43 ms·

Boeing looked for flaws in its Dreamliner and couldn’t stop finding them

253 points by dangle1 4y ago

dangle1 4y ago
https://archive.ph/mby8X https://archive.ph/mby8X
pseingatl 4y ago
South Carolina. Should have kept manufacturing in Washington.
- nickff 4y ago
  The Washington manufacturing facilities seem to have issues as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-whistleblower.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-w... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/16/more-electrical-problems-found-on-some-boeing-737-max-sources-say-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/16/more-electrical-problems-fou...
  - coredog64 4y ago
    737 fuselages are made in Kansas and then shipped to Renton via rail for final assembly.
- winslow 4y ago
  Why is the South Carolina factory worse than Washington?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    As soon as you figure that out, I'm sure Boeing would love to know as well
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      They do know: - older, more mature organization - based near the engineering teams; frequent collaborations - unionized, highly skilled workforce The people who took over Boeing and moved the HQ out of SEA intentionally picked SC to union-bust their own workforce. MBAs just refuse to believe that workplace culture and experience matter — so they treat high skilled workers like dumb, replaceable cogs and then their companies fail a decade later when the senior/principal staff are incompetent or non-existent. That same mentality is why their new planes have major issues: They don’t have competent senior/principal engineers because they viewed mid-career engineers as “too expensive” — and so didn’t train any.
      - kasey_junk 4y ago
        Nit: The HQ was moved to Chicago, manufacturing was moved to SC.
        rob74 4y ago
        I guess you have to read "moved the HQ out of SEA" (to Chicago) and "intentionally picked SC [for 787 final assembly] to union-bust their own workforce" separately, then it makes more sense...
      - wahern 4y ago
        The WSJ article was maddening in failing to even mention that for the years when the 787 was assembled in both Washington and South Carolina (up until 2020?), the vast majority of quality issues were coming from South Carolina. So much so that some airlines stipulated they would only take Washington-assembled planes. Now that the 787 is only assembled in South Carolina (Boeing doubled-down on their strategy despite the well-known quality issues), no doubt the ongoing defects issue is as least partly related, and not merely "microscope" related.
      - coredog64 4y ago
        Kansas is a right-to-work state and is where Boeing builds 737 fuselages, does passenger to cargo conversions, and does a hefty chunk of their work for the DoD on pre-merger products.
  - nickff 4y ago
    The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state), which has caused poor quality. I have not seen any clear evidence of this, as all Boeing facilities seem to have QC issues. On a related note, I'm not sure how Boeing's QC compares to Airbus, though both seem to have similar aircraft availability rates, which would indicate similar levels of QC.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      > The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state) FWIW "right to work" is the normal terminology.
      - justinjlynn 4y ago
        "Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest. Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".
        nickff 4y ago
        They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian? It's better to just allow people to name their own movement, otherwise, you end up endlessly fighting about names (i.e. are people 'pro-life' or 'anti-choice' and 'pro-murder'/'anti-life' and 'pro-choice').
        masklinn 4y ago
        > They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian? Right to work laws do not in any way provide a right to work.
        djbebs 4y ago
        They do though
  - posguy 4y ago
    South Carolina planes were getting flown to Washington before delivery to customers when I had a friend still working there. He was finding metal shavings in the fuselage of the plane, along with tools, nicked wires and such. None of this should have made it out of the factory floor. Every crew that works on a plane has to certify (literally sign off a form) that when they worked on the plane they left it in good shape (no obvious defects, like metal shavings, tools left inside, etc). If the next shift comes in and finds dangerous debris or damage the prior crew should have noted, then the prior crew is required by the FAA to have a formal report written against them, as they have created a dangerous plane. Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Ultimately, he took a $25k hit paying back the Boeing relocation package and left after 10 months to work on repairing trains (which has been a significant improvement).
    - phkahler 4y ago
      >> Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Yeah, the idea is to have management put pressure on the people who left stuff in bad shape. Shooting the messenger isn't the right answer.
      - posguy 4y ago
        Shooting the messenger seems to be Boeing tradition of the last decade. When I was a kid, half the parents I knew worked at Boeing and were proud of the quality engineering or manufacturing they did, but over the past two decades Boeing has had this crew retire and has worked to shift to a blame the messenger culture.
        FabHK 4y ago
        There's this documentary on Netflix that also notes the cultural shift, and largely blames it on the 1997 acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas, and the subsequent shift, roughly speaking, from an engineering-dominated culture to an MBA-dominated culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    - dang 4y ago
