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Boeing Dreamliner Catches Fire In Boston
19061969 writes "The BBC reports that a Boeing 787 Dreamliner caught fire in Boston. Carter Leake, an analyst at BB&T Capital Markets in Virginia, said, 'I don't want to be an alarmist, but onboard fires on airplanes are as bad as it gets.' This represents bad news for Boeing especially after the FAA identified errors in the assembly of fuel line couplings in the Dreamliner."
... there have been plenty of issues on the 787 which should not have made it to production - the QA issues that have hit over a dozen aircraft, numerous technical faults and electrical system issues etc etc etc.
I fully agree. Yes, all planes have issues when they're first deployed. For example, it was discovered that some parts of the wing structure on the A380 needed to be strengthened in order to meet the fatigue lifetime. However, this is not the kind of thing that would have caused failures in flight - it's a long term fatigue issue that was discovered years before it would have caused a problem. Issues like this are common since strength/fatigue vs. weight is such a difficult compromise on aircraft. 787 issues have been more the kind of thing that should have been fixed during design and testing.
The problem with the 787, and the reason that it was years behind schedule and has so many problems, is that the executive geniuses at Boeing decided to outsource as much of the engineering as they could ("outsource" here referring to both domestic and offshore outsourcing). Many of the companies that engineering was outsourced to simply didn't have the expertise. Large airliners are not exactly the kind of thing that every job shop and subcontractor has the know-how to design. There are only two companies worth mentioning in the world that do.
The only way they got the 787 out the door at all (and stemmed the financial bleeding of Boeing) was by taking emergency steps to find a large cadre of engineers who had decades of deep experience in airliner design. They found them at (surprise, surprise) Boeing! Golly, you mean there was some wisdom to the way the world's most successful airliner manufacturer has designed planes for decades? Whodda thunk it? No doubt the top execs at Boeing will get large bonuses for discovering this brilliant last minute solution, and blame Boeing engineering for the problems that do remain.
Yes- this ^
I live in Boeing's former home town (Seattle) and it may be sour grapes, but the buzz I hear here is that the other/new assembly site in South Carolina is an amateur hour kind of thing. Boeing set up shop there because of the union workers here, and the quality went away. I hear from labor and management folks both that Boeing is no longer in the aircraft business- they are now in the vendor management business, and there are no effective mechanisms for enforcing quality or delivery timeframes.