Boeing yanks eight 787s from service over structural issue | Hacker News Reader

Boeing yanks eight 787s from service over structural issue

theaircurrent.com

188 pointsthrowaway713135 comments

"The pieces are fabricated and joined with the aft pressure bulkhead at Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C. plant and then delivered for final assembly to the company’s nearby final assembly building or flown to Everett, Wash."

Not the first time quality control has been an issue at the N.C. plant.

From a New York Times article back in 2019: "Ever since, Qatar has bought only Dreamliners built in Everett." [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

Totally unsurprising that SC is having quality issues.

"We have a manager that will physically watch us while we're working on the jet and watch us as we go to the bathroom," he says. "I'm a 40-year-old military veteran and I have a 20-something-year-old manager asking me why I use time to use the bathroom."

https://psmag.com/economics/a-tale-of-two-boeing-factories

Sounds sucky to always be watched but, as someone that actually worked in an aircraft repair facility, we'd show up for work at 6am, then a 5 minute "break" at 8am and 10am followed by a 30 minute unpaid lunch from 12-12:30. Then another 5 minute break at 2:30pm followed by work ending at 4:30pm. And that was the schedule for Monday-Thursday followed by 8 hour days on Friday and Saturday. It got old quick and I left that field and went back to school lol.

But the point is, anytime you provide 4 "breaks" a day for bathroom time, you'll get some managers staring at you for breaking the pattern. And don't forget that most tasks in aircraft assembly require 2 people. If you're installing fasteners, you've got to normally have someone on the other side of the assembly to either buck the rivet or put a nut on a bolt. So one person running for the toilet causes work to stop for others.

That's just why workers' unions are useful though. Workers need breaks, especially more experienced (older) workers, managers don't want to provide those breaks. The union can work with the workers to determine how many breaks they need, and have the negotiating ability to back up workers whose breaks are being violated like above.

> That's just why workers' unions are useful though. Workers need breaks, especially more experienced (older) workers, managers don't want to provide those breaks.

The post you're responding to just stated they had 4 breaks a day. I doubt Boeing isn't providing breaks either, since that would be illegal.

It's entirely possible to have a non-union shop and still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees.

There are always going to be some employees that abuse things - people taking bathroom breaks every hour, 10 minutes at a time, etc. Those are the ones that get let go, when you're not a Union Shop. Unfortunately, for all the good Unions do, they also tend to protect exactly these sorts of employees, making it difficult or impossible to trim poorly performing employees.

4 breaks a day isn't either enough or too much in general-- it's very job and industry dependent.

Refusing to provide breaks is illegal, true, but it's trivially easy to legally force employees to take many fewer than they're entitled. Amazon employees in FCs don't piss in bottles because they're very into logistic efficiency of picking...

True, there will always be entities that abuse understandings, employer and employee. The thing is, corporations are superentities with monopsonic power. Employees are units, discouraged from communicating, with limited time in a day to make complaints or study potential improvements to working condition (or law, for that matter).

Unions are a method for setting up a superentity that has the bargaining, informational, and legal power to have a more equal footing with the corporate superentity.

Particularly when Unions have substantial ownership of the company, they have no specific wish to lose dues-paying members or make the company fail.

> or make the company fail

Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks, even though the Teamsters (representing the other portion of the employees) agreed. Now... nobody works for Hostess and everyone lost their jobs.

Not all Unions actually align their goals with what's best for the employees. Sometimes, it's all about collecting union dues...

> Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks

Except that Hostess had a bunch of debt loaded up from financial "engineering", and Hostess had already asked for and been granted concessions several times.

At some point, you're better off forcing the company into bankruptcy and rolling the dice--especially if the owners are bleeding it of cash via financial arrangements. It's going to be dead anyway; the only question is whether the owners also get to bleed the retirement fund, for example.

If Hostess can't employ those people after bankruptcy and reorganization, then those jobs were certainly dead, anyway.

I don't think you can use Hostess as a simple case of the BCTGM getting too hungry for dues, since Hostess has reformed under a new corporation after a defensive bankruptcy filing, to hire an entirely new set of employees. That is something that companies can do, and have done so for centuries.

At the very least, that seems like a case of a mix of vulture capitalism and failed union negotiations.

The Hostess of today isn't the Hostess of yesterday. It was shredded up and pieced out. What is today called "Hostess" is owned by a holding companies and is not the original ownership.

