Boeing is investigating a new quality problem with its 787 Dreamliner after discovering that hundreds of fasteners have been incorrectly installed on the fuselages of some undelivered jets, two people familiar with the matter said.
The latest in a series of manufacturing snags affecting the U.S. planemaker involves incorrect “torquing” or tightening in a Boeing plant of more than 900 fasteners per plane – split equally between both sides of the jet’s mid-body, they said.
”lefty loosey” … LOL … Kate, you’re a bloody genius.
The article was less rivetting than I expected.
Reading it caused my own sphincter to tighten … at the thought of boarding another Boeing jet
How does one do “incorrect torquing” using an electronically controlled and measured torque device? Or is Boeing so advanced they don’t use what is a basic tool that has been used for the last 30ish years in automotive plants?
How, you ask. By hiring individuals totally unqualified to hammer nails through dumplings. But the bottom line was impressive, until…………..it wasn`t.
I worked in a Duetz diesel R&D facility, the tightening tool for cylinder head-piston sleeve assembly on air-cooled engines measured the degrees of rotation a bolt was turned after first being seated hand.
A different time, 48 yrs back.
The same way and reason that welds aren’t properly inspected … because of lazy workers who fake their work product. Why? Some do it for malicious purposes … because they hate their supervisors who demand production rates. Some are simply lazy and sloppy, and shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. Hiring people who are competent and care is far harder than anyone understands.
Easy Now Kenji…seems to me that CWB in Canada and AWS in the US only allow Level II inspectors to “inspect” critical weldments – those that contain pressure. In the case of anything above 15psi, Piping is Radiographed a min of 10%.
Structural Steel being Mag Particle, UT, or LPI (liquid penetrant tested…and sometimes if required & accessible, radiographed.
Now as to Boeing…I have no idea as to who certifies & with what qualifications their “Inspectors” have..??
As for torquing, one can Under torque or Over torque – both presenting issues during the life of the equipment.
I’ve been a Certified CWB Level II (AWS – CWI), since 1991
Of course present company excluded. But surely you admit there are slackers in your ranks.
““inspect” critical weldments ”
LOL at ‘weldments…
(must be a variation of ‘fitment’)
I, for one, admire The King’s English!
Tightening of bolts via torquing is not as accurate as you might think. It is generally accepted that torquing a bolt properly results in a load on the bolt that is +/-30% of the expected bolt load. Incorrectly torquing the bolt can lead to a much larger spread in the accuracy. Even using “electronically controlled and measured” is not foolproof. For example, incorrect lubrication of a bolt can lead to a situation where the torque appears correct, but the bolt load is wrong.
In the Reuters report linking in the link, it states that bolts may have been torqued from the wrong side. (I.e. the bolt head was torqued instead of the nut). “Electronically controlled and measured torque devices” wouldn’t have made a difference here. The bolt load will be lower if the bolt head was torqued because of rotational friction between the bolt shaft and the hole it is going through.
Incorrect procedure used and not identified until after 900 bolts had been done…
YEP…!!
I’d like to know how this has been allowed to happen though. I went through BCIT aviation in the early 90s and we learned the correct way to torque fasteners in the first few weeks (tighten the NUT, not the bolt; torque to 50% then 75% then 100%), as well as DIRE warnings about what WOULD happen if we signed off on work that was done improperly, especially if it led to any sort of incident. Yet now we have a MAJOR manufacturer that has people working for it who can’t/won’t follow SIMPLE procedures that have been established for many decades?? And it’s not even that hard to do, and also if it takes you longer to do it properly, you’re getting paid for that!
Are these people all Affirmative Action hires?
You’d think that Aviation of all industries would be permitted to purge individuals who were putting others at risk through their incompetence.
It might be cheaper in the long run for Boeing to put all the Affirmative Action hires in a room and let them play video games or something and let competent people do the actual work.
I see that Reuters had this at the bottom of their page.
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Are we that screwed?
Are we that un-screwed?
Kenji,
No, we are that SCREWED.
My gut would say worker who didn’t have a ton of experience who wasn’t being properly supervised/trained.
Which VERY well could end up being a DEI issue on either the worker, the supervisor, or the inspector…or all of them.
Well someone in the work chain wasn’t doing their job.
