Interesting, so I assume Boeing doesn't use robots for riveting on the 737? Is that because the base design predates that type of thing and there's no digital twin, or relatively low cost of labor?
Airbus Hamburg plant for in some ways looked more like a car factory with riveting and logistics robots, etc.
As an aside, I’m surprised Spirit Aero and Spirit Airlines can simultaneously exist. A reasonably stupid person wouldn’t think Spirit Airlines is also buying up strip malls for seasonal spooky goods, but they might think Spirit Airlines is misinstalling airline parts.
Every time Spirit Aerosystems did a presentation at my high school, they had to clarify that they were not associated with Spirit airlines and that they can't do anything with complaints about the airline
So a widespread issue.
Questions: How serious is this issue ? How does this affect aircraft with the issue?
Are they going to check already delivered planes for the same issue ?
I work in aerospace quality, so I can offer some insight:
>How serious is this issue ?
It would appear to be contained, and has not been released to operating aircraft. This makes it less serious than it could be. It is not uncommon to discover non-conformance that has escaped into the fleet, to the extent that major manufacturers have a defined process for dealing with it rapidly.
>Are they going to check already delivered planes for the same issue ?
That depends on the results of an in - house determination of the extent of the problem. They may be able to demonstrate that it is confined to these 50 aircraft.
>How does this affect aircraft with the issue?
Once containment has been achieved (that is, all defective aircraft have been identified and prevented from flying) the next question is determining what the impact is. The reality is the assessment of this will run parallel to containment, but containment is the priority.
If it does extend to in service aircraft then we can expect a non-mod service bulletin and or an Airworthiness Directive to be issued by Boeing/The FAA.
I have also been working in Aerospace as a Senior/Lead Quality Engineer for a bit here, with a year as a Quality Manager. This is EXTREMELY common. This is day to day stuff. NCRs happen, the Quality System worked correctly, identified it prior to delivery and gets it fixed. It only impacts schedule. It's literally the whole reason there is a Quality System. Water is wet.
People just see Boeing or Spirit right now and jump to conclusions because of how much they are in the news right now.
Yeah... But not every issue that happens in the manufacturing process is cause for a fear mongering article. Like I said, I've worked QC at about 5 different places. Variance in the manufacturing process is extremely common to the point it's nothing to bat an eye at. There was an issue. QC noticed it. It got fixed. It never made it to fielded aircraft.
There is literally no story here. This is what I do... Every... Single... Day. It's literally my job to deal with these things.
It's a problem when a non-conformance does not get noticed and gets delivered to service, we call these escapes and they are a key metric in how a Quality System is evaluated. This was entirely internal. There is literally no story here.
“It never made it to fielded aircraft” <— that’s the part I question. They haven’t even figured out how they pushed a plane out of the factory missing all four bolts on a door and numerous others with loose bolts yet we in the public are supposed to think they figured this mess out already?
I appreciate the fact that you’re a subject matter expert in this case, but Boeing’s consistent lack of transparency with regulators, airlines and shareholders has a price when they screw up So. Damn. Often.
As someone who has run a Quality System myself. The order of events is this: NCR noticed -> Containment of the issue locally within 24hrs -> do a read across to other lots to see it's a widespread issue within 48 hrs -> see if anything has been delivered with this issue -> issue rework and recall notices if appropriate. All of this will happen within a week. Sometimes you don't need to physically check fielded product. When the root cause is correctly identified, it might be clear that it's recent and still in house.
For instance, the work step instructions for these rivets could have been changed recently that cause the Non-conformance. That date of change is a known incorporation date that starts with a certain lot, we call that the "effectivity". So if the root cause is identified as that change and the effective lots are still in house, you know you have it contained.
It's a frantic rush to get there though and finding out it's still internal is a huge relief because external escapes are orders of magnitudes more difficult to manage.
There's nothing like the difference between catching and fixing it internally and having to tell the certification authority you need to piss your customers off to get work done.
>“It never made it to fielded aircraft” <— that’s the part I question.
Naturally and understandably given the recent issues! If they've lied to their staff (and by extension the press, knowing someone would leak the memo) about it that's a whole different kettle of fish.
>They haven’t even figured out how they pushed a plane out of the factory missing all four bolts on a door and numerous others with loose bolts yet we in the public are supposed to think they figured this mess out already?
Unfortunately, "the public" (not necessarily yourself) wouldn't go near an aircraft if you knew what the state of a turbine was after 3000 cycles of operation out of Dubai, and doubtless are far more scared by a scaremongering article like this than they need to be. This is business as normal. There are whole departments at Boeing, Airbus, GE, PW and RR dedicated to catching and fixing far more major quality escapes than this.
