcontractor that was building the sensors which Boeing and Lion Air used had not been using a sufficient QA/QC process to ensure that miscalibration could never occur, added on the oddity that there was no post-installation confirmation step required of the maintainers to ensure the calibration on the plane was correct - a quality escape of itself. I never heard if the FAA shut down that company for a full investigation of all their work and procedures as they should have done.

That was the early warning the FAA should have taken, that subcontractors and repair work weren't properly managed.
Anyone who knew that one AoA sensor was a single point of failure for a system with full trim authority, and had the ability to authorize a design change for at least single redundancy, should have been tried for manslaughter. Period. The design plainly violates every aviation safety practice and norm in existence for decades.

The details of how MCAS crashed two aircraft are completely unimportant relative to the deliberately and literally fatally flawed design.

[remi]

They had 30+ years to understand the effect of a false stall warning. No one inside or outside the company spotted that problem. No one considered that no one had made a useful definition of "runaway trim" in those same 30+ years, even though the switches provided to deal with it were there the entire time. 100 years would not have been enough to notice that pilots might not recognize runaway trim and would not realize what a false stall warning was like. We know that because Airbus was unable to communicate a similar problem with the pilots of AF447.

The pilots of AF 447 had minutes, and the tendency of high altitude flights to get close to the "coffin corner" of stall vs buffet should be known to any competent commercial pilot. I can understand that the situation might have been confusing to the pilots, but that amount of confusion is incompetence and/or ineffective training. Meanwhile, the effect of MCAS down trim was so strong that after 10 or so seconds it was impossible to recover with the trim wheels (once auto trim was disabled) due to increased airspeed and resulting increased control surface forces.

Recognition of high altitude stall, even with some misleading instrument indications (which in this case were temporary), is pretty basic. Meanwhile, MCAS was designed to be a lethal trap for unlucky pilots.

One thing I wonder, though, is whether there is a prominent visual indication of conflicting pilot control inputs on Airbus aircraft. That potentially could have helped with AF 447.


In IBM, when IBM meant something, they used to have a group called the Black Team. This was a core of independent reviewers with significant experience that was given the freedom to go where they wanted and investigate what they wanted. A bit like the Spanish Inquisition, but less physical torture. They questioned fundamental assumptions, examined processes, and ran roughshod over the unprepared. In the initial rise of Microsoft, Bill Gates performed that function with the OS and the applications teams. It requires people who are smart enough to do the entire design job, but simply don't have the hours to do so. The clear mission isn't to tear people to bits, but to make the product as perfect as possible. Passing an audit was seen as a positive accomplishment.


Speaking of the coffin corner, that's where Boeing has put itself. It can't afford proper quality practices any longer, and it can't build deliverable aircraft without them. Commercial aviation isn't like military where if you're 10 years late and 3x over budget you're doing okay. At worst your program gets canceled and you're still in the defense business bidding on more future failures.

[GlobalNav]

A longer, more thorough review and vetting of the design may have pointed out the flaw in using a single sensor. The problem with MCAS was that in the rush to get things certified, no one considered the impact of a cascade of warnings and faults associated with a bad AoA sensor - overwhelming the flight crew and resulting in them failing to appreciate what was happening with the stab trim.

I also suspect that the safety assessment did not keep up with incremental changes of MCAS design and control authority. Coupled with the intent to keep changes under the radar and out of the required pilot training.

[safetypee]

Global, et al. From EASA EPAS Vol III 2024 edition.


Higher-risk safety issues in the EU aviation system:

Insufficient consideration of flight crew human factors in Functional Hazard Assessments
Insufficient consideration of flight crew human factors in the continued airworthiness process of the type design
Lack of focus on risk-based decision making in complex systems
Outdated certification bases established for major changes to type certificates

[tdracer]

I hear what you are saying but ultimately it is Boeing’s choice as to how much resources they want to assign to fix the identified system problems. The resources assigned will largely drive the timeline. The problem is the fairly massive upfront cost of an all hands on deck, let’s make this right ! approach would impair short term profitability which impact C suite bonuses, so we know that will never happen.

It's far from that simple. While a shortage of resources will delay a program, adding resources is far from an assurance that you can do it faster. Boeing applied a massive amount of resources to the 787 program, yet the program was beset by massive delays. Instead, it fed the creation of unproductive processes and overhead that hurt far more than they helped (something that became painfully apparent when they applied those same processes and overhead to the 767-2C/KC-46 program). I was on the 747-8 program at the time, and we were seriously starved of resources compared to 787 - as a result we figured out how to do things more efficiently with less people - and despite the program being launched years later, we actually certified and delivered before the first 787.
The comparison often made is that it takes ~9 months for a woman to produce a baby - and you're not going to quicken that by adding more women (i.e. resources) - it'll still take ~9 months with 9 women. It simply takes time to do things right.

[remi]

It's far from that simple. While a shortage of resources will delay a program, adding resources is far from an assurance that you can do it faster. Boeing applied a massive amount of resources to the 787 program, yet the program was beset by massive delays. Instead, it fed the creation of unproductive processes and overhead that hurt far more than they helped (something that became painfully apparent when they applied those same processes and overhead to the 767-2C/KC-46 program). I was on the 747-8 program at the time, and we were seriously starved of resources compared to 787 - as a result we figured out how to do things more efficiently with less people - and despite the program being launched years later, we actually certified and delivered before the first 787.
The comparison often made is that it takes ~9 months for a woman to produce a baby - and you're not going to quicken that by adding more women (i.e. resources) - it'll still take ~9 months with 9 women. It simply takes time to do things right.
"The Mythical Man-Month" -- Fred Brooks

https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2018-481/readings/mythical-man-month.pdf

This is a software engineering book, but is relevant to many engineering endeavors. Here for example:

The Man-Month
The second fallacious thought mode is expressed in the very unit
of effort used in estimating and scheduling: the man-month. Cost
does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the
number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit
for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It
implies that men and months are interchangeable.
Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when
a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communica-
tion among them (Fig. 2.1). This is true of reaping wheat or picking
cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

[Big Pistons Forever]

It's far from that simple. While a shortage of resources will delay a program, adding resources is far from an assurance that you can do it faster. Boeing applied a massive amount of resources to the 787 program, yet the program was beset by massive delays. Instead, it fed the creation of unproductive processes and overhead that hurt far more than they helped (something that became painfully apparent when they applied those same processes and overhead to the 767-2C/KC-46 program). I was on the 747-8 program at the time, and we were seriously starved of resources compared to 787 - as a result we figured out how to do things more efficiently with less people - and despite the program being launched years later, we actually certified and delivered before the first 787.
The comparison often made is that it takes ~9 months for a woman to produce a baby - and you're not going to quicken that by adding more women (i.e. resources) - it'll still take ~9 months with 9 women. It simply takes time to do things right.

I would argue that the resources initially assigned to the 787 were woefully inadequate. The distributed production process was selected because it allowed Boeing to get ride of many (most) of those pesky expensive engineers that were always pushing back. After it utterly failed Boeing was forced to spend huge amounts trying to un-Fu*k the program.
This is classic when accountants are running companies. There is never time or money to do the job right, but they always seem to find the time and money to do the job over (badly).

For the last 20 years Boeing always chose the cheapest, nastiest, quickest way to fix issues only after they were backed into a corner.

I get I am tilting at a windmill, but wouldn’t it be nice if Boeing decided it was going to be different going forward, and they were demonstrably going to put their money where their mouth is,

[tdracer]

I would argue that the resources initially assigned to the 787 were woefully inadequate. The distributed production process was selected because it allowed Boeing to get ride of many (most) of those pesky expensive engineers that were always pushing back. After it utterly failed Boeing was forced to spend huge amounts trying to un-Fu*k the program.
This is classic when accountants are running companies. There is never time or money to do the job right, but they always seem to find the time and money to do the job over (badly).

I was there - production was distributed, but not much of the engineering. The 787 engineering staff was initially larger than the 777 (and grew from there). The problem wasn't the number of engineers on the program, the problem was how they were used.
The 787 Propulsion group - for two engines - was nearly twice the size of what we had during the 777 development, and that was for three engine types. A huge part of the problem was the 787 insistence to do everything 'fresh' - repeatedly re-inventing the wheel in the process while ignoring five decades of 'lessons learned' on previous programs (and in the process repeating most of the mistakes that had been made on previous programs).

[Big Pistons Forever]

tdracer.

You were there and I was not so I defer to your knowledge. Given what you know how does Boeing un-fu*k the MAX program ?

[tdracer]

tdracer.

You were there and I was not so I defer to your knowledge. Given what you know how does Boeing un-fu*k the MAX program ?
Fire the entire executive board 'for cause' due to malfeasance - no compensation or 'golden parachutes'. Bring in new people who know the commercial aircraft business. Let it be known that any future lapses of due process will result in more heads rolling.
Back in the early 70's, people who survived told me that the company was technically bankrupt, but the banks knew that the people running Boeing lived the business and knew how to build airplanes - the bankers didn't. So the let them work it out. Ten years later we had the highly successful 757/767 programs.
The people currently in charge know banking, not how to build aircraft. That needs to change.

[MechEngr]

Present board, names removed, just where they are from:
Chairman and CEO, Amgen Inc.
President and CEO, The Boeing Company
Former U.S. Chairman and CEO, KPMG
Chairman and CEO, Carrier Global Corporation
Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy Corporation
Former United Airlines Pilot; Former Inspector General, U.S. Air Force
Former Executive Vice President and CFO, United Technologies Corporation
Former President and CEO, GE Aviation; Former Vice Chair, General Electric Company
Chair of the Board; Former Chairman and CEO, Continental Airlines, Inc.
Former CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
31st Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy; Former Director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, U.S. Navy
Chairman and CEO, SUEZ SA
Former Chairman, President and CEO, Aetna Inc.

For many of these I feel particularly disappointed at their allowing the failure with Spirit production and Boeing acceptance to last more than even a few months.

I would have to look more, but the Qualcomm guy should understand getting production done correctly. Things have to be right on the nanometer scale to even function and flawed components detected and rejected by rigorous testing before they get to end customers.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Fire the Board of Directors . . . alright, I'll take that as a serious argument.

A shareholders derivative lawsuit resulting in a new Board? A proxy fight launched on behalf of a slate of activist directors? I mean, it's obvious that the Board is the highest authority in the corporate entity - who is it, exactly, who would have authority legally to "fire the Board"?

There are perhaps components of (what in the 1960s, student radical political ideology referred to as) the "power structure" situated in holders of the corporate debt, lines of credit, and insurance. Get all these entities on the same page and led by the same principals? Unprecedented and unlikely to be accomplished.

The CEO is scheduled to be interviewed on CNBC's morning program today at 0900 ET (I realize this post won't age well on this point!). Guidance for 2025 and 2026 has been neither withdrawn nor confirmed. I hope the interviewer (whose regualar scope of coverage is aviation and cars) asks whether CEO sees the production issues on one hand, and the smash-up with certifications pending now, as two manifestations of the same issue. Don't hold your breath for massively insightful mea culpas, of course.

I'll go out on a limb here. Nothing about treating the crisis at Boeing and the decline of Boeing as if they were grist for Struggle Sessions during the Cultural Revolution would be in the national interest or beneficial to the aviation and aerospace sectors of the world economy, or the American economy, or do one iota of good. (Look them up if Struggle Sessions and the Cultural Revolution aren't familiar.) So where does the answer lurk?

Perhaps a proxy initiative to replace the Board. Of course, getting an Engineeering Excellence --and-- Banish the BeanCounters slate of Directors together, and waging the proxy fight, not easy, not even an easy choice to initiate. Got better ideas? - and this doesn't count stuff about 'let it die, break it up, too late to save the once great Boeing.'

