F.A.A. Audit of Boeing’s 737 Max Production Found Dozens of Issues
(www.nytimes.com)
from ylai@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.world on 12 Mar 2024 03:03
https://lemmy.ml/post/13063017
from ylai@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.world on 12 Mar 2024 03:03
https://lemmy.ml/post/13063017
Without paywall: archive.ph/2Ir4Q
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A six-week audit by the Federal Aviation Administration of Boeing’s production of the 737 Max jet found dozens of problems throughout the manufacturing process at the plane maker and one of its key suppliers, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times.
Last week, the agency announced that the audit had found “multiple instances” in which Boeing and the supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, failed to comply with quality-control requirements, though it did not provide specifics about the findings.
Since the Alaska Airlines episode, Boeing has come under intense scrutiny over its quality-control practices, and the findings add to the body of evidence about manufacturing lapses at the company.
At one point during the examination, the air-safety agency observed mechanics at Spirit using a hotel key card to check a door seal, according to a document that describes some of the findings.
Asked about the appropriateness of using a hotel key card or Dawn soap in those situations, a spokesman for Spirit, Joe Buccino, said the company was “reviewing all identified nonconformities for corrective action.”
The audit raised concerns about the Spirit technicians who carried out the work and found that the company “failed to determine the knowledge necessary for the operation of its processes.”
The original article contains 902 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wonder how many C-level execs get in trouble? /s
I don’t think this ends in beheadings, but there will (hopefully) be significant follow on effects. A threat to consumer confidence in flying is a risk to the entire industry, all Boeing’s competitors and the airlines will be screaming for the FAA to get the actions right here…
One would think so, but I haven’t heard a peep out of them.
Weird.
Competitors… You mean Airbus, the EU sponsored counterpart to Boeing? And literally no one else?
There’s almost no competition in the airliner space - both Boeing and Airbus are also state subsidised to a certain extent. Their mere existence is a strategic asset.
Either of them failing would have large global consequences… At worst, Boeing might no longer be able to hire their own FCC inspectors… At worst.
Even the smaller competitors like Bombardier would have an interest in this, even if they are not the manufacturers of similar sized aircraft, a loss of faith in the aviation industry hurts everyone too. Plus suppliers etc.
As for the investigators (I know you meant FAA, not FCC), we have a similar issue in medical devices - you need seriously well educated experts to perform the investigations, and it is hard to find any without industry experience which wouldn’t look good on paper. The solution is to try as hard as you can to not have ex-employees audit their ex-bosses, but it isn’t always possible so we accept some overlap. It doesn’t mean these people don’t take their job seriously.
Bombardier is 75% owned by Airbus now. There are hardly any competitors left, even small ones
Well, they did already have a CEO resign over the 737-Max.
Yeh but that guy wasn’t even in charge when that project was laid out and he got a massive golden parachute. Paid sacrafical lamb for PR purposes.
According to The Guardian he got $60M in stock and pension for being fired. Also it seems that stock price didn’t fall much after the crashes and the grounding. It is only after COVID hit that Boeing’s price plummeted. So it might be only by pure luck that he lost anything of value at all.
About 300 years at the salary of a doctor. I am sure he contributed as much to human happiness and well-being as 300 doctors working for a single year.
It’s funny I know someone who’s an exec at Boeing Space, which is practically a completely different company and 99% a gov contractor. Let’s just say the SLS hassss to work flawlessly because its got “Boeing” written all over its parts, luckily NASA is leading the project so it’ll probably go as planned.
That has got to be a depressing job. I can’t imagine the pain of being involved in starliner and SLS.
Not sure why you are getting down votes. Nobody wants SLS, even NASA. Congress is proping it up for pork
Because everyone assumes if you aren’t a SLS booster you agree with every single thing Elon Musk has ever done or said.
I hate how there isn’t a middle anymore. It is like the Middle East but for everything.
Ah. Yeah musk is insane but his rockets are cheaper than the SLS will be. Hell Congress hasn’t even funded more than 1 or 2 launches because it is so expensive.
I ran the calculations, but I got a divide by zero error
Infinite?
Killing that guy should fix this.
What do you mean “a whistleblower in the middle of testifying against Boeing’s shoddy and unsafe construction practices decides to off himself in a hotel parking lot” isn’t normal?
Two bullet wounds to the back of the head is perfectly normal. Happens all the time.
Did you just make that up?
No. Gary Webb, the reporter from the San Jose Mercury News who first broke the story of CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, was found dead with “two gunshot wounds to the head.” His death, in 2004, was ruled a suicide.
Not quite the back of the head.
<img alt="" src="https://h4x0r.host/pictrs/image/9bcd1dbb-3e66-4397-be16-620bff817208.jpeg">
Sorry I don’t have Wikipedia memorized
Ah, the meaning of my comment went straight over your head and you resort to throwing insults around.
