This week Boeing must deliver on safety–again

  Boeing’s FAA-mandated plan to improve its safety culture is due this week.

Following the Jan. 5 accident involving Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 and a year-long safety study commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Boeing was given 90 days to come up with a new plan to improve safety procedures.

Boeing’s been down this path before. Following the 2018/19 crashes of two 737-8 MAXes in which 346 people died, Boeing implemented several safety studies and procedures. Flight 1282 demonstrated a shocking lack of results from the earlier efforts.

The FAA on Feb. 29 gave Boeing 90 days to make a realistic plan for addressing the path forward to an acceptable level of quality. This is an exceptionally tall ask given all that has gone wrong in the recent past. It’s unclear if the FAA will release Boeing’s proposal publicly. But LNA’s reporting team, which includes retired Boeing employees whose duties included safety and production, thinks that whatever plan is put forth to the FAA will all boil down to one point, execution. That’s Boeing’s problem today: Failure to execute its production plan as documented in its operation command media.

Failure has been an option

The Execution Failure shortlist looks like this:

• Boeing’s Organization Designation Authority (ODA) is limited;
• 737 production has been capped at 38 aircraft due to quality problems;
• 787 fuselage splice gap rework continues;
• Numerous whistleblowers have stepped up with stories of retaliation and retribution;
• Alaska Airlines sustained a 737 in flight plug door departure;
• Lufthansa has delayed a 777 delivery over multiple quality escapes;
• 737 spoiler wire chafing has caused flight control problems;
• 777 fuel tank inerting grounding faults; and
• 787 titanium floor beam fittings are suspect on more than 400 aircraft.

In all fairness, one has to remember that transport aircraft are one of the most complicated products in the world to produce. They are incredibly tightly regulated when you look at all the boxes you must check to gain certification.

The FAA is completely correct in asking Boeing for a plan to reverse course and return to building a quality product again. But it seems to be a nebulous request. This appears to be a time when the FAA is being whipsawed between Congressional action, internal limitations, and a regulated entity that repeats the mantra, that this isn’t an immediate safety of flight concern.

So where do you start?

Quality Management Systems

Let’s look at the command media. ASQ/ANSI/ISO 9001:2015: Quality Management Systems. The Quality Management System, which is often referred to as a QMS, is a collection of policies, processes, documented procedures, and records. This collection of documentation defines the set of internal rules that will govern how a manufacturing system deals with defining and monitoring a Quality System. This is the Parent Spec; AS9100 is the upgraded Aerospace Industry version of the QMS Spec. The following description is from the Modus Engineering group.

AS9100

AS9100 takes all of the requirements of ISO 9001 and adds to them to make them more applicable to the unique requirements of the aerospace and defense industries. While not as widely applicable across industries as ISO 9001, AS9100 is the gold standard of quality manufacturing certifications in the aerospace industry.

Apart from AS9100’s focus on the aerospace industry, the requirements and focus areas of AS9100 and ISO 9001 are largely similar. However, there are a few key differences to pay attention to.

Risk Reduction

Because quality management systems can become a literal life and death concern in aerospace manufacturing, one of the most important components of AS9100 is reducing the ability of manufacturers to introduce risk as they produce parts for the aerospace and defense industries.

The basic risk identification procedures called for in ISO 9001 remain the same, but AS9100 adds to them. For example, AS9100 calls for the responsibilities associated with risk management during manufacturing to be assigned to a specific employee or department.

Information Verification and Counterfeit Parts

Another primary addition of AS9100 is required inspection and testing to account for risk factors inherent to the aerospace industry, such as counterfeit parts. While ISO 9001 calls for test reports and similar quality information from external providers of components, AS9100 requires manufacturers to actually verify that information through their own testing, inspection and audits.

Quality of Production Equipment

Where ISO 9001 remains more general about the storage and inspection of equipment used to manufacture various parts, AS9100 gets extremely specific. Under AS9100, everything used in the production process, from automated machinery on the production floor to the software that controls these devices, has to have defined storage protocols, as well as a hard schedule for maintenance and inspection.

Source: Modus Engineering group.

Production System 9001 has a few key differences from AS9100

From this internationally recognized standard, Boeing captured all the elements needed to certify its Boeing Production System with the FAA with respect to how quality would be defined, measured and monitored. This is a solid starting point in that nobody has implicated any failings in Boeing’s actual QMS. Boeing has written a great set of processes and procedures, and if they were followed, life would improve quickly.

