More Boeing Bad News

[PHXPhlyer]

With Boeing in hot seat over Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout, claims against supplier Spirit AeroSystems take shape

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2024/0 ... ake-shape/

SEATTLE — A major Boeing supplier was already facing allegations from one former employee that supervisors routinely ignore mistakes and send substandard quality parts to Boeing.

Now, as quality control problems at Boeing and its suppliers receive intense scrutiny following a Jan. 5 blowout aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9, another ex- Spirit AeroSystems employee has come forward to support the whistleblower’s claims.

Spun out of Boeing two decades ago, Wichita, Kan.-based Spirit AeroSystems builds large sections of several Boeing jetliner models, including the main body of the 737 MAX jets assembled in Renton. Federal investigators contend mistakes made in Renton during final assembly led to the midair blowout that left a hole in the side of Alaska Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland, an incident that has resulted in extraordinary new restrictions on Boeing’s plane production at a challenging time for the aerospace giant.

Joshua Dean, the first whistleblower whose claims were made public shortly after the blowout, worked as a quality auditor at Spirit’s flagship manufacturing site in Wichita, where workers assemble large pieces of the 737, including the fuselage. He was fired last year for allegedly failing to conduct inspections that were his responsibility, resulting in faulty tail fin fittings being shipped to Boeing.

Dean says his termination was retaliation for his repeated attempts to flag errors he observed on the manufacturing floor, reports that Spirit supervisors ignored, allowing unacceptable products to flow out the door to Boeing. He claims he flagged one major manufacturing flaw in fall 2022 that Spirit management never addressed until it was discovered by Boeing the following summer.

New scrutiny
Dean’s allegations are laid bare in a civil lawsuit brought against Spirit by investors who say that company leaders’ failure to address known problems drove down the value of Spirit stock. Spirit disputes the contention.

“We strongly disagree with the assertions made by the plaintiffs,” Spirit spokesperson Joe Buccino said in a written statement. “Spirit intends to vigorously defend against the claims.”

For the first time since Dean’s accusations surfaced, a former colleague who worked alongside him has affirmed claims that Dean told Spirit managers about misdrilled holes in 737 fuselage components, parts that were then sent to Boeing. Dean claims Spirit supervisors knew about and allowed subpar — or, as Dean describes them, unsafe — products to clear its inspection process.

Dean’s allegations against Spirit, made in a deposition for the lawsuit, have been spotlighted in news accounts since the dramatic midflight blowout panicked passengers.

The incident, which was not related to specific manufacturing errors mentioned by Dean, forced the grounding of 171 MAX 9s, disrupted air travel and triggered a Federal Aviation Administration investigation as well as hearings in Congress.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators say four key bolts on the panel were never reinstalled after the Spirit-built fuselage panel was opened at Boeing’s Renton final assembly plant.

The Seattle Times, citing a person familiar with the details, reported last month that personnel opened the panel so that a team of Spirit mechanics in Renton could repair rivets on the door frame. The NTSB report revealed Boeing mechanics discussed restoring the panel after the rivet rework was complete.

“Just really sick”
The lawsuit that contains Dean’s deposition was filed by Spirit stockholders in December. Attorneys for the investors accuse the company of downplaying its quality problems. When those problems were discovered and widely reported, the value of Spirit stock plummeted. The investors are seeking to recoup their losses from Spirit.

Dean’s former co-worker, Lance Thompson, told The Times that meeting production deadlines trumped safety and quality at the Spirit plant in Wichita. He said managers wanted fewer defects to be flagged, leading mechanics to hide them.

“You want to fix problems, not hide them,” Thompson said. “The culture is just really sick.”

“I almost quit because I was being asked to rush through the audits so we can stay on schedule,” Thompson said in a phone interview from Wichita. “I was getting to a point where I was going to have to tell my management — you know, be insubordinate — because I couldn’t rush through that fast.”

