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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has “Enormous Volume Of Defects” Bolts On MAX 9 Weren’t Installed::A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the aircraft. The takeaway appears to be that outsourced plane components have so many problems when they show up at the production line that Boeing’s quality control staff can’t keep up with them all.
To be fair, the defects SHOULD be found in the production line, but not in the finished product.
In something like a commercial airliner you can’t afford to just catch the mistakes. You have to prevent them.
In a commercial production line, there are part defects, engineering defects, assembly defects, testing defects, tool defects, etc.
Tens of thousands of parts. Thousands of employees (some new hires). Hundreds of vendors.
You will never prevent all defects, but you should be able to discover them before finishing production.
A lot of these wont even be discovered until they are assembled and it fails a test or inspection point.
Absolutely 0.0000000000 defects is impossible.
However, as an engineers, it’s troubling to hear Boeing say things like “well we added a few more inspection points”. Lack of inspection is a contributing cause but it’s not the root cause.
Finding errors at the factory is great and a great way to go out of business (both due to increased cost, as well as eventual escapes)
Yes, but you can’t inspect quality into a product; you have to build it into the product.
Years ago, some American auto executives toured a Toyota factory to learn from them. After the tour, one of them said, “Those sneaky Japanese, they didn’t show us their rework area.” What he didn’t know was that unlike American factories, there was no rework area. Everything was assembled correctly the first time, and any worker had the right to stop the assembly line at any time to fix a problem. It’s far easier than finding and fixing a defect that is buried deep in a finished product.