Damn, Jeff, that is both fascinating and scary stuff... Can't help but wonder what gets missed even on the rework... Far cry from the early "if it ain't boeing, I ain't going..." - Though I'm sure The union folks all over Airbus plants are exactly the same (though possibly better educated as the school system is Europe isn't too bad). Crap.

What's scary to me in the end is - the more you know, the scarier this world gets. In every field that I either know experts in, and the very few I consider myself knowledgeable in (hospitals and software) - it's exactly the same... There are %uckwits at every level that can't seem to get fired and produce shoddy work that can kill people, and everywhere the desire to make a buck overrides safety and reason (oh and also the media is full of $hit on almost every technical topic they ever report on)... I liked it more when I was young and blissfully unaware and thought adults were smart. Now I fully realize the idiot that could barely tie his own shoelaces back in highschool has a job, he could be building airplanes, coding driverless automation, digging into gas lines, or just texting while driving and plowing into me...
They're everywhere.. Idiocracy has arrived.

The mechanical bits of planes are simple, the software that (helps you) fly them is not.

There is indeed some correlation between aircraft manufacturing and, say, automobile manufacturing, but there are also some important differences. The differences are driven by production volumes. What would be considered a very short, custom, or even "bespoke" production run in the automotive world, for example, might very well be considered a very long production run in aircraft manufacturing.

In what we refer to as the "back shops", or the detail part and small assembly part of aircraft production, they can often be found building the same thing, in the same configuration, day after day, week after week, month after month, and even year after year. These are the parts and assemblies that go on each aircraft (of the same model) for each and every aircraft configuration for each and every customer. It is at this level that we have found that a less skilled, less educated workforce can produce the quality desired. In other words, if it is repetitive enough, and they do enough of it, they get good at it.

Once we get beyond that level, however, aircraft manufacturing veers sharply away from automotive and other such production. There is a saying at Boeing that "every airplane is a prototype", and that really is no exaggeration. Once customer specific, or sub model specific differences enter the picture, we will see no two airplanes on the very same assembly line that are alike.

And that is where the problems start. You can't just "build it like the last one", because that last one was significantly different than this one. The airplane to airplane variation, even within the same "customer block", is astonishing to anyone not familiar with it. This is where the problem solving skills, the ability to work through and solve new and different problems each and every day plays a vital role in airplane manufacturing.

And, ultimately, this is where SCAB fails. They are incapable of working at that level. They can perform the repetitive work just fine, and crank out some very high quality work. No doubt about it. But when it gets down to assembling a new and different variation of a major assembly or installation, they are at a loss. This is what has driven both their markedly lower production rate, and their markedly lower quality.

And no, one cannot "manage" their way out of this. The only level at which this is a management problem, or a processes problem, is in that management decided to try to build an item of this complexity with that workforce to begin with. Believe me, SCAB has been the focus of a great deal of management attention, "Kaisan" type process improvement efforts, endless coaching by folks from Everett who are doing this successfully - all for naught.

One cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear. They need to understand the limits of manufacturing capability in that region. And yes, a large part of the problem lies in the fact that Boeing has recruited high level management personnel from the automotive and similar mass production industries. These execs didn't "grow up" in the world or aircraft manufacturing, and cannot understand the nuances of it. It's just another product to them. They have tried and tried to introduce automotive style mass production techniques and philosophies to aircraft manufacturing and have failed miserably. The methods employed to manufacture tens of thousands of the exact same thing just do not transfer well when a "long" production run is several dozen, or maybe a few hundred at the most. That, and the problem solving skills required when "every one is a prototype" are vastly under appreciated by these folks. "We build cars there, why can't we build airplanes there?"...

Today a lot of human capital was dropped.

Old saying: "everyone knows what's wrong except those with the power to fix it".

If you can get management to actually pay attention to the details, you can really streamline the process.
Unless your managers are idiots.



http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1556141801.gif

Man-o-man, there is some serious vitriol in this thread.

If I can expand on the previous post a little, I am in management and many times have worked hard to solve a problem, only to have a worker-bee deliver a gift solution and all I had to do was ask.
"everybody knows what's wrong".
Well i didn't.
It's easy to get caught up in the technology and get out of touch with the people on the front lines.
So part of my post was directed right back at me.

I always found the easiest and best way to solve a tooling issue (which was my gig, after all) was to walk right past the manager raising hell about it to my manager and talk to the mechanic using the tool. We always spoke the same language. We would most often have a workable solution before either of our respective managers quit yelling at the other one about it.

Yep, but sometimes you have to have a good "filter" to separate the BS from the good stuff.
If you can sift through it, you'll find the gold.

