Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout Boeing has come in for criticism from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) over documentation detailing who was responsible for failures in the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 door plug attachment. NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy spoke before the Senate Commerce Committee on March 6. Responding to a question from ranking …
Maybe not. Aloha Airlines turned one of their 737's into a convertible at 24,000 ft, and managed to land it okay (less one flight attendant, unfortunately).
Also, United flight 811 had a door failure between Honolulu and Auckland. They lost nine people in the incident, but the 747 made it back in mostly one piece.
Airliners can take a lot of abuse, and still be able to return for landing.
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Higly unklikely. Especially knowing Aloha Airlines Flight 243. Which was a 737-200.
""With respect to documentation, if the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share. We will continue to cooperate fully and transparently with the NTSB's investigation.""
I'd forbid Boeing to sell any more planes into the commercial market until they come up with the documentation.
Military/black programs - we'll never know.
They're probably conducting a straw poll to decide who is going to be blamed. This poll obviously needs careful planning and verification. They've also learned their lessons and now require 2 out of 3 polls to produce matching results before they take any action.
The thing is that the NTSB investigation isn't about appointing blame to a specific person. It's about understanding the entire process, top to bottom and what led the person at the bottom of the food chain to make the decisions they did.We can already tell there's structural problems at Boeing, but understanding them from the viewpoint of the person that actually made the final mistake is imperative for a good understanding of the issue. And that is what Boeing is blocking. Because it doesn't WANT that person to point out the entire thing is a smegging clown show.
The biggest problem is that there is no fixing Boeing. The company is doomed. The ONLY way I can see it happening is literally firing EVERYONE. And then hiring back a competent engineer (who has not previously worked for Boeing) to slowly build things back up from primary principles. But that would take decades.
The biggest problem is that there is no fixing Boeing. The company is doomed. The ONLY way I can see it happening is literally firing EVERYONE.
You really think out of the 171,000 employees, they're all careless, cost-focused jokers? And that it doesn't hit everybody hard when there's fatalities that are on the company's tab?
I think you are taking things out of context, because there's over 10,000 Boeing aircraft in service, which normally operate entirely safely day in day out. Aviation is a high risk activity, airliners are immensely complex machines, each with millions of parts, so there's is no absolute of safety, it's a case of doing your best and learning from your mistakes. The door plug issues, 737 Max and other recent concerns don't mean Boeing aircraft are unsafe, they mean Boeing aircraft are less safe than they could be.
Boeing is not doomed and will (eventually) be fixed. There's a clear problem of compliance sometimes taking second place to speed and cost, that is entirely resolvable, albeit slow and time consuming to do so. The current challenge is that Boeing senior management are still in full on denial mode and trying to avoid the pain and cost of sorting out the McMess. And that's compounded by the fact that Boeing's share price has woefully underperformed the DJIA index for some years now, despite stock buybacks. And therein is part of the problem - senior leaders chose to hand money back to stockholders through buybacks when they should have been investing in new products, improved products, and the necessary safety culture.
So perhaps firing people is the answer, but only a tiny number. Even then, if the top leadership team and their immediate reports get sacked, where do you get the 25-40 senior leaders to take over from? How will the organisation cope with a head-transplant without anaesthetic? How will this go down with customers?
"You really think out of the 171,000 employees, they're all careless, cost-focused jokers?"
No, but I think it's near impossible to sort the chaff from the wheat in-situ. There's too much rot, too many bad apples to turn things around as is. There's not enough people who don't put there foot down when it comes to compliance or safety issues. Down from the work floor up into (upper) management.
"Boeing is not doomed and will (eventually) be fixed. There's a clear problem of compliance sometimes taking second place to speed and cost, that is entirely resolvable, albeit slow and time consuming to do so."
Read up on what is going on in nearly every single production line. 777 and 787 have very very similar cultural problems. There are structural, ongoing quality issues in nearly every single production line that Boeing is currently operating. The leaked information on what happened internally at Boeing with the accident door plug is exemplary of the sort of skullduggery where a MULTIPLE quality hit (incorrect/out of spec rivets, damaged door seal, rivets initially "fixed" by painting over them) should have led to a line stop and a quality audit at Spirit. Yet apparently Spirit employees thought it OK to initially just paint over out of spec rivets instead of replacing them and a work order in the Boeing quality management/tracking system was never made for opening the plug after the damaged seal was discovered. And it's unclear at this time at what point the damaged seal was found. A while back a big issue was workers leaving rubbish inside fuel tanks, the 787 early on suffered from battery fires because apparently they never even performed basic QC audits at the supplier, nor bothered to inspect the battery systems before installation. The 777X is several years behind schedule as as late as last year suffered from problems in it's flight control systems and there's reports they still don't have a handle on some of the quality issues they were having with the carbon composite layups for the wings.
