Well right now I’m sure they have plenty of professional engineers in charge of the design, who have signed off on everything and done a good job at that. Those engineers aren’t in charge of the company though. And the people in charge of the company are literally on the other side of the country.
Look at any of the insider leaks from Boeing, they are all saying upper management never visits the aircraft plant.
So you have a great design, that on paper is a safe airplane, and then you have it assembled by a bunch of people who are overworked and underpaid and don’t have enough quality inspections.
And the result is situations like the door plug. You have a design that is strong as hell, but just requires a few basic bolts to keep the strong latches engaged and whoops we just forgot to put those bolts in so the airplane hits a bump in turbulence and the door flies off in mid-flight.
Sometimes there are design deficiencies, that are caught after the fact. That’s true with any airplane all the way from an ultralight kit plane you build yourself that runs on a lawn mower engine all the way up to a jumbo jet. The question is how quickly those get fixed. And that’s an upper management decision, not an engineer decision.
For example, the latest 737 has a design deficiency in the de-icing system for the jet intake. When flying through clouds in cold weather, ice can build up on leading edges and cause air flow problems. So you need heated surfaces on the leading edges of the wings and tail and around the edges of the engine intake. They found that the current design has a flaw, if it is activated for more than 5 or 10 minutes when there is NOT icing conditions, the heat strip can peel off and get sucked into the engine. Since the heat strips on both engines would overheat pretty much simultaneously, this could, in theory, lead to a situation where surprise! both engines suck in bits of heat strip at the same time meaning engine failure and potentially bits of debris shooting out of the engine casing and into the cabin.
Boeing is working on a redesign, but they’ve gotten a bunch of approvals to keep selling airplanes with the old design. Solution, for the moment, is tell pilots not to leave the system on if there’s no ice. Hope nobody forgets to turn it off. But point is, they are continuing to sell airplanes with this known design flaw rather than giving a fix top priority. That’s not the engineers, that’s upper management deciding where to allocate resources. And then tried to do this with a newer model and FAA finally told them no, fix it before you sell the airplane not at some point in the future.
Well right now I’m sure they have plenty of professional engineers in charge of the design, who have signed off on everything and done a good job at that. Those engineers aren’t in charge of the company though. And the people in charge of the company are literally on the other side of the country. Look at any of the insider leaks from Boeing, they are all saying upper management never visits the aircraft plant.
So you have a great design, that on paper is a safe airplane, and then you have it assembled by a bunch of people who are overworked and underpaid and don’t have enough quality inspections. And the result is situations like the door plug. You have a design that is strong as hell, but just requires a few basic bolts to keep the strong latches engaged and whoops we just forgot to put those bolts in so the airplane hits a bump in turbulence and the door flies off in mid-flight.
Sometimes there are design deficiencies, that are caught after the fact. That’s true with any airplane all the way from an ultralight kit plane you build yourself that runs on a lawn mower engine all the way up to a jumbo jet. The question is how quickly those get fixed. And that’s an upper management decision, not an engineer decision. For example, the latest 737 has a design deficiency in the de-icing system for the jet intake. When flying through clouds in cold weather, ice can build up on leading edges and cause air flow problems. So you need heated surfaces on the leading edges of the wings and tail and around the edges of the engine intake. They found that the current design has a flaw, if it is activated for more than 5 or 10 minutes when there is NOT icing conditions, the heat strip can peel off and get sucked into the engine. Since the heat strips on both engines would overheat pretty much simultaneously, this could, in theory, lead to a situation where surprise! both engines suck in bits of heat strip at the same time meaning engine failure and potentially bits of debris shooting out of the engine casing and into the cabin.
Boeing is working on a redesign, but they’ve gotten a bunch of approvals to keep selling airplanes with the old design. Solution, for the moment, is tell pilots not to leave the system on if there’s no ice. Hope nobody forgets to turn it off. But point is, they are continuing to sell airplanes with this known design flaw rather than giving a fix top priority. That’s not the engineers, that’s upper management deciding where to allocate resources. And then tried to do this with a newer model and FAA finally told them no, fix it before you sell the airplane not at some point in the future.