UPDATE: Thursday, Jan 11, 2024 · 7:41:21 PM +00:00
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xaxnar
The New York Times is reporting the FAA is investigating whether or not Boeing 737 MAX 9 conformed to approved design:
In a letter to Boeing dated Jan. 10, the F.A.A. said that after the Portland incident, it was notified of additional issues with other Boeing 737 Max 9 planes. The letter does not detail what other issues were reported to the agency. Alaska and United Airlines, which operate most of the Max 9s in use in the United States, said on Monday that they discovered loose hardware on the panel when conducting preliminary inspections on their planes.
The new investigation is the latest setback for Boeing, which is one of just two suppliers of large planes for most airlines. The company has struggled to regain the public’s trust after two crashes, in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, involving the 737 Max 8 killed a total of 346 people.
….Mark Lindquist, a lawyer who represented the families of victims involved in the Max 8 crashes, said that the F.A.A. was being more proactive than it had been in the past by quickly opening an investigation into the Boeing 737 Max 9. Mr. Lindquist said the F.A.A. would take a much broader look at the aircraft than N.T.S.B., which aims to establish the cause of accidents and makes recommendations for how they can be prevented.`
“The tone of this announcement indicates the F.A.A. believes there was the potential for loss of life and the seriousness of the Boeing quality control issues,” Mr. Lindquist said.
In what is a breaking story, David Sirota from The Lever appeared on Democracy Now on January 9 to report to Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez that the major subcontractor building 737 MAX bodies for Boeing was facing whistleblower complaints and shareholder lawsuits over quality/safety issues.
It looks like this story is just beginning to break elsewhere; CBS had this report 5 hours ago: Boeing supplier that made Alaska Airlines door plug was warned of "defects" with other parts, lawsuit claims.
Via Truthout, which has video and a transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a breaking story, an update on the Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets that remain grounded after a refrigerator-sized fuselage door plug blew off on Friday on an Alaska Airlines plane in the air near Portland, Oregon. Officials with Alaska Airlines and United Airlines say they found loose bolts and other problems on some of the jets that have since been grounded.
Meanwhile, the online news outlet The Lever is reporting workers at a Boeing subcontractor were told to falsify records after inspection teams found, quote, “excessive amounts of defects” in parts being made for Boeing. Spirit AeroSystems reportedly manufactured the door that blew out on the Alaska Airlines flight 16,000 feet in the air. The Leverreports a group of Spirit shareholders filed a federal complaint last year saying Spirit executives had, quote, “prioritized production numbers and short-term financial outcomes over product quality.” Spirit was established nearly two decades ago as a spinoff of Boeing.
What Sirota has to say is damning:
DAVID SIROTA: Sure. Just a few days before — excuse me, a few weeks before the debacle over Portland, Oregon, court documents were filed by those shareholders that included allegations from safety officials, employees at the subcontractor, that basically allege a culture of defective products, a lack of quality control, and a retaliation — culture of retaliation against workers who were trying to sound the alarm. These workers say that they had found, as you said, excessive defects in the construction and production of these fuselages, that they tried to sound the alarm with corporate officials, with managers, including, by the way, the then-CEO of the company, and that they were retaliated against for raising those alarms.
And some of the specifics of the allegations relate to what we were now learning, the loose bolts situation as one example. One of the workers alleges that the calibration of the tools that tighten those bolts, that they had found problems in the calibration of those tools and that they had gone to management and said, “We have a systemic problem here,” and, again, that those warnings were ignored and that in some cases workers were retaliated against for trying to raise those alarms. At one point one of the workers, in an email and in an ethics complaint at the company, says, “Effectively, you’re asking us to report inaccurate information about the safety of the products that we’re putting out there,” the products, of course, being those components of the fuselage.
To summarize key points from the report:
- Workers were warning that quality and safety were being sacrificed to production quotas and profits.
- Work being performed to build the airliner bodies was found at times to have been poorly done; parts were installed improperly or not at all.
- Tools that were needed to insure work met specifications were not working; workers were told to falsify quality control reports.
- Workers who attempted to raise alarms were retaliated against and fired.
- The FAA was not able to exercise necessary oversight because they are understaffed, underfunded, and industry self-regulation is too often the default.
- Shareholders brought a lawsuit because they felt the inaccurate information they were getting from management amounts to fraud and prevented them from exercising accountability.
Sirota reports that Spirit AeroSystems is not a minor subcontractor; it is responsible for major construction of the 737, has direct ties to Boeing management, and has been supplying them with vital components after they were spun off from Boeing 20 years ago. That may be one of the roots of the problem, along with several others not limited to the aerospace industry.
SOME BACKGROUND
Luke Goldstein at The American Prospect discusses the industry trends that led to the use of plug doors of the kind that blew out of the Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9. While he gets into the pressures and other factors behind it, he makes an observation that deserves attention on its own:
A faulty course change pretty well describes Boeing, which went through a restructuring during the 1990s from an “association of engineers” to a firm run by Wall Street shareholders. This catastrophic path has led to another systemic crisis for one of the world’s two major commercial aviation companies, underscoring the deterioration of Boeing’s product quality by financialization, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen massive consolidation in the aerospace industry here and in other countries. Where Boeing was once a company largely run by engineers and concentrating on airliners, it is now a major defense contractor as well. Names that have come and gone were legendary stand-alone companies like Douglas, McDonnell, North American, Grumman, Bell, Vertol, Martin, Sikorsky, Lockheed… and that’s just American companies.