[EDLB]

"who would have authority legally to "fire the Board"?"
Easy. The shareholders.
However that are usually institutional investors (Vanguard etc.) with no knowledge about building planes. The the next feedback loop will be filing bankrupt. I am sure that some tax dollars will be wasted to avoid this.

[Peter Fanelli]

You beat me to it.
In addition the Boeing Starliner space capsule is a mess. Years behind schedule. Paid for by the public purse.

Starliner is being built for NASA which is a government organization funded by taxpayer dollars.
So who else would you have pay for it? Or do you expect Boeing to pay for it and give it to the government?
Personally I'd rather see my tax dollars go to that than into the Ukraine war money skimming operation for funding politician's retirements.

[JohnDixson]

Re ME’s post 151: Is it interesting to contrast the recent Boeing Chief Executive background with that of Guillaume Faury at Airbus. Would the MCAS mess would have passed muster at Airbus?

[Maninthebar]

"who would have authority legally to "fire the Board"?"
Easy. The shareholders.
However that are usually institutional investors (Vanguard etc.) with no knowledge about building planes. The the next feedback loop will be filing bankrupt. I am sure that some tax dollars will be wasted to avoid this.

Firing the Board is the least likely course for shareholdrs. Even firing the CEO is HIGHLY unsusual.

Why?

To do so will almost certainly destroy shareholder value without ANY guarantee of solving the problem. A company has to be in major difficulties for this to even be contemplated, and major shareholders have to both act in concert AND have a replacement (or replacements) in place. Even a whiff of plannnig forsuch actons will tank share values.

Not going to happen.

[20driver]

" contrast the recent Boeing Chief Executive background with that of Guillaume Faury at Airbus."
Faury had quite the engineers resume. Notice is served time as a test flight engineer.
Reminds me of the quote attributed to Sirkorsky :
In those early days, the Chief Engineer was almost always the Chief Pilot as well. This had the automatic result of eliminating poor engineering very early in aviation."
Seems to apply to the CEO as well.
Hard to imagine anyone would pull the MCAS bait and switch on his watch.
Still Airbus is not without some serious clangers.

[SRMman]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68157266

Here we go.

[WHBM]

I don't get how the 737-MAX7 can be delayed because the nacelle is out of current certification parameters, and this has to be redesigned before certification as a new variant, whereas the 737-MAX10 is expected to be certified by the end of 2024, yet it apparently has the same nacelle. Where am I wrong ?

[grizzled]

A former Boeing senior manager and a former engineer at Boeing and at the FAA provide damning comments to the Los Angeles Times:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-30/boeing-max-9-flying-again-after-door-panel-blowout

[TehDehZeh]

I would have to look more, but the Qualcomm guy should understand getting production done correctly. Things have to be right on the nanometer scale to even function and flawed components detected and rejected by rigorous testing before they get to end customers.
You could make the opposite case easily: For him a subtle flaw in the production process reduces yield and hence money, so it is investigated by QC (while the line keeps running).
Boeing needs a yield of unity.

[MechEngr]

You could make the opposite case easily: For him a subtle flaw in the production process reduces yield and hence money, so it is investigated by QC (while the line keeps running).
Boeing needs a yield of unity.

Making anything at the nanometer scale without any flaws is impossible. So the case remains - be able to 100% detect all flaws and reject the parts that don't perform correctly. I'd say that catching missing hardware is far easier than finding a trace that is 1nm too narrow or was spoiled by a 2nm fleck of contamination. A single microprocessor chip currently made has more features than there are mechanical parts in a commercial airliner. They make millions of those chips at a cost of a few cents to a few dollars each. The current Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 has around 5.3 billion transistors.

Machine vision can easily detect missing hardware and can detect missing torque stripe that should be applied to correctly tightened and torque-inspected hardware. That is the sort of automation Qualcomm uses to verify their product. Similar techniques are used throughout the electronics industry.

[GlobalNav]

Re ME’s post 151: Is it interesting to contrast the recent Boeing Chief Executive background with that of Guillaume Faury at Airbus. Would the MCAS mess would have passed muster at Airbus?
To begin with, it wouldn’t have been needed.

[TehDehZeh]

I'd say that catching missing hardware is far easier than finding a trace that is 1nm too narrow or was spoiled by a 2nm fleck of contamination.
Not at all the point. The point is that Qualcomm can afford to discard a certain quantity of their production (regardless of whether they understand why the specific chip does not work to spec) and it only affects the bean counters, while for Boeing a single such event produces anything between a long thread in this forum and a lot of dead people.

[TehDehZeh]

Let me put it differently: Qualcomm doesn't need to check whether the four bolts are in place. If their plane crashes they take one of the other 4000 from the same wafer.

edit: Or maybe like this: The mission target of Qualcomm QC is the efficiency of the production process. The mission target of Boeing QC is (presumably) the airworthiness of every single airframe.

edit2: Mapped on to Boeing we would also need them to benchmark each plane that leaves the factory and then bin it into various performance levels, so when you buy the 737 base model you know that that particular airframe could have been the 737-XT-Ultra, but something rattles a bit too much, so they derated it.

[megan]

Fear not, the latest version is good to go.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/469x441/737_2cf818dbe5edee92145cb02ca0f6a21b6e2b3c06.png

[Winemaker]

Mentour Pilot has a very good analysis of the quality problems Boeing is facing and needs to solve. Worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b0eyrE7tXU

[remi]

To begin with, it wouldn’t have been needed.
Worse behaving/more confusing systems than MCAS have made their way into Airbus aircraft, and the phenomenon of pilots being completely confused by their aircraft's behavior is much more a characteristic of Airbus pilots.

There is a famous fatal Airbus incident with frozen AoA sensors involving an extraordinarily experienced and knowledgeable pilot. There is also a famous event involving glitched ADIRUs that miraculously did not result in a plane load of passengers in a smoking hole. There's AF447. There's AF296Q.

Disregarding pilot error, other human behavior, and weather, Boeing aircraft, at least until MCAS, have an accident history biased toward hardware failure. The Airbus bias is toward pilots losing situational awareness due to a lack of understanding of their aircraft automation and/or difficult to understand presentation of information.

[waito]

.
Disregarding pilot error, other human behavior, and weather, Boeing aircraft, at least until MCAS, have an accident history biased toward hardware failure. The Airbus bias is toward pilots losing situational awareness due to a lack of understanding of their aircraft automation and/or difficult to understand presentation of information.

This is my impression as well. It's just that Airbus improved since then, but Boeing"s trend seems to be the opposite way. This is the worrying part if true.

Are there statistics about the AD"s and their seriousness for the B737 and A320 family?

[tdracer]

This is my impression as well. It's just that Airbus improved since then, but Boeing"s trend seems to be the opposite way. This is the worrying part if true.

Are there statistics about the AD"s and their seriousness for the B737 and A320 family?
If someone was so inclined, the relevant AD's are all on the FAA website (I haven't been there for a while, but IIRC - being a government website - navigating to the appropriate page(s) is a bit tricky).
Seriousness is a different question - AD's get created for a whole variety of faults, some far more serious than others. At best, coming up with some sort of scale for 'seriousness' would be highly subjective.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Congressional inquiry, continuing.

Letter to FAA Admin. Whitaker listing specific inquiries. Issued and signed by both Chairs (Committee and Aviation Subcomm.) and both Ranking Members of House Transportation and Infrastructure.

Link to House Commitee webpage:
https://transportation.house.gov/components/redirect/r.aspx?ID=482927-71714618

[waito]

Congressional inquiry, continuing.

Letter to FAA Admin. Whitaker listing specific inquiries. Issued and signed by both Chairs (Committee and Aviation Subcomm.) and both Ranking Members of House Transportation and Infrastructure.

Link to House Commitee webpage:
https://transportation.house.gov/components/redirect/r.aspx?ID=482927-71714618

Oh, interesting to hear the response to these questions, The testimony will happen in a few days.
Many thanks W-R

[kap'n krunch]

Isn't GE where they got the bad culture from?

Winner winner chicken dinner. Harry Stonecipher, James McNerney, Dave Calhoun were all former GE CEO Jack Welch disciples.

[waito]

From a Washington Post article, according to the neighbor thread covering the Alaska Air incident:

“A lot of angst out there in the populace,” said Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial airline pilot and spokesperson for the flight tracking site FlightAware. She said the site is seeing an interest in people searching types of aircraft, and Max 9 planes in particular. Travel booking site Kayak said usage of its 737 Max filter on flight searches increased 15-fold after the Alaska Airlines incident.

[waito]

If someone was so inclined, the relevant AD's are all on the FAA website (I haven't been there for a while, but IIRC - being a government website - navigating to the appropriate page(s) is a bit tricky).
Seriousness is a different question - AD's get created for a whole variety of faults, some far more serious than others. At best, coming up with some sort of scale for 'seriousness' would be highly subjective.
Allright, took a look. Not too difficult to find AD's and EAD's, nice filter options.

Before I dive deeper: Will the count of results be lower for Airbus, because the main source for that would be EASA? Or will I find all of EASA's Directives reflected at FAA as well?

see my next post

[Peter47]

There is an interesting chat with Jon Ostrower in the latest FR24 Avtalk. (Starts at 22 minutes)

AvTalk Episode 253: Time traveling with Taylor Swift and turtles | Flightradar24 Blog (https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/avtalk-253/?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sendgrid.com)

[Ancient Mariner]

On a side note. I am fully aware of the difference between building ships and aircrafts.
Ships are one offs or built in small series and can take years to complete, aircrafts are massproduced on "conveoyr belts" and finished in days, weeks, months?
Any shipowner that I have worked for, when ordereing a new ship would early on appoint an Inspector who would be technically responsible for that ship during the whole building process, and after, but shore based.
As soon as building starts, the Inspector, and depending on type of ship, the Captain, Chief Officer/Engineer and the Electrician would be on-site following the whole process.
The Classification Society would also have specialists within each field present to ensure that all their Rules are followed.
Other regulators would also do checks during the process, particularly on SLF carriers.
After sea trials, you accepted the ship as built, certain guarantees still in force.
Impossible in the Aviation industri, but that's how we did it.
Per

[waito]

Allright, took a look. Not too difficult to find AD's and EAD's, nice filter options.

Before I dive deeper: Will the count of results be lower for Airbus, because the main source for that would be EASA? Or will I find all of EASA's Directives reflected at FAA as well?

I also visited EASA website, very difficult there to dive for EAD's. Here's the results of both administrations:

FAA Filter Criteria for EAD's:
Status= Current, Pending, Historical
Make=The Boeing Company
Model: any from -600 on, excluding the 700C

EASA Filter Criteria for Safety Publications:
type=EAD
make=Airbus S.A.S
Models: any selectable A320 family, from A318-111 up to A321-272NX

EAD for 737-600 ... -9
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1220x690/eads_boeing_from_faa_1_8ecadeec8f17c203310eab907a0159eccd62b 7b1.jpg
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1234x664/eads_boeing_from_faa_2_df5ad773a1fe6f0dbb36be311ff03f5314d70 a16.jpg
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1229x150/eads_boeing_from_faa_3_5c846a862d4920485c1de05e9ce8be9bf2518 202.jpg



EAD for A318...321:

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1172x691/eads_airbus_from_easa_770ca096e676d0f27fc1c5cc8d70e17d668d84 ab.jpg

Note, there could be a cut in the EASA list in that there's no document before 2005, while FAA lists 7 more EAD's before 2005.
That gives us 10 Boeing EAD and 8 Airbus EAD. since 2005.

