United and Alaska Find Loose Bolts on Boeing 737 Max 9 Planes - Slashdot
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/01/09/1840214/united-and-alaska-find-loose-bolts-on-boeing-737-max-9-planes
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United and Alaska Find Loose Bolts on Boeing 737 Max 9 Planes
United and Alaska Find Loose Bolts on Boeing 737 Max 9 Planes (theguardian.com) 137
Posted by msmash
on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @02:21PM from the troubling-signs dept.›
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Everyone who scrolls through travelocity.com to find a flight that is $0.01 cheaper.
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Yes, because it's definitely not the fault of the multi-billion dollar companies. Last year United Airlines had a net income of $2.8bil and if I read correctly Alaska Airlines had a net income of around $600mil. While it's true that Boeing is hurting at negative $2.8bil net income, it's the airlines that pay Boeing not the penny pinching passengers.
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The merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas was what crippled the once great engineering powerhouse.
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Of course it's not the "fault" of those companies. They exist to make money. The will try and keep making that money. If they want to offer cheaper services to you who demand them they will find savings. Share holders are investors and expect returns.
This isn't their "fault", this is their expected method of operation.
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I think if you actually read what I wrote, I mentioned how much the two airlines in the story made last year. So, clearly they're making money off those passengers. There is obviously more too it, given the billions United lost during covid restrictions. However, I still wouldn't blame the passengers for any of that.
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Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas and went straight to hell immediately. It has nothing at all to do with what people will pay for flights.
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The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course [theatlantic.com] Nov. 20, 2019
"A company once driven by engineers became driven by finance."
Boeing must change leadership: Former employee [yahoo.com] Jan. 9, 2024
Quoting that story:
Boeing executives "need to get out of their corporate headquarters and they need to spend time with their troops on the factory floor and they need to understand what they're dealing with," Pierson, a former Boeing Senior Manager and a whistleblower on similar issues in 2019, adding: "If it was up to me, I would absolutely advocate the change of leadership."
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Everyone who scrolls through travelocity.com to find a flight that is $0.01 cheaper.
I'm sorry, I missed the option to click for "plane that doesn't fall apart." Can you tell me where it is in the UI?
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It's the part of the UI that says "Airbus." Often you have to click through to the seat map.
I'm only being halfway sarcastic. I know people who pick flights this way as they refuse to fly on a max. Sometimes you have to use a third party website like Seatguru to reverse engineer it and figure out what the plane will be (and hope it doesn't change). -
>I'm sorry, I missed the option to click for "plane that doesn't fall apart." Can you tell me where it is in the UI?
Look for flights on an Airbus.
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Your informative comment was modded down to -1?! When it should be modded to the MAX?
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Are they the same ones responsible for the Boeing Starliner being the disaster that it has been? Its first unmanned flight MISSED the ISS where it was supposed to dock. Boeings reaction? "We count that as a success". Only a public outcry made NASA do an investigation that found 87 flaws. The next flight docked with "issues" including TWO propulsion systems down to the 3rd and final backup by the time the mission ended and they STILL don't know why. The next mission cancelled due to valve problems nee
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Lol, such a lack of awareness of how the real world works. Airlines get hit hard in their bottom line when planes don't fly due to groundings, so the cost-cutting measure is to buy reliable planes that don't have issues leading to groundings. Boeing already had 1200 cancellations for the 737 MAX family, and that's before airlines not placing orders and choosing the A320neo and A321neo instead.
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Boeing went from an engineering driven company, to a profit driven company. One example is that to cut costs, Boeing eliminated in house project managers to contracted project managers. https://www.jacobs.com/newsroo... [jacobs.com]
Contract driven project management results in cheapest by a nickel contractors. As they gain experience and their value/price goes up, they don't win the next bid. Thus no knowledge gain across projects - classic corporate penny pinching that leads to this type of crap.-
One example is that to cut costs, Boeing eliminated in house project managers to contracted project managers. https://www.jacobs.com/newsroo [jacobs.com]... [jacobs.com]
That's a project/construction manager for construction of buildings/facilities, not for manufacturing aircraft. Having been in the consulting engineer side of construction for more than 40 years, I know that it's a very common practice for companies to hire outside entities for project management and construction management when expanding or remodelin
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who let the cost cutting PHB take over boeing?
When Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's own money, Boeing's tried-and-true leadership bailed out and Douglas' incapable, inept cost-cutting management moved in and changed the company culture.
That was 1997.
There were political motivations for this. At the time, Douglas was looking to China for potential partners. USA can't have that, no sir, so they forced this ill-advised merger.
And here we are. I'd rather fly in a 30 year old 757 with way too many hours on its hobbs meter than set foot on any post-merger design of Boeing's.
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Note that they weren't inept, they were inept at building airplanes. They were good at office politics. These things go hand-in-hand.
