It seems there's a sense of malaise falling over everything and everyone in the USA. People at large simply cannot be bothered to care about anything, including torque specs for freakin' AIRLINERS
American air travel is safer than it's ever been. Going years without a single fatality is now the norm, not an exception. The airlines are well run and do care deeply about safety. The regulators aren't perfect but generally do a good job. The NTSB is world-class.
Boeing will continue to lose marketshare to Airbus and feel some pain which is appropriate. Eventually they'll get their act together or they will continue to suffer real consequences.
There are only so many checks and balances you can build in until this situation will catch up with you.
Doesn't amazon have such a huge turn over that they are running out of possible candidate to replace those workers?
Being pushed to deliver more and more packages in shorter time or inspect train cars in less time then required why would one care if a packages gets tossed or a rail car is not properly inspected?
In most jobs the only consequence is to be fired which is already possible for no reason what so ever in many states.
You definitely have enough time to work at leisurely pace and assemble every part right. There's not much rushing going on there. If workers get away with doing dodgy work you have a QA issue.
So conditions at the plant in North Charleston haven't looked very good for almost 10 years...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...
Let's not pretend layoffs are new.
If not you've got things like a reduction in manufacture of ICBMs to consider.
The fact that people would share this and it didn't curb the amount of business and referrals he got just proved to me what you've said for the longest time.
People don't like to be troubled with details and they'd rather be ignorant of them.
If you are a professional mechanic, it's your responsibility to obtain the specifications and follow them. This is especially true when it comes to a licensed and certified A&P mechanic and not your neighborhood shadetree mechanic.
It's still doable to get the full manual off, just not easy anymore.
It gets worse when bolts and part are of different materials (say: steel bolt in aluminum part), that's a very nice recipe for trouble (also in the long run, not just during assembly because oxidization will almost certainly occur on the interface and oxidized metal takes up more room than clean metal so unless you very explicitly protect against it the fasteners won't come out without massive damage to the part).
WAGO clamp terminals are a godsend here - no need to take care about wire nuts going loose, screw terminals being too loose or too tight (leading to fracture), ferrules being properly crimped... just insert the cable, lower the lever, and off you go. Unfortunately, standard DIN fuses still come with only screw terminals.
You would definitely hope aerospace assembly would be immune to this widespread phenomenon though.
Given the amount of (soft) aluminum on aircraft, (737 is 80% aluminum), it would be insane to not precisely consider torque.
Steel on steel is more forgiving.
Much easier to strip aluminum threading if you over torque. Steel tends to just bend (and bend back better).
Aluminum also fractures while steel bends/stretch back and forth better.
(This is mainly from my experience working on bicycles, and a little auto)
e.g. any slight boogering of the threads of a used fastener could translate into rotational torque that doesn't end up being converted to a clamping force.
(or in more extreme instances, some fasteners are torque to yield, and change shape after their first use, and must be replaced. But I'll presume that's not what they were talking about here)
Most service manuals require new bolts, fasteners and washers for torque-critical parts.
[1] which makes an ass (out of) u (and) me
That obviously isn't the problem with airplane manufacturing, and maybe not for car mechanics either. But it's totally endemic in the consumer world.
"Do not operate while driving" on car HUDs. "Do not consume if pregnant" on perfectly safe OTC medications. "Do not continue to ride after a crash" on bike frames.
It's not surprising most of this is just ignored now -- there's no information content. The documentation is nothing more than a list of things for which the manufacturer would like not to be liable, and the marginal cost of adding to that list is ~0. It will grow until we run out of room in the manual / space on the packaging.
"Store between 68 and 75 F." Or what? Is that a "must follow or else death", or a "it may reduce efficacy 0.5%" or a "we've never run a sufficiently powerful study under any other conditions, but there's no theoretical reason it should matter"? It matters quite a bit to me which!
I don't see how we can hope to have good-faith communication under such a heavy threat of litigation. I would not be surprised if /that/ turns out to be relevant to the Boeing issue, even if the rest is unrelated.
> My theory is that this is not limited to Boeing or even aircraft design, it's a much deeper and systemic problem affecting all kinds of fields. We've had a lot of industrial accidents lately.
> When aircraft manufacturing was an emerging industry there were tons of undocumented safety margins and "slack" in the design and production pipeline. Over time, the beancounters start optimizing stuff, so these undocumented safety margins are eroded in the name of efficiency/profit (and sometimes even documented safety margins too).
> Furthermore, workers back in the day had a much better life when it comes to purchasing power (especially when it comes to property), and so could actually "give more fucks" about the job than they do now which is a compounding factor. You used to get a lot of implicit quality assurance back then which you don't get now.
> We've now reached a stage where these undocumented safety margins have been eroded enough that it actually starts to cause issues, and the safeguards that are supposed to catch them aren't good enough, either due to 1) they've never been good enough but just weren't really needed before or 2) they too have been eroded in the same way for the same reason.