(Edit:
lines with similar heights to give comparable optical proportions between the two tables
added Airbus EAD headlines from PDF document where missing)

[T28B]

For those of you raising the Qualcomm comparison and examining it: which products do they produce that have to do with airworthiness?
In other words, they as a company surely want a robust Quality effort, but when their products do not perform, what is the consequence?
A flaming wreck, or something else? With Honda or BMW, it's a car on the side of the road that won't run.
(It's been interesting watching the discussion, thank you all for your contributions).

[remi]

For those of you raising the Qualcomm comparison and examining it: which products do they produce that have to do with airworthiness?
In other words, they as a company surely want a robust Quality effort, but when their products do not perform, what is the consequence?
A flaming wreck, or something else? With Honda or BMW, it's a car on the side of the road that won't run.
(It's been interesting watching the discussion, thank you all for your contributions).
With a VW bus, it's a fire by the side of the freeway. They're all burned now though.

A friend of mine was riding his Ducati in fast rush hour traffic when the electrical system and thus the entire bike went dead. He wound up straddling the k-rail until a cop ran a traffic break.

[Blackfriar]

Regarding Bombardier and its asset sales including the C-Series (per tdracer), this SLF/atty called Montreal home during those events. The sense of loss among the aerospace commentators and cognescenti in the city and QC generally was nearly tangible. I can only guess wildly at how traumatic reaction to a similar sort of failure would be if a company in the U.S. tried to enter this market, but failed.

Before betting on any of the other aerospace manufacturers succeeding if they tried this market on the premise that BCA will fail (or as some here contend "has already failed"), would it not be the case that sufficiently wise Strategy decisions would be needed for substantial capital investment to materialize? Perhaps the insistent push toward net-zero would open avenues for successful new strategies, but isn't there still much skepticism in the engineering communities of relevance about the feasibility of the long-term aspirational goal set by the ICAO Assembly - especially regarding SAF at realistic quantities and the other new propulsion systems bandied about as if their technology will be available in just a few years? Boeing's difficulties have increasingly become traumatic but they've been starkly visible for all to see for . . . pick your example of decline of engineering excellence and fill in the blank. If a new Strategy was readily available, there has been plenty of time for it to have been recognized and shopped for investment.

Second, People. There are workforce components in various locales with the necessary skills, recency or currency with assembly techniques and all the other disciplines of relevance, just waiting to be hired by some new entrant? Maybe there are but the generalized slide of the American workforce - accelerated by the beancounters' devotion to ROI and share price - makes this poster skeptical.

Third, issues of Process (getting corporate leadership and Boards to understand the strategy and then commiting to the initiative) would be, if not herculean, still very heavy lifting. Fourth, what about Resources? - do any of the supposed willing potential new entrants have capital and debt structures sufficient to fund this sort of massive new aircraft (and/or powerplant) initiative? I mean, and not to pick on that bird, but don't Messrs. Pratt and Whitney have some other place where they're devoting lots of attention (the engine inspections etc.)?

Finally in my set of five objections to seeing a new entrant as of course, obviously realistic and feasible, is Integrity. What got BCA into its sorry state? Do you recall the unspeakably shallow, hollow look worn by the then-CEO as he testified on Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the MAX accidents? Well, is it clear beyond doubt or question that any of the other companies are not in the throes of the beancounters too?

I'm not advocating against any enterprise and I'd be happy to see information showing my doubts and negative assertions proved incorrect.

(Credit for the rubric, Strategy, People, Process, Resources, and Integrity to a true gentleman who shall remain nameless here, except to say his career featured being PASC at least three times. (Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed)

Could the aircraft design and build market move into the mid 21st Century with a startup (or startup subsidiary of a bigCo.) designing a new airliner with AI/Machine Learning/Digital twinning and outsourcing manufacture of the airframe to an existing company like Spirit, with bought-in engines, undercarriage etc.? A kind of Virtual Boeing?
Maybe not because because the volume market needs to be there, but with a Boeing Commercial/Chapter11/Financial haircut type company maybe the next 100-200 seat could be something different. Something radical needs to happen at Boeing for certain.
The problem is that there is so much uncertainty in the future at the moment. Technology is advancing rapidly, the old Empires are declining (US/EU) and the rest of the world is standing on its own feet and will probably vote with their money and a new competitor will arise in China. We face this uncertainty like many did in the 1960s - technology, British and European Empires declining and a shift in economics. Alvin Toffler described this as "Future Shock" - the uncertainty of the future - yet we all survived. Maybe some of the CEOs should read the book.

[Blackfriar]

To begin with, it wouldn’t have been needed.
Even a non-engineer idiot like me has heard of triple redundancy so why did Boeing not install 3 AoA detectors and the computer discard the info from the odd-one out? Can they really have been that penny pinching? Why not leave some other safety critical stuff out as well? It says the senior management didn't care.

[Thrust Augmentation]

With Honda or BMW, it's a car on the side of the road that won't run.

Or a ball of fire, or careering out of control towards another vehicle / pedestrians / cliff.

[Running On Empty]

“Red the view may be, but the trim switch under the left thumb of the guy in the left seat always functioned. I suppose the switch in the right seat is also under the left thumb. The first crew and second captain managed with zero difficulty; some roller-coaster, but not deadly.

On top of that every flight had far more than seconds (1-5) to deal with the trim loads. I saw red when "The pilots followed the emergency AD exactly" was not in the FDR, at all.”

Unbelievable ignorance from an armchair expert. You have no idea how the startle factor in such a precarious situation affects the individual. But sure, defend the indefensible from your static desk.

[Uplinker]

Even a non-engineer idiot like me has heard of triple redundancy so why did Boeing not install 3 AoA detectors and the computer discard the info from the odd-one out? Can they really have been that penny pinching?.........


Yes they were. They had decided to make money instead of aircraft. They kept adding onto a very very old design, thinking they would get away with it. They didn't - and they have blood on their hands because of their extremely poor decisions.

[Uplinker]

“Red the view may be, but the trim switch under the left thumb of the guy in the left seat always functioned. I suppose the switch in the right seat is also under the left thumb. The first crew and second captain managed with zero difficulty; some roller-coaster, but not deadly.

Right pitch trim switch is under the right thumb - the yokes are mirror layouts. Think more inboard / outboard.

[remi]

Even a non-engineer idiot like me has heard of triple redundancy so why did Boeing not install 3 AoA detectors and the computer discard the info from the odd-one out? Can they really have been that penny pinching? Why not leave some other safety critical stuff out as well? It says the senior management didn't care.
There are two physical AoA sensors in the MAX. MCAS now uses both.

In addition, the US Congress has required Boeing to implement additional MCAS safety systems, including a third "synthetic" AoA sensor. The timeline of that is currently looking pretty far out in the US (maybe 2029? due to the delay in the MAX 10) but I believe Europe has a similar requirement and may follow its own timeline.

[Tech Guy]

Does anyone think Embraer are in a position to launch a larger passenger aircraft to compete with the 737? The C-390 is similarly sized to the smaller 737 varients and is a considerably newer and more advanced design. I am not saying the C-390 airframe is suitable for this purpose, just that Embraer obviously have the skills and capability to produce a modern aircraft of this size. With Boeing being very much on the back foot, timing could be very favourable to them.

[petit plateau]

Does anyone think Embraer are in a position to launch a larger passenger aircraft to compete with the 737? The C-390 is similarly sized to the smaller 737 varients and is a considerably newer and more advanced design. I am not saying the C-390 airframe is suitable for this purpose, just that Embraer obviously have the skills and capability to produce a modern aircraft of this size. With Boeing being very much on the back foot, timing could be very favourable to them.

Let us assume for a moment that Boeing have truly dropped the ball re the 737 refreshes, and the 737 replacement product, vs the A320 family refreshes from Airbus. Let us assume that one is either a very senior person at Boeing (or their bondholders) or in the potential sources of competing product (Embraer, Comac, GD, Silly Valley .... Austin, etc) or their major stakeholders in Beijing, Sao Paulo, etc, and of course the engine companies and their associated nation-state golden share holders (or equivalents).

If so - then it is worth reading the latest entries in the (mis-named) EVTOL thread. Specifically they are regarding a Delft/etc conceptual design for a 76 tonne (76,000 kg) x 90-seat propellor driven BEV aircraft with a 1,000 km (LHR-ATH) range and a 2030s launch date possibility that would take about 1/3 of the potential marke (19% - 52% depending on how you count, see Fig 10 in the Delft study).

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/655821-evtol-news-progress-do-we-need-new-dedicated-section-5.html

https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/173363843/de_vries_et_al_2024_a_new_perspective_on_battery_electric_av iation_part_ii_conceptual_design_of_a_90_seater.pdf

There are also related discussion going on regarding the commercial viability and the volume scalability of the drop-in liquids eSAF and bioSAF on the one hand; the growth of high speed rail networks on the other hand; the unlikelihood of a hydrogen future; and the rapid growth in all things virtual and bandwidth/latency-related including whatever is called telepresence, virtual worlds, or whatever on any given day of the week.

So .... against this background, how would any potential new entrant manage the market entry risk associated with a fossil-fuel-powered narrowbody jet when there is one perfectly decent one available (A320-series) and two that are in various forms passable (737 and 919) if one is prepared to accept other 'issues'. Assuming one was technically successful in negotiating the project risks in bringing a cleansheet A320-series competitor to market in (say) the early 2030s, then how would one lock-in commercial success early enough so as to guarantee a good economic result by (say) mid-2030s when all the other pressures might completely restructure the market in favour of entirely different solutions.

These are the issues that any serious board looking at such a concept will likely be grappling with. Taking on the high risks of being just a 'me-too' new entrant as a A320-peer are one thing. Doing so just at the same time as high-bypass turbofans get supplanted by entirely different thrust devices with entirely different energy sources; or when the demand for travel goes through some major qualitative and quantitative shift entirely; is an entirely different class of risk.

I accept that for some types of competitor (i.e. nation-states) these may be acceptable risks for reasons of access to other value streams. But for mere commercial entities I suggest this is not a good reason to step forwards unless one is holding a gold-plated cost-plus contract.

Tell me, at what energy density does a 2,000-km range become attractive. If you can tell me that, I can tell you how many years wide your window of opportunity is to launch a commercially-funded conventional fossil-driven high-bypass ratio turbofan medium-range single-aisle*. Then you can judge whether you feel lucky.

(* my guess is a 5-10 year window, no more, until 1,000-1,200 Wh/kg cell densities are available, i.e. mid-to-late 2030s, almost certainly by 2040)

In the 1950-2020 period lots of stuff happened in jet airliners and the associated travel industry, but the main technologies increasingly focussed onto high-bypass. Now is a moment when that design paradigm may no longer hold true. It takes a brave business to launch a new 'conventional' product into such a market.

[Less Hair]

SAF and very high bypass turbofans will be the future, not battery aircraft. New engines and aircraft designs optimised for this will make a difference in about ten years. Now is the wrong moment to launch new competitors against established families. The engines are needed first.

[remi]

It would be silly to wait 10 years for an engine to begin a 10 year airframe design process.
SAF and very high bypass turbofans will be the future, not battery aircraft. New engines and aircraft designs optimised for this will make a difference in about ten years. Now is the wrong moment to launch new competitors against established families. The engines are needed first.

[Less Hair]

The engine is just not ready. You can draft concepts already if you like.

