Eight B787 pulled from service over structural issues
 

According to this article , Boeing identified manufacturing defects in eight B787 and asked the companies to stop using them.
Any better source?

The Air Current is a reputable source, and has Boeing quotes.

Eight aircraft affected with both issues.... wonder how many aircraft with one issue.

Outsourcing?
Not training up the next gen of engineers?
Cost Accountants?
Greedy shareholders?

Take your pick

I resent that, take your pick

If Boeing are like most other large engineering companies these days it will be a combination of most of the above.

From what I remember weren't the early production section 48 assemblies made in Italy. Boeing pulled the contract due to 'tolerance' issues.
I think that particular problem related to the stab cut out area. Shimming was the answer to that problem too I think.

I bet they were all built in Charleston.....

edit. The first article I read about this issue did not specify where the assembly was built but I now see in the article embedded in the link in the first post specifies that the offending structures were indeed built in Charleston. This is what happens when Boeing execs decide union busting is more important than production quality. Yet another example of a once proud company renown for engineering and production excellence driven into the ground by MBA bean counters who know the price of everything and the value of nothing......

What’s so special about CHS?

Big Pistons Forever

Nobody who has bothered to read the article will take your bet ...

FAA ?
 

...
So Boeing have 'acted' on the double assembly error problem - making a combo of shims and roughness unsafe, sufficient to justify immediate grounding of a small number of 787s.

Who's to decide whether one or other of these issues alone, can be safely discounted ?

I mean, its not as if the backend is going to fall off, or is it ?

Are we waiting for an FAA AD ?
...

Lordflasheart

Apparently it can adversely affect the fatigue life - so it needs to be fixed to avoid longer term issues.
Boeing technically doesn't have enforceable authority to ground those aircraft - so this is really just a recommendation. I'm sure an FAA AD will be coming shortly - which does have enforceable authority.

According to the article, it's not a fatigue issue - it's an inability to withstand limit loads issue (so yes, at least a theoretical back end falling off issue). Due to improper shim thicknesses installed during joining of the sections, installation of the fasteners for the joint causes localized pull-up loads and stress to be introduced in the composite material at the highly stressed areas of the joint. The surface discontinuities then apparently add stress concentrations. The joint strength with these conditions is apparently insufficient to withstand one or more of the applicable design limit loads. I don't know what flight conditions set the most critical limit loads for the section 47/48 joint, but gust loads, engine failure on takeoff, and hard landing touchdown are likely candidates.

Courtesy of another website I believe that all of these particular structures are built at CHS regardless of where subsequent final assembly of any individual 787 takes place.

Interesting that TAC (J Ostrower) doesn't note how it was detected. Maybe his Twitter stream will say something about this, if and when it emerges.

Assuming (always risky on a forum where speculation is frowned upon . . . ) that the two issues were uncovered by review of inspection data, hmmm, what is the nominal time lag between generating of the data sufficient to review for such issues, and these inspections? Is that time lag (if it exists) subject to particular engineering discipline standards (prompted by "tolerance" issue re: Italian production earlier)? Were any of the certification Special Conditions - some were pertinent to this first very extensive use of composite materials in the airframe, weren't they? - pertinent to time lags between completion of inspection data sets and review of this data?

I'm not going to say anything specific about No Highway in the Sky.

Bean counters took it down! Aviation and cheap - is a bad cocktail and very short sighted - the dudes counting the dudes don´t understand and don´t care. They´ll just move onto another industry and use there skills there. Really simple.

The article isn't entirely clear, but my reading is that there is (at least potentially) both a fatigue issue and a limit loads issue.

I think what is going on is that there are two issues, bad shimming (cut too small leaving gaps) and ridges on the internal surface of the composite.

The bad shimming on it's own might cause fatigue issues - gaps mean more movement thus more potential for fatigue. It isn't clear that they know that this is definitely a problem, yet, and if it is it may just reduce the fatigue life - more frequent inspections may be the only remedial action.

On the other hand if you have both the bad shimming and the rough internal surface it seems there is an immediate problem that the structure might not handle limit loads. This might be because of poor load transfer - ridge pushes shim away from composite and all the localised load goes through the ridge - or maybe the ridge means that any gap is guaranteed to be between composite and shim giving the composite space to delaminate and fail, or something else.

My guess on how this has been found is that they have found the poor shimming (and maybe some earlier-than-expected fatigue) in routine inspections and that the second issue with the rough composite may be theoretical. Since, apparently, they cut the shims custom for each airframe from scans they may well have kept the scanning data which would make identifying the affected airframes straightforward. Suspect the shimming issue is more widespread, I can't see them ending up with eight airframes affected by both issues if it was just one bad batch of shims.

From Boeing patent.https://patents.justia.com/patent/20200271016

macdo

Unions seem to be missing from your list. They can be just as cynical and greedy as shareholders

A relevant aviationweek article.

Shims
 

I have not found a clear explanation of the shims. Are the two imperfect mating surfaces scanned and then individual shims made for each mechanical fastener, leaving possible gaps between the fasteners?
Or is one continuous annular shim made in order to mate the two surfaces perfectly?

New article in the Seattle Times.

Who remembers of the whistle blowers at Charleston being ignored when they spoke of the 787s lash ups being produced there.

I ain't going if it's Boeing!
 

Just SOP for Boeing. Deny, deny, deny.
Another update today from The Air Current: "Best case the surface quality on these eight airplanes is good and then Boeing can put together a defendable argument that taking the things apart [across the fleet] isn’t needed."
Oh dear.

So Boeing is coming to the realisation that recruiting workers from fast food chains with no trade or industry experience to build airliners may not be a very clever idea.
If it's Boeing then I'm not going.