      Regional putdowns and flamewar will get you banned here, so please don't post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've unfortunately had to ask you many times for many years to stop breaking the HN guidelines. Would you please fix this? I don't want to ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687637 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29629314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29629314 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28859501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28859501 (Oct 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238567 (Aug 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27430570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27430570 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20380355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20380355 (July 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288841 (June 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233836 (Oct 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536933 (April 2016)
      - michaelmrose 4y ago
        Ok
bombcar 4y ago
> The agency now has more power to choose which Boeing employees represent the FAA’s interests, and there are new protections for them from undue pressure by company managers. This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive. I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive. Yeah but after I read this: >The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf. I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  1) it is absolutely a problem, but... 2) to fix it, you'd have to pay federal FAA employeees as much as equally-skilled members of the private sector at Boeing, and that hasn't happened in a long time. My understanding is this system started because the FAA's best technical people kept leaving for Boeing and other private-sector employers.
  - martin8412 4y ago
    Build it into the cost of certification. You absolutely want the brightest people working their hardest to uncover potentially fatal issues so they can be fixed before people die.
    - macintux 4y ago
nisten 4y ago
That's what happens when your executives vindictively outsource important software to the cheapest devshop they can find. You end up with a product being built by a team that by default has no sense of ownership. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-... https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/boeings-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9anhour-engineers https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...
- justinjlynn 4y ago
  > by default has no sense of ownership. Because they don't own anything. They're paid to enrich the requirements into software specifications and nothing else. It gains them absolutely nothing - so why would they ever feel any sense of ownership after the job is delivered and accepted? The business relationship is predicated on them being disposable contract workers. At a minimum, a sense of ongoing engineering ownership requires an ongoing relationship predicated on trust and support - which requires ongoing financial support after the software project is 'completed' - which Boeing, in hiring contract workers, explicitly did not want to provide. Given this, how can we seriously expect the engineers of an outsourced development shop, working under a piecework contract, to ever feel any sense of ongoing ownership?
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > how can we seriously expect We get really good as gaslighting and hope to find gullible fools
  - achow 4y ago
    By giving recognition for good work, which can go into their resume and/or elevate their status among industry peers.
    - justinjlynn 4y ago
      Ah, yes. Of course... "exposure". You know, the offering of that as compensation for work done has become a meme amongst creative professionals to the point of mocking absurdity.
assttoasstmgr 4y ago
> In 2019, they detected gaps between sections of the Dreamliner’s fuselage that were slightly wider than specified in the FAA-approved designs. The gaps, about the width of a piece of paper, were wider than the manufacturing tolerance of 0.005 of an inch allowed under the approved design. I feel like the article is really grasping at straws here, and I'd be willing to bet the author doesn't even comprehend how small this is. 0.005" is small. For the hardware-challenged: 0.005" is a typical manufacturing tolerance for a standard-spec PCB. Some of the Chinese board-houses that deal in high volume are higher than that[1]. The fact that they even found a gap this size on something the size of an airplane is amazing to me. [1] https://www.pcbway.com/pcb_prototype/PCB_Manufacturing_tolerances.html https://www.pcbway.com/pcb_prototype/PCB_Manufacturing_toler...
- dzdt 4y ago
  0.005 is 1/200. How thick is a 200 page book? About an inch seems right. Its not clear to me how much difference there is between 0.005" and the thickness of a sheet of paper.
  - hathawsh 4y ago
    The thickness of typical copy paper in the US is 0.1 mm. I measure it by measuring the height of a ream (500 sheets) and dividing by 500. This bit of trivia turns out to be rather helpful for 3D printing. Also, 0.005 inches = 0.127mm, so we're talking about slightly more tolerance than the thickness of copy paper.
    - skybrian 4y ago
      How do you use this in 3D printing?
      - r2_pilot 4y ago
        It's helpful to know how high above the print bed to print, so you can slide a piece of paper freely underneath the nozzle while only just feeling a tiny bit of drag from the nozzle. That way you have enough space to put your material down.
black_13 4y ago
ChicagoDave 4y ago
I’ve flown three times since the 800 has been green lighted. I have very intentionally picked Airbus flights. I’ll never get on one of those Boeing jets.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  The 800? I've no problem getting in a Boeing airplane. The 737NG, in particular, has one of the best (if not THE best) safety records in history.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    Airplane safety is a function of fatalities over capacity, flight hours and model service life. As such, planes that have been in production longer usually tend to become "more safe" (which is a self-fulfilling thing - notoriously unsafe planes eventually won't be sold anymore). See [1] for a short overview. As such, the 737NG - which had fatalities - is unlikely to be a contender, considering the much older A340 has had none. [1] https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-planes-to-fly-in-by-accident-statistics/ https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-planes-to-fly-in-by-accid...