[fdr]

Let us assume for a moment that Boeing have truly dropped the ball re the 737 refreshes, and the 737 replacement product, vs the A320 family refreshes from Airbus. Let us assume that one is either a very senior person at Boeing (or their bondholders) or in the potential sources of competing product (Embraer, Comac, GD, Silly Valley .... Austin, etc) or their major stakeholders in Beijing, Sao Paulo, etc, and of course the engine companies and their associated nation-state golden share holders (or equivalents).

If so - then it is worth reading the latest entries in the (mis-named) EVTOL thread. Specifically they are regarding a Delft/etc conceptual design for a 76 tonne (76,000 kg) x 90-seat propellor driven BEV aircraft with a 1,000 km (LHR-ATH) range and a 2030s launch date possibility that would take about 1/3 of the potential marke (19% - 52% depending on how you count, see Fig 10 in the Delft study).

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/655821-evtol-news-progress-do-we-need-new-dedicated-section-5.html

https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/173363843/de_vries_et_al_2024_a_new_perspective_on_battery_electric_av iation_part_ii_conceptual_design_of_a_90_seater.pdf

There are also related discussion going on regarding the commercial viability and the volume scalability of the drop-in liquids eSAF and bioSAF on the one hand; the growth of high speed rail networks on the other hand; the unlikelihood of a hydrogen future; and the rapid growth in all things virtual and bandwidth/latency-related including whatever is called telepresence, virtual worlds, or whatever on any given day of the week.

So .... against this background, how would any potential new entrant manage the market entry risk associated with a fossil-fuel-powered narrowbody jet when there is one perfectly decent one available (A320-series) and two that are in various forms passable (737 and 919) if one is prepared to accept other 'issues'. Assuming one was technically successful in negotiating the project risks in bringing a cleansheet A320-series competitor to market in (say) the early 2030s, then how would one lock-in commercial success early enough so as to guarantee a good economic result by (say) mid-2030s when all the other pressures might completely restructure the market in favour of entirely different solutions.

These are the issues that any serious board looking at such a concept will likely be grappling with. Taking on the high risks of being just a 'me-too' new entrant as a A320-peer are one thing. Doing so just at the same time as high-bypass turbofans get supplanted by entirely different thrust devices with entirely different energy sources; or when the demand for travel goes through some major qualitative and quantitative shift entirely; is an entirely different class of risk.

I accept that for some types of competitor (i.e. nation-states) these may be acceptable risks for reasons of access to other value streams. But for mere commercial entities I suggest this is not a good reason to step forwards unless one is holding a gold-plated cost-plus contract.

Tell me, at what energy density does a 2,000-km range become attractive. If you can tell me that, I can tell you how many years wide your window of opportunity is to launch a commercially-funded conventional fossil-driven high-bypass ratio turbofan medium-range single-aisle*. Then you can judge whether you feel lucky.

(* my guess is a 5-10 year window, no more, until 1,000-1,200 Wh/kg cell densities are available, i.e. mid-to-late 2030s, almost certainly by 2040)

In the 1950-2020 period lots of stuff happened in jet airliners and the associated travel industry, but the main technologies increasingly focussed onto high-bypass. Now is a moment when that design paradigm may no longer hold true. It takes a brave business to launch a new 'conventional' product into such a market.


Petit P; whatever the source of conversion from a fuel to an output to achieve some work, in the end y'all gotta convert that output from the engine to a means to develop a useful force.

Nootin' gave us a heads up with his Rule #3, where push meets shove, and that is how every current means of propulsion works, whether it is a Saturn V, Cessna 150, or arguably even your drive tyres on your bicycle. For aircraft, we have simple matters, f=m.an and that is restated as mdot.V. Whether it is an afterburner, turbojet, turbofan or propeller, force is generated by pushing a mass out the back, at a velocity greater than free stream. That bit ain't going away anytime soon. A core massflow happens to be hot, so the local speed of sound is higher, that helps avoid massflow choking at Mach 1.0. A fan massflow is a lower velocity, but higher mass flow, and it gives a better propulsion efficiency from less V losses in the far field. Unfortunately, the faster you fly, the lower the fan thrust component for the engine, for two simple reasons....

1. The fan is effectively a fancy fixed pitch prop. It is limited in the blade angle that can be set for takeoff, static, as stall has to be avoided, (blades are susceptible to flutter, and there is a lot of uglies that occur around non axisymmetric flow into the engine... Those mid span shrouds... dampers... they are there as they need to be normally. The fan blade actually is subject to torsion-bending that is pretty neat, as it is a splined section, the resultant aero forces cause torsion not just bending, and that happens to torsion to higher blade angles. All good when steady case, and when your blades don't have stress concentration built in as a design "feature".

2. The gross thrust output is great at relatively low speeds, but at cruise speed, all that TAS is working against your fan thrust output. For my turbofan in flight test, static 54% of the thrust is derived from the fan normally at sea level, but at FL400, M080, that is below 25%. (thats standard... my engine does something rather different).


FN Gross:

blob:https://www.pprune.org/5dd94502-aa50-4e4b-9c8a-6e0b375059bb
FN Net:blob:https://www.pprune.org/b5b6caa7-8846-4a29-bfa6-a6debfff1ff0

Thrust "Drag" Losses:

blob:https://www.pprune.org/7e9873db-f15e-4fcf-826a-c2809567ad5a




Way back when, Mr Froude n' Co sorted out ways to explain how a propeller works, by the means of an actuator disc, and that is a nice and simple analysis so long as you aren't running into compressibility, which unfortunately almost every prop on the planet does in use. (Keeping the tip velocity subsonic with respect to relative airflow is one thing, but if the blades have any level of resultant force giving a thrust component will be transonic, accelerating flow on the suction face to greater than Mach 1, and generating shocks (gaining entropy, sucks), mussing up the boundary layer, and the "CL's" and the "CD's" and the "Cm's". Your vibration isn't all from the engine, much of it is from the unsteady aero effects on the propeller. Prandtl added blade element theory to the propeller understanding, and yet, it is still just achieving Nootin's 3rd law, just as the the turbojet and the turbofan do.

The higher bypass achieves better propulsive efficiency, to a point. As the area of the intake gets bigger, so does the drag from the nacelle. Somewhere a bit past the GE90, we are about at the end of the diameter game for the engine, and can only improve stuff by gearing or variable blade angles or doing some magic.

For anyone who looks at the spoilers below, this causes some curious outcomes in the equations for turbomachinery.
1. Yes, we have removed a specific fluid mechanics limitation that exists in turbomachinery, and it was done by some neat aerodynamics.
2. Yes, the equations of propulsion efficiency look odd, I can't help that, I can only go by what the plane does, and it suggests that we are already overstating propulsive efficiency a tad. Anyone who likes algebra, we have a group of people working on resolving the surprise of propulsive efficiency.
3. No, we do not alter thermodyamics of the core of the blender at all. We do however alter profoundly the entropy of the fan, and the mass flow and velocity of the bypass flow. Amazingly, the engine core doesn't know that it is being fooled, the only difference is that at low RPM, fuel flow is slightly higher, but within error margins, and at higher RPM, fuel flow is around 1% lower than standard for a given RPM, with EGT following suit.
4. It has been flown to FL450, M080 so far, and seems happy enough to go to STC.
5. Vibration is lower, and loads on the fan blades and disc are lower than standard. That is a necessary outcome of the aerodynamics, and has been observed on propellers, helicopter rotors and turbo fans.

What magic looks like....
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/tfe731_test_cell_run_ef7dd1e2fc3e83f8648a869ac50cb02249cab8e b.png


Engine Test Cell run, for control engine.








https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1224x816/2_rated_thrust__66b0710cd7489d541cd4f144a645db3164fa248d.png


Test cell corrected data.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/3_temp_correction_81d45c9775ed7a889d2afffcdadc23605b753182.p ng

Test case OAT entry, (+34C)


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/4_limited_thrust_case_41a6b1b2175b66df92d1950467fafff37ce59e 28.png

Correcting the limit % Thrust available for the OAT above critical temperature.


https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/5_target_n1_6c81475e40dd6594f5540581343aafa571ae60ce.png

Entering the target N1% to achieve rated thrust % for the OAT.


https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/6_corrected_target_thrust_a43c868d58e35e0c22c28cc831ffc44118 b44e97.png

Adjusting Thrust/N1 curve to align with limit targets.


https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/7_symmetric_test_vs_control_0b2c183e3644b731e3d1ee56a9740f50 d2d2f520.png

Runway symmetry runs... open control loop, set control thrust and expected N1 for the test engine.... Gets there in about 3 runs... +/-, without losing too much hair. (wide runways are nice) If setting equal N1 for control and test case, note the runway ends up looking short and really wide. avoid grass stains.




https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/8_mod_thrust_curve_matched_b89b5f44d2bfc2c80b36fbc81eba0eeb0 f643b30.png

Adjust factor for test thrust curve, to intercept the N1 observed for symmetric thrust, and the % thrust line.

After this lot, go fly, and check changes for cruise case.

Note: the above case is per a recorded test, and in fact was not quite equal, the test case @ 89% N1 was producing more thrust than the control engine @ 97.5%, equal thrust was achieved at 87% N1 test vs 97.5% control.

Why use the example of the video? The RHS is occupied by an SME from the OEM of the engine, so it was independent of our fingerprints, for better or worse.

However, who wants more thrust? Apart from the A10 drivers, and the Buff, the main thing is efficiency, and that comes only if the TSFC is better. The biggest issue we have with getting more efficiency is that we get more thrust for the same N1, so for some aircraft, that becomes an interesting little factor to deal with. The take off case we are able to get about 40% more thrust out of the engine at Go Around N1, so thats fun for my plane, but many of the planes that are out there, we don't want to be giving the crew more thrust in the G/A, it is a busy enough time already without adding the equivalent of an afterburner to the equation.

blob:https://www.pprune.org/918ab866-45e5-477c-8917-8529bea6df18

So... for the figures above, the engine happens to run 1% lower fuel flow for equal N1's, and about 20C lower EGT.... for equal thrust case, there is a big difference.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/952x452/tfe731_takeoff_wf_t5_n1_e226438253cbebad8bb2b25fb96e8233203d de2a.png




https://youtu.be/PNt12O7wFNA




Magic at FL400, M076
So, doing something at sea level is one thing, but the planes need to work for a living...

At FL400, setting the test engine to the N1 for M0695, and the control engine N1 for M073, one would assume that an outcome would be about 1/2 of the difference between the two thrust settings... say, M0713 or so. The plane settles down at M0760. Doesn't sound like much, but, all of the change has happened from the test engine... and so that is a fair change in thrust.

Going from M0695 to M0760 is 760/695 as a change in speed, V, and the energy needed to do that is the square of the speed difference, V^2. So, the test engine gives (760/695)^2 more thrust, net, AND, it is also dragging the control engine from M0730 to M0760, which is.... (760/730)^2.

(760/695)^2 = 1.094^2 = 1.196
(760/730)^2 = 1.041^2 = 1.084

= 1.135^2 = 1.280

So, for modifying one engine, and running it at an RPM and fuel flow and EGT consistent with M0695, we are actually getting 28% more thrust in the cruise. That is for ONE of TWO engines. For both engines, the plane goes quite well.

This test done at FL400, M0760 is above the FPPM performance limit conditions.... by about 5,000' for that Mach number.

We are in the STC phase of this, with only two small airlines that are working with us as a JV partner for the first STC's. Thats OK, the rest of the airlines will be paying a fee that will make up for the lack of interest they have in CO2 reduction.

This modification is a field modification; My engineers modify a 30 blade turbofan in an hour. Propellers are faster to do, about 20 minutes for a C-130/L100-30 54H60 prop.

My work doesn't break physics, it is actually pretty elegant physics,

The prop is less effective, the turbofan is quite neat.

