Posted on 02/26/2024 1:04:17 PM PST by Red Badger
Edited on 02/26/2024 4:33:05 PM PST by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
In 2018, Ed Pierson decided that he could no longer work as a senior manager for Boeing’s 737 MAX program.
At the company’s production facility in Renton, Washington, he had watched as employee morale plummeted and oversight and assembly procedures faltered. He told his superiors but retired soon after. But then fatal MAX 8 crashes occurred in 2018 and 2019. He decided to speak up publicly and was then called to testify before Congress on the problems he says he saw up close.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
IF IT’S BOEING I’M NOT GOING! AVIATION PING!...............
Affirmative action hires are going to kill us all.
Good one, years ago when I travelled a lot on business there was a saying: “If it don’t say Boeing, then I ain’t going”. Now I think not so much.
This doesn’t pass the sniff test. I’d bet it’s a PR plant from a competitor.
Airbus?.......................
Why’d he get on it in the first place? Guess I’m gonna have to read the damn story.
Just a “Girly Man”.(/S)
Welp, read the story. No mention of affirmative action. There’s a plus for Boeing, right?
This is not how planes should be built. It was so bad in 2018 — we didn’t have engines on many of the planes and so they put these big concrete blocks on the engine pylons so the plane wouldn’t tip. Kind of an important part of the plane, right? A major warning bell that something’s not right.
Maybe he didn't remember that early on in the MAX production, CFM had problems with the new LEAP-1B engines for the MAX, so Boeing couldn't install engines that CFM couldn't deliver. That is in no way a Boeing-caused problem.
And the second crash in 2019 can be blamed on the HIGH-SCHOOL educated pilot in command not reading the emergency notice issued by Boeing on how to recognize runaway trim caused by MCAS. Had he kept the aircraft in manual trim as required by the flight manual and the emergency notice, they wouldn't have crashed.
Type of plane is in many types of flight information readily available. Most airports have the ability for the passenger to actually see the plane unless you are getting sloshed in the lounge and don’t pay attention.
“Last year, I was flying from Seattle to New York, and I purposely scheduled myself on a non-MAX airplane. I went to the gate. I walked in, sat down and looked straight ahead, and lo and behold, there was a 737-8/737-9 safety card. So I got up and I walked off. The flight attendant didn’t want me to get off the plane. And I’m not trying to cause a scene. I just want to get off this plane, and I just don’t think it’s safe. I said I purposely scheduled myself not to fly [on a MAX].”
He didn’t know what plane he was on till he saw the card in the pocket of the seaat in front of him!????
SORRY. His story lacks a significant amount of credibility.
“”This doesn’t pass the sniff test. I’d bet it’s a PR plant from a competitor.””
Yes, that was my first reaction also.
That said, there is something else occurring at Boeing. The Federal Government used to issue Cost Plus contracts, especially in the aerospace industry. Boeing had a huuuuge aerospace industry.
NASA no longer issues Cost Plus contracts. You bid for a NASA contract, and then you get the contracted amount. The recent James Webb telescope is one of the last Cost Plus contracts, and a great example of the insanity. The original estimated cost of the Webb telescope was $2 billion. Each time there were cost overruns, NASA just wrote another check. By the time Webb was finished, the $2 billion had ballooned to $10 billion. Much of NASA’S planetary budget was sucked up by Webb, and many other projects have been delayed, or outright canceled.
Since Boeing can no longer just bill more on some parts of it’s business, I am sure it is suffering overall.
Boeing has a contract to build a rocket capsule. It is called Starliner. It is behind schedule. One of the most insane problems was discovered last year. Some of the capsule wiring insulation turned out to be flammable. This IMMEDIATELY brought up memories of the Apollo 1 accident that killed 3 astronauts. How the #*&# could anyone overlook this??
These days, the SpaceX Falcon rockets seem more reliable than Boeing.
Totally misquoted but the general idea.
He is a self aggrandizing attention hound looking for hits to his web site.
He was only a Senior Manager which is a low level middle manager in the Boeing org chart. It is one step from the bottom Manager title and 7 levels from the top.
I watched the Downfall documentary on Netflix. It made me not want to fly Boing again.
I have to fly next week, and I'm on A321s for both legs, which gave me a sigh of relief. If my reluctance is not well grounded, I'm certainly open to feeling safe by being wrong.
I've flown on 787s without hesitation. But the way I understand the MAX, it's not really a new plane, only a legacy 737 with bigger engines on it, and it was created to compete with the new Airbus A320neo's. Boeing didn't have enough time to build an entirely new airplane because it would've had to have gone through an entirely new FAA inspection process. So they slapped some bigger engines on a 737, and called it new, but because it was still a 737 frame, it didn't need to go through the new approval process.
The problem was that the engines were too big for the fuselage, and would cause a stall at a certain angle of ascent. So they wrote a computer program (MCAS) that would correct for it, and outsourced the coding to an Indian sweatshop.
If the angle of attack indicator was broken or malfunctioning, it would send the plane into a nosedive, which is what happened on Ethiopian and Indonesian planes.
The door blowing off of the Alaska Air MAX didn't give me any comfort either.
The whole government has moved away from cost plus and cost plus fixed fee contracts. Contracts officers demand everything be fixed price and often depending on the acquisition try to force you to the GSA schedule. It makes it very difficult to do R\D contracts where a lot of the specifics are still unkown. I’ve been told by DOD acquisitions people if you’re not at a Technical Readiness Level (TRL) 4 or 5 don’t bother. I asked that guy -’ so you’re telling the next Dave Hewlett & William Packard to get lost’. He agreed with me that they are. Yet they sit back and complain they’re not getting the R/D they need. They want all the risk to be on the contractor. So you’re forced to go VC very early!
“This guy is a raging fruitcake.”
What is more correct is that you’re are a raging ignorant shi’ite projectionist than someone working at a senior level for decades.
-fJRoberts-
He purposely booked on a flight that wasn’t supposed to be on a Max. They must have changed planes, which happens all the time. A little mellow dramatic maybe since flying on a Max with all of its safety problems is still safer that driving a car or riding a bike. Nonetheless, Boeing’s upper management is poor and needs to be cleaned out. Put the engineers back on charge or at least change the culture so that the engineers are listened to.
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