Boeing's goings...

[Malcolm]

Ryanair CEO says airline found parts missing from Boeing planes

By Kathryn Mannie  Global News

Posted March 27, 2024 10:01 am

 3 min read

The CEO of Ryanair, one of the largest low-cost carriers in the world, said the airline has been voicing its concerns over the quality of Boeing aircrafts for the past 18 months, according to a video interview last week with CNN.

Michael O’Leary said that issues started arising in 2022 and 2023.

“We were finding little things like spanners under the floorboards, in some cases, seat handles missing, things like that,” O’Leary told CNN. (“Spanner” is another word for wrench.)

“This shows a lack of attention to detail, quality issues in Boeing,” the CEO added.

 

Ryanair’s fleet of over 1,000 aircraft is made up almost exclusively of Boeing airplanes, apart from 27 Airbus A320s.

 

O’Leary says the airline began noticing the issues with Boeing’s planes during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns were easing. Ryanair has been consistently in contact with “Boeing at the most senior levels” to communicate its concerns, O’Leary added.

“We’ve been saying for 18 months, both publicly and privately to Boeing, that quality control post-COVID as they got back making aircraft has not been acceptable and needs to be improved.”

O’Leary added that Ryanair takes 48 hours to inspect newly delivered planes at the company’s hangars in Dublin.

“We’re not willing to put an aircraft into service at Ryanair unless we’ve fully satisfied that everything’s there and as it should be,” he said.

O’Leary echoed these same concerns about Boeing in an earlier press appearance.

In January, the CEO said a wrench was found under the floor of one plane during an inspection.

“It is not acceptable that aircraft get delivered at less than 100 per cent,” he said at the time.

The situation at Boeing seemed to improve, O’Leary said, adding that the 12 planes Boeing delivered to the airline between October and December were “the best deliveries we’ve taken from Boeing.”

O’Leary’s comments come as Boeing continues to be the subject of intense scrutiny from the public and transportation safety agencies after a series of high-profile incidents.

 

[Kip Powick]

What else is he ging to say re-- recent  good arrivals....???.."time for a better price Boeing cause I am, obliquely, backing you up"...

[deicer]

[IFG]

Well-written article, in non-flying-nerd-speak, for the nervous flyers you might meet seeking reassurance. There's a thread or two one could start tugging on, but generally, Tufekci is a pretty solid, balanced reporter\commenter.

Cheers, IFG - 

You Don’t Need to Freak Out About Boeing Planes (but Boeing Sure Does)

".... the fact that Boeing managed to cut as many corners as it did is testament to the layers and layers of checks, redundancies and training that have been built into the aviation industry. Aviation safety is so robust because we made it so ...."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/opinion/boeing-plane-safety.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20240401&instance_id=118987&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=49978955&segment_id=162273&user_id=8ccecf3035088e379d1de9e79ae219b0

[Malcolm]

 

[Malcolm]

NTSB Looking Into More Door Plug Repair Instances At Boeing

Story by Rich Thomaselli

 • 45m • 2 min read

National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy told the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee that her investigators are looking at other instances in which Boeing employees removed and then reinstalled door plugs on airplanes.

The investigation stems from the January 5 incident in which a door panel blew off in Alaska Airlines plane in midflight.

 

Apparently, four critical bolts that were supposed to be reinstalled were not done so properly or not done at all.

Boeing previously said there is no documentation available regarding the work. That has angered Committee Chairperson Senator Maria Cantwell:“On this case, you’re saying in this case records don't exist, but you have other records that show when plugs were opened and closed? There are other instances where that kind of repair was documented?”

Homendy replied, “There are other instances where that work would occur. We still have to review all those instances to see if that was documented.”

Is documentation available if there were other incidents?

Whether or not other instances were found in which there was documentation available would deal a blow to Boeing and reflect poorly on the company, adding to the perception that Boeing is trying to impede the Alaska Airlines investigation.