So who had checked those parts and processes when the sections were built? It was only left to be discovered now by some heavy check staff years later? And to internal IT to find out about the more unpleasant combinations of errors? Early fatigue?

What else might be "hidden" away in the B787 and may cause problems at a later date?

Structural weaknesses and design defects in large commercial aircraft are nothing new, and are generally identified long before they cause an accident through a system of manufacturer testing, heavy maintenance checks and other in-service monitoring programs as has happened here. Also, this is nothing unique to Boeing, you will find similar issues cropping up from other makes and models of aircraft.

As an example, it took over 20 years for this issue to become apparent on the 737-classic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

it then took over 4 years of investigation to nail down the cause beyond reasonable doubt and for the FAA to order replacement of the offending parts.

The difference here is Boeing South Carolina is "so hellbent on making rate, sometimes engineering and production aren't aligned," in an engineer's words. The plant has a record of "undue pressure" on workers to make schedule over quality, unfortunately. The TAC, WSJ and NYT reports aren't flattering, at least. Neither is the number of fired whistleblowers.

Airbus A350 -
Interesting that in a situation of manufacturing and QC problems which appears to involve internal controls as well as tolerances, the assertions made about the root causes allow no role for either internal controls or tolerances.

The term whistleblower has obvious roots in the image of a ref calling a foul on, say, the basketball court or the gridiron type of football field. With the advent of instant replay, especially in the NFL, hasn't it become accepted that not every whistled call was correct? And even when "indisputable visual evidence" is said to have been discerned controversy often continues (and some of it can be honest). So why do press reports which use the magic whistle-word deserve unquestioned credence?

Regarding internal controls the full picture of what has gone wrong in the production process and what needs to be done about it has not yet emerged - certainly not within the confines of news reports. If a prior post is correct similar kinds of manufacturing anomalies, identified and resolved, have been part of a fair number of other aircraft programs.

The question whether Boeing management was over-eager in trying to correct what it perceived as a power imbalance in favor of organized labor in its Washington State workforce is a lot more complex than pointing to journalistic reports about employees, disgruntled, aggrieved or otherwise, identified as whistleblowers.

Collectively, the evidence looks poor for Boeing. Ostrower's article yesterday indicated Boeing's Quality Management System (QMS) failed to catch the defects in question. Boeing created QMS to make the case to the FAA that the company no longer required 900 quality inspectors. Not a good look for Boeing. Everybody I have spoken with agrees Boeing managers shifted away from a quality-first engineering culture to a cost-cutting business culture after the merger with McDonnell-Douglas. You can reasonably trace back most, if not all, of Boeing's problems to this culture clash, including the anti-union push by management.

The company needs an overhaul for the culture to return to its pre-merger days, which unfortunately looks unlikely. At best, you could argue Boeing's voluntary grounding and notice to the FAA marks a step in the right direction.

Joe Sutter, the Lead Engineer of the first ever Jumbo was asked to cut 1000 engineers from Boeing so they could have enough funds to market and build the aircraft. He walked into the meeting room and said "not happening" then walked out knowing full well he was probably now earmarked for the sack himself. Had he caved into board pressure, and Boeing hired brand new, lower paid, unskilled engineers, the 747 would've probably been a monumental failure owing to unreliability and poor manufacturing. Especially so when you consider the lack of advancement in materials and technology at the time. Seems Boeing needs to go back to valuing human experience once again.

And now several reports of a third manufacturing defect / quality control issue in a different section of the B787 (the horizontal stabilizer), potentially affecting 893 aircrafts.

PS: that's also in the article pointed by NutLoose above, perhaps the best of the three.

it no longer exists.

Rather sad.
Bill Boeing founded the company with the maxim 'Let no advance in aviation pass us by'. His successors kept that course until Phil Condit stood by while Harry Stonecipher destroyed the company.
It should have been a warning to all when Frank Shrontz resigned from all his Boeing positions after quitting the chairmanship in 1997. However, there was so much good in Boeing that it took 20 years to bring the company down.

Ah yes, so complex now. A century ago, American employers corrected such power imbalances with Pinkerton men and rifles. Kill a few unionists, and the natural order is restored. Or not.

The separation of the management from the actual manufacturing is surely a major factor. A corporate headquarters is not well equipped for finding problems and branch managers are not eager to report them.

KOMO radio just reported another defect today, this time with the vertical tail fin.

FlightlessParrot I don't believe you're inclined much, if at all, to commit thread drift by getting into the law applicable to the scope of mandatory subjects of collective bargaining. If it is preferred to adhere to a point of view by which a decision to build a plant in a right-to-work state was taken because of that legal status (of South Carolina) and it was just that simple, then there isn't much to discuss anyway.

Evidence . . . well, neither Ostrower reporting nor descriptions by Airbus_A350 of what people he's talked with have said, are evidence. And while I'm not questioning the veracity of either source the point was (in the post about whistleblowers) that caution should be exercised before taking at face value all reports of what they blew their whistles about.

The decline and fall of Boeing is not something especially in dispute. Nevertheless that set of facts and inferences is not the same thing as grappling directly with the facts about the manufacturing tolerances, inspection or other related processes, internal controls, and reporting to FAA. Or the same thing as the context noted by dastocks.

On the contrary, the reports from Ostrower et al. provide an increasingly clear picture regarding a number of questionable manufacturing processes for the 787. Specifically, automated quality systems failing and Boeing's justifications for cutting quality staff align very well with consistent complaints of undue pressure over making rate, whistleblower or not. Instead of quickly discounting quality complaints from workers and airlines, a healthy skepticism of Boeing PR will likely prove more objective. If nothing else, Boeing and the FAA's bungled response to MCAS justifies such skepticism. Had the FAA seriously investigated whistleblower claims preceding MCAS, the crash for Ethiopian, if not Lion Air, may have never happened.