They went from well over 30,000+ employees, down to 2,000 today.

Pretty sad honestly. The company was in a tight financial situation, and asked to postpone paying into the pension fund for a few years. The Bakers Union was the only holdout... and now nobody has a pension or wages.

I suppose I look at this as sad from a different angle than you. The brand itself has been losing consumer trust for decades, due to changing tastes and increasing health-consciousness. Eventually, that makes it so the company can't pay on its obligations. The debtors say those obligations are non-negotiable, the company folds, and now we're left with the private equity firms driving down costs at the cost of what consumer trust was left.

If a company I worked for was ever late on a paycheck, or refused to continue paying for a pension/matching 401k, I think it's perfectly reasonable that the company should collapse.

> If a company I worked for was ever late on a paycheck, or refused to continue paying for a pension/matching 401k, I think it's perfectly reasonable that the company should collapse.

Perhaps. Personally, I'd take it as a sign of whats-to-come, and leave. If other employees decided to stay, and agreed to some terms to save the company, let them.

In Hostess' case, I believe it was the Teamsters that had negotiated an equity stake in the company during a previous bout of poor financial times. There's always options.

I have a hard time believing the 30,000+ employees wanted their union to destroy the company, particularly since many of them had worked there all their life, their town had little or no other large company to provide jobs, and their pensions/retirement were tied to the entire mess. It's entirely possible Hostess was in bad times partly due to Union negotiated wage and pension funding levels.

In general, I guess I'm more skeptical of Unions than some. I've never been in a Union personally, and would chafe at the idea of being compelled to pay union dues (some jobs require this), and not being able to negotiate my own salary and benefits that fit my situation best.

The phrase "destroy the company" seems like an emotional appeal. If the company can restructure its debt, that leaves more of the pie for everyone else. Employees who didn't get a say in taking on the debt shouldn't have moral compunctions about creditors being stiffed. It's just business.

>> It's entirely possible to have a non-union shop and still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees

It’s really hard to do though due to the wrong incentives being in place. You’d need something like worker co-op’s to get the incentives aligned reliably in all cases, such that you don’t need unions.

Not really. Plenty of businesses don't have unioned employees, and get along just fine. I'd wager there's more non-union employers than union employers in this country.

Unfortunately, unioned jobs where it's known to be difficult or impossible to fire poor performing employees, seems to attract exactly that type of employee, in my experience.

Everybody knows the cliched arguments about why job security leads to inefficiency, but have you ever thought that job security leads to efficiency in that people don't resist automation and labor saving innovation as much when it doesn't threaten them?

When someone figures out how to do your job better (or tries) at a private company, then you may need to pretend it's a great thing, everybody goes around pretending, but it's a mortal threat and there are tons of ways to passively sabotage a project.

But when someone figures out how to do your job better at a government agency, either the automation makes it easier for you, or you are (nearly always) guaranteed a transfer to another position. People generally accept that work is a bad thing in itself so if you want to eliminate it, they like you. Laziness has its merits.

I've had some first hand experience in both types of environments.

>> still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees

>> get along just fine

Those are 2 different standards. The domain of highly skilled and fairly compensated is a subset of companies getting along just fine. Many workers are unable to fire their boss as it were, due to lack of alternatives. It’s hard to quit when there’s no alternative job and you’re tied to an area.

Like i suggested earlier, you can’t fix this while the information and power asymmetry exists. You can certainly hide it sufficiently in most cases to get along just fine though but that is under-rewarding the labour.

>> difficult or impossible to fire poor performing

Sure, but what’s the cost of that situation?

Sometimes the cost could be so dire it kills the business. That’s not to be sniffed at for sure. Sometimes though it just protects the worker who’s trying but their kid or SO got incapacitated or something equally horrible is happening to them and the last thing they need is fired.

It’s ok if the player with the lions share of the cash pays more than their fair share from time to time.

It’s not ok to protect the player with the lion’s share at all costs even to the detriment of the poorer players.

> Sometimes though it just protects the worker who’s trying but their kid or SO got incapacitated or something equally horrible is happening to them and the last thing they need is fired.

OK, but private businesses in the US are not public jobs programs, and shouldn't have any obligation to keep paying unproductive employees.

That puts a financial strain on the organization, and can be toxic to a healthy work environment.

