Boeing whistleblower says 787 fleet should be grounded | Hacker News Reader

Boeing whistleblower says 787 fleet should be grounded

thehill.com

104 pointspseudolus28 comments

Seems like Boeing could benefit from a Netflix style chaos monkey approach. Formalize a red team with the power to sabotage parts and processes throughout the build, measure downstream inspectors' responsiveness and demote and promote accordingly. Isolate the red team from the rest of the corporate culture, reward them in proportion to estimated lives saved, and arrange for their reports to be made public without a filter. Anyway it will take some such radical reform and transparency to regain trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering

Except if one of the intentional faults gets through people could die.

They could stop it from going out to the customer

Yes but you don’t know what other faults may be introduced when trying to fix the first one.

“X is broken. X is fixed. But while fixing X, Y is accidentally broken” is a common accident pattern.

Unlike in software, you can’t just roll back to a last known good configuration. Every modification carries a risk.

Don't fix it, dispose it

Throw out an entire brand new airplane?

Boeing would lock non-conforming parts in a cage so there is no chance they will be accidentally used. Unfortunately, managers would overrule an inspector and get the parts released for use

Now imagine that the manager knows there's an adversarial team actively working to entrap them into doing just that, with firing power and a financial incentive to use it.

Or imagine the CEO says, "Safety is everyone's job, we will accept no lapses in safety"

Instead the CEO said "increase monthly production 10% this quarter"

There is no trick needed here, just the proper leadership. The current Boeing CEO is an accountant who made a fortune running the private equity playbook of squeezing out costs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Calhoun

And what if the management hierarchy actively fought against safety and quality inspection, and deliberately avoided making documentation, and worked to kick out or demoralise anyone who tried to ensure safety and quality?

https://sdgln.com/news/2024/03/30/boeings-descent-into-chaos...

> Under the leadership of CEO Jim McNerney, Boeing underwent a seismic shift in its corporate culture. Driven by a desire to cut costs and bust unions, McNerney embarked on a mission to outsource the development and engineering of the 787 Dreamliner to suppliers, many of whom lacked the necessary expertise. This ill-conceived plan not only burned through billions of dollars but also set the stage for a systematic purge of Boeing’s most experienced and knowledgeable workforce.

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-03-14-strange-death-boeing...

> Deliberate nondocumentation was a cornerstone of the new Boeing culture with which Swampy came into constant conflict. In 2014, he was reprimanded in a performance review for documenting “process violations” in writing instead of flagging issues verbally and “working in the gray areas”—i.e., without leaving a paper trail. Nondocumentation was part of a larger “theory,” Swampy explained in an interview earlier this year with TMZ, that “quality is overhead and not value-added.”

Sounds like something the FAA and/or Boeing's accountants would shoot down the minute you think about it.

Building airplanes is expensive as hell

A broken clock is right twice a day. the 787 fleet has been flying since, what, 2011, without a single hull-loss event.

There was a youtube documentary I saw at least 5 years ago (before the max disasters), who had a hit piece on boeing. They duped them into letting them film in the (North|South) Carolina plant (787 I believe), until they started asking pointed questions about safety and were asked to leave. They interviewed (off-site) one of the hourly manufacturing employees who attested to a bunch of careless practices. This was right about the time one of the Middle Eastern airlines said they only wanted 787's from Seattle, not the Carolina plant.

Even though their documentary proved prescient with the Max problem, I still don't think they were able to really connect anything. IIRC most of the documentary focused on mechanical issues, leaving pliers/plastic junk inside the airframe, whereas the root-cause turned out to be a systems engineering: MCAS and allowing cost-saving on one AOA sensor.

I would try to find it, but given all the recent press, I highly doubt I could. It may not have been Youtube, it could have been Al-Jazeera or Vice, etc. But if you pick the most popular flying vehicle and then start a doomer prophecy, of course there will eventually be something that makes it sound like you were right.

To help find it, you could try searching youtube with this operator

<search terms> before:2018-10-28

You're referring to The Boeing 787: Broken Dreams published in 2014 by Al Jazeera

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

This revealed a host of problems with the 787 Dreamliner, mainly that its battery packs catch fire (which is why it was grounded by the FAA from January to April 2013 to revise the battery design). This is the plane relevant to this latest whistleblower, but not the same plane as the 737 MAX, the one with the MCAS system and the door plugs missing bolts

thank you for finding this. I disagree that this documentary revealed the battery pack fires. I remember seeing several of those stories in the news around 2011-12 because they were catching fire with passengers on board.

Yeah, it is easy to lose perspective of how safe air travel is today compared to even as recently as the '90s. See for example the 737 rudder jams, in which people died in multiple incidents during the '90s, yet for some reason it got much less media coverage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

Because Boeing did not actively try to hide the design flaw they knew about as they did with the 737 Max

I'm a bit skeptical that this in particular is a major issue, for the sole reason that fuselage joint shims, tolerances, bends, and fasteners on the 787 have been under a ridiculous level of scrutiny since 2019 and earlier: https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/new-boeing-787-fix-de...

It's clear that Boeing have awful quality control issues, but this one seems like it's already been investigated extensively. I absolutely believe that non-approved, dangerous procedures were used to fit 787 panels together, but this was known 5+ years ago and heavily investigated.

Of course, that doesn't justify retribution against a whistleblower. Which is all to say - I do believe Boeing are deeply questionable as an organization, but I'd still be comfortable flying on a 787.

From what I understood, the problem is not how the job has been done, but the design of the fuselage itself that can fall apart with time. The solution is to inspect several of these airplanes to make sure that the joints are in good condition.

> “We are fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner,” a Boeing spokesperson said in a statement.

Forgive me if I say you’ve lost the credibility necessary to make such a statement.

"We are confident in the safety of the 737 MAX and in the work of the men and women who design and build it," Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg March 2019

https://au.news.yahoo.com/boeing-ceo-says-confident-safety-2...

ITYM "We are fully convinced we will receive our usual bonuses, and if we get fired we expect a severance package of tens of millions of dollars."

While it sounds like there are problems, and they should be investigated, taking the word of a one (or even a few) whistleblower on something like this should be taken with skepticism. Everything involving airplanes extremely complex, and most people work on very specific parts. Most engineers work on very specific parts of it (like any field).

It's like a doctor coming out and saying "this drug, procedure, etc is completely worthless!". It takes more than a few single individuals to assess the problems or efficacy of things.

We should push for the government to investigate, but journalism pieces like this just erode trust when their headline is a single person is saying the equivalent of "SHUT IT ALL DOWN, TRUST ME". We have no idea what his role, skill set, or knowledge of all this is.

Can we use the original article? The Hill is clickbait and not reliable.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/whistleblower-outlines-...

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-a-veteran-reporter-wo...

If this complaint ends in an investigation (big if) and the investigation reveals those issues, this is going to be Boeing's nightmare that will pile onto their growing list of issues. Would it even be possible for the company to be salvaged at that point?

They don't have to worry about reputation, they can just grease Congress's pockets as they've been doing for the past 2-3 decades despite blatant problems. As long as they can keep blocking American competitors from emerging, they'll be fine.

Boeing is about as close as a company can get to being a strategic asset for US national security. Functional passenger airplanes or not, I have a strong suspicion they will not be allowed to fail.

Brave of him for speaking out after what happened to John Barnett. Hope more people will listen to him and he will have a more fortunate outcome than the previous whistleblower.

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