We are open to investment at the moment, but only at private placement, or investment groups, or HNW's. Investment is to redeemable preference shares, with a fixed redemption price. The shareholders can defer redemption for a period post revenue, their shares do accrue dividends at an agreed rate.

[Ikijibiki]

From the Financial Times:

==========
The head of Emirates Airline has warned Boeing was in the “last chance saloon” as he prepared to send his own engineers to oversee the plane maker’s production lines after witnessing a long decline in its manufacturing performance.

Sir Tim Clark told the Financial Times he had seen a “progressive decline” in Boeing’s standards, which he put down to long-running management and governance mis-steps, including prioritising financial performance over engineering excellence.
==========

https://on.ft.com/49mDHM1

[phantomsphorever]

And so it continues.....:

Misdrilled Holes Found on 50 Boeing 737 Max Aircraft: WSJ (businessinsider.com) (https://www.businessinsider.com/spirit-aerosystems-misdrilled-holes-found-50-boeing-737-max-aircraft-2024-2?r=US&IR=T#:~:text=A%20supplier%20of%20Boeing%20planes,been%20deli vered%2C%20the%20outlet%20reported.)

[remi]

The hits just keep on coming.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/04/business/boeing-737-max-holes-hnk-intl/index.html

Meanwhile, Boeing is instructing personnel who build aircraft to finish building them.

During a recent day on which Boeing halted production of the 737 Max to hold a staff meeting to stress the importance of quality control, “many employees voiced frustration with … how unfinished jobs – either from our suppliers or within our factories – can ripple through the production line,” Deal wrote in the memo.“These employees are absolutely right. We need to perform jobs at their assigned position,” he said. “We have to maintain this discipline within our four walls and we are going to hold our suppliers to the same standard.”

“We recently instructed a major supplier to hold shipments until all jobs have been completed to specification,” he said. “While this delay in shipment will affect our production schedule, it will improve overall quality and stability.”

[phantomsphorever]

Quite frankly I do not understand how a CEO of any airline can approve the buy of a 737 these days - as a shareholder of that company you are screwed.
So hopefully the market will sort the problems in the long run - short term I will avoid airlines that use this aircraft if at all possible.

[Less Hair]

Just try to get a A321neo delivery slot.

[phantomsphorever]

Just try to get a A321neo delivery slot.
Not a good reason to buy something that is clearly not designed and produced to the required standards.

A test pilot of my company who was a very picky guy and gave the engineers a hell of a time when he didn't like something always said:

"If we design and build something that just about fullfills the certification requirements, than we sent a worst possible (but still legal) product out the door"

Everybody can decide for himself, if Boeing is doing that at the moment - or if they fail even at that.

[Less Hair]

You asked.

[EDLB]

@fdr. In the proposed design 35T of 76T MTOW are battery mass. How good would such a design perform with normal Jet-A1 engines. The electric motors will need more mass than comparable jet engines, so you compare a fuel tank with batteries. 1500 battery lifetime cycles are not much for an passenger plane. So you think that the airline is willing to replace the battery set 20-40 times during the airframe lifetime? I think if there is no more crude oil to find and we are in a Mad Max type of world, those electric planes might be economic. As current Airbus or Boeing CEO I would not loose sleep on that competition..

[A0283]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68201371

[remi]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68201371
It makes me wonder if Emirates knows something about 777 and 787 that the rest of us don't know yet.

Or is this just because Tim Clark is tired of seeing schedules slip for not great reasons?

[petit plateau]

Petit P; whatever the source of conversion from a fuel to an output to achieve some work, in the end y'all gotta convert that output from the engine to a means to develop a useful force.

Nootin' gave us a heads up with his Rule #3, where push meets shove, and that is how every current means of propulsion works, whether it is a Saturn V, Cessna 150, or arguably even your drive tyres on your bicycle. For aircraft, we have simple matters, f=m.an and that is restated as mdot.V. Whether it is an afterburner, turbojet, turbofan or propeller, force is generated by pushing a mass out the back, at a velocity greater than free stream. That bit ain't going away anytime soon. A core massflow happens to be hot, so the local speed of sound is higher, that helps avoid massflow choking at Mach 1.0. A fan massflow is a lower velocity, but higher mass flow, and it gives a better propulsion efficiency from less V losses in the far field. Unfortunately, the faster you fly, the lower the fan thrust component for the engine, for two simple reasons....

1. The fan is effectively a fancy fixed pitch prop. It is limited in the blade angle that can be set for takeoff, static, as stall has to be avoided, (blades are susceptible to flutter, and there is a lot of uglies that occur around non axisymmetric flow into the engine... Those mid span shrouds... dampers... they are there as they need to be normally. The fan blade actually is subject to torsion-bending that is pretty neat, as it is a splined section, the resultant aero forces cause torsion not just bending, and that happens to torsion to higher blade angles. All good when steady case, and when your blades don't have stress concentration built in as a design "feature".

2. The gross thrust output is great at relatively low speeds, but at cruise speed, all that TAS is working against your fan thrust output. For my turbofan in flight test, static 54% of the thrust is derived from the fan normally at sea level, but at FL400, M080, that is below 25%. (thats standard... my engine does something rather different).


FN Gross:

blob:https://www.pprune.org/5dd94502-aa50-4e4b-9c8a-6e0b375059bb
FN Net:blob:https://www.pprune.org/b5b6caa7-8846-4a29-bfa6-a6debfff1ff0

Thrust "Drag" Losses:

blob:https://www.pprune.org/7e9873db-f15e-4fcf-826a-c2809567ad5a








Way back when, Mr Froude n' Co sorted out ways to explain how a propeller works, by the means of an actuator disc, and that is a nice and simple analysis so long as you aren't running into compressibility, which unfortunately almost every prop on the planet does in use. (Keeping the tip velocity subsonic with respect to relative airflow is one thing, but if the blades have any level of resultant force giving a thrust component will be transonic, accelerating flow on the suction face to greater than Mach 1, and generating shocks (gaining entropy, sucks), mussing up the boundary layer, and the "CL's" and the "CD's" and the "Cm's". Your vibration isn't all from the engine, much of it is from the unsteady aero effects on the propeller. Prandtl added blade element theory to the propeller understanding, and yet, it is still just achieving Nootin's 3rd law, just as the the turbojet and the turbofan do.

The higher bypass achieves better propulsive efficiency, to a point. As the area of the intake gets bigger, so does the drag from the nacelle. Somewhere a bit past the GE90, we are about at the end of the diameter game for the engine, and can only improve stuff by gearing or variable blade angles or doing some magic.

For anyone who looks at the spoilers below, this causes some curious outcomes in the equations for turbomachinery.
1. Yes, we have removed a specific fluid mechanics limitation that exists in turbomachinery, and it was done by some neat aerodynamics.
2. Yes, the equations of propulsion efficiency look odd, I can't help that, I can only go by what the plane does, and it suggests that we are already overstating propulsive efficiency a tad. Anyone who likes algebra, we have a group of people working on resolving the surprise of propulsive efficiency.
3. No, we do not alter thermodyamics of the core of the blender at all. We do however alter profoundly the entropy of the fan, and the mass flow and velocity of the bypass flow. Amazingly, the engine core doesn't know that it is being fooled, the only difference is that at low RPM, fuel flow is slightly higher, but within error margins, and at higher RPM, fuel flow is around 1% lower than standard for a given RPM, with EGT following suit.
4. It has been flown to FL450, M080 so far, and seems happy enough to go to STC.
5. Vibration is lower, and loads on the fan blades and disc are lower than standard. That is a necessary outcome of the aerodynamics, and has been observed on propellers, helicopter rotors and turbo fans.

What magic looks like....
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/tfe731_test_cell_run_ef7dd1e2fc3e83f8648a869ac50cb02249cab8e b.png


Engine Test Cell run, for control engine.








https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1224x816/2_rated_thrust__66b0710cd7489d541cd4f144a645db3164fa248d.png


Test cell corrected data.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/3_temp_correction_81d45c9775ed7a889d2afffcdadc23605b753182.p ng

Test case OAT entry, (+34C)


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/4_limited_thrust_case_41a6b1b2175b66df92d1950467fafff37ce59e 28.png

Correcting the limit % Thrust available for the OAT above critical temperature.


https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/5_target_n1_6c81475e40dd6594f5540581343aafa571ae60ce.png

Entering the target N1% to achieve rated thrust % for the OAT.


https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/6_corrected_target_thrust_a43c868d58e35e0c22c28cc831ffc44118 b44e97.png

Adjusting Thrust/N1 curve to align with limit targets.


https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/7_symmetric_test_vs_control_0b2c183e3644b731e3d1ee56a9740f50 d2d2f520.png

Runway symmetry runs... open control loop, set control thrust and expected N1 for the test engine.... Gets there in about 3 runs... +/-, without losing too much hair. (wide runways are nice) If setting equal N1 for control and test case, note the runway ends up looking short and really wide. avoid grass stains.




https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/612x408/8_mod_thrust_curve_matched_b89b5f44d2bfc2c80b36fbc81eba0eeb0 f643b30.png

Adjust factor for test thrust curve, to intercept the N1 observed for symmetric thrust, and the % thrust line.

After this lot, go fly, and check changes for cruise case.

Note: the above case is per a recorded test, and in fact was not quite equal, the test case @ 89% N1 was producing more thrust than the control engine @ 97.5%, equal thrust was achieved at 87% N1 test vs 97.5% control.

Why use the example of the video? The RHS is occupied by an SME from the OEM of the engine, so it was independent of our fingerprints, for better or worse.

However, who wants more thrust? Apart from the A10 drivers, and the Buff, the main thing is efficiency, and that comes only if the TSFC is better. The biggest issue we have with getting more efficiency is that we get more thrust for the same N1, so for some aircraft, that becomes an interesting little factor to deal with. The take off case we are able to get about 40% more thrust out of the engine at Go Around N1, so thats fun for my plane, but many of the planes that are out there, we don't want to be giving the crew more thrust in the G/A, it is a busy enough time already without adding the equivalent of an afterburner to the equation.

blob:https://www.pprune.org/918ab866-45e5-477c-8917-8529bea6df18

So... for the figures above, the engine happens to run 1% lower fuel flow for equal N1's, and about 20C lower EGT.... for equal thrust case, there is a big difference.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/952x452/tfe731_takeoff_wf_t5_n1_e226438253cbebad8bb2b25fb96e8233203d de2a.png








https://youtu.be/PNt12O7wFNA




Magic at FL400, M076
So, doing something at sea level is one thing, but the planes need to work for a living...

At FL400, setting the test engine to the N1 for M0695, and the control engine N1 for M073, one would assume that an outcome would be about 1/2 of the difference between the two thrust settings... say, M0713 or so. The plane settles down at M0760. Doesn't sound like much, but, all of the change has happened from the test engine... and so that is a fair change in thrust.

Going from M0695 to M0760 is 760/695 as a change in speed, V, and the energy needed to do that is the square of the speed difference, V^2. So, the test engine gives (760/695)^2 more thrust, net, AND, it is also dragging the control engine from M0730 to M0760, which is.... (760/730)^2.

(760/695)^2 = 1.094^2 = 1.196
(760/730)^2 = 1.041^2 = 1.084

= 1.135^2 = 1.280

So, for modifying one engine, and running it at an RPM and fuel flow and EGT consistent with M0695, we are actually getting 28% more thrust in the cruise. That is for ONE of TWO engines. For both engines, the plane goes quite well.

This test done at FL400, M0760 is above the FPPM performance limit conditions.... by about 5,000' for that Mach number.

