If you fly at all regularly it is almost certain you have flown on a Boeing 737. They have been the “workhorses” of the skys and are particularly popular with low cost airlines. It has been estimated that there are 1200 in the air at any one time and that one takes off somewhere in the world every 5.3 seconds.
Now a couple of whistleblowers have spoken on camera for the first time about potentially fatal faulty parts vital to the fuselage structural. These parts were used to construct Boeing 737 NG models between 1994 and 2002. They were made by a Boeing sub-contractor which apparently got its workers to manufacture the parts by eye rather than using the hi-tech cutting equipment Boeing thought they were using.
The two whistle-blowers were demoted and dismissed. They have a current case in the courts. I understand the judge in the case is 99 years old which makes him older than powered manned flight. He would have been 1 when the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk.
The (UK) Sky News report details how auditors were sent by Boeing to the subcontractors.
(Jeanne) Prewitt worked as a parts buyer for Boeing as an internal auditor from 1996 to 2003. In 1999, she discovered Boeing assembly workers were having serious problems with “bear straps” – the name for the large pieces of reinforcing sheet metal bonded to the skin around the 737’s doorways.
Prewitt found the bear straps had what they called “shy edge margins” – they were not fitting properly.
An investigation found that instead of using authorised and highly accurate computerised tools, workers at the subcontractors Ducommun were secretly cutting the parts by hand.
Even the chords that form the cage of the fuselage – one of the most fundamental parts of any aircraft – were being cut inaccurately.
“The chords were being made by hand, drawn by magic marker and hammered into shape”, according to the whistle-blowers’ lawyer, Bill Skepnek
The defective parts also had holes drilled in the wrong places and some had to be hand beaten to fit. The 737 is generally considered a safe plane but it has had a chequered history. These include engine problems and defects in the tail rudders. Rudder failure caused the crashes in Colorado in 1991 and Pennsylvania in 1994 in which a total of 157 people died. It is perhaps an indication of Boeing’s influence that the FAA only order these to be replace in 2002 and gave US airlines 6 years to do so.
The 737 is properly a family of aircraft. Since it first came into service 40 years ago it has undergone various design changes, changes of materials and upgraded engines. While demand for them obviously goes in cycles, there is an important indicator that their order books have been falling off. This comes in the shape of Ryanair, the Ireland based low-cost carrier in Europe. Part of their business plan is to use new aircraft to take advantage of the fuel cost savings they can give over the older configurations. At one stage they were Boeing’s biggest customer for the 737 and their entire fleet of over 200 of these planes were purchased in the last few years to replace their older models. One of the reasons for this is that Ryanair took advantage of the slack demand for aircraft after 9/11 and competition from Airbus to get what is believed to have been a very good deal. There are suggestions that the discount was about 50% but the details have always been a closely kept commercial secret.
Ryanair placed another order for a further 10 aircraft in July, ostensibly to help their expansion. The report values to order at £380 milion ($685m). That presumably is based on the list price of between $66-75 million depending on specification. That Ryanair’s CEO brought when he did may be due to the interesting phenomenon that while orders have increased over the past couple of years, deliveries have declined.