Or worse, that Boeing has a history of undocumented repair work.

 

Homendy suggested that the missing documentation on the Alaska Airlines repair was an exception.

“The records don't exist that what we are looking for, but that is, what we would call, an escape from normal process,” Homendy said. “We are looking at other instances where a door plug was opened and closed, to make sure those records are available. We are looking at how this happened.”

In other words, if documentation was available for repair work on other planes, why isn’t it available for this particular incident involving Alaska Airlines?

Homendy said that NTSB investigators are back at Boeing’s headquarters this week.

“I don't think there is anyone from Boeing from (CEO) Dave Calhoun down that doesn't want to know what happened here,” Homendy told the Committee. “They want to know and they want to fix it. And we are there to help. But we are also there to look at what more can be done, what the safety culture is, what the safety management system is — it is relatively new – how that can be improved, and their quality management system. We do have a lot of work to do.”

[Malcolm]

 

[Malcolm]

Fact or fiction.......

All 787 Dreamliners should be grounded, Boeing whistleblower says

By Kathryn Mannie  Global News

Posted April 17, 2024 10:02 am

 4 min read

A Boeing whistleblower is urging the planemaker to ground all 787 Dreamliners currently in operation around the world after warning that the long-haul jets could “fall apart at the joints.”

Sam Salehpour, a quality engineer at Boeing, went public with his concerns about the Boeing 787 and 777 jets last week. In an exclusive TV interview with NBC Nightly News, Salehpour doubled down on his allegations and called for all Dreamliners to be pulled from service and checked for small gaps in the fuselage.

“It’s as serious as I have ever seen in my lifetime,” Salehpour told NBC’s Lester Holt, adding that he would not put his family on a 787 jet.

“The entire fleet worldwide, as far as I’m concerned right now, needs attention. And the attention is, you need to check your gaps and make sure that you don’t have potential for premature failure.”

Salehpour claims that Boeing took shortcuts while building the 787 and 777 jets to save money and reduce bottlenecks during the assembly process. He says sections of the main body, or fuselage, of the 787 Dreamliner are not fastened together properly and that little gaps exist where the parts are joined. Under the stress of repeated flying, the fuselage could break apart mid-air, he warned.

“The plane will fall apart at the joints,” he told Holt on Tuesday.

When Salehpour initially went public with his concerns, he said he saw Boeing mechanics using excessive force to push sections of the fuselage together “to make it appear like the gaps didn’t exist,” during 787 assembly. Under normal manufacturing procedures, small pieces of metal, called shims, are inserted into gaps to fill space. But Boeing allegedly cut corners by not always inserting these shims.

Allowing such gaps to be unfilled could, over time, allow sections of the fuselage to move relative to one another — drastically reducing the lifespan of the plane. As the aircraft undergoes thousands of trips, the stress on the joints could one day “cause a catastrophic failure,” Salehpour said.

The engineer claims that when he raised these issues internally with Boeing, they retaliated against him and moved him out of the 787 program to work on 777 jets. There, he says he witnessed similar unsafe assembly practices that he claims also jeopardize the safety of the 777.

“I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align,” Salehpour said at the time.

Salehpour filed a formal whistleblower complaint to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in January, around the time Boeing came under intense public scrutiny when a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane mid-air during an Alaska Airlines flight.

The FAA said it is investigating his claims, as the agency does with all whistleblower complaints.nes plane mid-flight found in Oregon backyard

Boeing says it is fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner, adding that the claims “are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft.”

The company is also “fully confident in the safety and durability of the 777 family.”

Boeing held a media tour at its South Carolina manufacturing plant on Monday, where reporters heard from two top Boeing engineers who defended the structural integrity of its aircraft.

Production of the 787 had previously been halted by the FAA for nearly two years, starting in 2021, after this exact problem of small gaps existing where plane parts had been joined was raised to the agency. In order to regain FAA approval to deliver new 787 planes to customers, Boeing stress-tested the jet for 165,000 takeoffs and landings, far beyond the recommended lifespan of the plane, and found no evidence it would fail.

