NASA inspector general gives damning assessment of Boeing's quality control

If a board makes it from SMT to testing, or from testing to integration, or from anywhere to anywhere else with even a fingerprint on it a nonconformance is logged and it gets kicked back.

That’s like 9100D 101.

The thought of stamping or initialing something I am unsure of is a literal impossibility and the report says it is happening all of the god damned time at Boeing.

I cannot for the life of me understand what’s going on over there.

My first-hand experience at 2 large aerospace contractors is that QA resources have been a smaller and smaller portion of the contract budget.

The last companies I worked for had zero software QA. After two years of scraping together what I could, I eventually gave up.

I also feel like some of this, being starliner or SLS issues are shades of the "good, fast, cheap, pick two" problem.

I say this is also understandable because 1) The government is probably going to bail BA out for the next 10 mess-ups; and 2) The stock market, since 2010, and perhaps further before, has been a money game, mostly dictated by monetary policies instead of corporate performance.

Columbia killed people because NASA saw the flaking foam but kept flying the shuttle because they didn't have another option for space access. Afterwards, Commercial Crew was written up with multiple providers to keep this from happening again.

Imagine an alternative timeline where NASA learned that relying on one launcher was dangerous 20 years earlier from Challenger. In that world, apparently NASA would see the foam issues and still sent up a crew on Columbia's last flight to preserve 'dissimilar redundancy.' Nevermind that this was a policy instituted _specifically_ to make it politically easy to ground unsafe vehicles. Utter insanity.

1. Everything is fine. This is working as intended. The system (competition in this case) will "solve" this problem, if there is even a systemic problem; or

2. Therea are a few bad apples but the system is fine; or

3. The system is fundamentally flawed.

When it comes to capitalism, most people fall under (1) or (2). "The markets will solve it" is (1). "We need more or strong regulation" is (2). Even "we need less regulation" is also (2).

We can talk about how the finance people took over Boeing from the engineers and that's where these problems began. I agree with that. However, my view is that putting Boeing back in the hands of engineers won't solve this problem because it's a systemic issue. Financialization, profit-seeking and the lack of accountability at every level of Boeing is (IMHO* inevitable.

Boeing is really two companies right now.

The first is the part that makes commercial airplanes. It's a company that's really still coasting off the success and the ingrained culture from the hugely successful (but now reitred) 747. There are problems already evident however. We've seen it with the 737MAX and even the delays and cost overruns from the 787.

The second face of Boeing is the government and military contractor, which is where Starliner falls. It's the same basket as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. These companies sole purpose in existence is to extract wealth from the government and give it to shareholders. It is transferring all of the profits with none of the risk.

The last century really saw this idea take off of "small government" and outsourcing and "public-private partnerships". All of it is simply wealth extraction.

I would honestly be shocked at this point if Boeing was able to turn things around. The problems permeate every pore of the company and we live in a system where that outcome is arguably inevitable.

Plenty of executives pretend that if you throw enough procedures and micromanagement at cheap entry-level employees then they can produce similar stuff as experts, and this seems to be evidence Boeing is trying and failing to do just that. Any executive can put procedures in place, and good training can do great things, but it's hard to say you care about quality then slash pay for good labor. Take this line from the actual report:

"Michoud officials stated that it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce with aerospace manufacturing experience in part due to Michoud’s geographical location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors... it is too early to determine if the new training alone will result in a notable decrease in nonconformances and CARs issued. According to a NASA official, further quality assurance challenges related to the workforce stem from work instructions that lack explicit details on how to perform the task and with what tools. Some technicians reported they had to hunt through layers of documentation to identify required instructions"