"That airplane suffered 3 pressurization warning signals that were checked by maintenance engineers in the days before the door plug blew out. The plane was placed on limited service and prevented from doing over water flights like going to Hawaii. Should that plane even been in the air with passengers?
“Is it safe to fly any Boeing aircraft” (given Boeing management and safety performance)?
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy had a pained look on her face when she recited the standard propaganda that, “The United States has the safest air travel system in the World”
Conservative commentator Saager Enjetti really gives it to Boeing and the bipartisan culture of corporate and political corruption in Washington. Saager notes that Boeing diverted $60 Billion to stock buybacks that could have been better spent on product safety and manufacturing excellence. Your Jack Welch-trained MBA culture at work.
Whenever an MBA is overseeing major engineering problems we all know the world will be safe for shareholders. The rest is collateral damage. We can afford it.
The NTSB has been asking for that for something like 20 years, but the completely corrupt FAA has been loath to put the small cost of that Black Box improvement on the airlines. I imagine they are concerned about the small hit to excessive Executive Compensation.
They make it sound like these are top notch credentialled people. If they really are engineers I want to know what schools they went to. I am assuming they meant maintenance technicians.
I saw this video by accident expert Blaine Colirio. He explains that the bare fuselages are shipped from Spirit Aerosystems in Wichita, KS with the door plugs installed. Then Boeing removes them in Renton, WA during final assembly to make their work easier, and reinstalls them towards the end of the assembly process. Seems to me that if there are “loose bolts”, it’s a Renton WA error.
Every state has a “corporate exemption” to the Professional Engineering licensing laws. As long as the work is being done on the company premises by company employees, they don’t need no engineering credentials. I’m sure whoever looked at the plane was at least an FAA-certified Airframe & Engine Mechanic.
On the news they said that the FAA-required maintainence check on the door plug was going to take 4 to 8 hours per aircraft. That doesn’t sound too bad. The lost revenue from having the fleet grounded is the big cost.
And that there is really where all the talk about “it was too expensive to do the 737 MAX correctly” really falls apart. Boeing had more than enough money to do a full new, clean-sheet airplane, let alone do this modification to the 737 MAX properly. They had the money. They just wanted to fill their pockets instead. Plain and simple.
One of my coworkers had a saying “never enough time to do the job correctly the first time, but there is always time to go back and fix mistakes”,
I noticed a bit in the Wiki entry on Harry Stonecypher. The bit went along the lines of “when Boeing bought MDD, there was a culture war, Boeing’s engineering culture, v MDD’s accountant culture, and MDD won”.
Condit, an engineer, made a mess of running Boeing in the late 90s, They sold more planes than they could build, resulting in massive overtime, expediting charges paid to vendors, and out of sequence assembly due to shortages of parts. Boeing lost money, when it should have been making record profits.
Condit was tossed, in favor of the MDD culture, in the person of Stonecypher. When Stonecypher was tossed, they went outside the company for a Welch protege. Then they brought in Calhoun, another Welchist.
So, over the last several years, BA has earned a reputation for shoddy design and shoddy assembly. Their “solution”? Move their HQ to DC, so they can cozy up to DoD, while saying they don’t care if Airbus takes commercial market share away from them.
{{ PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The loud “boom” was startling enough, and the roaring wind that immediately filled the airline cabin left Kelly Bartlett unnerved. Still, it wasn’t until a shaken teenager, shirtless and scratched, slid into the seat next to her that she realized just how close disaster had come.
A section of the Boeing 737 Max 9’s fuselage just three rows away had blown out — at three miles high — creating a vacuum that twisted the metal of the seats nearby, and snatched cellphones, headsets and even the shirt off the teenager’s back. }}
Actually, someone who has done a bit of mentoring of me to get my stack together in game design is a Ph.D. in aerodynamics. His take is interesting. Hopefully, I do enough justice to it.
The issue is harmonic resonance in the plane with the engines. The mounting of the engines is different. The initial software failed. When the timing was sorted out the harmonics if you will became better. The 737 Max is now a better plane altogether than it had been. He claims better now than it was actually designed to be. That is because of the new software.
My friend was using a similar video game engine to create a specialized jet plane flight simulation. I forget which plane he was mocking up. He could not use something that already existed. He was redesigning an aircraft landing gear suspension system. His video production was for a professional report. He knew the video game software. Just good timing my talk over a year ago now to him about my project.
He has his own business with major contracts with Boeing, Airbus, Pratt, and others at various times. At least right now he works by himself. He has had employees in the past.
In a way, he does not consider himself all that intelligent. He could get his Ph.D. But he was limited to only that course of study. He is not good at other things. He is honest when he says that. That intensity did not exist for anything else.
Mea culpa I am giving a better response now than earlier.