Amid financial struggles that are inextricable from its reliance on Boeing’s business, Spirit, which also supplies Boeing competitor Airbus, changed leaders in October. Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive and past acting U.S. defense secretary, replaced Thomas Gentile as CEO. In his year-end message to investors, Shanahan was more forthcoming than his predecessors that Spirit must do a better job of limiting unacceptable products that reach Boeing.

“Every day, we have to put time and attention to that,” Shanahan told investors during his first stockholder call in November. “And it isn’t as though there’s a silver bullet out there or a different procedure that we can implement. It’s the whole organization being, first and foremost, focused on how we build the product.”

Dean, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering, brought about 20 years of experience to Spirit when he was hired in 2019. He was laid off in 2020 as the company made cuts due to COVID-19, but returned in May 2021 as a quality auditor. Thompson said he and Dean were not quality inspectors; their job was to monitor and analyze processes, not find individual defects.

In his deposition for the stockholder lawsuit against Spirit, Dean describes a workforce at Spirit that was ravaged by the pandemic and saw much of its workforce leave or get laid off. The positions that were filled were claimed by less experienced workers, “resulting in more rework and repairs that had to be performed,” Dean said, due to a degradation in the quality of work.

That was compounded by what Dean called Spirit’s “culture of not wanting to look for or to find problems.”

An unorthodox approach
Thompson described a pervasive reluctance to flag errors at Spirit for fear of employment consequences.

He said Spirit managers often didn’t address the root cause of manufacturing flaws Dean found. Instead they might have mechanics fix an individual error, while not recording it as a recurring flaw in the manufacturing process.

“This is about doing what’s right,” Thompson said. “In the aircraft industry, you can rework anything if you have cover and authority to do it. There’s such a stigma around a tag — a fix. That’s so wrongheaded.”

Dean and Thompson worked together as quality technical auditors at the Wichita plant. According to Thompson, their job was to assess the effectiveness of the manufacturing plans and systems at Spirit with the ultimate goal of reducing production errors, which can prove costly to the company when Boeing discovers errors and rejects components.

“There was no expectation that we were supposed to be ... finding everything wrong with every aircraft that went out of that factory,” Thompson said. “That was not our objective.” Rather, it was “to provide better guidance to the workers on the process to reduce defects in the long run.”

That didn’t stop Dean from closely watching mechanics on the factory floor as they worked. Thompson said Dean’s approach was unusual, and became a barrier to Dean completing the work he was expected to do.

“Everyone in the group knew that Josh was the outlier,” Thompson said. “He was not doing what the rest of the group was doing.”

Dean’s unorthodox work on the factory floor rubbed some mechanics the wrong way. Thompson said they complained about Dean to the mechanics union. By training his attention on every turn of the screw, Dean was promptly discovering errors that might otherwise have evaded the Spirit inspection process.

“There was value in what he did, and he found some things you might not expect to,” Thompson said. Dean “caught ‘em because he was standing over their shoulder watching them, and nobody else was.”

The most significant manufacturing errors Dean flagged involved misaligned holes drilled on 737 MAX aft pressure bulkhead break rings, which fasten the dome-shaped end cap at the back of the passenger cabin to the fuselage skin and are critical to maintaining safe air pressure in flight. He discovered further drilling mistakes when he observed a mechanic performing an unauthorized rework on another section of the aft pressure bulkhead.

PP

[PHXPhlyer]

Part 2

With Boeing in hot seat over Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout, claims against supplier Spirit AeroSystems take shape

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2024/0 ... ake-shape/

Last August, Boeing discovered misaligned drill holes in the aft pressure bulkheads of some 737 MAX models. Repairs caused MAX delivery delays for several months.

Dean believes those errant holes are the same ones he flagged for supervisors in October 2022. Spirit’s failure to follow up on his findings may have hidden that issue for as long as 10 months.

Thompson confirmed that Dean found and reported the errors at that time.

“I can vouch for the fact that Josh turned in [those] findings,” Thompson said.

According to the investors’ lawsuit against Spirit, Dean directly shared with a supervisor “that the mis-drilled holes defect was the worst issue that he had found in one and a half years in his audit role.”

