12 ms·

"We’re sending our audit people to audit their quality control systems and processes to make sure that every aircraft that comes off that production line, that

"We’re sending our audit people to audit their quality control systems and processes to make sure that every aircraft that comes off that production line, that comes to Alaska has the highest levels of excellence and quality," he said. This seems crazy to me. Alaska Airlines doesn't trust Boeing enough that they're sending their audit team to Boeing to check for quality. Though safety inspections were initially estimated to take between four and eight hours per plane, Whitaker said they’ve “been longer than that.” “We’ve required a lot of measurements,” he said. “Once the area’s exposed, we want to understand bolt tensions and gaps and things of that nature. So we’ve required more data than would normally be the case because we really wanted to understand the issue.” Also, the FAA is at Boeing checking their quality process. They're only doing it for the door and bolts. The problem is that we don't know which other parts and systems Boeing might have quality issues for. Yes, I'm confident they'll make the bolts tighter on the door. But what about the entire plane's quality check? I feel like the FAA should ground the plane until they audit every single thing about the plane. That's the only way I would personally feel confident.

H8crilA 3y ago
It's interesting that they managed to get this access. It may be useful in the lawsuit that will surely follow.
- hhh 3y ago
  This is pretty normal is it not? In the automotive world when you have quality or run rate problems the big 3 company will have someone on the line watching.
  - swiftcoder 3y ago
    Yeah, same for consumer tech. We always had our own people embedded in the manufacturing operations in China/Taiwan/Vietnam to keep things running smoothly and ensure there were no miscommunications around specifications.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  When you're buying a ~$100M/unit where the manufacturer is making 15+% margin, you get pretty good access to do what you need to do in order to feel comfortable with the purchase.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  [dead]
londons_explore 3y ago
It makes sense from a commercial perspective. Every fault you can find is a bit of a discount off the plane price
- aurareturn 3y ago
  It's not that. It's the fact that Boeing is letting an Airline do this. So now what? Every Airline is going to send their team to check their own Max planes during production? And if an Airline doesn't send a team to check on their plane, does that mean quality control is worse?
  - dannyw 3y ago
    There's presumably clauses in the contract that let Alaska cancel orders due to issues like this; especially now that the FAA and NTSB is involved. Boeing might be willing to let airlines do things they won't normally consider, to try and save these orders.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      Let’s say Alaska Airlines returns all Max planes… They can go bankrupt, because it will disrupt their business too much. So, as in every negotiation, they can’t submit Boeing to the maximum penalty.
  - jagged-chisel 3y ago
    It makes sense to Boeing. They now have a path to externalizing QA costs to the airlines.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      5D accountant chess
    - lupire 3y ago
      That will factor into pricing.
tmalsburg2 3y ago
> Alaska Airlines doesn't trust Boeing enough They don't trust Boeing enough or their customers don't trust Boeing enough and it's a PR measure to calm the passengers' nerves. Could also be a bit of both.
- distortionfield 3y ago
  To me it says their lawyers don’t trust Boeing enough. My cynical side says companies never give a shit what their customers think in an industry like aviation where they have so few or no other real options.
  - internetter 3y ago
    If people don’t think planes are safe, they won’t fly on planes
    - BurningFrog 3y ago
      There are some people like that, sure. But most of us know driving isn't safe, and still do it daily.
    - dessimus 3y ago
      More people die in the US Every. Single. Day. on the roads than in the last decade in total from commercial flying, but sure flying is unsafe. https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
      - dylan604 3y ago
        You're using facts in an emotional argument. When the phrase "doesn't feel" is used, logic goes out the window. Have you not ever had an argument with a significant other?
      - Zigurd 3y ago
        Commercial aviation is about 10X safer than driving per mile. That is a valid comparison if you need to cover a distance and have a choice of driving or flying. You should also add an amount of risk for driving to the airport. Flying is clearly safer than driving for long distances. It is less clear if the choice is driving to a beach two hours away or flying to a different beach two hours away by air.
cgeier 3y ago
This seems to be common practice at Airbus. I recently did a public tour of one of Airbus' major assembly lines. I remember the tour guide telling us, that their customers (the airlines) either have their own QA people on the line when their planes get assembled, or pay another company to do it for them.
- someotherperson 3y ago
  Yep, it's a very "trust but verify" industry.
  - laserlight 3y ago
    > trust but verify I would like to phrase this as “trust and verify”, because the state of trust arises from being open to verifiability, contrary to common misconception that they are against each other.
    - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
      It's also insurance against systemic failure at Airbus.
    - lupire 3y ago
      It's short for "trust, but also verify". They are naturally against each other, which is why the "but" statement is meaningful. "Slow and steady" vs "fast but steady". "Move fast and break things" vs "move fast but don't break things".
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      It should be "trust because you verify". The other phrases don't really make sense.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    Given the relative costs of their own inspection, the cost of the plane and the cost of a crash or downtime, it seems to make perfect sense. Plus the fact that these machines have a 30 year working life.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
Why is Alaska doing this? I agree, the FAA should absolutely ground them all and white glove everything.
_ph_ 3y ago
In the current situation, sending your own engineers to the manufacturer is the best way to ensure an independent check of the whole production chain. Much easier than having your mechanics take the airplane apart after delivery.
- 3pt14159 3y ago
  The problem is that there are many of these planes that have already been delivered. They're going to have to find some way of ensuring QA for those before they're allowed in the air again.
  - _ph_ 3y ago
    Right. They have to be taken apart. All doors have to be checked systematically and also they need to do random probes to sample for possible other systematic manufacturing defects. Probably talking to their mechanics, they might quickly identify other problematic components which might have been noticed during maintenance but not strongly enough reported and tracked. Basically everything that needed repairs which shouldn't have been needed.
- dylan604 3y ago
