Alaska Air Passenger Video During 737 Max Door Plug Failure Flight

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An Alaska Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after the door plug failed.

The Boeing 737-MAX 9 had 174 passengers and six crew members aboard.

Nextbigfuture Read Goatguy Comments on Impact, Competence and Safety Concerns Over Boeing

Hmmm… shoddy workmanship in manufacture? IF SO, then Boeing … the company … goes down. EVERY other plane they’ve made becomes suspect. Every one, say in the last 5 years. (It is notable that the length-of-service of this particular fuselage has not been leaked. Has it been in service a month? A year? 2 or 3? Was there a particular crew of assembly hacks employed ‘back then’ that are not now? Or are they still there? Was some kind of torque-wrench supposed to be used to secure the bolts, which wasn’t, or which turned out to either be defective, or set to the incorrect torque setting?)

This is a RED HOT POTATO for Boeing. A nuclear shît-storm. That other planes have already been discovered as having ‘loose bolts’ is a shocker, actually. Imagine of the whole-fleet correlation was done on all available maintenance data! (AI could do such a specific correlation across all sorts of potentially lethal shortcomings in mere seconds, with all the data). If Boeing doesn’t come up — VERY quickly — with some kind of “defective materials” explanation, or “deficient maintenance protocol” finding, well I think we can watch Boeing fall from grace mighty fast.

Because Defective Materials (i.e. bolts out-of-spec, or fittings out-of-true, or a door panel torqued for some reason, or the aforementioned torque wrench being a bogey) and procedures is FIXABLE. Not only fixable, but fixable-and-provable. New procedures, second (or third, or 4th) independent QC checks, rëd-flags in software assessment, specifically keeping manual checks by “old codgers” who understand the intricacies of maintaining and building flawless commercial aircraft … really would do the trick.

Then Boeing lives to see another day.

Fess up, recall ALL aircraft made in the last 10 years, check ALL of the critical points-of-failure and FIX all of them FOR FREE. Don’t make another aircraft until all this work is completed, and comprehensively summarized before Congressional Board of Inquiry and Investigation.

‘Cuz, if they fall into the trap of calling the failure a one-off, and then evidence continues to pile up publicly that other fuselages ALREADY have had yellow-flag maintenance warnings of inadequate operational QC … then they’ve Fûqued. The 737 MAX debacle of self-crashing planes due to a software combo-bug some years back has barely worn off. Every time I geti into an Alaska 737 MAX (as I did 2× last week), I still think about it.

And now this?

Quite simply, I won’t be flying ANY flights in this QC nightmare bird until something seriously believable, forthright and actively remedial is done. Something water-tight. Then, and ONLY then, will I fly a Boeing bird.

Sheesh.

⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

Boeing CEO and FAA Audit

Boeing has FAA and NTSB (National Transport Safety Board) investigation all over the company.

Boeing is still the main US airplane contractor with most of the commercial and military plane business.

This is shifting a lot of customers and business away from Boeing to Airbus planes. The overall demand for Boeing flights will drop. Customers will choose Airbus options when possible.

Boeing did contract this work out. However, Boeing is responsible for the overall plane quality.

12 thoughts on “Alaska Air Passenger Video During 737 Max Door Plug Failure Flight”

  1. The US form of capitalism embraced financialization culture and short-term returns to share-holders over long-term success. Boeing is losing against the French and other Euro-weenies. Bwa ha ha ha ha.

  3. Boeing destroyed itself more than twenty years ago when it “financialized” – i.e., it was hijacked by middle managers who fired the engineers who knew what they were doing and outsourced everything. In essence, a control accounting fraud occurred. Crooks took over management of the business and used outsourcing to dodge labor, safety and environmental laws, outsourced everything and pocketed the “savings.” Over time, this once great company transferred all its skill to foreigners and now Airbus is beating them in airplane sales and China won’t be far behind. Same thing happened with chip packaging, drug manufacturing and a number of other crucial industries necessary for national sovereignty. Anger at this deindustrialization is what drives the Trump vote and the Biden CHIPS Act (flawed, though it is).

    For the last ten years, America’s defense contractors have spent more on stock buybacks (considered an illegal form of insider trading back in pre-Reagan-fraud-orgy 1980) than they spend on R&D, with a chunk of this going into ads on TV to buy the silence of the “news” and campaign donations to keep the gravy train going.

    If we could just find a way to load up our bombers with financial derivatives, stock options, McKinsey “efficiency experts,” Harvard MBAs, lobbyists and leaky old Samsung batteries and other weapons of mass financial destruction, we’d have the Russians on their knees in days. As it is, as corrupt and murderously fascistic as the new blood & soil Russians are, we so crooked we can’t make enough artillery shells to keep up with them.

