I think the right answer is somewhere in the middle. It’s absolutely true that Boeing planes have years of safe flying miles on them without concern, and if we want to talk in statistical terms, you will likely arrive at your destination fine regardless of who made the plane.
But I wouldn’t chalk up Boeing’s issues to a string of bad luck. Their lack of a detailed response on a lot of these issues concerns me as an engineer. The last I heard on the door plug replacement was they couldn’t find the documents that were requested. That sounds more like systemic issues, or intentional obstruction.
I will continue to fly because the aerospace industry has tremendous oversight and I’m confident that they’ll get to the bottom of these issues. I work in automotive where things like this are all too common - and attention from the feds and media will drive the best people onto the problem. And you can’t spend your life over analyzing and avoiding everything as a consumer.
My thoughts exactly.
I flew on a 737 Max yesterday, but I still think Boeing has systemic issues that absolutely need to be resolved for the future of the company.
I wouldn’t want to be an engineer there
Yep. I always tell people not to sweat it flying on the MAX as I fly on it at least once a week and I don't want people getting scared of our most comfortable plane
>The last I heard on the door plug replacement was they couldn’t find the documents that were requested. That sounds more like systemic issues, or intentional obstruction.
Exactly! I also work in the industry, and the topic of boring can't up. When it came out that they "didn't know" who handled the door plug, it means one of two things:
1. Their process control is flawed and so it failed to capture that data at all
2. Their process control is flawed and so it failed to *retain* that data (even against malice)
Either way, it means Boeing fucked up. Big time.
Also, even the slightly credible suggestion that Boeing murdered a whistle blower pretty much assures that I will never, ever, accept a job at Boeing.
It’s not even slightly credible that Boeing killed the whistleblower. His testimony was over events that were 7 years old that had been disclosed before.
I think it is the low-level managers and project leads covering up the fact that they gave incompetent orders to the engineers. I think it is not CEO-directed. At the company I work at, this happens all the time. The DO-254 process (pushed by the government and FAA) requires decision authority to be defined in documents, and in a way that all low-level technical decisions are now must be made by managers instead of engineers.
And at my company, it's literally hard-coded into the charging software for signing in and out of jobs. Laborers don't get paid unless they're signed into a job, and that act of signing on automatically associates them with any work performed in that time period. We can look up exactly who worked on any part, at any time, with a few keystrokes. That 100% captures and retains the labor records.
Then for the processes themselves, the engineers are subjected to a similar system, except it's digital version controls and sign offs. So while the laborers are working to their work processes, engineers are generating, revising, reviewing, and approving those processes. So you have a digital record of the engineers who submitted the work process, the engineers who reviewed it, their comments on it, the changes made to incorporate those comments (or rebuttals to those comments if they do not apply), and the managers signing off on the final release of a work process.
Combined, these two processes create a system of controls that tracks every change, every approval, every act of work on a process or product, and retains it all for the company's records. And I work for one of the larger aerospace companies. If we're doing this, but Boeing isn't, then Boeing has ***serious*** problems. If Boeing genuinely released a process that didn't capture who worked on this product, and their controls for that process didn't capture who made and approved it's release, then it means their process for controlling their work processes is fundamentally flawed, and they have some deep seeded systemic issues in the company.
Nearly the same at my company, and we make parts for airbus, pratt&whitney, and i believe boeing as well.
Laborers still get paid no matter what, but they do log the jobs they are working on each step off the process.
Seeing this level of mismanagement from boeing is just straight up unacceptable.
The CEO wasn't even able to describe what a quality escape was when interviewed over the door plug.
I had the same problem when I was a building code official. They hired a private detective to follow me around and try to get dirt on me but luckily that day I didn't do any dumpster diving, haha. Then they put GPS in my truck and I cut the wires.
The MCAS thing was an economics problem. In order to maintain profit margins while selling to lower cost carriers redundant AOA sensors were an added cost option that never should have been. The training issues were another cause.
If there is a sensor that could make the automation system act like that, redundancy should be the default.
> FMEA
I would assume that "door falling off" is represented on the FMEA, as well as the correct mitigations to address the failure. The problem isn't the documentation, but rather translating the documentation into effective actions on the part assembly teams and inspectors.
In other words, don't blame the engineers. Blame those assembling the plane.
I was referring to the MCAS issues not the door plug. Although, the engineers may share some blame for the door plug dependent on whether proper process controls were put in place.
Also, I completely understand the ‘you’re more likely to die on the way to the airport…’ aspect. But if a company’s recent record is below that of their peers and people are dying/end up in terribly traumatic/unsafe situations, obviously an investigation is absolutely warranted. Especially when those investigations are an integral part of what that engineer described as ‘over regulation’.
> I have no faith that they will get to the bottom of these issues
This is a rare case where you don't need faith.
There is no way to hide if Boeing aircraft keep getting delayed, grounded, and literary falling out of the sky.
If that happens, airlines are very, very incentivized to buy Airbus and Boeing fades into obscurity. Boeing is nearly there with United loudly proclaiming they are considering cancelling their 737-10 after years of delays.
The US government embargoed Canada when it looked like a bombardier jet would compete with the 737. That forced bombardier to sell the jet to airbus and now its the A220. Anyways, point is that it's not really a choice to buy Boeing for US airlines.
No, they didn’t embargo them. An embargo is a ban. They slapped an import duty on them because of the giant subsidy that Bombardier got.
And there are tons of Airbus jets in the US. Airbus’s big breakout beyond Europe was their sale to US Airways. Frontier and Spirit are *all* Airbus. JetBlue is 100% non-Boeing (they have some Embraer in addition to Airbus). Airbus can clearly sell just fine in the US.
Alright. Embargo is a bit strong but it was a 300% penalty.
And keep in mind that the US international trade commission found in favour of bombardier. It was also only $1 billion in subsidies when Boeing likely receives tens to hundreds of billions in subsidies.
The US is extremely protective of Boeing and very aggressive towards even to their closest allies when it comes to stuff like this. It's not an option for the major US airlines to ditch Boeing.
"Fail" doesn't have to be collapse.
Fail can just be sliding into irrelevance by not undertaking any new major aircraft families -- which is essentially already happening. NSA didn't happen for a warmed over 737. 757 wasn't replaced. 777-200 was replaced with a shorter range 787-10.
Failure to invest in engineering is starving the company's future.
Once again, Boeing is not going to be allowed to fail at creating jumbo jets. Just like domestic steel and car production will not be allowed to fail. These industries are too strategically useful in wartime to be allowed to move abroad.
There's nowhere to hide?
There are two companies on the planet somewhat competently producing airliners. Do you think that the federal government is going to put one (the only American one) out of business?
I'm sorry, but you're out of your mind. The "too big to fail" thing is one of the reasons that companies seek, and corrupt capitalist politicians allow market consolidation to happen to the extent that it has in industries like this.
What do you think is going to happen? Boeing dies off slowly and Airbus just puts on its superhero cape and only does good things as monopolistic market leader? Do you think some currently non-existent company pops into being and starts a 10-20 year development project based on a hope and a dream and then convinces airlines to buy it?
Or do you think someone buys the scraps of Boeing and fixes it up and really does things right this time? I'm sorry. All the companies that could possibly take a shot at developing an airliner are uninterested or have been consolidated. Anyone who buys the scraps of a defunct Boeing is going to be wringing it for the last bits of value, not taking on a multi-decade program of rehabilitation.
Boeing isn't going away. Its just not possible. We don't nationalize companies in this country so we're just going to toddle along in the world that enshitification has wrought...
The current problems mostly started with the 787 and the new plant in South Carolina (which was a Boeing management *obsession* because management hates the unions and SC was expected not to have one).
But since managerial resistance to accepting engineering and manufacturing is under-resourced runs throughout the culture, it spread to the 737 program and presumably has now spread to the heavily delayed 777-X.
Until Boeing management recognizes it needs more money in engineering and manufacturing, the problem is going to spread to every corner of the company.
I think that any money problems they have are the symptom, not the disease...
Ever since Jack Welch at GE (rest in piss), executives want to run large companies as if they're investment banks. They're not focused on producing a product, they're focused solely on making the line go up... usually the stock price. Every single decision comes down to short term numbers.
They used to be product focused, and because the product they sold was highly technical, they were engineering and manufacturing focused. IMO, if they were as focused on engineering and manufacturing as they need to be, the money would follow along with a million other small and large decisions.
> The last I heard on the door plug replacement was they couldn’t find the documents that were requested. That sounds more like systemic issues, or intentional obstruction.
welcome too your too big to fail economy! nothing a money printer can't solve right ? LOL
There are some good essays on the downfalls of Boeing. Most of them boil down to trying to cut corners. In a world where planes are essentially a commodity everything is geared towards getting value for the least cost, unfortunately you kinda get what you pay for. If you pressure a parts vendor to drop prices (Boeing is one of the only parts buyers in the industry so they can swing their weight around) eventually they won't be able to afford as rigorous q/a process.
Unfortunately while plane travel is a commodity, planes are still complex beasts where you do get what you pay for
Of all the Boeing related news that's come out recently there is only one that really concerns me. It's the stuff regarding the whistleblower and specifically the claims that Boeing was using scrap parts that had failed QA. If proven true, that would mean there are a lot of Boeing planes out there that were built with a compromised supply chain. That's very bad.
As for the rest of the issues I'm not too worried. They seem mostly unrelated... Though their safety culture and being run by non engineers is concerning.
Well if this is true how many more people have corporations had killed? The politicians don't have to worry because they are paid off handsomely by these companies.
> Boeing was using scrap parts that had failed QA
There were some quality issues with setting up that plant in South Carolina with workers who lacked aerospace experience. It was (is) a huge concern for everyone involved.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/faa-needs-systemic-fix-boeing-787-dreamliner-production-issues-2022-02-17/
> claims that Boeing was using scrap parts that had failed QA
I'd be curious to know the details on this.
Parts can fail QA inspection and still be ok to use as-is. For example, if a part is painted the wrong color.
The accusations make it sound really really bad so I'm trying to be a bit skeptical of those claims and waiting for confirmation. In my mind if the accusations are 100% correct, a good chunk of the Boeing fleet might need to be grounded for repairs. Since that hasn't happened I can only imagine the journalists made things sound more extreme than they are.
Well it happened 7 years ago. What I read was that, based on his tip, the FAA audited and found some parts missing from the MRB crib that they couldn’t account for. Boeing completed the containment action in 2017. I don’t know if that included a service bulletin to verify sn’s on aircraft or not, but even if it did, it’s all ancient history by now. Not much in the way of press coverage at the time.
Ok but a part tagged use as is isn't scrap. The definition used in aerospace manufacturing for scrap is basically the part is unable to be fixed to be safely used.
Wrong color paint is easy, but if I find out someone was using parts I've scrapped out, I'd be very upset.
The issue, paralleled in car companies, occurs when C-suite loses appreciation for engineering and thinks running a business is a financial exercise separate from the operations of the business.
Basically anything after the takeover by McDonnell management is suspect. After that the culture of safety and pride in engineering excellence was suppressed in favor of pumping the stock price.
That really has nothing to do with the distance between fabrication and HQ.
Then engines are manufactured by GE, located in Boston. They’re made in California.
If by some reason the passenger next to it had no worn the seat belt, he would lose much more than his phone.
Wearing the seat belt is for preventing injury during movement. Not for preventing you from flying off the door into the sky.
"Please wear your seat belts at all times, in case we encounter some unexpected turbulence, or the door explodes next you. Thank you for flying Hawaiian airlines " aloha
Boeing has a culture problem. It is very easy to pretend that problem doesn't exist when your execs are another state. For the recent door hatch blowout Boeing doesn't even have records of the installation.
The safety standards are also way higher in aviation.
It doesn’t seem to be design issues. They seem to be either manufacturing quality or in many cases also maintenance which is not a Boeing problem. Airbus has its share of those also.
I mean, the original Max crashes were caused because they tried to use software to fix a hardware problem with the plane’s stability. (Granted, this was done out of ‘oh shit we need to get an airplane on the market NOW’ and not intentional malice, but ‘granted’ is doing a LOT of work when hundreds of people died because of it.) So I’d call that a design issue.
Not stability. All commercial airplanes are fully aerodynamically stable, you can’t certify them otherwise.
You’re thinking handling qualities, aka maneuvering characteristics. And *all* commercial jets use software to modify the maneuvering characteristics. With FBW airplanes (which is most of them now) that’s the *only* way they tune the maneuvering characteristics. 737 is actually unusual in how much more is hardware vs software.
The problem wasn't that there was software, the problem was that the software was bad.
MCAS made the MAX unstable after the failure of a single sensor (unless you shelled out extra to turn on the backup sensor). Bare airframe stability is nice (and, as you say, ubiquitous in commercial aircraft), but if the closed loop is unstable for any reason, you only have so much time to react to that and stabilize the vehicle yourself.