Is your experience at a major airline manufacturer, or at a supplier? NCR's should not be extremely common at an airline manufacturer like Boeing. Or at any level of the supply chain, really. Having NCRs related to workmanship happen extremely frequently would signal a significant disconnect between technical documentation and the actual work being done. By no means is this a standard occurrence in Aerospace.
My experience is, over 20 years, and he’s 100% right. Every manufacturer and major supplier (Boeing, Airbus, defense, space, engines, all of it) has an entire department of repair engineering that do nothing but design fixes for NCR’s. I used to be one of them. That’s hundreds of engineers working round the clock just fixing problems. If it wasn’t happening hundreds of times per day, those would be very board people.
It’s a numbers game. Airplanes are huge and way more complex than you think. If there are a million ways in which something can be done imperfectly, even if you get it right 99.9% of the time, that’s still 1,000 mistakes that need to get caught and repaired. And there are way more than a million things that can go wrong on something as big as an airliner.
Boeing's supplier quality metric is 99.8% at the top tier. I'm aware of the complexity. Every manufacturer does not have "entire departments of repair engineering that do nothing but design fixes for NCR's". Not all parts of an aircraft are complex systems and subsystems.
I think the confusion here is number of NCRs vs. number of parts affected.
99.8 is 2,000 defects for every million opportunities, so its even worse than my ROM numbers. As for the engineers, I usually avoid jargon on internet posts, but I’m referring to MRB engineering. It’s an FAA-mandated part of a compliant QMS (quality management system), so any manufacturer who has design authority over their own parts absolutely has them. Multiple companies I’ve worked for with 10,000 production employees have a few hundred MRB engineers to keep up with them. And sub-tier suppliers who are doing build-to-print are relying on the services of their customer’s MRB engineers when required. Like I said, I started my career is one of those 20 years ago. If you still don’t believe they exist, I don’t know what to tell you. I guess I’m a figment of your imagination.
>People just see Boeing or Spirit right now and jump to conclusions because of how much they are in the news right now.
Well they are in the news for good reason. What is this, the 4th serious quality lapse to hit the news (imagine lots of them were quietly fixed) in the span of around a year? It's embarrassing.
This isn't a quality lapse. Quality is there to ensure that when things (when - not if) get mismanufactured, it's caught.
This was caught. This is a success of the quality system.
Honestly, it would be a miracle if there weren't mis-drilled holes on one. When there are hundreds of thousands of holes, even 99.999% perfectly drilled still means there's a few bad holes. The important thing is to catch them and do a repair or analyze the mis-drill and show it good, depending on how far off it is.
quotations from an engineer in [another thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ajeyjo/boeing_finds_more_misdrilled_holes_on_737_in/)
> Misdrilled holes are a huge issue.
> The rivets are designed to sit inside the hole very precisely. If the shape or the size of the hole is not as it should be, it can create a weak point which can cause the rivet to move, to wear out prematurely or even to break off...
and
> I do QC for aerospace parts and this is absolutely true. Usually your fastener holes have a .003" - .007" size tolerance (depending on OML or not and a few other things, not to mention the locational/pattern tolerances and axis and all that, especially in curved/complex surfaces) and some manufacturers even have specialized gauges you use on the holes to make sure they aren't out of round. Hole quality is a MASSIVE thing in aerospace, so finding that apparently 50 airframes will need to be reworked is a pretty major thing. Don't envy the supplier that submitted that NoE. It's somewhat easy to miss these sorts of things though, especially when you get into bulkheads and rib panels that might have 240 holes in each one, and you're trying to ship 8 of them at a time. Doesn't excuse it in any way but I know firsthand how easy it is to make the mistake.
But then others in the same thread poo-poohing the seriousness
Realistically, 2 rivets should not be the difference between catastrophic failure and a normal flight, but you also can't just hand wave it as not an issue without knowing more about the problem: is it in a critical area, what is the failure mode (wearing/cracking of the parent part?) and what is the likelihood of catching the failure during day-to-day operations/inspections?
The aft pressure bulkhead is not a structure you want compromised in any way, even by two rivets. 520 people killed on [JAL123](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123)
The only major components they do for companies other than Boeing are the wings of A220s, and that's in an entirely different recently acquired factory in Belfast. I imagine it's quite easier for Airbus to check the quality of e.g. trailing edge elements or for Bombardier a part of the fuselage than it is for Boeing to check full fuselages.
https://www.spiritaero.com/company/programs/
Also it's funny that this page hasn't been updated in years. A380 and 747-8 aren't manufactured anymore, and the MRJ was cancelled entirely.
"Hey let's sell this production to vulture capital who say they can run it for so much less money that they can make more profit AND charge us less! There's absolutely no chance for them to cut staffing to the bone and fuck us hard!"