    If we don’t end these “public/private” partnerships and return to regulated public utilities, we aren’t going to survive as a nation. Privatized nutrition is giving us malnutrition for profit: foods chemically redesigned to induce perpetual hunger and be addictive (palmitate/FAS/TLR4 in the hypothalamus for overeating, in the microglia for addiction). Privatized military contractors have given us endless war for profit. Why win the war if you make a profit on it? The war’s over and then there ain’t no more profit.

    These gimmicks are all ways to evade Progressive Era controls on theft of public budgets by the politicians controlling them. When the Marines give part of their budget to a Congressman, they both go to prison – but fire the Marines guarding embassies, replace them with private contractors and then the private companies give kickbacks to the politicians under the table. Nobody goes to prison and you have a generation of crooked politicians singing the praises of private defense contractors. And since they buy ads on TV and seed this news with “experts” making a profit off every bomb dropped, no news service will tell you Afghanistan really fell apart because of military contracting and other corruption.

    In order to re-establish sovereignty, we don’t just need to return manufacturing to domestic shores we also have to structure it properly. Military equipment must be designed and built in a regulated public utility that is banned from funneling money back into the political classes who supervise it. The supply chain – from mining to healthcare provision – must similarly be restructured to make them resilient. Only by providing this cheap public infrastructure will the economy return to productive competitiveness.

    Believe it or not, this is close to the way the Japanese build road infrastructure so quickly and efficiently – with their own dedicated standing utility that builds and retains expertise. We, on the other hand, use networks of private road contractors who pad the budget, provide inaccurate estimates and are generally far less inefficient; their true efficiency lies in fleecing the taxpayer. It’s what Elon Musk is criticizing when he talks about the “cost plus” contracting system (which makes it all the more baffling that he doesn’t convert Twitter to a public utility and impose statistical quality control standards on the “news” it produces the way Tesla inspects its car components for defects).

    • Perfect and exactly right.
      My uncle was a V.P. for International Sales at Boeing. He gave me a private tour of the Boeing factory in Seattle in 1978 when I was 20. Everything was about technical specs, and this from a V.P., not even a “real” engineer. Back then, a line assembler could stop the entire line if he (always a “he” back then) found anything wrong and it would be fixed and documented before continuing. Now, it could get you fired.
      See: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing on Netflix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boeing
      It’s symptomatic of corporations throughout America. It’s the reason Ukraine is losing the war when the mixture of too much expense for too little weaponry and ammunition is failing to match economically tiny Russia on the kind of ramped up war-footing American hasn’t been able to do since WWII.
      You’re right, the country will not survive until stock buybacks, derivatives become negligible compared to engineering and quality control.

  4. It had to be super exciting for the guys sitting next to giant hole,

    I hope management said they were sorry and that next time they will be more careful with door installation. After all it happens.

  5. If I were Embraer, I would be itching to develop some bigger airplanes, predicting mighty Boeing downfall. Although I guess they will be saved by the US government. Everybody is free market and no regulamentation until jobs go to other countries.

  6. Important point: For the last three decades the majority of airframe failures have been difficult to track down issues that are usually related to long term wear on airframes. This problem and other problems with the Boeing Max are issues that were previously caught by factory line QA/QC and good software/hardware development practices.

    The root cause of these failures is managerial in nature. There is nothing new about door plugs. Door plugs have mature and reliable engineering solutions. This is a QA/QC culture problem.

  7. Scary things going on in the aviation industry. At the same time 2023 may have been the safest year ever in modern aviation history. Only 1 big fatal accident which was the yeti air flight.

  8. Length of service of this plane was a whole two months. It is a manufacturing defect. Planes aren’t meant to fall apart after two months.

  9. Thx Brian. So far, the wrong ‘we are sorry’ words are being used by Boeing’s management. Best would be “We are determined to, and investing ALL our efforts into finding out what systematic errors and lack-of-feedback that caused this fuselage failure in flight. No additional planes will be rolled out from ANY of our lines until the systematic shortcomings of our engineering and QC process are overhauled and rebooted.” Much better, much more costly, but ultimately more assuring words. GoatGuy

    • Yes Boeing management is going out of their way to frame this as anything other than “This is another example of the systemic problems with QA/QC in our company.”

      The door plug making an early departure from the plane and United’s investigation showing that other planes had loose bolts is a symptom of a deeper problem. Maybe the stock will be hit hard enough that Boeing will switch management bonuses back to quality from their current focus on DEI.

      We live in stupid times.

  10. Just waiting for the class action lawsuits to start over this latest Boeing “error”.
    I’m hearing there is no evidence of the two upper retaining bolts ever being installed.
    This is prime example of what happens when a company changes from Engineer lead management to Accountant lead management. Today’s Boeing is not the Boeing not the past.

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