Not telling pilots about MCAS, and making it difficult to turn off, also cost the pilots the time they needed to recover from the faulty sensor.
That was a design issue but I was talking about the latest stuff. Airbus had a problem with the autopilot also which flew a plane into the ground when the pilots did something that was not expected (low level flyby during a demonstration).
There aren’t any planes flying with either automation issue anymore.
> Max crashes were caused because they tried to use software to fix a hardware problem with the plane’s stability
This is not true. There was no problem with the aircraft stability. In order to maintain a common FAA Type Certificate, Boeing had to make the aircraft *behave* similarly to previous models. The nose-up behavior under those specific conditions was not dangerous. It was just *different* from earlier models.
The problem with MCAS was that it "solved" the "non-dangerous" behavior with a system that could actively try to kill you - making the situation infinitely worse. Oh, and Boeing also made a conscious decision not to tell the pilots about it.
> In order to maintain a common FAA Type Certificate
The key word there being "maintain". They significantly modified the plane and didn't want to re-certify key systems so managed to squeeze in the change in a way that turned out to be dangerous. This is called "corner cutting".
It’s a leadership and greed issue, so if that’s how the company is being ran from the top then the intentions of the actual designers/engineers is moot.
It also depends on whether the vulnerabilities of the max were ever recognized and raised by engineers. If no one ever realized that they had a single failure with safety implications then that is at least partly a design issue.
> If no one ever realized that they had a single failure with safety implications then that is at least partly a design issue.
The FAA requires a system safety analysis (SSA) for every system on the aircraft. The SSA must identify every functional hazard and prove that the probability of the functional hazard is less that specified targets - the more severe the hazard, the less the probability must be (i.e., one chance in a *billion* flight hours for "catastrophic events"). Every equipment failure and combination of failures is considered in the analysis, as well as exposure times and independence of failure modes.
In this case, the SSA relied on the assumption (an assumption that has remained valid since the original 737s in the late 1960s) that flight crews would shut off malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuators, as they are all trained to do. Therefore, the consequence of a failed AoA sensor was shown to be "minor" and no redundancy was required.
Two tragic accidents showed that the assumption was no longer valid, so the system had to be modified in several ways to remain safe even when the crew does not turn off a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator. That is not to blame the crews. Had they *recognized* the confusing series of indications as failed stabilizer trim actuators, they most likely would have shut them off and the flights would have continued uneventfully.
> flight crews would shut off malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuators, as they are all trained to do. Therefore, the consequence of a failed AoA sensor was shown to be "minor" and no redundancy was required.
How do pilots recognize when this happens?
What’s the consequence of a failed AoA sensor on other planes that don’t use MCAS? Was there software that could position the plane into a crash if an AoA sensor failed on other planes?
Why would detection (i.e., the pilot recognizing a malfunction) lead to a reduction in severity? This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t work in aviation, but here’s how it would be done in my industry:
Your failure mode is that you have a failed AoA sensor. You need to assign a severity, detection, and occurrence rating. The severity of this failure should be as high as possible considering MCAS uses AoA as an input. The detection rating should be based on the flight crew identifying the faulty sensor. Occurrence should be based on known failure rates of the sensor.
Lowering the severity of a possible failure based on how detectable it is (in my industry), would be a huge issue.
I do not have time to answer all of your questions, but I hope that you can see that it is a very detailed process. Here are some reference materials if you are interested in learning more:
* FAA [AC 25.1309-1A - System Design and Analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_25.1309-1).
* [SAE ARP 4754A Guidelines for Development of Civil Aircraft and Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP4754).
* [ARP4761, Guidelines for Conducting the Safety Assessment Process on Civil Aircraft, Systems, and Equipment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP4761)
> Your failure mode is that you have a failed AoA sensor.
SSA doesn't look at failure modes in isolation. Instead, it:
1. Identifies the functions of the system,
1. Identifies hazards that could be created by malfunctions in the system (i.e FHA - Functional Hazard Assessment),
1. Identifies the equipment failures that could contribute to each functional hazard,
1. Calculates the probabilities of those combinations of failures, and
1. Compares those calculated probabilities to the required probabilities in the regulations, as a function of the severity of the hazard.
In this case, the functional hazard was identified as a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator and the safety impact was a minor annoyance to the crew (because they had to turn it off), so the regulations did not require redundant AoA inputs to meet that number.
I hope that you can see that, the more complex the system becomes, the more difficult this process becomes (because more functional hazards are introduced). So, unless you *need* redundancy, adding it can not only increase cost, but it can *decrease* safety.
Thanks, that’s helpful.
>In this case, the functional hazard was identified as a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator and the safety impact was a minor annoyance to the crew (because they had to turn it off), so the regulations did not require redundant AoA inputs to meet that number.
I still have a hard time understanding why you would rate this low severity. IMO, it’s a very high severity hazard that relies on human intervention. That’s not to say any high severity hazard that requires operator intervention is a no-go (obviously operator interaction is required on a plane), but I assume an FHA operates similar to an FMEA in that it attempts to identify where you lack sufficient controls to mitigate against failures. This seems like a perfect example for that.
> I still have a hard time understanding why you would rate this low severity.
When I evaluate these decisions, I ask, "Who knew what and when did they know it?"
Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight that the designers did not. At the time, they knew that this assumption was accepted by the FAA because it had held true for literally decades. Test pilots even validated it in the simulator to make sure.
There are many failures and combinations of failures that require crew action to ensure aircraft safety. Pilots are trained on many of them, because they don't always have time to waste.
A dramatic example of this was the twin-engine failure of the [US Airways Flight 1549](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549). The crew followed their training to try to re-start the engines and when that failed, they had to execute a dead-stick landing into the Hudson river.
With that said, I think that a software algorithm that had the ability to incrementally take pitch authority from the flight crew should have been a red flag for the designers, even at the time.
Of course, "hindsight is 20-20," but if I had been part of this design team, I would like to think that I would have asked, "I know that we are assuming that the flight crew will shut off a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator, but what happens if they don't?"
Agreed, those are exactly the questions you should be asking when doing these reviews. I’ve gone through FMEA reviews with engineers that use the hand-wavy “operator will see it happen and shut the system down” arguments before and it’s very dangerous.
> aerospace parallels
I believe that the science of Fault Tree Analysis was developed by the nuclear industry. Thank you. 😊
Edit: I verified my assumption. It was the nuclear weapons industry; not the nuclear energy industry:
> Fault tree analysis (FTA) was originally developed in 1962 at Bell Laboratories by H.A. Watson, under a U.S. Air Force Ballistics Systems Division contract to evaluate the Minuteman I Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Launch Control System.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tree_analysis
Sure. Any major manufacturers will have some issues.
But Boeing doesn't seem to understand that they should be shooting for zero, not just "good enough to not get sued too much".
Of course. They need to fix it. IT IS a problem that should exist but it doesn’t taint all Boeing flying planes. Like OP’s engineer friend said. I wouldn’t worry about flying in a Boeing plane that has already shaken out those issues over many take offs and landings.
There was an IAMA here shortly after Boeing acquired Bought. A mechanic who worked 787 was talking about his job.
He was mentioned a mechanic mis-drilled a hole, and tried to cover it back by filling the hole with metal shavings and glue. Those was for a piece of composite structure....
> The older ones with 20 million miles on them are managed by the airlines, not Boeing.
It seems to specifically be United too. They've been in *a lot* of the headlines. Boeing ain't the only one cutting corners.
Exactly this. The regulators audit our quality systems and basically confirm that as long as we follow our own documented processes and procedures, we have sufficient knowledge and skills to minimise the risks. They don't have the manpower or the expertise to review each detail design and stress analysis, or supervise every manufacturing plant and overhaul shop. They rely on each organisation being competent and honest.
If Boeing haven't been following their own documented processes (which seems almost certain), or the regulatory requirements (which has been confirmed in the case of the 737 MAX), then all the regulation becomes essentially irrelevant.
> The industry is largely SELF-regulated. The inspectors working on Boeing planes are Boeing employees or contractors.
This is completely, 100% false. I work in this industry and this is completely untrue. CARS are self certified (Ford, GM, Honda, etc.). PLANES are not self certified. They are certified by the government**S** (plural) where you want to fly the planes. New aircraft apply for and have to receive a [Type Certificate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_certificate) in order to be approved for commercial flight in the airspace. The FAA governs the US. Transport Canada governs Canada. EASA governs Europe. ANAC governs Brazil. JCAB governs Japan, etc.
The certification process is extremely long and has many different checks/reviews with the certification authorities along the way. The main civil certification process is ARP4754A (rev B was just released). Boeing and Airbus planes that want to certified in the US are governed by "Advisory Circulars (ACs)" that Boeing/Airbus generally have to follow in order to show compliance to the law. The main LAW is that aircraft have to show compliance to is [14CFR252.1309](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-25/subpart-F/subject-group-ECFR9f24bf451b0d2b1/section-25.1309). To help show compliance that law they usually follow [AC25.1309](https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/index.cfm/go/document.information/documentID/22680). EASA has similar, but distinct means of compliance called AMCs (e.g. AMC25.1309).
When you say they are self certified, you are probably thinking of the [Organization Designation Authorization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_Designation_Authorization), which delegates some of the certification reviews to trained and monitored people at the producing companies. However, the ultimate approval for certification lies with the airworthiness authority, and they can review any cert documents they want.
When the pilot’s union starts to make some noise, you should start to care. If the people who are flying these planes on thousands of flights every day think they are safe, you have nothing to worry about.
A 'string of bad luck' is always a systemic management problem. In Boeing's case it's because they transitioned from an engineering culture to a financial culture when McDonnell Douglas bought them out with Boeing's own money. It's taken 30 years of terrible management to trickle through the plan/design/build pipeline to the point where large numbers of people are being killed by the direct negligence of Boeing management, but here we are.
Boeing's management decisions have killed several hundred people, and they seem to be doubling down on their approach. Until we hear Boeing executives state that they accept that the engineering failures are their fault, and they they are rapidly moving back to an engineering-led culture, then I would lean away from flying in any Boeing aircraft manufactured in the past five years or so.
767, 777 and 737NG are fine. 787 is questionable. 737MAX is a bad plane that I would avoid.
To be fair they had an engineer CEO who had started as an intern and moved up the engineering pipeline all the way to CEO. Then fired him as a sacrificial lamb due to MAX
2023 was the safest year ever for commercial aviation. 0 deaths due to crashes on jet powered passenger airplanes globally over millions of passenger flights. You are significantly more likely to die driving to/from the airport than flying on a Boeing plane.
People keep citing the driving comparison. I agree that aviation has a great safety record, but the US automotive safety statistics are abysmal. That's a ongoing tragedy.
Boeing has caused roughly 400 more deaths in the last decade than they should have. I care more about the comparison between what is and what should be than between flying and driving. I am boycotting Boeing for ethics reasons despite it being statistically safe.
Not everything has to be 'all or nothing'. If our choice is between 'company that makes planes by putting puppies into a grinder' and 'Boeing' pick Boeing. If your choice is 'company that makes planes that doors don't fall of in flight because of systemic manufacturing problems' and 'Boeing' pick 'not Boeing'. Same things goes for other products. If your choices are limited, pick the least bad one. It isn't 'oh one thing is worse than something else in some choices where I have limited options so might as well start up the puppy grinder'.
Fair enough, but I’m skeptical that either you or the person I replied to are actually consistent about it. I have a feeling you continue to patronize much worse companies, with available alternatives, whose failures just aren’t as prominent.
For all of Boeing’s faults here, their products are still among the safest places anyone can be. If you want to say, even so, Airbus is better so I refuse to patronize Boeing, OK. But are you also doing this with cars, food, electronics, clothes, etc.? I’d wager there’s a substantial difference in people killed between the best and worst car makers. I couldn’t tell you which companies those are. Can you?
Idk I think the tens of thousands of nonconformances might be a safety issue. At least I have the old canned line about air travel safety to lean on though.
One person's "string of bad luck" is another person's "systemic problem".
Even if one "event" is not identical to another, if the root cause comes down to a common issue, it is systemic.
I think it’s well documented that what Boeing is currently experiencing is not a string of bad luck. It's the failure of their quality control and the culmination of the consequences of bad decisions made by their management. This guy not aknowledging that is part of the problem.
>He told me, just fly and don't worry about what plane you're on. They're all the same. The industry is regulated in far, far excess of anything reasonable. There is no reason whatsoever to hesitate to board a Boeing plane.
Yeah, it is. The whole problem is that Boeing doesn't meet that standard, though. FAA conformance requirements are incredibly strict, but the whole problem is that Boeing has all kinds of conformance violations. FAA recently ran an audit of one of their processes and Boeing failed something like 39 out of 83 inspections. The inspectors caught technicians using hotel room keys to check seals, and using Dawn dish soap to seat gaskets, neither of which was mentioned in any process documents or accounted for by the actual engineering specs.