This.
I used to get so GD frustrated with the office manager at head office who used to redesign shipping forms with zero input from the people who had to actually use the darned forms in the fridges and freezers. Up in his cozy,well lit office, he couldn't understand and didn't care why he contributed to thousands of dollars worth of shipping errors each week. What an arrogant A hole.
Rant over.
Les

agree 100%, my way of working too, talk straight with the guy doing the job not through his boss, not in a rude way, more of filtering out the noise way

Back during my glory years when I was a 'Wheel Nut and Pitstop Gear Chief Designer' ;) my boss told me the chief mechanic had complained because I talked directly to his mechanics that did the team's pit stop's.

I kept up my approach all race season and eventually the chief mechanic got fed up of complaining ;)

Here's a vid of what we called a 'Doppio' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXjjEKb0um4

A lot goes on in a very short time so I needed to know about every single movement so I could figure out how to design out the time. The really quick guys would have the wheel nut off the car before it had stopped which I'd have never guess until I'd talked with them :eek:

This is golden.

During the Kaisan Event at Sikorsky, the floor guys, away from their Foreman, said a big time driver on Blackhawks was interior install (sound proofing)...nothing lined up.

Seemed the old ink-on-mylar drawings and the manufacturing processes drifted out of spec over 20 years...imagine. Easy fix.

No one had listened to the kids who knew the holes did not line up!

in my previous line of work, one of the things that frustrated me most was all the work that kept me from my work.

Lots of meetings that could have been e-mails.
Lots data shuffling "just because we've always done that".
Lots of time spent keeping the exec. leadership team informed of things that should NOT be any of their concern (micro-managing)
Lots of paperwork that serves no real purpose.
Lots of time spent staying "in compliance" with gubmint red tape
Lots of time doing things that my bosses didn't want to do (but should have).
Lots of time dealing with a couple of union trouble-makers who made trouble just because they could

Not much time managing.

The 787 is in trouble too now... Apparently some major defect in fire suppression/extinguisher issues where they cannot be activated in case of an engine fire. Not seeing too much in english yet but it's coming... Not a good time to hold boeing stock.

As has been pointed out in this thread, the same flaw was discovered in the A-380 but better trained pilots (Quantis) recovered and disabled the crap off before it crashed the airplanes.

it isn't a boeing problem, it isn't an airbus problem, it's an automation problem.
relying on machines to think for themselves when they are not capable of thinking for themselves is a problem, no matter how much we pretend.

This was posted on our Union website:

Continued:

Errr....what are you talking about? A-380? Quantis? Automation problem?


Qantas A380 suffered engine fire/turbine explosion due to RR manufacture defect (wrongly machined oil pipe). Automation performed flawlessly and A/C landed with all passengers unharmed.

Automation is not going anywhere. Even Boeing has seen writing on the wall.

Correction, A-330 and not a 380.

First mention of it was in post 196.

The fancy airbus computer took altitude readings and labeled them as angle of attack readings. Then the fancy computer said nose down 6 degrees. then it decided it was going into stall, which it wasn't, so it pitched down another 4 degrees for a total of 10.
It tried doing that a couple of times.
That was enough to send passengers and crew into the ceiling of the plane and hurt a bunch of people.

The pilot was ex-military and did a really good job of recovering and landing the plane.
It happened again on two other A-330s. They never figured out why, so they just disabled that function.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72



<iframe width="964" height="542" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8AwPg6jbYMg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Interesting article.

Not my area of expertise, but the original design/software sounds criminally negligent.

Criminal negligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_negligence
Clearly more than "intermediate seriousness", there might be a better phrase for this, like are "are you freaking serious?"

I looked for news on the 737 Max and found this recent article below.

I was curious find out past the headlines of stopped and canceled orders and sought to find out if the assembly lines are still going and at what rate.

As I posed a few pages back, Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita makes many of the 737 Max fuselages.

May 1, 2019
Spirit AeroSystems won’t immediately move on next Boeing 737 increase
https://www.bizjournals.com/wichita/news/2019/05/01/spirit-aerosystems-won-t-immediately-move-on-next.html
They are still making 42 of these a month, where are they stacking them up at?

I assume the wing sections are also stacking up somewhere.

It's Tornado season, all those 737 parts being stored outside might take flight sooner than expected.

Boeing Manufacturing Countries.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1556820159.jpg


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1556820179.jpg

Boeing is still filling orders for other 737 models, not just the Max.

Man, Jack screws. Jeff, given that jammed j/s's have been an issue for a long time, whether mechanical or aerodynamic load, why hasn't someone come up with an alternative?

Jackscrews can have tremendous leverage on a component like that and one factor that’s important is that the forces on the stabilizer don’t tend to be able to move the jackscrew. The jackscrew can easily move the stabilizer but the stabilizer cannot easily move the jack screw.

Yup, that's why.

A very incomplete list. You will notice that all of the components listed are structural parts and control surfaces. No systems listed - hydraulic, electrical, landing gear, avionics, navigation, environmental, flight controls, etc. There are dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) more suppliers than that. Not to mention who has design responsibility for all of it.

