Is a Boeing 737 MAX the safest plane in service?

Oh my God, what a problem to have!

All the best,
Andrew.

 

All kinds of good things happened when subassemblies were shipped by rail. One vertical fin arrived from a coach builder outfit that had a number 10 bucking bar left in it near the tip. The bar had vibrated its way down through four ribs by the time it arrived in Renton. The railroads swore that they never "Humped" the cars that had airplane parts in them. Boeing placed accelerometers in the assemblies and got recordings of 20 G sometimes. All caught by incoming inspection.

 

I do not know how they were damaged. It is my understanding that Spirit did not "send" a crew to Renton-- they have a full-time, permanent crew at Renton for rework.

 

You asked a question and got an answer! The answer, by the way, is "no."

 

Years ago when i was working on the first 767 we went down to see the arrival of the first fuselage panels and pressure dome from Japan and Canada. The panels from Japan were absolutely pristine with not one pickup indicated. The panels from Canada looked like they had been in a snow storm, covered with white pickup stickers. Drill shavings, hair, dirt, and debris were painted over. The pressure dome was summarily rejected and returned to the vendor with a warning that their contract would be cancelled if they couldn't perform acceptable work. Two of my sons were inspectors and they did the battle. They are sickened, as I am, at how things have deteriorated. Again, the problem isn't with the design engineering, it's with the paper pushing, number shuffliing, MBA manipulators that are going to save the company millions.

 

During my short stint at Grumman's St. Augustine plant, the first set of wings for the re-winging project for the A-6 Intruder arrived from Boeing. It was absolutely full of pickup stickers! I suppose Grumman sent Boeing a rather angry letter.....

 

What’s a pickup sticker?


Sent from my iPhone using FerrariChat

 

My kid can beat up your honor student.

 

When an inspector finds a flaw in a part, it is marked with a small white marker that is stuck to the item next to the flaw. It could be a scratch, dent, dirt sprayed over, etc. The flawed item has a rejection tag afixed to it and the part is held until a disposition is made.

 

Have we ver heard any actual data on the “loose bolts” found on other aircraft?

as a non engineer my “impression”
Is that thy are finding loose bolts when looking at a specific part, which raise the question what’s loose or missing in. Oter parts of Boeing aircraft where thy are not inspecting.

I won’t say if I arrived at eh gate and there was a 737 I’d flat out refuse to fly it, but given the choice I’d avoid Boeing aircraft,

recently took a long trip, airbus 320 and the. A350,
There was a sense of comfort in that.

boeing could rebuild its reputation but that is a decade long process and Frankly there is zero evidence that has even begun. All I read comming out of Boeing is corporate speak “it’s on us” etc.

To paraphrase a prior quote here, those who are the problem can’t solve it, hell I’m not sure they even reckognoze it

 

Interesting features about Boing.



and

 

I found this on another forum. Bob Parks, are you the "Old Timer" who contributed this? If you're not, I bet you agree with the sentiments 100%.

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What's the endgame here for Boeing? Their reputation is likely to never recover, they don't have enough cash to develop a new plane (even if they could get it certified, which is doubtful in this environment), they are losing money hand over fist on the defense side due to the fixed price contracts and they still can't get the 777X certified. Ohh and China is coming. Do they just go the way of US steel? Does someone buy them up, split them back up and rebrand the planes?

 

Kinda like Gm in the 80s then.

 

they do make really earnest sounding statements though.

 

JAL just ordered its first ever non Boeing narrowbodies. A320 neo.

 

The really bad news about this is that the FAA had allowed its engineering expertise to atrophy so much they had as much to learn, or more, than Boeing when the stuff hit the fan. They are still scrambling to do what they should have been doing all along.

 

Its been a long time since the FBI has had a director that was worthy of any respect to speak of. And this is an election year.

 

Interesting.... Its behind a pay wall. Its too long to copy and paste but there's a lot of details here.

The Disarray Inside Boeing’s 737 Factory Before the Door Plug Blowout

Factory logs indicate missed procedures, confusion and delays during the production of the jet that later burst open in flight

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/disarray-boeing-factory-door-plug-blowout-f063e27e

 

Here is as best I can copy behind the paywall.


Renton, Wash., factory stalled on a future 737 MAX jet then known as Line No. 8789. Pressure was building.

More than two weeks had passed since workers on Sept. 1 flagged damaged rivets on a fuselage that needed fixing. The section had been assembled by supplier Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kan., and shipped by train to Boeing’s plant.

Targets for completion came and went before employees escalated the situation to “Tier 3” priority, a move intended to get high-level attention at the factory, according to an internal Boeing log of employees’ push to finish the jet—the same one that would later lose its door plug panel in a near tragedy in flight just months later.

Punctuating how the situation was escalating with dollar signs, an internal message read: “$$TIER-CHG: 2 – 3 $$,” according to a Sept. 17 entry in the Shipside Action Tracker, or SAT, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The SAT is like a factory Slack channel for fixing a production problem.

The communications of the Boeing employees working on the door plug, previously unreported, help illuminate why it blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan 5. The factory was in disarray. Crews were unable to keep a schedule and apparently didn’t follow procedures, and production pressure mounted as delays piled up, according to entries in the SAT, people who have reviewed the logs and interviews with Boeing employees who worked on the plane.

In their logs, workers extended 50 times the estimated time for completing work on the damaged rivets around the frame of the door plug. The delays ranged from a half-hour to days. The work was finally signed off on and officially completed by the morning shift on Sept. 20, after a final quality check was requested the previous day, the records show.