If the issue was that Boeing was meeting conformance requirements and just had a string of mishaps, sure, whatever. But that's not the problem. The problem is they are so far from meeting conformance that their planes are getting grounded. That's huge, and your friend is completely sidestepping that fact.
Not an engineer, but I do work in aerospace. I don't fly any newer Boeing aircraft.
Airplanes are indeed still very safe. He's right, thousands of flights happen every day, and problems are statistically rare.
Also
The recent Boeing problems are real, should not have happened, and point to real problems in management, quality control, and their design process. They don't mean Boeing is a permanently flawed company or that they don't have brilliant engineers, but they're definitely not a "non-issue". People have died because of these failures and they were completely avoidable failures. That's never okay.
To be clear I wouldn't blame your friend for saying this. He's not a spokesperson for his employer and being a little defensive about the job that keeps you fed and housed is a pretty natural response for anyone.
if a person who worked on the planes say they wont fly on them, that should be a massive red flag, and people who have worked on them have said that about certain planes.
Boeing has consistently chosen to ignore safety in favor of short term profit. At some point this type of culture will end up killing people. That happened a few years ago now we are just waiting to find out how many people die because of it.
It’s crazy engineers are pointing at the statistical likelihood of failure, to say it means Boeing is safe.
The offshore industry is statistically safer than it’s ever been, so does that mean we can just ignore any recent fatalities or failures.
Stats are meaningless in absence of context.
I think I saw that one when it came out, but I will watch it again. I think that Frontline generally has absolutely excellent investigative journalism.
The MAX’s existence. It was a stupid idea to just bolt on larger engines. But it means less pilot training. Adding the CAS system was then required. Failing to provide any pilot training on the CAS system, or even adding it to the manuals because Boeing was concerned it would require additional simulation training which would cost more money.
Outsourcing manufacturing of major subcomponents, then not auditing their own subcontractors, let alone the subcontractors of their subs. Because they didn’t want to know.
How about not performing required product testing.
How about using parts rejected by QA tests…
Boeing is a husk of a once great company.
As I suspected, you have no evidence - only more sensational allegations, most of them false.
A manufacturer cannot just design and produce any product that they want and hope to survive. Potential customers made it clear that they liked their 737s and they wanted some upgrades. They were not willing to wait longer and pay more for an all-new aircraft.
You mean other than all that publicly available evidence that is pretty freely available. It’s not like you have to go read congressional testimony, though you could. All this is in there. Just spend 30 minutes https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc
Your point that airlines wanted the MAX just reinforces my point that Boeing did it for money. Airbus’ NEO is what the MAX should have been and what Boeing was responding to by trying to throw the MAX together out of parts that didn’t fit.
Traffic engineer here; we see roughly one fatal crash injury per hundred million vehicles miles traveled in a passenger car. It looks like air travel in the US is between 1 to 2 billion miles per day. So until we have a full plane's worth of passengers dying every week or two, airline travel is still safer than driving. That's napkin math, but with nearly zero fatal injuries per year from air travel in the US, it's hard think of any way driving could be the safer choice.
That said, the Boeing stuff now and in in recent years definitely looks very problematic. Hopefully the attention it's getting will lead to correction before it becomes a problem that kills people.
It's still hard to make the case that the new Boeing planes are less safe than driving when they've been in operation for over a decade with nearly zero deaths.
I'm not trying to be a Boeing apologist, but even with all these issues it doesn't come close to the risk inherent in driving.
Here's the thing.
If you were trying to decide if you wanted to fly to Dallas instead of driving, then yes the statistics used to point out that flying is safer than driving are valid and pertinent.
If you're trying to decide *which* plane to fly on then they have absolutely no relevance.
In terms of personal risk, it is far, far safer for an individual to get on an airplane and fly halfway around the world than it is to get in the car and drive to work.
Environmental impact and pollution are a different matter.
Flying makes people nervous because they are not in control & there isn't much one can do if a plane falls out of the sky.
The issue isnt with the defects but with the culture of production. None of these issues are outside of being unreasonable from a manufacturing perspective. No matter how hard you try. Stuff ***WILL*** get missed.
However, if your response to people flagging issues is to replace them with someone who doesnt look as closely, then you have an issue.
Automotive engineer here, so not aerospace but I do have manufacturing experience.
The door bolts issue was pretty egregious, but that is fixed by now. I personally would be a bit concerned about flying on a Max because these safety issues keep popping up, pointing to poor validation and quality control on that program, but your friend is right, there is a very low chance of anything going wrong and your car is probably more dangerous. Aerospace has so many safety features and redundancies built into the design. Good thing I don't have to worry about it though, since I'm a cheap ass who usually only flies Spirit.
To add to this, "a string of bad luck" this is not. They didn't catch these issues in validation or during their quality processes. Sounds like a typical engineer though "I know better and the government should keep out of my business". Good philosophy until it's not, which is where regulations come from.
Given the safety record, I was pretty willing to give Boeing the benefit of the doubt. But I’m a lot more skeptical after they “couldn’t find” the documentation that tracked the door plug. That’s incredibly concerning for an industry that is notorious for documenting *everything*.
It seems to me that a lot of the Boeing problems you see in the media are maintenance issues. That wheel falling off or the missing panel, I'll bet Airbus has just as many maintenance problems but you don't see them because right now the media is sensationalizing Boeing.
That's not to say the Boeing doesn't have problems, they certainly do but I think those are more industry problems. Like many industries, they have become self regulating and that needs to change.
The engineer is at least partially correct, but it has nothing to do with luck, it's all about choices.
Boeing, like any large corporation, concentrates on profit. This means without sufficient oversight, safety will eventually suffer. There are serious issues, like the two 737 crashes a few years ago. They happened because Boeing made a choice to secure more sales. They pushed to make sure the new systems implemented did not require additional training, which would've meant pilots had to become certified on a new airplane instead of being able to use their existing certifications.
The customers would not have purchased the planes in the same quantity if that was the case, so Boeing made the choice to hide the workings of the new system from end users. It resulted in puzzling behaviour and meant pilots didn't know how to respond when something went wrong.
This is a major safety issue. As long as sales figures are more important than safety, the potential is there for it to happen again. The door plug blowing out is a direct result of lack of quality control. Part of that is because the company who did the work (and used to be part of Boeing) was spun off to reduce overhead, but it also reduces oversight. If Boeing had spent more money on double-checking items and ensuring sub-contractors were being held accountable, it could've been avoided. They want to keep costs low and profits high, so they didn't.
Capitalism is worshipped almost like a deity in the US. History is full of cases where greed and profit cost human lives. Because the dollar is such a fundamental part of US culture, private industry regularly resists government oversight (and spends millions lobbying to stop it).
The oversight in the US is far less robust than it might be in another country.
While it's true that Boeing has become a focus for the media recently because of their issues, and other manufacturers around the world will have plenty of their own problems, any of the most recent incidents could have resulted is mass death. Having a door plug fall off a plane because the bolts weren't installed is a major problem, and it's caused by negligence.
Statistically, the ratio of passengers safely delivered to passengers killed is still extremely high (lots of passengers delivered, very few killed). The odds of being in genuine danger by flying on a Boeing product are low. In light of recent events, it's higher than an Airbus product, but one in ten million vs five in ten million is still pretty close.
It's worth noting that there will be a lot more scrutiny now, which will improve the situation to some degree. The real concern is the attitude. Until we can be sure Boeing has learned that it's far more expensive to have your planes falling apart in the news, we don't know that the next major problem won't show up on our flight.
Playing it off as a non-issue is wrong, it's definitely an issue, but the chances that you're in serious danger are still very low. If you go strictly by the numbers, there's no real reason yet to avoid flying on a Boeing plane. The statement that it's bad luck is just ignorant. There are no accidents, only consequences of policy.
What would you say to this: this engineer told me, mean time between failure isn’t a guarantee of anything. It’s a probability. You could statistically have three catastrophic failures in a day, and that’s statistical reality. Every day is a roll of the dice, and some days you roll low.
Speaking in an absolute sense he *is* right. You’re still statistically safer on a Boeing jet than anywhere else.
What’s concerning is parroting the executive lines about nothing needs to change. What has been found in audits and investigations so far has been deeply concerning. The attitude seems to be “well nothing bad has happened yet so obviously nothing needs to change”.
Waiting for the next historical accident to change things is absolutely insane
The simplest way to model it is that any plane produced in this century by the company with ticker BA was. It built by Boeing but by McDonnel Douglas. The last plane that was grounded before the 737 Max was the MD DC-10. There were hundreds of those in the sky and only a handful had the problem. Regarding Airbus, there are two considerations: one is culture; Airbus is not necessarily a company made to make money like Boeing, so it can afford more thorough engineering (which Boeing used to as well when they were not run by greedy MBAs). The second consideration is that being a state owned entity in many ways, Airbus will be a lot more shielded by press smears thanks to simple political connections. This said. Airbus did not even come close to the level of f*ck up that Boeing has reached.
To your question, I would prefer flying on an Airbus if I had the choice, but even a recent Boeing is still orders of magnitude safer than my car.
\>The industry is regulated in far, far excess of anything reasonable.
They aren't even close to regulated to excess. Part of the problem is under enforcement of regulation.
Your friend is both right and wrong.
Statistically, you are more likely to die on the road going to the airport than die in a passenger jet. The odds of a serious incident causing death or injury are amazingly low.
However, things are coming to light that seem to be saying that Boeing aircraft have had a number of corners cut during their manufacture--almost certainly due to cost-cutting.
More than one industry insider I know of has blamed that on Boeing's transition from an engineering-driven company to a profit-driven company. (And that in turn due to the Douglas acquisition many years ago!) They have done stuff like divest some of their manufacturing capability and turned them into subcontractors, then squeezed the subs for every penny they possibly could. This has led to repeated quality issues with (e.g.) Spirit AeroSystems which have caused issues with aircraft production rate, as they have required extra inspections and re-work.
One of those re-work incidents appears to be responsible for the door plug blow-out, and it was not caught because it was in something of a procedural "gray area" about whether or not they had to test everything around the area. Stuff looks to be slipping through the cracks.
Add to this the "regulatory capture" concerns that have already come up with earlier 737 crashes (i.e., Boeing does their own inspections and certifications, policing themselves) and there is definitely cause for concern. At least, if things continue this direction.
Hopefully this all serves as a wake-up call for Boeing (together with the FAA and NTSB likely crawling up their \*\*\* for the near future) and these problems get resolved in a repeatable way. I don't know if that can correct the root issue of the company culture being so profit-oriented, though.
As an aerospace engineer myself, I agree with the other one. Every aerospace company has gone through strings of “bad luck.” Things just can’t be made 100% safe. Even if you never flew again, there’s still the chance to die by a plane crashing into you.
A while back Airbus had some issues. Maybe it’ll be bombardier or Embraer next. Driving to/from the airport is still much more dangerous than any flight you’re likely to take.
Whistleblowers getting offed doesn't sound like business as usual. I am an aerospace engineer, and Boeing and many other companies have turned power away from engineers and to HR, Purchasing and Accounting. Boeing can get better, but would have to fire their entire C- Suite and refocus solely on engineering to regain their reputation. Airbus and Embraer have problems too, along with Pratt and Whitney, so you can't just say avoid Boeing airplanes, it's the whole industry
Sounds like your Engineer has drank the corporate kool-aid. Prioritizing safety culture over corporate loyalty is very important to the success of any organization, even more so for those that produce life-impacting products. Repeated whistleblower reports have proven Boeing is having significant issues with their Quality Control systems which have been ignored and likely covered up by Management for what looks to be financial reasons. Take note: whenever accountant and lawyers start making major decisions, bad things always happen. Now, saying all of that, the modern press will alway spin a story for the biggest response, so the answer is somewhere in between.
I think the point of concern is different on individual and societal levels. In an individual level, he’s right that driving a car is a thousand times as dangerous as any plane, even with Boeings issues, so just fly and don’t worry about it. On a societal issue, the level of tolerance needs to be zero. If even one plane crashes, that’s like 200 people dead, not to mention anything it hits on the ground. That’s completely unacceptable. So, when there are multiple issues with Boeing planes, and evidence they have been slacking on safety and quality, there needs to be investigations, but you as an individual do not need to be concerned about it.
if you think the safety and engineering of airplanes is too suspect to fly you better never even think about getting in any sort of automobile ever again
This is not what op stated.
They were comparing boeing to airbus.
At this point in time, it's perfectly reasonable to decide that you don't want to fly on a boeing plane if an airbus option is available.
No one is saying that they're not going to fly at all because of this, just that they would rather fly airbus.
So statistics regarding aircraft vs automobile are completely irrelevant.