- assttoasstmgr 4y ago
  Good thinking. Airbus planes are impervious to software glitches[1] and sensor failures[2] that result in catastrophic loss of control of the aircraft. Better bring a gas mask[3] though. And bring one for the flight crew too in case they become incapacitated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 [3] https://viewfromthewing.com/is-airbus-doing-enough-to-stop-the-fumes-that-are-making-people-sick/ https://viewfromthewing.com/is-airbus-doing-enough-to-stop-t...
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    AF 447 was first and foremost a problem between the controls and the seat. The sensor problem you're referring to did not render the plane incapable of flying, but it did remove one level of idiot proofing. As a result one of the pilots pulled the stick back and didn't relent even as the plane stalled. If you did that in a Boeing plane (or any plane) with functioning sensors you'd have the same end result.
twobitshifter 4y ago
Has anyone noticed the windows on these planes become very hot when dimmed? They don’t have regular blinds but instead include a gel which can be electrically dimmed. They aren’t hot enough to burn you but uncomfortable to touch.
- BostonEnginerd 4y ago
  My experience with regular windows on airplanes is that the shutters can get quite hot as well. The energy they absorb from the sun has to go somewhere — and it gets radiated away as heat.
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    That’s possible. I was wondering if it is typical and I was just attributing it to the new design
    - usefulcat 4y ago
      I've never seen that design but I have seen lots of shuttered airplane windows get quite hot due to the sun shining on them.
- robbiep 4y ago
  Depends entirely on if you’re on the sun side or not
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  I got to work on these windows a decade ago! They use basically the same chemistry as in auto-dimming rearview mirrors. Feel your mirror sometime when you're driving in traffic at night on the interstate and it's been dimmed because of the vehicle following you for some time...it will be perfectly cold. The electrochromic material between the panes goes through an oxidation/redox reaction in the presence of a voltage. In circuit, it functions something like a low-storage battery or capacitor. It does not have enough leakage current to cause it to get hot, that's just the effect of the sun on the plane.
alliao 4y ago
makes me wonder if COVID saved Boeing
ummonk 4y ago
Some passages in the article are suggestive that Boeing is being proactive about finding issues, even beyond what the FAA is making them do. It’s a welcome change and hopefully they remain serious about safety despite the pushback from customers who’re focused on cost and timelines.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It is what their PR staff identified would increase people's confidence if they published things saying it. That has nothing to do with anything actually happening in the factories, except more or less by accident.
smadge 4y ago
The 737 MAX didn’t crash because it wasn’t manufactured to the specified standards. It had a flawed design. No amount of precision can fix that.
- mc32 4y ago
  I think it's more of the airliner version of the X-29. Yes, it can be made to fly, but only when controlled against normal aeronautic tendencies. In other words, unless you have compensating (automated) controls, the things would not fly as a conventional aircraft and would soon lose control and lift.
  - jquery 4y ago
    As far as I'm aware, it would glide as well as any other 737 if both engines were cut. It merely had a slightly lower maximum nose-up because of the increased engine thrust or something like that.
    - mc32 4y ago
      I'm not in aeronautics obviously and I overstated the case, but my understanding is that the MAX series have different flight characteristics (behaves differently) due to bigger engines which also were moved forward both of which resulted in altering the aerodynamics and flight characteristics --making it different to non MAX 737s... so far, so good. They fly different and you have to treat them differently. But in order to make the pre MAX 737 pilots pre-crosstrained for the new MAXes they installed MCAS systems that made the controls feel like they would respond in a pre MAX 737. In other words computerized compensation. But due to the new flight characteristics you could not exactly fly it like a ore MAX 737 and so if you did bad things could happen if you were not being attentive.
      - coredog64 4y ago
        This isn’t correct. There’s one portion of the flight regime where the new engines result in different characteristics. To counter that, the MAX has an automated stick pusher. What’s the alleged fix? Pull the breaker on the overhead panel. There’s a similar failure mode in pre-MAX 737s called “runaway trim”. The giant trim wheels on the center pedestal spin in a loud and attention-getting fashion. The fix? Pull the breaker on the overhead panel.
rootusrootus 4y ago
How much of this is to be expected anyway? I.e. in any sufficiently complicated system, you can never find all the flaws. Is there a particular reason to believe the 787 in particular has a disproportionate number of flaws given what it is?
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  The reasons I've heard is that after merging McDonald-Douglass, Boeing developed a culture of cost-cutting and gutting engineering, and it's only gotten worse over time.
  - GianFabien 4y ago
    From what I've read, following the merger Boeing was no longer run out of Seattle but Chicago. How can you effectively manage a manufacturing facility from halfway across the country? What we are seeing is regulatory capture by McDonald-Douglass top level executives and board of the FAA. Standard operating procedure for the capitalists. Everything is permissible as long as it increases their and the shareholders' profiteering.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      There’s a huge facility in Everett where they “manage the manufacturing facility”. It was built during the 777 era and, at least when I was there, everyone called it the “Taj Mulally” after Alan Mulally the director of engineering. Mulally stayed with Boeing in increasingly higher positions until he left to be the CEO of Ford in 2006.