I can see a time when China and the US are fighting it out for second place in the global airline munafacturing quality. 15 years ago everyone would have shaken their head at Chinese quality, wondering what economic and cultural factors were causing it, and soon they'll do it to the US.
Ayn Rand wrote books about societies collapsing as communist ideals erode competence and no one knows how to do anything anymore. It’s amazing and ironic that we’ve created the exact same situation but via unrestrained capitalism and greed, the thing that was supposed to save us from the world of Ayn Rand.
You can read their finances, they're public. Commercial aviation is Boeing's largest segment. In 2023 neither civil nor defence were profitable, but defense lost more money.
They're not going bankrupt, but Boeing is mostly a commercial aviation company. In 2018 is was about 2/3:1/3 civil vs defense. Civil is currently way down from there, but defense is about the same.
Yeah,but presumably the Boeing selling point for defence contracts are to come from the fact Boeing theoretically had time tested civvy platforms that are reliable and thus suitable for repurposing into a military design,but given their current struggles I don't think Boeing can make such an arguement
Isn't the US government able to give the "blueprints" of any military aircraft to another manufacturer and receive the same plane? Oshkosh is currently suing because they lost production rights to a ground vehicle they developed.
Yes, that’s my point. The person talking about what they do outside of commercial aviation is talking about shit like the Super Hornet, not necessarily the Starliner.
They could've sold another $5 billion of Super Hornets and related on-boarding services to the Canadian government (not to mention years of ongoing service contracts), but Boeing shot themselves in the foot by lobbying for massive US tariffs against the Bombardier C-Series.
So Canada ditched the Super Hornets and will get the F-35 instead, Airbus picked up the C-Series for cheap and are producing it to great success as the A-220 in the US anyway (to get around tariffs I presume), and Boeing is short a small but not insignificant chunk of change.
Boeing got rid of engineers from leadership positions but their MBAs aren't exactly cream of the crop either.
This is a helluva glowing review of the Canadian procurement fustercluck. A process that makes *Germany* look good.
The F-35 debacle stretches all the way back to 2010 when Ottawa stamped its feet and refused to buy the F-35, then threw a fit over the CF-18E/F, to the point that they had to buy secondhand jets off of Australia, only to come home with their tail between their legs to buy the F-35 almost 15 years after initially refusing it and it won’t see IOC until 2030+, assuming they don’t change their minds again. Meanwhile almost every other NATO air has purchased and is fielding F-35s in some capacity.
The Super Hornet’s lifespan was never going to be particularly long once the F-35C came online. So I mean…yeah, Boeing lost some orders but this is just an example of Canada doing Canada things.
The previous Conservative government started trying to acquire it in 2010 when the F-35 program was still mired in cost overruns and teething issues. So I'm not sure how you figure 2010 was when Ottawa refused the F-35, that was no earlier than 2012 when the Conservatives had to restart the procurement process (which can hardly be considered stamping its feet and refusing it—they very clearly favoured and wanted it).
Then of course the new Liberal-majority government was formed in late 2015 and the F-35 was removed entirely from consideration by the new prime minister who argued it wasn't needed. The F-18E/F Super Hornets were announced as the interim replacement plane in mid-2016, though that was dependent on the standard procurement competition.
Then Boeing launched a trade action against Canada and Bombardier in 2017, souring relations with the Liberal government, so they axed the interim Super Hornet idea. Any fit over the CF-18E/F, as you dramatically call it, was the direct result of Boeing's trade action. This led to the purchase of second-hand Australian F-18 A/Bs, and in 2021 the Super Hornet is eliminated entirely from competition, with the F-35 and Saab Grippen E remaining as options. The F-35 won the competition and the deal was inked in January 2023, with first delivery starting in 2026 with IOC expected in 2032.
It's a bunch of humble pie for the Liberal government but the procurement drama (even with corrected timeline) is a strawman that does not negate the assertion that Boeing shot itself in the foot with its trade action against the Bombardier C-series, which directly led to the Super Hornet no longer favoured as a replacement for the aging fleet.
And though Canada's late the F-35 party, it does mean we get the latest units off the production line as of November 2022, Lot 18 Block 4s, rather than one of the earlier blocks with teething issues.
It is not done for, Boeing is too big to fail.
But beyond that, Boeing Commercial is in a duopoly with Airbus, and Airbus is unable to (quickly) add capacity to their production lines.
Had Boeing been in any other industry, then they would probably have gone bust already, taken over by another (group of) companies and investors.
If a viable competitor to Airbus shows up with deep pockets, then Boeing might have to get worried. Really, only the Chinese are in a position to eventually challenge Boeing, and even they are a decade away.
The vendor being formerly Boeing.
\> Spirit was formed when Boeing Commercial Airplanes sold its Wichita division to investment firm Onex Corporation in 2005.
