The company did not name the supplier, nor did it identify the part, although the Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the defect involved certain titanium parts that are weaker than they should be.
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It would seem that we would need to know what kind of part this is if we want to continue flying and trusting Boeing. Is it a part in the kitchen of the plane or a more critical holding the jet engines. It would seem this might be a critical part as it is titanium.
I do think Boeing is being a little too tight lipped on this. I think a decade ago, many would have let the questions end at Boeing’s statement, but their trust has really been harmed over the last 10 years, and I’d like them to provide more information.
> "While our investigation is ongoing, we have determined that this does not present an immediate safety of flight concern for the active in-service fleet," a company spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
>While I agree that Boeing should tell us which specific part it is,
In general, it's bad business etiquette to publicly name & shame defects/mistakes made by business partners or company employees. Whether a supplier messed up a titanium part or a Facebook employee misconfigured a router, you don't call out their names in public.
Yes, it's understandable we readers would want to know all the dirty details but Boeing giving us that may also have the opposite effect: less safety instead of more.
In this case, it was the supplier that notified Boeing about the defect. If Boeing publicly outed that supplier to the press, that adds perverse incentives for the supplier (and other suppliers) to not notify airplane manufacturers in the future which creates unsafe planes.
On the other hand, it's probably good if Boeing privately notifies the FAA inspectors so they are alerted to it. Maybe they already shared that information.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/aluminum-extrusion-manufactur...
Is Boeing publicly naming the part also publicly naming the supplier?
If they tell you that the some part will wear out 5% faster on the planes with out of spec parts then every two-bit who took an engineering class once upon a time will be writing medium posts and creating youtube analysis videos with clickbait titles that overblow things and make it look like the world is ending when in reality it just means that the plane operators will have to inspect the part more and the end of life operators will have to replace it more.
From the Pinto to the 737 MAX the lesson that the public has repeatedly taught corporate America is that when there is a problem the narrative matters more than reality and it is to their best advantage to control it as much as they possibly can and because there are big bucks at stake they learn the lesson and do just that.
We reap what we sow.
If they had sufficient information to put people's mind at ease as you described above then the inherent failure is not providing it because it was entirely certain that everyone's mind is going to fill in the blanks with the worst possible thing that fits the bill and everyone's mental pictures is going to be of air frames disintegrating in the air. This was entirely predictable.
More likely the actual details haven't been communicated because it isn't nearly so reassuring. Let me speculate blindly...
It's a structural part the failure of which threatens the life of everyone on board the plane but rather than merely failing 5% faster it would never have passed spec in the first place and would if left alone have been found in the aftermath of hundreds of people hurtling to their fiery deaths and would tend to have started failing when the part failed halfway through its original expected lifespan.
It is only not an immediate threat to safety as 787s have only been around for 9 years and we still have literally single digit years before they would have started falling out of the sky so because they managed to discover this before falling planes took down the rest of their reputation they have time to strategize how they will take care of this in a way that simultaneously isn't ruinous to them or airlines.
This is like discovering your breaks don't work a half a mile before the edge of the cliff instead of 100 ft from it or having your appliance catch fire when you happen to be on hand to use your kitchen fire extinguisher.
They never should have moved substantial operations to a state full of complete idiots who can't be trusted to operate a toaster let alone build planes. THEY are reaping what they sowed.
What did we sow with the 737 MAX disaster. Are you saying the public behaved inappropriately in their reactions to the MAX? That feels like it’s really sweeping the very legitimate problems under the rug and blaming the public for reacting to those problems.
It’s not like the public was reacting to hyperbolic engineering theories related to MCAS. Two planes crashed because of the system’s failure and the lack of notification and training to airlines and pilots.
I’m curious what you see as the public’s failing in this regard?
99.999999999999% of people have no idea what any of this info actually means or how to process it.
COVID has proven this fact
That being said, yes I think everyone agrees that the FAA was far too lax in the certification process. Doesn't change the fact that the post I replied to contained objectively false information that I corrected.
What they won't blame at all but probably deserves a mention is a long and expensive type certification process that provided the incentives for all the dominoes on the Boeing and airline side of things to line up the way they did. Nobody at Boeing or the airlines was attempting to achieve this outcome. They were trying to achieve a marginally better 737 within the bounds of the existing regulation.
“The Boeing 737 MAX passenger airliner was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 – longer in many jurisdictions – after 346 people died in two crashes, Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) resisted grounding the aircraft until March 13, 2019, when it received evidence of accident similarities. By then, 51 other regulators had already grounded the plane,[2] and by March 18, 2019, all 387 aircraft in service were grounded.”
https://www.aviationpros.com/aircraft/news/21230827/delaware...