TRANS FAA grounds Boeing 737 Max 9 planes for mandatory door plug inspections, Post #82 DOJ Opens Criminal Investigation Post# 103 Whistleblower Dead
- Thread starter Macgyver
- Start date
northern watch
TB Fanatic
Well, I hate to make this thread somewhat political, but I have a friend who works for Boeing, and he said that the company has gone “woke” and is pushing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training on its employees and is increasingly ignoring the more basic things it needs to be a good company and produce quality products. He specifically pointed to the earlier severe software issues with the 737 Max from a few years back along with the issues Boeing has had with the Starliner spacecraft (hydrazine valve leakage and parachute reefing issues). These, among others, point to a decline in corporate culture (especially in quality control of engineering and manufacturing) that occurred in part due to acquisition of McDonnell Douglas and in part due to the recent DEI push by major corporations.
I think these factors are all major players in these recent incidents, of which the door plug failure is just one.
Countrymouse
Country exile in the city
I never said it wasn't.
I just can't believe they're weren't being more proactive, themselves.
But then a couple of posts above explain that, for me.
Ever read the poem "Departmental"?
Everyone does their own job, precisely, as they've been "trained" to do--and no more.
No thinking outside the box.......no creative thinking.......nothing beyond one's own small sphere.
"Technically" correct.
By the way--did you know that the news reported that a boy, "sitting with his mother" near the door---
had his shirt sucked right off his body?
Dang good thing everyone's seat belts were still on.
Scare on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282: A loud bang, a whooshing sound and a boy’s shirt sucked right off
Story by By Jay Croft, CNN • 1dIt happened in a moment: The Boeing 737 Max-9 was gaining altitude after taking off from Portland. Then a loud boom – an explosion – then a rush of air and screams as a refrigerator-sized hole was left in the side of the 220-passenger plane.
A boy’s shirt was ripped clean off his body, flying out the hole, amid the air pressure loss after a part of the plane’s fuselage blew off. Some passengers screamed and cried, drafting text messages to their loved ones as a rush of air entered the plane and oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling.
Nick Hoch, a 33-year-old passenger on the plane, called the ordeal “traumatic,” “tense,” and “jarring,” in a phone interview with CNN.
“A mist or cloud whooshed past me that kind of hit me in the face,” he said. “People’s hair was flying all over the place.”
After the initial “boom,” he said the plane “kind of jolted.” Oxygen masks fell, everyone put them on and he said he felt disoriented.
“I was pretty startled and frightened, and I think other folks were pretty distraught as well.”
Hoch said he was sitting on the left side of the plane a couple of rows in front of where the panel blew off. “There were people much closer who I spoke with who lost AirPods out of their ears,” he said.
Hoch said he was sitting on the left side of the plane a couple of rows in front of where the panel blew off. “There were people much closer who I spoke with who lost AirPods out of their ears,” he said.
Soon after the portion of the plane blew off, Hoch said people were “remarkably calm,” as they sat quietly listening to the flight crew.
Hoch told CNN the flight crew and pilot did a magnificent job. He said they were calming and reassuring. “There were a few frantic passengers but mostly everybody was calm,” he said.
The flight had reached 16,000 feet after taking off from Portland, Oregon, bound for Ontario, California, about 5:07 p.m., according to FlightAware.
Shortly after takeoff, a panel, including a window, popped off, passenger Kyle Rinker told CNN. “It was really abrupt. Just got to altitude, and the window/wall just popped off.”
“We’d like to get down,” the pilot told air traffic control, according to a recording posted on liveatc.net. “We are declaring an emergency. We do need to come down to 10,000.”
The plane, with 171 passengers and six crew members on board, landed safely about 20 minutes later at the airport. One person was taken to a hospital. The airline said in a Saturday statement several guests on Flight 1282 were injured and required medical attention but have all since been medically cleared.
Alaska Airlines temporarily grounded the rest of its Boeing 737-9 Max fleet and said it was inspecting the plug doors on all its jets. The “plug door” refers to a portion of the plane’s fuselage the manufacturer can put in place instead of an emergency exit door, depending on the configuration requested by an airline.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday said it was grounding many aircraft of the model for inspections, affecting 171 jets used by airlines.
Alaska Airlines said it inspected 18 of the Boeing 737 Max 9 in its fleet Saturday and returned those to service, but hours later, reversed course and said those aircraft would be removed “until details about possible additional maintenance work are confirmed with the FAA.”
Passenger Emma Vu said passengers comforted each other during the ordeal.
“The flight attendant came over, too, and told me it was going to be OK,” Vu told CNN. “The fact that everyone was kind of freaking out and she took that time to kind of make me feel like I was the only passenger – honestly that was really sweet.”
Passengers applauded as the plane landed, King’s video shows.
Some passengers stood up. Flight attendants reminded them to remain seated.