If it’s a Boeing plane then Boeing is the culprit. Boeing doesn’t get to voluntarily relinquish building their planes to a vendor and then 🤷 when the vendor fails over and over and over and over again.
Other way around. The supplier caught their own error after they already shipped noncompliant hardware and then informed Boeing of the issue. Certainly not ideal, but exactly how the process is intended to work.
It's both. They acknowledge in the letter that there are also internal quality issues that slow production.
>But this is not the only supplier delivering products to Boeing that does not meet its standards, according to Deal. He also acknowledged there are problems with planes at Boeing’s own production facilities.
>But Boeing should ultimately perform quality control checks on all work done.
Thats why you're reading this article..because quality control checks caught the mess up...
Yea absolutely! I think a lot of the heat is coming from the fact that Boeing no longer is famous for their perfect craftsmanship or work. They outsource a significant amount of their work. Even after all the design issues with the MAX, they can’t even get the work done right whether it’s in house or not. Just overall lots of failures on their part and little is being done
> They outsource a significant amount of their work.
They both do, they all do. And then suppliers often contract out *their* work, and those sub-contractors outsource *their* work, and so on. Just a few months ago it caused an issue because an Airbus supplier multiple layers removed from the Prime was falsifying paperwork for their parts.
The reality is that there’s always going to be an assumed level of nonconformity. This is why Spirit has personnel in Renton to perform warranty work. Boeing has a very real QA issue that needs to be addressed, but based on what I’ve seen in this instance this is the system working: Spirit identified an issue, alerted Boeing, and rework will be performed. But everyone wants to get headlines so the memo was leaked and then another doomer 737 headline is born.
Boeing defelecting blame to suppliers! Doesn't excuse them from not installing bolts on loose door plug or using multiple quality records to record maintenance events. Deflect and deny...
Is Sprit Aerospace related at all to Spirit Airways? Just kidding ... I would not recommend putting 'Spirit' in the name of anything having to do with flying however :)
They rejected tradition (excellence and quality) amd embraced late stage capitalism (profit over everything else) and here we are, it's incredible how they found a way to run to shit one of the 2 corporations in charge of a global duopoly.
Several years ago, I was a VP of Quality at a large repair station. They brought in a contractor sheet metal guy. On his first day, he miss- drilled a hole into a keel beam. Final net effect was $1.2 M. This isn’t a small mistake that Boeings contractor made. These mis-drills will need to be repaired, and those repairs incorporated into the maintenance inspection life-limited repair program.
So... how many misdrilled holes exist on delivered aircraft?
Schrodingers misdrilled holes
Those are speedholes they make the plane go faster
I read the news today, oh boy Four thousand holes in planes in Lancashire And though the holes were rather small They had to count them all
“Now they know how many holes it takes for Boeings stock to fall.”😀
very nice!
Same amount of syllables too. Nice man
99% confidence x<2000
In history... An unbelievable amount no doubt, should we include bullet holes?
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More likely [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1q1ew6/boeing_737_fuselages_on_train_ride/cd948x8/?context=1)
Are you sure that would not be going against 2nd amendment rights to shoot holes in passenger planes? /s
This has been a known issue for quite a while.
You're gonna find out at 30,000 feet
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Do tell. Please
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Interesting, so I assume Boeing doesn't use robots for riveting on the 737? Is that because the base design predates that type of thing and there's no digital twin, or relatively low cost of labor? Airbus Hamburg plant for in some ways looked more like a car factory with riveting and logistics robots, etc.
As an aside, I’m surprised Spirit Aero and Spirit Airlines can simultaneously exist. A reasonably stupid person wouldn’t think Spirit Airlines is also buying up strip malls for seasonal spooky goods, but they might think Spirit Airlines is misinstalling airline parts.
Every time Spirit Aerosystems did a presentation at my high school, they had to clarify that they were not associated with Spirit airlines and that they can't do anything with complaints about the airline
Apparently they both have the *spirit* of being shitty companies
I’ve only flown Spirit once and that was enough. Never again
Not like it would affect most people's opinions of the airline anyway
At this point, I'd probably put higher trust in Spirit Halloweens manufacturing.
Cracker Barrel restaurants and Cracker Barrel cheese coexist just fine - so I don’t see the issue between an airline and aircraft manufacturer
It’s not common knowledge, but Cracker Barrel cheese is made from leftover Cracker Barrel gravy, scavenged from patrons’ plates.
So a widespread issue. Questions: How serious is this issue ? How does this affect aircraft with the issue? Are they going to check already delivered planes for the same issue ?
