5 ms·

FAA Investigates Claims by Boeing Whistle-Blower About Flaws in 787 Dreamliner

48 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

Davidbrcz 3y ago
[flagged]
- TylerE 3y ago
  The first wasn't the slightest. He had testified a decade earlier and had both personal problems and several recent deaths in the family, including at least one suicide. Don't muddy the waters of a serious issue with this conspiracy garbage that doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny.
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - itscrush 3y ago
    A decade earlier? Barnett was in the middle of deposition against Boeing and was located at the hotel for the whistleblower retaliation case. [1]https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-dead https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Ok, I misremembered, it wasn't quite a decade, but the testimony happened in 2017, not recently. Why kill him almost 8 years later?
      - salawat 3y ago
        Unless you've ever been a QM (Quality Manager), and a damn good one to boot, you wouldn't understand. We're a bit like Internal Affairs. We know where all the skeletons are. We take notes. To a point, as long as there is hope something'll actually get remedied, it doesn't have to go much further than that. Prove mens rea though, and we tend to be that perfect combination of places, names, who was involved, what they said, and where to find the evidence, because we were the ones who put it there. Just in case. A QA/QM with a conscience, notes, and evidence is an exec's absolute worst nightmare from the legal liability perspective. Criminal charges that pierce the corporate veil need names. If you were going to merc someone, they'd be the ones to merc.
    - dralley 3y ago
      It was a second retaliation case against Boeing from this one person. I don't know what you think he would have testified now that would have been done previously.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
CoastalCoder 3y ago
> Boeing concedes those manufacturing changes were made, but a spokesman for the company, Paul Lewis, said there was “no impact on durability or safe longevity of the airframe.” > > Mr. Lewis said Boeing had done extensive testing on the Dreamliner and “determined that this is not an immediate safety of flight issue.” I'd guess that Boeing's PR department no longer thinks Congress and/or the public will believe statements like "trust us, it's fine." What does the PR playbook say to do in situations like this? I hope the answer is: share the engineering data and analyses, and make a public argument for why Boeing's is right and the whiste-blower is mistaken. I fear the answer will be something that's less likely to ultimately save lives.
- johnnyo 3y ago
  Isn’t the claim that the issue is long term safety? Saying “there is no immediate safety of flight issue” kinda dodges the question. Perfect PR language
petre 3y ago
Let's just hope that this whistleblower won't commit suicide the day before testifying in court.
- KenArrari 3y ago
  It's crazy how we all just accept that he was definitely assassinated but know nothing will come of it.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    No one should just accept that. That’s a lazy narrative being propped up by pripgafists distorting the facts. He had already testified years earlier.
    - GaveDrohl 3y ago
      Fair enough, but who won't testify in the future out of fear of being murdered? It still served a purpose of true.
    - benzible 3y ago
      I agree that no one should just accept it, but credible people including ex Boeing execs don't dismiss the possibility.. > Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied. More importantly, he added, “there is a principle in American law that there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony. Let’s say you rob a bank and while traveling at high speed in the getaway you run down a pedestrian and kill them. That’s second-degree murder at the very least.” [1] There needs to be an investigation. [1] https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/ https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-2...
    - MilStdJunkie 3y ago
      It's not just a lazy narrative. It's a profitable one. That narrative could help save their ass. I wouldn't be surprised if legions of paid "social media analysts" are barfing this out 24/7 on the grams and the twits. Think about it. What's going to have a better impact on your disgruntled workforce: 1) the idea that someone ratted out big Ma B, got sidelined, got sad, then killed themselves? or 2) the idea that rats get murdered? I don't know about you, but with 2 I'd be definitely be thinking twice before calling the FAA or anyone else.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Oh boy, composites! That brings me back. Time for another story, from the lands of not-necessarily-big-B-but-could-very-well-be, told by someone who has no idea whatsoever what he's doing. New product, new structures. Composites! Leadership says that Flight Science needs to sim every single top level assembly permutation - that's a hundred some different airframes, in a few dozen flight regimes each. Now, if you paid money for a decent CAD/CAM package, those big packages have prefabs for all sorts of things when it comes to composites - you don't need to sim from nothing. This being the beloved military industrial complex[1], no one wants to pay money for anything, so sim from nothing it was. Poor bastards in Flight Science spend seven hundred hours simming every single flyable configuration. Why did I care? I was keeping a thumb in this pie because I planned to integrate with their sim runs, keeping my team from needing to drawn graphs manually every time they updated. Hook up the data to a graphing doohickey, key in the right aircraft / configurations, and never need to draw graphs again. Anyway. A week goes by, I send an email. Nothing. A month goes by, I drop by their hallway with sandwiches to get the lowdown. After the "SIM EVERYTHING" directive, a dozen or so major changes and additional flyable configurations got railroaded into engineering release. So they ran out of time to sim anything before the heat death of the universe. Now, hold on a second, I said. The military needs operational limits and maintenance schedules - how do you know how many flight cycles, say, this widget here can take before it breaks? Whelp. The Overlords got on the horn with the military procurement dudes and they basically ballparked a number - say, 20 flight hours, for this one carbon component - that it would need to be inspected and serviced. They did this for everything, dreaming up a LORA out of thin air. But these components had only been through, at best, a partial model run, and since everything was changing twice weekly, some of those part configurations never saw one single pixel side of a stress-strain analysis. The military procurement guy waived absolutely everything; I want to emphasize this, because this sort of thing, it's much harder to get away with in civilian, pax-carrying aircraft. Something to be emphasized here is that composites don't deform, they don't absorb energy as they fail. They fail, everywhere, all at once - the nonlocality of it can be a little scary. What this means is that the margins are razor thin. Remember that little part with the 20 hours? Weeeeellllllll turns out that got halved by saltwater/spray, then halved again for extreme cold, and halved because extreme 3-axis vibration . . und so weiter, und so weiter. Our little part didn't make it through one single climbout. Even more fun, since everything else was so close to its limits, when that little part went, everything it was attached to got whomped, and 20% of those other parts failed. To draw a big picture: imagine an aircraft that takes off, then before it gets a few thousand feet it . . sort of self-disassembles. The ones that do manage to make it back - keeping enough lifting surface and controls to wing around - are totalled - the airframe's thrashed, with so many loose fasteners inside it sounded like a pair of maracas. It's sort of impressive that it's even possible to build something so fragile it springs itself into bits. It's like a prank plane. And I never did get that flight sim data to make my team's life any easier. The sim runs were never allowed to get to completion, and no sim, no data, no graph widget. So the graphs got drawn just like they always did; that is, from the imagination of one of the senior flight ops guys. "Just draw this curve . . up . . up . . and ooooooover . . . and then it comes back down again. Science!" Alright, what's the lesson here? What's the takeaway? Well, aside from the obvious (don't hire fast food franchise executives to run your airplane company), composites are very different, and old school engineers used to steel and aluminum really need to think when they're doing stress and risk analysis. Sure, they're strong as hell, but in the same vein, when they fail they break. They're done. I think the CAD systems have a good background for handling this, but the LORA and the risk methods haven't caught up - they're still stuck thinking about metal. [1] And also a place where none of the Overlords had any aerospace background; in fact, most of them don't even have STEM backgrounds. One VP Engineer thought FEM (Finite Element Method) modeling was a euphemism for something dirty.
Havoc 3y ago
> eventually causing the fuselage to fall apart in mid-flight. Reminds me of the “front fell off” ship meme. And Boeings response here feels about as credible.