(For the record, I'm not railing against people in that position - I'm railing against people perfectly capable of working productively, but choose not to because there is no consequence. It would be analogous to government jobs where the worst that happens is you're transferred to a different department and become their problem instead.)

>> I'm railing against people perfectly capable of working productively

I get that and i’m in no mind to let them off but i’m not willing to hurt good actors just to be sure no bad actor ever scores a free lunch.

Fair enough. There is a fine balancing act with heavy-Union shops.

My experience might be more sour than others... I've never personally seen a Union step up to help someone justly... it's always been to keep bad employees employed, and to sue management for various things, and demand higher wages even though the business can't afford them.

You end up spending a bunch of time worrying about what the union will think, instead of what the employee needs.

Unions and union-shops set the standard that non-union shops have to match. If they didn't people would just go across the street and work at the union shop with better benefits and breaks because of the nature of markets.

So in a sense employees at non-union shops are free loaders that reap the benefits of union shops without paying into the organizations that create them

Such precise schedule keeping is a job for robots. Either factor in time for squishy bio-bot maintenance or switch to machines.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Taylorism substantially predates robotics, and the low-hanging fruit for robot assembly in factories is good and plucked.

I'm no manager but I'd guess some of the most basic rules of management will say "don't do this". Yet some managers do it, like they can't see the damage it's doing to trust and morale, and that it will simply not (unless under special circumstances) bring any higher quality or other value. Yet still it happens. It's so strange.

Insecurity. "I'm the manager, therefore you WILL do as I say!". These people can boss people around, but they don't know how to manage.

Good management can’t be taught, it can only be learned through experience. Hence why MBAs used to require work experience or the concept of non commissioned officers in the military. You must experience the suck to learn how not to suck.

With that said, you have to still make an effort to filter out people with no empathy or low emotional IQ from management roles. Having authority over another human being is serious business.

>With that said, you have to still make an effort to filter out people with no empathy or low emotional IQ from management roles. Having authority over another human being is serious business.

yeah but their resume, they went to "insert super important college here"!

Micromanaging people is a lot of work, and it prevents both the IC and the manager from doing important tasks. Micromanagement either comes from managers not trusting their reports (this can have several causes), or from the manager feeling insecure and finding ways to project control or power over their charges.

The exact opposite of good leadership, that is, leading through influence.

Or perhaps (also) toxic pressure from above?

IME a good manager is an umbrella against the shit raining down from higher. I suppose they're not good so... yep. They folded.

"There are three kinds of managers: the shit umbrella, the shit funnel and the shit fan."

It’s also extremely rare to find an organization with middle managers that don’t reflect the culture of the organization as a whole. If the middle management is toxic and/or incompetent, it’s a good bet that all layers of management are similar.

Most of these "managers" are just farmhands like the workers. They are there to be the point of contact with the rest of the cattle, do the dirty work of enforcing whatever they were told and to accomplish that they resort to what they "know", which is micro-managing and fear.

The less popular part of this whole thing is that the "quality" of the workers at this particular plant is less than "optimal" let's just leave it at that, and that issue is general knowledge since the beginning.

Human education hasn't reached to the level that people understand pain and productivity has zero or negative correlations.

I'd have to resist the urge to walk up to that manager and stare them in the eyes while peeing on their shoes.

Please don't do this here.

You are very badass.

Interestingly I found out about Boeing's N.C. plant quality control issues from an Al-Jazeera report on the 787 [0] way back in 2014. The part about the plant has an interview with an employee recording other employees worried about safety, training and other issues. There is a Q&A with a Boeing VP that is interrupted by some PR/legal aide when questions about quality issues in Charleston start.

It's an ongoing issue for quite a long time...

[0] https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?t=1434 (I've timestamped to the relevant part about the Charleston plant)

It has been an issue since the very beginning. The play from Boeing was obviously to cut costs and since many states in the US have been plagued by the complete collapse of manufacturing jobs since at least the 70's they are willing to give Boeing tax cuts and incentives by the billions.

The only small problem is that they turned this plant into a sweatshop, not only the workers have no aviation culture but people in power seem to think they are bolting on just another Ford Pinto like the old days.

> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.

> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.

> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.

Oops.

The entire 787 project plan smelled like union busting to me. I was very surprised they didn’t strike over it.

But the company also has regrets about how the project was run and vowed not to do that again. I doubt that applies to the [SC] part of the equation, though.

787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs trying to run an engineering and development program with all the worst business & management practices, and the results show.

