Boeing Troubles - One of the world's largest aerospace manufacturers keeps having problems with their planes.

  • 🔧 Actively working on site again.
Another One.

A Boeing-made Delta Airlines flight out of Aruba and bound for Atlanta was forced to turn back and make an emergency landing after an engine blow out on take-off.

The Pilot of the Boeing 737 900 circled the Caribbean island four times before coming back into land following the 'mechanical issue'.

A spokesperson for the airline told DailyMail.com that there were 168 passengers on board in addition to four flight attendants and two pilots. The passengers were forced to spend an extra night in Aruba before being flown out on Wednesday.

'Delta flight DL581 from Aruba to Atlanta experienced a mechanical issue shortly after takeoff. It landed safely and returned to the gate uneventfully,' the spokesperson said.

'Delta teams are working to get our customers to their final destinations as quickly and safely as possible and we apologize for the delay in their travels.'

One passenger described the ordeal on Reddit saying that 'one of the engines blew up mid takeoff, we circled Aruba four times and emergency landed.'
Click to expand...
 
  • Informative
  • Like
Reactions: spiritofamermaid, Markass the Worst, byuuWasTaken and 15 others
Boeing President and CEO Dave Calhoun announced that he will be stepping down at the end of this year. Stan Deal, the President and CEO of the commercial branch of Boeing planes, also announced his retirement; he will be replaced by the current Chief Operating Officer. Chairman Larry Kelner will not stand for re-election, meaning he will not participate in the next round of elections when it comes time to pick another, or retain a member for the board.

No other board resignations have been announced.

The FBI has informed passengers present during the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout that they may be crime victims. (Archive)

Now, what's interesting about this is that the door plug incident comes 2 days before the end of the 3-year deferred prosecution agreement, in which Boeing has to pay $2.5 billion and play nice and submit yearly reports to the fraud department. I am not a legal expert, so I don't know if this means that Boeing will most likely get the original criminal charges slapped on plus another few due to violating the 3-year agreement. (Agreement Text) (DoJ outline of the agreement)
 
  • Informative
  • Like
  • Thunk-Provoking
Reactions: spiritofamermaid, madethistocomment, Super Kami Guru and 15 others
city-journal.org / archive

“It’s an Empty Executive Suite”​

An insider explains what has gone disastrously wrong with Boeing.
Apr 03 2024

Boeing is—or was—a great company. From its manufacturing plants in Seattle, it produced the world’s most reliable, efficient aircraft. But after merging with McDonnell Douglas, shifting production around the world, and moving its headquarters to Chicago and then Arlington, Virginia, the Boeing Company has been adrift.

Then, in October 2018, one of Boeing’s new 737 MAX aircraft crashed. Then, a few months later, another. Recent months have seen embarrassing maintenance failures, including a door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight.

To help explain what went wrong, I have been speaking with a Boeing insider who has direct knowledge of the company’s leadership decisions. He tells a story of elite dysfunction, financial abstraction, and a DEI bureaucracy that has poisoned the culture, creating a sense of profound alienation between the people who occupy the executive suite and those who build the airplanes.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Rufo: I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing?

Insider: At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.

In 2018, the first 737 MAX crash that happened, that was an engineering failure. We built a single-point failure in a system that should have no single-point failures. Then a second crash followed. A company cannot survive two crashes from a single aircraft type. Then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress, defended the engineering, defended the work—and that protected the workforce, but it also prodded the board and stoked public fear, which resulted in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.

So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is all outsiders. The current CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO whom he brought in. And we have a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. The head of our commercial-airplanes unit in Seattle, who was fired last week, was one of the last engineers in the executive council.

The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The head of HR lives in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.

In this business, the workforce knows if you love the thing you are building or if it’s just another set of assets to you. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most important story of all. There is no visible center of the company, and people are wondering what they are connected to.

Rufo: If they have lost the love of building airplanes, what is the love, if any, that they bring to the job?

Insider: Status games rule every boardroom in the country. The DEI narrative is a very real thing, and, at Boeing, DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power.

DEI is the drop you put in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture and was tied to compensation. Every HR email is: “Inclusion makes us better.” This kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.

If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it’s a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.

The radicalization of HR doesn’t hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they’re making a large profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring policies. Because they are paying 30 percent or 40 percent more than the competition in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the “DEI tax” and still find top people.

But this can be catastrophic in lower-margin or legacy companies. You are playing musical chairs, and if you do the same things that Google is doing, you are going to end up with the bottom 20 percent of the preferred population.

Rufo: What else does the public not understand about what is happening at Boeing?

Insider: Boeing is just a symptom of a much bigger problem: the failure of our elites. The purpose of the company is now “broad stakeholder value,” including DEI and ESG. This was then embraced as a means to power, which further separated the workforce from the company. And it is ripping our society apart.

Boeing is the most visible example because every problem—like, say, a bolt that falls off—gets amplified. But this is happening everywhere around us, and it is going to have a huge effect. DEI and ESG became a way to stop talking honestly to employees.

We need to tear off the veil of all this coded language that is being used everywhere, and our elites need to recover some sense of service to people. They think they have it already because they are reciting these shibboleths of moral virtue: “I am serving because I am repeating what everyone else is saying about DEI.” It’s a form of cheap self-love that is being embraced by leaders. If you pay the tax to the DEI gods or the ESG gods and use coded language with your workforce, it absolves you of the hard work of really leading.

No. Service means you are spending the extra time to understand what’s really happening in the factory and in your supply chain. There should be some honor in understanding that we inherited something beautiful and good and worth loving.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.
Click to expand...
 
