The FAA has opened a new investigation into a potential manufacturing quality lapse on Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and whether inspection records were falsified.

The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner after the company disclosed that employees in South Carolina falsified inspection records on work done where the wings are joined to the fuselage body.

Boeing informed the Federal Aviation Administration in April that, despite records indicating completion of required inspections, workers had not performed some of those inspections to confirm adequate bonding and electrical grounding at the 787 wing-to-body join.

“The FAA is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records,” the federal safety agency said via email.

Boeing said its engineers have established that this newly discovered lapse does not create “an immediate safety of flight issue.”

    • @Audrey0nne@leminal.space
      50•13 days ago

      It’s going to trickle down further, next it’s going to be employees at outsource facilities falsified records. I know someone who worked in the QA department for a company involved with the design and manufacture of certain parts of the fuel system and they are all currently shitting themselves.

  • littleblue✨
    31•13 days ago

    And this is the company about to launch actual humans into space, officially? No, I mean astronauts this time, not unwitting airplane passengers. This is the timeline we’re in? Just checking.

    • @halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18•13 days ago

      On a capsule that failed to deploy all three parachutes during its first abort test. And then also failed during its first real launch. Made it to orbit at least but it wasn’t able to dock with the ISS as planned due to failures, just deorbited instead. Third launch was originally scrubbed due to valve issues, and wasn’t tried again until 9 months later. Clearly wasn’t just a simple valve issue.

      And that’s just the actual launch issues.

        • @halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10•13 days ago

          Welp, scrubbed. Oxygen relief valve issue with the Centaur upper stage. Not actually a capsule issue this time… But that’s still a little bit concerning since the Centaur isn’t exactly a new rocket, it’s quite a mature vehicle. Issues like that should normally be caught before they have astronauts loaded onboard.

          • @over_clox@lemmy.world
            7•13 days ago

            Did they forget to bolt the valve in? 😂

            Meh, par for the Boeing course huh? At least the astronauts are safe.

    • @Sc00ter@lemm.ee
      -5•13 days ago

      That video provides literally no value. “Spend money on share holders and cut corners.” Examples?

      A big part of what’s going on is a reverb of covid. The whole aerospace industry got hammered during covid, which forced a lot of experienced people to retire. We are now seeing what happens when a company with has a ton of tribal knowledge loses a lot of experienced all at once

      • @sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
        9•13 days ago

        Buybacks were illegal throughout most of the 20th century because they were considered a form of stock market manipulation. But in 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission passed rule 10b-18, which created a legal process for buybacks and opened the floodgates for companies to start repurchasing their stock en masse.

        The SEC’s decision to make this shift came against the backdrop of President Ronald Reagan’s era of deregulation and coincided with the rise of ‘free market’ economists preaching a new type of social responsibility for business: increasing profits.

        So, uh, yeah, it’s more of that sweet #1 bullshit from Reagan. It’s true the loss of experienced people hurt the company, there have been numerous reports on that aspect. That doesn’t have anything to do with cheating on quality inspections.

      • @Chuymatt@beehaw.org
        7•13 days ago

        Nope. You are wrong. It is all about the move to force actual aerospace engineers out of management. Then it was the long hard drive to the bottom. Move away from a fairly strong union state, make ‘companies’ that make parts all over the US, assemble by non union workers (who have no power, poor training, and are expendable). Further, those folks NEARING retirement get nit picked to oblivion to quit before they are supposed to retire or are fired for mounting minor infractions. QA folks have been undermined constantly during this time.

        All to save money in the short term. This is a story I have been hearing in the Puget Sound area for a decade at least. It is now finally catching up to them, but they are going to try to make the little folks eat it. These are C suite decisions, purely.

  • @gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    19•13 days ago

    Jesus fucking christ they are doing this on a plane that we don’t have any industry-wide long-term real-world durability data on because that’s the first fully composite airliner ever manufactured. Nobody really knows what long-term high-hour failure modes will look like.

    We can simulate and guess, but when they cut corners like that, it introduces all kinds of horrifying possibilities involving cascading structural failures. Like, maybe the bonding surfaces between the fuselage and wing box starts to delaminate and, oh, I don’t know, the wing separates from the fuselage or something like that.

    Perhaps I’m being sensationalist - I don’t know all the ins and outs of their manufacturing process. But I’m going to remain pretty fucking concerned until Boeing can conclusively prove it’s either not a problem, or that it can be correctly repaired back to original specs.

  • shameless
    2•12 days ago

    Planning on a holiday later this year, safe to say I’ll be going out of my way to not be on a boeing.