How Boeing wants to get its quality problems under control
The negative headlines about Boeing just won't stop. Now the aircraft manufacturer is going on an information offensive.
"Quality Stand Down" in Everett in the US state of Washington at the beginning of the year. Aircraft of the 777/777x type are manufactured there.
(Image: Boeing)
In future, Boeing intends to send out emails to inform employees about what the aircraft manufacturer is doing to improve its safety management and quality assurance. The company's 70,000 employees have been subject to various measures since January 2024, according to the first mailing. More are to follow.
Boeing's problems have been ongoing since January of this year, when a 737 Max from the manufacturer lost a part of its fuselage during a flight. However, the problems are older; two fatal crashes involving the same aircraft type in 2018 are now having legal repercussions in the USA. In March, another Boeing aircraft lost a fuselage section during flight, and at the end of January, a Boeing lost one of its front wheels shortly before take-off.
Thousands of feedbacks
Boeing is now reporting "quality stand downs". This means that since January, employees at a good 20 locations have interrupted production and delivery for a day in order to focus on increased safety and quality measures. "Based on feedback from our workforce, we have focused primarily on the areas of training, processes, defects and culture," Boeing writes in the email, which is available to heise online.
The collected feedback - thousands of comments and suggestions - will be prioritized and reviewed for safety and quality measures, it continues. Some suggestions will be taken into account in the safety and quality plan called the "90-day plan", which Boeing intends to submit to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) at the end of the mail.
As examples of such proposals, Boeing cites new training material for the areas of manufacturing and quality, which the company has already introduced. Depending on the scope of the work, the training courses conducted with these materials involved an average of 20 to 50 additional training hours per employee. In addition, the teams have received more than 7000 new tools and other equipment to enable them to work better.
"Stand downs are not a punishment"
Shortly after the incident in January, the FAA grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft and demanded that they be inspected immediately. The following week, it became known that the FAA had identified numerous production problems at Boeing and wanted to investigate the company's conditions more closely.
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Boeing now emphasizes in its e-mail that the information gained through the "quality stand downs" will be communicated across all production areas. This means that not only the production of 737 aircraft, but also that of the 767 and 787 should benefit from the feedback. "When we identify problems, we want to make sure that all team members in the affected area are aware of the problem," explains Boeing manager Mike Fleming. "We even go so far as to 'shut down' the work of teams for a short time". This is not intended as a punishment. "Rather, it's about sharing information across all programs." (anw)
