A Bad Bear almost killed a bunch of hillbillies or in English, Did a failed reinforcing chord cause the depressurization of a 737 in flight?
Emergency Depressurization is a pretty scary thing. It gets cold, it sounds like a cannon shot, all the moisture in the air turns to snowflakes (Instant Snowstorm), The Air Pressure drops to about 3 PSI and people start passing out and convulsing.
But was this an accident, or a natural result of Boeing trying to save money after the failed acquisition of McDonnel Douglas?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
A “gunshot-like sound” woke Brenda Reese as her Southwest Airlines flight cruised at 36,000 feet. Looking up, she could see the sky through a hole torn in the cabin roof.
The Boeing 737 lost cabin pressure after the hole developed Friday, prompting frightened passengers to grope for oxygen masks as the plane made a terrifying but controlled descent.
One passenger called it “pandemonium.” Another watched as a flight attendant and another passenger passed out, apparently for lack of oxygen, their heads striking seats in front of them.,,,,Reese said the plane had just left Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport for Sacramento, Calif., when the “gunshot-like sound” woke her up. Oxygen masks dropped as the plane dove.
Seated one row from the rupture, Don Nelson said it took about four noisy minutes for the plane to dip to less than 10,000 feet. “You could tell there was an oxygen deficiency,” he said.
“People were dropping,” said Christine Ziegler, a 44-year-old project manager from Sacramento who watched as the crew member and a passenger nearby fainted. Nelson and Ziegler spoke after a substitute flight took them on to Sacramento.
Ok, that's bad, but it's happened before.
A similar incident happened in July 2009 when a football-sized hole opened up in flight in the fuselage of another Southwest 737, depressurizing the cabin. The plane made an emergency landing in Charleston, W.Va. It was later determined that the hole was caused by metal fatigue.
But is this a pattern of failure or merely random? Al Jazeera says it's a consequence of bad Bear Straps made by Duocomm being used in Airplanes made between 1996 and 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
Southwest's jet was 15 years old and had logged 39,000 pressurization cycles, a measurement of the number of takeoffs and landings. That's 7.2 cycles every day for every year it has been in service.
Well-documented history
Boeing said Monday that it will issue guidance this week on how airlines should do checks on the affected airplanes now in service. An estimated 1,800 airplanes, including -300, -400, -500 model 737s, are affected by the aircraft maker's service bulletin.
EDIT NOTE Now 39,000 cycles seem like a lot but it's half the cycles of ALoha Airlines of
flight 243 which lost it's fuselage skin in flight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The age of the aircraft became a key issue (it was 19 years old at the time of the accident and had sustained a remarkable number of takeoff–landing cycles — 89,090, the second most cycles for a plane in the world at the time — well beyond the 75,000 trips it was designed to sustain)
This aircraft is younger then 243 also.
http://english.aljazeera.net/...
(If the Video above doesn't run, go to the link and watch the video)
An Al Jazeera documentary has raised serious questions about official investigations into the safety of more than 1,500 of the most commonly-used passenger planes in the world.
Boeing's 737NG is flown by more than 150 airlines worldwide, but for more than 10 years whistleblowers who used to work for Boeing have raised serious doubts about the manufacture of key structural parts for many of the planes.
The parts in question are called "chords" and "bear straps": the chords make up the ribs of the aircraft fuselage and the bear straps are huge sheets which reinforce the exits and doorways on the fuselage.
The whistleblowers have made claims in a US court that the parts – made by a sub-contractor for Boeing between 1996 and 2004 - were ill-fitting and illegal, but that Boeing used many of them to build the aircraft.
Aviation experts working with these whistleblowers tell the programme that the problem with these parts could lead to a "catastrophic failure" of aircraft fitted with them.
Allegations dismissed
Boeing has dismissed the allegations as "without merit", and the American Federal Aviation Administration – which regulates the US aircraft industry - has supported Boeing.
But a year-long investigation by Al Jazeera's People & Power series has uncovered a draft internal Boeing memorandum which appears to contradict Boeing’s assertion and, instead, supports the whistleblowers’ allegations.
The document warns that the problem highlighted by the whistleblowers "poses a quality risk to the production of quality airplane parts" and that the "integrity" of the sub-contractor places Boeing itself "at risk".
If you follow the MSNBC link does the rip look like it's in the area near the exit window, which might have a bear strap in it?
Even the Washington Post Covered this issue
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The three whistle-blowers, however, contend that Boeing officials knew from their own audits about thousands of parts that did not meet specifications, allowed them to be installed and retaliated against people who raised questions. They say the parts, manufactured from 1994 to 2002, fit the Federal Aviation Administration's definition of "unapproved" because they lack documentation proving that they are airworthy. Moreover, they say, forcing a part into place could shorten its lifespan.,,,,One reason the FAA chose not to pursue the whistle-blowers' claims, officials said, was that its engineers believed the parts in question would not present a safety risk even if they failed in flight. There has never been a crash caused by such a failure, the agency said.
But on a number of occasions, the agency has expressed concern about similar parts, albeit on the previous generation of 737s, which Boeing began phasing out in 1996. Last year, prompted by reports from some carriers of cracks, the FAA formally alerted U.S. air carriers that fly the older version of the 737 to inspect for possible fatigue cracks around such parts. Cracks in these areas, the FAA said, "could result in reduced structural integrity of the frames, possible loss of a cargo door, possible rapid decompression of the fuselage."
It hasn't been a problem before, therefore it's fine. That's called a "Normalization of Deviance" or the same miserable reasoning that led to the loss of the Challenger and Columbia
Guarding against a "Normalization of Deviance"
Normalization of deviance is a long term phenomenon in which individuals or teams repeatedly “get away” with a deviance from established standards until their thought process is dominated by this logic: Repeated success in accepting deviance from established standards implies future success. Over time, the individual/team fails to see their actions as deviant. Normalization of deviance leads to “predictable surprises” which are invariably disastrous to the team.