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The plug would have likely been initially installed at the manufacturer Spirit Aero. Boeing does final assembly of the aircraft after the fuselage is shipped to them. The question (still unanswered, but it will be) is who is responsible for checking the bolt's tightness. As I recall, in some cases, on some aircraft, the plug(s) may be removed to install some interior equipment (and reinstalled afterwards), but I am not familiar with the final assembly on the 737 Max 9 to know if that happened in this ca
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Mostly agree, but this bit:
Maybe in some eyes, but what I heard was a door blew off an Alaska Airlines flight. "The bolts weren't fastened tight enough at the factory" is not an excuse that will fly with me (a guy who checked every bolt on my new bike, and rechecks them periodically, and that's just a damn bicycle).
Fast forward to this article and we see that the airlines themselves when and checked the bolts, found them to be loose, tightened them, and returned them to service! Um... if those are user serv
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Um... if those are user serviceable parts (Boeing told the airlines to check them; they didn't send out their engineers to check them), why haven't they been checked before?
Because accessing those bolts requires removing two rows of seats, multiple panels, five technicians and between four and eight hours.
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"The bolts weren't fastened tight enough at the factory" is not an excuse that will fly with me (a guy who checked every bolt on my new bike, and rechecks them periodically, and that's just a damn bicycle).
Do you x-ray the welds too?
If checking the bolts is on the manufacturer's maintenance schedule and it wasn't done, then the airline is at fault. If it's not, or it wasn't recommended in the interval, then it's not. It is not a good idea to have every airline making up its own maintenance schedule from scr
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The plane that had the issue was delivered in October 2023. I am pretty sure it has very few things to check on its maintenance schedule especially a bolt behind an interior panel that no one accesses.
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Certain things on aircraft are inspected before and after every flight. On the 737 the maintenance A Check occurs every 500 flight hours, which on a heavily utilized airliner could be almost once a month, but is typically more like every two months.
You're right, interior bolts wouldn't be on any of the frequent maintenance schedules, which is why airlines shouldn't be messing with them on delivery, as the OP suggested.
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This particular aircraft that the door plug blew out on was only two months past initial flight certification. It's basically a brand new airplane.
Alaska isn't totally without fault here either - it's not been reported that particular aircraft had the depressurization warning light come on a few times in previous flights, so it was restricted from flying an over-ocean route so they could emergency land if there was a depressurization event.
Sorry, if that light comes on, you better positively find out why b
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On almost all transport (cars, trains, boats, aircraft, and even bycycles), the manufacturer sets out a maintenance schedule to be performed on a regular interval, and not before each and every trip. If every item was checked before every flight there would be more like one flight per aircraft about once every few months (the heavy maintenance can take over two months for some aircraft).
Those forms of transport also come with extensive documentation as to how to perform that maintenance when it is neede
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More than that, Alaska Airlines took delivery of this particular aircraft in October. It's a brand new airplane - to think that you would have to start tearing apart the fuselage to check the bolts on a god damn door plug of a 2 month old aircraft is ludicrous.
This is nothing but another huge Boeing quality control issue.
Oh, and apparently United has now found several MAX 9 aircraft with loose door plug bolts as well.
This is not a "routine maintenance" issue. It's shitty manufacturing that they were very
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In *theory* there is someone who does the work, and someone else (the inspector) who checks that the work was completed properly. So at least two people (one of which is somewhat senior) will need to be scapegoated (which may still happen).
The cockpit voice recordings were not lost. The Airline Pilots union insisted that recordings are erased after two hours (in order to protect the privacy of the pilots). The NTSB will likely, again (this is not a new issue) make recommendations that the time frame be
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There's just something *wrong* about moveable escape hatches.
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if any one took the fall, they figured it was cheaper to ask for an exemption!
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Capitalism, that's who!
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More face-saving than cost-saving. Possibly personal-bonus-saving.
Boeing management promised to deliver so many planes in 2023, and as the year drew to a close they were behind, so they ordered the production lines to sprint [reuters.com] to meet the promises.
Some of the things that ended up getting cut like quality control checks probably did save money in the short term, but nobody in his right mind could possibly think rushing to build something complex as an airliner is going to end well.
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I don't fly, but I think it should be safe. I also think the fuel should be taxed the same as my car. Not everyone forced it. I am tired of hearing planes overhead. Now please excuse me, my lawn needs some attention.
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Oh I agree it should be taxed, but when the price rises I *will* complain about it, and that's the point isn't it.
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It’s getting so deep in here I need a shovel. This is a direct result of engineers no longer running the company. It has nothing to do with poor people flying you entitled prick. Airbus doesn’t seem to produce planes that fly you into the ground or lose critical pieces during flight. Maybe because they have competent management who value safety over pennies.
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Airbus has certain had it's share of design flaws [google.com], too.
Boeing just has it's share, and McDonnell Douglas' share, and several other companies shares as well.
Any company that size is run by MBAs, always, because the shareholders won't have it any other way.
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Unfortunately, Boeing and Airbus issues are not comparable here.
