Boeing 737 MAX family NEWS ONLY

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Oh, crap. "And another one bit the dust..." To be honest, it is difficult to distinguish between a) airline servicing failures and b) Boeing manufacturing failures. Of course the media has no clue and happily mix both.

Do you think that failure could be an airline mechanics mistake, and thus Boeing has nothing to do with it ?
 
So another Boeing 737 Max issue this time an engine Couling detaches during flight, I do wonder why the 737 Max is having all these problems. I would not like to travel on a Boeing passenger airliner right now especially the 737 Max.
 
FighterJock said:
So another Boeing 737 Max issue this time an engine Couling detaches during flight, I do wonder why the 737 Max is having all these problems. I would not like to travel on a Boeing passenger airliner right now especially the 737 Max.
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It's an -800 not a Max8.
 
Thanks TomS, with all the issues at Boeing curently it is easy to get the airliners mixed up. Though I wonder what happened to the Couling to become detached the way that it did during flight? Is it a Boeing problem or the engine manufactures this time round?
 
This is not the first time this has happened to an airliner and it has happened on other manufacturers aircraft as well. This from back in 2013 re an Airbus 319.

A319 Double Cowling Loss and Fire - AAIB Report - Aerossurance

In particular, we look at the maintenance human factors that resulted in the cowlings being left unlatched, including an aircraft 'swap-error' and fatigue.
aerossurance.com aerossurance.com

In that case the investigation revealed the following contributory factor

"The design of the fan cowl door latching system, in which the latches are positioned at the bottom of the engine nacelle in close proximity to the ground, increased the probability that unfastened latches would not be seen during the pre‑departure inspections. The lack of the majority of the high-visibility paint finish on the latch handles reduced the conspicuity of the unfastened latches. The decision by the technicians to engage the latch handle hooks prevented the latch handles from hanging down beneath the fan cowl doors as intended, further reducing the conspicuity of the unfastened latches."
That was not the first time that had happened. There had been a similar incident at New York in 2008 on the same type..

Also ATR at Mumbai in Feb 2022.

Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-900ER in Aug 2022
www.9news.com.au

Alaska Airlines engine cover rips off during emergency landing

It started with an "unusual vibration" on the left side of a US commercial jet and ended with its engine co...
www.9news.com.au www.9news.com.au
 
publiusr said:
Dish soap?
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Took an awful long time for Boeing/Spirit to respond to this...

(And I cannot read most of that article without creating a NYT account. I refuse to give them any profits from me on the grounds that they're liars about the Bestsellers list. And if they're lying about the Bestsellers list being a list of the most-purchased books the previous week or two, what else are they lying about?)

But overall it looks like Boeing/Spirit is making the same point I did either here or on FB:
  1. Dish soap is often used to ease the installation of door seals, the problem was specifically that Dawn was not called out in the procedure.
  2. A credit card or hotel keycard is a perfect soft 1mm feeler gauge that won't contaminate aluminum parts with steel or brass, the problem is that it wasn't called out in the procedure.
So it now appears that Boeing has approved the procedures that specify Dawn dishsoap and the use of a keycard as the feeler gauge.
 
WatcherZero said:





As a QA I can say that using Dawn soap in a process isn't in and of its self wrong so long as the method and result has been validated as resulting in a product of acceptable quality and that once validated as the approved method you then always use the same product that has been validated or validate additional products as acceptable substitutes and that the usage of the products in the process is recorded and documented as it is used.
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I refer you to my 12th March post above.

Cant read the specific NYT article but a similar article says the use of Dawn soap is now properly written into their procedure. They had previously validated the use of Dawn soap after the validations of Talc and Vaseline failed as they were found to degrade the seals over time. However they have now replaced the use of credit cards with a proper 1mm feeler gauge.
 
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robunos said:
www.independent.co.uk

‘This will end with a hole in the ground’: Inside the Boeing catastrophe

‘They were always caught flat-footed by some terrible problem that many people in the workplace knew would happen... And that happened over and over and over and over and over again.’ Io Dodds reports on a corporate nightmare
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk

cheers,
Robin.
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Sweet Jesus. The horror, the horror.

That approach might work well for other industries, whose products are less complex and tend to kill fewer people when they fail.
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Reminds me of Hammond and Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park

John Hammond: All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.

Just realized that present Boeing shape is not unlike Jurassic Park in the first movie. Hammond = Boeing CEOs, Ian Malcolm is the whistleblowers while 737MAX are the raptors.
 
Technically, Boeing is North American, Rockwell, manufacturers of the X-15, Apollo, Saturn 2nd stage and the shuttle orbiter...
Boeing made also the X-20 Dyna Soar and X-37...
 