The Challenger tragedy is an example of “Normalization of Deviance”. Under tremendous schedule pressures the NASA team accepted a lower standard of performance on the solid rocket booster O-rings, i.e., they repeatedly accepted heat damage that was never expected. The team slowly fell into the trap of believing their repeated success in accepting the deviance implied future success. A “predictable surprise”, i.e., a deadly disaster, resulted.
She said the chord problem reinforced worries that others had raised for a year about other Ducommun parts. She had examined reports of problems with "bear straps," large pieces of reinforcing sheet metal bonded to the skin around an airliner's doorways. Prewitt said the pieces, which have four jutting corners something like a bearskin rug, were coming in short in one corner. That forced workers to drill holes for rivets closer to the edge of the piece than specified.
The whistle-blowers said they learned that some managers knew of the problem but encouraged workers to make the parts fit. For example, when Prewitt recommended tossing out 24 bear straps she considered unacceptable, a Boeing procurement manager objected. "Scrapping any bearstraps is stupid, since we've used over 300 with the same condition," the manager wrote a whistle-blower in a May 13, 1999, e-mail reviewed by The Post.
That's called the Normalization of Deviance.
Beverly Sharkey, who heads the parts investigation office, said the agency decided not to physically inspect the parts already on aircraft because that would have required the "destructive testing or peeling apart" of hundreds of cabins. That was unnecessary, she said, because airlines had no reports of parts failures and the FAA had no reason to believe that there was a safety problem. Inspectors visited the Ducommun and Boeing factories and said they found no problems.
Of course there were no problems the aircraft were young. Now 15 years later the birds are getting older and 1500 of these aircraft are aging and starting to blow out in flight. FAA thinks they are going to stop this by inspecting the outsides of aircraft when the problem is in the inside. By the time cracks show up on the outside, it's the last line of defense. Loads not carried internally by the Chords are now being carried in the failing skin.
But some analysts suggest that when factory workers force together parts that are not built according to their design, it could eventually cause premature cracking.
When you "bend and twist" with undue force, you can introduce more stress on the parts and the structure they are attached to, said John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member and former airline mechanic. Goglia said that can be especially true of parts used to reinforce the cabin around doors, which may be more vulnerable to fatigue.
But Why was this?
he assembly workers Prewitt observed were not the only ones who noted problems with parts from a key Boeing supplier, AHF Ducommun of Los Angeles.,,,,For nearly 40 years, the airframe for the Boeing 737 has been assembled in Wichita, loaded on trains, and hauled to the Pacific Northwest to get its wings, tail and engines. Boeing sold the plant in 2005 to a Canadian firm, which still does that work in Wichita under contract.
See, Boeing used to build all these parts in house. They had an all union workforce.
Then they started outsourcing. They sent parts out to places like DuCommon which was cutting corners. They Sold the Wichita Assembly to Spirit to cut costs.
They also Acquired McDonnel Douglas
Following Boeing's 1996 acquisition of Rockwell's North American division, McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997 in a US$13 billion stock-swap to create The Boeing Company.[1][47]
http://economics.illinoisstate.edu/...
It combines two companies who were both leaders in their respective
specialties, and simultaneously capitalized on utilizing eachother’s strengths to develop a company that will stand out as the best world-wide. Within the one short hour that the decision was made, one of the greatest aerospace companies of the world was created.
That was the theory of why they spent $13 Billion to Buy Macdac, but
instead of a huge gain, it damn near killed Boeing
http://www.economist.com/...
Arguably, the task of making the merger work distracted top management from the basic task of making and selling jet aeroplanes at a profit. Mr Stonecipher, now Boeing’s president, predictably denies that. He claims it was just a coincidence that the civil-jet crisis came along at the same time. The whole board had agreed to expand production of 737s to counter Airbus’s incursions into the American market with its A320 aircraft. “The same would have happened without the merger,” he insists.
However, the merger’s legacy of uncertainty and wrenching change may have triggered Boeing’s second post-merger crisis. Earlier this year, just as the company seemed to be recovering from the first crisis, Boeing’s white-collar engineers embarked on a bitter strike, which will dent Boeing’s profits. The company’s recovering share price fell back, but has since recovered.
Phantom in the works
The crisis on the civil-aircraft side of the business had another, more benign effect. It became obvious that Ron Woodard, the super-salesman who ran the civil business, was incapable of getting things under control. Wall Street was baying for blood; Mr Woodard was fired. In the management reshuffle to replace him, Mr Condit and Mr Stonecipher decided to give the company a clearer focus.,,,,
In February 1999, when Boeing’s share price was last almost as low as it was recently, Mr Condit warned his top managers that the company was theoretically a takeover target, as its market capitalisation fell below net asset value.
So let's put this in some context.
Boeing had done a 13 billion dollar acquisition, the merger had gone badly,
Stock prices were staggering and the company was a takeover target.
In this environment the pressure to avoid scrappage costs must have been enormous.
The Head of the Civil Aircraft division had been fired.
And what do we have? Bad Bears. Normalized Deviance
and How does this tie into Fukushima?
It's never been a problem?
That same thing we are seeing at Boeing on the Bear Straps, GE and TEPCO had to
have been saying at the Reactor ops meetings.
It is the second time in a year that a powerful, wealthy, profitable energy industry has been exposed for engineering fraud.
the quote above from a diary i wrote yesterday is the same a third time.
And I didn't even mention Darleen Druyun and the scandals elsewhere.