https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/podcasts/the-daily/boeing...
The excerpt that stands out to me the most related the story of one of the whistleblowers finding pieces of debris within a 787 aircraft (between the passenger compartment and the skin), telling his supervisor, and then being told not to worry about it. In another case, a whistleblower in charge of defective inventory found that some of the items marked defective were going missing and ending up installed on aircraft to meet production goals rather than wait for a proper replacement, the red paint marking them defective having been clumsily rubbed off.
https://interestingengineering.com/boeing-whistleblowers-rep...
Boeing also has foreign object damage problems on the 787 and on the KC46 tankers. Looks like this story still has a long way to run.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/u-s-a...
I wonder what the odds are that the Dreamliner gets grounded (again) soon to have them all gone over with a fine-tooth comb.
If this issue is concerning to you I'd recommend you do the same. To make it easier, I've put the links to all the contact sites below.
United Airlines https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/customer/customercare
Southwest Airlines https://www.southwest.com/contact-us/contact-us.html
American Airlines https://www.aa.com/contact/forms?topic=CR#/
Find your Congressional representatives https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representati...
"Why do you hate American jobs!"
At the same time, some high-up people in VW are paying for the emissions-cheating scandal, which arguably could endanger human beings and the environment.
When are people in Boeing going to pay for actually contributing to the deaths caused by this scandal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Defense,_Space_%26_Secu...
You don't hate the troops after all, do you?
Edit: Ah, the good ol' "reality makes me unhappy so I'll shoot the messenger" down-votes. I don't know why I even comment in any of the Boeing threads anymore.
Until this episode I was deliberately looking for 787's and such when booking international flights, despite what I had heard about the batteries, because I thought Boeing had to be just that much better than Airbus and their unintuitive UI's that I heard crashed AF447.
And now all that good will is gone.
I will wait for the emails and other documents to surface and see how they took the decisions after the first crash, if the engineers reported the issues but nobody listen etc.
Hopefully some lessons will be learned from thins and engineers from other companies like Airbus would speak if shortcuts that are not safe are pushed.
I thought the American airlines had all opted for the AoA disagree light, but now it sounds like Southwest didn't have it because Boeing lied to them and said it was standard.
Moving the HQ to Chicago was a terrible idea. Companies like boeing should be managed by engineers not salespeople.
Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO, is an engineer.[0] And he apparently doesn't even have an MBA. It's hard to know exactly how and when he became seduced by the dark side.
Here's a summary (which I've posted before) of his egregiously bad behavior:
Oct 29, 2018 Lion Air crash, 189 dead
Nov 10, 2018 pilots already talking about Boeing
emergency airworthiness directive related to MCAS[1]
Mar 10, 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash kills 157
Mar 11, 2019 Boeing CEO "confident in 737 MAX safety"[2]
[1] https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/614857-indonesian-aircra...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo...
The bottom line is always above all else. Or is it executive compensation? I always forget which is first.
There's lower hanging political fruit out there.
[0] https://www.consultancy.uk/news/297/outsourcing-main-cause-f...
Boeing has one job - making airliners that don't fall out of the sky. People have been putting planes in the air for over 100 years, it should be getting safer and easier to do so each year but apparently not. Boeing is failing at their one job.
It sounds like you're suggesting that we shouldn't hold Boeing too accountable because they wouldn't be able to retain or hire as many blue collar workers.
That definitely could be a side effect but I'd be more concerned about creating safe airplanes than safe jobs.
"One whistleblower reported to the FAA that they had seen damage to the electrical wiring connected to the plane’s angle of attack sensor from a foreign object, which feeds data to the MCAS system so it can determine whether it needs to engage to prevent the plane from stalling. This wouldn’t be the first time Boeing’s manufacturing process reportedly had problems guarding plane components against foreign object debris produced by the fabrication process."
> In another case, a whistleblower in charge of defective inventory found that some of the items marked defective were going missing and ending up installed on aircraft to meet production goals rather than wait for a proper replacement, the red paint marking them defective having been clumsily rubbed off.
In a unionized workforce, people are far more confident about pushing back on this sort of criminal bullshit, when their manager asks it of them. (Because getting rid of someone in a union shop requires a paper trail. And people making illegal demands hate, hate, hate paper trails.)
In a non-unionized workforce, the only recourse we, as the public have is to jail the line workers who scrubbed the paint, while their managers will quietly deny any wrongdoing (Of course we didn't suggest this sort of thing, of course we had no idea this was happening, of course we didn't pressure anyone into doing something so blatantly unethical, under express or implied threat of termination...)
We just told people that we need them to ship 100 parts, and waggled our eyelashes suggestively at a box labeled '100 defective parts'.
It's a pretty routine argument that says if you threaten my job for any reason I'll vote you out.
Doesn't matter if my job is creating things that crash, giving people cancer, etc.
That argument doesn't fly for a lot of us.
There will still be mechanical and aerospace jobs, just at companies that aren't going to play fast and loose with regulations.
By that logic you can say it is a quality control, FAA or management issue (and not an engineering issue) - because the engineering problem was not caught by other systems.
Also "engineering" created the AoA disagree alert. Whoever decided to make that an optional feature should be "strictly" at fault? Maybe it is the fault of the airlines that decided not to have that feature installed?
Engineering is just one part of a complex system so why do you think engineering should be blamed 100% for failures that occurred due to the whole system?
Because that's the only way something this complicated can possibly work. Fault tolerance is optional only if failure is considered to be a valid option.
Getting back to what happened in this case: at some point, a Boeing engineer was asked to make MCAS work with input from only one AoA sensor. That person could have made all the difference by saying, "Lol no," and SPEEA would have had their back.
I think failure is always acceptable engineering: a defining feature of engineering is finding compromises because we don't have infinite resources, infinite ability, or perfect materials.
> a Boeing engineer was asked to make MCAS work
That sounds like you are just making stuff up about a team of engineers. So your opinion is this is all the fault of a single engineer? Not engineering after all?
2. Drive MCAS with only one AOA sensor.
3. Don't tell MCAS to look for (or even think about) bad AOA data or AOA disagreements.
4. Equip airplane with two AOA sensors as usual, but make the AOA disagree warning light a "value added option" that customers have to pay extra for.
5. Don't actually bother to tell pilots that they don't have AOA disagree warning lights.
6. Don't bother to tell pilots that MCAS exists at all.
7. Don't test MCAS subsystem to see what it actually does with bad AOA data.
8. Give MCAS a ridiculous amount of control authority, operating cumulatively over repeated applications to exceed what the pilot can manually override.
Now, exactly what items on this list are the responsibility of non-union labor in a South Carolina assembly plant, or whatever other mistuned horn you're tooting? Once again, in the absence of gross engineering malpractice, a broken AOA sensor is no big deal.