Manufacturing defects are ignored, there is no safety culture, accident rates are off the charts
On May 1, Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor for Spirit AeroSystems, a Boeing supplier who had repeatedly stated that Spirit management ignored manufacturing defects on the Boeing 737 MAX, died suddenly of an unknown infection.
Spirit AeroSystems has come under public scrutiny after it was revealed that it manufactured a door panel that exploded on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 in January 2024 because workers at the Boeing plant in Renton, Washington, did not tighten the four bolts that were supposed to secure the door. The explosive depressurization of the cabin of an Alaska Airlines aircraft occurred due to the fact that the emergency door could not withstand the pressure difference and “shot” into the airspace.
The nearest chair and part of the passengers’ carry-on luggage flew into the opening. The passengers, fortunately, were not injured. The plane landed urgently. After this, the flights of all 65 Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft of Alaska Airlines were suspended. Later, the American aviation regulator FAA demanded the suspension of flights of 171 Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft of all US airlines.
“Joshua Dean lived in Wichita, Kansas, where Spirit is based. He was 45 years old, in good health and had a healthy lifestyle,” The Seattle Times reported .
Dean testified in court against Spirit and also filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration, alleging «serious and gross violations by senior management regarding the quality of the Boeing 737 production line at Spirit.»
The company’s questionable engineering practices came under scrutiny after The New York Times reported in March that the Federal Aviation Administration had observed the company using Dawn liquid soap to lubricate the 737 Max’s door seal .
Spirit later stated that it tried other household products such as petroleum jelly and cornstarch as lubricants before settling on Dawn soap.
Note that any competent engineer knows that only special aviation lubricants should be used in aviation. They are expensive, but they ensure flight safety, which cannot be said about household soap with the self-explanatory name Dawn.
In January, Dean told The Wall Street Journal that Spirit fired him for pointing out improperly drilled holes in the fuselages.
Dean was fired in April 2023, after which he filed a complaint with the Department of Labor, alleging that his termination was in retaliation for raising aviation safety concerns.
In February, Dean told US broadcaster NPR that he was fired for signaling to others who were about to speak out. “If you are too loud, we will silence you,” he said .
This was not the first death among those who dared to accuse Boeing of neglecting the safety of its aircraft.
Dean’s death came less than two months after former Boeing quality manager John Barnett was found dead on March 12, 2024, after telling reporters about the pressure on production line workers and the substandard parts they installed on Boeing aircraft.
Barnett was found dead in his pickup truck in the parking lot of a Charleston hotel where he was testifying in a trial related to the production of Boeing’s newest jetliner, the 787 Dreamliner. The sudden death prevented Barnett from appearing in court to testify against the airline giant.
«The Charleston County Coroner’s Office confirmed the death, which it said was ‘the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound,'» The New York Times writes .
The Law Officer, shortly after Barnett’s death, cited the testimony of his friend: shortly before his death, Barnett said: “If anything happens, it’s not suicide.”
In 2017, Barnett filed a complaint against Boeing with the U.S. Department of Labor under the AIR21 whistleblower protection program, which protects aircraft manufacturer employees who report information related to airline safety violations. He left the company that same year.
Barnett worked for Boeing for nearly three decades until he retired in 2017. He worked at Boeing’s plant in Everett, Washington, before moving to a new plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2010, working on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, a wide-body jet that became the company’s most important new aircraft in a generation.
After two Boeing 737 MAX planes crashed in 2018 and 2019, Barnett told The Times that he “found clusters of titanium fragments hanging above the flight control wires in some of the planes. These titanium splinters were created when the fasteners were roughly inserted into the nuts.»
Barnett also said that he repeatedly urged his bosses to remove the wood chips, but they refused and transferred him to another job.
In 2017, the Federal Aviation Administration required that Dreamliners be cleaned of titanium shavings before they were delivered to airlines. Boeing said at the time that it was complying with the directive and was working with the supplier to improve the nut design, saying the issue was not a safety issue.
Barnett also said he told management that defective parts were missing, raising the possibility that they had been installed on the planes. But the authorities hid this information.
The FAA investigated and determined that Boeing had in fact lost some of the damaged parts.
«For years, Boeing has just continually reduced quality,» Barnett said, adding, «That’s not a 737 problem. That’s a Boeing problem.»