One man can be heard saying, “There’s a f**kin’ hole inside the plane. What the f**k is that?”
Macgyver
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Hardware to secure panel that blew off Boeing 737 jet may never have been installed: NTSB
Federal investigators probing last week’s Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 fuselage panel blowout are looking into the possibility that the hardware that was supposed to keep it secured were never …
nypost.com
Hardware to secure panel that blew off Boeing 737 jet may never have been installed: NTSB
Federal investigators probing last week’s near-disastrous Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 fuselage panel blowout are looking into the possibility that the hardware that was supposed to keep it secured was never installed in the first place.
National Transportation Safety Board officials made the revelation during a Monday night press conference, hours after United Airlines reported finding loose bolts and “installation issues” on some Boeing 737 MAX 9 jetliners in the wake of Friday evening’s emergency landing of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 at Portland International Airport.
Officials told reporters the door plug came off the plane minutes after it took off from PDX, causing the cabin pressure to drop precipitously and creating the terrifying “loud” and “windy” conditions that led a young passenger sitting next to the missing door to reportedly lose his shirt as he was held down by his mother.
The large panel that was blown off the plane was located where an emergency exit door would normally be on a plane with more seats, and should have been secured by stop bolts and 12 interlocking pins and pads, investigators said.
“The exam to date has shown that the door did in fact translate upwards, all 12 stops became disengaged, allowing it to blow out of the fuselage,” said NTSB aerospace engineer Clint Crookshanks.
The panel that blew off the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 last week may not have been bolted down, according to federal investigators. NTSB/Handout via REUTERS
“We found that both guide tracks on the plug were fractured … we have not yet recovered the four bolts … that restrain it from its vertical movement, and we have not determined if they existed there,” Crookshanks continued.
Investigators were looking to see if the bolts “were there, or … if they came out during the … violent explosive decompression event,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy added.
The jet door plug that blew off the plane, followed by passengers’ personal items, was found by a Portland science teacher in his backyard Sunday, a discovery which investigators hope will offer more clues once it arrives at the NTSB’s Washington, DC, laboratory.
According to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, investigators are looking into whether the bolts were installed or blew off during the flight. NTSB
The NTSB said the plane’s “very emotional” flight attendants were in counseling after being traumatized by the potentially deadly incident, which left no one seriously injured.
The crew members reported “pretty significant crew communications challenges during the event,” officials explained.
“They didn’t know what was occurring. They were certainly concerned, they stated, about the four unaccompanied minors and their focus was on them and the three lap children at the time,” Homendy said
“The flight attendants mentioned that the … communication was so poor that they felt like they, they really needed guidance and information, and it was, it was [a] pretty terrifying event.”
The plane’s captain and first officer also told investigators that the cockpit door flew open during the incident and said they heard a bang and felt pressure changes in their ears.
A laminated flight checklist even blew into the cabin before a flight attendant was able to close the cockpit door, officials revealed.
“They had trouble communicating … they had trouble hearing each other, they had trouble hearing air traffic control and they had trouble communicating throughout the event,” Homendy said.
Investigators did not connect the investigation to the loose bolts found on several United Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets, saying they were solely focused on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.
The NTSB said it expected its investigation to take between a year and 18 months.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday temporarily grounded some 170 of the planes internationally for inspections in the wake of the spine-tingling snafu.
All Boeing MAX jets were grounded for two years after two crashes on Indonesia’s Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people.
Boeing’s president and CEO Dave Calhoun had scheduled a companywide safety meeting Tuesday.
“While we’ve made progress in strengthening our safety management and quality control systems and processes in the last few years, situations like this are a reminder that we must remain focused on continuing to improve every day,” Calhoun told his staffers.
Hfcomms
EN66iq
Hardware to secure panel that blew off Boeing 737 jet may never have been installed: NTSB
That wouldn't only be on the technician who is responsible for the plug installation but on the supervisor that double checks and signs off on the work. A little thing called 'pencil whipping' I believe.
ainitfunny
Saved, to glorify God.
It sounds like sabotage to me.
Hfcomms
EN66iq
Would have to be from Boeing as delivered. New aircraft and the standard 100 hour checks that the A&P's do wouldn't require disassembling the interior to check the fasteners.
Shadow
Swift, Silent,...Sleepy
You cannot correct the faults of these people or you are picking on them. The kind of a$$ chewing, for doing something stupid that could cost lives, is just not done with the DEI hires. They have been given participation trophies and praised for trying, or just showing up. We older aircraft mechanics cringe at what we see coming.
There are some good and very promising young mechanics coming in. They all had fathers who taught them, expected them to learn by themselves and held them to account with standards they expected. It is not all hopeless, but, the current direction of the industry is frightening.
Shadow
ainitfunny
Saved, to glorify God.