  This is pretty standard for people manufacturing in China. I guess someone assumed because it was "Made in USA" meant the due diligence wasn't necessary?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    In decades past, you could actually trust Boeing's QA processes. I think there may be a lot of people who haven't got the memo that Boeing is a different company now.
bumby 3y ago
>Alaska Airlines doesn't trust Boeing enough that they're sending their audit team to Boeing to check for quality. Granted they are different divisions, but after the CST-100 debacle [1], NASA also sent a team to audit them [2]. Some of the off-channel remarks by NASA were striking. [1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/boeing-starliner-error-would-have-been-caught-with-expanded-testing/ https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/boeing-starliner-error-wou... [2] https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/02/07/nasa-shares-initial-findings-from-boeing-starliner-orbital-flight-test-investigation/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/02/07/nasa-shares...
- mlinhares 3y ago
  > “If we would have run the integrated test with ULA through the first orbital insertion burn timeframe, we would have seen that we would have missed the orbital insertion burn” I can't believe I've read that. There's no saving this company.
  - twh270 3y ago
    That section reads like a Bad Advice column for software testing in general. "Ehh, don't bother with end to end testing -- testing each part in isolation will be fine." Maybe fine for an e-commerce site or game, where the stakes are measured mainly in lost revenue/customers and a team of engineers burning the midnight oil to sort the problem. Not so fine for spaceflight.
    - boringg 3y ago
      When lax QA testing / engineering practices / boost the share price strategies from move fast break stuff e-commerce/social media practices seep into real world systems companies.
      - Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago
        From an outsider's perspective, it seems "move fast and break things" worked well enough for SpaceX. Boeing et al seem to be following the "move slow and hide problems so we don't fix anything" mantra.
pixelesque 3y ago
This apparent anonymous comment from a Boeing employee about the number of issues happening in their qaulity system is a bit worrying: https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962 https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installa...
- kloch 3y ago
  > So, where are the bolts? Probably sitting forgotten and unlabeled (because there is no formal record number to label them with) on a work-in-progress bench, unless someone already tossed them in the scrap bin to tidy up. So this is like when I would take apart and re-assemble everything when I was a little kid. Sometimes I would have several screws left over. It's a good thing I wasn't making airplanes!
  - brk 3y ago
    >It's a good thing I wasn't making airplanes! Although it appears you would have been immensely qualified to do so.
    - smegger001 3y ago
      no not immensely qualified. Merely as qualified as Boeing which is a fairly low bar apparently.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    This seems very funny/strange to me. Way back in the early/mid-90s, the company I worked for invested a lot of money to switch to some new computer accounting/inventory system that ran on AS400 (just to show its age). The software was originally built to track all of the parts and pieces to build an airplane. What type of airplane I don't know, but we made VHS tapes so the level of complexity between and airplane and VHS cassette always seems to be out of whack. After that, I just assumed all airplane manufactures used something like this.
- FredPret 3y ago
  That comment thread is wild. Do you think it is genuine? If what that commenter says is true, the whole company ought to be shut down. It’d also be an easy sell for either of the two presidential candidates - one can say he’s clamping down on incompetent elites who aren’t that elite after all; the other can talk about a profit-seeking company killing Americans.
mentos 3y ago
Yea the doors and bolts are just the canary in the coal mine.
toss1 3y ago
The Boeing CEO's quote is really bad: ".... We will follow the lead of the FAA and support our customers every step of the way.” It should be: "we will lead the way in putting engineering first, and building in quality from before the first part is built" But those financialists just cannot see anything but their short term profits. Executive earnings for the past decade+, when they goosed profits by cutting quality, should be clawed back.
- lupire 3y ago
  Yeah that's the aeronautics version of "We will use your information for X, Y, Z, and other purposes permitted by law". It's the "genuine leather" of aeronautics. It's the lowest possible standard that keeps the speaker out of jail.
photochemsyn 3y ago
It's also the case that Alaska doesn't trust the FAA - for good reason. There used to be FAA-linked auditors that reported back to the FAA directly, even though they were paid by Boeing (i.e. they could be fired by the FAA, but not by Boeing). This was the case up through 2004: > "This all changed in 2004, when a committee made up largely of industry backers passed a rule establishing the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) system. The ODA system transformed the way DERs worked. Now called Authorized Representatives (ARs), these employees reported not to the FAA, but to Boeing managers." Regulatory Capture at the FAA, Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy Leo Kalb Bourke, November 12, 2021 https://www.5clpp.com/?p=4026 https://www.5clpp.com/?p=4026
spywaregorilla 3y ago
Seems quite shocking that an audit of structural integrity of an entire plane down to the bolt level takes only 4 hours in anyones estimate
pdpi 3y ago
> The problem is that we don't know which other parts and systems Boeing might have quality issues for. We don't need to go through everything, at least not immediately. We know the door/bolts have issues, so we can just scrutinise those really carefully. The crucial part is not looking at whether there are issues (we already know there are), but at the nature of those issues. Are they localised and contained, or are they systemic? The extent to which they're systemic tells us how worried we need to be about everything else in the planes (Personally, given the MCAS situation, I don't believe for a moment these issues are not systemic, but a layperson's semi-educated guess isn't a valid basis for an airplane audit)
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
>This seems crazy to me. Alaska Airlines doesn't trust Boeing enough that they're sending their audit team to Boeing to check for quality. I wouldn't say it's crazy. When buying industrial equipment, it's commonplace to have a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) where engineers from the customer travel to the supplier factory to verify everything is built to spec and functions as expected. Upon passing FAT, equipment is shipped to site and installed where it then undergoes a site acceptance test (SAT). After SAT, the equipment is "handed over" to the client. The FAT-SAT process can be applied to anything from small individual pieces of equipment all the way up to huge skids/packages. In shipbuilding, classification agencies like ABS or DNV have inspectors that monitor the construction of a ship.
justinclift 3y ago
Sounds like the US airlines should get together and make their own "Boeing QA" group that fully QA's Boeing aircraft upon receipt. aka share the costs of doing the QA (of the full aircraft themselves