It may have not been operator error with the torque wrench. Maybe the torque wrench itself was miscalibrated. Maybe the bolt had a flaw in the metal. It seems too early to make conclusions.
An example of flawed bolts on aircraft in an excerpt from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136970210...:
A bolt from an aircraft flap control unit fractured in the threaded region of the shank near the shoulder with the head upon installation after a major service. A metallurgical investigation was carried out to identify the cause of failure. The bolt was manufactured from cadmium-plated, high-strength steel. Material checks carried out on the bolt showed that it conformed to the required specification and was found to have an approximate ultimate tensile strength of 1380 MPa.
The fracture surface of the failed bolt was examined using SEM to identify the mode of fracture and determine if pre-existing defects were present that could account for the unexpected failure. The fracture surface exhibited two distinct modes of failure. [...]
The embrittlement in this case was attributed to the cadmium plating, which is applied to the bolts to provide corrosion protection to the steel. Hydrogen is evolved during the plating process, which becomes absorbed by the steel. The cadmium plating acts as a barrier to hydrogen diffusion at ambient temperature so that the hydrogen becomes ‘trapped’ in the steel. In high strength steels (>1100 MPa) this leads to embrittlement. To overcome this problem, high strength steel fasteners, which have been cadmium-plated, are baked at 175–205°C for 24 hours to allow hydrogen to diffuse through the cadmium. In this case, failure of the bolts was caused by insufficient baking after plating, which gave rise to hydrogen embrittlement.
In this specific case, I would agree.
I share much of the sentiment of the OP, but I wonder if it is simply my perspective changing as I take on more and more responsibilities. Maybe things have always kind of been this way.
I would be hesitant to say it's all going to hell in a handbasket because that tends to be one of those self-fulfiling prophecies. I prefer to look at things as "challenging, but workable".
People care deeply about a lot of things, just not this. And why should they? When you have every business decision made either by private equity or public companies with a focus only on the next 90 days it turns out everything goes to shit. Wages are stagnant. Wealth inequality is massive. Our society is sick. Issues like this will only increase. Our rail ecosystem is experiencing the same issues for the same reason.
$1000 for a first class ticket from DC to BOS. 6.5 hours.
Same flight first class with Delta this week is $850. Also 6 hours with layover.
Blows my mind first class rail travel is as much as first class air travel.
In my experience, in the UK, taking a train is more expensive than taking a flight (or driving, for that matter).
The train cost more, but you enter the train in the city centre, sit down and relax, go to the restaurant car and eat a nice dinner, relax som more and you arrive in the destination city.
This works better in continental Europe, where you have shorter distances and high speed trains between the capitols, often making the train faster from city centre to city centre than air travel. Traveling from Chicago to SF by train is pleasant, but take a couple days, not a couple of hours.
I took the Amtrak a couple times from DC through WVA and have had several delays trying to get from VA to KY due to priority being given to the freight trains. I remember one trip having a one or two hour delay in the middle of no where while we were side tracked.
It is much, much more comfortable than a plane though.
Also IME Amtrak's prices are surprisingly reasonable. More like a place around the corner than like an airport food court.
I haven't ridden Amtrak in a long time, but I would be absolutely shocked if the first class experience on the Acella is as nice, much less worth a premium compared to flying. Regardless, there's pretty much nothing they could offer to make it worth the price premium.
I guess it has to do with planes replacing plane, hence plane must be better, hence more expensive.
But the reality is that the plane won because of two things: speed and cost. Air is free. Miles of miles of railroad is very expensive to build and maintain.
Trains are a bit cheaper than planes. But they travel slowly. So cost per mile per passenger is lower for a plane.
Even when subsidized, the cost of rail travel is often more expensive per mile than air travel.
So when Europe and Asia now are building a lot of high speed rail, it's not to make it cheaper, but to lower carbon footprint and to make a more pleasant experience.
Privately-owned companies or worker-owned companies are more resilient to this problem because the nature of their existence means a stronger focus on long term goals. Though there are still issues with publicly owned companies exerting enough influence to acquire and subsequently destroy private companies. For example, Rite-Aid acquiring Bartell Drugs then going bankrupt and proceeding to shutter most Bartell Drug stores leaving Seattle with a deficit of pharmacies.
Welcome to the outcome. When companies look at employees and employee training as an expense, and when the only way to improve your salary is to go to a new company, expect to see these companies to be hollowed out shells of untrained people.
Leadership from a more environmentally-conscious and empathetic Gen Z would definitely have safer products that last longer.
For example a company of 400 people laying off vital talent is literally shooting themselves in the foot. If I was a CEO I would take a cut till I could course correct. Losing talent with a layoff is way more expensive.
You end up paying three to six months for that talent to not work. This is a huge problem.