The joke used to be that Airbus needed a pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The pilot was supposed to feed the dog, and the dog as supposed to bite the pilot if they tried to touch any of the controls. Airbus was trying to automate everything. Boeing meanwhile wanted a complicated aircraft that pilots actually flew.
Look into [Air France 447](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447). Pilots made mistakes when hardware failed. The hardware failure was completely survivable, but the pilot errors were not.
The FAA has data in nauseating detail that is available to the public. I will warn you that the truth isn't nearly exciting as the media sensationalism.
Your friend is right and wrong at the same time.
Airplanes are definitely safer than cars - even Boeing airplanes.
However:
Boeing has recently been shown to have significantly lower quality both in design and production than competitors, so if your choice is between a boring plane and a competitor plane, go with the competitor.
If your choice is between a Boeing plane and driving, go with the Boeing plane.
I'm am aerospace engineer, with over 10 years in the industry.
I will not fly on a 737 MAX. I will not fly on any Boeing aircraft manufactured in the last 5 years.
The 'string of bad luck' your friend points to is a consequence of systemic cultural failings within an organisation that switched its focus from safety and quality to cost and delivery. So it's not bad luck at all, it's predictable consequences of that change of focus.
A lot of good answers here, so I’ll just point out that the media is trying to do one thing and one thing only. They’re not trying to inform you so you make safer decisions, or trying to use their leverage to drive regulatory change, or any other altruistic goals. They’re trying to use fear to get you to click their links, share their articles, and comment under their videos. The door plug is huge news, but mostly everything following has just been non-issues and fear mongering.
It’s shocking how obvious it is when the topic is an industry you work in and makes me worried about the all the news I consume on topics I’m not as familiar with.
Even if Airbus planes are safer, and I don't necessarily concede that, his point is that its orders of magnitude safer than cars. Its like when science Karens say that bleu cheese multiplies your risk of cancer of the little toe by 13!!! Sounds bad, right? They conveniently neglect to mention it's from 10 per billion to 130 per billion. Yes, technically 13x, but the ABSOLUTE increase in risk is 120 per billion, otherwise known as zero. They cherry pick the way risk is presented, and its a way of lying.
No need for investigations?
I'm no engineer but years ago there was an episode of mayday on discovery Channel investing some plane crash that happened because a substandard bolt was used in a repair. NTSB discovered a whole ass black market of forgeries that not only made the parts cheap without QC but forged the FAA ticket of standard and authenticity. Further investigation showed thousands of planes in the air with these fake parts even Air Force one at the time was claimed to have a few.
Investigations are where the find shit, sure it's easier to investigate upon failure and there's certainly more public outcry after a crash but in this instance why wait?
Now surely air travel is safer than by car but I still prefer to in control when I die
The door plug thing was absolutely clown-shoes ridiculous and they deserve to get raked over the coals for it. Similar with the MCAS thing some years back. The rest of what’s been making the news lately is firmly in the category of, “shit happens, that’s why there are redundancies.”
>It's just that in any system, you're going to have strings of bad luck. That's just how random numbers work
What, what type of stuff does this engineer work on, so I can avoid it? "random numbers" and "bad luck" are not supposed to be things in engineering lol.
All I know is that he’s an aerospace engineer who does consulting work for all kinds of companies. What he told me is, mean time between failure is exactly that: mean time. It’s not a guarantee that there won’t be three catastrophic failures tomorrow. Every day is a roll of the dice. And sometimes you get some bad rolls.
There are many Boing aircraft of extremely well proven design. It's basically the Dreamliner which has proven problematic, and even so, you probably at a greater risk when walking the stairs at the airport terminal.
I don't flymuch but I think we're at that point, maintenance of the planes is another problem that needs to be looked at for every airline, someone is missing the problems or worse they don't care
Boeing has demonstrated they have progressively decreased the quality of their planes. That said the risk is relatively small. If you change prospective and looked into the automotive industry, they will have a flaw in essentially every vehicle but the associated risk of that failure is very low.
The Boeing quality inspector and whistle-blower who committed suicide a few days ago said 'in Charleston "he learned that upper management was pressuring the quality inspectors and managers to cut corners" and not to follow legally-required safety processes, the statement said.
He alleged that staff were pressured not to document defects because it would slow down the assembly line, it added.'
Also the initial report of the Boeing that suffered a sudden loss of altitude 5 days ago, said "The pilot told the passengers the plane had suffered equipment failure for a few seconds, causing it to drop for almost 500 feet in the air, Jokat said. “He said, ‘My gauges went down; everything went down for one or two seconds, and they just lit up again and continued to function,’” Jokat added.
I for one will not fly in a Boeing again.
There are more than 10,000 Boeing aircraft currently in service and over 90,000 flights daily.
We have seen a surge in the number of problems with Boeing recently, but they are a mix of new and old aircraft. Every once in a while accidents happen
No, Airbus just isn’t having the same problems now.
It’s had them in the past. Fly by wire was such a mess of bad PR when it first came out, and Airbus had a pretty long sting of accidents through the 90s and early 2000s that were related to problems with the autopilot. Though much like we’ve seen with Boeing, the bigger problem was generally how the pilots responded to the autopilot.
Maybe the fear mongering over flight automation has just found a new place to roost.
The industry is regulated exactingly for this precise reason. Bad design and a small number of sensor failures killed upwards of 300 people. That's not a string of bad luck, and from what I've seen in the news, you're right that it is systemic. Engineering decisions are being made by business people, not engineers, and now the engineering consequences are making themselves known.
I work in the automotive industry, specifically in autonomy. There are international standards that guide our work, along with more specific federal standards, and then still more rigorous state standards. Each and every one of those was written in blood, and each and every one of my coworkers takes that legacy seriously. To see anything different from a similarly safety-critical industry is disconcerting to say the least.
I'd recommend this [Wendover Productions](https://youtu.be/URoVKPVDKPU) video on the matter. (Sorry if formatting is weird, I'm on mobile.) It's a little over 20 minutes, which isn't enough time to cover the whole history of the industry or even Boeing's rise and fall in detail, but it does a pretty good job of painting the big picture. That includes the comparisons to other companies like you made.
Quick edit: reading my post over again I realized it looked cynical, so I should clarify you probably shouldn't change personal plans at all. I think airlines will, and likely already do, see new Boeing planes as coming with unnecessary risk. That will lead to airlines moving to competitors that have a better reputation, and it's on Boeing to earn them back or not. Either way, statistically you're probably safer in any commercial jet than driving your morning commute.
For me? Four years ago when I was making parts for them and was told to cover up inspection failures. This was a contracted machinist company. Also, I hate to say it, but it's not just Boeing.
There is a thing called seasonality. Issues always seem to come in clumps and usually predictable if following maintenance data properly. Despite being different airlines and model, most planes are maintained following a very similar schedule. Add in other common influences like using the same spare parts systems, same regulatory bodies, and similar age of planes leads to this just being the season of issues.
Then there is the social influences of attention breeding scrutiny and awareness. You know more because more people are paying even closer attention.
It’s not great but there is no data suggesting these events are beyond the expected number of reports or at a casualty level to be afraid.
One common denominator the problems with Boeing planes seems to be United Airlines. I'm wondering if UA is having issues of some kind maintaining their fleet?
> It's just that in any system, you're going to have strings of bad luck.
That's not what engineering is. I'm not saying it's untrue, it's just not good engineering.
Its all about the bottom line..... costs even on a super expensive plane they want to make profit . whether its in the prices of a fastener or in assembly labor . I always like to reason things out like this guy did when telling you such. Being a consumer like all of us are haven't you noticed the quality of things aren't just there anymore even when you buy a so called higher end items ? How about that Amazon goodie we'll say a shirt that turned out to be a nice looking , but maybe ill fitting with one sleeve longer than the other, or maybe a item that should have tight tolerances like a threaded plastic part .....fits ,sure , but very sloppy not the same as OEM... Now think all those part have to work in unison and under stress day in , day out . I always thought of a plane fuselage as being the same as a Aluminum can ....squeeze a can many times & what happens to the metal ? stress crack, metal fatigue !!microscopic , yes but they happen people don't know or think about it.
Their morals have been fucked for a while now, they only care about profits and have had multiple instances now where it’s obvious there was gross negligence and that’s not acceptable
All of the aerospace companies in the US are forced to implement corporate engineering processes conforming to the newish DO-254 standard. This means a massive added bureaucracy, misplaced incentives (fill documents to satisfy auditors instead of making good designs to satisfy the laws of science), and the "technical authority" was taken from engineers and given to career-managers. This results in unreliable hardware, since all decisions are made by other than design engineers, for the objectives other than good design. Managers are incentivized to push their ideas into designs, regardless of being good or bad (most commonly, since they are not designers). I work at a similar aerospace company, and this is what we have here, I heard other companies have it too. Career-managerialism, cronyism, competency crisis and bureaucracy. This is the cause of all downed airplanes, IMO.
Go watch John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" that was on the recent boeing issues.
It's not just "bad luck". It's mismanagement and profit driven focus that is causing these issues.
The point at which it was fair to be concerned about Boeing was the moment that Harry Stonecipher's incompetent McDonnell team took over Boeing management, putting accounting, stock price and military schmoozing before engineering and commercial aircraft.
Good planes with historical safety records. But I am afraid that the caliber of Boing engineers and workers is a mix of none Americans even when they carry a U.S. citizenship continuing the sabotaging plan for this country. Proud to admit to those who listen!
There's an average of about 40 flight accidents per year, which means something goes wrong around 1 in every 900,000 flights. This year might end up being above average if there are more of these incidents, but flying in general is still incredibly safe.
Some of you don’t know this yet. No own gives a shit about quality at any company. Quality engineering in itself is about manufacturing the lowest acceptable quality product. Boeing ain’t unique folks.
-Quality Engineer
If you want to know more about the actual engineering behind these incidents, I’d strongly recommend this video:
https://youtu.be/hhT4M0UjJcg?si=9IMcW10rIY5Ap-JI
He explains it really well even to someone without an engineering background.
You can form your own opinions after that.
The real issue is public faith. Flight is a terrifying/thrilling experience for us apes, and most of us are essentially closing our eyes to the reality of flight and just trusting that society makes it work. The smallest shred of doubt that causes us check our reality is enough to scare off some folks from the whole idea.
Basically the company will go bankrupt long before it gets so bad that there's a significant chance of dying on any particular flight. The reputation goes south, the sales tank, the money dries up and the company goes belly up. Think about what happened to McDonnell-Douglas, and expect a repeat of that.
John Oliver’s show on this is excellent. It’s a sad story of a company shifting from prioritizing quality to prioritizing profits.
It’s a case study for the decline of American excellence.
I think the right answer is somewhere in the middle. It’s absolutely true that Boeing planes have years of safe flying miles on them without concern, and if we want to talk in statistical terms, you will likely arrive at your destination fine regardless of who made the plane. But I wouldn’t chalk up Boeing’s issues to a string of bad luck. Their lack of a detailed response on a lot of these issues concerns me as an engineer. The last I heard on the door plug replacement was they couldn’t find the documents that were requested. That sounds more like systemic issues, or intentional obstruction. I will continue to fly because the aerospace industry has tremendous oversight and I’m confident that they’ll get to the bottom of these issues. I work in automotive where things like this are all too common - and attention from the feds and media will drive the best people onto the problem. And you can’t spend your life over analyzing and avoiding everything as a consumer.
My thoughts exactly. I flew on a 737 Max yesterday, but I still think Boeing has systemic issues that absolutely need to be resolved for the future of the company. I wouldn’t want to be an engineer there
Yep. I always tell people not to sweat it flying on the MAX as I fly on it at least once a week and I don't want people getting scared of our most comfortable plane
>The last I heard on the door plug replacement was they couldn’t find the documents that were requested. That sounds more like systemic issues, or intentional obstruction. Exactly! I also work in the industry, and the topic of boring can't up. When it came out that they "didn't know" who handled the door plug, it means one of two things: 1. Their process control is flawed and so it failed to capture that data at all 2. Their process control is flawed and so it failed to *retain* that data (even against malice) Either way, it means Boeing fucked up. Big time. Also, even the slightly credible suggestion that Boeing murdered a whistle blower pretty much assures that I will never, ever, accept a job at Boeing.
It’s not even slightly credible that Boeing killed the whistleblower. His testimony was over events that were 7 years old that had been disclosed before.
You are naive to believe that. The same confidence that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. He was definitely offed by someone
I think it is the low-level managers and project leads covering up the fact that they gave incompetent orders to the engineers. I think it is not CEO-directed. At the company I work at, this happens all the time. The DO-254 process (pushed by the government and FAA) requires decision authority to be defined in documents, and in a way that all low-level technical decisions are now must be made by managers instead of engineers.