The company says it also inspected 689 of the more than 1,100 787s in service worldwide, NBC reports.

 

 

2:57Business Matters: FAA says Boeing can’t increase 737 Max production until quality, safety culture improved

But Salehpour contends that Boeing never fixed the fuselage issue, and instead concealed it from the FAA. Eventually, in 2022, the FAA allowed Boeing to continue delivering new 787s.

 

Lisa Banks, one of Salehpour’s lawyers, says she’s heard from half a dozen other potential whistleblowers who have similar concerns with Boeing’s safety practices.

“I think some of them will come forward, but frankly, they’re terrified,” she told NBC News.

As for Salehpour, he says he’s “at peace” with himself “because this is going to save a lot of people’s lives.”

Salehpour is set to address a U.S. Senate subcommittee on Wednesday to discuss his concerns about Boeing’s safety practices.

[W5]

Boeing unlikely to meet FAA’s 90-day deadline for new safety program

https://leehamnews.com/2024/04/18/boeing-unlikely-to-meet-faas-90-day-deadline-for-new-safety-program/

By Scott Hamilton

April 18, 2024, © Leeham News: Boeing appears unlikely to meet a 90-day deadline to submit a comprehensive plan to address safety concerns, insiders tell LNA.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Feb. 28 gave Boeing three months to address “systemic quality-control issues,” a move sparked by new safety concerns following the Jan. 5 accident of Alaska Airlines flight 1282. A 10-week-old 737-9 MAX was minutes into climb-out from the Portland (OR) airport when a door plug blew out, prompting explosive decompression of the cabin. Nobody died but there were injuries and damage throughout the cabin.

“FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker told Boeing that he expects the company to provide the FAA a comprehensive action plan within 90 days that will incorporate the forthcoming results of the FAA production-line audit and the latest findings from the expert review panel report, which was required by the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act of 2020,” the FAA said in the Feb. 28 press release.

“The plan must also include steps Boeing will take to mature its Safety Management System (SMS) program, which it committed to in 2019. Boeing also must integrate its SMS program with a Quality Management System, which will ensure the same level of rigor and oversight is applied to the company’s suppliers and create a measurable, systemic shift in manufacturing quality control.”

Now 45 days later, LNA is told Boeing is unlikely to meet the deadline. Furthermore, Boeing’s engineering and technicians union has had no outreach from Boeing seeking its input into the plan.

 

Collaboration Needed

“The current status of safety culture issues at Boeing underscores the need for collaboration between the company and its labor unions. This collaboration is necessary to elevate an unfiltered voice for safety experts who have been ignored and employees who have been silenced,” SPEEA said in a memo reviewed by LNA.

SPEEA proposed several steps to improve safety and quality assurance, but so far with little progress, according to the memo.

Boeing’s touch-labor union, the IAM 751, has not heard from Boeing.

Boeing did not respond to a request for comment.

What happens if Boeing fails to meet the deadline?

What happens if Boeing fails to meet the deadline set by the FAA? One former Boeing employee whose duties included safety compliance told LNA at the time the FAA issued the mandate that Boeing would be unlikely to meet the deadline due to the complexities of the task.

On the one hand, the FAA could extend the deadline. On the other hand, the FAA could take the extreme step, if unlikely, of suspending Boeing’s PC 700 production certificate for the troubled 737 line. (It could also suspend the production certificate of all 7-Series airplanes, including the 737- and 767-based military aircraft. This seems highly unlikely.)

[W5]

Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/boeing-corporate-america-manufacturing/678137

Somewhere along the line, the plane maker lost interest in making its own planes. Can it rediscover its engineering soul?