H8crilA 3y ago

It's interesting that they managed to get this access. It may be useful in the lawsuit that will surely follow.

hhh 3y ago
This is pretty normal is it not? In the automotive world when you have quality or run rate problems the big 3 company will have someone on the line watching.
- swiftcoder 3y ago
  Yeah, same for consumer tech. We always had our own people embedded in the manufacturing operations in China/Taiwan/Vietnam to keep things running smoothly and ensure there were no miscommunications around specifications.
sokoloff 3y ago
When you're buying a ~$100M/unit where the manufacturer is making 15+% margin, you get pretty good access to do what you need to do in order to feel comfortable with the purchase.
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]

londons_explore 3y ago

It makes sense from a commercial perspective. Every fault you can find is a bit of a discount off the plane price

aurareturn 3y ago
It's not that. It's the fact that Boeing is letting an Airline do this. So now what? Every Airline is going to send their team to check their own Max planes during production? And if an Airline doesn't send a team to check on their plane, does that mean quality control is worse?
- dannyw 3y ago
  There's presumably clauses in the contract that let Alaska cancel orders due to issues like this; especially now that the FAA and NTSB is involved. Boeing might be willing to let airlines do things they won't normally consider, to try and save these orders.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    Let’s say Alaska Airlines returns all Max planes… They can go bankrupt, because it will disrupt their business too much. So, as in every negotiation, they can’t submit Boeing to the maximum penalty.
- jagged-chisel 3y ago
  It makes sense to Boeing. They now have a path to externalizing QA costs to the airlines.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    5D accountant chess
  - lupire 3y ago
    That will factor into pricing.