There's so many layers of people at Boeing where it's obvious they think getting the aircraft to the next station on time is more important than getting it there 100% correct that you can't just fix that with a simple memo. There's too many people with the wrong mindset. Even if you get the right persons in upper management positions you have to somehow get that attitude to permeate to the rest of the tens of thousands of employees and there WILL be too many resisting such a change or unwilling to change their way of working. Weeding them out and firing them is near impossible and as such I consider fixing the companies attitude to safety and compliance in situ near impossible. The problem also isn't compliance or finances. The problem is a fundamental lack of the correct mindset when it comes to safety and delivering high quality work in an aerospace company. Compliance follows pretty much automatically from such a mindset.
My understanding is that Spirit also do work for Airbus and other manufacturers. And they don't have bits falling off. So the "screw it, ship it" attitude is only for Boeing jobs. Which means what they will be hiding is Boeing either explicitly or on-the-quiet instructing Spirit to skip steps for speed.
I'd forbid Boeing to sell any more planes into the commercial market until they come up with the documentation.
Not sure the NTSB/FAA etc. could do that. However, forcing Boeing to halt deliveries of all MAX9 models and revoking the airworthiness certificates of all MAX9's in service so that they are all grounded until the documentation is located and the paper trail correctly sorted out would probably focus Boeing's attention a bit better.
I'd suggest that rather "no fly till docs appear", "no fly until we've determined that your processes are all sorted" would be better.
If you simply revoke airworthiness certs until the docs appear, then as suggested, docs could well "magically appear". If you insist that the process (of which the docs are just a part) needs a thorough going through means being a pain in the wallet for potentially years - and that's the sort of incentive the senior people need in order to fix things.
My feeling is that it's going to be getting ever harder for Boeing to get systems/procedures approved as people like the FAA know they can no longer apply any level of trust. And given teh FAA are understaffed once you take out the Boing employees marking their employers homework, I see approval/certification delays looming.
"I'd forbid Boeing to sell any more planes into the commercial market until they come up with the documentation."
Their biggest competitor is Airbus, a "foreign" company. Boeing are already protected somewhat by having large tarifs on imported aircraft. WHich is odd when those same aircraft are allowed to fly into the USA so long as it's not a US owned/operated company flying them without tarifs. There's no way in hell the US Gov would penalise Boeing in any way which might give a foreign competitor any sort of advantage, no matter the seriousness.
<There are some problems with your post.
The title is too long.> Chopped it :-)
I would go further, the article is actually contradictory:
> The Boeing jet made an emergency landing, and all passengers and crew were unharmed. According to the NTSB's preliminary report [PDF], seven passengers and one flight attendant received minor injuries.
I would say that if you received minor injuries, you most definitely *were* harmed.
YouTube channel "Mentour Now!" made a video about this titled "WHAT Is going ON with Boeing?! MAX-9 Door blowout". According to it, the team working on the plug might have figured a loophole in the procedure and if they pretended that the plug was "a weird door", they could open and close the door without papertrail.
That said, it seems insane that Boeing wouldn't know who were working on the plane at that time. They shouldn't be working with aircraft with such a poor management!
Maybe they should put some cameras and livestream all the work to YouTube (one video per worker per workday). Then they could simply review all the videos when something happens...
... to avoid tedious paperwork... Well, maybe not quite. There's a procedure for opening and closing a plug, but no procedure for opening and closing a door. Doors open, it's what they do.[1]
It is possible that the team that needed to get at the bungled rivets in the door frame didn't consider that they were doing anything other than opening a door - the interior trim was already stripped out for the rivet job. However, somewhere along the line the bolts were removed, and possibly they're still in a parts box in Renton: four bloody great bolts, castellated nuts and cotter pins that someone put away and forgot about.
I'm violently agreeing with everyone who thinks that the procedure was insufficiently monitored and quality assured, and guessing that time pressure is what forced out good practice.
[1] And close again, with a sense of satisfaction with a job well done. Couldn't resist, sorry.
Aircraft engineers will at times try to find ways to shortcut official procedures due to the time pressure they are placed under. See AA flight 191 for a classic example, where incorrect maintenance procedure was the root cause of an engine separation.
Even after engine separation though, this aircraft should have been able to land. Numerous other factors led to the loss of everyone on board. The slats on one wing retracting due to hydraulic pressure loss as there was no backup system to keep them deployed producing asymmetric lift. The engine out checklist stating to throttle back, which then caused a stall. The stall warning stick shaker only being on one stick due to cost savings with that shaker being disabled when the engine failed. The stall warning indicator failing due to the engine separation.