    - DocTomoe 4y ago
      > From what I've read, following the merger Boeing was no longer run out of Seattle but Chicago. How can you effectively manage a manufacturing facility from halfway across the country? It's worse than that: They deliberately moved management to Chicago to separate management decisions from engineers. All those pesky pocket-protector-wearing eggheads were considered a nuisance who were apparently hellbent to rain on MBA powerpoint parades.
bsimpson 4y ago
I wonder how much of this is a problem with Boeing in particular. If someone squinted at Airbus with the same scrutiny, would they find similar problems?
- atoav 4y ago
  I had some contact with Airbus engineers, and none of them complained about their managment, which might be an i dicator. But the sample size is small..
  - ggm 4y ago
    Because of the end of the 380, Airbus will be shedding staff at some point. If enough of them are disaffected, some of the NDA knowledge will leak. Sure, you have to discount sour grapes, but this is also true of the ex-Boeing engineers who are backfilling our belief in the corporate failure there. I don't think there is an elephant in the room, but there's potential for an unknown problem, sure. One way to understand the risk might be to do the differential on each companies commercial and military product, and its failure rate: the mil stuff has different pricing, and might have different 'six sigma' type rules around things because it has to manage being flown in much more variant constraints: bigger envelope, more risk. If they can do it "better" for mil spec, and don't do it better for commercial, then something is bust in the culture.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Airbus is hiring, actually. I know periods when Airbus had hiring freezes. I cannot remember a time were they reduced internal workforce in the last 20 years, despite sharp drops in their defense business. Also, Europe doesn't have US-style NDAs. >> One way to understand the risk might be Don't assume.
      - ggm 4y ago
        I don't understand don't assume I certainly don't assume, I hypothesised. Europe certainly does have nda. Not like the US I agree but people are bound by confidentiality agreements enforced in contracts all the time. Airbus cut 15,000 Jobs internationally in 2020. German unions forced them to halt layoffs in the EU until 2023
than3 4y ago
What a deceitful headline, the upper management knows about the flaws, they've been in spin control since 2012. There have been whistleblowers, and no corrective action was taken. There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media on this, and it was damning and that was done a decade ago. No one has been held to account for the systematic failures that were largely introduced as a result of upper management and propagated due to failures in process with the FAA. I'd like to see a corruption probe, and mandatory cool-off periods for regulators seeking to jump from regulation to working in the industry.
- gsibble 4y ago
  The Netflix documentary Downfall talked a little about it as well. It's absolutely cost cutting measures and horrendous engineering and QA across all of Boeing.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Sabotaged QA you mean. When you're getting hounded about polishing that apple because management wants crap out the door, that's a powerful message that not even some of the most insanely dedicated QA groups can fully defang.
- scoot 4y ago
  > There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media As the name might suggest, Al Jazeera isn't a US media company. And despite being Qatari state owned, has mostly retained its editorial independence. It reminds me of what the BBC used to represent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    Al Jazeera English was (at least initially) mostly ex-BBC staff.
  - rnk 4y ago
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
> There is some risk of the pendulum swinging too far the other way No, no, no, no! There is no „too much safety“ when we are talking about airplanes.
madsbuch 4y ago
Boeing, isn't that the investment company with a side hustle on air plane manufacturing?
marbex7 4y ago
I would like a system where the airline had to declare the type of aircraft used on the flight at the time of booking. If at the time of departure the aircraft model actually use for the flight is different then the passenger must on request be repaid the entire value of the ticket. This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust. Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions. Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence. An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves. Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
  I initially was skeptical but statistically the 737 MAX really is about 44x more prone to major loss of life than the 737NG![1] [1] http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
- belter 4y ago
  Does not resolve the problem, but for some models, this is a possible aproach: "How To Avoid Flying The Dreaded Boeing 737-MAX" https://www.godsavethepoints.com/how-to-avoid-flying-the-dreaded-boeing-737-max/ https://www.godsavethepoints.com/how-to-avoid-flying-the-dre...
- noelherrick 4y ago
  If you're flying commercial, I don't think laws are going to get made for you against the interests of airlines and aircraft manufacturers. And before you think market pressures will work, they know you'll keep flying.
- mdmglr 4y ago
  You can already vote as a customer as to which fleet you want to fly on. It may not be practical but it is possible. For example, jetBlue only flies Airbus and Embraer. Spirit and Frontier exclusively fly Airbus. Lufthansa's commercial fleet is mostly Airbus and the Boeing aircraft it does operate have good track records.

