The Boeing 787: Broken Dreams l Al Jazeera Investigations

The MCAS is what brought Boeing issues into the zeitgeist, but I was aware of issues at Boeing ~ 18 years ago from friends who had worked there and Al Jazeera did a great investigation ~ 9 years ago ( [this video] ). Boeing used to be the gold standard and as someone who researches such gold standards it was disheartening to see them give that up. But that happened very slowly and started a long time ago. Clearly diluting focus away from safety is an issue for whatever the reason especially when the safety of airplanes is declining. This should also be taken in context that many aspects of manufacturing have improved greatly over the past 20 years so even if everything else stayed the same the general safety should have been greatly improved. So the drag on safety by the culture is bad enough to overcome these 'free' gains and end up with even less safe planes should highlight just how bad that effect is.

The SC Boeing plant doesn't exactly come off looking very good in the Aljazeera documentary [1] on the 787. Just having a job shouldn't necessarily be the goal...the quality of the job and the rights of the workers to advocate for the safety of workers and the public are also things the Unions have traditionally done. I don't usually advocate for or against unions...I think they make sense in some situations and less so in others, but the Boeing case doesn't seem to be a good argument against unions. Boeing prospered tremendously when working with the unions in Washington state and it seems that a lot of their recent anti-union behavior is part of a number of decisions they've made that are quite short-sighted. [1] [this video]

I still don't trust the FAA at all. They've been sourcing out their own work to Boeing since the 787 Dreamliner [0]. That's seven years ago. I don't think this will make them change their practices. The 787 fiasco certainly didn't. Personally I'd be happiest if the world just scrapped all the Max-es. Just scrap 'em, let Boeing go out of business, it's what they deserve now, they shouldn't exist anymore as a company. There are enough businesses that happily create planes without putting profit before people. It's really too bad that there's no footage of either of the crashes, because if people could see what happened they would never fly one of those things again. That's why people don't fly zeppelins anymore. Not because of what people said or read, but because they saw. The Max deserves the same. Do you want to fly in a plane which was created using the deaths of over 300 people to finalize the design? [0] The Boeing 787: Broken Dreams, Al Jazeera Investigations, [this video]

> I love flying on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner Then you really shouldn't watch this video: [this video] TLDW: Critical Dreamliner fuselage parts didn't fit together because workers at the subcontractor (Ducommun) traced a template with magic marker onto the material and cut and drilled the part by hand. Officially, the parts were manufactured by high precision CNC machinery with extremely small tolerances. At Boeing, if drill holes didn't match up in parts A and B, workers were told to just put the parts together and re-drill the hole in part B through the hole in part A, or hammer the parts into place. Internal Boeing investigators who found out and documented the issues were threatened to be sued if they spoke up. They were later fired, after the US government allegedly leaked their identities to Boeing. Here, a Boeing employee speaks about the work culture in the manufacturing plant: [this video]

It describes how it used providers instead of internalization to push down on the prices. However, to anyone who might expect it, it doesn’t tell that Boeing has fired 900 QAs out of 3000 back in 2021. This documentary is not as damning as Al Jezeera’s documentary on the 2013 airframe mishaps: [this video] Maybe it’s a European bias, but I’d like to see more shame (and jail time) upon the Boeing management, down to the guy at the bottom who signed off the bolt work without even looking at the plane, which is criminal. But I’m fair, I’d also enjoy the management of Volkswagen going to jail, like that manager who went to holidays through a USA connection and was intercepted by the US border and is still rotting in jail.