Boeing Has a New 787 Dreamliner Headache With Wing Cracks

[KeepItReal]

Source: BusinessWeek

Boeing’s (BA) 787 is the airplane program that keeps on giving—problems. The company will inspect about 40 airplanes and delay some 787 deliveries after Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which makes the plane’s carbon fiber wing, discovered small cracks in newly built wings following a change in its manufacturing process, Boeing said Friday.

The cracked area is very small and will require repairs that will take a week or two per airplane, Boeing spokesman Marc Birtel said. “We are confident that the condition does not exist in the in-service fleet,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “We understand the issue, what must be done to correct it, and are completing inspections of potentially affected airplanes.”

Mitsubishi Heavy crafts the wings in Nagoya, Japan, and Boeing flies them to its 787 assembly plants in Everett, Wash., and North Charleston, S.C. About 17 of the 787s being inspected are fully completed, and seven have been undergoing predelivery flight tests, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported news of the cracks.



Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-07/boeing-has-a-new-787-dreamliner-headache-with-wing-cracks

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More details in this WSJ article (if you can access their paywall).

[Blue_Tires]

1. Battery = Outsourced to Japan

Wing = Outsourced to Japan

Boeing outsources a lot of high-paying jobs to Japan in the hopes that their national airlines would be 'encouraged' to buy the 787...

JAL announces they will be instead buying the competitor from Airbus....

Great success all around!

[CurtEastPoint]

2. Not to generalize, but isn't this being built in a right-to-work/non-union place?

[KamaAina]

3. I don't know if Japan has right to work

I certainly hope not!

[CurtEastPoint]

6. Sorry, was meaning SC. That's where Boeing moved from WA to there for cheaper labor.

[Igel]

9. It's built in bits all over the place.

S. Korea. S. Carolina. France. Japan. Kansas. Etc.

Assembled in Washington.

[PSPS]

4. "Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which makes the plane’s carbon fiber wing"

You get things like this flying disaster when you outsource everything to the lowest bidder.

[cstanleytech]

5. Well in all fairness it could have happened even if they were paying 100x what they

are paying now or in other words bad workmanship is bad workmanship regardless of price.

[JoeyT]

10. Yeah, but as what you're willing to pay decreases,

the chances of shoddy workmanship increases. There's a possibility a guy that charges thirty bucks an hour is a shitty electrician, but a guy that's willing to do it for five is pretty much guaranteed to burn your house to the ground.

[Psephos]

7. Mitsubishi is a quality industrial manufacturer. n/t

[amandabeech]

12. They also outsourced to companies that had never built airplane parts

before.

The tolerances on planes are very, very, very small.

If a manufacturer is not used to that degree of precision, there can be problems.

Or so I've read.

[DeSwiss]

8. ....

[IDemo]

11. The design underwent pretty rigorous stress testing to begin with

Was it just the handoff to Mitshubishi that caused the problem?

[amandabeech]

13. It was handed off to manufacturers all over the place.

It's the wings this time.

Next month it will be something else.

[MannyGoldstein]

16. Things change as wings cycle through liftoffs, landings, weather...

And IIRC composite wings are much easier to screw up during the manufacturing process, i.e., some wings will be fine and others not. Most of the not-fines should be detectable at the factory, but perhaps some are not.

[seabeckind]

14. Most critical part of the article, I think

(apologies for not following the link) is:

"Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which makes the plane’s carbon fiber wing, discovered small cracks in newly built wings following a change in its manufacturing process"

Boeing, like so many other companies that try to devolve into one which has nothing to do with true manufacturing other than beancounter oversight, contracts a lot of the core, critical functions of the process.

Cause beancounters are very good at counting beans. And not very good at manufacturing. Or knowing core functions. And usually refuse to deal with engineers. (If an engineer were truly knowledgeable, he'd control the money and boardroom instead of the beancounter. But he doesn't. So he isn't. Ergo his opinion ...).

I have no doubt Boeing went through a very thorough vetting process before accepting the Mitsubishi product initially. Or at least after it failed a few times.

But then built nothing into the contract to ensure that any change in the manufacturing process would require a revetting before the new product is acceptable.

Cause beancounters aren't good at contractual stuff either.

So just like so many other factors that plague the 787, here we go again.

I will never fly on a 787.

[MannyGoldstein]

15. After the battery, I expected that would come next.

The battery fires indicated that some pretty basic engineering had been FUBARed. In something like a plane, if one obviously-dangerous thing gets FUBARed then it's probably due to a process problem and it's pretty likely others were as well. The next obvious place that novel engineering was used (and could be FUBARed) was the composites. Like LiIon batteries, composites have been used before but not the way they're used on the 787.

I was seriously thinking the other day: would I fly on a 787? Probably, but maybe not.