Interestingly, none of the systems, assemblies, or installations implicated in their current issues made this list.

Yup. They will be filling pre-Max orders for some time.

I am not entirely sure (since I have been out of the loop for a couple of years and never worked on Renton aircraft anyways), but it would not surprise me in the least if the affected systems are in place on pre-Max 737 models, if not other Boeing aircraft.

The rather unsophisticated public and press has no idea how new technologies proliferate across the range of currently offered models. The larger twin aisle aircraft, however, are typically flown by more experienced pilots, flying for larger, more successful airlines, and probably would not have the problems demonstrated by second rate third world airlines with under qualified, inadequately trained pilots.

Have they been? Really? My God, there are literally tens of thousands of aircraft in the air today with jack screws utilized to set horizontal stabilizer trim. Hundreds of millions of flight hours. There have been a few notable failures, definitely. Each and every one has been traced to improper maintenance or, at worst, faulty manufacturing resulting in premature component failure. The concept itself is very sound.

We could only dream of such reliability in any of the other mechanical devices with which we surround ourselves. Granted, the price of failure in aviation is much higher than with, say, washing machines, but so is the demonstrated reliability. Anything made by man will never be perfect all of the time. Commercial airplanes are actually about as close as we have ever come.

Didn't know where else to put this, but I enjoyed the video.

I have been to Davis Mothan (where military aircraft are stored) but not to Victorville.

I would love a tour.

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This is an interesting thread. I've no technical knowledge of aircraft. Here's my general conclusion from reading all of this - please tell me if you guys disagree?

1. The plane has some problems (MCAS reliance on single sensor, MCAS operation, warnings optional, training procedure and/or manuals incomplete).
2. The problems can be fixed relatively quickly and inexpensively, once the fix is approved, and the fix won't affect the characteristics that carriers bought the plane (economy, performance, etc).
3. A couple hundred people have died, mostly from third-world countries, the probable damages payout is in the few hundreds of millions US$.
4. Carriers have had to ground their planes for a few months, business losses may be in the few-several hundreds of millions US$.
5. Boeing will be raked over the Congressional coals, but the inquiries will show (maybe) negligence rather than deliberate criminality, fraud, or corruption.
6. The only other source of large commercial aircraft, Airbus, has had similar problems.
7. The carriers are not seeing a downturn in demand, they still need the planes that they have on order, and if they abandon their Boeing orders to buy from Airbus, they'll get their planes even later
8. The current production, that is stacking up as work-in-progress, will be delivered to carriers later this year.
9. Boeing is a critical military contractor in addition to a critical commercial supplier.

If this is all correct, seems to me this will cost Boeing around $1BN in damages and not much in lost orders, although some revenue will be shifted from 1H19 to 2H19.

For sure.

Back in the day, when I had my Mooney, I used to subscribe to all the MOT accident reports. They were interesting reading.

This happened just a few miles from my home

good news everyone is ok

bet it flying to Mecca and operated by 3rd world pilot's :rolleyes:

More details.................

Boeing 737 coming from Guantanamo Bay slid off runway and fell into Florida river, officials say
https://wtkr.com/2019/05/03/commercial-jet-carrying-136-passengers-lands-in-water-near-nas-jacksonville-sources-say/
Looks to be an old facility, hemmed in by the river and a highway. Shorter than usual runways?

http://www.scharch.org/Ed_Scharch/08-nas-jax-oper.htm
http://www.scharch.org/Ed_Scharch/na...ax-general.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1556969442.jpg
https://maps-jacksonville.com/nas-jax-map
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1556968854.jpg

NAS Jax is a very modern facility. Home to the P-8 Poseidon and HSM-60 and MH-60R.

I have flown into Jax dozens of times. Beautiful place.

CNN had interviewed a woman on the flight this morning and her profound description of the event was "the landing didn't feel right"!

No ****, way to go CNN.

737-MMA / P8A Poseidon
Thank you for answering my question.

Good to know that the runway is long enough for those two helicopters you listed. ;)

More to that article that is newsworthy.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/04/us/military-plane-crash-bormann-passenger/index.html

Then you've flown over my house dozens of times too. I live on the east side of the river.

Interesting tidbit - the 60 has a forward landing speed of 70kts if required, which they practice all the time.

Among other reasons, that forward air speed helps with loss of tail rotor control or thrust: At certain forward air-speeds the 60 can fly without an operational tail rotor. Lot's of reasons why, but there is at least one instance where a 60, without tail rotor thrust, was able to land at 70kt forward airspeed and control the landing on roll out. The procedure is in NATOPS. Coming into a hover with an controllable or operation tail rotor is not possible.

Jacksonville has really come into it's own since the 90's. In the old days SH-60B's were all in Mayport and the H-3's were in Jax. I went to the FRS requal in Mayport and spent many nights over in Jax with friends of mine on the weekends. Things have changed for the better.

Nice place!