Boeing reported another problem with fuselages on its 737 jets that might delay deliveries of about 50 aircraft in the latest quality gaff to plague the manufacturer.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal said in a letter to Boeing staff seen Monday that a worker at its supplier discovered misdrilled holes in fuselages. Spirit AeroSystems, based in Wichita, Kansas, makes a large part of the fuselages on Boeing Max jets.
"While this potential condition is not an immediate safety issue and all 737s can continue operating safely”
‘bUT iT’s sAFE’
Dealy Stan: Reeling in the Yeets
I get that reference.
I know Boeing is kind of fucking everything up right now, but safety delays are an indicator of safety, not the opposite.
They can also be a sign of poor quality control and/or poor quality in general, which makes them newsworthy to people (potentially) entrusting their lives to the workmanship involved.
Not to mention… didn’t Boeing also help with the Ospreys? Those things are known for eating Marines throughout its development cycle. Gotta wonder if this complete lack of engineering may be a reason.
This is kind of a survivorship bias kind of thing (with the WW2 bombers): NOT getting the news is the actual indicator of lack of quality control. Getting reports of them finding things is an indicator they’re actually looking. We know they had problems due to the whole, you know, planes falling out of the sky.
Of course it’s not black and white, what’s in the news isn’t really the important thing either way. It’s just what we can see.
Yes, but actually no. They are looking NOW, because they are being forced to look. They apparently weren’t before, which is a sign of bad QA, and the scary part for the potential passengers.
What exactly is the relationship between spirit aero systems and Boeing? Who owns which responsibilities between these types of fuck ups? Is it Boeing design? Spirit manufacturing? Boeing inspection? The buck stops with Boeing, but since they deliver the final product, but wtf is going on at Spirit.
So this is great the answer is nobody really knows. Spirit aerosystems used to be part of Boeing it was a Boeing manufacturing plant owned and run by Boeing full of Boeing employees. Then the c-suite got the brilliant idea of selling off a good chunk for their business. So that they could then contract with the new company to do the exact same work that was happening at the plant before it was spun off. Yeah crazy isn’t it. My understanding is it looks good on the books in the short term plus it might have been to get rid of some labor and pension obligations. The union workforce was let go and had to apply to be rehired with the sale of the division. They ended up taking a 10% pay cut.
Anyway at the moment this is letting Boeing and spirit both point fingers at each other. Additionally it is slowing down any kind of engineering fix because there are separate engineering teams working for separate companies working on the same problem. We saw the same thing with the misaligned holes on the rear pressure bulkhead that Spirit was making. Oh also Spirit now contracts some of its work out for Boeing to third parties making it more convoluted.
Spirit does do some aerospace work for other companies but roughly 85% of their income comes from Boeing.
I used to work for a company that was Spirit’s largest supplier. Spirit contracts a bunch of parts out to smaller manufacturing companies. We would manufacture parts, process them (paint and anodizing), then assemble them at all of our facilities, then they would get shipped to Wichita for further assembly by Spirit. The 737 MAX has been Boeing’s fastest selling plane in recent history, so you can imagine the pressure on the manufacturing contractors to get their parts out the door. After seeing everything from the inside, I personally wouldn’t fly on a 737 MAX. I would stick with Boeing’s older models or choose an airline that has primarily an Airbus fleet.
Yeah I work in the airline industry and I am right there with you I won’t fly the MAX planes . Hell I just heard an interview on the radio with a former high level engineer at Boeing. He straight up walked off a plane when he figured out it was a MAX.
Misdrilled holes in the fuselage aren’t really a safety concern, they are a personnel concern tho. Sometimes you fuck up and have to eat shit, hopefully before you fuck up 50 fucking jets.
Yeah I don’t really buy that it is not a safety thing. Like I know it depends a bit on where the hole is and what it is for. Regardless I don’t like the wrong holes in pressure vessels that is just not good for things having to do with safety pressurizing the fuselage.
Without knowing specific locations it’s hard to say exactly, but it likely wouldn’t keep me out of the airplane. They pressure test them, so that’s at least verified.
Yeah they pressure tested the Max 9s before delivery and we can see how well that worked out…
No worries - so long as they don’t forget all the rivets in integration the fuselage won’t split in half. They’d have to forget way more than four fasteners lol
It’s ironic that it’s 737 of them
That would actually be a coincidence, but it’s not because it’s 50. Alanis Morissette is ignorant and so are the dudes that wrote the song.
This is the same article that’s been going around for a couple days now.
So far we’ve got the missing bolts that caused the door cover to be blown out, and now these incorrect holes. I don’t think anything else… yet.
I know they have contacts to respect, but out of safety, they should completely stop production and offer an alternative to honor their contracts.
What’s crazy is this is after the many news articles over the past few months, and their commitment to safety.
Which means… Either they are doing a lot of changes and things creep through, or they’ve been lying.
Being in IT, the only analogy I can make is that when a software design is crappy, it doesn’t matter how many bug fixes or vulnerability patches you add, it’s still going not going to work properly.
You have to go back to the drawing board and apply good, proven design guidelines and restart from there.
The FAA is kinda doing that, but I agree they probably need to go further - https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-halts-boeing-max-production-expansion-improve-quality-control-also-lays-out-extensive
Look I’m all for the “Fuck Boeing” circlejerk but as someone who actually works QA at an aircraft manufacturer this is likely a whole lot of nothing.
I’d be shocked if you could find a single aircraft of any make in service that didn’t have dozens of misdrilled holes.
Without any context this is just fear mongering.
Fair enough, I think boeing has fucked up so much that even something benign is being taken seriously, which is good imho, but it is also kinda scary, what else did they get away with?
Again, I understand the sentiment but this is not an example of them “getting away” with anything.
If anything this is indicative of a healthy Quality Management System given that this condition was identified and contained prior to any impacted articles entering into service.