tmalsburg2 3y ago

> Alaska Airlines doesn't trust Boeing enough They don't trust Boeing enough or their customers don't trust Boeing enough and it's a PR measure to calm the passengers' nerves. Could also be a bit of both.

distortionfield 3y ago
To me it says their lawyers don’t trust Boeing enough. My cynical side says companies never give a shit what their customers think in an industry like aviation where they have so few or no other real options.
- internetter 3y ago
  If people don’t think planes are safe, they won’t fly on planes
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    There are some people like that, sure. But most of us know driving isn't safe, and still do it daily.
  - dessimus 3y ago
    More people die in the US Every. Single. Day. on the roads than in the last decade in total from commercial flying, but sure flying is unsafe. https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
    - dylan604 3y ago
      You're using facts in an emotional argument. When the phrase "doesn't feel" is used, logic goes out the window. Have you not ever had an argument with a significant other?
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      Commercial aviation is about 10X safer than driving per mile. That is a valid comparison if you need to cover a distance and have a choice of driving or flying. You should also add an amount of risk for driving to the airport. Flying is clearly safer than driving for long distances. It is less clear if the choice is driving to a beach two hours away or flying to a different beach two hours away by air.

cgeier 3y ago

This seems to be common practice at Airbus. I recently did a public tour of one of Airbus' major assembly lines. I remember the tour guide telling us, that their customers (the airlines) either have their own QA people on the line when their planes get assembled, or pay another company to do it for them.

someotherperson 3y ago
Yep, it's a very "trust but verify" industry.
- laserlight 3y ago
  > trust but verify I would like to phrase this as “trust and verify”, because the state of trust arises from being open to verifiability, contrary to common misconception that they are against each other.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    It's also insurance against systemic failure at Airbus.
  - lupire 3y ago
    It's short for "trust, but also verify". They are naturally against each other, which is why the "but" statement is meaningful. "Slow and steady" vs "fast but steady". "Move fast and break things" vs "move fast but don't break things".
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    It should be "trust because you verify". The other phrases don't really make sense.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  Given the relative costs of their own inspection, the cost of the plane and the cost of a crash or downtime, it seems to make perfect sense. Plus the fact that these machines have a 30 year working life.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

Why is Alaska doing this? I agree, the FAA should absolutely ground them all and white glove everything.

_ph_ 3y ago

In the current situation, sending your own engineers to the manufacturer is the best way to ensure an independent check of the whole production chain. Much easier than having your mechanics take the airplane apart after delivery.

3pt14159 3y ago
The problem is that there are many of these planes that have already been delivered. They're going to have to find some way of ensuring QA for those before they're allowed in the air again.
- _ph_ 3y ago
  Right. They have to be taken apart. All doors have to be checked systematically and also they need to do random probes to sample for possible other systematic manufacturing defects. Probably talking to their mechanics, they might quickly identify other problematic components which might have been noticed during maintenance but not strongly enough reported and tracked. Basically everything that needed repairs which shouldn't have been needed.
dylan604 3y ago
This is pretty standard for people manufacturing in China. I guess someone assumed because it was "Made in USA" meant the due diligence wasn't necessary?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  In decades past, you could actually trust Boeing's QA processes. I think there may be a lot of people who haven't got the memo that Boeing is a different company now.

bumby 3y ago

>Alaska Airlines doesn't trust Boeing enough that they're sending their audit team to Boeing to check for quality. Granted they are different divisions, but after the CST-100 debacle [1], NASA also sent a team to audit them [2]. Some of the off-channel remarks by NASA were striking. [1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/boeing-starliner-error-would-have-been-caught-with-expanded-testing/ https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/boeing-starliner-error-wou... [2] https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/02/07/nasa-shares-initial-findings-from-boeing-starliner-orbital-flight-test-investigation/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/02/07/nasa-shares...

mlinhares 3y ago
> “If we would have run the integrated test with ULA through the first orbital insertion burn timeframe, we would have seen that we would have missed the orbital insertion burn” I can't believe I've read that. There's no saving this company.
- twh270 3y ago
  That section reads like a Bad Advice column for software testing in general. "Ehh, don't bother with end to end testing -- testing each part in isolation will be fine." Maybe fine for an e-commerce site or game, where the stakes are measured mainly in lost revenue/customers and a team of engineers burning the midnight oil to sort the problem. Not so fine for spaceflight.
  - boringg 3y ago
    When lax QA testing / engineering practices / boost the share price strategies from move fast break stuff e-commerce/social media practices seep into real world systems companies.
    - Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago
      From an outsider's perspective, it seems "move fast and break things" worked well enough for SpaceX. Boeing et al seem to be following the "move slow and hide problems so we don't fix anything" mantra.