I’ll spell it out then: The fact that the first shot merely went through his mouth, from one cheek to the other makes it entirely possible, even probable, that Gary Webb commited suicide. Even his ex-wife said so:
Spreading unfounded, exaggerated conspiracy theories while not even getting the facts straight isn’t helping anyone but the perpetrators, especially when the CIA actually did commit some atrocious crimes that can be cited by stating facts instead of fiction.
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The idea that someone trying to commit suicide would shoot themselves through the cheeks implies a truly staggering level of incompetence. The whole point of shooting yourself in the head is to have a quick and painless death. Shooting random holes in your body first is the opposite of that.
Pretty sure this meme refers to when someone finds the slightest, most irrelevant technicality so they can say you’re wrong. You’re just straight up incorrect here in a way that’s directly applicable to the thread. There’s nothing wrong with that, everyone gets shit wrong.
Oh. I didn’t realize you were talking about a completely different event.
People fall out of the window all the time. It just happens. Clearly he was troubled.
From two different guns
Aah, the famous hotel-key-card feeler gauge! 🥹
I’ve used my badge before, but not for production processes. It’s more of a ‘damn that gap is big’ thing.
This looks like the full text without a paywall:
sammyboy.com/…/f-a-a-audit-of-boeing’s-737-max-pr…
Are these facilities not regularly audited by a 3rd party to maintain their ISO certifications? The stuff mentioned in the article (key card feeler gauge…WTF!?) would/should have been caught in any routine audit.
They are audited by FAA “compliance officers” who conveniently are employees of the company they are auditing. No conflict of interest at all
That’s absolutely insane…why is it not a requirement to have audits performed by a third party, or the FAA themselves? This is laughably ridiculous, especially for an industry that claims to be focused on safety and quality.
The term you're looking for is "regulatory capture."
FREEDUM™️
Err, wut?
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<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/589397f8-c564-432e-8e9f-e53cb36240fc.gif">
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That’s bullshit. FAA audits some things, but quality audits are third party. Here it’s usually SAI global.
Base pay $25,000
Performance related bonus per quarter:
0 issues found: $25,000
1+ issues found: $0
Uh is that real? It cant be.
We get AS9100 audits routinely. Also, for sub-tiers, we get customer audits.
The key card is fucking hilarious and I am going to give some friends some shit for that. But, no, every process isn’t fully audited constantly. Any employee in visual distance should have called that shit out, though. It’s not hard to get a feeler gauge stack or even a custom ground go/no go. Though would they know to check their feeler stack with a mic? Not likely if they think using a key card is reasonable.
Dude. Regulatory agencies are corrupt as heck. There’s no incentive to be a good auditor and actually dig deep to find issues and lots of incentive to have no findings. They’re all buddies with the management.
Why do boeing planes sound like Linux file permissions?
Edit: typo
737 is a very unusual file permission. But IIRC it actually works as intended. The group that owns the file can’t read it but can write and execute, everyone else can. However I suspect you can probably figure out a way to drop the relevant group?
Few of them make sense, but 787 raises the most questions.
It lets you write backwards in time.
If Boeing stock drops another $30 or so, I’m going to have to buy some.
Username checks out?
I really, really hate capitalism most days but play the game I suppose.
Think of it as a win win. If a company you hate does well then you get consolation money. If it does badly then thats nice too.
lol yep, this describes my outlook as well. I can play the game, and I’m actually decent at it, but the game is absolutely, categorically awful, and it’d be great for humanity at large if we could all stop playing it.
Why? I think there’s a decent chance they don’t survive this - at least their commercial airplanes. I won’t fly on a Boeing any time soon, if ever. It will take years to get back to a safety culture and there are tons of shit planes manufactured in the past several years that will be in service for decades.
If I was a pilot, I wouldn’t want to fly one either. They just had another incident where a pilot says the gauges went blank and he lost control. If a pilot union starts pushing back, it’s game over.
Would you fly on one of their planes?
They’re the airplane manufacturer in the US at that scale. There is zero chance the gov’t will let them fail.
Third largest US wepons contractor as well.
Edit: Added info about ranking
Because the US government is going to seem them too big to fail. Too many jobs, too much lobbying, and too many government contracts.
www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Boe…
Boeing isn’t going anywhere, they’re a major part of the US MIC and DoD contracts will keep em afloat. They clearly don’t care about civilian affairs, based on their QC as seen here, imo
You should. Government isn’t going to let them go under. At least not in a crash and burn sense.
I still have two from when I was a youngin’. 😞
Related: m.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=Q8oCilY4szc
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Is “dozens” a large amount?
