The door plug on the plane blew off due to a lack of key bolts
The Case for a Pizza Party: Spirit Aerosystems’ Fuselage Problems at the Wichita, Kan., Factory of the Boeing 737 Max
At the factory in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit AeroSystems builds the fuselage for the Boeing 737 Max, management would sometimes throw a pizza party to celebrate a drop in the number of problems reported on the line.
Dean, a former quality auditor at the factory, said that the pizza party would be held because of the lowering of defects. “But we’re not lowering defects. We just ain’t reporting them, you know what I mean?”
The door panel that blew off the Alaska Airlines plane is the focus of federal investigators and they’re trying to figure out what went wrong. Max 9 in midair last month — the latest chapter in the long and troubled relationship between the two companies.
Dean has given statements as part of a shareholder lawsuit against Spirit AeroSystems that alleges an “excessive” numbers of defects at the Kansas factory, although he’s not a plaintiff.
I’m not saying that they do’t want you to inspect a job. You know, they do,” Dean said. “But if you make too much trouble, you will get the Josh treatment. You will get what happened to me.”
FAA Investigation of the Boeing-Spirit Factory Violations Resulting from the FAA’s FAA Detection of the 737 Door Plug
Whitaker says the FAA has sent about 20 inspectors to Boeing’s Washington facilities, and six to the Spirit AeroSystems factory in Wichita, Kan. where the 737 fuselages are produced. And he said some inspectors may have to remain at those factories permanently.
That’s not unusual, according to the person who made the complaint. The number of defects discovered by Boeing is “hideously high and very alarming”, they say.
The problem that was identified did not conform to engineering standards, said the spokesman in the statement. “We are in close communication with Boeing on this matter,” he said.
The two companies have had an argument before. Last year, Spirit reported two other embarrassing and expensive production problems that were not related to the door plug.
“The mindset I have is that we can eliminate all defects,” Shanahan said on a call with analysts and investors last November. I believe we will improve quite a bit in this area.
Boeing agreed to give $90 million to build the production capacity of Spirit in exchange for improvements to its quality control.
An Insider Account of the NTSB’s Missing Key Bolts: A Boeing Insider Explains the Communication and Quality Control Problems
WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board says four key bolts were “missing” when a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines flight in midair last month. That’s one of the findings from the NTSB’s preliminary investigative report released Tuesday.
It is not known yet what happened to those bolts. An anonymous person claiming to be a Boeing insider offered an explanation.
The communication problems between Boeing and the mechanics is described by the whistle blower. The door plugs that were missing from the plane were not installed in Boeing’s internal records, according to the person who has access to the records.
Quality control problems at the two companies come as no surprise to longtime industry analyst Richard Aboulafia, because Boeing has been aggressively pushing its suppliers to cut costs for years.
“You had the people at the top focused on numbers, money,” said Aboulafia, the managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory. Everyone was subject to cost cuts without knowing what this would do to technical execution.
“Did it go too far? It’s likely that did. Now it’s here and now, and now I’ve got to deal with it,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in an interview with CNBC last week. “And yes, the subject of how we interact with all of our suppliers at large, that will be a subject that we will be working out for quite a long time.”
Deal wrote a letter to Boeing employees that instructed a supplier to hold shipments until all jobs had been completed to specification. He said the delay in shipment would affect the company’s production schedule, but would also help improve overall quality.
In order to conduct an audit of production and an employee culture survey at Boeing, the FAA has six weeks to do it. Whitaker testified that the agency will wait until those are complete before making any decisions about a permanent inspection plan.
Boeing and Alaska Airlines After 737 Max 9 Incident: What Happened? After the Flight of the Airplane, an FAA Administrator Revised
The door plug on the plane blew out as it climbed through 15000 feet. There was an emergency landing at Portland.
Another crisis has been created by the incident. The troubled plane maker was still working to rebuild public trust after 346 people died in two 737 Max 8 jets that crashed in 2018 and 2019.
“Whatever final conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in a statement. “An event like this must not happen on an airplane that leaves our factory. We must do better for our customers and passengers.
The Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 incident came up during a Congressional hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday. The FAA administrator told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that the recent crash of a 737 has created problems for the agency.
“One, what’s wrong with this airplane? But two, what’s going on with the production at Boeing?,” Whitaker said. “There have been issues in the past. And they don’t seem to be getting resolved. So we feel like we need to have a heightened level of oversight to really get after that.”
“We will be looking closely at production and manufacturing activities going forward and we will have more boots on the ground to do this,” he said. I believe that we will want to keep people on the ground. We don’t know how many yet. We do believe that presence will be necessary.
The FAA had already taken an unprecedented step and ordered Boeing not to increase its production rate until it’s satisfied the quality control measures have improved.