48 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

Davidbrcz 3y ago

[flagged]

TylerE 3y ago
The first wasn't the slightest. He had testified a decade earlier and had both personal problems and several recent deaths in the family, including at least one suicide. Don't muddy the waters of a serious issue with this conspiracy garbage that doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  [flagged]
- itscrush 3y ago
  A decade earlier? Barnett was in the middle of deposition against Boeing and was located at the hotel for the whistleblower retaliation case. [1]https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-dead https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Ok, I misremembered, it wasn't quite a decade, but the testimony happened in 2017, not recently. Why kill him almost 8 years later?
    - salawat 3y ago
      Unless you've ever been a QM (Quality Manager), and a damn good one to boot, you wouldn't understand. We're a bit like Internal Affairs. We know where all the skeletons are. We take notes. To a point, as long as there is hope something'll actually get remedied, it doesn't have to go much further than that. Prove mens rea though, and we tend to be that perfect combination of places, names, who was involved, what they said, and where to find the evidence, because we were the ones who put it there. Just in case. A QA/QM with a conscience, notes, and evidence is an exec's absolute worst nightmare from the legal liability perspective. Criminal charges that pierce the corporate veil need names. If you were going to merc someone, they'd be the ones to merc.
  - dralley 3y ago
    It was a second retaliation case against Boeing from this one person. I don't know what you think he would have testified now that would have been done previously.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

CoastalCoder 3y ago

> Boeing concedes those manufacturing changes were made, but a spokesman for the company, Paul Lewis, said there was “no impact on durability or safe longevity of the airframe.” > > Mr. Lewis said Boeing had done extensive testing on the Dreamliner and “determined that this is not an immediate safety of flight issue.” I'd guess that Boeing's PR department no longer thinks Congress and/or the public will believe statements like "trust us, it's fine." What does the PR playbook say to do in situations like this? I hope the answer is: share the engineering data and analyses, and make a public argument for why Boeing's is right and the whiste-blower is mistaken. I fear the answer will be something that's less likely to ultimately save lives.

johnnyo 3y ago
Isn’t the claim that the issue is long term safety? Saying “there is no immediate safety of flight issue” kinda dodges the question. Perfect PR language

petre 3y ago

Let's just hope that this whistleblower won't commit suicide the day before testifying in court.