Never-nudes: no
Safety flaws in aircraft production: yes
I would imagine you can find safety flaws in anything because safety isn’t a thing we can measure.
“safety isn’t a thing we can measure” says a guy who knows nothing about measuring risk and assumes it means no one in the world does either.
I take a lot of risks but never with yo mama. I always take my time with her.
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I’m going to take a leap of faith and say you don’t work in aviation…
Step one… define safety in the context of the airplane.
Step two… measure it.
So yea. If safety is never defined it cannot be measured. But is the sentiment you are attempting to express is that measurable safety guidelines have not been defined for these massively complicated and long-running commercial aircraft?
Maybe I am misunderstanding because at first glance your comment comes across as nonsensical, please elaborate.
How do you think safety is verified?
Safety cannot be measured because it’s a feeling. One person feels safe climbing a mountain without a rope and the next person is petrified. Safety is just word to describe a concept. It’s different to the wavelength of light or force or charge. These things are based on fundamental properties of the universe that can be measured and are repeatable.
A reasonable approximation might be to consider the likelihood of an adverse event given a use case over time. We could say that an accident every million hours is our definition of safe but that is completely arbitrary in the way that the physical laws and constants are not.
One accident per million hours is a direct measurement of safety, not “completely arbitrary”. The idea that the threshold in aviation regulations are “arbitrary” because it’s not based on a physical law or constant is like saying the temperature we use as “too hot for prolonged contact” is arbitrary. If you exceed it you’re likely to get burned, and if you exceed the safety thresholds in aviation regulations you’ll be less safe in an airplane than other types of transportation that we as a society find acceptable.
In engineering safety is not “just a feeling”.
Your arguments are so absurd I’m certain you’re just trolling for a reaction with brain dead comments like this.
It’s a measurement on an arbitrary scale. Nothing I’ve said is news to anyone who designs safety critical systems. I’m certainly not saying that safety isn’t important or that we can’t assess it. What I’m saying is that placing a number on that assessment will always stray into the realm of politics in a way that physics and mathematics never does. It lulls ignorant people into the belief that something is safe or not safe. They feel safe because they’ve been told it is safe or vice versa. Physics doesn’t care if you feel safe.
It’s notable that contemporary safety standards such as ISO 26262 generally avoid numerical assessments, for the reasons outlined above.
First Incidents per hour is not arbitrary. These numbers compare very well to daily activities such as walking, driving, bathing, eating, swimming so that non specialists have a good idea of how much risk an activity carries by comparing it to an activity they’re familiar with.
Secondly ISO 26262 produces ASILs as its output which are qualitative, but still based on probably assessments in terms of chance of incidence per hour. The reason for qualitative instead of quantitative assessments of the more general SILs (based on IEC61508, the parent of ISO 26262) is that qualitative is cheaper than quantitative and the automotive industry is full of corner cutting.
Third, aircraft use QUANTITATIVE risk assessments based on ARP476, so risk can be directly measured and mathematicaly compared to any other activity. When people say “flying is safer than driving” it’s not arbitrary, it’s based on real math. The same math the FAA is using to find safety issues in the Boeing production line.
Fourth
Is this you?
Amazing that you survived until you were able to post this crap on the internet
I’m sorry, idk why but this comment is so funny. Like I’m laughing irl but I can’t explain to anyone why.
“Because safety isn’t a thing we can measure” reads exactly like a dril tweet.
… holy shit there’s a whole academic-level analysis of dril’s tweets. I am enchanted.
You’re right, it absolutely does sound like dril! I’d forgotten about that account since I left Twitter
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An assessment is not a measurement and safety is not an SI unit, deal with it bro.
That is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve heard in a while. Safety can ALWAYS be measured. Hell, that’s OSHA’s entire purpose!
What are the units?
This reminds me so much of a client I had a while back. Safety inspector found one possible violation and what followed was a scream fest with cussing on the floor. Suddenly a lot more violations were found.
Edit: just in case there is any confusion. If you happen to be running a factory or a construction site the correct response to a a safety inspector telling you about a violation is “you are right, I am sorry, we will come up with a plan to make sure this isnt going to happen moving forward”. The incorrect response is pissing the hell out of the safety inspector. However, if you hate the place feel free to get your revenge.
Alternatively if you’re a worker you scream and make a big deal and the real issues get found.
I viewed this – y2u.be/URoVKPVDKPU
The vid showed that Boeing seemed to have questionable quality control. The focus was maximizing profit. Boeing outsourced the ✈’s parts to different firms but seemed to have a loose grasp on the whole thing. As the main firm, Boeing must have keenly supervised the crucial things. It’s a key part of quality control.
Also, some knowledgeable Boeing folks left Boeing. Brain drain.