Boeing is having a rough time of it right now, with parts falling off its planes left, right and center. Just last week, a wheel came loose and smashed through a car, and earlier this year the door from a 737 Max aircraft broke off mid-flight. That mid-air disaster sparked an audit from the Federal Aviation Administration, which has gone far from well.
The hotel keycard was used to check seals of doors, the dishsoap was used to lubricate the door seals to make them fit better.
The documentation about the steps were vauge and badly documented, neither of which I want in the documentation for building aircraft.
Tbh, I don’t see a problem with using Dawn dish soap and hotel key cards.
When another company has already made a product that perfectly suits your needs it’s absolutely reasonable to utilize that product.
The issue is that if they are doing this, it means that the workers doesn’t have the proper tools for the job.
The keycard should be replaces with a go/nogo custom card, and the soap should either be specified by brand in the manual or swapped to a certified lubecricant, that has been tested to work fully with the gasket and not cause deteriation or on any way affect the quallity of the seal.
I can’t know for certain what is specifically going on there but I do work in contract manufacturing for high end scientific equipment and critical medical electronics so I do know a fair bit about the processes used. For me the dishsoap and keycards on their own don’t raise any alarms. It sounds like the main issue is poorly written incomplete manufacturing instructions, which is a big enough issue on it’s own and is an absolute monster to try and fix once your production workers have gotten used to working like that.
the soap should either be specified by brand in the manual or swapped to a certified lubecricant, that has been tested to work fully with the gasket and not cause deteriation or on any way affect the quallity of the seal.
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The seals used are most likely silicone (it’s what we use on environmental chamber doors). If so there are very few chemicals that will harm them let alone dishsoap. We actually use 409 (a bathroom cleaner) spray to lubricate our seals where I work.
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The dishsoap is almost certainly something they order and stock with their own internal shop supply number. The instructions most likely reference that number but that number would be meaningless to anyone else so the news article just said dawn dishsoap. It’s not going to be any random dishsoap because that’s not how industrial supply works. It would be more expensive for them to go pick up random dishsoap than to just keep ordering the same part number (that specific dawn dishsoap) in bulk from their industrial supplier.
The keycard should be replaces with a go/nogo custom card
Why in the world would you make custom tooling when there is a readily available off the shelf solution? You can just buy packs of keycards for dirt cheap and they are going to be a known thickness because they need to be to keep working in the same keycard slots. That thickness should be documented somewhere but it isn’t going to be in the manufacturing instructions because the production people don’t need it; they just need to know that the go/nogo gauge (the keycard) should fit. The more extraneous information you include on manufacturing instructions the greater the chance you have of someone missing or misreading something. If someone needs that extraneous info or something on the production floor isn’t right that’s when you bring in the engineer or process support staff who will have access to that info and the authority to make decisions based on it. If your production staff are making critical decisions on their own then something is very wrong with your manufacturing instructions (which sounds like the real problem here).
Submariner here. After several incidents in which submarines imploded, burned, or otherwise caused death and/or endangered thermonuclear weapons systems, our current procedures specify every single item used down to specific serial numbers, with specific authorized substitutes. If the authorized substitute cannot be found, the procedure is simply not done, and if necessary for ensuring the actual safety and conduct of the submarine’s primary mission, the entire multi-million-dollar mission is cut short and the ship surfaces to either receive the requisite supplies or goes back to port. Specific serial numbers for lubricants, specific stress-tested seawater-proof pressure-resistant alloys for bolts, specific serial numbers and part numbers for fuses, specific torque wrenches, even specific serial numbers for indicator lights. Every single maintenance step of certain procedures are read out loud at least three times and re-confirmed and acknowledged by both the worker and supervisor before being conducted, including the opening and closing of maintenance panel doors.
Sounds tedious and like it costs too much, fuck it let’s not do that - some asshat at Boeing
I’d suspect neoprene not silicone, for door-seals of aircraft.
the Dawn I’ve no problem with.
The checking-fit with hotel-keycards I have one HELL of a problem with.
It’s an aircraft: tolerances should be specified, and should be made to fit those tolerances.
It’s umpteen tens-of-degrees below freezing outside, when you’re at cruising-altitude, so you’ve got a pressure-vessel ( the fuselage of the aircraft ), AND you’ve got a termperature-differential, AND you’ve got metal-fatigue ( or composite-aging/accumulating-cracks-in-its-reinforcement-fibers ), and tolerances are supposed to be engineered, not “oh, it seems to fit” bullshit.
Anyone who cares about such things, please read some in-depth stuff on aviation crashes.
There are youtube channels devoted to going through things, and I found out about a jetliner losing its tail because of 3 bolts that were the wrong steel, on one of those channels, but the written stuff packs more knowledge per hour of study…
Jan Roskam, aircraft-designer, has one book on it, old, but important, subtitle is “The Devil Is In The Details”.
The Lessons From The Sky series has info on near-accidents, and you’ll note they are more human-centered than the sometimes technical-as-hell items in Roskam’s book…
When one discovers that a jetliner can kill everyone aboard, when it’s being used for short island hops ( Hawaii ), and that means it’s getting many more pressurization/depressurization cycles than the engineers intended, or that salt-spray in the air can corrode an airframe enough to cause catastrophic failure, or that a single failed cotter-pin can remove the controls from a homebuilt while in-flight ( another source )…
“The Devil Is In The Details” is the most-true subtitle I’ve ever seen in any book.
- Prevent problems.
- Catch All Lapses.
- Discover problems you didn’t know to be proactively preventing.
- Prevent any discovered problem from ever EVER getting roots/legs to harm anyone else.
seems saner to me, than the jackassery that Boeing has been doing, since McDonnell Douglass did a reverse-takeover from the inside, after their merger.
Bottom-line “leads” the company, my ass: it’s sunk Boeing.
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But tell me if the CEO and shareholders are still getting their bonuses and stock buy backs?!
Well obviously!
Thank God, for a second there I thought the top 1% were going to be held accountable for their actions.
No, no, no, no, no, no - the Law is still only for the little people not for important people.
Worry not, everything is still as it’s meant to be.