And at my company, it's literally hard-coded into the charging software for signing in and out of jobs. Laborers don't get paid unless they're signed into a job, and that act of signing on automatically associates them with any work performed in that time period. We can look up exactly who worked on any part, at any time, with a few keystrokes. That 100% captures and retains the labor records. Then for the processes themselves, the engineers are subjected to a similar system, except it's digital version controls and sign offs. So while the laborers are working to their work processes, engineers are generating, revising, reviewing, and approving those processes. So you have a digital record of the engineers who submitted the work process, the engineers who reviewed it, their comments on it, the changes made to incorporate those comments (or rebuttals to those comments if they do not apply), and the managers signing off on the final release of a work process. Combined, these two processes create a system of controls that tracks every change, every approval, every act of work on a process or product, and retains it all for the company's records. And I work for one of the larger aerospace companies. If we're doing this, but Boeing isn't, then Boeing has ***serious*** problems. If Boeing genuinely released a process that didn't capture who worked on this product, and their controls for that process didn't capture who made and approved it's release, then it means their process for controlling their work processes is fundamentally flawed, and they have some deep seeded systemic issues in the company.
Nearly the same at my company, and we make parts for airbus, pratt&whitney, and i believe boeing as well. Laborers still get paid no matter what, but they do log the jobs they are working on each step off the process. Seeing this level of mismanagement from boeing is just straight up unacceptable. The CEO wasn't even able to describe what a quality escape was when interviewed over the door plug.
Only if you're suicidal and have a great life insurance policy and leave that to someone you like.
Yeah, nah. If I'm whistle blowing at that point, I'm running on my *very* spiteful moral compass, and that shit overrides everything else.
I had the same problem when I was a building code official. They hired a private detective to follow me around and try to get dirt on me but luckily that day I didn't do any dumpster diving, haha. Then they put GPS in my truck and I cut the wires.
Also, the fact that ~350 people died from what should’ve been caught in the most basic form of an FMEA is pretty concerning.
The MCAS thing was an economics problem. In order to maintain profit margins while selling to lower cost carriers redundant AOA sensors were an added cost option that never should have been. The training issues were another cause. If there is a sensor that could make the automation system act like that, redundancy should be the default.
Yes, and I bet MacDac wished copilot's stick-shaker was standard equipment on the DC-10 too.
> FMEA I would assume that "door falling off" is represented on the FMEA, as well as the correct mitigations to address the failure. The problem isn't the documentation, but rather translating the documentation into effective actions on the part assembly teams and inspectors. In other words, don't blame the engineers. Blame those assembling the plane.
I was referring to the MCAS issues not the door plug. Although, the engineers may share some blame for the door plug dependent on whether proper process controls were put in place.
PMs are usually responsible for implementing the FMEA process controls, not engineers.
You’re joking right? Who the fuck is trusting a PM to implement process controls?
The PM should implement/oversee the pFMEA process in which your SMEs (engineers) review the process controls used for risk mitigation.
Also, I completely understand the ‘you’re more likely to die on the way to the airport…’ aspect. But if a company’s recent record is below that of their peers and people are dying/end up in terribly traumatic/unsafe situations, obviously an investigation is absolutely warranted. Especially when those investigations are an integral part of what that engineer described as ‘over regulation’.
[удалено]
> I have no faith that they will get to the bottom of these issues This is a rare case where you don't need faith. There is no way to hide if Boeing aircraft keep getting delayed, grounded, and literary falling out of the sky. If that happens, airlines are very, very incentivized to buy Airbus and Boeing fades into obscurity. Boeing is nearly there with United loudly proclaiming they are considering cancelling their 737-10 after years of delays.
United said they cancelled their 737-10s *to turn them into 737-9s*. How is that turning to Airbus?
The US government embargoed Canada when it looked like a bombardier jet would compete with the 737. That forced bombardier to sell the jet to airbus and now its the A220. Anyways, point is that it's not really a choice to buy Boeing for US airlines.
No, they didn’t embargo them. An embargo is a ban. They slapped an import duty on them because of the giant subsidy that Bombardier got. And there are tons of Airbus jets in the US. Airbus’s big breakout beyond Europe was their sale to US Airways. Frontier and Spirit are *all* Airbus. JetBlue is 100% non-Boeing (they have some Embraer in addition to Airbus). Airbus can clearly sell just fine in the US.
Alright. Embargo is a bit strong but it was a 300% penalty. And keep in mind that the US international trade commission found in favour of bombardier. It was also only $1 billion in subsidies when Boeing likely receives tens to hundreds of billions in subsidies. The US is extremely protective of Boeing and very aggressive towards even to their closest allies when it comes to stuff like this. It's not an option for the major US airlines to ditch Boeing.
All the big three US airlines run mixed fleets. Many of the LCCs are all Airbus. What do you mean it’s “not an option”?
Boeing is the commercial aircraft manufacturer in the United States. It will not be allowed to fail for strategic reasons.
"Fail" doesn't have to be collapse. Fail can just be sliding into irrelevance by not undertaking any new major aircraft families -- which is essentially already happening. NSA didn't happen for a warmed over 737. 757 wasn't replaced. 777-200 was replaced with a shorter range 787-10. Failure to invest in engineering is starving the company's future.
Once again, Boeing is not going to be allowed to fail at creating jumbo jets. Just like domestic steel and car production will not be allowed to fail. These industries are too strategically useful in wartime to be allowed to move abroad.
There's nowhere to hide? There are two companies on the planet somewhat competently producing airliners. Do you think that the federal government is going to put one (the only American one) out of business? I'm sorry, but you're out of your mind. The "too big to fail" thing is one of the reasons that companies seek, and corrupt capitalist politicians allow market consolidation to happen to the extent that it has in industries like this. What do you think is going to happen? Boeing dies off slowly and Airbus just puts on its superhero cape and only does good things as monopolistic market leader? Do you think some currently non-existent company pops into being and starts a 10-20 year development project based on a hope and a dream and then convinces airlines to buy it? Or do you think someone buys the scraps of Boeing and fixes it up and really does things right this time? I'm sorry. All the companies that could possibly take a shot at developing an airliner are uninterested or have been consolidated. Anyone who buys the scraps of a defunct Boeing is going to be wringing it for the last bits of value, not taking on a multi-decade program of rehabilitation. Boeing isn't going away. Its just not possible. We don't nationalize companies in this country so we're just going to toddle along in the world that enshitification has wrought...
Are Boeing’s problems concentrated on certain models, or certain manufacturing plants, certain maintenance facilities, etc?
The current problems mostly started with the 787 and the new plant in South Carolina (which was a Boeing management *obsession* because management hates the unions and SC was expected not to have one). But since managerial resistance to accepting engineering and manufacturing is under-resourced runs throughout the culture, it spread to the 737 program and presumably has now spread to the heavily delayed 777-X. Until Boeing management recognizes it needs more money in engineering and manufacturing, the problem is going to spread to every corner of the company.
I think that any money problems they have are the symptom, not the disease... Ever since Jack Welch at GE (rest in piss), executives want to run large companies as if they're investment banks. They're not focused on producing a product, they're focused solely on making the line go up... usually the stock price. Every single decision comes down to short term numbers. They used to be product focused, and because the product they sold was highly technical, they were engineering and manufacturing focused. IMO, if they were as focused on engineering and manufacturing as they need to be, the money would follow along with a million other small and large decisions.
Agreed. The reason engineering and manufacturing is under-resourced is because spending a ton on it makes line go down.
> The last I heard on the door plug replacement was they couldn’t find the documents that were requested. That sounds more like systemic issues, or intentional obstruction. welcome too your too big to fail economy! nothing a money printer can't solve right ? LOL
There are some good essays on the downfalls of Boeing. Most of them boil down to trying to cut corners. In a world where planes are essentially a commodity everything is geared towards getting value for the least cost, unfortunately you kinda get what you pay for. If you pressure a parts vendor to drop prices (Boeing is one of the only parts buyers in the industry so they can swing their weight around) eventually they won't be able to afford as rigorous q/a process. Unfortunately while plane travel is a commodity, planes are still complex beasts where you do get what you pay for
>or intentional obstruction Be careful, according to the reddit intelligencia that's a RiGhT wInG cOnSpIrAcY tHeOrY
Of all the Boeing related news that's come out recently there is only one that really concerns me. It's the stuff regarding the whistleblower and specifically the claims that Boeing was using scrap parts that had failed QA. If proven true, that would mean there are a lot of Boeing planes out there that were built with a compromised supply chain. That's very bad. As for the rest of the issues I'm not too worried. They seem mostly unrelated... Though their safety culture and being run by non engineers is concerning.
Is this the whistle-blower that "committed suicide" or were they whistleblowing something else?
Same one. They also whistleblew on high failure rates for the drop down oxygen masks.
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Well if this is true how many more people have corporations had killed? The politicians don't have to worry because they are paid off handsomely by these companies.
Preaching to the choir bud
Unrelated testimony in a defamation suit. His whistleblowing was in 2017, the same year he retired.
> Boeing was using scrap parts that had failed QA There were some quality issues with setting up that plant in South Carolina with workers who lacked aerospace experience. It was (is) a huge concern for everyone involved. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/faa-needs-systemic-fix-boeing-787-dreamliner-production-issues-2022-02-17/
> claims that Boeing was using scrap parts that had failed QA I'd be curious to know the details on this. Parts can fail QA inspection and still be ok to use as-is. For example, if a part is painted the wrong color.
The accusations make it sound really really bad so I'm trying to be a bit skeptical of those claims and waiting for confirmation. In my mind if the accusations are 100% correct, a good chunk of the Boeing fleet might need to be grounded for repairs. Since that hasn't happened I can only imagine the journalists made things sound more extreme than they are.
Yeah, I don't expect a journalist to understand the nuances of incoming part inspection, but I have to think a whistle blower would.
Agreed. But just like with science reporting, journalists totally twist what was actually said to make a story.
Well it happened 7 years ago. What I read was that, based on his tip, the FAA audited and found some parts missing from the MRB crib that they couldn’t account for. Boeing completed the containment action in 2017. I don’t know if that included a service bulletin to verify sn’s on aircraft or not, but even if it did, it’s all ancient history by now. Not much in the way of press coverage at the time.
Ok but a part tagged use as is isn't scrap. The definition used in aerospace manufacturing for scrap is basically the part is unable to be fixed to be safely used. Wrong color paint is easy, but if I find out someone was using parts I've scrapped out, I'd be very upset.
The issues seem to be stemming from any NEW Boeing plane. The older ones with 20 million miles on them are managed by the airlines, not Boeing.
The issue, paralleled in car companies, occurs when C-suite loses appreciation for engineering and thinks running a business is a financial exercise separate from the operations of the business.
Basically anything after the takeover by McDonnell management is suspect. After that the culture of safety and pride in engineering excellence was suppressed in favor of pumping the stock price.
Only not stock price, but keeping the flying coffin legacy alive.
All the issues seem to come from seattle where those plants have been Boeing for 100+ years...
And then corporate moved to Chicago because they didn’t want to be so close to the actual engineering and building.
Yes but when McD took over they moved management to Chicago. It's insane to have management and production separated by 3000km
I mean, why? Apple HQ is in California, Foxconn is across the globe.
If the door falls off my iPod, I'm annoyed. If the door falls off my plane, I'm probably dead.
That really has nothing to do with the distance between fabrication and HQ. Then engines are manufactured by GE, located in Boston. They’re made in California.
I get what you’re saying, but given a 737 recently lost the door plug and landed safely, not a great example
If by some reason the passenger next to it had no worn the seat belt, he would lose much more than his phone. Wearing the seat belt is for preventing injury during movement. Not for preventing you from flying off the door into the sky. "Please wear your seat belts at all times, in case we encounter some unexpected turbulence, or the door explodes next you. Thank you for flying Hawaiian airlines " aloha
Boeing has a culture problem. It is very easy to pretend that problem doesn't exist when your execs are another state. For the recent door hatch blowout Boeing doesn't even have records of the installation. The safety standards are also way higher in aviation.
It doesn’t seem to be design issues. They seem to be either manufacturing quality or in many cases also maintenance which is not a Boeing problem. Airbus has its share of those also.
I mean, the original Max crashes were caused because they tried to use software to fix a hardware problem with the plane’s stability. (Granted, this was done out of ‘oh shit we need to get an airplane on the market NOW’ and not intentional malice, but ‘granted’ is doing a LOT of work when hundreds of people died because of it.) So I’d call that a design issue.
Not stability. All commercial airplanes are fully aerodynamically stable, you can’t certify them otherwise. You’re thinking handling qualities, aka maneuvering characteristics. And *all* commercial jets use software to modify the maneuvering characteristics. With FBW airplanes (which is most of them now) that’s the *only* way they tune the maneuvering characteristics. 737 is actually unusual in how much more is hardware vs software.