Out of the two main manufacturers, Boeing is the one that has seen 4 major groundings of its aircraft since the 1980s (the 737 Classic in 1989, the 787 in 2013, the MAX in 2019 and 2024), while Airbus has had none.
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The engineers should be running the show is a tired and misinformed trope at this point. Dennis Muilenburg was a heritage Boeing engineer. Harry Stonecipher was a physics major that started as a lab tech. Phil Condit was also an aerodynamics engineer. Meanwhile, some of the historical, "great" Boeing CEO's weren't engineers either - William Allen, who "bet the farm" on the 367-80 and launched the Boeing 707, 727, 737, and 747, was a Harvard lawyer. Frank Shrontz, was also both a lawyer and *GASP* a Harvard
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Having observed Dennis Muilenberg for almost 10 years as the Boeing PM on Army FCS, it was clear that 'engineering' was not his interest. His primary interest was earning 100% of the award fee each year. Despite the well-documented problems with Boeing engineering, Muilenberg exercised no oversight to fix the engineering problems. "If the government pays full award fee, we don't have any real problems." I still remember watching him and the Army PM standing in front of the assembled "OneTeam" claiming FC
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"Engineers running the show" does not mean "the CEO earned an engineering degree and he runs the show, so...".
It means the CEO lets his engineers run his show.
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Plenty of engineers go through a 'conversion experience' in the earning of their MBA degree. Engineering is a state of mind. It's practise includes reasonable respect to financial constraints. Utter devotion to financial metrics (aka greed) takes hold of many erstwhile 'engineers'.
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Does wanting things to be cheaper make me entitled? Congrats you just described 100% of the human race removing all meaning of the word.
You don't seem to understand my point. The premise of the question has nothing to do with airbus's better safety record, it was "who let the cost cutting PHB take over boeing?" and the answer remains us, the market which shareholders wanted Boeing to capture.
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You forced it. I forced it. Everyone forced it. We wanted everyone to be able to afford to fly, and not save flying for only the wealthy upper-class. To do that one of the things Boeing had to do was remove $50m from the sticker price (in todays dollars).
The market at work.
Who is "we"? And the drivers for the 737 Max were also time no doubt expressed as dollars. And there was significant cheating as well. They wanted the Max out quickly to compete with Airbus They wanted to maintain the normal 737 flight characteristics, so that they didn't have to have pilots retrained on flight simulators. They wanted to have bigger engines, but the 737 was already gulping air fairly close to the ground, so they raised the wing which with the bigger engine, which made for an unstable airframe, as at high angles of attack, the engine nacelles contributed to the lift, making stall more likely to happen. Enter the MCAS, and who on earth made the decision to keep it some sort of secret.
The door is a new issue, but all of the other issues of this star crossed plane would have been taken care of by not making MCAS secret, not trying to make it pretend to be a normal 737, and sensibly have pilots need simulator training, and above all allowing pilots control of MCAS.
I'm sure at the time the bean counters and top management thought these were sound decisions. Obviously they weren't. But it isn't anyone's fault but theirs.
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"I'm sure at the time the bean counters and top management thought these were sound decisions."
Only if you mean that in the sense that they expected not to get in trouble for these decisions personally. And I'll bet they were right.
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Sure - when people who have no interest or understanding of the knowledge needed to build the technology they want to squeeze every last piaster out of, they will make certain to give themselves a get out of jail free card. Even if forced to resign, they personally profit. Some Janitor or Bob in the mailroom will pay though! 8^)
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Who is we? Anyone who flies or wants to fly somewhere, i.e. the market.
And yes the drivers are clearly my point. I want a cheap flight, you want a cheap flight. Airlines want us to buy their flights, but they need to upgrade their planes. Boeing wants to sell them planes but needs to do it at budget prices. At no point is anyone willing to give up profit.
The request comes from the bottom up.
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And yet flying is nearly unimaginably safer than it was back in the days when it was only for the rich. Or the 80s, 90s or 00s.
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That has zero to do with Boeing and everything to do with the FAA and global air safety regulations. Money doesn't give a shit about safety, case in point, the entire MAX 8 saga.
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I don't understand the argument. Death and destruction costs money when it occurs to say nothing of cost to reputation and prospects for future sales. How can money not give a shit when fucking up costs far more than doing it right the first time?
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So how does Airbus, Bombardier, Lear, Gulfstream, etc. manage to build aircraft that don't try to lawn dart themselves from altitude (737 Max 8) or blow out door-sized chunks of the fuselage 2 months after rolling off the assembly line (737 Max 9)?
If it was a function of cost cutting, don't you think we'd see issues from aircraft manufacturers not named Boeing as well?
Seems you didn't think that one through in your rush to blame "the market" rather than "the only manufacturer with these issues."
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I remember discount flights in the 1960s. They cost about 2-3x as much as a flight today. An average intercontinental flight in the 60s cost 6x as much as it does today. Inflation is a thing you need to adjust for.
Flying is far FAR cheaper than it was in the 60s, claiming otherwise is quite delusional.
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