Boeing at X-Roads?
Paxing All Over The World
Forbes magazine: "Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems Safety Crisis Predicted 23 Years Ago"
As is so often the case, following a disaster (corporate or goverment) you learn that advice was ignored.
As the Seattle Times reported before the Spirit AeroSystems spin-off took place, one of Boeing’s top engineers—John Hart-Smith, a senior technical fellow at the Phantom Works research unit who joined Boeing after the McDonnell Douglas acquisition—warned against "outsourcing all of the value-added work.” The concern was that this move might dilute Boeing’s critical engineering and manufacturing capabilities and prevent the manufacturer from benefiting from its in-house expertise.
“The most important issue of all is whether or not a company can continue to operate if it relies primarily on outsourcing the majority of the work that it once did in-house,” Hart-Smith wrote in the paper. Hart-Smith’s warning was based on his direct experience with a similar integrator strategy applied at McDonnell Douglas.
Twenty years on, the early warnings Hart-Smith published in an internal paper align with the FAA’s Expert Review Panel findings of “diminishing senior engineering resources” at Boeing.
Seattle Times reporter Dominic Gates wrote in 2003 that Charles Bofferding of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace also questioned the integrator strategy: “Is our best business model to distribute our expertise around the world, having it flow out from Boeing? That's disturbing. How can that be a sustainable business model?”
“The most important issue of all is whether or not a company can continue to operate if it relies primarily on outsourcing the majority of the work that it once did in-house,” Hart-Smith wrote in the paper. Hart-Smith’s warning was based on his direct experience with a similar integrator strategy applied at McDonnell Douglas.
Twenty years on, the early warnings Hart-Smith published in an internal paper align with the FAA’s Expert Review Panel findings of “diminishing senior engineering resources” at Boeing.
Seattle Times reporter Dominic Gates wrote in 2003 that Charles Bofferding of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace also questioned the integrator strategy: “Is our best business model to distribute our expertise around the world, having it flow out from Boeing? That's disturbing. How can that be a sustainable business model?”
Last edited by PAXboy; 7th Mar 2024 at 23:28.
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There also could be a reluctance by FAA to refer to the audit as if it were an adjudication, or contested legal proceeding or process. Outside those formats, results produced by the audit are categorized as "information" and not a determination.
Most simplistically, as the old legal maxim states, "the thing speaks for itself" - as a good number of posters here and on the incident thread have also said in various words and phrases.
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More trouble - NTSB Chair scores Boeing in investigation
Taken from a post on Accidents and Close Calls thread on door plug:
https://www.flightglobal.com/airfram...157279.article
https://www.flightglobal.com/airfram...157279.article
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s six-week audit of Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, prompted by the January 5 incident involving a new, Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft, found multiple instances where the companies allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements.
Given the lack of detail regarding the alleged violations, I’m underwhelmed by this FAA press release. For a large, complex organization such as Boeing to pass an audit with no discrepancies or violations would make me doubt the integrity of the audit. How would Airbus’s U.S. production facility perform under a similar audit?
* According to the whistleblower, Spirit personnel/contractors/??? don't have access to the formal system of record that Boeing uses to document manufacturing progress, changes, repairs etc
* So when Boeing gives Spirit some work to do, Boeing is responsible for observing and documenting what was done
* It being Boeing's aircraft being worked on in Boeing's facility, Boeing is also responsible for all aspects of quality and manufacture
It's just a bad system. If you have contractors doing critical work closely integrated with employees' work, you have to give the contractors the maximum allowable trust and credentials, not treat them like interlopers. Otherwise you will get interloper quality results.
Boeing did not give Spirit work to do. Boeing rejected Spirit's work. It's up to Spirit to fix it to meet Boeing specifications per the contract and Spirit did that, Boeing inspected the work to see that the result was acceptable and that the problem no longer existed and that the repair is suitable for use. That is how contracts work.
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That's doubly a Boeing problem, or maybe triply:
* According to the whistleblower, Spirit personnel/contractors/??? don't have access to the formal system of record that Boeing uses to document manufacturing progress, changes, repairs etc
* So when Boeing gives Spirit some work to do, Boeing is responsible for observing and documenting what was done
* It being Boeing's aircraft being worked on in Boeing's facility, Boeing is also responsible for all aspects of quality and manufacture
It's just a bad system. If you have contractors doing critical work closely integrated with employees' work, you have to give the contractors the maximum allowable trust and credentials, not treat them like interlopers. Otherwise you will get interloper quality results.