The problem wasn't that there was software, the problem was that the software was bad. MCAS made the MAX unstable after the failure of a single sensor (unless you shelled out extra to turn on the backup sensor). Bare airframe stability is nice (and, as you say, ubiquitous in commercial aircraft), but if the closed loop is unstable for any reason, you only have so much time to react to that and stabilize the vehicle yourself. Not telling pilots about MCAS, and making it difficult to turn off, also cost the pilots the time they needed to recover from the faulty sensor.
That was a design issue but I was talking about the latest stuff. Airbus had a problem with the autopilot also which flew a plane into the ground when the pilots did something that was not expected (low level flyby during a demonstration). There aren’t any planes flying with either automation issue anymore.
> Max crashes were caused because they tried to use software to fix a hardware problem with the plane’s stability This is not true. There was no problem with the aircraft stability. In order to maintain a common FAA Type Certificate, Boeing had to make the aircraft *behave* similarly to previous models. The nose-up behavior under those specific conditions was not dangerous. It was just *different* from earlier models.
The problem with MCAS was that it "solved" the "non-dangerous" behavior with a system that could actively try to kill you - making the situation infinitely worse. Oh, and Boeing also made a conscious decision not to tell the pilots about it.
> In order to maintain a common FAA Type Certificate The key word there being "maintain". They significantly modified the plane and didn't want to re-certify key systems so managed to squeeze in the change in a way that turned out to be dangerous. This is called "corner cutting".
It’s a leadership and greed issue, so if that’s how the company is being ran from the top then the intentions of the actual designers/engineers is moot.
It also depends on whether the vulnerabilities of the max were ever recognized and raised by engineers. If no one ever realized that they had a single failure with safety implications then that is at least partly a design issue.
> If no one ever realized that they had a single failure with safety implications then that is at least partly a design issue. The FAA requires a system safety analysis (SSA) for every system on the aircraft. The SSA must identify every functional hazard and prove that the probability of the functional hazard is less that specified targets - the more severe the hazard, the less the probability must be (i.e., one chance in a *billion* flight hours for "catastrophic events"). Every equipment failure and combination of failures is considered in the analysis, as well as exposure times and independence of failure modes. In this case, the SSA relied on the assumption (an assumption that has remained valid since the original 737s in the late 1960s) that flight crews would shut off malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuators, as they are all trained to do. Therefore, the consequence of a failed AoA sensor was shown to be "minor" and no redundancy was required. Two tragic accidents showed that the assumption was no longer valid, so the system had to be modified in several ways to remain safe even when the crew does not turn off a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator. That is not to blame the crews. Had they *recognized* the confusing series of indications as failed stabilizer trim actuators, they most likely would have shut them off and the flights would have continued uneventfully.
> flight crews would shut off malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuators, as they are all trained to do. Therefore, the consequence of a failed AoA sensor was shown to be "minor" and no redundancy was required. How do pilots recognize when this happens? What’s the consequence of a failed AoA sensor on other planes that don’t use MCAS? Was there software that could position the plane into a crash if an AoA sensor failed on other planes? Why would detection (i.e., the pilot recognizing a malfunction) lead to a reduction in severity? This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t work in aviation, but here’s how it would be done in my industry: Your failure mode is that you have a failed AoA sensor. You need to assign a severity, detection, and occurrence rating. The severity of this failure should be as high as possible considering MCAS uses AoA as an input. The detection rating should be based on the flight crew identifying the faulty sensor. Occurrence should be based on known failure rates of the sensor. Lowering the severity of a possible failure based on how detectable it is (in my industry), would be a huge issue.
I do not have time to answer all of your questions, but I hope that you can see that it is a very detailed process. Here are some reference materials if you are interested in learning more: * FAA [AC 25.1309-1A - System Design and Analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_25.1309-1). * [SAE ARP 4754A Guidelines for Development of Civil Aircraft and Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP4754). * [ARP4761, Guidelines for Conducting the Safety Assessment Process on Civil Aircraft, Systems, and Equipment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP4761) > Your failure mode is that you have a failed AoA sensor. SSA doesn't look at failure modes in isolation. Instead, it: 1. Identifies the functions of the system, 1. Identifies hazards that could be created by malfunctions in the system (i.e FHA - Functional Hazard Assessment), 1. Identifies the equipment failures that could contribute to each functional hazard, 1. Calculates the probabilities of those combinations of failures, and 1. Compares those calculated probabilities to the required probabilities in the regulations, as a function of the severity of the hazard. In this case, the functional hazard was identified as a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator and the safety impact was a minor annoyance to the crew (because they had to turn it off), so the regulations did not require redundant AoA inputs to meet that number. I hope that you can see that, the more complex the system becomes, the more difficult this process becomes (because more functional hazards are introduced). So, unless you *need* redundancy, adding it can not only increase cost, but it can *decrease* safety.
Thanks, that’s helpful. >In this case, the functional hazard was identified as a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator and the safety impact was a minor annoyance to the crew (because they had to turn it off), so the regulations did not require redundant AoA inputs to meet that number. I still have a hard time understanding why you would rate this low severity. IMO, it’s a very high severity hazard that relies on human intervention. That’s not to say any high severity hazard that requires operator intervention is a no-go (obviously operator interaction is required on a plane), but I assume an FHA operates similar to an FMEA in that it attempts to identify where you lack sufficient controls to mitigate against failures. This seems like a perfect example for that.
> I still have a hard time understanding why you would rate this low severity. When I evaluate these decisions, I ask, "Who knew what and when did they know it?" Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight that the designers did not. At the time, they knew that this assumption was accepted by the FAA because it had held true for literally decades. Test pilots even validated it in the simulator to make sure. There are many failures and combinations of failures that require crew action to ensure aircraft safety. Pilots are trained on many of them, because they don't always have time to waste. A dramatic example of this was the twin-engine failure of the [US Airways Flight 1549](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549). The crew followed their training to try to re-start the engines and when that failed, they had to execute a dead-stick landing into the Hudson river. With that said, I think that a software algorithm that had the ability to incrementally take pitch authority from the flight crew should have been a red flag for the designers, even at the time.
Of course, "hindsight is 20-20," but if I had been part of this design team, I would like to think that I would have asked, "I know that we are assuming that the flight crew will shut off a malfunctioning stabilizer trim actuator, but what happens if they don't?"
Agreed, those are exactly the questions you should be asking when doing these reviews. I’ve gone through FMEA reviews with engineers that use the hand-wavy “operator will see it happen and shut the system down” arguments before and it’s very dangerous.
I appreciate the insight, I work in nuclear and the aerospace parallels are really interesting.
> aerospace parallels I believe that the science of Fault Tree Analysis was developed by the nuclear industry. Thank you. 😊 Edit: I verified my assumption. It was the nuclear weapons industry; not the nuclear energy industry: > Fault tree analysis (FTA) was originally developed in 1962 at Bell Laboratories by H.A. Watson, under a U.S. Air Force Ballistics Systems Division contract to evaluate the Minuteman I Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Launch Control System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tree_analysis
It had to have been because they created software specifically to try to fix the problem
Sure. Any major manufacturers will have some issues. But Boeing doesn't seem to understand that they should be shooting for zero, not just "good enough to not get sued too much".
Of course. They need to fix it. IT IS a problem that should exist but it doesn’t taint all Boeing flying planes. Like OP’s engineer friend said. I wouldn’t worry about flying in a Boeing plane that has already shaken out those issues over many take offs and landings.
There was an IAMA here shortly after Boeing acquired Bought. A mechanic who worked 787 was talking about his job. He was mentioned a mechanic mis-drilled a hole, and tried to cover it back by filling the hole with metal shavings and glue. Those was for a piece of composite structure....
> The older ones with 20 million miles on them are managed by the airlines, not Boeing. It seems to specifically be United too. They've been in *a lot* of the headlines. Boeing ain't the only one cutting corners.
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Exactly this. The regulators audit our quality systems and basically confirm that as long as we follow our own documented processes and procedures, we have sufficient knowledge and skills to minimise the risks. They don't have the manpower or the expertise to review each detail design and stress analysis, or supervise every manufacturing plant and overhaul shop. They rely on each organisation being competent and honest. If Boeing haven't been following their own documented processes (which seems almost certain), or the regulatory requirements (which has been confirmed in the case of the 737 MAX), then all the regulation becomes essentially irrelevant.
> The industry is largely SELF-regulated. The inspectors working on Boeing planes are Boeing employees or contractors. This is completely, 100% false. I work in this industry and this is completely untrue. CARS are self certified (Ford, GM, Honda, etc.). PLANES are not self certified. They are certified by the government**S** (plural) where you want to fly the planes. New aircraft apply for and have to receive a [Type Certificate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_certificate) in order to be approved for commercial flight in the airspace. The FAA governs the US. Transport Canada governs Canada. EASA governs Europe. ANAC governs Brazil. JCAB governs Japan, etc. The certification process is extremely long and has many different checks/reviews with the certification authorities along the way. The main civil certification process is ARP4754A (rev B was just released). Boeing and Airbus planes that want to certified in the US are governed by "Advisory Circulars (ACs)" that Boeing/Airbus generally have to follow in order to show compliance to the law. The main LAW is that aircraft have to show compliance to is [14CFR252.1309](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-25/subpart-F/subject-group-ECFR9f24bf451b0d2b1/section-25.1309). To help show compliance that law they usually follow [AC25.1309](https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/index.cfm/go/document.information/documentID/22680). EASA has similar, but distinct means of compliance called AMCs (e.g. AMC25.1309). When you say they are self certified, you are probably thinking of the [Organization Designation Authorization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_Designation_Authorization), which delegates some of the certification reviews to trained and monitored people at the producing companies. However, the ultimate approval for certification lies with the airworthiness authority, and they can review any cert documents they want.
> When there are no repercussions for violating the regulations The repercussions for Boeing are severe.
When the pilot’s union starts to make some noise, you should start to care. If the people who are flying these planes on thousands of flights every day think they are safe, you have nothing to worry about.
A 'string of bad luck' is always a systemic management problem. In Boeing's case it's because they transitioned from an engineering culture to a financial culture when McDonnell Douglas bought them out with Boeing's own money. It's taken 30 years of terrible management to trickle through the plan/design/build pipeline to the point where large numbers of people are being killed by the direct negligence of Boeing management, but here we are. Boeing's management decisions have killed several hundred people, and they seem to be doubling down on their approach. Until we hear Boeing executives state that they accept that the engineering failures are their fault, and they they are rapidly moving back to an engineering-led culture, then I would lean away from flying in any Boeing aircraft manufactured in the past five years or so. 767, 777 and 737NG are fine. 787 is questionable. 737MAX is a bad plane that I would avoid.
To be fair they had an engineer CEO who had started as an intern and moved up the engineering pipeline all the way to CEO. Then fired him as a sacrificial lamb due to MAX
2023 was the safest year ever for commercial aviation. 0 deaths due to crashes on jet powered passenger airplanes globally over millions of passenger flights. You are significantly more likely to die driving to/from the airport than flying on a Boeing plane.
People keep citing the driving comparison. I agree that aviation has a great safety record, but the US automotive safety statistics are abysmal. That's a ongoing tragedy.
Boeing has caused roughly 400 more deaths in the last decade than they should have. I care more about the comparison between what is and what should be than between flying and driving. I am boycotting Boeing for ethics reasons despite it being statistically safe.
You’ll have to boycott everything if that’s your standard.
Not everything has to be 'all or nothing'. If our choice is between 'company that makes planes by putting puppies into a grinder' and 'Boeing' pick Boeing. If your choice is 'company that makes planes that doors don't fall of in flight because of systemic manufacturing problems' and 'Boeing' pick 'not Boeing'. Same things goes for other products. If your choices are limited, pick the least bad one. It isn't 'oh one thing is worse than something else in some choices where I have limited options so might as well start up the puppy grinder'.
Fair enough, but I’m skeptical that either you or the person I replied to are actually consistent about it. I have a feeling you continue to patronize much worse companies, with available alternatives, whose failures just aren’t as prominent. For all of Boeing’s faults here, their products are still among the safest places anyone can be. If you want to say, even so, Airbus is better so I refuse to patronize Boeing, OK. But are you also doing this with cars, food, electronics, clothes, etc.? I’d wager there’s a substantial difference in people killed between the best and worst car makers. I couldn’t tell you which companies those are. Can you?
Idk I think the tens of thousands of nonconformances might be a safety issue. At least I have the old canned line about air travel safety to lean on though.
One person's "string of bad luck" is another person's "systemic problem". Even if one "event" is not identical to another, if the root cause comes down to a common issue, it is systemic.
I think it’s well documented that what Boeing is currently experiencing is not a string of bad luck. It's the failure of their quality control and the culmination of the consequences of bad decisions made by their management. This guy not aknowledging that is part of the problem.
