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Boeing says certain 787 parts improperly manufactured

102 points4 yearsreuters.com
quacked4 years ago

There are two phenomenal pieces of writing that lend great insight to what's going on at Boeing (that is, if you believe the two authors):

How Boeing Lost Its Bearings: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

Out-Sourced Profits -- The Cornerstone Of Successful Subcontracting: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...

I've worked with Boeing spaceflight engineers, and several acquaintances of mine have worked for Boeing aviation. I have never seen or heard of any Boeing-branded organization putting out a single well-organized, quality piece of engineering or IT infrastructure since I entered the job market in 2017. From what I can tell, it's practically a state department at this point.

N_A_T_E4 years ago

Painful to read “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

xyzzy214 years ago

Indeed. The guy not understanding EITHER what an engineering firm actually is nor what a business is.

twiddling4 years ago

I would also plug Dominic Gates from the Seattle Times ( https://twitter.com/dominicgates ) with his on the ground (ha) reporting on the Lazy B

barbarbar4 years ago

But 2017 is also sort of yesterday.

JumpCrisscross4 years ago

Would breaking up Boeing alleviate the problem? If so, what would be the fracture lines (and conditions)?

Accujack4 years ago

I don't think so - no. There's no turning back the clock here. Prior to the "big change" Boeing was one of the last survivors of the huge industrial boom that followed world war 2.

It's difficult to overstate how gigantic that boom was in the aerospace field and how unique the industry it created in the US was.

So many aerospace related companies, all competing with each other, all continually improving the aircraft technology, engineering best practices, manufacturing practices, corporate structure and governance, and everything else associated with aircraft manufacture so they produced the best product.

The competition produced some incredible advances and some unique corporations (like Boeing was) that functioned in a way not before seen (and not presently continued) for an American corporation. Basically, an engineering firm that as sort of side business produced airplanes.

The problem was, of course, that the boom couldn't last - as other countries rebuilt their industries, the US was no longer the only game in town. For a long time, the US dominated aerospace because not only did this unique industry exist here but also because we had a huge head start.

Eventually, though, through mismanagement and delusions about why the US was in the lead, that lead was squandered, companies were sold out, consolidated, and markets shrank as regulation caused aircraft manufacturing to be a more specialized industry.

Boeing was one of the last firms that retained the focus on engineering from that post war boom time. Now that it's changed, to change it back would require a new generation of employees to make a conscious effort to do so, to replicate what happened during the post war boom.

That's nearly impossible.

throw637384 years ago

》For a long time, the US dominated aerospace because not only did this unique industry exist here but also because we had a huge head start

Also eliminating competition with threats, bribes and corruption.

cafard4 years ago

Actually, the US was one of the first to crack down on the bribes and corruption part. I think that the law that can get you in trouble for bribing a foreign government official arose out of fighter jet sales to a European country.

Accujack4 years ago

At the time we got the head start, no competition existed.

fsckboy4 years ago

you're asking somebody who entered the job market in 2017 and worked in one division which was not aviation how Boeing should be broken up?

JumpCrisscross4 years ago

> you're asking somebody who entered the job market in 2017 and worked in one division which was not aviation how Boeing should be broken up?

Yup! In my experience, the guys in Chicago have zero clue how their technical teams work and so where a schism could be debilitating versus not noticeable.

geodel4 years ago

Yeah, like management consultants who become experts overnight once billing starts from clients.

bluedino4 years ago

We are a Boeing supplier and it is rumored they are going to require 50 year data retention

Yikes.

imglorp4 years ago

The B52 first flew in 1952; the 737 in 1967. Both are still in the air. With lifetimes like that, who can blame them? Someone needs to hold that data while the product is in use.

bigbillheck4 years ago

What's wrong with that? Seems like good practice if you expect these planes to be flying for decades.

bluedino4 years ago

How do you store data for that long? Imagine the costs.

piva004 years ago

Imagine the costs of not having the data for planes still being flown. Missing manuals, tech specs, testing procedures, etc. for some strange part that was manufactured 40 years ago, with completely different people, tooling and processes.

I believe the cost of missing data is much larger than keeping an archival storage, we have been doing archiving for a long, long time as a species.

bigbillheck4 years ago

You do it however you have to, for example: https://hvmag.com/life-style/history/a-history-of-iron-mount...

HeyLaughingBoy4 years ago

Don't imagine: someone will calculate it.