A lot of recommendations came out of the report. Enforcing maintenance procedures, mandating stick shakers on both sticks, changes to checklists and many others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191
"It is possible that the team that needed to get at the bungled rivets in the door frame didn't consider that they were doing anything other than opening a door"
A very likely scenario, and a very common occurrence. I remember once when on a change control committee, challenging a "simple firewall rule change" that was about to be fast tracked without further investigation, to find that it was to allow a new POS terminal to be installed without reference to the existing scope under PCI-DSS (which would have rendered the organisation non-compliant). Nobody on the committee had considered the questions "what is this for and does it have any wider implications?"
Surprising as it may seem, there are a number of youtube channels around made by serious people, knowledgeable about their subject, who have something important to say.
They are vastly outnumbered by the 'I was shocked!' brigade, and even more so by cats, but some are worth watching. Mentour is one of them.
If you are looking for accurate and insightful information, try these two YouTube channels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnFzT6aUehg&ab_channel=blancolirio and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FcyvFfHsjQ&t=720s&ab_channel=TheBoeing737TechnicalChannel
I too am irritated with the unnecessary switch to "International English" when as far as I can see it's only the United States who uses it as their first language.
However, taking umbrage at the title of Ted Cruz as "ranking member" is uncalled for.
The US Congresses' use of the title "ranking member" is correct.
It's like saying a junior MP is a "Private Parliamentary Secretary" which is used in the House of Commons.
It's just the way things are done.
But didn't you know? America runs the world. If america, can tell dutch companies to ignore their government and do what they say, why is it surprising that simple language has gone their way.
We live in a wine country system. Long past then two party option within our, its all just america now, what they say goes.
Its a good thing this planet is beyond our control now, hopefully it just gets quicker now and wipes out humans.
> The US Congresses' use of the title "ranking member" is correct.
That's as may be, but I dare say that most Brits, like me, haven't the faintest idea what it means. Is he a Sergeant, or something?
> It's like saying a junior MP is a "Private Parliamentary Secretary" which is used in the House of Commons.
PPS is an actual job, not a synonym for junior MP.
-A.
The question is whose trust, if it's going to be undermined surely it already has, and would fines make any difference?
South West Airlines have an entirely 737 fleet, they seem entirely happy with McBoeing's safety record, and presumably their customers are as well. Just a couple of months ago Indian low-cost outfit Akasa ordered 150 737s. So whilst Airbus have rather more sales per year, it seems that Boeing's slipshod approach to safety is not really harming its sales.
>Why no alternative to Boeing? Delta, American Airlines, Hawaiian and SkyBlue all have Airbus aircraft in their fleets.
Well yes if you are a woke commie airline you might want to fly a cheese-eating surrender aircraft, but expect no government business and a bunch of 'regulatory issues' if the wrong senator is on the committee.
Those airlines generally have Airbus because they bought some startup airline that bought Airbus because they got a deal.
Alaskan just finished offloading the Airbuses they got when they acquired Virgin (IIRC) and ran an Ad campaign full of US flags and bald eagles about how they now only flew proud American built American Boeing aircraft hand-built by proud American workers - juts before the doors fell off.
Yes - Airbus build aircraft in plants across the confederacy but unless they paint the local flag across them, airlines aren't going to buy them.
"...leaving the market wide open for other players like Airbus and Comac."
Hmm, I'll let you fly on a Comac product. I've no problem with new entrants like Embraer, but something cobbled together by the CCP fills me with the same confidence as I'd have for the various aircraft Russia's currently building.
Currently reading and highly recommend "Flying Blind" by Peter Robinson.
Probably the most depressing book I've read in ages - and one that very seriously makes me not want to step into a Boeing aircraft ever again. Reading it, none of this comes as a surprise. And it was "merely" written in the wake of the 737MAX disasters, so doesn't even cover the door mess or the Boeing rocket fiascos.
Firstly:
Either Boeing have provided information or they haven't. We (as plebs) are getting two contradictory stories. Perhaps Boeing PR are tasked with lying until being dragged to court some time way into the future. That sort of thing, blunt denial, is common nowadays.
Secondly:
The safety regulator appears from this article (and I don't know better) to be asking nicely if Boeing might perhaps possibly shed some light on the situation. One would hope that safety regulators had teeth. Apparently not.
Both the above destroy confidence in the honesty and integrity of air safety. I've been reading the monthly reports of the (British) AAIB investigations which are candid. And thorough.
