South Carolina planes were getting flown to Washington before delivery to customers when I had a friend still working there. He was finding metal shavings in the fuselage of the plane, along with tools, nicked wires and such.
None of this should have made it out of the factory floor. Every crew that works on a plane has to certify (literally sign off a form) that when they worked on the plane they left it in good shape (no obvious defects, like metal shavings, tools left inside, etc). If the next shift comes in and finds dangerous debris or damage the prior crew should have noted, then the prior crew is required by the FAA to have a formal report written against them, as they have created a dangerous plane.
Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Ultimately, he took a $25k hit paying back the Boeing relocation package and left after 10 months to work on repairing trains (which has been a significant improvement).
There are numerous reports on debris (metal shavings, tools, and even a whole ladder) being discovered in aircraft by customers after delivery. This requires not only that assembly signed off on the aircraft, but that the issues are not discovered in final inspection either.
Some reporting suggests several major customers (airlines) were so fed up with this 'foreign object debris' (metal shavings etc) problem that they said they would only accept aircraft from Washington. From your story, I can't help but wonder if Boeing management got around this by flying near-complete aircraft from SC to WA to get around this.
To give you a sense of how bad this debris issue is: the US Air Force refused delivery of new air tankers after finding debris (in fuel tanks if I remember correctly).
The story about airlines only accepting 787 aircraft from Washington was from the time when it was still being assembled in two plants (Everett, WA and North Charleston, SC). Since March 2021 (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner), the only plant assembling 787s is the SC plant, which is cheaper and non-unionized. I guess that's more important to Boeing than occasional quality issues...
Hiring mechanics & technicians for Boeing in the Pacific Northwest is also quite difficult with their poor reputation, middling pay and the high cost of living. FAANG has increased the cost of living in the region to the point of pricing out whole neighborhoods that used to be Boeing employees, pushing them out of the inner suburbs.
Shooting the messenger seems to be Boeing tradition of the last decade.
When I was a kid, half the parents I knew worked at Boeing and were proud of the quality engineering or manufacturing they did, but over the past two decades Boeing has had this crew retire and has worked to shift to a blame the messenger culture.
There's this documentary on Netflix that also notes the cultural shift, and largely blames it on the 1997 acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas, and the subsequent shift, roughly speaking, from an engineering-dominated culture to an MBA-dominated culture.
The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state), which has caused poor quality. I have not seen any clear evidence of this, as all Boeing facilities seem to have QC issues. On a related note, I'm not sure how Boeing's QC compares to Airbus, though both seem to have similar aircraft availability rates, which would indicate similar levels of QC.
SpaceX manufacturing facility in California is also un-unionized. The amount of difference between the two places is very large, to just conclude that it has to do with unions seems like a stretch to me.
That one factory is the home factory close to where the designs are made and the other is so far away seems like a pretty important thing.
This seems like the kind of argument people who really love unions would make.
Where you have unions, people are not as afraid of management pressure.
When the management pressure is for better quality, the union may interfere. Where management pressure is for lower quality, the union should interfere.
We see the harmful effect of unions where the police are in one.
Among other things: the safety tolerances for SpaceX are substantially different than those for commercial airliners. When a SpaceX launch craft fails, it explodes somewhere over the ocean or in LEO. When a commercial passenger airliner fails, several hundred human beings die.
SpaceX management is currently oriented to both high quality and high production rate. When their commitment to quality slips, such as traded off for production rate, quality will slip. When quality in a rocket engine slips, they explode.
When that starts, we may expect they will start by exploding mainly on test stands, instead of vehicles.
How many launch failures have been attributed to materials failures in the engines themselves, and not improper process and/or maintenance before actual launches?
My intuition is that the latter would exceed the former, and that test stands aren’t a realistic environment for predicting their likelihood.
Probably the main difference from operating bolted to a test stand is vibration both from its own operation and from all the other engines operating at the same time, and instabilities in fuel flow caused by the same. The bottom end of a launching rocket is a really hostile environment. Just the noise would kill you. Top is marginally better, depending on what happens at the bottom.
It is hard to imagine how you would determine, after the fact, whether a rocket blew up because of material failure or something else, but they seem to do it, anyway during development when they have a zillion sensors attached logging everything in real time: "hmm, a millisecond before the explosion, this reading went out of tolerance, and then this one, then this one, and then the data ends."
"Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest. Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".
> "Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest.
The latter is essentially a term of art, the former is not. Using the former is imprecise and confusing.
> Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".
That is a completely different concept called at-will employment. RTW is about union shops (not to be confused with closed shops, which have been illegal in the US since Taft-Hartley)
They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian?
It's better to just allow people to name their own movement, otherwise, you end up endlessly fighting about names (i.e. are people 'pro-life' or 'anti-choice' and 'pro-murder'/'anti-life' and 'pro-choice').
I don't blame you for confusing the terms but I am so upset that the average person upvoted you without checking. You have the wrong term, and I'm going to comment here just to give people an extra chance to know that.
That's the whole point of 'right to work.' Allow new employees to freeload on the union-negotiated rates for the shop without requiring them to actually join the union. Who would pay if they got the benefits anyway? So the union gets defunded.
- based near the engineering teams; frequent collaborations
- unionized, highly skilled workforce
The people who took over Boeing and moved the HQ out of SEA intentionally picked SC to union-bust their own workforce.
MBAs just refuse to believe that workplace culture and experience matter — so they treat high skilled workers like dumb, replaceable cogs and then their companies fail a decade later when the senior/principal staff are incompetent or non-existent.
That same mentality is why their new planes have major issues:
They don’t have competent senior/principal engineers because they viewed mid-career engineers as “too expensive” — and so didn’t train any.
The WSJ article was maddening in failing to even mention that for the years when the 787 was assembled in both Washington and South Carolina (up until 2020?), the vast majority of quality issues were coming from South Carolina. So much so that some airlines stipulated they would only take Washington-assembled planes. Now that the 787 is only assembled in South Carolina (Boeing doubled-down on their strategy despite the well-known quality issues), no doubt the ongoing defects issue is as least partly related, and not merely "microscope" related.
I guess you have to read "moved the HQ out of SEA" (to Chicago) and "intentionally picked SC [for 787 final assembly] to union-bust their own workforce" separately, then it makes more sense...
Kansas is a right-to-work state and is where Boeing builds 737 fuselages, does passenger to cargo conversions, and does a hefty chunk of their work for the DoD on pre-merger products.
Boeing sold off the fuselage plant in 2005, closed up conversions, and moved the DOD work to San Antonio in 2014. There are a few small subsidiary companies there, but no mainline Boeing.
None of this should have made it out of the factory floor. Every crew that works on a plane has to certify (literally sign off a form) that when they worked on the plane they left it in good shape (no obvious defects, like metal shavings, tools left inside, etc). If the next shift comes in and finds dangerous debris or damage the prior crew should have noted, then the prior crew is required by the FAA to have a formal report written against them, as they have created a dangerous plane.
Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Ultimately, he took a $25k hit paying back the Boeing relocation package and left after 10 months to work on repairing trains (which has been a significant improvement).