Model Airplanes

A Boeing Co. program that speeds production by letting mechanics inspect their own work is leading to repeated mistakes on the 787 Dreamliner production line in North Charleston, workers say, at a time when the airplane maker is facing worldwide scrutiny over its safety record.

Some of the mistakes are serious safety hazards, like debris being left in the sensors that measure air speed while a plane is in flight. More common problems, workers say, range from surplus rags and bolts left in planes to loose cabin seats and unsecured galley equipment.

Workers say many of those production problems can be traced to the relatively new self-inspection program now spearheaded by Boeing Vice President Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, a former automobile executive with no previous aviation manufacturing experience.

The lean manufacturing approach Gonzalez-Beltran is working to incorporate at Boeing drew similar complaints and a lawsuit at a California auto plant he once helped manage.

“I’m always finding cases where jobs are signed off and the parts aren’t installed,” said a Boeing worker, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. “It happens a lot.”

Boeing says the program, which some regulators have called ineffective, is only used in stable production areas where defects typically are not being made.

But some workers say the self-inspection program puts production speed ahead of passenger safety and that problems are often ignored to meet deadlines. While most of the mistakes are eventually caught before a plane is turned over to an airline, workers say they worry about what’s being missed.

And the

Article source: https://www.postandcourier.com/business/boeing-sc-lets-mechanics-inspect-their-own-work-leading-to/article_5ccc89ce-6cea-11e9-af3c-bfe34127eb85.html

Russia’s main investigative body on Monday said both flight recorders had been recovered from the Sukhoi passenger plane that caught fire while making an emergency landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. At least 41 people, including two children, lost their lives.

The Sukhoi SSJ100 turned back to Moscow during a flight to Murmansk for unspecified reasons. Video on Russian television showed fire bursting from the plane’s underside as it landed.

Despite the incident, Russian Transport Minister Yevgeny Dietrich said Russia saw no reason to ground its domestic-made Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft.

Dietrich told reporters that 33 passengers and four crew members survived, while six of the survivors are in serious condition and receiving treatment.

‘I wouldn’t fly on this type of airplane’

Vadim Lukashevich, an independent aviation expert who previously worked as an engineer at Sukhoi, told DW that there have been safety concerns about this type of aircraft.

Ever since international sanctions were implemented against Russia in 2014, it has become difficult to obtain parts for the planes.

“I wouldn’t fly on this type of airplane,” Lukashevich told DW.

He added that if there is an accident with a plane in military aviation, that plane model is immediately grounded — the same cannot be said for passenger planes.

“In civilian aviation we don’t do that because there are the airlines to think about, the profits, there are commercial interests at play. And that means we don’t stop using the planes,” Lukashevich said, adding: “I think that there can never be enough security measures in civilian aviation.”

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/russian-plane-fire-investigators-recover-flight-recorders/a-48614490

By Chloe Aiello

Boeing’s board of directors is increasingly under scrutiny as more details come to light about what went wrong aboard two doomed 737 Max planes. And if the board failed to ask enough tough questions about safety features of the plane, it could be because many board members lacked the expertise necessary to oversee an aerospace company, said Doug MacMillan, a Washington Post reporter who covered the story.

“These are not people with a lot of deep aerospace industry expertise, so you could argue the board doesn’t really have the tools it needs to oversee something as complex as airplane safety,” said MacMillan, a corporate accountability reporter.

Boeing ($BA) 737 Max planes have been grounded globally for more than a month after two crashes within six months killed a total of 346 people. Investigations into the Lion Air and more recent Ethiopian Airlines crashes unearthed the role of Boeing’s planes in the fatal incidents, which were initially thought to be unrelated.

In both flights, for example, investigators found that faulty “angle of attack” sensors activated software that forced the planes into nosedives. An optional alert feature that the company said in a statement Sunday it thought was standardized could have notified pilots that the sensors were inputting false information, according to The New York Times. After the first crash in Indonesia, Boeing conducted an internal review of the problem, and said the alert feature’s absence “did not adversely impact airplane safety or operation.”

However, MacMillan said board members he

Article source: https://cheddar.com/media/boeing-board-737-max-safety-crashes