Perhaps we should all just STOP building stuff … as ex FED Chair Alan Greenspan scolded. That we SHOULD export ALL the manufacturing and building of things to the Communist Chinese. All these subpar bolt installers and build managers should “learn to code” … or now … “learn to teach AI to code” … and leave all the physical stuff to the 3rd worlders working under far harsher taskmasters, who will work them to the bone and whip them when they make mistakes.
That’s easy. You set the air wrench to “4” and drive the nut until it stops turning.
Ever wonder why wheels keep falling off transport trucks? That’s why. Broken wheel studs from morons with air wrenches set to max.
Now imagine an airplane.
Management: “Hey Jimmy! Did you torque that wing stud to spec?”
Minimum Wage Knob: “Naw, I just zipped ‘er on, because Boss Man was yelling at us to go faster.”
Management: “Good enough.”
What member of the Monkees knew how to use a wrench?
Peter Torque!
were the instructions in ebonics? that doesnt translate well for aerospace jobs.
Just make sure you don’t fly on a Boeing that was built on a Monday or a Friday.
Almost 50% of passenger planes and 90% of cargo aircraft currently flying were made by Boeing. Good luck.
Government dictating the process (DEI), is no different than government dictating production output.. Corners will be cut, or else you become the problem.. $$$..
I will give it to China.. At least they send the ones responsible (not true) off to camps from time to time to explain it all away.. Its John’s fault.. lol
Boeing to change their name, to Boing.
The article calls them “fasteners.” There is a wide variety of fasteners in an airplane, especially transport-category aircraft. I suspect that the incorrectly-torqued fasteners might have been Hi-Loks, which have a precision bolt that resembles a threaded rivet, and a funny-looking nut that has an extended hex and a machined “neck” beneath the hex. The nut is tightened until the hex breaks off, which it will do at the correct torque, leaving the rounded, threaded portion on the bolt. The correct torque also depends on the hole having been reamed to exactly the right size.
Several ways to screw this up. Not reaming the hole properly so that the bolt is too tight in the hole and doesn’t seat properly before the hex breaks off the threaded portion of the nut. Or maybe the nut was never tightened until the hex broke off. (“We don’t want to break stuff, do we??”) In any case, improper training will be at fault, along with improper supervision and inspection during the assembly of the fuselage section.
In Canada it takes four years of training and apprenticeship to get an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer’s license. This not only trains you in the proper procedures and imparts an understanding of the theory of a huge range of subjects, but entitles you to certify work done by you or others. In the US, it takes a little less time, and there is no requirement for formal academic training. One can apprentice for about 30 months, write the exams, and get the certificate. The exam questions and answers are available in books you can study and memorize without having a real understanding of the subjects. In Canada there are no such shortcuts, no exam question/answer books to memorize. You have to know the stuff. I wrote my exams at a time the system was transitioning from 17 license categories down to four, and the exams had not yet been consolidated. I had to write ten exams. And show proof of academic training, apprenticeship, and tasks completed.
In a place like Boeing, most of the workers are not licensed mechanics. They are technicians trained for the narrow range of tasks they do. They’re more like the guy that just puts the wheel nuts on cars on the assembly line. There are not nearly enough licensed mechanics for such work, and it looks like the techs they are getting are not being selected on the basis of merit or competence or mechanical aptitude or anything else that has to do with building an airplane that will carry hundreds of people miles above the earth at speeds not much below the speed of sound, in a fuselage that is pressurized like an air tank so they don’t die at altitudes where the air is far too thin for survival.
We live in a world that caters to the demands of insane people.
Question. How do you get to own a piece of Boeing? Answer. Buy land under a flight path near an airport and wait.
Well it is:
Lefty loosey.
Righty tighty.
Politics gets into everything…………
There was another gem in the Boeing / Airbus decline from yesterday…
Fake titanium … (do I need to include an “lol” here too?)
https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/counterfeit-titanium-found-in-boeing-and-airbus-jets/
Fake metals are an issue. I bought duplex stainless steel bolting once….buyer got cheapest he could find from India, it came with mill certs, markings, and paperwork saying it was what we had ordered.
They looked like junk…I ordered PMI to verify metallurgy…and they were most definitely not the material we had specified. Had to hotshot bolts in from England to try to mitigate delays…
OK not the hate towards you, but using NY slime as a news service. I would like to heard from someone else
Boeing – Starliner problems. Boeing Artemis being over priced. That’s what you get from being an Engineering company to a lobbying firm.
Maureen Tkacik has been writing about Boeing’s problems for some time :
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/
(…) CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company (…)