By Jerry Useem

 

The sight of bill boeing was a familiar one on the factory floor. His office was in the building next to the converted boatyard where workers lathed the wood, sewed the fabric wings, and fixed the control wires of the Boeing Model C airplane. there is no authority except facts. facts are obtained by accurate observation read a plaque affixed outside the door. And what could need closer observation than the process of his aircraft being built? One day in 1916, Boeing spotted an imperfectly cut wing rib, dropped it to the floor, and slowly stomped it to bits. “I, for one, will close up shop rather than send out work of this kind,” he declared.

When David Calhoun, the soon-to-be-lame-duck CEO of the company Boeing founded, made a rare appearance on the shop floor in Seattle one day this past January, circumstances were decidedly different. Firmly a member of the CEO class, schooled at the knee of General Electric’s Jack Welch, Calhoun had not strolled over from next door but flown some 2,300 miles from Boeing’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. And he was not there to observe slipshod work before it found its way into the air—it already had. A few weeks earlier, the door of a Boeing 737 had fallen out mid-flight. In the days following his visit, Calhoun’s office admitted that it still didn’t know quite what had gone wrong, because it didn’t know how the plane had been put together in the first place. The door’s restraining bolts had either been screwed in wrong, or not at all. Boeing couldn’t say, because, as it told astonished regulators, the company had “no records of the work being performed.”

The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes. For nearly 40 years the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005 it sold this facility to a private-investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its “supplier.” Offloading, Boeing called it. Meanwhile the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits. Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.

The past 30 years may well be remembered as a dark age of U.S. manufacturing. Boeing’s decline illustrates everything that went wrong to bring us here. Fortunately, it also offers a lesson in how to get back out.

In bill boeing’s day, the word manufactory had cachet. You could bank at the Manufacturers Trust. Philadelphia socialites golfed at the Manufacturers’ Club. Plans for the newly consecrated Harvard Business School called for a working factory on campus. The business heroes of the day—Ford, Edison, Firestone—had risen from the shop floor.

There, they had pioneered an entirely new way of making things. The American system of production—featuring interchangeable parts, specialized machine tools, moving assembly lines—was a huge leap beyond European methods of craft production. And it produced lopsided margins of victory for the likes of Ford, GM, and Boeing. To coordinate these complex new systems, two new occupations arose: the industrial engineer, who spoke the language of the shop floor, and the professional financial manager, who spoke the language of accounting.

At first the engineers held sway. In a 1930 article for Aviation News, a Boeing engineer explained how the company’s inspectors “continually supervise the fabrication of the many thousands of parts entering into the assemblage of a single plane.” Philip Johnson, an engineer, succeeded Bill Boeing as CEO; he then passed the company to yet another engineer, Clairmont Egtvedt, who not only managed production of the B-17 bomber from the executive suite, but personally helped design it.

After the Second World War, America enjoyed three decades of dominance by sticking with methods it had used to win it. At the same time, a successor was developing, largely unnoticed, amid the scarcities of defeated Japan. The upstart auto executive Eiji Toyoda had visited Ford’s works and found that, however much he admired the systems, they couldn’t be replicated in Japan. He couldn’t afford, for instance, the hundreds of machine tools specialized to punch out exactly one part at the touch of a button. Although his employees would have to make do with a few general-purpose stamping presses, he gave these skilled workers immense freedom to find the most efficient way to run them. The end result turned out to be radical: Costs fell and errors dropped in a renewable cycle of improvement, or kaizen.

What emerged was a different conception of the corporation. If the managerial bureaucrats in the other departments were to earn their keep, they needed a thorough understanding of the shop floor, or gemba (roughly “place of making value”). The so-called Gemba Walk required their routine presence at each step until they could comprehend the assembly of the whole. Otherwise they risked becoming muda—waste.

When the wave of Japanese competition finally crashed on corporate America, those best equipped to understand it—the engineers—were no longer in charge. American boardrooms had been handed over to the finance people. And they were hypnotized by the new doctrine of shareholder value, which provided a rationale for their ascendance but little incentive for pursuing long-term improvements or sustainable approaches to cost control. Their pay packages rewarded short-term spikes in stock price. There were lots of ways to produce those.