“A culture of pressure”
Dean’s approach, camping out on floor work instead of judging the effectiveness of manufacturing systems, had a troubling side effect: While he’d been occupied with observing work on the factory floor, Dean missed an obvious problem. Another auditor found cracks in approximately 40% of the fittings that attached the vertical tail fin to the fuselage, also called “dagger fittings,” that slipped past Dean while he was focused on the drilling errors.

In April, Spirit terminated Dean, who months earlier had shifted to a new role with the company. The basis offered for his firing, according to the investor lawsuit, was falsified audits. The company claimed he did not conduct audits of the dagger fittings, despite turning in paperwork that claimed he had.

Thompson, who described Dean as “a good guy” and “a friend,” acknowledged Dean put himself in a difficult position by improvising his approach to the job.

Even so, based on the timing of Dean’s firing after he’d been moved to a different job, Thompson said he believes Spirit is scapegoating Dean for problems company leaders were aware of but failed to address.

“They went after him and fired him to make it look like we had one crazy guy who’s to blame,” Thompson said.

Dean’s firing only served to make workers more reluctant to point out errors, according to Thompson, who left Spirit in January to join a different manufacturing firm.

“It wasn’t over defects that are being hidden, it was just a culture of pressure, and they didn’t want to hear what you had to say, and [just] get it done now,” Thompson said. “At one point we were told if we didn’t like it, to start looking for another job. I did, and within another month I found one.”

PP

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

It's a terrible situation, which I have also seen in education.
Lots of people, at every level, are not competent.
That's not to say they weren't competent out of training, or aren't capable of becoming competent, but they aren't now.
This happens when there are too few more experienced and skilled staff to educate (not just shout at) the new hires.
The reaction at every level is to entrench and defend positions, rather than make changes to procedures, since by suggesting changes it implies things may be unsatisfactory.
However, whilst not making changes to their own role, people insist on those below changing, in order to 'fix' the problems.
And to meet routine deadlines, whether or not changes occur, the paperwork is changed to make it look like progress is being made.
So the real standards continue to drop whilst the paper 'achievements' continue to improve.
The only solution is to fire those right at the top, Boeing 'C' suite and the FAA Director, but that appears to be politically impossible.
So I think Boeing is doomed...or more of their passengers and crew are.
Or both.

[OFSO]

Boeing has ousted the executive responsible for rolling out its troubled 737 MAX planes - weeks after a panel on a new aircraft blew out in midair.

Ed Clark, who had been with the company for 18 years, is leaving effective immediately as the manufacturer battles to save its reputation and quell safety concerns.

He had overseen production at the factory in Renton, Washington, where final assembly took place on the Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 that was involved in last month's incident.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Not a high enough exec, and this won't fix the other problems at Spirit.
This is the 'C' Suite throwing an underling under the bus.

[OFSO]

Yes, it's only a matter of time. One more fatal accident will be the end of Boeing. The company resembles a liner heading for an iceberg while the crew run about panicking and the captain does nothing other than steer straight ahead.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I am trying to think of an example of where a big company, private or state-run, has actually been turned around from a situation like this.
The basic problem is that the guys in charge are incapable of fixing what they caused.
But as well as new top management that knows what they are doing, they would also need the experienced workers and supervisors they got rid of to come back.
I can't recall that happening anywhere, and in any case too many will have moved on.
I know with big trucking companies in the UK, when the pandemic lifted, they were desperate to recall all those they dumped.
My brother, who was one of them, told me he told them to shove it, despite the offer of a big raise, and he said most others he knew did too.

And in Boeing's case, there's also the lead time of the products. No one has any idea of what else is wrong with the MAX, because it was designed by muppets.
And they can't just magic up a new airliner.

Of course, the US Government might decide to keep Boeing propped up, because of the military stuff, but that still wouldn't fix the problems, of which the KC-46 has more than a few.

[OFSO]

Thread drift: I knew a worker on security at Schiphol who was fired when COVID started. When the airport reopened, none of the guys wanted to return and work appalling hours at low wages, so Schiphol ended up hiring schoolkids and illegal immigrants, and even then only got half the staff they needed.