The production breakdown had stunning consequences: The jet’s door plug blew off in flight, triggering an explosive loss of cabin pressure that risked the lives of passengers who could have been sucked out midair. It has sparked federal probes, including a criminal investigation, and hastened the exit of senior leaders including Chief Executive David Calhoun, who had vowed to improve Boeing’s safety and quality.

A Boeing spokesman said the company is prohibited by federal rules from discussing the investigation and referred to recent remarks by executives that they will slow down the factories to focus on quality and will take new steps to prevent problems from being pushed down assembly lines. The company is in talks with Spirit to acquire the company in an effort to rein in the supplier’s quality issues and also recently changed its bonus plan for 100,000 workers to emphasize quality and safety over meeting financial targets.

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Boeing 737 fuselages outside the Boeing factory in Renton, Wash. PHOTO: DAVID RYDER/ZUMA PRESS
“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right,” Brian West, Boeing’s finance chief, said at a recent investor conference. “That’s got to change. The leadership team got it in the immediate aftermath of January 5.”

The SAT logs show that a fix for the damaged rivets was in the works for days, and that workers had to wade through layers of management to get the problem addressed. That task required opening or removing the door plug, which was installed in place of an unused emergency exit.

The workers discussed what documentation was required if they opened or removed the plug. “If removal needed, a removal needs to be written first,” one staffer wrote on Sept. 17. Altering airplane parts requires documentation in the heavily regulated and safety-focused world of aerospace manufacturing.

No such documentation appears to exist, however, Boeing has told U.S. lawmakers and accident investigators who have since been probing why the door plug blew off. The National Transportation Safety Board has said workers appear to have failed to replace four critical bolts needed to keep the panel in place.

The SAT records show a manager communicated that a mechanic was opening the door plug, however.

The NTSB has said investigators haven’t been able to interview the manager who oversees the team of Renton employees responsible for door work. The safety board has said the manager is out on medical leave.
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Boeing was given 90 days to present regulators with an action plan to address quality-control issues at its 737 factory. Here’s a look at the layers of Boeing’s quality process and the issues each faces. Photo illustration: JJ Lin
Starts and stops
When Calhoun, a Boeing director and former GE executive, took over as Boeing’s CEO in January 2020, he promised change by improving safety and engineering. “It’s going to last for a long time, and it’s going to be healthy,” he told reporters at the time. Two 737 MAX jets had crashed, taking 346 lives and grounding hundreds of Boeing planes for 20 months.

Then the pandemic grounded flights and halted factories at Boeing, rival Airbus and suppliers such as Spirit. By 2022, they were straining to meet a surge in demand for new jets as travel boomed. Boeing hired thousands of new staff and steadily increased 737 MAX production, and Calhoun issued financial targets that relied on plans for higher output.


Last year, the factories were still running with stops and starts as the company worked to return to production levels seen before the MAX crashes. Boeing delivered 580 737s in 2018, the year of the first crash.

Calhoun was promising to deliver as many as 450 737s for 2023. Through August, Boeing had only delivered 271 of the jets. Airlines were frustrated and cutting schedules since they didn’t get expected planes.

“Is there pressure? Yes and no. We’re still there to do a job,” said one Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug on Line No. 8789. “I have a deadline every day, my team has a deadline every day, so if it gets behind schedule you have to get it on schedule.”


Behind the scenes, regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration and leaders of its factory workers’ union tussled with Boeing over its practices. The FAA and union pushed Boeing to add back second-party quality inspections that had been cut.

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Boeing CEO David Calhoun after meetings on Capitol Hill after the blowout. PHOTO: AARON SCHWARTZ/ZUMA PRESS
In September, while the Renton team was working on Line No. 8789, Boeing’s output of 737 jets had fallen to the lowest levels in two years. Boeing delivered just 15 new 737s to the world’s airlines that month. Executives had been telling airlines and investors that it wanted to produce about 38 a month.

The culprit was a separate issue from the rivets involved in the door plug. A defect in the rear of 737 fuselages supplied by Spirit had been discovered by Boeing the month before. Fixing the issue required inspecting and correcting misdrilled fastener holes in a key structural part. It had snarled production at Spirit, which in turn had delayed Boeing’s factories.

To keep things moving, Boeing kept accepting flawed fuselages from Spirit, including Line No. 8789. And the plane maker allowed unfinished tasks to flow through its factory—knocking production out of sequence in a practice called “traveled work,” which can increase the risk of slip-ups.

“Years ago, we weren’t going this fast,” said the Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug on Line No. 8789. “I’m not saying fast caused the problem. Something happened. I don’t know what it was.”

The Alaska 737 MAX had a door plug in place of an unused emergency exit. Investigators have said workers appear to have failed to replace four critical bolts needed to keep the panel in place.
How Door Plugs Are Secured
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Guide track

Door plugs are secured by

pushing the plug down on spring-loaded hinges,

closing the plug and

pushing the plug up into place where it is secured on guide tracks

1

Pin

Bolt

2

3

As the plug is

pushed up into

place, a guide

track on the

door slips onto a

pin affixed to

the plane, where

it is locked with

a bolt and pin.

2

3

1

Source: Boeing
Adrienne Tong and Peter Champelli/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A second Boeing employee who was also involved with the same Alaska 737 MAX said he has never felt pressured to move too quickly. The company’s attention to quality and safety has improved significantly in recent years, and the mishap with Line No. 8789 has been weighing on the Renton workforce.

“It’s a failure on all of us,” he said. “We all feel it.”

FAA officials have criticized what they have found upon closer inspection of Boeing’s Renton factory since the blowout. They have described an operation that appears to prize production schedules over safety and quality.