Which brings us to the hinge point of 1990, when a trio of MIT researchers published The Machine That Changed the World, which both named the Japanese system—“lean production”—and urged corporate America to learn from it. Just then, the Japanese economy crashed, easing the pressure on U.S. firms. In the years that followed, American manufacturers instead doubled down on outsourcing, offshoring, and financial engineering. This round of wounds was self-inflicted. Already infused with a stench of decay, manufacturing was written off as yesterday’s activity.

At GE, which produced three of Boeing’s last four CEOs, manufacturing came to be seen as “grunt work,” as the former GE executive David Cote recently told Fortune’s Shawn Tully. Motorola—founded as Galvin Manufacturing and famed for its religious focus on quality—lost its lead in mobile-phone making after it leaned into software and services. Intel’s bunny-suited fab workers were the face of high-tech manufacturing prowess until the company ceded hardware leadership to Asian rivals. “Having once pioneered the development of this extraordinary technology,” the current Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, wrote recently, “we now find ourselves at the mercy of the most fragile global supply chain in the world.”

Phil Condit, the talented engineer who had overseen design of the hugely successful 777, was atop Boeing when I visited the company in late 2000. He was no stranger to the shop floor. Traversing Boeing’s Everett plant in a golf cart, he pointed out the horizontal tail fin stretching above us. Hard to believe it was larger than the 737’s wing, he marveled. Waiting back in his office—still located on the bank of the Duwamish River but greatly swollen by the recent merger with McDonnell Douglas—was a different sort of glee. “Wow! Double wow!” his mother had emailed him, referring to Boeing’s closing stock price that day. And, it would soon emerge, he wanted to get some distance from what he described to the Puget Sound Business Journal as “how-do-you-design-an-airplane stuff.” The next year, he moved Boeing’s headquarters to Chicago, pulling the top brass away from the shop floor just as the company was embarking on a radically new approach to airplane assembly.

Its newest plane, the 787 Dreamliner, would not be an in-house production. Instead Boeing would farm out the designing and building to a network of “partner” companies—each effectively its own mini-Boeing with its own supply chain to manage. “It used to be you’d have some Boeing people develop the blueprints, then march over and say, ‘Hey, would you build this for me?’” Richard Safran, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners and a former aerospace engineer, told me. “Now, instead, you’re asking them to design it, to integrate it, to do the R&D.”

The allures of this “capital light” approach were many: Troublesome unions, costly machine shops, and development budgets would all become someone else’s problem. Key financial metrics would instantly improve as costs shifted to other firms’ balance sheets. With its emphasis on less, the approach bore a superficial resemblance to lean production. But where lean production pushed know-how back onto the shop floor, this pushed the shop floor and its know-how out the door altogether.

Beyond that were the problems that a Boeing engineer, L. J. Hart-Smith, had foreseen in a prescient white paper that he presented at a 2001 Boeing technical symposium. With outsourcing came the possibility that parts wouldn’t fit together correctly on arrival. “In order to minimize these potential problems,” Hart-Smith warned, “it is necessary for the prime contractor to provide on-site quality, supplier-management, and sometimes technical support. If this is not done, the performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers.”

Boeing didn’t listen. Wall Street dismissed Hart-Smith’s paper as a “rant,” and Boeing put each supplier in charge of its own quality control. When those controls failed, Boeing had to bear the cost of fixing flawed components. Most troubling was the dangerous feedback loop Hart-Smith foresaw. Accounting-wise, those fixes, which in reality are the costs of outsourcing, would instead appear as overhead—creating the impression that in-house work was expensive and furthering the rationale for offloading even more of the manufacturing process.

In the short term, this all worked wonders on Boeing’s balance sheet: Its stock rose more than 600 percent from 2010 to 2019. Then the true folly of this approach made its inevitable appearance when two strikingly similar crashes caused by faulty software on Boeing planes killed a total of 346 people.