253 points by dangle1 4y ago

dangle1 4y ago

https://archive.ph/mby8X https://archive.ph/mby8X

pseingatl 4y ago

South Carolina. Should have kept manufacturing in Washington.

nickff 4y ago
The Washington manufacturing facilities seem to have issues as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-whistleblower.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-w... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/16/more-electrical-problems-found-on-some-boeing-737-max-sources-say-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/16/more-electrical-problems-fou...
- coredog64 4y ago
  737 fuselages are made in Kansas and then shipped to Renton via rail for final assembly.
winslow 4y ago
Why is the South Carolina factory worse than Washington?
- dylan604 4y ago
  As soon as you figure that out, I'm sure Boeing would love to know as well
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    They do know: - older, more mature organization - based near the engineering teams; frequent collaborations - unionized, highly skilled workforce The people who took over Boeing and moved the HQ out of SEA intentionally picked SC to union-bust their own workforce. MBAs just refuse to believe that workplace culture and experience matter — so they treat high skilled workers like dumb, replaceable cogs and then their companies fail a decade later when the senior/principal staff are incompetent or non-existent. That same mentality is why their new planes have major issues: They don’t have competent senior/principal engineers because they viewed mid-career engineers as “too expensive” — and so didn’t train any.
    - kasey_junk 4y ago
      Nit: The HQ was moved to Chicago, manufacturing was moved to SC.
      - rob74 4y ago
        I guess you have to read "moved the HQ out of SEA" (to Chicago) and "intentionally picked SC [for 787 final assembly] to union-bust their own workforce" separately, then it makes more sense...
    - wahern 4y ago
      The WSJ article was maddening in failing to even mention that for the years when the 787 was assembled in both Washington and South Carolina (up until 2020?), the vast majority of quality issues were coming from South Carolina. So much so that some airlines stipulated they would only take Washington-assembled planes. Now that the 787 is only assembled in South Carolina (Boeing doubled-down on their strategy despite the well-known quality issues), no doubt the ongoing defects issue is as least partly related, and not merely "microscope" related.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      Kansas is a right-to-work state and is where Boeing builds 737 fuselages, does passenger to cargo conversions, and does a hefty chunk of their work for the DoD on pre-merger products.
- nickff 4y ago
  The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state), which has caused poor quality. I have not seen any clear evidence of this, as all Boeing facilities seem to have QC issues. On a related note, I'm not sure how Boeing's QC compares to Airbus, though both seem to have similar aircraft availability rates, which would indicate similar levels of QC.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state) FWIW "right to work" is the normal terminology.
    - justinjlynn 4y ago
      "Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest. Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".
      - nickff 4y ago
        They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian? It's better to just allow people to name their own movement, otherwise, you end up endlessly fighting about names (i.e. are people 'pro-life' or 'anti-choice' and 'pro-murder'/'anti-life' and 'pro-choice').
        masklinn 4y ago
        > They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian? Right to work laws do not in any way provide a right to work.
        djbebs 4y ago
        They do though
- posguy 4y ago
  South Carolina planes were getting flown to Washington before delivery to customers when I had a friend still working there. He was finding metal shavings in the fuselage of the plane, along with tools, nicked wires and such. None of this should have made it out of the factory floor. Every crew that works on a plane has to certify (literally sign off a form) that when they worked on the plane they left it in good shape (no obvious defects, like metal shavings, tools left inside, etc). If the next shift comes in and finds dangerous debris or damage the prior crew should have noted, then the prior crew is required by the FAA to have a formal report written against them, as they have created a dangerous plane. Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Ultimately, he took a $25k hit paying back the Boeing relocation package and left after 10 months to work on repairing trains (which has been a significant improvement).
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Yeah, the idea is to have management put pressure on the people who left stuff in bad shape. Shooting the messenger isn't the right answer.
    - posguy 4y ago
      Shooting the messenger seems to be Boeing tradition of the last decade. When I was a kid, half the parents I knew worked at Boeing and were proud of the quality engineering or manufacturing they did, but over the past two decades Boeing has had this crew retire and has worked to shift to a blame the messenger culture.
      - FabHK 4y ago
        There's this documentary on Netflix that also notes the cultural shift, and largely blames it on the 1997 acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas, and the subsequent shift, roughly speaking, from an engineering-dominated culture to an MBA-dominated culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  - dang 4y ago
    Regional putdowns and flamewar will get you banned here, so please don't post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've unfortunately had to ask you many times for many years to stop breaking the HN guidelines. Would you please fix this? I don't want to ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687637 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29629314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29629314 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28859501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28859501 (Oct 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238567 (Aug 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27430570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27430570 (June 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20380355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20380355 (July 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288841 (June 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233836 (Oct 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536933 (April 2016)
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Ok

bombcar 4y ago

> The agency now has more power to choose which Boeing employees represent the FAA’s interests, and there are new protections for them from undue pressure by company managers. This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive. I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.

