1y ago

Hotel Keycards And Dawn Dish Soap Used In 737 Max Production As Boeing Fails 33 FAA Safety Checks

Boeing is having a rough time of it right now, with parts falling off its planes left, right and center. Just last week, a wheel came loose and smashed through a car, and earlier this year the door from a 737 Max aircraft broke off mid-flight. That mid-air disaster sparked an audit from the Federal Aviation Administration, which has gone far from well.

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The hotel keycard was used to check seals of doors, the dishsoap was used to lubricate the door seals to make them fit better.
The documentation about the steps were vauge and badly documented, neither of which I want in the documentation for building aircraft.
- But tell me if the CEO and shareholders are still getting their bonuses and stock buy backs?!
  
  Well obviously!
- Tbh, I don't see a problem with using Dawn dish soap and hotel key cards.
  When another company has already made a product that perfectly suits your needs it's absolutely reasonable to utilize that product.
  
  The issue is that if they are doing this, it means that the workers doesn't have the proper tools for the job.
  The keycard should be replaces with a go/nogo custom card, and the soap should either be specified by brand in the manual or swapped to a certified lubecricant, that has been tested to work fully with the gasket and not cause deteriation or on any way affect the quallity of the seal.
  
  Are you joking? Please say you are joking... Because adding TBH is confusing.
  If you aren't joking, dish soap should only be used to clean dishes, and key cards should only be used to open doors through the card slot.
57% is owned by institutional investors who ruined the company.
Scumbag investors have intentionally ruined one of the best companies in America.
JSYK.
- Hey, but imagine how much their dicks get sucked with all that money?
- It's really not the Investors. Boeing had Investors before and it all went fine. It's the McDonnel Douglas leadership that took over that ruined it.
Don't forget, they're also killing whistleblowers! Real rough time for Boeing. Boo hoo
How does this part (which is what the headline refers to and presumably the most outrageous inspection finding)
At one point during the examination, the air-safety agency observed mechanics at Spirit using a hotel key card to check a door seal [...]. In another instance, the F.A.A. saw Spirit mechanics apply liquid Dawn soap to a door seal “as lubricant in the fit-up process,” according to the document. The door seal was then cleaned with a wet cheesecloth
have anything to do with the opening of the article
Just last week, a wheel came loose and smashed through a car, and earlier this year the door from a 737 Max aircraft broke off mid-flight
???
The article misses the whole point, which is that the audit did not uncover the sources of these incidents.
- The audit was not about finding the exact cause of the previous incidents:
  The audit, which is kind of like a quality control inspection for large companies, analyzed 89 aspects of Boeing’s 737 Max production
  The audit looks at current production to assess wether or not everything is being done to prevent further hazards (they failed over a third of the inspections). Determining what caused the past incidents would be assigned to the equivalent of crime scene investigators (FAA detectives?).
  Determining production line compliance and investigating the cause of a major malfunction are two entirely different beasts.
  
  To expand on "FAA detectives", a specific incident would be investigated by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board).
- The issue with those items is that they are not in the list of approved materials for Boeing's manuals. It might be normal to see these sort of practices in a line maintenance environment where it's hard to get the proper tooling; but the manufacturer should be abiding by it's own regulated publications. It's just more symptoms of their cost cutting and schedule rushing measures that are leading to their quality issues.
  My company has been spending a lot of time and money doing warranty repairs on brand new airplanes that we received from Boeing over the past couple of years. It's very concerning when a customer has to fix things that should have never left the factory floor.
- The part about the crappy QA process explains why the delivered planes keep having problems.
  
  Not to me. Absence of QA allows faulty parts to make it into a plane, it does not explain why there are faults in the first place. For doors and wheels popping off there have to be either lethal part design mistakes, parts made from play doh instead of aluminium/steel, or the people on the assembly line throwing fasteners in the bin instead of putting them on. It's not like a door pops of because its seal touched soap once and somebody poked an unverified piece of plastic at it. Especially in aviation, where you need to have redundancies.
- In addition to what the others said, I think the wheel thing was probably not boeing's fault. That plane was delivered to United 22 years ago. It could have been a manufacturing error, but it was probably a maintenance error.
They should have used Palmolive.
Plane crash into the ocean? You're soaking in it.
- I don’t know why, but that commercial literally popped into my head yesterday when I went somehow found myself in a mental tangent thinking about the product name wondering if they used palm and olive oil. Then of course synthetic palm oil and how would they test that since I haven’t heard about dishpan hands since the 70s.
They're experimenting with how to build planes as cheaply as possible, and anyone who dies is just collateral damage.
- So long as they save more on the planes than they spend on the lawsuits it's a win according to investors.
  
  Exactly.
  
  Corporations have a legal requirement to provide value to the shareholders. That's it.
And a 787 had a ooops moment this week.
Boeings are flying coffins.
- Oh my god, no they’re not. The vast majority of the issues being reported on right now are maintenance issues that are the responsibility of the airline.
  Boeing needs to get its shit together but 33 QA failures is pretty damn small in the literal thousands of QA checks that go into the production of every aircraft. Flying is still the safest means of travel, even on a Boeing aircraft.
I can already hear the Behind The Bastards episode about Boeing.
Hotel card seems like a decent tool for the job not hard enough to cause damange but rigid enough to poke around and test. And soap is a pretty good lubticant but mixing it with the existing lipids wont be doing it any wonders.
- The point isn't that the tools were inappropriate, it's that they were used outside the defined assembly and inspection processes - if you need some lubricant to get the door seal in that's fine, but the process docs need to specify that. Similarly, if the testing process defines that you need to check for gaps, it should be specifying the thickness of gauge to use and how much of a gap is permissible, not just grab whatever random card you have lying around and poke it in.
  
  Fair
- As they just want it temporarily lubed water based lubricants from the sex shop might be a better option. They don't leave much residue, and are tested for compatibility with various rubbers.
  
  It would also make a better funny headline too.

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