Such a shame because the 777 program in the 90s was an excellent program to model the 787 after, but Boeing threw it all away to agitate the union, penny pinch everything, and outsource all that expertise to the lowest bidder.

Ultimately it ended up costing more to build a worse product with a long tail of severe post-launch quality and design issues.

Airplane programs at Boeing are siloed. They build up a little company to run the program and then retire bits of it once production is looming. There's no guarantee that any sanity found on one program will translate to another. Or insanity.

This is why I said in another response that if Everett loses the 787 but gains 777 orders it may be bad news for the people on the 787 line but neutral news for the state. They could lay off 20,000 people, hire 12,000 of them back, and hire 8,000 new people or folks furloughed from some other program.

ETA:

> 787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs

I mentioned cynicism elsewhere. You may be right, but I always thought of it more as a Captain Ahab maneuver, where the unions are Moby Dick.

(As a child I did not know that the speech at the end of Wrath of Khan was from Moby Dick. That scene is much darker once you understand that a scholar has chosen these as his final words, knowing damned well how it ends. He will make the gesture anyway, even if the 'whale' survives.)

*SC. “At least we’re not South Carolina”, the mantra of North Carolina

People from Illinois pronounce it, ill eh NOY or ill uh NOY (even though proper french would be ill EE nwah) and get pissed when people from Wiscaaaahnseeehn pronounce it ILL uh noise. It is clear they are aware of this.

But people from Missouri (especially southern) may pronounce their state as misery. Having known someone who moved away from there, I'm assured this is perfectly accurate. Biases may have been involved, but 'state of misery' jokes basically write themselves.

Apologies both to the fine people of North Carolina and the good people of Charleston. You do not all look the same and I did not mean to imply that Charleston has anything to do with North Carolina.

(I'm from the midwest, we take our cross-border rivalries far more seriously than should be legal, but nobody outside the midwest can tell you the difference between Iowa/Illinois/Indiana/Missouri and have no qualms about saying it to your face. The struggle is real)

I think it stands for "North Charleston" in this context.

I was at Boeing when that plant opened up. I recall it specifically being talked about in hushed tones as a place where there would be no unions, and thus they could hire cheaper labor.

Don't get me wrong, the Everett plant certainly has had issues in the past (there are plenty of signs hanging up about Foreign Object Debris), but the company seems to have targeted cost cutting as priority one.

I was there at the same time and I remember the exact same thing. There was a lot of talk about this being used to offset some of the losses caused by any future union strikes and also as leverage when negotiating with the unions.

I also remember that there were consistent ongoing quality issues. Planes from SC would require significant rework when they arrived in Everett.

It's almost like union employees under fair management do a better job or something /s

The auto industry seemed to provide a counterexample, or at least showed that the "management" part was the deciding factor.

If I were Boeing, I'd also be looking into the possibility of sabotage, but it's more likely cost cutting.

Yea I knew Peterbuilt an engineer who talked at how bad the work was at the Nashville/union plant. He watch people get fired for gross negligence, be hired back a month later. There are several fleets who would specifically order trucks from the other two non-union plants.

A lot of your manufacturing is down south because of how hostile it is to unions down here. I know in SC, we have BMW, Volvo and I think Benz along with Boeing on the coast.

I believe the federal circuit there has a much more limited interpretation of the ADA too, which can benefit employers in certain situations.

Companies wanting to operate in places without unions because the labor is cheaper isn't exactly the kind of thing that requires "hushed tones."

It sure is if you are talking about workers rights to unionize, specifically, and how you plan to undercut the existing union.

And yet they are closing the Everett factory:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/losing-787-would-be-ma...

Yes, as part of a long-running union busting campaign.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/03/boeing-union...

> Boeing’s mere presence in South Carolina was already viewed as a union-busting move when the company first opened an aircraft production plant there in 2011 rather than Washington state, where Boeing had unionized operations. South Carolina has the lowest union membership rate in the United States at just 2.7% of workers. The National Labor Relations Board filed a federal complaint against Boeing for the move, accusing the company of violating federal labor law, before dropping it after the company came to an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).

That’s a speculative piece and the one it links to is as well.

The 787 was designed to not require as much infrastructure as the Everett plant has to offer. I’m out of the loop, but Wikipedia still lists most of the rest of their catalog as being produced in Everett, and the new 777 is coming online.