Mergers and consolidation have been driven by A) the cost of developing new aircraft which calls for massive financial assets, B) increasing competitiveness from foreign competition, and C) the increasing financialization of the industry as the numbers keep getting bigger. A lack of real anti-trust action by the government can't be dismissed either.
Boeing has absorbed a number of weaker companies — and I’ve seen the observation that the resulting management ended up drawing too much from the ranks of the poor managers whose decisions made those companies takeover targets. The people at the top of the behemoth are more focused on earnings and stock prices than the basic business of building flying machines. They know more about spreadsheets and leveraged buyouts than they do about bending metal… or flight control software. The drive for profits above all is not good — like the earlier problems with the 737 MAX and its control systems that led to two crashes.
Spinning off portions of a company into separate sub contractors, resorting to out-sourcing, can have a corrosive effect. It erects barriers between workers and management so that critical information may not get transmitted, expertise gets balkanized, accountability gets blurred. Keeping everything in-house has its advantages.
So why have so many corporations embraced it? Greed is the basic explanation. A sub contractor can be put under real pressure to keep their costs down or be replaced. Companies can look for the cheapest suppliers, in whatever country they may be found — lengthening critical supply chains. It can end up transferring critical technology to eventual competitors. It’s a way of breaking unions and forcing workers to accept lower wages. It can lead to de-industrialization here in the U.S. as plants are closed and critical worker skills are lost. It may look good on quarterly earnings reports, but the long-term consequences are what we are seeing at Boeing.
What is happening with the 737 MAX seems troublingly similar to problems with another Boeing product, the KC-46 Pegasus. Intended to replace the aging fleet of aerial refueling tankers currently operated by the U.S. Military, it got off to a rocky start early on, as the companies vying to build a new tanker challenged the selection process in court, complaints about the way mission requirements were being written, and companies struggling to form partnerships that could get the winning bid. Years of delay ensued.
Boeing eventually got the contract, but troubles didn’t end there. The boom that delivers fuel to a plane needing a fill-up turned out to need redesign to solve problems with airflow and making a connection. The system of cameras and computer displays that were supposed to allow the boom operator to sit up front and operate the boom remotely turned out to have multiple issues.
But as with the 737 MAX, there have been more basic issues with quality. A 2019 report in the Seattle Times, via the Aviation Geek Club reported:
Boeing is just one step away from shutting down the KC-46A aerial refueling tanker assembly line, an internal memo has revealed.
As reported by The Seattle Times, the Feb. 21 memo said new KC-46As being delivered to the U.S. Air Force has been found with loose tools and bits of debris inside the aircraft. “We have USAF pilots here for flight training and they will not fly due to the FOD (foreign object debris) issues and the current confidence they have in our product that has been discovered throughout the aircraft,” it pointed out.
The memo in fact notes that eight tools were found in aircraft delivered to the Military Delivery Center (MDC) and two more in tankers delivered to the USAF.
“This is a big deal,” the memo emphasized. The MDC has issued a state 3 level of alert. One step away from total shut down of the assembly line.
And then there’s this:
Noteworthy as we have reported, last year the Pentagon faulted Boeing for continuing quality, management and other deficiencies in the production of F-15s and F/A-18 fighters at its St Louis production facility.
Undelivered aircraft have been found with missing, backwards and out-of-specification fasteners. Jets under assembly are inadvertently damaged when they hit maintenance work stands or other equipment on the floor.
Even though the aerospace company was punished by the Pentagon by withholding payments, the Pentagon itself said Boeing was more focused on “maintain cash flow, increase profit and achieve contract award.”
emphasis added
The KC-46 program is moving forward, but there are still issues, as Air & Space Forces Magazine reports in an August 7, 2023 update by Greg Hadley.
DAYTON, Ohio—More than six years after the Air Force identified the first serious deficiency on the KC-46 tanker, six Category 1 deficiencies still remain and a seventh was downgraded to Category 2 in April, said Col. Leigh Ottati, chief of the KC-46 program office—the first public announcement of that development
Ottati detailed the deficiencies still plaguing the Pegasus during the Life Cycle Industry Days conference last week and shared updated timelines for resolving some of them.
The Air Force defines a Category 1 deficiency as one which “may cause death, severe injury, or severe occupational illness; may cause loss or major damage to a weapon system; critically restricts the combat readiness capabilities of the using organization; or result in a production line stoppage.” Category 2 defects, meanwhile, “impede or constrain successful mission accomplishment.”
emphasis added
The appearance of the company CEO Dave Calhoun on the news accepting blame for the door plug failure and being visibly shaken by how much worse it could have been seems sincere enough — but it’s worth asking why nothing seems to have been learned from the previous 737 MAX crashes. This CBS news report has Calhoun speaking about the Alaska Airlines incident about 1 minute into the clip:
The official biography of Calhoun shows that he has a background in finance, investment banking, and early on in his career at GE, it also included marketing responsibilities. (edit — I wonder how much Calhoun learned from Jack Welch at GE.) Calhoun has been a member of Boeing’s Board of Directors since 2009 and served as board chairman from October to December 2019. He became CEO in 2020. Not a lot of aerospace experience there — but a thorough grounding in the corporate trends that have put Boeing and so many other industry behemoths in the last few decades where they are today — all about money, divorced from values. If you want cheerful PR about how great Boeing is though, you can find it at Watch U.S. Fly and sign up for updates. No bad news there.
Calhoun certainly should have had a wake up call after the prior 737 MAX fatal crashes showed how management decisions and company culture set the stage for disaster. This is going to take time to turn around — if it can happen at all under anyone’s leadership, let alone Calhoun’s.
Maybe it’s not a bad thing that the Biden administration is trying to really expand passenger rail, and not just for Climate reasons.