[llondel]

Yes, it's only a matter of time. One more fatal accident will be the end of Boeing. The company resembles a liner heading for an iceberg while the crew run about panicking and the captain does nothing other than steer straight ahead.

They could start by throwing the beancounters overboard. Might still be too late, but them being in charge is what started the rot.

[PHXPhlyer]

February 20, 2024
Breaking News: Congressionally-mandate safety study finds flaws at Boeing

https://leehamnews.com/2024/02/26/break ... at-boeing/

Leeham News: A Congressionally-mandated safety review study of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) dropped this morning. The 50-page report of a committee appointed by the Federal Aviation Administration found serious flaws in Boeing’s safety culture despite years of attempts to improve.

LNA is still absorbing the study, which may be downloaded here: Boeing Safety Study by FAA Panel 2-26-24

The Executive Summary is synopsized below.

Executive Summary
The Expert Panel observed a disconnect between Boeing’s senior management and other members of the organization on safety culture. Interviewees, including ODA Unit Members (UM), also questioned whether Boeing’s safety reporting systems would function in a way that ensures open communication and non-retaliation. The Expert Panel also observed inadequate and confusing implementation of the five components of a positive safety culture (Reporting Culture, Just Culture, Flexible Culture, Learning Culture, and Informed Culture).
The Expert Panel found Boeing’s SMS procedures reflect the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the FAA SMS frameworks. However, the Boeing SMS procedures are not structured in a way that ensures all employees understand their role in the company’s SMS. The procedures and training are complex and in a constant state of change, creating employee confusion especially among different work sites and employee groups. The Expert Panel also found a lack of awareness of safety-related metrics at all levels of the organization; employees had difficulty distinguishing the differences among various measuring methods, their purpose, and outcomes.
Boeing’s restructuring of the management of the ODA unit decreased opportunities for interference and retaliation against UMs, and provides effective organizational messaging regarding independence of UMs. However, the restructuring, while better, still allows opportunities for retaliation to occur, particularly with regards to salary and furlough ranking. This influences the ability of UMs to execute their delegated functions effectively.
The Expert Panel also found additional issues at Boeing that affect aviation safety, which include inadequate human factors consideration commensurate to its importance to aviation safety and lack of pilot input in aircraft design and
Failure to implement safety procedures
The panel was not directed “to investigate specific airplane incidents or accidents, or to make recommendations toward a specific airplane incident or accident, which either occurred prior to or during the Expert Panel’s work,” the Executive Summary continued. “However, on several occasions during the Expert Panel’s activities, serious quality issues with Boeing products became public. These quality issues amplified the Expert Panel’s concerns that the safety-related messages or behaviors are not being implemented across the entire Boeing population.”

More reporting will be forthcoming.

PP

[Boac]

Gosh! That was an investigation worth doing. I wonder what it cost to tell us what we all basically knew?

[OFSO]

Does the autothrottle on the 737 still disengage at random intervals while on final ?

[Boac]

??? Never happened to me in 21 years. What was this 'happening'?

[Wodrick]

I don't recall much in the way of 737 A/T defects in a similar timescale and I'm sure disengaging on finals would have been recorded.

[Boac]

Now, I used normally to disengage it 'on finals' but we never wrote it up

[PHXPhlyer]

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to address quality issues

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/28/business ... index.html

Boeing must produce within 90 days a plan to fix serious quality and safety issues, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday.

The agency said FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker and Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun held a day-long meeting on Tuesday where Whitaker made the demand.

That meeting came the day after a year-long FAA-commissioned probe found a “disconnect” between Boeing executives and employees on safety and said employees fear reassignment or stalled career growth for reporting safety issues.

The meeting preceded the anticipated release of a six-week FAA audit of Boeing’s production line – an audit spurred by investigators’ finding that critical bolts were not installed on a Boeing 737 Max 9 door plug that blew open mid-flight.