Sounds more like having to choose between 787 capacity and other production lines.

I’m not sure where they get losing the 787 meaning nothing to backfill it. For those specific employees, changing programs may be difficult and not all of them will be picked up, but for the region, I don’t see how this means 30k fewer jobs.

Also Everett does other things besides assembly. I think most of their IT and a few other programs are there.

And now Boeing is mulling closing 787 production in WA and moving it all to SC.

The SC thing was to save on costs, now since this many years passed and no one got killed ( yet ), they are confident they can move it all there, where the sun is bright, the unions are pretty and the wages are low.

I think there's a reasonable case for nationalizing Boeing to remove the profit motive.

I'm not saying it's the only play, but Boeing is a strategic interest to the nation (both economically and strategically), it's already receiving massive subsidies, and huge paychecks are being cut to executive leadership.

It might be worth it to continue to manufacture these planes in the US, with an emphasis on safety and providing good jobs, even if that meant it wasn't strictly profitable to do so. If we're giving them billions in tax cuts anyways, which they then use to layoff workers and move plants, maybe we should cut out the song and dance.

It has been mumbled in many a kitchenette that if St Louis were to sink into the river a lot of these problems would go away. There is something more cynical and, some argue, rotten about the way the MD executives are running things.

10 years ago they were cutting research but keeping the management chain. Fewer people to bill hours for that the same overhead. Yeah that probably didn’t work out.

ETA: the US govt is substantially responsible for this situation. They had the bright idea to reduce the diversity of defense contracts and that they meant to accomplish this by having some of the contractors merge. I believe they actually facilitated the Boeing-MD as well.

So I’m not sure how them taking over entirely will fix this. Defense contracts have always been political chips for Congress. Giving them more control won’t help that.

I’ve briefly been on the inside of government projects. I wouldn’t trust them to build anything like this, unless they allowed NASA or some similarly engineering-orientated agency to manage it.

Even NASA with cost plus space launch system style contracts would spend 10B with nothing to show for it. I too have been inside a govt project. Delivering a product of value to end user on commercially reasonable basis is not the goal of such efforts for better and worse. There is no profit motive.

Is Boeing the company of strategic interest to the U.S., or just its intellectual property and factories?

Its brand has been seriously damaged by these scandals. It used to be, "If it's not Boeing I'm not going," now it's, "If it's Boeing, I'm not going."

Let the company go bankrupt, enact export controls on its capital and IP. The free market will do a better job than the government could.

I agree. Boeing, if it cannot find investors to keep it afloat, can simply sell off its IP. There are a considerable number of aerospace engineers who would kill for a fresh start. Look at the recent article on the Colorado startup with their supersonic experiment, or SpaceX. And yes, SpaceX does got a lot from tax payers and there are issues with that, but it's also a case of the State investing in something rather than owning it.

Nationalization for something like an airplane company is terrible idea.

As SpaceX (and Tesla) have shown, sometimes in order to make real progress you need to restart things from zero. Tech debt piles up and political lines become entrenched to the point where nothing but marginal change can be made. Nationalizing the company would basically make this impossible.

And maybe putting a real engineer in charge of a freaking engineering company wouldn't be a bad first step either...

> The free market will do a better job than the government could.

I see this sentiment a lot, but nobody ever says what it will do a better job of: Innovation? Meeting customers’ needs? Or just providing a minimum marketable product while maximising returns for shareholders?

Is Boeing the company of strategic interest to the U.S., or just its intellectual property and factories?

Both.

Strategic interest because Boeing has a massive military business.

Plus, the sheer size of the company and the fact that's it's one of two airline manufacturers worldwide (ignoring the few companies that focus solely on the regional jet business).

Rather we should let them fail. The US needs a company like Boeing, so simply start fresh, the subsidies will keep it afloat regardless.

It takes an existing major aircraft manufacturer years and billions of dollars to get a new aircraft up and running, and that's leveraging decades of experience, staffing, tooling, and existing facilities.

It's not an easy industry to start a startup in.

I assume "let them fail" = "let them run themselves in bankruptcy". At which point, a court manages their re-org into something (hopefully) more lean, efficient, and probably several smaller independent units.

No doubt if they went bankrupt some of their existing employees could make a case to investors to take over the company but run it in a way that doesn't destroy the company due to predictable quality issues.

Especially employees who have a documented history of discussing those exact issues with management, being whistleblowers, etc.

