Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has “Enormous Volume Of Defects” Bolts On MAX 9 Weren’t Installed::A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the aircraft. The takeaway appears to be that outsourced plane components have so many problems when they show up at the production line that Boeing’s quality control staff can’t keep up with them all.
Bean counter who ordered cuts on QC probably failed upward
You’d think corporations would learn from these types of failures. But no, not as long as endless growth is the overall plan. The yes men will keep cutting corners at the expense of safety and quality.
So far they’ve learned the benefit far outweighs the cost
Especially if you can get a new job before something goes wrong. Get an upper management job, strip the metaphorical walls of copper to “cut costs”, and use that on your CV to get a C-suite job somewhere else.
What do you mean goes wrong?
Boring still isn’t suffering for this. They’ve made their money and will continue to make more.
To be fair, the defects SHOULD be found in the production line, but not in the finished product.
In something like a commercial airliner you can’t afford to just catch the mistakes. You have to prevent them.
In a commercial production line, there are part defects, engineering defects, assembly defects, testing defects, tool defects, etc.
Tens of thousands of parts. Thousands of employees (some new hires). Hundreds of vendors.
You will never prevent all defects, but you should be able to discover them before finishing production.
A lot of these wont even be discovered until they are assembled and it fails a test or inspection point.
For anyone interested what happened (according to some anonymous whistle-blower):
They had to remove the door plug to replace damaged pressure seal but didn’t want to run QA on the plug after installing it back so they didn’t mark it as ‘removed’ in the tracking system, they simply treated it as door that were “opened”. Parts were missed when inserting the plug, QA didn’t check because it wasn’t in the system, plane was delivered to the client. The rest is history.
There’ s a lot of backstory to it but that’s the direct cause. Supposedly.
If true, Boeing will cease to exist in a few years for the amount they are about to be sued.
Unfortunately, the US government will protect them despite all this, I’m afraid.
You know, I’d be perfectly fine if they nationalized the company for as long as it takes to restore a deep and unshakable sense of “you do not fuck with QA” to Boeing.
Their current board and corporate leadership should be prosecuted for criminal negligence for allowing it to get this bad after the MCAS crashes, and moreover after they publicly committed to drastically improving QA and general safety policies following those crashes.
The US government will disolve the FAA before they nationalize any industry.
I’m not talking about the whole industry. Boeing is a single company.
People who know more than me have pointed out that the the hole in the fuselage and the plug found on the ground don’t show the kind of damage you’d expect if the bolts were present and secure.
So them being absent entirely is consistent with the publicly available evidence.
Time to start arresting people at the top and work your way down. Also Pete Buttigieg needs to answer why it has taken so long for the grounding of the 737 Max 9.
FAA grounded them the day after the incident
