When God Closes a Door, He Blows Off Another One
Just ask Boeing
So, by now, everyone has probably heard of the comforting news of doors falling off of the passenger airliner mid-flight from Portland Oregon operated by Alaskan Airlines last week.
Yes.
The door…
Just fell off.
While the plane was sixteen thousand feet in the air.
To be precise, the door plug on the fuselage panel was “improperly attached” and came loose mid-flight causing the cabin to lose pressure prompting the pilots to land quickly.
I’m actually surprised no one was sucked out of the cabin. Amazingly, the seat next to the faulty door was empty or I would be writing about a tragedy instead of a bizarre situation.
Boeing decided to ground the other 737 Max9s and according to their investigation, they found other planes with “installation issues”.
Uhh… ya think?!?
That’s putting it mildly.
I’ve only flown maybe four times in my life.
Ok, six.
There was that time I went to Texas.
I’ve always been told that there are more accidents on the road than there are airplane accidents which makes flying safer by far than driving.
Another reason for that is that there are high standards when it comes to manufacturing airplanes as well as high standards for pilots.
When you hear the word Boeing, what immediately springs to your mind? For me, it’s quality. They’ve always marketed themselves as having high engineering standards and it looks like it’s mainly due to a successful marketing strategy.
Turns out that their quality has been slipping since 1997 when the merger between Boeing and McDonald Douglas happened. The new partners wanted to run Boeing more like a business instead of an engineering Mecca. They also did away with their labor union.
You could say that these “quality issues” if you will, were bound to happen based on their current structure. Back in the day, engineers with twenty to thirty years of experience would get promoted to management which ensured that people with stellar expertise and experience would be making the decisions.
Now, the people with the least amount of experience are in the roles of management.
Basically, a poisoned stew of bad decisions and ineffective regulations has made this breakdown in quality to happen.
Doors are falling off, windows are cracking and I’m just waiting for the news of a wing coming off and all this can be traced back to bad decisions made almost thirty years ago. They’ve had all this time to fix these problems and I don’t see them getting fixed anytime soon.
Happy flying😐
