Were these plug doors mounted by Boeing themselves? Or under Boeing's aegis, which is the same thing. Or were they sold in a different configuration and an external contractor did the modifications?
United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
581–590 of 773 posts
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that doesn't contradict the parent, does it? I'd say you both make good points.
Well... here's a thought experiment. Let's say you have a bunch of school children and architects create a skyscraper. I've given both groups the process to design a skyscraper. So in both cases, I should end up with a safe building?
I’d bet the children would come out better simply because they have parents who are likely multi-disciplined as a group. A disparite group will (almost) always come up with better results than a homogeneous one (at least in my experience)
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#583I was responsible for safe for flight inspections on military aircraft and the photo included in that post is completely insane to me. Those bolts being loose (and they are BIG bolts) would mean multiple people in the installation process didn’t do their jobs, and signed their life on the line saying they did. When I did maintenance, there was someone (QA) there to witness every torqued bolt, inspect every safety wir…
The management imported from McDonnel-Douglas? The same management that drove it to ground? The fish rots from the head. And these constant problems sure do sound like a new company culture of cutting corners instead engineering first.
Looks like the installer did their job poorly and the QA rubber stamped it without checking.
Are the QAs required to make photos to prove that they did their job? Like those food delivery people.
Alternative is wrong bolts, or sabotage.
But more possible - one lazy QA ghosting.
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#584On at least 5 airplanes? Of one airline? Are loose bolts a minor issue, or is it as insane as it reads?
No, it's as insane as it reads. It means people were careless and sloppy during assembly. Think of it like seeing "one cockroach in your kitchen." It's not one cockroach. You just haven't opened up the rest of the walls.
From Alaska Airlines...
>> "Initial reports from our technicians indicate some loose hardware was visible on some aircraft."
Friendly reminder that 'some' can also mean most or all.
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#585This is reassuring news to me, as someone who has opted for Airbus over Boeing (and even paid extra for it) whenever given the choice since the first 737-MAX crashes in 2017.
I've tried doing this too but unfortunately still ended up on some 737 max due to airplane change after I booked the ticket.
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#586I found it interesting that Boeing did proactively tell airlines to inspect 737 MAXs for a possible loose bolt in a different part of the plane (rudder section) at least 8 days before the January 5th event. Example story: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-ur... Unfortunately, Boeing did not know they had other issues with the plug door bolts.
I recall a running joke from my childhood - from a former communist East European counry - about a certain car saying you should finish the assembly at home after purchase, tightening the screws before first use. Despite being a famously poor quality car - even in the sloppy East European practices - that supposed to be a joke not to follow suit!
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in the defense industry, it’s very much like the aerospace industry in that we deal with human life as a consequence of our work. We have software QA departments that operate very much like manufacturing or aerospace QA. Software QA provides nothing of value to software development; having it as a dedicated function works against the overtly stated goals of the function and counterintuitively acts to degrade q…
About 2000, Software QA (and almost all traditional QA activities) were changed. The focus was on process over inspection. "Design in quality, do not inspect it into the product" Suppliers (to include software) were expected to manage the quality of the product they provided; the purchaser would focus on how they managed the process, not in the compliance of every part. This had a chance until software process was to…
I recall a bug I was involved with at a telecoms equipment market in the early 2000s. The bug only showed up in our biggest base stations in high load situations. We diagnosed the bug, and there were a couple of parts to it. Sloppy software design in an optional hardware module (no state machine) was one part - and was fixed. But there was another underlying issue in the way message queues were handled.
Anyhow, the fix for this was created and written. But we never got to put it into production. The reason: the company didn't have a lab test facility that could put a sufficient load on the software to prove it. Even though we were getting field failures because of this issue that were getting a bad rep, we couldn't fix it because even though the old code was known to be buggy, we couldn't prove the new code. So the process said we couldn't ship it.
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really about the door plug per se, it's about how Boeing's entire manufacturing, design and QA process could allow such an elementary mistake to escape notice in the first place. If they got this wrong, what other bolts didn't they tighten properly? This question is especially relevant since just a few weeks ago, Boeing issued an airworthiness directive about loose bolts in the rudder system. In any reasonab…
The crazy thing is that since the old Max fiasco several of us believed that the priorities of the Boeing company were completely wrong: they had decided to cut so many corners to increase profit to the point of negligence. Doing That, in an airplane is just crazy. Their manufacturing process is just kaput. And there is no force that will make them fix it until their planes start falling mid flight in pieces. I find…
All the 737 Max of the same type in the incident have been grounded.
Grounding every plane Boeing has ever built would be quite an overreaction and would be disastrous for both passenger and cargo transportation.
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#589I was responsible for safe for flight inspections on military aircraft and the photo included in that post is completely insane to me. Those bolts being loose (and they are BIG bolts) would mean multiple people in the installation process didn’t do their jobs, and signed their life on the line saying they did. When I did maintenance, there was someone (QA) there to witness every torqued bolt, inspect every safety wir…
The management imported from McDonnel-Douglas? The same management that drove it to ground? The fish rots from the head. And these constant problems sure do sound like a new company culture of cutting corners instead engineering first.
> The management imported from McDonnel-Douglas?
I've heard this since they killed hundreds of people in the two crashes. Why are they being protected? They have names.
Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
#590Bolts and machine screws are very interesting. One mistake I, an amateur bike mechanic, made for years was not greasing bolts properly before assembly. It sounds counterintuitive but without grease a bolt (or machine screw) will bind early with a high torque well before it is correctly tensioned lengthways. The torque is just a proxy for the tension and it is this tension which is needed to fasten your components tog…
I keep a toothbrush covered in grease for just this purpose. It’s also a magnetic one so I can stick it to stuff and it stays put.
Where does one find a magnetic toothbrush?