Today, if you stand along the Seattle waterfront long enough, sooner or later you’ll catch sight of a train headed south carrying the distinctive shape of a Boeing 737. Though it’s colored a metallic green and missing its tail—clearly not the finished product—it’s the kind of thing you point to and say, Look kids, a Boeing plane’s on that train! Not so. The logomark on the side spells it out: Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kansas, has built this fuselage, which isn’t coming from Boeing. It’s going to Boeing.

A plane is a complex system in which the malfunction of one piece can produce catastrophic failure of the whole. Assembly must be tightly choreographed. But now—especially with Boeing continually trying to wring costs from its suppliers—there were many more chances for errors to creep in. And when FAA investigators finally toured the premises of Spirit AeroSystems—maker of the blown-out door as well as the fuselage it was supposed to fit in—they did not find a tight operation. They found one door seal being lubricated with Dawn liquid dish soap and cleaned with a wet cheesecloth, and another checked with a hotel-room key card.

Adark age doesn’t descend all at once. The process of emerging from one also takes time. It must begin with a recognition that something has been lost. Boeing’s fall just might have provided that rush of clarity. You could be from the 12th century and still know that soap and cheesecloth aren’t for making flying machines. Boeing’s chief financial officer recently admitted that the company got “a little too far ahead of itself on the topic of outsourcing.” It is in talks to reacquire Spirit AeroSystems and is already making the composite wings of its next-gen plane, the 777X, in-house at a new, billion-dollar complex outside Seattle. “Aerospace Executives Finally Rediscover the Shop Floor,” Aviation Week declared on the cover of a recent issue.

As for the rest of corporate America, one of the strongest signals may be coming from the company Boeing has striven so hard to emulate: GE. Under operations-minded boss Larry Culp, the company is finally—only 40 or so years late—pushing itself through a crash course in lean manufacturing. It is belatedly yielding to the reality that workers on the gemba are far better at figuring out more efficient ways of making things than remote bureaucrats with spreadsheet abstractions.

In the crucial field of semiconductors, meanwhile, Intel has recognized that Moore’s Law (the doubling of computing power roughly every 18 months) flows not from above but from manufacturing advances it once dominated. It has undertaken a “death march,” in the words of CEO Pat Gelsinger, to regain its lost edge on the foundry floor. The CHIPS Act has put a powerful political wind at his back. Green and other incentives are powering a broader, truly seismic surge in spending on new U.S. factories, now going up at three times their normal rate. No other country is experiencing such a buildout.

Add all the capacity you want. It won’t reverse the country’s long decline as a manufacturing superpower if corporate America keeps gurgling its sad, tired story about the impossibility of making things on these shores anymore. It’s a story that helped pour a whole lot of wealth into the executive pockets peddling it. But half a century of self-inflicted damage is enough. The doors have fallen off, and it’s plain for all to see: The story was barely bolted together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[W5]

Interestingly, lean manufacturing and Quality Assurance were brought to Japan by an American:

W. Edwards Deming.

 He is known as the father of the quality movement and was hugely influential in post-WWII Japan, credited with revolutionizing Japan's industry and making it one of the most dominant economies in the world. He is best known for his theories of management.

Edited April 22 by W5

[J.O.]

16 hours ago, W5 said:

Interestingly, lean manufacturing and Quality Assurance were brought to Japan by an American:

W. Edwards Deming.

 He is known as the father of the quality movement and was hugely influential in post-WWII Japan, credited with revolutionizing Japan's industry and making it one of the most dominant economies in the world. He is best known for his theories of management.

Indeed. Before he worked with Japan, Deming tried to convince the American auto industry that they needed a similar strategy, but the industry told him to pound sand. The first real effect of his work was seen in Toyota's shift from being builders of crap that noone in North America wanted to making cars that were the envy of the Big Three.