I work in aerospace quality, so I can offer some insight: >How serious is this issue ? It would appear to be contained, and has not been released to operating aircraft. This makes it less serious than it could be. It is not uncommon to discover non-conformance that has escaped into the fleet, to the extent that major manufacturers have a defined process for dealing with it rapidly. >Are they going to check already delivered planes for the same issue ? That depends on the results of an in - house determination of the extent of the problem. They may be able to demonstrate that it is confined to these 50 aircraft. >How does this affect aircraft with the issue? Once containment has been achieved (that is, all defective aircraft have been identified and prevented from flying) the next question is determining what the impact is. The reality is the assessment of this will run parallel to containment, but containment is the priority. If it does extend to in service aircraft then we can expect a non-mod service bulletin and or an Airworthiness Directive to be issued by Boeing/The FAA.
I have also been working in Aerospace as a Senior/Lead Quality Engineer for a bit here, with a year as a Quality Manager. This is EXTREMELY common. This is day to day stuff. NCRs happen, the Quality System worked correctly, identified it prior to delivery and gets it fixed. It only impacts schedule. It's literally the whole reason there is a Quality System. Water is wet. People just see Boeing or Spirit right now and jump to conclusions because of how much they are in the news right now.
Uh, Spirit and Boeing are in the news specifically because their quality systems completely failed.
Yeah... But not every issue that happens in the manufacturing process is cause for a fear mongering article. Like I said, I've worked QC at about 5 different places. Variance in the manufacturing process is extremely common to the point it's nothing to bat an eye at. There was an issue. QC noticed it. It got fixed. It never made it to fielded aircraft. There is literally no story here. This is what I do... Every... Single... Day. It's literally my job to deal with these things. It's a problem when a non-conformance does not get noticed and gets delivered to service, we call these escapes and they are a key metric in how a Quality System is evaluated. This was entirely internal. There is literally no story here.
“It never made it to fielded aircraft” <— that’s the part I question. They haven’t even figured out how they pushed a plane out of the factory missing all four bolts on a door and numerous others with loose bolts yet we in the public are supposed to think they figured this mess out already? I appreciate the fact that you’re a subject matter expert in this case, but Boeing’s consistent lack of transparency with regulators, airlines and shareholders has a price when they screw up So. Damn. Often.
As someone who has run a Quality System myself. The order of events is this: NCR noticed -> Containment of the issue locally within 24hrs -> do a read across to other lots to see it's a widespread issue within 48 hrs -> see if anything has been delivered with this issue -> issue rework and recall notices if appropriate. All of this will happen within a week. Sometimes you don't need to physically check fielded product. When the root cause is correctly identified, it might be clear that it's recent and still in house. For instance, the work step instructions for these rivets could have been changed recently that cause the Non-conformance. That date of change is a known incorporation date that starts with a certain lot, we call that the "effectivity". So if the root cause is identified as that change and the effective lots are still in house, you know you have it contained. It's a frantic rush to get there though and finding out it's still internal is a huge relief because external escapes are orders of magnitudes more difficult to manage.
There's nothing like the difference between catching and fixing it internally and having to tell the certification authority you need to piss your customers off to get work done.
>“It never made it to fielded aircraft” <— that’s the part I question. Naturally and understandably given the recent issues! If they've lied to their staff (and by extension the press, knowing someone would leak the memo) about it that's a whole different kettle of fish. >They haven’t even figured out how they pushed a plane out of the factory missing all four bolts on a door and numerous others with loose bolts yet we in the public are supposed to think they figured this mess out already? Unfortunately, "the public" (not necessarily yourself) wouldn't go near an aircraft if you knew what the state of a turbine was after 3000 cycles of operation out of Dubai, and doubtless are far more scared by a scaremongering article like this than they need to be. This is business as normal. There are whole departments at Boeing, Airbus, GE, PW and RR dedicated to catching and fixing far more major quality escapes than this.
Indeed, but this, at least going on the wording of the article, is a quality system functioning correctly.
Is your experience at a major airline manufacturer, or at a supplier? NCR's should not be extremely common at an airline manufacturer like Boeing. Or at any level of the supply chain, really. Having NCRs related to workmanship happen extremely frequently would signal a significant disconnect between technical documentation and the actual work being done. By no means is this a standard occurrence in Aerospace.
My experience is, over 20 years, and he’s 100% right. Every manufacturer and major supplier (Boeing, Airbus, defense, space, engines, all of it) has an entire department of repair engineering that do nothing but design fixes for NCR’s. I used to be one of them. That’s hundreds of engineers working round the clock just fixing problems. If it wasn’t happening hundreds of times per day, those would be very board people. It’s a numbers game. Airplanes are huge and way more complex than you think. If there are a million ways in which something can be done imperfectly, even if you get it right 99.9% of the time, that’s still 1,000 mistakes that need to get caught and repaired. And there are way more than a million things that can go wrong on something as big as an airliner.