Not either/or.
I'm sure that Boeing have supplied lorry loads of documentation including the names of employees who 'know about doors'(*).
I'm sure the investigators have not (yet?) had the specific information they asked for (which employees did the various stages of the job in question)
Icon: past audits remembered. (vastly less in the way of bad consequences)
(*) in a general way
I'm pretty sure NTSB do have considerable teeth, and that they have the highest integrity and professionalism, but there's three complications that I can observe from my perspective as a UK regulator.
The first is resource. Last year NTSB spent $133m or so, and about $63m was on aviation safety. That £63m has to cover their share of organisational overheads, payroll taxes, health and pension benefits, the agency's activities cover all aviation in the US or of US manufacture. There's actually not that much resource to go round when you think about the base salary cost of hiring suitably qualified professionals. Boeing's 737 doors might be what you think is important, but NTSB have between 80 and 400 accidents and incidents every single month, almost 1,700 in FY2022. Many will be incidents that simply need a quick triage and logging (but still by a competent professional) others will require minimal investigation and a summary statement, others will involve many hours of investigation and ongoing work. NTSB is tiny compared to the industry it regulates, and tiny compared to the big players in that industry. A related comparison here is that NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy has a salary of $168k, whereas Boeing's chief legal officer was paid $6.2 million in 2022. And for the record Jennifer's surname is pronounced "Hahmendy", I do like to get things right.
And that leads to the second complication below.
Regulators are accountable to politicians (as we see here), and that gives some modest clout, but you have to recognise that Boeing in particular are recognised around the world for their generously resourced and hugely effective lobbying. In America's gangster capitalism model, Boeing don't merely have political influence, they own a number of congressman and senators, as in own like a slave. Over and above the owned politicians, Boeing have turnover of around $80 billion, they directly employ 171,000 people, and probably two-five times as many people at subcontractors and suppliers. In this context, if NTSB do use their powers then Boeing will turn on the tears, and congress will punish NTSB either by replacing NTSB leadership, or by cutting their budget. You have to recognise Boeing have shown in recent years they they knowingly do the wrong thing, so influencing congress to water down regulatory oversight is exactly the sort of mentality here; And US politicians have shown time and again that they are venal and self interested. In an election year no politician wants to displease anyone, so they'll look to kick the can down the road for the time being, and when the Orange Stain has spread back across the stars and stripes you can be sure he'll side with corporate interests. Boeing known this, maybe that's all part of the delay.
And the third thing is that using statutory powers is a risk because they are open to legal challenge. The UK regulator I work for has a hugely significant legal case coming up that has implications for almost every person in the UK. In short a US based global firm who everybody has heard of is taking legal action to say we don't in fact have the powers we believe we do. You may have noticed other US corporations trying to assert in the US that (for example) the SEC doesn't have the powers it claims, or that those powers are unconstitutional, so this is how US business thinks, and they're trying it on worldwide. In this UK instance, because laws as drafted are often unclear, or out of date for current realities, we can't be sure that we'll win - we didn't seek this court action, preferring to try and use moral suasion, the company concerned want to go for broke, throwing top tier legal firms at the case. All of which means delay, and the risk that the regulated company wins, and it turns out the courts assert we don't have the powers we (and government) believed we did. Use of powers needs to be carefully judged - in some cases it's quite simple to use them to demand documentation from small or mid-tier players, it's less straightforward when dealing with combative, politically engaged corporations that do a lot of lobbying and have a legal budget
And finally, worth considering that even where a regulator has penalty-levying powers and sanctions, that's actually not their purpose. A regulator is not a policeman or a judge, the purpose of regulators is to try and ensure compliance with regulations and standards, and that requires a lot of softly-softly work.
Ultimately it should be recognised that the regulators are working to save boeing from itself as much as they are saving the public from Boeing. If trust is lost in the company then airlines find it more difficult to sell journeys on its products and then Boeing finds itself unable to sell planes to airlines. That's a slow process and probably beyond the horizon of its directors.
Which is why the NTSB was created. Originally the FAA were in charge of promoting air travel AND investigating accidents.
Which meant every accident was a one in million freak occurrence which could never happen again and nothing needed to be done and passengers shouldn't worry
"The UK regulator I work for has a hugely significant legal case coming up that has implications for almost every person in the UK."
Oooh, that's tickled my curiosity bone! But based on the little you said about yourself and the upcoming case, I fully understand that you almost certainly can't elaborate any further on the matter. I'll keep an eye on the news :-)
"Both the above destroy confidence in the honesty and integrity of air safety."
