Tuesday, January 9, 2024

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.

5 comments:

  1. Sounds like maintenance to me..

    Before that plane flew for Alaska air..
    Boeing assembled it and it got a flight test.
    The paint shop got it..
    The interior shop got it.
    and since it apparently few at least a few times, it saw a maintenance cycle or several.

    So who missed the bolts?

    Eck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. They're inside the wall panelling, should have been installed right and never had to have been looked at again (short of a major strip the interior out depot interior refurb) You can either have quality work of pride and dignity, done right at every level, or you can have rah-rah 6 Smegma inititiatives and shit coming off the plane in midair. As it was, there were whistlwblower complaints that were blown off.
    Clockwork Orange behavior mod for the beancounters....

    ReplyDelete
  3. Assembled in Wichita, then the fuselage section is shipped to Boeing, where the door plug is removed during the fit-out and installation of the interior and re-installed. If there's an issue there, it's on Boeing not Spirit.

    Didja hear they found bolts without nuts in the rudder assy in Max airplanes?

    If it's Boeing, I ain't going.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Slipped this into a roundup this morning, paired with ~ a three-way, if you wish ~ reference to Michael Creighton's 1990s Airframe. Might be apples and oranges but ... it's fruit that grows on trees

    ReplyDelete
  5. Shoddy is the Occam's Razor so far. Could the normal flexing of a properly installed plug lead to failure, given the bolt failure? A material science engineer brought that possibility up in a conversation last night. It would seem to be the acid test of reliability.

    ReplyDelete

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