We are in the STC phase of this, with only two small airlines that are working with us as a JV partner for the first STC's. Thats OK, the rest of the airlines will be paying a fee that will make up for the lack of interest they have in CO2 reduction.

This modification is a field modification; My engineers modify a 30 blade turbofan in an hour. Propellers are faster to do, about 20 minutes for a C-130/L100-30 54H60 prop.

My work doesn't break physics, it is actually pretty elegant physics,

The prop is less effective, the turbofan is quite neat.

We are open to investment at the moment, but only at private placement, or investment groups, or HNW's. Investment is to redeemable preference shares, with a fixed redemption price. The shareholders can defer redemption for a period post revenue, their shares do accrue dividends at an agreed rate.






fdr,

I am in wild agreement, hence my more generic comment about different thrust devices and different energy sources, and also regarding potential changes in the underlying travel market.

Tell me, regarding your thrust widgetry which you seem justly proud about, how would it fare if the energy source was not burning long-dead dino juice ? Would your widgetry still be at all relevant, or would one design 180-220 seat aircraft around other thrust devices ?

If you were an airframer considering a market entry would you jump in now, or hold back ten years and wait and see ?

And in the meantime am I right in guessing that you see your widgetry as being most interesting in sweating the existing fleets to perform better, rather than switching out for new fleets entirely ?

regards, pp

[SRMman]

Not sure if this NYT article has been posted…

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/business/dealbook/boeing-culture.html

[fdr]

fdr,

I am in wild agreement, hence my more generic comment about different thrust devices and different energy sources, and also regarding potential changes in the underlying travel market.

Tell me, regarding your thrust widgetry which you seem justly proud about, how would it fare if the energy source was not burning long-dead dino juice ? Would your widgetry still be at all relevant, or would one design 180-220 seat aircraft around other thrust devices ?

If you were an airframer considering a market entry would you jump in now, or hold back ten years and wait and see ?

And in the meantime am I right in guessing that you see your widgetry as being most interesting in sweating the existing fleets to perform better, rather than switching out for new fleets entirely ?

regards, pb

Petite P;

My text Is agnostic to the manner that torque is applied to the propeller, rotor or fan blade. The engine is either purely a source of tprque to spin a shaft that does something to generate a force and hopefully achieve some work output. Electric, hydrogen, SAF, Jet A, or white spirits, it doesn't matter.

While I am pushing ahead with the STC for props and the turbo fans that I have funding or JV's to cover, and that is a major effect on CO2 and NOx, I am not a proponent of electric propulsion for aircraft use at present. The fundamental problems of a plug in electric motor is the risk in accidents; they have a significant fire risk that appears to be difficult to mitigate. Hope that Toyota gets somewhere with their onboard electrolysis processing, but not certain the enegy balance works, unless they have some seriously magic ceramic catalyst tech in the background. In the absence of that, it seems that using renewable electric harvesting to generate hydrogen in a distributed network would allow a move towards FT, CO added ethanol, which may avoid having to disinvite a number of the citizenry from eating and living on this fair planet.

The rate of CO2 addition is an issue, as is NOx, particularly where we inject it into the atmosphere. Cycling CO2 within a loop process to give a high energy density fuel still seems to make sense IMHO.

boring stuff

As far as application of technology goes, my old B737 CL would burn around 2.4 T/hr when we started the first STC series win that. I took just on 5% off that, with a simple STC to circumvent the mess that the slat trailing edge makes of the boundary layer. That particular mod is fairly sensitive to AOA, so the operators had variable outcomes. The propeller works on any prop, the higher the TAS, the better. The fastest we have run to date was on a heavily modified P51, but my old T28B ran along at 330KTAS, so was analogous to the C130 54H60 prop. We have a JV underway for the C130/L100-30. The prop is only around 20% increase in thrust, and yes, that makes for some weird math when considering the efficiency the propulsion system. For what it's worth, the greatest effect we get is where there is transonic or sonic flow, that is where stuff goes really fun. Shocks mess up efficiency, directly and indirectly. The B737 mod was shock suppression, what we are doing now is shock avoidance, and that really is a neat trick. The greatest change in efficiency occurs when the prop or fan blade is transonic, or sonic. The Classic burns 2.4T/hr as said, and we are already demonstrating around 1/3rd reduction in FBO, so that gives about.. 1.6-1.7T/hr, for a well worn, amortised, end of life aircraft type. It is at the end of life due to efficiency, and SSID/CPCP long term costs, but, for 3-5M vs 110 M for a Max, which might have a few more seats and nicer interior, and will burn more than the classic? We shall see. We have given a briefing to Airbus, and that is necessary; system integration is more complex with the thrust management system on the Airbus and the EMB 170-195 series. Boeing's are straightforward integration, as are the CRJ, ERJ and earlier A300/310's. The latter is however still of concern my little turbo fan outperforms my earlier bunsen burner baby Learjet which was fun to fly itself. Limiting TO thrust is straightforward but has raised some curious paradoxes; §33.27 provides the requirements for TO/GA time limits, yet operating at lower RPM and EGT than MCT will achieve the same thrust up to a but below 10,000' PA ISA +15C, so thats weird.

Our interest is towards STCs for the existing designed props rotors and fan blades. This technology does not apply to the core flow at this time, and I am not prepared to go below 2.3 BPR, that was hard enough. Bigger is better. It is agnostic to titanium, hollow or CFRP blades, all current designs are applicable. The only design that caused grief was a 1m fixed pitch folding blade which had an outer blade angle that was weird. The outcome sucked, we got 17^ higher thrust, static, but fore the first time that was at a lower TSFC. Sucked. Eventually got an 8% efficiency gain, static. Being fixed pitch, the efficiency in flight was quite different, but it was head scratching until a close look at the blade AOA was conducted.


The problem we solve...

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/905x810/1_s2_0_s127096382030691x_gr004_lrg_133d8f9e6c6e4e4c0e798e087 ec11e97c6088352.jpg




https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/2000x551/screenshot_2024_02_01_at_6_14_47_pm_5da3fe0dea969bd4255e11b4 f86677e236141ee1.png



https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/2000x1504/321946007_5776450399100816_403300332486882683_n_451027f8a6e3 a013649c1b8d3ceca356bcabcca2.jpeg

[BRE]

Yet another problem? Or an old problem being no longer ignored?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/business/boeing-737-max-problems.html

[petit plateau]

Petite P;

My text Is agnostic to the manner that torque is applied to the propeller, rotor or fan blade. The engine is either purely a source of tprque to spin a shaft that does something to generate a force and hopefully achieve some work output. Electric, hydrogen, SAF, Jet A, or white spirits, it doesn't matter.

While I am pushing ahead with the STC for props and the turbo fans that I have funding or JV's to cover, and that is a major effect on CO2 and NOx, I am not a proponent of electric propulsion for aircraft use at present. The fundamental problems of a plug in electric motor is the risk in accidents; they have a significant fire risk that appears to be difficult to mitigate. Hope that Toyota gets somewhere with their onboard electrolysis processing, but not certain the enegy balance works, unless they have some seriously magic ceramic catalyst tech in the background. In the absence of that, it seems that using renewable electric harvesting to generate hydrogen in a distributed network would allow a move towards FT, CO added ethanol, which may avoid having to disinvite a number of the citizenry from eating and living on this fair planet.

The rate of CO2 addition is an issue, as is NOx, particularly where we inject it into the atmosphere. Cycling CO2 within a loop process to give a high energy density fuel still seems to make sense IMHO.

boring stuff

As far as application of technology goes, my old B737 CL would burn around 2.4 T/hr when we started the first STC series win that. I took just on 5% off that, with a simple STC to circumvent the mess that the slat trailing edge makes of the boundary layer. That particular mod is fairly sensitive to AOA, so the operators had variable outcomes. The propeller works on any prop, the higher the TAS, the better. The fastest we have run to date was on a heavily modified P51, but my old T28B ran along at 330KTAS, so was analogous to the C130 54H60 prop. We have a JV underway for the C130/L100-30. The prop is only around 20% increase in thrust, and yes, that makes for some weird math when considering the efficiency the propulsion system. For what it's worth, the greatest effect we get is where there is transonic or sonic flow, that is where stuff goes really fun. Shocks mess up efficiency, directly and indirectly. The B737 mod was shock suppression, what we are doing now is shock avoidance, and that really is a neat trick. The greatest change in efficiency occurs when the prop or fan blade is transonic, or sonic. The Classic burns 2.4T/hr as said, and we are already demonstrating around 1/3rd reduction in FBO, so that gives about.. 1.6-1.7T/hr, for a well worn, amortised, end of life aircraft type. It is at the end of life due to efficiency, and SSID/CPCP long term costs, but, for 3-5M vs 110 M for a Max, which might have a few more seats and nicer interior, and will burn more than the classic? We shall see. We have given a briefing to Airbus, and that is necessary; system integration is more complex with the thrust management system on the Airbus and the EMB 170-195 series. Boeing's are straightforward integration, as are the CRJ, ERJ and earlier A300/310's. The latter is however still of concern my little turbo fan outperforms my earlier bunsen burner baby Learjet which was fun to fly itself. Limiting TO thrust is straightforward but has raised some curious paradoxes; §33.27 provides the requirements for TO/GA time limits, yet operating at lower RPM and EGT than MCT will achieve the same thrust up to a but below 10,000' PA ISA +15C, so thats weird.

Our interest is towards STCs for the existing designed props rotors and fan blades. This technology does not apply to the core flow at this time, and I am not prepared to go below 2.3 BPR, that was hard enough. Bigger is better. It is agnostic to titanium, hollow or CFRP blades, all current designs are applicable. The only design that caused grief was a 1m fixed pitch folding blade which had an outer blade angle that was weird. The outcome sucked, we got 17^ higher thrust, static, but fore the first time that was at a lower TSFC. Sucked. Eventually got an 8% efficiency gain, static. Being fixed pitch, the efficiency in flight was quite different, but it was head scratching until a close look at the blade AOA was conducted.


The problem we solve...

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/905x810/1_s2_0_s127096382030691x_gr004_lrg_133d8f9e6c6e4e4c0e798e087 ec11e97c6088352.jpg




https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/2000x551/screenshot_2024_02_01_at_6_14_47_pm_5da3fe0dea969bd4255e11b4 f86677e236141ee1.png



https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/2000x1504/321946007_5776450399100816_403300332486882683_n_451027f8a6e3 a013649c1b8d3ceca356bcabcca2.jpeg










fdr,

Thank you for a helpful answer.

It is good to know that your widgetry is applicable to any torque consumer. Knowing that, my suspicion is that industry will be even more motivated to sweat the existing airframe designs for longer, maybe even the existing actual in-service airframes. That in turn suggests that other airframers may be slightly more reluctant to gatecrash the Boeing-Airbus duopoly in the next 10-years.

I am not sure I agree with you on the electric propulsion front given the timelines of interest, but we will see and I am very unlikely to be involved in making the decisions. With regard to your thoughts on hydrogen (via various carriers) may I politely disagree for all timeframes at any serious volume in civil use at economic prices, and again we will see.

Good luck with your widgetry.

regards, pp

[Big Pistons Forever]

Yet another problem? Or an old problem being no longer ignored?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/business/boeing-737-max-problems.html

The microscope is being brought out and so I expect to see more instances of Boeing “good enough, passed by QA” turn out to be not good enough after all.

Personally the detail that really defines how deeply delusional Boeing management is, is the fact that the FAA had to refuse Boeing’s request to up the 737 production rate.