>...take over the company but run it in a way that doesn't destroy the company

Obviously, there is selection bias, but rarely have I seen "investors" take over something without hollowing it out withing a few years. Looking at you Sencha and Thoma Bravo...

So what? It takes a lot of money and coordination to run a war effort too, or to go to the moon in the 1960s.

It's not an easy industry if you're private without subsidies. But if the government sponsors it and it is a necessity, it's much easier.

> So what? It takes a lot of money and coordination to run a war effort too, or to go to the moon in the 1960s.

Which is why government managed each of those.

It sounds like you're arguing for nationalization, not subsidies.

I'm not arguing for either option - both are essentially the same thing.

I'm arguing that sometimes you need a new culture, and the old culture needs to be destroyed. So let it fail and just start over again.

And Boeing announced last year they were planning to significantly reduce their quality control inspectors. Whoops...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...

Reading this while sitting in a 787-9 that's just about to take off isn't very comforting.

Jokes aside, this again brings up the fact that Boeing as a company has deep quality control issues and I really hope this "structural issue" (vague sounding terms aren't comforting either) is limited to the 8 aircrafts in question and hope many more don't pop up, else it'll be a serious blow to public confidence on Boeing, especially after the MAX situation.

>Reading this while sitting in a 787-9 that's just about to take off isn't very comforting.

In a similar vein, that reminds me of the time I was stuck in my seat on plane that had pushed away from the gate, but was just sitting on the tarmac because the captain "didn't like the look of an engine indication". About 45 minutes in to just waiting there, there was a commotion as everyone's phones/Blackberries started chirping. Apparently, some plane had just landed in the Hudson river.

I was on a direct flight from Heathrow to DFW when the captain announced that we needed to divert to Ottawa because "Air Traffic Control was down". We landed safely and were the first flight to re-enter US airspace two days later on 9/13.

When things go sideways, keeping everyone calm is a big part of the job, even if it means fibbing a bit.

I was on a flight to Los Angeles when the Captain reported that the entire Southwestern US had lost contact with air traffic control, and we diverted IIRC to Chicago. The Captain said he didn’t know what was going on, and we called someone in LA using the overpriced airplane phone to confirm that LA still existed.

The Captain handled the diversion very nicely. He said we were welcome to deplane and walk around, and that he would give us a 15 minute warning when it was time to get back on the plane. Awhile later, the announcement came over the PA, we got back on the plane, and went to LA.

The root cause was timestamp overflow! https://m.slashdot.org/story/49885

I remember the JetBlue aircraft that was having trouble getting its landing gear down. It struck me that they had live TV. So the passengers could watch live news video of their own plane trying to get the gear down.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_Flight_292

Edit: Interesting tidbit from the Wikipedia page:

"Screenwriter Zach Dean was also on the plane, and while contemplating his mortality resolved to write a script about mortality (which eventually became the film Deadfall)."

Well, that's terrifying!

Did your flight eventually take off? Was the captain legitimately concerned about an indication, or was he just aware of the emergency declaration of Flight 1549 and waiting to see how it played out?

The time between the beginning and end of the 1549 emergency was far less than 45 minutes.

I'm aware; there was certainly lag time between the event & the reporting, though. It's relatively likely that the PIC knew of the emergency declaration 10-20 minutes before it was triggering push notifications on devices. Regardless, I'm legitimately curious what the outcome of his flight was that day.

I'd bet the average pilot does not get any notification in advance of the general public unless they are in the midst of an incident in progress, and then it would be ATC notifying them. Even then, probably just enough info to keep them safe.

So unless they were actually at the airport where 1549 took off, it's possible they didn't even hear about it until the evening news.

In emergency situations, flights on the ground are held on the ground, planes in the air get pushed to a holding pattern or diverted depending on need. ATC wants to give the plane in distress clear air to make the maneuvers needed without worrying about traffic.

We eventually went back to the terminal and departed about 5 hours behind schedule. I'm not sure if we got a new plane or the engine issue on the original plane got resolved.

Boeing has had a lot of issues with the South Carolina plant, but I don’t think the 787-9 is built there.

Either way, safe travels!

Oh but all 787 will be most likely.

https://simpleflying.com/boeing-charleston-consolidation-imp...

Oh, that’s terrific.

Bigly looking forward to flying in an SC-built plane.

