Jeez, Boeing

Federal investigators say a door panel slid up before flying off an Alaska Airlines jetliner last week, and they are looking at whether four bolts that were supposed to help hold the panel in place might have been missing when the plane took off.

The comments Monday from the National Transportation Safety Board came shortly after Alaska and United Airlines reported separately that they found loose parts in the panels — or door plugs — of some other Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

The door was part of the fuselage made by Spirit Aerosystems in Wichita, KS, which was Boeing's Wichita division until it was split off about twenty years ago in some of the usual corporate shenanigans after the MBAs and beancounters took control in the late nineties. The Wichita plant was the lead factory for B-29s.

Still, if there is a critical gizmo that needs bolts to hold it in place, shouldn't somebody be checking it? Hell, does somebody bother to check to see if the fucking wing attachment bolts are properly installed?

My suspicion is that this is the sort of shit that happens when the damned beancounters decide tha tthey don't need a lot of quality control, that they can give the workers a form to fill out with a checkbox for "check the bolts". After awhile, the box gets checked without thinking about it, because nobody is checking on the work.

Pretty fucking shoddy.