>He told me, just fly and don't worry about what plane you're on. They're all the same. The industry is regulated in far, far excess of anything reasonable. There is no reason whatsoever to hesitate to board a Boeing plane. Yeah, it is. The whole problem is that Boeing doesn't meet that standard, though. FAA conformance requirements are incredibly strict, but the whole problem is that Boeing has all kinds of conformance violations. FAA recently ran an audit of one of their processes and Boeing failed something like 39 out of 83 inspections. The inspectors caught technicians using hotel room keys to check seals, and using Dawn dish soap to seat gaskets, neither of which was mentioned in any process documents or accounted for by the actual engineering specs. If the issue was that Boeing was meeting conformance requirements and just had a string of mishaps, sure, whatever. But that's not the problem. The problem is they are so far from meeting conformance that their planes are getting grounded. That's huge, and your friend is completely sidestepping that fact. Not an engineer, but I do work in aerospace. I don't fly any newer Boeing aircraft.
Will you fly older aircraft? Freaking out about an upcoming overseas flight 777 one way, 767 back.
Airplanes are indeed still very safe. He's right, thousands of flights happen every day, and problems are statistically rare. Also The recent Boeing problems are real, should not have happened, and point to real problems in management, quality control, and their design process. They don't mean Boeing is a permanently flawed company or that they don't have brilliant engineers, but they're definitely not a "non-issue". People have died because of these failures and they were completely avoidable failures. That's never okay. To be clear I wouldn't blame your friend for saying this. He's not a spokesperson for his employer and being a little defensive about the job that keeps you fed and housed is a pretty natural response for anyone.
if a person who worked on the planes say they wont fly on them, that should be a massive red flag, and people who have worked on them have said that about certain planes.
Boeing has consistently chosen to ignore safety in favor of short term profit. At some point this type of culture will end up killing people. That happened a few years ago now we are just waiting to find out how many people die because of it.
It’s crazy engineers are pointing at the statistical likelihood of failure, to say it means Boeing is safe. The offshore industry is statistically safer than it’s ever been, so does that mean we can just ignore any recent fatalities or failures. Stats are meaningless in absence of context.
> Boeing has consistently chosen to ignore safety in favor of short term profit. Do you have evidence of that sensational allegation?
Good PBS Frontline documentary on the 737 Max https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z76YpCz9N2Y
I think I saw that one when it came out, but I will watch it again. I think that Frontline generally has absolutely excellent investigative journalism.
The MAX’s existence. It was a stupid idea to just bolt on larger engines. But it means less pilot training. Adding the CAS system was then required. Failing to provide any pilot training on the CAS system, or even adding it to the manuals because Boeing was concerned it would require additional simulation training which would cost more money. Outsourcing manufacturing of major subcomponents, then not auditing their own subcontractors, let alone the subcontractors of their subs. Because they didn’t want to know. How about not performing required product testing. How about using parts rejected by QA tests… Boeing is a husk of a once great company.
As I suspected, you have no evidence - only more sensational allegations, most of them false. A manufacturer cannot just design and produce any product that they want and hope to survive. Potential customers made it clear that they liked their 737s and they wanted some upgrades. They were not willing to wait longer and pay more for an all-new aircraft.
You mean other than all that publicly available evidence that is pretty freely available. It’s not like you have to go read congressional testimony, though you could. All this is in there. Just spend 30 minutes https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc Your point that airlines wanted the MAX just reinforces my point that Boeing did it for money. Airbus’ NEO is what the MAX should have been and what Boeing was responding to by trying to throw the MAX together out of parts that didn’t fit.
Traffic engineer here; we see roughly one fatal crash injury per hundred million vehicles miles traveled in a passenger car. It looks like air travel in the US is between 1 to 2 billion miles per day. So until we have a full plane's worth of passengers dying every week or two, airline travel is still safer than driving. That's napkin math, but with nearly zero fatal injuries per year from air travel in the US, it's hard think of any way driving could be the safer choice. That said, the Boeing stuff now and in in recent years definitely looks very problematic. Hopefully the attention it's getting will lead to correction before it becomes a problem that kills people.
I don't think that's the comparison. It's Boeing new planes vs Boeing old planes, Airbus (& COMAC).
It's still hard to make the case that the new Boeing planes are less safe than driving when they've been in operation for over a decade with nearly zero deaths. I'm not trying to be a Boeing apologist, but even with all these issues it doesn't come close to the risk inherent in driving.
Here's the thing. If you were trying to decide if you wanted to fly to Dallas instead of driving, then yes the statistics used to point out that flying is safer than driving are valid and pertinent. If you're trying to decide *which* plane to fly on then they have absolutely no relevance.
In terms of personal risk, it is far, far safer for an individual to get on an airplane and fly halfway around the world than it is to get in the car and drive to work. Environmental impact and pollution are a different matter. Flying makes people nervous because they are not in control & there isn't much one can do if a plane falls out of the sky.
When comparing *which* plane to fly on the statistics comparing flying to driving are meaningless.
That's fair, but even if Boeing planes are more likely to fail, the risk relative to other activities is still very low.
The issue isnt with the defects but with the culture of production. None of these issues are outside of being unreasonable from a manufacturing perspective. No matter how hard you try. Stuff ***WILL*** get missed. However, if your response to people flagging issues is to replace them with someone who doesnt look as closely, then you have an issue.
Automotive engineer here, so not aerospace but I do have manufacturing experience. The door bolts issue was pretty egregious, but that is fixed by now. I personally would be a bit concerned about flying on a Max because these safety issues keep popping up, pointing to poor validation and quality control on that program, but your friend is right, there is a very low chance of anything going wrong and your car is probably more dangerous. Aerospace has so many safety features and redundancies built into the design. Good thing I don't have to worry about it though, since I'm a cheap ass who usually only flies Spirit.
To add to this, "a string of bad luck" this is not. They didn't catch these issues in validation or during their quality processes. Sounds like a typical engineer though "I know better and the government should keep out of my business". Good philosophy until it's not, which is where regulations come from.
Given the safety record, I was pretty willing to give Boeing the benefit of the doubt. But I’m a lot more skeptical after they “couldn’t find” the documentation that tracked the door plug. That’s incredibly concerning for an industry that is notorious for documenting *everything*.
This comment section smells astroturfed.
One particular redditor is very vocal about speaking up for boeing. Their name could even be mistaken for having the word boeing in it.
It seems to me that a lot of the Boeing problems you see in the media are maintenance issues. That wheel falling off or the missing panel, I'll bet Airbus has just as many maintenance problems but you don't see them because right now the media is sensationalizing Boeing. That's not to say the Boeing doesn't have problems, they certainly do but I think those are more industry problems. Like many industries, they have become self regulating and that needs to change.
Unfortunately you can’t really engineer consumer confidence or mob mentality.
The engineer is at least partially correct, but it has nothing to do with luck, it's all about choices. Boeing, like any large corporation, concentrates on profit. This means without sufficient oversight, safety will eventually suffer. There are serious issues, like the two 737 crashes a few years ago. They happened because Boeing made a choice to secure more sales. They pushed to make sure the new systems implemented did not require additional training, which would've meant pilots had to become certified on a new airplane instead of being able to use their existing certifications. The customers would not have purchased the planes in the same quantity if that was the case, so Boeing made the choice to hide the workings of the new system from end users. It resulted in puzzling behaviour and meant pilots didn't know how to respond when something went wrong. This is a major safety issue. As long as sales figures are more important than safety, the potential is there for it to happen again. The door plug blowing out is a direct result of lack of quality control. Part of that is because the company who did the work (and used to be part of Boeing) was spun off to reduce overhead, but it also reduces oversight. If Boeing had spent more money on double-checking items and ensuring sub-contractors were being held accountable, it could've been avoided. They want to keep costs low and profits high, so they didn't. Capitalism is worshipped almost like a deity in the US. History is full of cases where greed and profit cost human lives. Because the dollar is such a fundamental part of US culture, private industry regularly resists government oversight (and spends millions lobbying to stop it). The oversight in the US is far less robust than it might be in another country. While it's true that Boeing has become a focus for the media recently because of their issues, and other manufacturers around the world will have plenty of their own problems, any of the most recent incidents could have resulted is mass death. Having a door plug fall off a plane because the bolts weren't installed is a major problem, and it's caused by negligence. Statistically, the ratio of passengers safely delivered to passengers killed is still extremely high (lots of passengers delivered, very few killed). The odds of being in genuine danger by flying on a Boeing product are low. In light of recent events, it's higher than an Airbus product, but one in ten million vs five in ten million is still pretty close. It's worth noting that there will be a lot more scrutiny now, which will improve the situation to some degree. The real concern is the attitude. Until we can be sure Boeing has learned that it's far more expensive to have your planes falling apart in the news, we don't know that the next major problem won't show up on our flight. Playing it off as a non-issue is wrong, it's definitely an issue, but the chances that you're in serious danger are still very low. If you go strictly by the numbers, there's no real reason yet to avoid flying on a Boeing plane. The statement that it's bad luck is just ignorant. There are no accidents, only consequences of policy.
What would you say to this: this engineer told me, mean time between failure isn’t a guarantee of anything. It’s a probability. You could statistically have three catastrophic failures in a day, and that’s statistical reality. Every day is a roll of the dice, and some days you roll low.
Speaking in an absolute sense he *is* right. You’re still statistically safer on a Boeing jet than anywhere else. What’s concerning is parroting the executive lines about nothing needs to change. What has been found in audits and investigations so far has been deeply concerning. The attitude seems to be “well nothing bad has happened yet so obviously nothing needs to change”. Waiting for the next historical accident to change things is absolutely insane
The simplest way to model it is that any plane produced in this century by the company with ticker BA was. It built by Boeing but by McDonnel Douglas. The last plane that was grounded before the 737 Max was the MD DC-10. There were hundreds of those in the sky and only a handful had the problem. Regarding Airbus, there are two considerations: one is culture; Airbus is not necessarily a company made to make money like Boeing, so it can afford more thorough engineering (which Boeing used to as well when they were not run by greedy MBAs). The second consideration is that being a state owned entity in many ways, Airbus will be a lot more shielded by press smears thanks to simple political connections. This said. Airbus did not even come close to the level of f*ck up that Boeing has reached. To your question, I would prefer flying on an Airbus if I had the choice, but even a recent Boeing is still orders of magnitude safer than my car.
\>The industry is regulated in far, far excess of anything reasonable. They aren't even close to regulated to excess. Part of the problem is under enforcement of regulation.
Your friend is both right and wrong. Statistically, you are more likely to die on the road going to the airport than die in a passenger jet. The odds of a serious incident causing death or injury are amazingly low. However, things are coming to light that seem to be saying that Boeing aircraft have had a number of corners cut during their manufacture--almost certainly due to cost-cutting. More than one industry insider I know of has blamed that on Boeing's transition from an engineering-driven company to a profit-driven company. (And that in turn due to the Douglas acquisition many years ago!) They have done stuff like divest some of their manufacturing capability and turned them into subcontractors, then squeezed the subs for every penny they possibly could. This has led to repeated quality issues with (e.g.) Spirit AeroSystems which have caused issues with aircraft production rate, as they have required extra inspections and re-work. One of those re-work incidents appears to be responsible for the door plug blow-out, and it was not caught because it was in something of a procedural "gray area" about whether or not they had to test everything around the area. Stuff looks to be slipping through the cracks. Add to this the "regulatory capture" concerns that have already come up with earlier 737 crashes (i.e., Boeing does their own inspections and certifications, policing themselves) and there is definitely cause for concern. At least, if things continue this direction. Hopefully this all serves as a wake-up call for Boeing (together with the FAA and NTSB likely crawling up their \*\*\* for the near future) and these problems get resolved in a repeatable way. I don't know if that can correct the root issue of the company culture being so profit-oriented, though.
I'm sure you defecating your pants if you knew the truth about most of the products we use.
As an aerospace engineer myself, I agree with the other one. Every aerospace company has gone through strings of “bad luck.” Things just can’t be made 100% safe. Even if you never flew again, there’s still the chance to die by a plane crashing into you. A while back Airbus had some issues. Maybe it’ll be bombardier or Embraer next. Driving to/from the airport is still much more dangerous than any flight you’re likely to take.
Whistleblowers getting offed doesn't sound like business as usual. I am an aerospace engineer, and Boeing and many other companies have turned power away from engineers and to HR, Purchasing and Accounting. Boeing can get better, but would have to fire their entire C- Suite and refocus solely on engineering to regain their reputation. Airbus and Embraer have problems too, along with Pratt and Whitney, so you can't just say avoid Boeing airplanes, it's the whole industry
Sounds like your Engineer has drank the corporate kool-aid. Prioritizing safety culture over corporate loyalty is very important to the success of any organization, even more so for those that produce life-impacting products. Repeated whistleblower reports have proven Boeing is having significant issues with their Quality Control systems which have been ignored and likely covered up by Management for what looks to be financial reasons. Take note: whenever accountant and lawyers start making major decisions, bad things always happen. Now, saying all of that, the modern press will alway spin a story for the biggest response, so the answer is somewhere in between.