pixelesque 3y ago

This apparent anonymous comment from a Boeing employee about the number of issues happening in their qaulity system is a bit worrying: https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962 https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installa...

kloch 3y ago
> So, where are the bolts? Probably sitting forgotten and unlabeled (because there is no formal record number to label them with) on a work-in-progress bench, unless someone already tossed them in the scrap bin to tidy up. So this is like when I would take apart and re-assemble everything when I was a little kid. Sometimes I would have several screws left over. It's a good thing I wasn't making airplanes!
- brk 3y ago
  >It's a good thing I wasn't making airplanes! Although it appears you would have been immensely qualified to do so.
  - smegger001 3y ago
    no not immensely qualified. Merely as qualified as Boeing which is a fairly low bar apparently.
- dylan604 3y ago
  This seems very funny/strange to me. Way back in the early/mid-90s, the company I worked for invested a lot of money to switch to some new computer accounting/inventory system that ran on AS400 (just to show its age). The software was originally built to track all of the parts and pieces to build an airplane. What type of airplane I don't know, but we made VHS tapes so the level of complexity between and airplane and VHS cassette always seems to be out of whack. After that, I just assumed all airplane manufactures used something like this.
FredPret 3y ago
That comment thread is wild. Do you think it is genuine? If what that commenter says is true, the whole company ought to be shut down. It’d also be an easy sell for either of the two presidential candidates - one can say he’s clamping down on incompetent elites who aren’t that elite after all; the other can talk about a profit-seeking company killing Americans.

mentos 3y ago

Yea the doors and bolts are just the canary in the coal mine.

toss1 3y ago

The Boeing CEO's quote is really bad: ".... We will follow the lead of the FAA and support our customers every step of the way.” It should be: "we will lead the way in putting engineering first, and building in quality from before the first part is built" But those financialists just cannot see anything but their short term profits. Executive earnings for the past decade+, when they goosed profits by cutting quality, should be clawed back.

lupire 3y ago
Yeah that's the aeronautics version of "We will use your information for X, Y, Z, and other purposes permitted by law". It's the "genuine leather" of aeronautics. It's the lowest possible standard that keeps the speaker out of jail.

photochemsyn 3y ago

It's also the case that Alaska doesn't trust the FAA - for good reason. There used to be FAA-linked auditors that reported back to the FAA directly, even though they were paid by Boeing (i.e. they could be fired by the FAA, but not by Boeing). This was the case up through 2004: > "This all changed in 2004, when a committee made up largely of industry backers passed a rule establishing the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) system. The ODA system transformed the way DERs worked. Now called Authorized Representatives (ARs), these employees reported not to the FAA, but to Boeing managers." Regulatory Capture at the FAA, Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy Leo Kalb Bourke, November 12, 2021 https://www.5clpp.com/?p=4026 https://www.5clpp.com/?p=4026

spywaregorilla 3y ago

Seems quite shocking that an audit of structural integrity of an entire plane down to the bolt level takes only 4 hours in anyones estimate

pdpi 3y ago

> The problem is that we don't know which other parts and systems Boeing might have quality issues for. We don't need to go through everything, at least not immediately. We know the door/bolts have issues, so we can just scrutinise those really carefully. The crucial part is not looking at whether there are issues (we already know there are), but at the nature of those issues. Are they localised and contained, or are they systemic? The extent to which they're systemic tells us how worried we need to be about everything else in the planes (Personally, given the MCAS situation, I don't believe for a moment these issues are not systemic, but a layperson's semi-educated guess isn't a valid basis for an airplane audit)

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

>This seems crazy to me. Alaska Airlines doesn't trust Boeing enough that they're sending their audit team to Boeing to check for quality. I wouldn't say it's crazy. When buying industrial equipment, it's commonplace to have a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) where engineers from the customer travel to the supplier factory to verify everything is built to spec and functions as expected. Upon passing FAT, equipment is shipped to site and installed where it then undergoes a site acceptance test (SAT). After SAT, the equipment is "handed over" to the client. The FAT-SAT process can be applied to anything from small individual pieces of equipment all the way up to huge skids/packages. In shipbuilding, classification agencies like ABS or DNV have inspectors that monitor the construction of a ship.

justinclift 3y ago

Sounds like the US airlines should get together and make their own "Boeing QA" group that fully QA's Boeing aircraft upon receipt. aka share the costs of doing the QA (of the full aircraft themselves