Everyone knows that the fundamental problem at Spirit and Boeing itself is too few, too new employee’s being ask to do too much too fast, yet Boeing wants to stress the production line more to generate short term profits and protect C Suite bonuses.

Boeing simply isn’t serious about addressing the root cause of the QA production problems. Instead we are see a continuation of the standard bean counter MBA playbook. Incentivize a culture where there will never be enough time, money, or people to do the job right and then scramble for find the cheapest, nastiest, fastest way to do the job over after problems get so big they can’t be explained away.

[WillowRun 6-3]

The engineering and physics discussion going on about propulsion systems and potential systems . . . . don't you think we should wait for the report? (okay, not really funny enough, but anyway....)

To right the Boeing ship something like "magic" evidently is going to be required. If for no other reason, the confidence of the traveling public, and all the commercial activities which depend on air transport, requires - or at least strongly recommends - that calls and initiatives for vengeance against Boeing go unheeded. Turning out the rascal Directors and Execs, fine. But burning down the company in order to save the air transport system which has significant dependencies upon the company in order to save that system, won't solve anything.

A source of beneficial redirection might be found in the aviator community. I mean, the community writ large. Besides IFALPA, there are other major labor-organization types of pilot groups worldwide, are there not? Give them some Board seats without a lot of process to get there. FAA - as has been repeatedly, many times, noted, has never received the levels of funding to do all that has been asked of it, especially after its mandate was changed. We know the bonus-seeking Execs and their cadres of running dogs of Bean Counting cannot be looked upon for solvency initiatives. Who then? Well, who has the most learned and dedicated focus upon getting safe aircraft built properly and with all safety built in rather than randomized, if not the aviator community? As Starbuck said to Steelkilt (though in a mutinous situation), "Look to yourself!". Actually, a mutinous attitude might be a decent substitute service for vengeance.

And speaking of understanding that hot motive, i.e., vengeance, how about some Mitsubishi Heavy with your hand-flying skills? They were pretty good at stick-and-rudder in the Second WW, were they not? And you want by the book, first time, next time, every time? - I dunno, maybe I just enjoyed the 777-300ER rides Chicago O'Hare-Tokyo Narita, Narita-NYC JFK too well, little while back.

As for strategy, let the engineering community in the Western world get itself organized and empanel some grouping at the level of IFALPA. Board seats of course.

FInally, and here I know I've gone to the edge of the proverbial deep end.... someone has got to channel Winpisinger. Because he was Aggressive, Radical, Blunt, Outspoken, and Flamboyant. Due respect to those noted above, still somebody's got to kick some.

[tdracer]

The microscope is being brought out and so I expect to see more instances of Boeing “good enough, passed by QA” turn out to be not good enough after all.

The good news is that (according to write-up in the Seattle Times), the defect was self-reported by a couple of Spirit employees.
I don't think that would have happened a couple months ago...

[GlobalNav]

The good news is that (according to write-up in the Seattle Times), the defect was self-reported by a couple of Spirit employees.
I don't think that would have happened a couple months ago...
Perhaps, though I suspect even if an employee did report an issue a few months ago, management would have quashed it.
The good news is that the report was effective now. At least while attention remains focused on the issue.

[EEngr]

Perhaps, though I suspect even if an employee did report an issue a few months ago, management would have quashed it.
The good news is that the report was effective now. At least while attention remains focused on the issue.

And how long will attention remain focused? When I was there, Boeing management had just brought back lessons from Japanese (Toyota, et al) quality and process management. The streamlining and optimization was put to good use. But the quality control, where any employee could pull a cord and stop the line for a problem was quietly forgotten. One mechanic on the shop floor said that if anyone on the Boeing line pushed a big red 'stop' button, management's response would be to dust it for fingerprints. Whether true or not, the thinking was there. As was the fear of the button.

[megan]

One mechanic on the shop floor said that if anyone on the Boeing line pushed a big red 'stop' button, management's response would be to dust it for fingerprints. Whether true or not, the thinking was there. As was the fear of the buttonThe fear of the stop button - we had an explosion in our gas plant which killed some and injured others, the operators first though was I if I hit the stop button production will cease, on the face of it in the circumstances faced an odd thought to have you would think. But once again managements view was production was paramount. The plant was continually run in alarm mode, that is, there was always an emergency being handled some where.

The lad (operator) they tried to place all the blame upon was blameless, a Royal Commission investigation so found. Never the less it destroyed the young man psychologically, also his marriage. A large, large American company by the way with a complete lack of standards.

[WillowRun 6-3]

On Thursday Feb. 8 the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee of the United States Senate is scheduled to mark-up the Senate version of the FAA reauthorization legislation. It's a fair guess at this point that the extension of the mandatory retirement age to 67, which is part of the bill passed by the House, will not be approved by the Committee or the Senate. Vehement opposition by Sen. Duckworth especially (and in light of the Senator's military aviation career and experience) as well as other legislators, plus the position taken just days ago by the FAA on the item, point to the outcome. Likewise, probably, on modifications of the so-called 1500-hour rule. (These observations aren't meant to comment on the merits of either proposal.)

Though sadly there's precious little making much sense in Washington at present, it does appear that the legislation will get through the Senate now and move to conference where the House and Senate conferees will reconcile the two somewhat different bills and derive a final bill.

The point is, with the significantly ramped up scrutiny of Boeing announced by FAA in the aftermath of thr Flight 1282 door plug accident, getting reauthorization legislation done (and enacted and signed into law), finally, will enable if not empower the recently-confirmed Administrator to press forward more deliberately. Provisions in the bill also are designed to address ATCO staffing directly if not aggressively. The legislation also addresses issues in several other parts of the aviation sector.

This SLF/attorney had observed that the nomination and confirmation of Mr. Whitaker was praised widely throughout various parts of the aviation community (and deservedly so). Once the reauthorization of FAA finally is complete, curb your surprise over FAA taking more intensive approaches to issues with Boeing. And other safety-critical issues too.

[Big Pistons Forever]

WillowRun. I fixed the last sentence of your excellent summary for you….

Once If the reauthorization of FAA finally is complete, curb your surprise over FAA taking more intensive approaches to issues with Boeing. And other safety-critical issues too.

[WillowRun 6-3]

WillowRun. I fixed the last sentence of your excellent summary for you….

Touche' Big Pistons, touche'. Believe it or not, some lawyers (pro pilots too, probably) have a sense of humor, believe it or not.

All kidding aside - and even though I'm not claiming sources on Captiol Hill - there's a vested interest at work here. Very few Members on either side of the Hill walk to work.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Committee vote against raising the mandatory retirement age. Projecting ahead, assuming the House will accept the Senate version (and that the Senate passes the bill reported out by Committee first), the age of mandatory retirement stays as it is.

Which leaves a pretty significant problem. If a principal barrier - according to opponents of raising the age level - is the ICAO rule, how is anyone who supports raising the mandatory retirement age level rationally expecting progress to be made at ICAO while the United States has not had a Permanent Representative at ICAO with rank of Ambassador since Sullenberger resigned, way back in..... oh, never mind.

[tdracer]

More fine journalism regarding Boeing issues:
Rusty on X: "I'm pretty sure Airbus products will also suffer from the same problem, but... man, Boeing is just having a bad run of publicity these days, huh? https://t.co/ZDTtD6Tb8P" / X (twitter.com) (https://twitter.com/LieutenantRusty/status/1755355335924343194)​​​​​​​


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/679x428/1707426134_6c9331758a81ed4688db2020b92be43b463bc1e0.jpeg

Wonder if the US Congress will launch an investigation of this defect :ugh:

[BFSGrad]

But you notice that it doesn’t say that the 777 is unable to maintain altitude with empty fuel tanks. Therefore, a reasonable conclusion is that, with sufficient struggle, the 777 can maintain altitude with empty fuel tanks. Unclear who or what is doing the struggling or what level of struggle is required.

[krismiler]

Boeing isn’t the only company which has been trashed by corporate greed, up until privatisation in the early 1990s, QANTAS set the standard for quality and safety in airline operations. Then a similar bonus driven culture took hold resulting in a string of incidents. Now the Australian public has been left with a woke airline more interested in pushing for gay rights and minority issues than delivering a quality transport system. Price gouging has taken hold and the previous CEO was forced to resign early after the airline was caught selling tickets for cancelled flights.

Aviation businesses need to be run by aviation people committed to safety and quality above all else. Finding ways to do it better rather than do it cheaper should be ingrained from the top down. Executive pay and bonuses have reached ridiculous levels and have attracted the wrong sort of people. Offering less money would make the robber barons look elsewhere and we could have a different culture in place where an engineer who wanted to use better quality material in a component, wouldn’t be overridden by a manager concerned about how this would affect his bonus.

[fdr]

More fine journalism regarding Boeing issues:



https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/679x428/1707426134_6c9331758a81ed4688db2020b92be43b463bc1e0.jpeg

Wonder if the US Congress will launch an investigation of this defect :ugh:


TD, seems that Boeing has the same ruling as the great orange one is looking like getting, that they and he are above the laws of gravity and the constitution respectively.

Once there was a democracy and a damned fine plane maker, now you are about to have a king (god save you guys, not the king) and you have Boeing. Well done guys. About on par with Brexit and the exercise of trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Ukraine. Y'all gonna end up with Boeing building carbon fiber submarines to go visit the other Titanic, Mrs Green as the Veep, an orange fascist in the Whitehouse, which would suggest the old red white & blue should be changed to orange green & white.... generally, a very strange world.

[Bidule]

Finding ways to do it better rather than do it cheaper should be ingrained from the top down.

I fully agree with your whole post. However, don't forget that the "cheaper" is mainly driven by people willing to travel...., unfortunately. Most of passengers only look at the fare, and when something is going wrong they understand that they have no recourse, but it is too late.

.

[phantomsphorever]

More fine journalism regarding Boeing issues:



https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/679x428/1707426134_6c9331758a81ed4688db2020b92be43b463bc1e0.jpeg

Call me old fashioned - but is that statement not true for pretty much all aircraft that have engines - I guess motor gliders may be the exception :-)

[waito]

More fine journalism regarding Boeing issues:



https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/679x428/1707426134_6c9331758a81ed4688db2020b92be43b463bc1e0.jpeg

Wonder if the US Congress will launch an investigation of this defect :ugh:
​​​​​​​Picture search shows appearance of that one as early as 2015. Most likely a joke, a meme.

[OuchSpud]

I worked at a couple of the Boeing plants in the 90's - early 00's and some of the observed work pracrtices on the shop floor were surprising compared to other manufacturers i've worked for. e.g. a hammer to make something fit, or redrilling rivet holes if they didnt line up.
But there did appear to be robust inspection to catch the worst things, and a general culture of quality higher up.
I'm not sure those positives have fared well in the last 20 years.

[n77]

in the early 1990s, QANTAS set the standard for quality and safety in airline operations

and these AUStronauts still wander across the globe

[slacktide]

​​​​​​​Picture search shows appearance of that one as early as 2015. Most likely a joke, a meme.

Not a joke and not a meme. Actual CNN screenshot from the Malaysia 370 story.

[waito]

Not a joke and not a meme. Actual CNN screenshot from the Malaysia 370 story.
ok, that's in fact a context I noticed during my search. So it's not related to current reports about Boeing, 777-X issues.

tdracer made me think it's part of an actual campaign. And I haven't seen that screenshot before.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Not a joke and not a meme. Actual CNN screenshot from the Malaysia 370 story.

In fact, the words "vanished 20 days" appear (though not entirely clear) in the box to the far lower left of the screen shot, and taken together with the "developing story" tag, the incisive and insightful aeronautical point in the wording in white on a blue background also would appear to make sense.