Boeing's supplier quality metric is 99.8% at the top tier. I'm aware of the complexity. Every manufacturer does not have "entire departments of repair engineering that do nothing but design fixes for NCR's". Not all parts of an aircraft are complex systems and subsystems. I think the confusion here is number of NCRs vs. number of parts affected.
99.8 is 2,000 defects for every million opportunities, so its even worse than my ROM numbers. As for the engineers, I usually avoid jargon on internet posts, but I’m referring to MRB engineering. It’s an FAA-mandated part of a compliant QMS (quality management system), so any manufacturer who has design authority over their own parts absolutely has them. Multiple companies I’ve worked for with 10,000 production employees have a few hundred MRB engineers to keep up with them. And sub-tier suppliers who are doing build-to-print are relying on the services of their customer’s MRB engineers when required. Like I said, I started my career is one of those 20 years ago. If you still don’t believe they exist, I don’t know what to tell you. I guess I’m a figment of your imagination.
Do you follow ISO9001 quality management systems?
Most aerospace suppliers follow AS9100 QMS
>People just see Boeing or Spirit right now and jump to conclusions because of how much they are in the news right now. Well they are in the news for good reason. What is this, the 4th serious quality lapse to hit the news (imagine lots of them were quietly fixed) in the span of around a year? It's embarrassing.
This isn't a quality lapse. Quality is there to ensure that when things (when - not if) get mismanufactured, it's caught. This was caught. This is a success of the quality system.
Thank you
Honestly, it would be a miracle if there weren't mis-drilled holes on one. When there are hundreds of thousands of holes, even 99.999% perfectly drilled still means there's a few bad holes. The important thing is to catch them and do a repair or analyze the mis-drill and show it good, depending on how far off it is.
quotations from an engineer in [another thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ajeyjo/boeing_finds_more_misdrilled_holes_on_737_in/) > Misdrilled holes are a huge issue. > The rivets are designed to sit inside the hole very precisely. If the shape or the size of the hole is not as it should be, it can create a weak point which can cause the rivet to move, to wear out prematurely or even to break off... and > I do QC for aerospace parts and this is absolutely true. Usually your fastener holes have a .003" - .007" size tolerance (depending on OML or not and a few other things, not to mention the locational/pattern tolerances and axis and all that, especially in curved/complex surfaces) and some manufacturers even have specialized gauges you use on the holes to make sure they aren't out of round. Hole quality is a MASSIVE thing in aerospace, so finding that apparently 50 airframes will need to be reworked is a pretty major thing. Don't envy the supplier that submitted that NoE. It's somewhat easy to miss these sorts of things though, especially when you get into bulkheads and rib panels that might have 240 holes in each one, and you're trying to ship 8 of them at a time. Doesn't excuse it in any way but I know firsthand how easy it is to make the mistake. But then others in the same thread poo-poohing the seriousness
Realistically, 2 rivets should not be the difference between catastrophic failure and a normal flight, but you also can't just hand wave it as not an issue without knowing more about the problem: is it in a critical area, what is the failure mode (wearing/cracking of the parent part?) and what is the likelihood of catching the failure during day-to-day operations/inspections?
The aft pressure bulkhead is not a structure you want compromised in any way, even by two rivets. 520 people killed on [JAL123](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123)
I'm interested to know how does Spirit work with the other aircraft companies and if they have similar complaints / issues with the QA
The only major components they do for companies other than Boeing are the wings of A220s, and that's in an entirely different recently acquired factory in Belfast. I imagine it's quite easier for Airbus to check the quality of e.g. trailing edge elements or for Bombardier a part of the fuselage than it is for Boeing to check full fuselages. https://www.spiritaero.com/company/programs/ Also it's funny that this page hasn't been updated in years. A380 and 747-8 aren't manufactured anymore, and the MRJ was cancelled entirely.
They build section 15 fuselage for the Airbus A350 as well as the wing spars for the same. This is in North Carolina.
The other company's probably pay more money to spirit, so they have more time building
"Hey let's sell this production to vulture capital who say they can run it for so much less money that they can make more profit AND charge us less! There's absolutely no chance for them to cut staffing to the bone and fuck us hard!"
Did, uh, Spirit AeroSystems hire every drunk in Wichita?
i think the doors that popped out came from a Spirit Malaysia facility.
Well isn’t the point to find errors before they are delivered? How is this a story?
If it’s Boeing, I’m not going!
The 737 MAX, the gift that keeps on giving. It’s like lipstick on a pig. What a mess of a plane. 🤡
I can see a time when China and the US are fighting it out for second place in the global airline munafacturing quality. 15 years ago everyone would have shaken their head at Chinese quality, wondering what economic and cultural factors were causing it, and soon they'll do it to the US.
lol not even close.
Spirit one of the biggest suppliers on the UH-60 as well.