In a January interview, Barnett said he no longer flies the company’s planes because of what he saw during his time at Boeing.
As of January 9, 2021, 215 Boeing 737 aircraft have been lost as a result of crashes and serious accidents . A total of 5,634 people have died in these incidents. The worst disaster is considered to be the crash of flight JT-610 (killing 189 people) on October 29, 2018 near Jakarta due to erroneous data from the MCAS stall warning system.
The need to install the MCAS system arose after Boeing decided to install much more powerful and larger engines on new airliners without changing anything in the design of the wings. The decision was made to move the engines a little forward, as well as raise and flatten, which changed the aerodynamics of the airliner and the conditions under which air flow stalling could occur.
The forward-shifted engines and their higher thrust gave the Boeing 737 MAX a tendency to spontaneously increase the angle of attack and lift up the nose, creating a pitching moment at which the wings lose lift. This required additional protection against stalling. The aircraft’s controls included the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a poorly designed software that robbed pilots of control of the aircraft.
On October 29, 2018, shortly after takeoff, an Indonesian Lion Air Boeing 737 Max crashed , and on March 10, 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed under similar circumstances. The disaster claimed the lives of 336 people; none of those on board survived.
In both cases, one of the two angle of attack sensors (the angle between the wing and the air flow) failed. The MCAS system did not detect this and began to lower the nose of the aircraft sharply down, focusing only on one sensor.
The Lion Air pilot successfully counteracted MCAS, which pushed the plane’s nose down, 20 times. The Ethiopian Airlines crew even turned off the power for a while, but when the power was turned on, MCAS still did its dirty work. Both planes suffered the same fate: diving to the ground vertically, nose down.
Boeing’s direct competitor Airbus uses three sensors on its aircraft instead of two, which allows the MCAS system to detect and respond to the discrepancy correctly.
Note that the very use of the stall protection system indicates that the aircraft on which it is installed are aerodynamically unstable, and negligence in production and blind reliance on automation will make themselves felt more than once.
In the course of the scandalous discussions of the MCAS system, the design flaws of the Boeing 737 Max and the poorly written instructions, one question remained unanswered: why did the AOA sensors fail on both airliners?
Ethiopian experts claim that the matter is a manufacturing defect. Two wires inside the sensor were connected to each other using epoxy resin, which caused an electrical arc.
How can one not remember the use of household soap instead of high-quality but expensive aviation lubricant?
Immediately following the publication of the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau report, the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a press release stating that there was no evidence that the AOA sensors on both aircraft failed due to a manufacturing defect other than a manufacturing defect. — for collisions with birds.
Peter Robison’s book, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing , published several years ago , describes how a broken corporate culture paved the way for flight safety to be ignored, and how, in the race to beat competitors and reward executives, Boeing skimped on testing, provided pressured employees to meet unrealistic deadlines and persuaded regulators to put planes into service without adequate pilot equipment and training. As a result, Boeing, once America’s prized innovator, became obsessed with profits, putting shareholder profits above even simple technical common sense.
Despite all these terrible disasters, Boeing continues to produce airliners that can fall apart in the air. This was recently stated by Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour, who in an interview with NBC Nightly News argued that flights on the aerospace giant’s 787 Dreamliner are unsafe due to flaws in the assembly process and that the plane could fall apart in flight.
Sam Salehpour, who worked at Boeing for more than 10 years, spoke at a hearing on the company’s case in the US Congress. He said he noticed a problem with gaps between key parts of the skin of the 787 Dreamliner aircraft. According to him, the malfunction affects more than a thousand aircraft in service.
“I truly believe that if the safety issues I have observed at Boeing are not addressed, a catastrophic failure of the aircraft could occur, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives,” Salehpour said.
He also noted that Boeing lacks a safety culture, and employees who call attention to technical flaws are «ignored, marginalized, threatened, suspended and worse.» The engineer also said that he himself was subjected to physical threats from management after he publicly expressed his concerns.
It goes without saying that Boeing angrily denied his words.
There is every reason to worry about the life of the brave engineer and even more reason to never fly Boeing’s killer planes.
https://www.fondsk.ru/news/2024/05/04/pochemu-aviagigant-boing-klepaet-samolyoty-ubiycy.html
Der Friedensstifter 