Besides, what's important is that the benefit outweighs the cost. If the cost is required to stay in business, then it's probably important enough to incur. Remember: someone's going to be paying that cost and it's clearly worthwhile to them.

hungryforcodes4 years ago

100 year archival DVDs with redundancy? The first question should be how much data do they need to store over 50 years...

ortusdux4 years ago

I thoroughly enjoyed the YouTube channel Real Engineering's two part series on all the innovations that were packed into the 787.

Part 1 is mostly about the body of the plane - https://youtu.be/lapFQl6RezA

& part 2 is mostly about the powertrain - https://youtu.be/Sf6H8kSunRA

They discuss the dramatic increase in the need for titanium parts around 18 minutes into the first video. https://youtu.be/lapFQl6RezA?t=1090

When aluminum and carbon are in direct contact, galvanic corrosion is an issue. The only way they could make a plane with carbon fiber wings, fuselage, and empennage, was to replace most metallic elements with titanium. The final 787 is 15% titanium by weight.

Titanium is tough to work with, and I can see how problems would arise when you redesign what must be thousands of parts.

latchkey4 years ago

Specialized used to make a bike out of coated carbon tubes glued into Aluminum lugs using the same manufacturing process that the aerospace industry used. The Allez.

Beautiful bike, I had one, but it suffered from two problems: it was overly flexible and if you got a nick in the coating on the fiber or water got into the lugs, you'd get the GC issue.

Of course, their marketing claimed they 'solved' the issue...

https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-vintage/422428-specialize...

jacquesm4 years ago

Cadex made a similar bike, I rode it for years and never had any issues and I'm also not aware of any issues with that model. I wonder what the differences in processes and/or materials were.

justinator4 years ago

Was there also a problem with the glue failing?

chroem-4 years ago

> The only way they could make a plane with carbon fiber wings, fuselage, and empennage, was to replace most metallic elements with titanium.

That's not really true: galvanic corrosion can be stopped if you simply anodize the aluminum parts. There is no titanium required to do this. This is a common practice when working with carbon fiber.

Nick876334 years ago

Maybe they wanted the lower CTE and higher fatigue resistance of the titanium, and one fewer process step to qualify and control (the anodization).

app4 years ago

Came here to say this. Very informative, if somewhat laudatory, videos.

Gravityloss4 years ago

As comparison, the series "21st Century - Jet Building the Boeing 777 " is online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw

They have pretty intense meetings with the subcontractors.

S_A_P4 years ago

Wasnt there an Al-Jazeera documentary about 787 manufacturing problems, some 5 years ago?

Googled it- 7 years ago: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...

There were line workers complaining of many manufacturing defects and bad practices that were being swept under the rug.

rob744 years ago

Yes, but that was about the quality of the assembly of the plane, particularly with 787s coming from the Boeing plant in South Carolina (which was until recently one of two plants that assembled the 787 - now however it's the only one). This article is about unnamed parts (whatever they may be) coming from an unnamed supplier (whoever it may be), but not related to the actual quality of Boeing's work (except maybe the quality control of the parts of course).

droopyEyelids4 years ago

The Al Jazerra doc covered the problems assembling the airframes _because the parts used to make the fuselage were defective_ They were cut by hand because the manufacturer never assembled the CNC machine.

rsj_hn4 years ago

I'm reminded of the Chinese guy who paid two million yuan for a hit, and then the hit man kept half and outsourced it, and that guy kept half and outsourced it, down to five levels deep, and finally the guy at the very bottom faked the murder, got caught, and the whole chain got rolled up.

That's basically Boeing.

Somewhere is a hut and parts are being made on a dirt floor in a half-assed way - or at least the modern equivalent of that. This supports an enormous pyramid of managers, business process outsourcers, accountants, lobbyists, and executives. Meanwhile, real engineers are holding their head crying at what happened to their company.

loonster4 years ago

I used to work for that company at the bottom. Naively I thought we were the only bottom feeder. The company would use up the tool budget on useless things, then ended up hand working everything.

wahern4 years ago

> The defect was found as the planemaker grapples with other problems in its 787 that have caused it to cut production and halt deliveries since May.

From Boeing management's long-term perspective, the upside to the current downturn is that it provides them an excuse to shift more production from their unionized Washington factory to their non-unionized South Carolina factory. (Anybody know if 787 production has now--or will be--moved entirely to South Carolina?)