At this stage, replace Boeing with any large influential IS business, and we are there.
By zero cause of our own doing we are regularly subjected to american idiocy, where ultimately the non Americans paynwoth their lives, but we still support this bullshit.
The USA need to be treated like the third world dictatorship it is, placed under sanction for war crimes and held account able for murdering hundreds of people outside their borders.
No they use two computer systems, one is the unofficial log which everyone has access to and the other is the official log which only Boeing staff can make entries in. This does create the issue that if contractors start and finish a job quickly Boeing staff might not know about it so it will won't be recorded on the official log.
"Are they really building planes in the 21st centuary and using physical paper to track everything? Surely it would all have been computerised decades ago?"
Language. It's a funny old thing. Sometimes changing so rapidly it's hard to keep up, other times it seems stuck in the past. Do you still "dial" a phone? Have video "footage" on your digital phone/camera?
It's worth noting that for our IT security documentation, we get audited once a year, not just when something went wrong, and if there are any gaps in specifying who is responsible for a given system or service, we either fail the audit, or don't pass it until that information is documented (and correctly so).
Strange to think that oversight for an aircraft that physically takes people up to 30,000ft seems less than for IT security.
There was, but doing the paperwork would trigger a lot of tests and more paperwork so they became experts at doing things in a way that wouldn't trigger the paperwork
That's not a change pushed to production - it's just a temporary test that happens to run on the production server and has no end date
even we mere amateur recreational pilots/maintenance crew must have a paper trail. Anything done is on the planes log book. Issues found by whom and when. Issues examined, repaired by whom and when. If FAA were serious, all aircraft in last year that passed thru the maintenance site would be grounded and all work re-certified where no correct documentation exists. With deep full auditing for compliance. Perhaps the costs could come from Boing manglement bonuses and salaries of last ten years. If one is responsible for average performance then one is responsible for incompetent performance, not the shareholders.
Literally - I just heard of another incident where a tyre fell off a 777 during takeoff and landed in the airport car park. Thankfully I believe nobody was hurt, but several cars were crushed as it bounced.
It's time for a new slogan: If It's Boeing, I'm Not Going.
And your point is?
Aircraft are built to last a long time, and get (or are supposed to get) regular maintenance.
It's not like they go out of fashion. or rust (I live in Canada, it's the reason we don't have old cars).
A 20 year old civilian plane is not new, but it should be still perfectly good. There's a 747 built in 1973 that's still in commercial service.
How often to wheels fall off planes in general? Whatever is going on, it is most certainly odd.
There seems to be a lot of media interest in -any- Boeing failure right now, and they also seem to be more frequent than normal. Something odd is going on. Either the Media have it in for Boeing, or somebody is sabotaging planes.. Or both. (or neither, it could be an emergent social-media phenomenon that after the door blowout everyone is on the lookout for more Boeing failures). Maybe the WEF-types are trying to reduce air travel ahead of WWIII while shorting Boeing stock? :P
Well, a wheel fell off a 777 a week or so ago, a 737 Max has gone off the taxiway in the past couple of days (cause to be determined), a couple of months back an ageing 757 lost a wheel, and a 747 Dreamlifter lost a wheel (see Youtube) last October. Going back further I found more Boeing wheel losses, but also a couple of A319s losing wheels. I don't think Airbus are getting preferential treatment, they've just been lucky that there's not been any newsworthy incidents featuring their products this week.
There have been long running cost cutting and quality issues over the last 10 years, there are some documentaries about ex Boeing staff being sacked for raising these quality issues. Some of them refuse to actually flyy on a Boeing plane. It is now becoming an issue. There was a time when British Airways insisted they had staff supervise the building of there plains. Also subcontractors who were cheaper than in house.
>here was a time when British Airways insisted they had staff supervise the building of there plains.
Doesn't really scale though - and is more for performative value.
You can watch the final assembly, but you can't oversee the machining of each part. Then do you watch the rolling of the Aluminium stock at the metal supplier. What about the refinery, do you check the Bauxite coming in?
The do you review all the pull requests form the software team? Does BA have to people inside TSMC watching the fabbing of the semiconductors ?
It's nice to see Boeing try the Sergeant Shultz defence, but they know the government knows they are too big to fail. Even worse, when push comes to shove the airlines don't want to see their investment or decision to buy these lemons go down the drain, hence I don't expect any consequences. It's the reason the NTSB is separate from the FAA.
The NTSB can do all the investigations and make all the recommendations it wants, but the FAA regulate the industry. The only calculus will be what will be the acceptable losses in terms of passengers and aircraft hulls.
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