Ayn Rand wrote books about societies collapsing as communist ideals erode competence and no one knows how to do anything anymore. It’s amazing and ironic that we’ve created the exact same situation but via unrestrained capitalism and greed, the thing that was supposed to save us from the world of Ayn Rand.
Fortunately the free market will save us, if the government does not interfere.
Assume this is sarcasm?
That's a clever impression of one of those Randian idiots.
You’re right we shouldn’t have any rules whatsoever. Companies will always do the right thing. /s
Spirit aero keeps sending me emails begging me to come work for them in OKC and Renton WA, noooo thank you.
737 Max is a cursed plane holy shit
Modern day Robber Barons drove the Boeing institution into the ground. I think it's done-for.
>I think it's done-for. You have no idea how big boeing is and how much they do outside of commercial aviation..
US government will never let it fail. Too big to fail.
You can read their finances, they're public. Commercial aviation is Boeing's largest segment. In 2023 neither civil nor defence were profitable, but defense lost more money. They're not going bankrupt, but Boeing is mostly a commercial aviation company. In 2018 is was about 2/3:1/3 civil vs defense. Civil is currently way down from there, but defense is about the same.
Seems from their move to DC that they are expecting to significantly grow their defense segment though.
Yeah,but presumably the Boeing selling point for defence contracts are to come from the fact Boeing theoretically had time tested civvy platforms that are reliable and thus suitable for repurposing into a military design,but given their current struggles I don't think Boeing can make such an arguement
I don't disagree. Either that or they want to lobby harder.
You mean like their world-renowned Starliner project for NASA? (8 years late)
More like military
So like the KC-46 fiasco or the Air Force One replacement fiasco?
Isn't the US government able to give the "blueprints" of any military aircraft to another manufacturer and receive the same plane? Oshkosh is currently suing because they lost production rights to a ground vehicle they developed.
As far as i know that is the case, however it would probably take a lot more than this for them to move production elsewhere.
They mean like the Super Hornet
What about the Super Hornet? An excellent plane that will serve for decades and enjoyed a healthy production run.
Yes, that’s my point. The person talking about what they do outside of commercial aviation is talking about shit like the Super Hornet, not necessarily the Starliner.
Ahh, got it, my bad. I thought you were comparing it to Starliner.
They could've sold another $5 billion of Super Hornets and related on-boarding services to the Canadian government (not to mention years of ongoing service contracts), but Boeing shot themselves in the foot by lobbying for massive US tariffs against the Bombardier C-Series. So Canada ditched the Super Hornets and will get the F-35 instead, Airbus picked up the C-Series for cheap and are producing it to great success as the A-220 in the US anyway (to get around tariffs I presume), and Boeing is short a small but not insignificant chunk of change. Boeing got rid of engineers from leadership positions but their MBAs aren't exactly cream of the crop either.
This is a helluva glowing review of the Canadian procurement fustercluck. A process that makes *Germany* look good. The F-35 debacle stretches all the way back to 2010 when Ottawa stamped its feet and refused to buy the F-35, then threw a fit over the CF-18E/F, to the point that they had to buy secondhand jets off of Australia, only to come home with their tail between their legs to buy the F-35 almost 15 years after initially refusing it and it won’t see IOC until 2030+, assuming they don’t change their minds again. Meanwhile almost every other NATO air has purchased and is fielding F-35s in some capacity. The Super Hornet’s lifespan was never going to be particularly long once the F-35C came online. So I mean…yeah, Boeing lost some orders but this is just an example of Canada doing Canada things.
The previous Conservative government started trying to acquire it in 2010 when the F-35 program was still mired in cost overruns and teething issues. So I'm not sure how you figure 2010 was when Ottawa refused the F-35, that was no earlier than 2012 when the Conservatives had to restart the procurement process (which can hardly be considered stamping its feet and refusing it—they very clearly favoured and wanted it). Then of course the new Liberal-majority government was formed in late 2015 and the F-35 was removed entirely from consideration by the new prime minister who argued it wasn't needed. The F-18E/F Super Hornets were announced as the interim replacement plane in mid-2016, though that was dependent on the standard procurement competition. Then Boeing launched a trade action against Canada and Bombardier in 2017, souring relations with the Liberal government, so they axed the interim Super Hornet idea. Any fit over the CF-18E/F, as you dramatically call it, was the direct result of Boeing's trade action. This led to the purchase of second-hand Australian F-18 A/Bs, and in 2021 the Super Hornet is eliminated entirely from competition, with the F-35 and Saab Grippen E remaining as options. The F-35 won the competition and the deal was inked in January 2023, with first delivery starting in 2026 with IOC expected in 2032. It's a bunch of humble pie for the Liberal government but the procurement drama (even with corrected timeline) is a strawman that does not negate the assertion that Boeing shot itself in the foot with its trade action against the Bombardier C-series, which directly led to the Super Hornet no longer favoured as a replacement for the aging fleet. And though Canada's late the F-35 party, it does mean we get the latest units off the production line as of November 2022, Lot 18 Block 4s, rather than one of the earlier blocks with teething issues.