phkahler 4y ago
>> even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive. Yeah but after I read this: >The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf. I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.
rossdavidh 4y ago
1) it is absolutely a problem, but... 2) to fix it, you'd have to pay federal FAA employeees as much as equally-skilled members of the private sector at Boeing, and that hasn't happened in a long time. My understanding is this system started because the FAA's best technical people kept leaving for Boeing and other private-sector employers.
- martin8412 4y ago
  Build it into the cost of certification. You absolutely want the brightest people working their hardest to uncover potentially fatal issues so they can be fixed before people die.
  - macintux 4y ago

nisten 4y ago

That's what happens when your executives vindictively outsource important software to the cheapest devshop they can find. You end up with a product being built by a team that by default has no sense of ownership. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-... https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/boeings-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9anhour-engineers https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...

justinjlynn 4y ago
> by default has no sense of ownership. Because they don't own anything. They're paid to enrich the requirements into software specifications and nothing else. It gains them absolutely nothing - so why would they ever feel any sense of ownership after the job is delivered and accepted? The business relationship is predicated on them being disposable contract workers. At a minimum, a sense of ongoing engineering ownership requires an ongoing relationship predicated on trust and support - which requires ongoing financial support after the software project is 'completed' - which Boeing, in hiring contract workers, explicitly did not want to provide. Given this, how can we seriously expect the engineers of an outsourced development shop, working under a piecework contract, to ever feel any sense of ongoing ownership?
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > how can we seriously expect We get really good as gaslighting and hope to find gullible fools
- achow 4y ago
  By giving recognition for good work, which can go into their resume and/or elevate their status among industry peers.
  - justinjlynn 4y ago
    Ah, yes. Of course... "exposure". You know, the offering of that as compensation for work done has become a meme amongst creative professionals to the point of mocking absurdity.

assttoasstmgr 4y ago

> In 2019, they detected gaps between sections of the Dreamliner’s fuselage that were slightly wider than specified in the FAA-approved designs. The gaps, about the width of a piece of paper, were wider than the manufacturing tolerance of 0.005 of an inch allowed under the approved design. I feel like the article is really grasping at straws here, and I'd be willing to bet the author doesn't even comprehend how small this is. 0.005" is small. For the hardware-challenged: 0.005" is a typical manufacturing tolerance for a standard-spec PCB. Some of the Chinese board-houses that deal in high volume are higher than that[1]. The fact that they even found a gap this size on something the size of an airplane is amazing to me. [1] https://www.pcbway.com/pcb_prototype/PCB_Manufacturing_tolerances.html https://www.pcbway.com/pcb_prototype/PCB_Manufacturing_toler...

dzdt 4y ago
0.005 is 1/200. How thick is a 200 page book? About an inch seems right. Its not clear to me how much difference there is between 0.005" and the thickness of a sheet of paper.
- hathawsh 4y ago
  The thickness of typical copy paper in the US is 0.1 mm. I measure it by measuring the height of a ream (500 sheets) and dividing by 500. This bit of trivia turns out to be rather helpful for 3D printing. Also, 0.005 inches = 0.127mm, so we're talking about slightly more tolerance than the thickness of copy paper.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    How do you use this in 3D printing?
    - r2_pilot 4y ago
      It's helpful to know how high above the print bed to print, so you can slide a piece of paper freely underneath the nozzle while only just feeling a tiny bit of drag from the nozzle. That way you have enough space to put your material down.

black_13 4y ago

ChicagoDave 4y ago

I’ve flown three times since the 800 has been green lighted. I have very intentionally picked Airbus flights. I’ll never get on one of those Boeing jets.

rootusrootus 4y ago
The 800? I've no problem getting in a Boeing airplane. The 737NG, in particular, has one of the best (if not THE best) safety records in history.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Airplane safety is a function of fatalities over capacity, flight hours and model service life. As such, planes that have been in production longer usually tend to become "more safe" (which is a self-fulfilling thing - notoriously unsafe planes eventually won't be sold anymore). See [1] for a short overview. As such, the 737NG - which had fatalities - is unlikely to be a contender, considering the much older A340 has had none. [1] https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-planes-to-fly-in-by-accident-statistics/ https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-planes-to-fly-in-by-accid...
assttoasstmgr 4y ago
Good thinking. Airbus planes are impervious to software glitches[1] and sensor failures[2] that result in catastrophic loss of control of the aircraft. Better bring a gas mask[3] though. And bring one for the flight crew too in case they become incapacitated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 [3] https://viewfromthewing.com/is-airbus-doing-enough-to-stop-the-fumes-that-are-making-people-sick/ https://viewfromthewing.com/is-airbus-doing-enough-to-stop-t...
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  AF 447 was first and foremost a problem between the controls and the seat. The sensor problem you're referring to did not render the plane incapable of flying, but it did remove one level of idiot proofing. As a result one of the pilots pulled the stick back and didn't relent even as the plane stalled. If you did that in a Boeing plane (or any plane) with functioning sensors you'd have the same end result.

