Typical engineer finger pointing when something doesn't work like it's supposed to on paper, blame the guy who put it together.

 

The shining light of outsourcing!

 

It does appear that these issues stem from design or faulty materials. However, Boeing employees are really irate over the company having a facility in South Carolina. I wonder if there might be some union sabotage occurring. Not saying that is the case, just a thought. I just know how ticked the workers were.

Back in the 70's to early 80's, Harley Davidson motorcycles were unreliable due in large part to union sabotage. After AMF bought Harley, worker dissatisfaction increased, and product quality suffered. Nuts and bolts were found in crankcases, parts were installed backwards, parts were machined to incorrect tolerances.

Due to lessons from the past, any speculation that some of this may be happening? If so, its a real bad situation when your dealing with airplanes ( motorcycles, too, for that matter).

 

I have a little inside baseball with Boeing.

It is most certainly NOT union sabotage, although that sort of things has happened before in other industries. This is aviation and those folks seem to have a higher sense of professional responsibility. That would be like ****ed off pilots rough-handling airliners to scare pax and get back at the company. Besides you'd be up on mass-murder charges if something happened.

The real problem with the 787 is that when the MBA's and been counters went looking for cheap labor offshore they somehow convinced themselves that they could get around the quality issue with ISO 9000 and similar certifications. Their fundamental gross conceptual failure was that many non-first world countries have inherently corrupt cultures (by western standards) and that anything like ISO 9000 is only as good as the people implementing it. This is amplified by the fact that they relied on offshoring for not just production but design as well.

There are very few places where you can have your cake and eat it to, ie low labor cost for skilled, quality labor and processes.

In retrospect, Boeing should have been far more selective in their outsourcing. After all is said and done I'm not sure they saved a dime.

 

Interesting indeed, I hate to say it, but serves them right. I wonder what these MBAs and bean counters are thinking now? I'm sure they accept ZERO responsibility

 

Actually Boeing has rogered up for their miscalculation and presumably won't make the same mistake with the 737 upgrade/replacement...

http://madeinusanews.com/2011/02/22/...n-outsourcing/

I'm annoyed because I dumped my lock-mart stock a few years ago when I started to get suspicious about the F-35 (good move)...but I hung onto Boeing because it looked like they were over the certification production ramp-up problems. I assumed once it started flying, it would be all good. I didn't think it would start to to rot from the inside-out on the line due to systemic quality issues. Hopefully it's just a few glitches that can ID'ed and fixed, and not indicative of more to come...

 

Japan

Full article.

 

The launch of the A380 wasn't exactly stellar. The wing design initially didn't meet ultimate load specifications and had to be beefed up. The Vmu testing didn't go as planned and as such they severely damaged the test aircraft. Off-shored wiring bundles had to be redesigned as the first batch received were too short. The A380 was grounded for emergency inspections of wing cracks and continues to be a problem. Qantas grounded the A380 for 3 weeks after the uncontained engine failure which damaged other aircraft systems and very narrowly avoided a major crash.

Let's not get too down on the 787. There's a lot of risk in a new aircraft design. I'm sure they'll fix the battery and move on. There's a reason why all of our manuals have cautions and warnings and we get paid the big bucks.

 

After all the pinnacle/delta debacle im still amazed at the huge amount of morons that still defend non-union approaches... oh well, it serves them right.

 

I'm not following...

Pinnacle and Delta are both unionized pilot labor groups. Why would it serve as an example of shoddy, non-union work?