Issue with 737 scrapping their tails during takeoff traced back to a software code (from Sweden):

The program is supposed to deliver “crucial weight and balance data” that pilots enter into their flight computers to help determine stuff like “how much thrust the engines will provide and at what speed the jet will be ready to lift off.”

The data [delivered] was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds light. With the total weight of those jets at 150,000 to 170,000 pounds, the error was enough to skew the engine thrust and speed settings
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airlive.net

REPORT Two Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 tail strike incidents were caused by a software glitch

A software glitch caused a temporary shutdown of Alaska’s flight activity nationwide. On the morning of Jan. 26, as two Alaska Airlines flights from Seattle to Hawaii departing six minutes apart experienced a tail strike. The pilots of each flight felt a slight bump and the flight attendants at...
airlive.net airlive.net
 
TomcatViP said:
Issue with 737 scrapping their tails during takeoff traced back to a software code (from Sweden):



airlive.net

REPORT Two Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 tail strike incidents were caused by a software glitch

A software glitch caused a temporary shutdown of Alaska’s flight activity nationwide. On the morning of Jan. 26, as two Alaska Airlines flights from Seattle to Hawaii departing six minutes apart experienced a tail strike. The pilots of each flight felt a slight bump and the flight attendants at...
airlive.net airlive.net
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I’m not sure if Alaskan Airlines, or even the FAA, fully understands the scope of the American obesity epidemic.
 
Seattle Times goes a bit deeper into it. Bug was in the server rather than with the calculation itself, it couldn't handle a large amount of aircraft simultaneously requesting weight calculations. The airline told their crews to switch off remote synchronisation on their pads so that the calculation was done locally for the five hours until it was patched.
 
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Great news but I don't quite understand how wrong data could be returned as a result of an overflow.
The server program should either send a false flag or accurate results.
 
@TomcatViP That's what a software glitch is about - a program is expected to do something, then - it doesn't. Either by defective design, or a programming error that wasn't discovered during testing.
 
TomcatViP said:
That means most if not all returned results were wrong.
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Without knowledge of the total number of errors versus the total number of correct results, the conditions that led to errors - impossible to say.
TomcatViP said:
That nobody noticed earlier is concerning.
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How long has the affected software version been in use? I would say the people responsible should thoroughly review their testing procedures.
 
Why was W&B even done as a server/cloud computation? It's literally simple enough to do by hand (if unpleasant on a large plane)
 
Scott Kenny said:
Why was W&B even done as a server/cloud computation? It's literally simple enough to do by hand (if unpleasant on a large plane)
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Most of the airlines have some central office computing the W&B data and sending it to the aircrew. Recently had the experience where we pushed back from the gate, almost got to the runway and got pulled aside so the office could confirm our W&B was good for the flight, after a few minutes we got cleared to go, makes me wonder though if some of the basic airmanship is lost these days. I got my license at 18 and never forgot how to do a W&B and did my fair share of potato diagrams in engineering school. I'm probably just an old fart by now, BTW you kids get off my lawn!!! ;)
 
The Atlantic on Boeing's decline. The author primarily blames alienation of the executives from the shop floor and outsourcing almost all manufacturing to subcontractors with poor - if any - centralised record keeping or quality control. Boeing is not the only one.

May be paywalled but here's the essence.

The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes. For nearly 40 years the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005 it sold this facility to a private-investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its “supplier.” Offloading, Boeing called it. Meanwhile the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits. Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.

[...]

Hart-Smith warned, “it is necessary for the prime contractor to provide on-site quality, supplier-management, and sometimes technical support. If this is not done, the performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers.”

[...]

A plane is a complex system in which the malfunction of one piece can produce catastrophic failure of the whole. Assembly must be tightly choreographed. But now—especially with Boeing continually trying to wring costs from its suppliers—there were many more chances for errors to creep in. And when FAA investigators finally toured the premises of Spirit AeroSystems—maker of the blown-out door as well as the fuselage it was supposed to fit in—they did not find a tight operation. They found one door seal being lubricated with Dawn liquid dish soap and cleaned with a wet cheesecloth, and another checked with a hotel-room key card.

www.theatlantic.com

Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing

Somewhere along the line, the plane maker lost interest in making its own planes. Can it rediscover its engineering soul?
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

A significant link to a Casandra's warning in the article:

DocumentCloud

www.documentcloud.org www.documentcloud.org

The same problem, I think, is going to be the undoing of many startups, such as in EVOTL where techbros with Powerpoints and AI-generated imagery think they can outsource everything but the 'vibe.'
 
Didn't realized that Spirit company was Boeing divesting the historical Wichita plant to a separate entity. No surprise the whole thing went right into a wall.
 
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