twobitshifter 4y ago

Has anyone noticed the windows on these planes become very hot when dimmed? They don’t have regular blinds but instead include a gel which can be electrically dimmed. They aren’t hot enough to burn you but uncomfortable to touch.

BostonEnginerd 4y ago
My experience with regular windows on airplanes is that the shutters can get quite hot as well. The energy they absorb from the sun has to go somewhere — and it gets radiated away as heat.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  That’s possible. I was wondering if it is typical and I was just attributing it to the new design
  - usefulcat 4y ago
    I've never seen that design but I have seen lots of shuttered airplane windows get quite hot due to the sun shining on them.
robbiep 4y ago
Depends entirely on if you’re on the sun side or not
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
I got to work on these windows a decade ago! They use basically the same chemistry as in auto-dimming rearview mirrors. Feel your mirror sometime when you're driving in traffic at night on the interstate and it's been dimmed because of the vehicle following you for some time...it will be perfectly cold. The electrochromic material between the panes goes through an oxidation/redox reaction in the presence of a voltage. In circuit, it functions something like a low-storage battery or capacitor. It does not have enough leakage current to cause it to get hot, that's just the effect of the sun on the plane.

alliao 4y ago

makes me wonder if COVID saved Boeing

ummonk 4y ago

Some passages in the article are suggestive that Boeing is being proactive about finding issues, even beyond what the FAA is making them do. It’s a welcome change and hopefully they remain serious about safety despite the pushback from customers who’re focused on cost and timelines.

ncmncm 4y ago
It is what their PR staff identified would increase people's confidence if they published things saying it. That has nothing to do with anything actually happening in the factories, except more or less by accident.

smadge 4y ago

The 737 MAX didn’t crash because it wasn’t manufactured to the specified standards. It had a flawed design. No amount of precision can fix that.

mc32 4y ago
I think it's more of the airliner version of the X-29. Yes, it can be made to fly, but only when controlled against normal aeronautic tendencies. In other words, unless you have compensating (automated) controls, the things would not fly as a conventional aircraft and would soon lose control and lift.
- jquery 4y ago
  As far as I'm aware, it would glide as well as any other 737 if both engines were cut. It merely had a slightly lower maximum nose-up because of the increased engine thrust or something like that.
  - mc32 4y ago
    I'm not in aeronautics obviously and I overstated the case, but my understanding is that the MAX series have different flight characteristics (behaves differently) due to bigger engines which also were moved forward both of which resulted in altering the aerodynamics and flight characteristics --making it different to non MAX 737s... so far, so good. They fly different and you have to treat them differently. But in order to make the pre MAX 737 pilots pre-crosstrained for the new MAXes they installed MCAS systems that made the controls feel like they would respond in a pre MAX 737. In other words computerized compensation. But due to the new flight characteristics you could not exactly fly it like a ore MAX 737 and so if you did bad things could happen if you were not being attentive.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      This isn’t correct. There’s one portion of the flight regime where the new engines result in different characteristics. To counter that, the MAX has an automated stick pusher. What’s the alleged fix? Pull the breaker on the overhead panel. There’s a similar failure mode in pre-MAX 737s called “runaway trim”. The giant trim wheels on the center pedestal spin in a loud and attention-getting fashion. The fix? Pull the breaker on the overhead panel.

rootusrootus 4y ago

How much of this is to be expected anyway? I.e. in any sufficiently complicated system, you can never find all the flaws. Is there a particular reason to believe the 787 in particular has a disproportionate number of flaws given what it is?

