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Old Aug 18, 2019, 9:04 am
  #42  
13901
 
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 7,237
Originally Posted by ermis177
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...hour-engineers

A very good article regarding 787 and 737 pretty much saying how Boeing decided many years ago to outsource pretty much everything and label them...
Off topic but it explains lots of the problems 787 and 737 are facing.
Also from personal point of view i am a civil servant and the quality of our service has been declining since the goverment decided to outsource many of our departments.
I know outsourcing-bashing is a favourite activity on this forum, but we got to be objective here.

The issue with the MAX is not that an Indian paid 9 bucks an hour worked on the MCAS. It's that Boeing's executives decided to take a design made in the 1950s, with a wing and landing gear designed to accommodate an engine with a diameter of 1.5 meters, and thought that one with a diameter of 2.5 could fit nonetheless. And to alleviate the obvious issues it caused they fitted a software without notifying the pilots. And the proof that it isn't the fault of an Indian fella paid 9 bucks is the fact that it's been 5 months and we're still nowhere near the end of the grounding; had it been just sloppy programming, it'd been easy to rectify wouldn't it?

As for the 787, it's also wrong to consider outsourcing as the one and only issue. Firstly we've got to remember that Boeing went for a global supply chain not only to reduce costs, but also to spread the development risk. Boeing outsourced a lot of the headaches deriving from the design of the aircraft to its global partners: the Japanese heavies spent a lot of (Japanese taxpayer's) money trying to get the wingbox not to open up like a multi-layered cake and Alenia also had to spend a lot to design an industrially-scalable system to 'cook' the carbon fiber fuselage and cut out the windows and all the other access panels without weakening the fiber's structure itself. Those were all costs and headaches Boeing didn't have to incur into. A lot of delays that the 787 ran into would've happened regardless, because the plane was - and is - so different from all other planes in commerce. Some would say overengineered but I'm not one (engineer, I mean).

The other issue of the 787, i.e. the poor production quality in Charleston, has zero to do with outsourcing. Charleston employees are Boeing employees and poor quality is strictly a Boeing issue. In all fairness it's always been an issue at Boeing, at Everett as in Charleston. Even BA LHR Engineering has embraced non-personalised tooling; Boeing still hasn't, and they still leave personal tools in the planes. BA's first 787 was meant to be G-ZBJA, but JB arrived because BA's engineers refused to accept BA with so many defect as that bird had. And I remember one of the last 77W to arrive that got here with the wiring for the fire suppression system of the cargo doors mounted the wrong way round...
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