Yeah,at Boeing, with their DEI hires, it probably would be easy for terrorists to get a job at Boeing and comprimise the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people with missing or not tightened bolts!
¹
Interesting - it's beginning to appear that maybe this was an installation issue rather than a design or materials issue. It's still possible that the bolts might have been there and failed - which could point to a design and/or materials issue. Since it appears that the design had 4 restraining fasteners holding the door plug in place, it's hard to believe that the design of the door plug was the issue. Aircraft companies have had pretty decent design practices for doors/plugs for well over 60 years of designing jet aircraft, and it's likely that such was practiced here (despite the corporate move to "wokeness"). Further investigation should reveal whether or not it was an installation issue or a material strength issue with the fasteners or other attach hardware. They will especially take a look at the fracture surfaces of the track and other broken components to narrow down the cause.Hardware to secure panel that blew off Boeing 737 jet may never have been installed: NTSB
Federal investigators probing last week’s Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 fuselage panel blowout are looking into the possibility that the hardware that was supposed to keep it secured were never …
Hardware to secure panel that blew off Boeing 737 jet may never have been installed: NTSB
Federal investigators probing last week’s near-disastrous Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 fuselage panel blowout are looking into the possibility that the hardware that was supposed to keep it secured was never installed in the first place.
National Transportation Safety Board officials made the revelation during a Monday night press conference, hours after United Airlines reported finding loose bolts and “installation issues” on some Boeing 737 MAX 9 jetliners in the wake of Friday evening’s emergency landing of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 at Portland International Airport.
Officials told reporters the door plug came off the plane minutes after it took off from PDX, causing the cabin pressure to drop precipitously and creating the terrifying “loud” and “windy” conditions that led a young passenger sitting next to the missing door to reportedly lose his shirt as he was held down by his mother.
The large panel that was blown off the plane was located where an emergency exit door would normally be on a plane with more seats, and should have been secured by stop bolts and 12 interlocking pins and pads, investigators said.
“The exam to date has shown that the door did in fact translate upwards, all 12 stops became disengaged, allowing it to blow out of the fuselage,” said NTSB aerospace engineer Clint Crookshanks.
The panel that blew off the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 last week may not have been bolted down, according to federal investigators. NTSB/Handout via REUTERS
“We found that both guide tracks on the plug were fractured … we have not yet recovered the four bolts … that restrain it from its vertical movement, and we have not determined if they existed there,” Crookshanks continued.
Investigators were looking to see if the bolts “were there, or … if they came out during the … violent explosive decompression event,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy added.
The jet door plug that blew off the plane, followed by passengers’ personal items, was found by a Portland science teacher in his backyard Sunday, a discovery which investigators hope will offer more clues once it arrives at the NTSB’s Washington, DC, laboratory.
According to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, investigators are looking into whether the bolts were installed or blew off during the flight. NTSB
The NTSB said the plane’s “very emotional” flight attendants were in counseling after being traumatized by the potentially deadly incident, which left no one seriously injured.
The crew members reported “pretty significant crew communications challenges during the event,” officials explained.
“They didn’t know what was occurring. They were certainly concerned, they stated, about the four unaccompanied minors and their focus was on them and the three lap children at the time,” Homendy said
“The flight attendants mentioned that the … communication was so poor that they felt like they, they really needed guidance and information, and it was, it was [a] pretty terrifying event.”
The plane’s captain and first officer also told investigators that the cockpit door flew open during the incident and said they heard a bang and felt pressure changes in their ears.
A laminated flight checklist even blew into the cabin before a flight attendant was able to close the cockpit door, officials revealed.
“They had trouble communicating … they had trouble hearing each other, they had trouble hearing air traffic control and they had trouble communicating throughout the event,” Homendy said.
Investigators did not connect the investigation to the loose bolts found on several United Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets, saying they were solely focused on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.
The NTSB said it expected its investigation to take between a year and 18 months.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday temporarily grounded some 170 of the planes internationally for inspections in the wake of the spine-tingling snafu.
All Boeing MAX jets were grounded for two years after two crashes on Indonesia’s Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people.
Boeing’s president and CEO Dave Calhoun had scheduled a companywide safety meeting Tuesday.
“While we’ve made progress in strengthening our safety management and quality control systems and processes in the last few years, situations like this are a reminder that we must remain focused on continuing to improve every day,” Calhoun told his staffers.
Cacheman
Ultra MAGA!
Boeing again, this time at Atlanta. Glad I don't fly...
RT1:30
View: https://twitter.com/ABCWorldNews/status/1749998438299701396
RT1:30
View: https://twitter.com/ABCWorldNews/status/1749998438299701396
Hfcomms
EN66iq
That might not be on Boeing though unless the airframe is brand new. Commercial aircraft have to undergo 100 hour inspections and all sorts of maintenance requirements. Included in that is re-torqueing items such as the bolts and cotter pins on the gear mechanisms. This one is probably on the airline maintenance A&P’s.