joe_the_user 4y ago
The reasons I've heard is that after merging McDonald-Douglass, Boeing developed a culture of cost-cutting and gutting engineering, and it's only gotten worse over time.
- GianFabien 4y ago
  From what I've read, following the merger Boeing was no longer run out of Seattle but Chicago. How can you effectively manage a manufacturing facility from halfway across the country? What we are seeing is regulatory capture by McDonald-Douglass top level executives and board of the FAA. Standard operating procedure for the capitalists. Everything is permissible as long as it increases their and the shareholders' profiteering.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    There’s a huge facility in Everett where they “manage the manufacturing facility”. It was built during the 777 era and, at least when I was there, everyone called it the “Taj Mulally” after Alan Mulally the director of engineering. Mulally stayed with Boeing in increasingly higher positions until he left to be the CEO of Ford in 2006.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    > From what I've read, following the merger Boeing was no longer run out of Seattle but Chicago. How can you effectively manage a manufacturing facility from halfway across the country? It's worse than that: They deliberately moved management to Chicago to separate management decisions from engineers. All those pesky pocket-protector-wearing eggheads were considered a nuisance who were apparently hellbent to rain on MBA powerpoint parades.

bsimpson 4y ago

I wonder how much of this is a problem with Boeing in particular. If someone squinted at Airbus with the same scrutiny, would they find similar problems?

atoav 4y ago
I had some contact with Airbus engineers, and none of them complained about their managment, which might be an i dicator. But the sample size is small..
- ggm 4y ago
  Because of the end of the 380, Airbus will be shedding staff at some point. If enough of them are disaffected, some of the NDA knowledge will leak. Sure, you have to discount sour grapes, but this is also true of the ex-Boeing engineers who are backfilling our belief in the corporate failure there. I don't think there is an elephant in the room, but there's potential for an unknown problem, sure. One way to understand the risk might be to do the differential on each companies commercial and military product, and its failure rate: the mil stuff has different pricing, and might have different 'six sigma' type rules around things because it has to manage being flown in much more variant constraints: bigger envelope, more risk. If they can do it "better" for mil spec, and don't do it better for commercial, then something is bust in the culture.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Airbus is hiring, actually. I know periods when Airbus had hiring freezes. I cannot remember a time were they reduced internal workforce in the last 20 years, despite sharp drops in their defense business. Also, Europe doesn't have US-style NDAs. >> One way to understand the risk might be Don't assume.
    - ggm 4y ago
      I don't understand don't assume I certainly don't assume, I hypothesised. Europe certainly does have nda. Not like the US I agree but people are bound by confidentiality agreements enforced in contracts all the time. Airbus cut 15,000 Jobs internationally in 2020. German unions forced them to halt layoffs in the EU until 2023

than3 4y ago

What a deceitful headline, the upper management knows about the flaws, they've been in spin control since 2012. There have been whistleblowers, and no corrective action was taken. There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media on this, and it was damning and that was done a decade ago. No one has been held to account for the systematic failures that were largely introduced as a result of upper management and propagated due to failures in process with the FAA. I'd like to see a corruption probe, and mandatory cool-off periods for regulators seeking to jump from regulation to working in the industry.

gsibble 4y ago
The Netflix documentary Downfall talked a little about it as well. It's absolutely cost cutting measures and horrendous engineering and QA across all of Boeing.
- salawat 4y ago
  Sabotaged QA you mean. When you're getting hounded about polishing that apple because management wants crap out the door, that's a powerful message that not even some of the most insanely dedicated QA groups can fully defang.
scoot 4y ago
> There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media As the name might suggest, Al Jazeera isn't a US media company. And despite being Qatari state owned, has mostly retained its editorial independence. It reminds me of what the BBC used to represent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Al Jazeera English was (at least initially) mostly ex-BBC staff.
- rnk 4y ago

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

> There is some risk of the pendulum swinging too far the other way No, no, no, no! There is no „too much safety“ when we are talking about airplanes.

madsbuch 4y ago

Boeing, isn't that the investment company with a side hustle on air plane manufacturing?

marbex7 4y ago

I would like a system where the airline had to declare the type of aircraft used on the flight at the time of booking. If at the time of departure the aircraft model actually use for the flight is different then the passenger must on request be repaid the entire value of the ticket. This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust. Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions. Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence. An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves. Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.

unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
I initially was skeptical but statistically the 737 MAX really is about 44x more prone to major loss of life than the 737NG![1] [1] http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
belter 4y ago
Does not resolve the problem, but for some models, this is a possible aproach: "How To Avoid Flying The Dreaded Boeing 737-MAX" https://www.godsavethepoints.com/how-to-avoid-flying-the-dreaded-boeing-737-max/ https://www.godsavethepoints.com/how-to-avoid-flying-the-dre...
noelherrick 4y ago
If you're flying commercial, I don't think laws are going to get made for you against the interests of airlines and aircraft manufacturers. And before you think market pressures will work, they know you'll keep flying.
mdmglr 4y ago
You can already vote as a customer as to which fleet you want to fly on. It may not be practical but it is possible. For example, jetBlue only flies Airbus and Embraer. Spirit and Frontier exclusively fly Airbus. Lufthansa's commercial fleet is mostly Airbus and the Boeing aircraft it does operate have good track records.