Boeing reported another problem with fuselages on its 737 jets that might delay deliveries of about 50 aircraft in the latest quality gaff to plague the manufacturer.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal said in a letter to Boeing staff seen Monday that a worker at its supplier discovered misdrilled holes in fuselages. Spirit AeroSystems, based in Wichita, Kansas, makes a large part of the fuselages on Boeing Max jets.
"While this potential condition is not an immediate safety issue and all 737s can continue operating safely”
‘bUT iT’s sAFE’
So this is great the answer is nobody really knows. Spirit aerosystems used to be part of Boeing it was a Boeing manufacturing plant owned and run by Boeing full of Boeing employees. Then the c-suite got the brilliant idea of selling off a good chunk for their business. So that they could then contract with the new company to do the exact same work that was happening at the plant before it was spun off. Yeah crazy isn’t it. My understanding is it looks good on the books in the short term plus it might have been to get rid of some labor and pension obligations. The union workforce was let go and had to apply to be rehired with the sale of the division. They ended up taking a 10% pay cut.
Anyway at the moment this is letting Boeing and spirit both point fingers at each other. Additionally it is slowing down any kind of engineering fix because there are separate engineering teams working for separate companies working on the same problem. We saw the same thing with the misaligned holes on the rear pressure bulkhead that Spirit was making. Oh also Spirit now contracts some of its work out for Boeing to third parties making it more convoluted.
Spirit does do some aerospace work for other companies but roughly 85% of their income comes from Boeing.
I used to work for a company that was Spirit’s largest supplier. Spirit contracts a bunch of parts out to smaller manufacturing companies. We would manufacture parts, process them (paint and anodizing), then assemble them at all of our facilities, then they would get shipped to Wichita for further assembly by Spirit. The 737 MAX has been Boeing’s fastest selling plane in recent history, so you can imagine the pressure on the manufacturing contractors to get their parts out the door. After seeing everything from the inside, I personally wouldn’t fly on a 737 MAX. I would stick with Boeing’s older models or choose an airline that has primarily an Airbus fleet.
Yeah I work in the airline industry and I am right there with you I won’t fly the MAX planes . Hell I just heard an interview on the radio with a former high level engineer at Boeing. He straight up walked off a plane when he figured out it was a MAX.
Originally from the Seattle area. This was my assumption right here. About everything they’ve done in the last few decades has seemed to be around removing union labor.