Notably, most 787 quality problems have been with their South Carolina factory, which has less expertise and less ability to push back against the unreasonable management demands that result in shortcuts and defects. Some customers were even stipulating Washington built planes. But of course Boeing management couldn't care less about their quality problems. Presumably their gamble is that with Washington out of the equation, the defect rates will silently become status quo and then people won't complain as much.

It would be entirely unsurprising if this management culture bleeds through its suppliers, assuming it hasn't already. Major f'up? Terminate the contract to appease everybody, and sign a new contract with a virgin outfit. Wash, rinse, repeat.

noahtallen4 years ago

> Anybody know if 787 production has now--or will be--moved entirely to South Carolina?

Yep, I believe it happened earlier this year: https://www.king5.com/article/tech/science/aerospace/boeing/...

niffydroid4 years ago

Whats new? This has been going on for quite some time. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-united-tech-pratt-lawsuit...

searine4 years ago

The 787 uses additively manufactured titanium parts. I think they are part of the bracket that holds the engine on the wing(?), Norsk describes them as "structural, load-bearing components". Could be those since that is where it would be most critical. Or not, this is just speculation.

https://www.norsktitanium.com/media/press/norsk-titanium-to-...

anaganisk4 years ago

So the MSFS2020 plane wasn’t huggy, but actually was replicating real world plane?

drdeadringer4 years ago

I think I'm late to the party but at this point I'm thinking the name "Dreamliner" is a misnomer.

amelius4 years ago

So they found their scapegoat?

1cvmask4 years ago

From the article:

The company did not name the supplier, nor did it identify the part, although the Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the defect involved certain titanium parts that are weaker than they should be.

-

It would seem that we would need to know what kind of part this is if we want to continue flying and trusting Boeing. Is it a part in the kitchen of the plane or a more critical holding the jet engines. It would seem this might be a critical part as it is titanium.

ncallaway4 years ago

While I agree that Boeing should tell us which specific part it is, they are making the claim that it’s not an “immediate flight safety concern”. The fact that their PR team felt the need to include the word “immediate” indicates to me it’s more important than a kitchen part, but that whatever it is likely has redundant systems that can handle a failure of this part.

I do think Boeing is being a little too tight lipped on this. I think a decade ago, many would have let the questions end at Boeing’s statement, but their trust has really been harmed over the last 10 years, and I’d like them to provide more information.

> "While our investigation is ongoing, we have determined that this does not present an immediate safety of flight concern for the active in-service fleet," a company spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

jasode4 years ago

>>It would seem that we would need to know what kind of part this is if we want to continue flying and trusting Boeing.

>While I agree that Boeing should tell us which specific part it is,

In general, it's bad business etiquette to publicly name & shame defects/mistakes made by business partners or company employees. Whether a supplier messed up a titanium part or a Facebook employee misconfigured a router, you don't call out their names in public.

Yes, it's understandable we readers would want to know all the dirty details but Boeing giving us that may also have the opposite effect: less safety instead of more.

In this case, it was the supplier that notified Boeing about the defect. If Boeing publicly outed that supplier to the press, that adds perverse incentives for the supplier (and other suppliers) to not notify airplane manufacturers in the future which creates unsafe planes.

On the other hand, it's probably good if Boeing privately notifies the FAA inspectors so they are alerted to it. Maybe they already shared that information.

magicalhippo4 years ago

I mean it might not even be the direct supplier's fault, if they sourced the titanium from a company which didn't deliver what they certified[1].

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/aluminum-extrusion-manufactur...

wombatpm4 years ago

Raw materials should be quality inspected. It was a big deal when we had 150 rolls of copper strip fail the QC testing. I worked inbound inspection for three summers at Andrew Corporation. We checked everything before it was stocked on our shelves. I remember asking why do we have to have to check the threads on boxes of Cap Screws from external supplies. The answer I was given is that when a technition is 150ft in the air mounting waveguides, he needs to know that the stupid screws will work the first time.

jacquesm4 years ago

That's not how it works in aerospace. Certification is there to ensure quality control throughout the chain, but you still need to do your own quality control at every step to ensure that what you produce will be within spec. You can't just rely on the certification of your source materials.

vkou4 years ago

It's the supplier's fault that they didn't do QC on their upstream vendors, just like it's Boeing's fault that they didn't do QC on their supplier.

ncallaway4 years ago

Is it public knowledge which contractors provide which parts for every part?