People Parts and Processes

People, Parts, and Processes all need to be in place to deliver a quality aircraft. The processes are there, proven, and exceptionally robust. Parts are somewhat problematic in that the supply chain woes affecting the industry causing late deliveries of components don’t look to have an answer soon. Boeing’s supply issues seem to involve more reported quality problems than Embraer or Airbus. Spirit’s problems are so severe that Boeing may be better off buying back their old Wichita facilities.

Partnering for Poverty

Boeing had a program in place called Partnering for Success. Our understanding of it was that ultimately, Boeing was reclaiming supplier margins by applying a learning curve rationale to decreasing payments over time. The justification was that the more a vendor performed a task, the better they got at it and the less it cost them.

Boeing’s arguably arrogant point was that if it cost a vendor less to build their parts, they were entitled to pay less. This is seen by some as the reason Boeing’s vendors seem to have more reported quality issues than Airbus in that you may be getting what you pay for.

Boeing may have created financial incentives for vendors to widen their goalposts and accept non-conforming parts as good to reduce their losses. Recently, reporting has indicated that Boeing may be softening this position as it seems to recognize the unintended consequences of financially squeezing suppliers.

The changes needed

People are the issue inside Boeing and where change needs to occur. There are a few reasons.

First is the loss of skills as the older experienced folks left all levels of the company. This skill vacuum contributed to many of the issues we note today. Loss of institutional knowledge accelerated the offload of Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering work packages. Critically, the loss of Ukrainian Engineering personnel due to the war with Russia as well as the inability to continue to source Boeing Moscow for offload work has dramatically restricted Boeing’s ability to get their work done on schedule.

The impact of these losses creeps through the entire Engineering workforce.

Second, there seems to be a lack of focus on doing the right thing. Rate became king and Boeing by its admission focused on delivery first. This was a top-down failure starting in upper management and winding its way down to the shop floor.

Notably, each year there is an ethics commitment exercise where senior Boeing leadership “teach” rank and file to do the right thing first, without fear of repercussions while managing the company to focus on delivery rates above all. Boeing’s leadership gave their employees two distinctly different messages. The public relations face of Boeing said to always do the right thing while managers were tasked with moving the birds through the factory.

Past complaints

Look at the ODA issue as an example of this phenomenon. Boeing’s ODAs have complained bitterly that their management pressured them to approve FAA designee work when it was against the better judgment of the ODA members. This is a people problem caused by management chasing deliveries while ODA members chase compliance with requirements. This isn’t easily solved until there is an actual shift in priorities in the management of the enterprise.

The Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines plug door loss is another example of chasing deliveries over following the process. The plug door removal/opening fiasco involving finger-pointing between Spirit and Boeing resulting in the loss of the plug door in flight highlights just how broken the system is today. It was more important to blame somebody for the defect than it was to do a good job putting the airplane together. The cause is a mixed message:  do a good job, but don’t get in the way of delivering the airplane.

The Message

Years ago, the overarching rule for quality in everything that was done was simple: Perform to the requirements or cause the requirements to be officially changed. That should be today’s message. It isn’t. There seems to be an inability for something this simple to be embraced again. Until Boeing puts this into place as the prime directive, any plan offered to the FAA will fail, no matter what the plan looks like.

Last week, Boeing issued this message about its safety progress since flight 1282:

 In late February, we paused training for our new Manufacturing and Quality hires for about six weeks to assess how we could better prepare teammates. We then made substantial improvements to our training program based on feedback from employees, and the FAA, as well as a review of industry best practices.

 Here are some of the changes we’ve made for employees across Commercial Airplanes:

Expanded workforce training and proficiency

• • New hires in Manufacturing and Quality continue to start in our Foundational Training Centers. Now, each new employee receives 10 to 14 weeks of foundational skills training before moving to the production floor, which is one to two weeks more on average per teammate. We provide more time and support for those who need it.
  • New hires are then paired with a workplace coach or peer trainer on the factory floor for structured on-the-job training and won’t work on their own until they demonstrate established proficiency measures.
  • Teammates already on the production floor prior to these improvements are required to take proficiency assessments.

Investments in training

• • We’re transitioning to a digital record-keeping platform for new employees. This paperless system helps trainees track and formally document their progress while allowing leaders to verify who’s ready for a particular job and who needs more attention and training.

In our Renton Foundational Training Center, we installed a section of 737 fuselage for employees to practice various skills including wiring installation and identifying potential defects.

Given the safety improvement plans adopted after the 2018-19 MAX crisis, Boeing has yet to explain why those failed and the current effort is necessary.

https://leehamnews.com/2024/05/28/todays-the-day-boeing-must-deliver-on-safety-again/