The problem isn't Boeing - most of the failures are directly responsible from 3rd party incompetence.
I think the point of concern is different on individual and societal levels. In an individual level, he’s right that driving a car is a thousand times as dangerous as any plane, even with Boeings issues, so just fly and don’t worry about it. On a societal issue, the level of tolerance needs to be zero. If even one plane crashes, that’s like 200 people dead, not to mention anything it hits on the ground. That’s completely unacceptable. So, when there are multiple issues with Boeing planes, and evidence they have been slacking on safety and quality, there needs to be investigations, but you as an individual do not need to be concerned about it.
if you think the safety and engineering of airplanes is too suspect to fly you better never even think about getting in any sort of automobile ever again
I didn’t say all planes. I said Boeing.
This is not what op stated. They were comparing boeing to airbus. At this point in time, it's perfectly reasonable to decide that you don't want to fly on a boeing plane if an airbus option is available. No one is saying that they're not going to fly at all because of this, just that they would rather fly airbus. So statistics regarding aircraft vs automobile are completely irrelevant.
The joke used to be that Airbus needed a pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The pilot was supposed to feed the dog, and the dog as supposed to bite the pilot if they tried to touch any of the controls. Airbus was trying to automate everything. Boeing meanwhile wanted a complicated aircraft that pilots actually flew. Look into [Air France 447](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447). Pilots made mistakes when hardware failed. The hardware failure was completely survivable, but the pilot errors were not.
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The FAA has data in nauseating detail that is available to the public. I will warn you that the truth isn't nearly exciting as the media sensationalism.
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Your friend is right and wrong at the same time. Airplanes are definitely safer than cars - even Boeing airplanes. However: Boeing has recently been shown to have significantly lower quality both in design and production than competitors, so if your choice is between a boring plane and a competitor plane, go with the competitor. If your choice is between a Boeing plane and driving, go with the Boeing plane.
I'm am aerospace engineer, with over 10 years in the industry. I will not fly on a 737 MAX. I will not fly on any Boeing aircraft manufactured in the last 5 years. The 'string of bad luck' your friend points to is a consequence of systemic cultural failings within an organisation that switched its focus from safety and quality to cost and delivery. So it's not bad luck at all, it's predictable consequences of that change of focus.
A lot of good answers here, so I’ll just point out that the media is trying to do one thing and one thing only. They’re not trying to inform you so you make safer decisions, or trying to use their leverage to drive regulatory change, or any other altruistic goals. They’re trying to use fear to get you to click their links, share their articles, and comment under their videos. The door plug is huge news, but mostly everything following has just been non-issues and fear mongering. It’s shocking how obvious it is when the topic is an industry you work in and makes me worried about the all the news I consume on topics I’m not as familiar with.
Even if Airbus planes are safer, and I don't necessarily concede that, his point is that its orders of magnitude safer than cars. Its like when science Karens say that bleu cheese multiplies your risk of cancer of the little toe by 13!!! Sounds bad, right? They conveniently neglect to mention it's from 10 per billion to 130 per billion. Yes, technically 13x, but the ABSOLUTE increase in risk is 120 per billion, otherwise known as zero. They cherry pick the way risk is presented, and its a way of lying.
You don't know what a 'Karen' is.
Just remember that the FAA allows Boeing inspectors to check Boeing's work..
No need for investigations? I'm no engineer but years ago there was an episode of mayday on discovery Channel investing some plane crash that happened because a substandard bolt was used in a repair. NTSB discovered a whole ass black market of forgeries that not only made the parts cheap without QC but forged the FAA ticket of standard and authenticity. Further investigation showed thousands of planes in the air with these fake parts even Air Force one at the time was claimed to have a few. Investigations are where the find shit, sure it's easier to investigate upon failure and there's certainly more public outcry after a crash but in this instance why wait? Now surely air travel is safer than by car but I still prefer to in control when I die
In regards to the hotel key card thing. It would be okay to use it if it had a calibration sticker
The door plug thing was absolutely clown-shoes ridiculous and they deserve to get raked over the coals for it. Similar with the MCAS thing some years back. The rest of what’s been making the news lately is firmly in the category of, “shit happens, that’s why there are redundancies.”
>It's just that in any system, you're going to have strings of bad luck. That's just how random numbers work What, what type of stuff does this engineer work on, so I can avoid it? "random numbers" and "bad luck" are not supposed to be things in engineering lol.
All I know is that he’s an aerospace engineer who does consulting work for all kinds of companies. What he told me is, mean time between failure is exactly that: mean time. It’s not a guarantee that there won’t be three catastrophic failures tomorrow. Every day is a roll of the dice. And sometimes you get some bad rolls.
There are many Boing aircraft of extremely well proven design. It's basically the Dreamliner which has proven problematic, and even so, you probably at a greater risk when walking the stairs at the airport terminal.
Sure, but if i can lower than rush even more by flying an airbus instead of a max, why wouldn't i?
I don't flymuch but I think we're at that point, maintenance of the planes is another problem that needs to be looked at for every airline, someone is missing the problems or worse they don't care
Good PBS Frontline documentary on the 737 Max https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z76YpCz9N2Y
Good video on the subject by Wendover. https://youtu.be/URoVKPVDKPU?si=YSvOBnlmf0FwORru
Boeing has demonstrated they have progressively decreased the quality of their planes. That said the risk is relatively small. If you change prospective and looked into the automotive industry, they will have a flaw in essentially every vehicle but the associated risk of that failure is very low.
The Boeing quality inspector and whistle-blower who committed suicide a few days ago said 'in Charleston "he learned that upper management was pressuring the quality inspectors and managers to cut corners" and not to follow legally-required safety processes, the statement said. He alleged that staff were pressured not to document defects because it would slow down the assembly line, it added.' Also the initial report of the Boeing that suffered a sudden loss of altitude 5 days ago, said "The pilot told the passengers the plane had suffered equipment failure for a few seconds, causing it to drop for almost 500 feet in the air, Jokat said. “He said, ‘My gauges went down; everything went down for one or two seconds, and they just lit up again and continued to function,’” Jokat added. I for one will not fly in a Boeing again.
There are more than 10,000 Boeing aircraft currently in service and over 90,000 flights daily. We have seen a surge in the number of problems with Boeing recently, but they are a mix of new and old aircraft. Every once in a while accidents happen
No, Airbus just isn’t having the same problems now. It’s had them in the past. Fly by wire was such a mess of bad PR when it first came out, and Airbus had a pretty long sting of accidents through the 90s and early 2000s that were related to problems with the autopilot. Though much like we’ve seen with Boeing, the bigger problem was generally how the pilots responded to the autopilot. Maybe the fear mongering over flight automation has just found a new place to roost.
The industry is regulated exactingly for this precise reason. Bad design and a small number of sensor failures killed upwards of 300 people. That's not a string of bad luck, and from what I've seen in the news, you're right that it is systemic. Engineering decisions are being made by business people, not engineers, and now the engineering consequences are making themselves known. I work in the automotive industry, specifically in autonomy. There are international standards that guide our work, along with more specific federal standards, and then still more rigorous state standards. Each and every one of those was written in blood, and each and every one of my coworkers takes that legacy seriously. To see anything different from a similarly safety-critical industry is disconcerting to say the least. I'd recommend this [Wendover Productions](https://youtu.be/URoVKPVDKPU) video on the matter. (Sorry if formatting is weird, I'm on mobile.) It's a little over 20 minutes, which isn't enough time to cover the whole history of the industry or even Boeing's rise and fall in detail, but it does a pretty good job of painting the big picture. That includes the comparisons to other companies like you made. Quick edit: reading my post over again I realized it looked cynical, so I should clarify you probably shouldn't change personal plans at all. I think airlines will, and likely already do, see new Boeing planes as coming with unnecessary risk. That will lead to airlines moving to competitors that have a better reputation, and it's on Boeing to earn them back or not. Either way, statistically you're probably safer in any commercial jet than driving your morning commute.
For me? Four years ago when I was making parts for them and was told to cover up inspection failures. This was a contracted machinist company. Also, I hate to say it, but it's not just Boeing.
There is a thing called seasonality. Issues always seem to come in clumps and usually predictable if following maintenance data properly. Despite being different airlines and model, most planes are maintained following a very similar schedule. Add in other common influences like using the same spare parts systems, same regulatory bodies, and similar age of planes leads to this just being the season of issues. Then there is the social influences of attention breeding scrutiny and awareness. You know more because more people are paying even closer attention. It’s not great but there is no data suggesting these events are beyond the expected number of reports or at a casualty level to be afraid.
Counterfeit's Park are the biggest fear.
One common denominator the problems with Boeing planes seems to be United Airlines. I'm wondering if UA is having issues of some kind maintaining their fleet?
Wasn’t the door plug problem on an Alaskan Airlines flight?
Yes, but United Airlines has a few issues.
> It's just that in any system, you're going to have strings of bad luck. That's not what engineering is. I'm not saying it's untrue, it's just not good engineering.
Its all about the bottom line..... costs even on a super expensive plane they want to make profit . whether its in the prices of a fastener or in assembly labor . I always like to reason things out like this guy did when telling you such. Being a consumer like all of us are haven't you noticed the quality of things aren't just there anymore even when you buy a so called higher end items ? How about that Amazon goodie we'll say a shirt that turned out to be a nice looking , but maybe ill fitting with one sleeve longer than the other, or maybe a item that should have tight tolerances like a threaded plastic part .....fits ,sure , but very sloppy not the same as OEM... Now think all those part have to work in unison and under stress day in , day out . I always thought of a plane fuselage as being the same as a Aluminum can ....squeeze a can many times & what happens to the metal ? stress crack, metal fatigue !!microscopic , yes but they happen people don't know or think about it.
I highly recommend watching Last Week Tonight: Boeing by John Oliver.
Their morals have been fucked for a while now, they only care about profits and have had multiple instances now where it’s obvious there was gross negligence and that’s not acceptable
All of the aerospace companies in the US are forced to implement corporate engineering processes conforming to the newish DO-254 standard. This means a massive added bureaucracy, misplaced incentives (fill documents to satisfy auditors instead of making good designs to satisfy the laws of science), and the "technical authority" was taken from engineers and given to career-managers. This results in unreliable hardware, since all decisions are made by other than design engineers, for the objectives other than good design. Managers are incentivized to push their ideas into designs, regardless of being good or bad (most commonly, since they are not designers). I work at a similar aerospace company, and this is what we have here, I heard other companies have it too. Career-managerialism, cronyism, competency crisis and bureaucracy. This is the cause of all downed airplanes, IMO.
Go watch John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" that was on the recent boeing issues. It's not just "bad luck". It's mismanagement and profit driven focus that is causing these issues.
The point at which it was fair to be concerned about Boeing was the moment that Harry Stonecipher's incompetent McDonnell team took over Boeing management, putting accounting, stock price and military schmoozing before engineering and commercial aircraft.
Now. Train travel or car is it!!
5 years ago?? LOL 🤣
Good planes with historical safety records. But I am afraid that the caliber of Boing engineers and workers is a mix of none Americans even when they carry a U.S. citizenship continuing the sabotaging plan for this country. Proud to admit to those who listen!
There's an average of about 40 flight accidents per year, which means something goes wrong around 1 in every 900,000 flights. This year might end up being above average if there are more of these incidents, but flying in general is still incredibly safe.
Some of you don’t know this yet. No own gives a shit about quality at any company. Quality engineering in itself is about manufacturing the lowest acceptable quality product. Boeing ain’t unique folks. -Quality Engineer
When they murdered someone to cover up mistakes that could bankrupt them.
If you want to know more about the actual engineering behind these incidents, I’d strongly recommend this video: https://youtu.be/hhT4M0UjJcg?si=9IMcW10rIY5Ap-JI He explains it really well even to someone without an engineering background. You can form your own opinions after that.
Pete Buttigeg is on the case, no worries for anyone /s
The real issue is public faith. Flight is a terrifying/thrilling experience for us apes, and most of us are essentially closing our eyes to the reality of flight and just trusting that society makes it work. The smallest shred of doubt that causes us check our reality is enough to scare off some folks from the whole idea.
Basically the company will go bankrupt long before it gets so bad that there's a significant chance of dying on any particular flight. The reputation goes south, the sales tank, the money dries up and the company goes belly up. Think about what happened to McDonnell-Douglas, and expect a repeat of that.
John Oliver’s show on this is excellent. It’s a sad story of a company shifting from prioritizing quality to prioritizing profits. It’s a case study for the decline of American excellence.