The FAA said the Boeing plan must address weaknesses in implementing the company’s Safety Management System, known as SMS, as well as integrating the SMS program with another quality program. SMS is a manual which is supposed to guide employees on procedures they should follow to insure planes are safe. But the panel said despite a wholesale re-write of the manual in recent years, it found “many Boeing employees did not demonstrate knowledge of Boeing’s SMS efforts, nor its purpose and procedures.”

The panel that reported on Boeing’s safety shortcomings on Monday recommended the company address those issues within six months; the FAA’s new directive sets a faster timeline.

The resulting plan from Boeing must lead to a “measurable, systemic shift in manufacturing quality control,” the FAA said.

Boeing has had a history of safety lapses. The January 5 blowout incident triggered a 19-day emergency grounding of all Max 9s and re-ignited scrutiny of Boeing following the fatal Max 8 crashes of 2018 and 2019.

PP

[PHXPhlyer]

Boeing is in talks to reacquire fuselage maker Spirit Aerosystems after spate of quality defects
Both companies have been scrambling to stamp out manufacturing flaws on Boeing’s top-selling plane.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/busine ... rcna141409

Boeing is in talks to buy back Spirit Aerosystems, which makes fuselages for Boeing’s 737 Max jets, according to a person familiar with the matter, as both companies scramble to stamp out manufacturing flaws on the top-selling plane.

Shares of Spirit were up 13% as of early afternoon on Friday, while shares of Boeing were down about 1%. Spirit Aerosystems had a market capitalization of $3.3 billion as of Thursday’s close.

“We do not comment on market speculation,” a spokesperson for Spirit Aerosystems told CNBC. Boeing also declined to comment.

Boeing in 2005 spun off operations in Kansas and Oklahoma that became the present-day Spirit Aerosystems. About 70% of Spirit’s revenue last year came from Boeing, and about a quarter comes from making parts for Boeing’s main rival, Airbus.

The repurchase talks were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

It comes less than two months after a section of a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight. The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded all of the planes in January, leading to investigations into the accident and Boeing’s production lines.

It was the latest and most serious in a host of flaws on the Boeing 737 Max, Boeing’s best-selling jet.

The bolts on the door plug of the Max involved in the January accident appeared not to have been attached when it left Boeing’s Renton, Washington, factory, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.

Boeing has disclosed several production problems and quality flaws on the fuselages that Spirit makes, including incorrectly drilled holes and incorrect spacing on some fuselage components, problems that slowed deliveries of new jets to airlines.

If this deal goes through Boeing will no longer have anyone else to lay any blame on.

PP

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Fixes nothing.

I think this is merely a means to secure the future of Boeing's supplies, since Spirit has less than 3% of Boeing's capitalisation, and would likely go under first as things worsen, but would therefore drag Boeing under too.
This reacquisition would just delay things for Boeing a bit longer, or give them more time to fix things if you still think that's possible.

[PHXPhlyer]

The FAA has identified more safety issues on Boeing’s 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/01/business ... index.html

Washington DC
CNN
—
The Federal Aviation Administration has flagged more safety issues for two troubled families of Boeing planes, the latest in a series of issues at the embattled aircraft maker.

The issues involve engine anti-ice systems on the 737 Max and larger 787 Dreamliner. While the FAA flagged the issues in a filing in mid-February, it drew greater attention on Friday because of a Seattle Times article.

The safety regulator continues to allow both models of the plane to fly despite the potential problems. Both issues are moving through the FAA’s standard process for developing airworthiness directives — rather than an emergency process — signaling that the agency and plane maker do not believe the issues are serious enough to require the planes to stop flying immediately.

But another safety issue is the last thing that Boeing needs at this moment, two months after a door plug on a 737 Max blew out on an Alaska Air flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the jet shortly after take-off. The Max has had a series of problems over the last five years, including two fatal crashes that between them killed 346 people in late 2018 and early 2019, which led to a 20-month grounding of the jet.

The importance of de-icing
While it might seem as if de-icing equipment is less important in summer months, the cold temperatures at high altitudes at which commercial jets fly, combined with the amount of moisture in clouds that they must fly through, make the de-icing equipment necessary twelve months a year.