The 757 went into production in 87. Stopped in 2004 so the newest 757 is about 20 years old. A wheel falling of is Delta problem, not Boeing.
Mark D
Now running for Emperor.
THIS
If I heard correctly, the NTSB says they have not found any damage to the door mechanism of the airplane.
This is adding to the theory that the door bolts were never installed in the first place.
IMO, that would be a huge revelation.
1911user
Veteran Member
Supplier finds another problem with some Boeing 737 fuselages
The problem might delay deliveries of about 50 aircraft in the latest quality gaff to plague the manufacturer.
kfor.com
Supplier finds another problem with some Boeing 737 fuselages
by: The Associated Press
Posted: Feb 5, 2024 / 05:06 AM CST
Updated: Feb 5, 2024 / 06:42 AM CST
Boeing reported another problem with fuselages on its 737 jets that might delay deliveries of about 50 aircraft in the latest quality gaff to plague the manufacturer.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal said in a letter to Boeing staff seen Monday that a worker at its supplier discovered misdrilled holes in fuselages. Spirit AeroSystems, based in Wichita, Kansas, makes a large part of the fuselages on Boeing Max jets.
“While this potential condition is not an immediate safety issue and all 737s can continue operating safely, we currently believe we will have to perform rework on about 50 undelivered planes,” Deal said in the letter to employees share with the media.
The problem was discovered by an employee of the supplier of the fuselages who notified his manager that two holes might have not been drilled according to specifications, Deal said.
Both Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems are facing intense scrutiny over the quality of their work after an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 was forced to make an emergency landing on Jan. 5 when a panel called a door plug blew out of the side of the plane shortly after takeoff from Portland, Oregon.
The NTSB is investigating the accident, while the Federal Aviation Administration investigates whether Boeing and its suppliers followed quality-control procedures.
Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, the only other U.S. airline flying the Max 9, reported finding loose hardware in door plugs of other planes they inspected after the accident. The FAA grounded all Max 9s in the U.S. the day after the blowout. Two weeks later, the agency approved the inspection and maintenance process to return the planes to flying.
Alaska Airlines and United Airlines have begun returning some to service.
Boeing, based in Renton, Washington, said last week it was withdrawing a request for a safety exemption needed to certify a new, smaller model of the 737 Max airliner. Boeing asked federal regulators late last year to allow delivery of its 737 Max 7 airliner to customers even though it does not meet a safety standard designed to prevent part of the engine housing from overheating and breaking off during flight.
Wildweasel
F-4 Phantoms Phorever
I wonder if the Navy's P-8 aircraft, based on 737s are getting some attention over the door plug blowout? P-8s use a lot of door plugs in place of emergency exits, since they don't have to worry about evacuating passengers.It wasn't just a window, it was an optional door that blew out at 16,000 feet.
That would also apply to foreign P-8 operators plus E-7 aircraft, since they come down the same assembly lines as the 737 Max 9 and 10.
Mark D
Now running for Emperor.
JUST... HOLD IT... TOGETHER... Until November...
Then I can retire and take my Lump Sum.
ainitfunny
Saved, to glorify God.
I think they must have problems with sabatours and
just don't give a damn workers coming in. There also may be a mentally ill mechanic whose trying for his five minutes of fame by causing a large aicraft to crash wuth
his "handiwork"!.
just don't give a damn workers coming in. There also may be a mentally ill mechanic whose trying for his five minutes of fame by causing a large aicraft to crash wuth
his "handiwork"!.
This would be the worst outcome because it raises so many questions about build quality.
View: https://twitter.com/aviationbrk/status/1754959649269313848
View: https://twitter.com/aviationbrk/status/1754959649269313848
Blacknarwhal
Let's Go Brandon!
Oh yeah. Will it be "Boeing's workers don't care," "Boeing's workers don't know what they're doing," or, "Boeing's management is flogging the workers to do the work of three in the space and time of one"?
Cacheman
Ultra MAGA!
Does this explain all the flight delays and train wrecks?
View: https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1764730734185419212
View: https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1764730734185419212
Johnny Twoguns
Senior Member
I am not positive but I think those were two different incidents. I've seen the claims that the issues are DEI hires (and/or gen z, m, whatever, lazy little fxxks) and very dangerous shoddy workmanship. To support it I've seen people post some DEI crap that Boeing has put out.It wasn't just a window, it was an optional door that blew out at 16,000 feet.
bw
Fringe Ranger
Juan Browne says the problem is that Boeing and their suppliers use different work tracking systems, and the systems don't communicate with each other. My wife used to work with Boeing data and agrees that this is an old problem. I got a significant career boost in doing data reconciliation to make Boeing data agree with a vendor, so I definitely got the T-shirt.