* According to the whistleblower, Spirit personnel/contractors/??? don't have access to the formal system of record that Boeing uses to document manufacturing progress, changes, repairs etc
* So when Boeing gives Spirit some work to do, Boeing is responsible for observing and documenting what was done
* It being Boeing's aircraft being worked on in Boeing's facility, Boeing is also responsible for all aspects of quality and manufacture
It's just a bad system. If you have contractors doing critical work closely integrated with employees' work, you have to give the contractors the maximum allowable trust and credentials, not treat them like interlopers. Otherwise you will get interloper quality results.
Not that terms of a CBA apply to this type of situation. I mean, who could even imagine a strong labor organization agreeing to kick out "completed" airplanes with shoddy processes and quality defects that open the door to safety of flight problems?
Instead my question yields back to the labor organization experience I'm fortunate, as an attorney (and SLF obviously also) to have had in a younger day. On any crew to which I was assigned to work in the cold-rolling steel Mill, if there were guys who didn't do things right, there were numerous ways to help one's buddy see the light (so to speak). If there were any slackers and slaggards who were sent into the Mill from some other Company . . . there weren't any of those. But semi-tractor-trailer operators taking loads of coils and lifts of sheet steel, if they did stuff the Shipping Foreman got ticked off about, that stuff ground to a halt real fast. Even on Midnights.
And in Primary Production, working directly with heats poured at almost 3000 deg F from a BOF furnace - no way in Hades would a "quality escape" have escaped a kind of Millrat tar-and-feathering.
But the best example is the way my buddy who had become a journeyman Ironworker described a tryout of an apprentice applicant in the welding yard. Five seconds of observing technique, and if it wasn't right, "Get out-of-here." If you have ever been in the presence of an upset or angry Ironworker, you can fill in the rest. And if you haven't, trust me (because they walk on high steel in the air).
To get back to the question, was there this sort of internal, shop-floor, within-crew discipline in the heyday of I.A.M. or other labor organization? Obviously, I'd like to advocate for proper labor organizations (sorry, not baristas) to receive a bigger role in any Boeing recovery scheme. But not if the I.A.M. of Wimpy's era lacked internal-crew kick-in-the-aft for slackers.
CNN headline: ‘I want to get off the plane.’ The passengers refusing to fly on Boeing’s 737 Max"Ed Pierson was flying from Seattle to New Jersey in 2023, when he ended up boarding a plane he’d never wanted to fly on. The Seattle resident booked with Alaska Airlines last March, purposefully selecting a flight with a plane he was happy to board – essentially, anything but a Boeing 737 Max. “I got to the airport, checked again that it wasn’t the Max. I went through security, got coffee. I walked onto the plane – I thought, it’s kinda new,” Pierson told CNN. “Then I sat down and on the emergency card [in the seat pocket] it said it was a Max.” He got up and walked off. “A flight attendant was closing the front door. I said, ‘I wasn’t supposed to fly the Max.’ She was like, ‘What do you know about the Max?,’” he said. “I said, ‘I can’t go into detail right now, but I wasn’t planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane.’” Pierson made it to New Jersey – after some back and forth, he said, Alaska’s airport staff rebooked him onto a red-eye that evening on a different plane. Spending the whole day in the airport was worth it to avoid flying on the Max, he said.
Pierson has a unique and first-hand perspective of the aircraft, made by Boeing at its Renton factory in the state of Washington. Now the executive director of airline watchdog group Foundation for Aviation Safety, he served as a squadron commanding officer among other leadership roles during a 30-year Naval career, followed by 10 years at Boeing – including three as a senior manager in production support at Renton itself, working on the 737 Max project before its launch.
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The rest of the article is worse from Boeing's point of view, with discouraging poll numbers. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/boein...ott/index.html
'If it's Boeing, I'm not going.'
Pierson has a unique and first-hand perspective of the aircraft, made by Boeing at its Renton factory in the state of Washington. Now the executive director of airline watchdog group Foundation for Aviation Safety, he served as a squadron commanding officer among other leadership roles during a 30-year Naval career, followed by 10 years at Boeing – including three as a senior manager in production support at Renton itself, working on the 737 Max project before its launch.
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The rest of the article is worse from Boeing's point of view, with discouraging poll numbers. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/boein...ott/index.html
'If it's Boeing, I'm not going.'
Boeing did not give Spirit work to do. Boeing rejected Spirit's work. It's up to Spirit to fix it to meet Boeing specifications per the contract and Spirit did that, Boeing inspected the work to see that the result was acceptable and that the problem no longer existed and that the repair is suitable for use. That is how contracts work.