[tdracer]

tdracer made me think it's part of an actual campaign. And I haven't seen that screenshot before.

It's a reminder of just how crappy MSM reporting can be - and to be skeptical of just about anything that is reported until you have some sort of validation as to its accuracy and/or relevancy.
There is no question that the media has been in something of a feeding frenzy with regard to news regarding Boeing aircraft - with routine, everyday occurrences (e.g. a benign engine shutdown) suddenly becoming headline news.
Can you imagine what would have been written if that Virgin flight that was cancelled when passengers noted some missing fasteners shortly before takeoff had been a Boeing instead of Airbus aircraft?

Yes, Boeing has issues, and they've brought a lot of this on themselves. But the media screaming that the sky is falling isn't helpful or constructive.

[krismiler]

This is 23 minutes long but worth watching.

​​​​​​https://youtu.be/URoVKPVDKPU?si=BmIk7MfKA72o3P8a

[kcockayne]

It's a reminder of just how crappy MSM reporting can be - and to be skeptical of just about anything that is reported until you have some sort of validation as to its accuracy and/or relevancy.
There is no question that the media has been in something of a feeding frenzy with regard to news regarding Boeing aircraft - with routine, everyday occurrences (e.g. a benign engine shutdown) suddenly becoming headline news.
Can you imagine what would have been written if that Virgin flight that was cancelled when passengers noted some missing fasteners shortly before takeoff had been a Boeing instead of Airbus aircraft?

Yes, Boeing has issues, and they've brought a lot of this on themselves. But the media screaming that the sky is falling isn't helpful or constructive.
tdracer; totally correct !

[waito]

... and to be skeptical of just about anything that is reported until you have some sort of validation as to its accuracy and/or relevancy.
100% Agree, increasingly so.


But the media screaming that the sky is falling isn't helpful or constructive.

well... looks like it could be necessary nowadays as another way to control greedy corporations and mitigate unscrupulous managers, when normal supervision fails or act too slow. Not new that media is the 4th power. Friend of mine told me about their corporate Risk Assessment Process. Gives Managers guidance what effect, consequences a risky decision can show. His corporation includes something as "damage level of media response".

So in that sense media echo can have a helpful, even preventing effect.

[vegassun]

Bean counters running airlines

I have a "friend" worked for one of those airlines/have seen their shenanigans from close range. To this day I am still baffled that it is perfectly legal for them to receive the bulk of their compensation in RSUs and at the same time do things like stock buybacks which affects the price of shares. Or they say certain things to Wall Street types knowing full well that the stock will take a hit, but no worries; they sold 2 million dollars worth of their stock the day before.

What again is the difference between that and what Martha Stewart was sent to prison for?

[M4rtyman]

This is 23 minutes long but worth watching.​​​​

From the video ... “Boeing is trying to be a Michelin Star kitchen with a fast food mindset.”

Says it all :bored:

[Big Pistons Forever]

From the video ... “Boeing is trying to be a Michelin Star kitchen with a fast food mindset.”

Says it all :bored:

:D.................

[White Knight]

Yes, Boeing has issues, and they've brought a lot of this on themselves. But the media screaming that the sky is falling isn't helpful or constructive.

They’re not wrong tbh… I personally won’t fly on a Max! And I’m a pilot, not an engineering type!

[SOPS]

Boeing needs to go back to being run by engineers not bean counters!!!

[fdr]

There is no impediment beyond neglect and lack of will to reset the focus of TBC back to where it has been in the past. The B737MAX has had issues, and TBC needs to be held accountable for what their processes resulted in, but just as it is possible for the company to alter its ways and return to technical competency, it will not occur without a commitment at all levels of the company management to do that. There has been 28 years of disregard of red flags and warnings about the direction they were going, and the board and management failed at every opportunity.

The 777 is a good product, the 787 can be with care. The 737 should be on its last rodeo, but its success is the roadblock to a white sheet project to replace it.

[MechEngr]

Federal tax law has made American manufacturing what it is today. How should Boeing buck a trend designed to push manufacturing out of the US? Will Boeing overcome the poor funding and focus of American education? Airbus is a product of European socialism that America literally cannot match. I don't see why anyone has a criticism of Boeing when the country in which it exists has become so poisonous to manufacturing. Would a farmer reasonably blame corn for not growing in salted soil?

[GlobalNav]

Federal tax law has made American manufacturing what it is today. How should Boeing buck a trend designed to push manufacturing out of the US? Will Boeing overcome the poor funding and focus of American education? Airbus is a product of European socialism that America literally cannot match. I don't see why anyone has a criticism of Boeing when the country in which it exists has become so poisonous to manufacturing. Would a farmer reasonably blame corn for not growing in salted soil?


Sorry, Boeing, not tax law, is the author of their own demise.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Sorry, Boeing, not tax law, is the author of their own demise.

I was wondering about that assertion too. While the fact of much of the manufacturing sector moving to countries with lower cost structures is an obvious one, what knowledge I might have about tax law isn't enough to identify which parts of tax law MechEngr might have had in mind, or to contradict him.

But one subpart of the post does provoke more comment. Not to say that Boeing isn't the author of its tale of demise. Rather to say that the decline of the education system has played a role.

Long years ago, in the class teaching German in the secondary school I attended, we were taught about the educational system in Germany, how it utilizes a quite rigorous exam in order to qualify for post-secondary education (or perhaps the "Arbitur" was for the level of education known as "Gymnasium", a more rigorous form of secondary school - it's way back in the Nixon Administration, so I'm not sure). One reason this has always stuck in my mind, compared to the system in the U.S., is that when it came time to select a foreign language to study as I was starting high school, the guidance counselor - my having said I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer - suggested German as the language to study (so much technical literature is published in German, he said). Though the conversation details aren't all important, he also asked me what else I might be interested in as a future career. I said something about becoming a lawyer - so he said, study Latin. Confronted with indecision, the guidance counselor then said - and the essence has remained indelible these many years - "well, maybe someday you'll be a lawyer working with airplane crashes."

But I digress. The workforce of Boeing might seem like the target or object of the criticism I'm implying. It isn't. What on earth entered into the minds of the execs and second-echelon corporate staff that would allow, let alone require, such destructive and ill-advised decisions about corporate strategy? Greed, alone? If they had received in their respective educational background some sense of calling, of higher order responsibility, maybe some leader would have emerged to contend and weigh against the decisions documented and put in context in the video recently posted up-thread. And the conclusion I draw from all this is that the only way to restore Boeing if it can be restored, or to reverse the downward slide to some extent or to slow it down, or to salvage as much remaining value as possible, is to find the latter-day version of - if not Winpisinger, then someone in that mold. A Joe Patroni of the corporate suite. Who is it? Well, George Kennedy isn't available.

[MechEngr]

Sorry, Boeing, not tax law, is the author of their own demise.

Along with Chrysler, US Steel, TWA, Pan Am, <long list of other American companies that either no longer exist or make crap in China or are foreign owned because of tax laws.>

Americans deserve every crappy company that screws them over, Boeing included, until they return the tax code to pre-Reagan condition.

You blame "Boeing," whatever that is, but not the workers who won't quit jobs where they make crap? QA and QC workers who don't do their jobs by taking an ax to defective work rather than overseeing out of sequence repairs? Not laws that make stock buy-backs possible (also Ronald Reagan)? Incentives that make companies vulnerable to financial mismanagement of their production?

You must mean stockholders. You should blame them. They own the company. They let this happen.

[twochai]

Where is Deming when you need him?
W. Edwards Deming - Wikipedia (https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrEoMfhocplpYEANXnrFAx.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZ AMEc2VjA3Nj/RV=2/RE=1708988129/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fW._Edwards_Deming/RK=2/RS=xUPb5FUY5ufp2VccA0pt0UEyRu4-)

[GlobalNav]

Along with Chrysler, US Steel, TWA, Pan Am, <long list of other American companies that either no longer exist or make crap in China or are foreign owned because of tax laws.>

Americans deserve every crappy company that screws them over, Boeing included, until they return the tax code to pre-Reagan condition.

You blame "Boeing," whatever that is, but not the workers who won't quit jobs where they make crap? QA and QC workers who don't do their jobs by taking an ax to defective work rather than overseeing out of sequence repairs? Not laws that make stock buy-backs possible (also Ronald Reagan)? Incentives that make companies vulnerable to financial mismanagement of their production?

You must mean stockholders. You should blame them. They own the company. They let this happen.

What Boeing has "managed" to do cost them much more than any tax bill ever would. Shareholders to blame, you say, because they "let" the executives make the decisions they made. Huh. Executives have executive decision-making authority and are responsible for the decisions they make, even when those decisions are irresponsible. Their strategy of satisfying the shareholders might be to blame, but the real goal was lining their own pockets with outlandish compensation packages for meeting the destructive "business goals" they established. Those who established those business goals are to blame, should be held accountable and sued for every last penny of their exorbitant compensations. Shareholders should invest elsewhere.

[EEngr]

... but the real goal was lining their own pockets with outlandish compensation packages for meeting the destructive "business goals" they established....

I worked the math out once. Taking the annual compensation from the entire executive suite and spreading it across the entire companies employees would have provided them with a nice (but not exceptionally large) Christmas bonus. When compared to the average employees income, executive compensation might seem obscenely high. But in the greater scheme of things, it's not that big a chunk of money.

Could Boeing take that money and purchase a better herd of management? Maybe yes. But then there are other boards of directors bidding for the top talent in the available management pool as well. Like Ford.

MechEngr's assertion that it was bad tax law is close to the truth. It all comes down to how tax law and generally accepted accounting principles treat debt, interest, leveraged buy-outs and other accounting maneuvers that harm US business. Boeing used to be sitting on a huge pile of cash. Knowing that, from time to time, it was going to cost them billions to design and tool up for a new airplane model. But between new product launches, holding that kind of money just makes a company a takeover target to be stripped of it when a dip in the share price makes it an easy target. So the current plan is to dump cash, buy back shares and make the company look good, but not too good.

[Big Pistons Forever]

I worked the math out once. Taking the annual compensation from the entire executive suite and spreading it across the entire companies employees would have provided them with a nice (but not exceptionally large) Christmas bonus. When compared to the average employees income, executive compensation might seem obscenely high. But in the greater scheme of things, it's not that big a chunk of money.


The problem is the behavior that is incentivized at the individual level in the C suite. Most bonus schemes are tied directly or indirectly to stock prices, so an individual executive will pursue strategies that will increase the stock price like stock buy backs, and reducing forward costs such as investments in R & D. The individuals win in the short term and will be gone before the follow on effects are felt, and even if the worst happens, like your product killed 372 people, you still get your guaranteed 65 Million dollar golden parachute......

Boeing spent 40 Billion dollars on stock buy backs and 17 Billion dollars on dividends since 2010. I am pretty sure if some of that had been spent on product development and production line QA Boeing would not be in the position it is in now.

[MechEngr]

Boeing likely would have been picked off by such as Bain Capital and sucked dry, the way that TWA was gutted.

Those incentives exist because the stockholders voted for them.

About half of those killed died because of someone else's failed incentive scheme.

[artee]

Boeing likely would have been picked off by such as Bain Capital and sucked dry, the way that TWA was gutted.

Those incentives exist because the stockholders voted for them.

About half of those killed died because of someone else's failed incentive scheme.

But it wasn't a failed incentive scheme, that's the problem. Until the MAX crashes, it was working as planned. The stock price went up, the dividends went up, the incentives went up.


https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/700x465/boeing2_185c9d94211a9947f0cbb9c025c9cb38a7a78fcb.png