KenArrari 3y ago
It's crazy how we all just accept that he was definitely assassinated but know nothing will come of it.
- TylerE 3y ago
  No one should just accept that. That’s a lazy narrative being propped up by pripgafists distorting the facts. He had already testified years earlier.
  - GaveDrohl 3y ago
    Fair enough, but who won't testify in the future out of fear of being murdered? It still served a purpose of true.
  - benzible 3y ago
    I agree that no one should just accept it, but credible people including ex Boeing execs don't dismiss the possibility.. > Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied. More importantly, he added, “there is a principle in American law that there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony. Let’s say you rob a bank and while traveling at high speed in the getaway you run down a pedestrian and kill them. That’s second-degree murder at the very least.” [1] There needs to be an investigation. [1] https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/ https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-2...
  - MilStdJunkie 3y ago
    It's not just a lazy narrative. It's a profitable one. That narrative could help save their ass. I wouldn't be surprised if legions of paid "social media analysts" are barfing this out 24/7 on the grams and the twits. Think about it. What's going to have a better impact on your disgruntled workforce: 1) the idea that someone ratted out big Ma B, got sidelined, got sad, then killed themselves? or 2) the idea that rats get murdered? I don't know about you, but with 2 I'd be definitely be thinking twice before calling the FAA or anyone else.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

Oh boy, composites! That brings me back. Time for another story, from the lands of not-necessarily-big-B-but-could-very-well-be, told by someone who has no idea whatsoever what he's doing. New product, new structures. Composites! Leadership says that Flight Science needs to sim every single top level assembly permutation - that's a hundred some different airframes, in a few dozen flight regimes each. Now, if you paid money for a decent CAD/CAM package, those big packages have prefabs for all sorts of things when it comes to composites - you don't need to sim from nothing. This being the beloved military industrial complex[1], no one wants to pay money for anything, so sim from nothing it was. Poor bastards in Flight Science spend seven hundred hours simming every single flyable configuration. Why did I care? I was keeping a thumb in this pie because I planned to integrate with their sim runs, keeping my team from needing to drawn graphs manually every time they updated. Hook up the data to a graphing doohickey, key in the right aircraft / configurations, and never need to draw graphs again. Anyway. A week goes by, I send an email. Nothing. A month goes by, I drop by their hallway with sandwiches to get the lowdown. After the "SIM EVERYTHING" directive, a dozen or so major changes and additional flyable configurations got railroaded into engineering release. So they ran out of time to sim anything before the heat death of the universe. Now, hold on a second, I said. The military needs operational limits and maintenance schedules - how do you know how many flight cycles, say, this widget here can take before it breaks? Whelp. The Overlords got on the horn with the military procurement dudes and they basically ballparked a number - say, 20 flight hours, for this one carbon component - that it would need to be inspected and serviced. They did this for everything, dreaming up a LORA out of thin air. But these components had only been through, at best, a partial model run, and since everything was changing twice weekly, some of those part configurations never saw one single pixel side of a stress-strain analysis. The military procurement guy waived absolutely everything; I want to emphasize this, because this sort of thing, it's much harder to get away with in civilian, pax-carrying aircraft. Something to be emphasized here is that composites don't deform, they don't absorb energy as they fail. They fail, everywhere, all at once - the nonlocality of it can be a little scary. What this means is that the margins are razor thin. Remember that little part with the 20 hours? Weeeeellllllll turns out that got halved by saltwater/spray, then halved again for extreme cold, and halved because extreme 3-axis vibration . . und so weiter, und so weiter. Our little part didn't make it through one single climbout. Even more fun, since everything else was so close to its limits, when that little part went, everything it was attached to got whomped, and 20% of those other parts failed. To draw a big picture: imagine an aircraft that takes off, then before it gets a few thousand feet it . . sort of self-disassembles. The ones that do manage to make it back - keeping enough lifting surface and controls to wing around - are totalled - the airframe's thrashed, with so many loose fasteners inside it sounded like a pair of maracas. It's sort of impressive that it's even possible to build something so fragile it springs itself into bits. It's like a prank plane. And I never did get that flight sim data to make my team's life any easier. The sim runs were never allowed to get to completion, and no sim, no data, no graph widget. So the graphs got drawn just like they always did; that is, from the imagination of one of the senior flight ops guys. "Just draw this curve . . up . . up . . and ooooooover . . . and then it comes back down again. Science!" Alright, what's the lesson here? What's the takeaway? Well, aside from the obvious (don't hire fast food franchise executives to run your airplane company), composites are very different, and old school engineers used to steel and aluminum really need to think when they're doing stress and risk analysis. Sure, they're strong as hell, but in the same vein, when they fail they break. They're done. I think the CAD systems have a good background for handling this, but the LORA and the risk methods haven't caught up - they're still stuck thinking about metal. [1] And also a place where none of the Overlords had any aerospace background; in fact, most of them don't even have STEM backgrounds. One VP Engineer thought FEM (Finite Element Method) modeling was a euphemism for something dirty.

Havoc 3y ago

> eventually causing the fuselage to fall apart in mid-flight. Reminds me of the “front fell off” ship meme. And Boeings response here feels about as credible.