  • Informative
  • Winner
  • Like
Reactions: Otterly, spiritofamermaid, Markass the Worst and 12 others
RodgerDodger said:
I think this one is believed to be a bird strike. At least that's how it initially came in.
Click to expand...
Thats what the crew told the passengers but I doubt it. The birds would have had to smack into both the left and right sides of the engine and they are pretty tightly secured when secured properly. My theory is still that maintenance was looking inside the engine before the flight and didn't secure them properly. Theres also no visible blood or feathers on the engine, and no performance issues or bangs were reported to ATC, crew were only aware something was wrong because the flight attendants informed them. No way it was birds.
 
  • Like
  • Thunk-Provoking
Reactions: spiritofamermaid, Markass the Worst and Falcos_Commisar
Google.com said:
Thats what the crew told the passengers but I doubt it. The birds would have had to smack into both the left and right sides of the engine and they are pretty tightly secured when secured properly. My theory is still that maintenance was looking inside the engine before the flight and didn't secure them properly. Theres also no visible blood or feathers on the engine, and no performance issues or bangs were reported to ATC, crew were only aware something was wrong because the flight attendants informed them. No way it was birds.
Click to expand...
The FA's and passengers did report a loud bang like something hit the wing. I don't rule out somebody failing to properly secure the cowling. The way the cowling peeled back like a banana is kind of unusual.
 
RodgerDodger said:
The FA's and passengers did report a loud bang like something hit the wing. I don't rule out somebody failing to properly secure the cowling. The way the cowling peeled back like a banana is kind of unusual.
Click to expand...

These are images from two other cowlings failing due to not being secured. I wouldn't call it very unusual. It just doesnt make sense for a bird to have caused that damage, it would have had to be two hitting very hard and at a very odd angle.

D1RjJxm.jpga319_g-euoe_london_130524_9-905940927.jpg

Also if you look up site:aviation-safety.net and cowling you can see that incidents where the cowling is lost is almost always due to either maintenance leaving it unlatched or a catastrophic engine failure. Birds have caused damage to cowlings before but rarely a complete separation.
 
Last edited:
  • Informative
  • Like
Reactions: spiritofamermaid, Markass the Worst, madethistocomment and 9 others
If anyone has insight, are airplanes like an Apple product meaning even though another company owns the machine/device, they have to be worked on by Boeing trained mechanics? Also, you really can't tell from the video what caused it. Judging by the record of Quality Control I'm inclined to believe that a bolt wasn't properly seated. Now if I got a look in the turbine we'd be able to tell if it was a bird or something else. Broken turbine, etc.
 
Absurdist Laughter said:
If anyone has insight, are airplanes like an Apple product meaning even though another company owns the machine/device, they have to be worked on by Boeing trained mechanics? Also, you really can't tell from the video what caused it. Judging by the record of Quality Control I'm inclined to believe that a bolt wasn't properly seated. Now if I got a look in the turbine we'd be able to tell if it was a bird or something else. Broken turbine, etc.
Click to expand...
The rules that apply to you, don't apply to corporations like Boeing and Southwest Airlines.
 
  • Feels
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: spiritofamermaid, Markass the Worst, N Space and 7 others
Google.com said:
Thats what the crew told the passengers but I doubt it. The birds would have had to smack into both the left and right sides of the engine and they are pretty tightly secured when secured properly. My theory is still that maintenance was looking inside the engine before the flight and didn't secure them properly. Theres also no visible blood or feathers on the engine, and no performance issues or bangs were reported to ATC, crew were only aware something was wrong because the flight attendants informed them. No way it was birds.
Click to expand...
Not a bird strike for sure. In order for a bird ingestion to cause the cowling to open it would have to have caused a catastrophic engine failure. That did not happen based on the ATC recording.
Plus in the video of the landing from forward of the engine (7:31 in the above video), you can see the inboard cowling is closed until the reverse thrusters are engaged and then it pops loose. If the engine had failed, it would not have been running and the reverse thruster on it would not have been engaged by the crew, and even if they fucked up and did, it wouldn't have mattered much since the engine wouldn't have been running.

Looks like another maintenance issue.
Absurdist Laughter said:
If anyone has insight, are airplanes like an Apple product meaning even though another company owns the machine/device, they have to be worked on by Boeing trained mechanics?
Click to expand...
Oh God no.
Absurdist Laughter said:
Judging by the record of Quality Control I'm inclined to believe that a bolt wasn't properly seated.
Click to expand...
Cowlings aren't held closed with bolts like a typical panel. They are hinged and fastened closed with latches. Kinda (not really but for purposes of a quick example), like the hood of a car.
 
  • Informative
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: The Foxtrot, spiritofamermaid, Markass the Worst and 8 others
Sam Losco said:
Cowlings aren't held closed with bolts like a typical panel. They are hinged and fastened closed with latches. Kinda (not really but for purposes of a quick example), like the hood of a car.
Click to expand...
Nah I got ya, it's a hook and loop type of deal. I'd assume that is for ease of access to the engine's internals? Also thank you all for clarifying about the mechanics, I have to work with enterprise stuff that requires certified techs to do stuff and wasn't sure if this is something that is done in airplanes too. More horrifying, to me at least, it isn't an isolated company issue but an industry one.
 
Absurdist Laughter said:
Nah I got ya, it's a hook and loop type of deal. I'd assume that is for ease of access to the engine's internals? Also thank you all for clarifying about the mechanics, I have to work with enterprise stuff that requires certified techs to do stuff and wasn't sure if this is something that is done in airplanes too. More horrifying, to me at least, it isn't an isolated company issue but an industry one.
Click to expand...
This is what the 737ng nacelles look like when undergoing maintenance.

webamac-bbj-2.jpg
 
  • Informative
  • Like
Reactions: spiritofamermaid, make_it_so, Falcos_Commisar and 5 others
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back