“You’re not protected by Mother Nature’s seasons,” said Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines pilot and a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association. “Airworthiness directives aren’t issued unless you have an unsafe condition that need to be addressed. It’s ominous. It may be manageable on a temporary basis. But it’s not a solution.”

The FAA said the newly disclosed Max issue could cause the jet’s engines to stop working. An electrical issue “could result in loss of thrust on both engines due to damage from operation in icing conditions.” The fix includes replacing wiring in a panel above the pilots’ heads.

The issue was discovered during a Boeing engineering analysis three years ago and is “a remote concern that has never been seen during decades of service” in both the current and previous generations of 737, said Jessica Kowal, a Boeing spokeswoman. The company said it disclosed the issue to airlines and the FAA at the time, and provided a fix.

The 2021 discovery lines up with the company’s order that year to ground some Max planes because of a different electrical problem. The Boeing Max — at the time, only recently back in service after the nearly two-year grounding prompted by two fatal crashes — underwent an extensive electrical system analysis.

A different issue with the Dreamliner
Less than a week after publicly publishing the 737 Max notice, the FAA reported a separate anti-icing issue with the 787 Dreamliner. It said a damaged seal could cause heat damage to an engine inlet — and risk serious damage to the plane.

In 2018, an outer covering of an engine cowling that broke loose on an earlier version of a 737 jet shattered a window on a Southwest Airlines flight. The passenger sitting next to that window, Jennifer Riordan, 43, was expelled through the broken window. While other passengers were able to bring her back inside, she died as a result of blunt impact trauma of the head, neck and torso.

Boeing is working on redesigning the part on the 787 Dreamliner engine to prevent further issues, Kowal said. The issue was discovered on fewer than two dozen of over 1,000 Dreamliners in service, she said.

The FAA described neither issue as a production quality problem — which is its current focus at Boeing following the January in-flight blowout.

The FAA orders have not yet taken effect, but said they would apply to about 315 planes, including both Maxes and Dreamliners.

Series of safety and quality questions
Boeing drew criticism from lawmakers after the January 737 Max mid-flight blowout for having asked the FAA to certify new models of the 737 Max despite a different flaw in the anti-ice system. The company ultimately withdrew that request, which will delay its plans to deliver the new planes to its airline customers.

But it continues to build existing models of the jet with the same engine de-icing flaw that is delaying certification of the next Max versions.

In addition to the de-icing equipment issue, Boeing has been stung by numerous questions about the quality and safety procedures at its factories.

The National Transportation Safety Board is looking into the causes of the incident and already found that four bolts needed to hold the door plug in place were missing when the plane left a Boeing factory in October.

The FAA is also demanding that Boeing come up with a plan to improve its quality controls for its aircraft manufacturing.

And the Justice Department is investigating whether the incident is a violation of a settlement it reached in 2021 to defer prosecution on charges that it defrauded the FAA during the original certification of the 737 Max before two fatal crashes resulted in a 20-month grounding of the plane.

The NTSB has yet to determine blame or fault for the door plug incident on the Alaska Air flight. That will come later in its investigation, perhaps a year or more from now. But Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun told investors in January, “We caused the problem, and we understand that. Whatever conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened.”

PP

[llondel]

Fixes nothing.

I think this is merely a means to secure the future of Boeing's supplies, since Spirit has less than 3% of Boeing's capitalisation, and would likely go under first as things worsen, but would therefore drag Boeing under too.
This reacquisition would just delay things for Boeing a bit longer, or give them more time to fix things if you still think that's possible.

It fixes one thing - at the moment Spirit has incentive to ship stuff even if the corners have been filed off a bit, because not shipping affects their bottom line. As part of Boeing, there's the greater picture that shipping such parts will ultimately cause more expense than fixing them first.

This does assume that the QA people actually get listened to now - if they can call a Boeing internal hotline and get the system on their side when they hang a quarantine tag on something then things might improve. It still doesn't fix the case of chronic beancounteritis though.