Is Boeing publicly naming the part also publicly naming the supplier?

throwaway0a5e4 years ago

In addition to what other commenters have said about not throwing your vendors under the bus this kind of hand wringing is why they don't trust the public with the more specific info.

If they tell you that the some part will wear out 5% faster on the planes with out of spec parts then every two-bit who took an engineering class once upon a time will be writing medium posts and creating youtube analysis videos with clickbait titles that overblow things and make it look like the world is ending when in reality it just means that the plane operators will have to inspect the part more and the end of life operators will have to replace it more.

From the Pinto to the 737 MAX the lesson that the public has repeatedly taught corporate America is that when there is a problem the narrative matters more than reality and it is to their best advantage to control it as much as they possibly can and because there are big bucks at stake they learn the lesson and do just that.

We reap what we sow.

ncallaway4 years ago

> the 737 MAX the lesson that the public has repeatedly taught corporate America is that when there is a problem the narrative matters more than reality

What did we sow with the 737 MAX disaster. Are you saying the public behaved inappropriately in their reactions to the MAX? That feels like it’s really sweeping the very legitimate problems under the rug and blaming the public for reacting to those problems.

It’s not like the public was reacting to hyperbolic engineering theories related to MCAS. Two planes crashed because of the system’s failure and the lack of notification and training to airlines and pilots.

I’m curious what you see as the public’s failing in this regard?

michaelmrose4 years ago

The Pinto an the MAX are drastic preventable failures that took the lives of passengers. If your take away from these failures is that the American public is somehow at fault for blowing things out of proportion you have come to the wrong conclusion.

If they had sufficient information to put people's mind at ease as you described above then the inherent failure is not providing it because it was entirely certain that everyone's mind is going to fill in the blanks with the worst possible thing that fits the bill and everyone's mental pictures is going to be of air frames disintegrating in the air. This was entirely predictable.

More likely the actual details haven't been communicated because it isn't nearly so reassuring. Let me speculate blindly...

It's a structural part the failure of which threatens the life of everyone on board the plane but rather than merely failing 5% faster it would never have passed spec in the first place and would if left alone have been found in the aftermath of hundreds of people hurtling to their fiery deaths and would tend to have started failing when the part failed halfway through its original expected lifespan.

It is only not an immediate threat to safety as 787s have only been around for 9 years and we still have literally single digit years before they would have started falling out of the sky so because they managed to discover this before falling planes took down the rest of their reputation they have time to strategize how they will take care of this in a way that simultaneously isn't ruinous to them or airlines.

This is like discovering your breaks don't work a half a mile before the edge of the cliff instead of 100 ft from it or having your appliance catch fire when you happen to be on hand to use your kitchen fire extinguisher.

They never should have moved substantial operations to a state full of complete idiots who can't be trusted to operate a toaster let alone build planes. THEY are reaping what they sowed.

jacquesm4 years ago

That's pretty weasily wordy though, it is only immediate if it has just failed and then suddenly it is a safety risk? That's way too ambiguous for my taste, and given the state of trust with Boeing I think more transparency here would be better.

doikor4 years ago

Even if it was some more critical part it could just mean that it has a lifetime of 10 years instead of 15 or 20. Or just needs to be checked more often so adding a bit to the maintenance costs until it is replaced. Worst case is that it is some really important part that is not designed to be changed during the lifetime of the plane making fixing it really hard (or impossible)

kova124 years ago

Or it could mean that a wing might fall off next time plane is under stress. We don't know, and since it's our life on the line, we do deserve to know

NikolaeVarius4 years ago

If the damn FAA hasn't issued a AirWorthiness Directive, you'll be fine.

99.999999999999% of people have no idea what any of this info actually means or how to process it.

COVID has proven this fact

+1
dahart4 years ago
kova124 years ago

based on FAA stellar record in that matters, I'd say we still better be informed

nolok4 years ago

You say "just" as if it wasn't important. I understand why you say that, but you clearly don't realise how much % of airplanes crash ends up being caused by maintenance skipping a beat. Shorter beats means a lot more skips.

fsagx4 years ago

little birds say Boeing has already made the move to bring the part in-house:

https://www.aviationpros.com/aircraft/news/21230827/delaware...

hef198984 years ago

If it is flight critical, Boeing has to publish official announcements through the FAA and EASA. If not, they don't any passengers don't have to worry too much.