Thank you, just landed safely. Glad that this flight of mine won't be part of Boeing's fat book of hull loss statistics.

This is a good sign, they have realized that it would've destroyed the company if they had another jet liner fall from the sky due to a problem they chose to ignore. This way, they appear to be doing their due diligence, even though they made a mistake in manufacturing.

The real question now is how are they identifying these issues now and how many more have they identified or failed to identify.

It sounds like they're combing over historical manufacturing records:

> The company “conducted a thorough review of the manufacturing data with respect to both shimming and skin surface profile. Based on that analysis we were able to determine that both conditions affected these eight airplanes only,” said the Boeing spokesman, who added that it has notified the Federal Aviation Administration “and are conducting a thorough review into the root cause.”

Who knows why they decided to review that data. Maybe they have a project to try to spot problems they missed before, or maybe someone just noticed a problem on a newer plane and they went back to find out if any others were affected by that same problem.

Someone knows why and there's likely a non conspiracy reason behind it. Such as: one of them went in for an inspection (they're inspected a lot) and someone noticed something wrong in a significant capacity. Which then made it's way through Boeing because it shouldn't happened and they realized a potential problem.

Al Jazeera reported about the horrible South Carolina plant issues six years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os

Coincidentally I wrote this comment [0] now, 20 minutes past yours, before scrolling down... It's not a new thing on that plant.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24306431

> The pieces are fabricated and joined with the aft pressure bulkhead at Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C. plant

At least one airline has refused to accept airplanes from boeing's SC plant because of the poor manufacturing policies practiced there. if boeing does shut down it's everett assembly plants as part of the downturn, i will stop flying any recent (post classic 737) boeing equipment for my own safety.

> Classic 737

I think there are only a few hundred of those left, they stopped making them 20 years ago. NGs seem fine to me, I've never thought twice before flying on one.

yeah, i mean '737s made before the MAX body length extension.' thanks for making me clarify.

Why? The existing planes that were assembled in Everett were still assembled in Everett, whether or not they close the plant. You either want to only fly stuff built before the SC plant opened, or you want to fly individual planes that were built in Everett. Whether the plant stays open has nothing to do with it.

site is being slashdotted, the gist:

> The source of the newly-discovered structural issue has been traced to a mating point inside the aft fuselage between two carbon fiber composite barrels, known as Section 47/48 where the two barrels meet with a large bulkhead that caps the pressurized cabin. The pieces are fabricated and joined with the aft pressure bulkhead at Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C. plant and then delivered for final assembly to the company’s nearby final assembly building or flown to Everett, Wash.

"Boeing has identified two distinct manufacturing issues in the join of certain 787 aft body fuselage sections, which, in combination, result in a condition that does not meet our design standards," said the company's statement. It said it is conducting a thorough review into the root cause of the problem.

Wow. And that's the PR-approved press release. More details will probably appear in Aviation Week.

Is this a problem with joining carbon fiber?

>Is this a problem with joining carbon fiber?

Fundamentally? No. That said, I imagine there's a lot of pressure from the management to make big, expensive, slow-to-manufacture subassemblies fit together, even when they maybe don't quite. Not sure if it's an issue with their tolerances, or if something bigger is going on (the skin roughness they mention is troubling, because it implies the carbon layup might not have been compressed enough during its cure, and would require significant reinforcement at the very least to meet minimum strength requirements--an aircraft that can't even reach its limit load is fantastically unsafe to fly), but joining composites is mostly about having good procedures and following them religiously.

It's almost as if there was a documentary released 6 years ago that documented the serious structural problems and manufacturing incompetence.

Boeing has outsourced all core competencies, including manufacturing the main fuselage. They are more or less a last-step assembler at this point. There's no reason to get in a 787, and I'll never, ever step foot into a MAX.

> and I'll never, ever step foot into a MAX

Aka the 737-8, which is what they have low-key renamed the MAX.

Bizarre - the site has javascript that disables selecting text on the article because "Content is protected".

It gets better, open chrome devtools and look at the Source tab - its empty? Reload with devtools open on source tab gets it populated, weird.

Anyway, for 'copy protection' they are using wpcp_disable_selection https://myprogrammingnotes.com/protect-web-page-copied-using... , it hooks document.onselectstart and document.onmousedown. onselectstart is very abuse-able and has no place in User Agents just like the likes of onbeforeunload navigator.sendBeacon and window.opener, meaning you should probably hardcode disable it (userscript, or directly modding own browser). onmousedown is a bit more problematic and cant be dealt in automatic fashion. You will have to manually go to devtools every time and delete all onmousedown event listeners.

