On January 5, 2024, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 made global headlines, when a door plug blew off while the aircraft was inflight. This caused the FAA to temporarily ground the Boeing 737 MAX 9, so that regulators could investigate what happened. The jet is now flying again, but with updated inspection guidelines.
Continue reading: NTSB Report: Boeing Mis-Installed 737 MAX 9 Door Plug That Blew Off
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
On December 6, 2012, Washington became the first U.S. state to legalize recreational use of marijuana and the first to allow recreational marijuana sales. That said, Boeing employees are subject to random drug testing with the company doing 5 panel drug test on new employees and random tests if accidents occur. Any other former aerospace workers wondering if this epic failure by employees in repair and quality inspection qualifies as an accident?
Keep firing experienced technicians, reduce spending in quality control, use that money for stock buybacks, increase CEO and shareholder payout.
This is in essentially what all corporations are doing.
Only thing, Boeing's products have to stay up in the air.
Manufacturing quality in Renton has been going down the tubes for years now. So what’s Boeing’s response? Move HQ back there from distant Chicago?
Nope. They’re moving to DC instead, even further from the manufacturing HQ. They’d rather be closer to the politicians than their assembly line. Why try and fix defects when you can just lobby them away? Disgusting.
You realize that corporate drug testing has been a thing for decades on end, and didn't just cease when marijuana became legal on a state level, right?
"Why try and fix defects when you can just lobby them away?"
And they're certainly trying, too. They just applied for a safety exemption on the MAX7 and MAX10, rather than fix the problem through engineering (imagine such a thing) a redesign.
Then on top of that, they move production to what's arguably scab labor, in S.Carolina.
Hope 3 production shutdowns in only 2 years, due to QC issues on the 787, was worth it.
And you can argue with techs, argue with stockholders, argue with the FAA, even argue with laws passed by Congress..... but the thing you cannot argue (or even bargain/compromise) with, are the laws of physics.
Yet Boeing sometimes seems intent on doing just that.
Realistically, what would/could he even do?
Boeing's fundamental problem is that it went from being a company run by engineers who climbed through the ranks, therefor knowing what it takes to craft a quality aircraft in-house...
...to Jack Welch acolytes, who wanted to run a Wall Street lobby that coincidentally snaps together pre-fabricated parts for aircraft models well past their prime, as its seed-money scheme.
And then stayed that way for the last quarter century.
One person, no matter how potent, would really struggle to change that, after all this time. 🙁
My dad used to work for Boeing on the 737 line in Renton back in the 90s. He was constantly complaining that management would be on his case for going too slow. They wanted him to work faster, which he argued (rightfully) that the faster they make them go, the more chances there are to make a mistake. He would always say 'no one is in that much of a hurry to die, so why should I go faster? It takes me as long as it takes me to do the job right.' It seems to me that nothing has changed in the last 30 years, and in reality has probably gotten worse. As the daughter of a Boeing man I used to always prefer to fly Boeing, but over the last several years I find that I will go out of my way to fly Airbus when possible and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Lego (or insert here any other building toy) 101 - why do we have four bolts left over?
To play the devil's advocate a bit.
And how is it possible that this is the process after Boeing got so much scrutiny regarding the 737 MAX, after it was grounded for nearly a couple of years?
Because the issues of the MCAS had nothing to do with production process and quality assurance on the line.
Fly Boeing at your peril. Terrible company and terrible products. If it’s Boeing ain’t nobody going.
That's exactly the concerning part. If there are two fundamental failures, so far detached that investigating one does not reveal the other, the door opens to there being a third, fourth, or tenth.
Really because total socialism is a total failure.
Why do you see that as some kind of defense against the notion of unfettered capitalism/corporatism?
Did you ever consider the possibility of, say, neither being an optimal state of operation.....?
There’s a deeper reason that many people don’t want to admit that’s going on. I wonder how many people weren’t hired based on their actual qualifications....
How could the plug, without the 4 restraining bolts c/w castle nuts and cotter pins, during several flights over a period of not less than 40 days, some of which encounted heavy turbulence along with internal and external forces acting on or against it, remain in place? On the incident flight, could an internal differential force acting against the plug window (at 14,840 feet elevation) have been enough to cause the stop plug pins to free themselves allowing the now boltless fittings to fail? My thoughts only. Tog
People can talk as much as they want about the four missed bolts. But something which, as far as I have seen, fails to ever get mentioned is the incredibly impressive 99.9% success rate of Boeing aircraft coming off these very same production lines. Thousands of people work very hard to deliver a reliable product and it's an amazing feat of cooperation and human ingenuity that this is even possible.
Shit happens, people make mistakes. Are there places to improve? Always. Are the profiteering attitudes of Boeing management the right way to run a business? Absolutely not. But let's not forget the millions of Boeing flights which have had zero issues, the hundreds of thousands of Boeing planes which have flown successfully (often even beyond their intended service life), and the tens of thousands of people that go to work every day to make this all happen.