CNN headline: ‘I want to get off the plane.’ The passengers refusing to fly on Boeing’s 737 Max"Ed Pierson was flying from Seattle to New Jersey in 2023, when he ended up boarding a plane he’d never wanted to fly on. The Seattle resident booked with Alaska Airlines last March, purposefully selecting a flight with a plane he was happy to board – essentially, anything but a Boeing 737 Max. “I got to the airport, checked again that it wasn’t the Max. I went through security, got coffee. I walked onto the plane – I thought, it’s kinda new,” Pierson told CNN. “Then I sat down and on the emergency card [in the seat pocket] it said it was a Max.” He got up and walked off. “A flight attendant was closing the front door. I said, ‘I wasn’t supposed to fly the Max.’ She was like, ‘What do you know about the Max?,’” he said. “I said, ‘I can’t go into detail right now, but I wasn’t planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane.’” Pierson made it to New Jersey – after some back and forth, he said, Alaska’s airport staff rebooked him onto a red-eye that evening on a different plane. Spending the whole day in the airport was worth it to avoid flying on the Max, he said.
Pierson has a unique and first-hand perspective of the aircraft, made by Boeing at its Renton factory in the state of Washington. Now the executive director of airline watchdog group Foundation for Aviation Safety, he served as a squadron commanding officer among other leadership roles during a 30-year Naval career, followed by 10 years at Boeing – including three as a senior manager in production support at Renton itself, working on the 737 Max project before its launch.
Pierson has a unique and first-hand perspective of the aircraft, made by Boeing at its Renton factory in the state of Washington. Now the executive director of airline watchdog group Foundation for Aviation Safety, he served as a squadron commanding officer among other leadership roles during a 30-year Naval career, followed by 10 years at Boeing – including three as a senior manager in production support at Renton itself, working on the 737 Max project before its launch.
It's not a bad way to make safety work.
Now Renton and Everett are union shops so that does indeed raise the question, what kind of agreement is in place here and why isn't it functioning properly? Did management abrogate the agreement? Did both sides give up on safety and quality? I think the agreement might be 10 years old unless it was quietly renegotiated recently; maybe that's a factor too.
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I haven't been able to read every recent post, but I don't think this has been posted here yet. From MIT Press Reader:
What Boeing’s Door-Plug Debacle Says About the Future of Aviation Safety
For a flight to be imperiled by a simple and preventable manufacturing or maintenance error is an anomaly with ominous implications.I don't doubt his sincerity, just his target of convenience when the actual culprits are unreachable.
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I have, in researching the MAX follow on. His main advocacy would not have made any difference in the suit(s) he is pursuing. If he felt conditions at Boeing were so bad that he quit, then he certainly knew the name of the local chickenhawk that writes about the company and he could have provided all the inside dirt to prevent the door departure. If I thought people would die if I didn't act I'd take a chance on defamation suits and see if the other party was as confident as I was. I'd also get a lot of very reliable evidence first, but if he thought Boeing was going to straight up kill someone and Boeing ignored that, the next stop is either the news media or the state AG.
I don't doubt his sincerity, just his target of convenience when the actual culprits are unreachable.
I don't doubt his sincerity, just his target of convenience when the actual culprits are unreachable.
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As neither mod nor admin
Is it?
We have had a few discussions here on PPRuNe over the years about accidents with fairly simple causes.
The example I have in mind is static ports being clogged/taped/obstructed but not noticed before takeoff, which in turn led to a pitot-static system failure that cascaded into something worse.
While I do not disagree with the general thrust of his article, taken as a whole, I found the tone and language the author used in his opening paragraphs to be a bit much.
This is because when jetliners fail for mechanical reasons, those reasons tend to be much more complicated and interesting (at least from an engineering perspective). For a flight to be imperiled by a prosaic and eminently avoidable manufacturing or maintenance error is an anomaly with ominous implications.
The example I have in mind is static ports being clogged/taped/obstructed but not noticed before takeoff, which in turn led to a pitot-static system failure that cascaded into something worse.
While I do not disagree with the general thrust of his article, taken as a whole, I found the tone and language the author used in his opening paragraphs to be a bit much.
As neither mod nor admin
Is it?
We have had a few discussions here on PPRuNe over the years about accidents with fairly simple causes.
The example I have in mind is static ports being clogged/taped/obstructed but not noticed before takeoff, which in turn led to a pitot-static system failure that cascaded into something worse.
While I do not disagree with the general thrust of his article, taken as a whole, I found the tone and language the author used in his opening paragraphs to be a bit much.
Is it?
We have had a few discussions here on PPRuNe over the years about accidents with fairly simple causes.
The example I have in mind is static ports being clogged/taped/obstructed but not noticed before takeoff, which in turn led to a pitot-static system failure that cascaded into something worse.
While I do not disagree with the general thrust of his article, taken as a whole, I found the tone and language the author used in his opening paragraphs to be a bit much.
Here you have a plane that was delivered ready to blow. There was nothing I'm aware of that could have been done to prevent the failure after that. There's no Swiss cheese, just a funnel leading into one big hole.
It's certainly true that very silly basic mistakes can cause catastrophic events but let's distinguish between human error and systems failure.