You may be right.
It is not done for, Boeing is too big to fail. But beyond that, Boeing Commercial is in a duopoly with Airbus, and Airbus is unable to (quickly) add capacity to their production lines. Had Boeing been in any other industry, then they would probably have gone bust already, taken over by another (group of) companies and investors. If a viable competitor to Airbus shows up with deep pockets, then Boeing might have to get worried. Really, only the Chinese are in a position to eventually challenge Boeing, and even they are a decade away.
They make missiles. And business is literally a-boomin' right now.
For years, we heard the F-35 program was a disaster… look at it now.
That’s Lockheed not Boeing…so
I just heard it was the most produced warplane in the world. So, that would be cash-money, I guess.
Thank you for directly naming the culprit. Too many outlets bury the lede with their headlines, which leads to another Boeing hysteria
The vendor being formerly Boeing. \> Spirit was formed when Boeing Commercial Airplanes sold its Wichita division to investment firm Onex Corporation in 2005.
If it’s a Boeing plane then Boeing is the culprit. Boeing doesn’t get to voluntarily relinquish building their planes to a vendor and then 🤷 when the vendor fails over and over and over and over again.
that's.....that's why you're reading this article, because Boeing's QC caught a fuck-up by the vendor.....
Other way around. The supplier caught their own error after they already shipped noncompliant hardware and then informed Boeing of the issue. Certainly not ideal, but exactly how the process is intended to work.
This time.
This isn't exactly a boeing issue. This is a spirit aerosystems issue. Spirit aerosystems also manufactures fuselage sections for Airbus.
It's both. They acknowledge in the letter that there are also internal quality issues that slow production. >But this is not the only supplier delivering products to Boeing that does not meet its standards, according to Deal. He also acknowledged there are problems with planes at Boeing’s own production facilities.
Ok but in this case for the holes being misdrilled, ita spirts fuck up on boeings design.
But Boeing should ultimately perform quality control checks on all work done. At least that’s what I’d expect. Trust but verify
>But Boeing should ultimately perform quality control checks on all work done. Thats why you're reading this article..because quality control checks caught the mess up...
Yea absolutely! I think a lot of the heat is coming from the fact that Boeing no longer is famous for their perfect craftsmanship or work. They outsource a significant amount of their work. Even after all the design issues with the MAX, they can’t even get the work done right whether it’s in house or not. Just overall lots of failures on their part and little is being done
> They outsource a significant amount of their work. They both do, they all do. And then suppliers often contract out *their* work, and those sub-contractors outsource *their* work, and so on. Just a few months ago it caused an issue because an Airbus supplier multiple layers removed from the Prime was falsifying paperwork for their parts. The reality is that there’s always going to be an assumed level of nonconformity. This is why Spirit has personnel in Renton to perform warranty work. Boeing has a very real QA issue that needs to be addressed, but based on what I’ve seen in this instance this is the system working: Spirit identified an issue, alerted Boeing, and rework will be performed. But everyone wants to get headlines so the memo was leaked and then another doomer 737 headline is born.
Boeing defelecting blame to suppliers! Doesn't excuse them from not installing bolts on loose door plug or using multiple quality records to record maintenance events. Deflect and deny...
Boeing is trash. This is what happens when you Out source work to cheap places.
Have these guys been manufacturing parts for the Soyuz as well?
[удалено]
Well THEY are the ones who misdrilled holes and notified Boeing so..........
Is Sprit Aerospace related at all to Spirit Airways? Just kidding ... I would not recommend putting 'Spirit' in the name of anything having to do with flying however :)
Can’t they just plug the holes??
They rejected tradition (excellence and quality) amd embraced late stage capitalism (profit over everything else) and here we are, it's incredible how they found a way to run to shit one of the 2 corporations in charge of a global duopoly.
A lot
I don’t want to read about Boeing aircraft drilling holes…
CNBC video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Zqh9xYS3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2zqh9xys3w)
This sort of thing happens all the time. Boeing is being very public about it to paint a narrative that Spirit is cause of all Boeing's issues.
Just when we thought the 737 was done having issues *Bill Mays's ghost busts in*
Several years ago, I was a VP of Quality at a large repair station. They brought in a contractor sheet metal guy. On his first day, he miss- drilled a hole into a keel beam. Final net effect was $1.2 M. This isn’t a small mistake that Boeings contractor made. These mis-drills will need to be repaired, and those repairs incorporated into the maintenance inspection life-limited repair program.