Boeing has a really interesting strategy right now, essentially, they want to do DaaS —- Design as a Service — and leave that icky business of manufacturing to contractors. It’s a bold move; for decades Boeing has been doing design and build, pretty solidly verticalized. But now, they seem to want to outsource manufacturing entirely, and leave their core competency to be design, supply chain, regulatory logistics, and sales. A huge shift. And one that is not going super well. But perhaps there’s wisdom to it.

If it's really slow loading:

https://archive.is/vz3kE

It'll be interesting to see whether similar problems occur with Boom's supersonic all-composite airframe.

This isn't a fundamental issue with composites. Although they do require more stringent process control than traditional metal structures, with good procedures and QC they are extremely strong (and have significant advantages over metal structures--we've just been working with metal for so long that we know a lot about its issues).

The main question is whether or not Boeing fundamentally has good procedures and QC--if those have been compromised, they can't really be trusted to make mostly-metal airplanes, either.

That's why I make my planes out of titanium.

It’s a good sign, they’re learning to take these things more seriously.

This is not the first time such issues have been reported. I wonder if there will be any change in behavior, specially now that the company is in a bad financial situation.

It's a bit late I think.

It might be easier to just list what is still in-service at this point. 737 Max, 737-7s both have issues. 747s are being retired. Unsure what's left.

737-200, -300, -400, -500.

737-6, -8, -9. (Assuming that the -7s are temporarily out of service as you've said)

747 (cargo)

757

767

777

787 (all but these 8)

So still quite a few lines flying.

your listing of 737's isn't quite correct:

737-600s, 737-700s, 737-800s and 737-900s are part of the 737NG/Next Generation series that debuted in 1998. They are still flying and are safe. 737-8s are part of the 737MAX series (which includes 737-7s, 737-8s, 737-9s, and 737-200s), and they are all unsafe/grounded. As far as I know, the 737-8 is the only MAX variant to actually have been delivered so far, but I can't find a proof of that at the moment.

Yeah, I should have said -600, -700, -800, -900 instead of -6, -7, -8, -9.

For some reason I got that naming convention mixed up, and forgot that the -800 was NG while -8 was MAX.

The 737-200 is one of the first-gen 737s, and still active today, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737#737-200

Sibling comment got it, but I was thinking about the MAX 200/737-8200, which is a variant of the -8 that has more exit doors and therefore can have a higher seating density.

Totally agree that the model numbers are confusing, though (obviously).

> 737MAX series (which includes [...] 737-200s),

The 'MAX 200' is the 737-8200. The 737-200 is one of the originals from the 1960s.

There is so much publicity over Boeing problems. I'm wondering if 30-50 years ago they were more thorough or just it was more accepted to have accidents. Probably the latter. I'm just worried there is too much safety everywhere and no one takes risks any more. Its a wonder Tesla autopilot is still allowed.

No, the problem is apparently boeing has been getting away with BS at their south carolina plant because of lax oversight, and that wouldn't have "flown" previously: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-p...

A few things have changed Boeing's culture, but none more so than the McDonnell Douglas merger in 1997. MD brought with it a culture that put safety second, emphasized defense contracts, and gutted programs in favor of profits. (IMO)

The culture continued to emphasize profits first through Jim McNerney, and searched for ways to cut costs at every turn.

> I'm just worried there is too much safety everywhere and no one takes risks any more.

If this is really true, then I personally think it's wonderful that no one is taking a risk with my safety when I'm flying on an airplane.

What I mean though if we always had this approach we probably wouldn't have had airplanes.

I highly doubt that. There's a difference in expectations on the safety of the first airplanes versus airplanes for mass consumer daily usage. Or in other words, a matured technology.

If what you think is true, no one would be bothering to explore self driving cars. Once that technology is matured enough, I absolutely expect (and hope) that they reach the same level of safety standards and requirements that airplanes take on.

Safety was always a concern even in the first days, except for the daredevils which exist in every field. The only difference is that nowadays we have more safety exactly because of this mindset. Imagine if people now start to think it is ok to "take risks" with aviation.

>I'm just worried there is too much safety everywhere and no one takes risks any more

Oh I think they take plenty of risks. Look at the 787 Max.

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