Thursday Throughput: Boeing Edition

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

Related Post Roulette

6 Responses

  1. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    What I find amazing about the new and improved superconductor is that, in theory, it works at temperatures that humans are pretty good at creating. Like in your freezer in your fridge in your kitchen.

    Sure, humans couldn’t work in that environment for a long time… but they can work in that environment *AT ALL*.

    This is so very exciting and I hope that *SOMETHING* comes of it.

    Even if it is an interesting third thing instead of a mega-interesting “room temperature” superconductor.Report

  2. DensityDuck
    Ignored
    says:

    Global Warming? ech. An awful lot of Being Soothingly Mean And Comfortingly Angry was excused by the Truly Dire Nature Of The Situation, and if it turns out to Not Be Quite As Dire As Previously Suggested, well…

    Oh, don’t I take it seriously? Sure I do! I think we should be building thousands of nuclear power plants about it! We aren’t! And the people saying we shouldn’t are the same people who tell me they don’t think I’m taking the matter seriously. So I guess that I see “seriously” differently from everyone else, where I think “seriously” means “we should do the thing that solves this problem most quickly” and everyone else thinks “seriously” means “we have time for me to argue down everybody that doesn’t like my preferred solution”.Report

  3. DensityDuck
    Ignored
    says:

    The Boeing Door: Based on my experience with this sort of thing, I figure that it’s probably “Step 94: install lock bar and torque bolts to hand-tight. Step 21741: Remove lock bar bolts, apply threadlock adhesive, torque to 5 ft-lb” and they were so busy on the line that they forgot to do Step 21741, and when it came time to close out the documentation they noticed that Step 21741 hadn’t been signed off by the Quality inspector, and said ‘well, there’s no way we’d forget to torque critical bolts like that, go ahead and ship it”.

    So, y’know. Not not a cost-saving move, because they’d have to pay four guys to rip apart large portions of the interior fittings to get at those bolts and check to see if they were torqued and glued down. But neither something you’d consider the result of A Poor Engineering Culture or Cost-Cutting Measures or Corrupt Incompetent Management. Like, yeah, it’s easy to say “oh well they should have done it anyway“, and, yeah they should have! But it’s also not like there’s no reasonable incentive to not go back and check.Report

    • Damon in reply to DensityDuck
      Ignored
      says:

      Agreed. I had a convo with one of my Program Managers about this. He informed me that he used to be a materials engineer working for Boeing. 9/10 times when something like this happened, it was an assembly guy using the wrong bolt, lock washer, etc. DEI didn’t even come up.Report

      • Michael Siegel in reply to Damon
        Ignored
        says:

        The way he talks about the Boeing door sounds like a classic cascade. One wrong decision along the way cascades down through multiple bad decisions until you end up with a door plug flying out. The manufacturer didn’t seal the door while shipping, Boeing didn’t seal it down while testing, Alaska ignored warning signs. And pow.

        The engine failures are a bit different since that seems like a preventable error made because Boeing didn’t want to redo the landing gear.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Damon
        Ignored
        says:

        Humans aren’t very good at working through long lists of things in order and doing exactly what they say. Foxconn is using robots for assembly in China now, not because they’re cheaper than the humans but because the robots are really good at that kind of repetitive thing.Report

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *