#The Boeing Company

[stone-cold-groove]

The Boeing 247-D.

[rickladd]

Bye Bye Twitter?

I first joined Twitter in March of 2006. At the time part of my job at Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power, a division of The Boeing Company, was to examine platforms described as examples of what was then referred to as Web 2.0, as well as new applications being referred to as “social media.” I was doing this as a member of the Knowledge Management team for the division, and as the Knowledge…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 25, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 26, 2024

This morning The Boeing Company announced that the chief of Boeing’s commercial airplane division, Stan Deal, is leaving immediately. Chief executive officer Dave Calhoun is stepping down at the end of the year. Chair of the board Larry Kellner will not stand for reelection. 

On January 5 a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max jetliner operated by Alaska Airlines while it was in flight. The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) immediately grounded about 170 similar Boeing planes operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory until they could be inspected. “The FAA’s first priority is keeping the flying public safe,” it said, and added: “The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 MAX to service.”

Last year an FAA investigation “observed a disconnect between Boeing’s senior management and other members of the organization on safety culture,” with employees worrying about retaliation for reporting safety issues. After the door plug blew off, an FAA audit of different aspects of the production process released two weeks ago found that Boeing failed 33 of 89 product audits. On March 9, Spencer S. Hsu, Ian Duncan, and Lori Aratani of the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the door plug failure. 

Today, Boeing announced a change in leadership.

Also today, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su reminded readers of Teen Vogue, on the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that killed 147 garment workers in New York City after their employer had locked the exits, of how that tragedy prompted the federal government to create “programs that generations of Americans have relied on for economic security and dignity, including a nationwide minimum wage, health and safety regulations, restrictions on child labor, and more.”

Each generation “has a duty to take the baton of progress from those who came before us,” Su said. She noted that industries whose workforces are mostly women or immigrants have historically often broken the law, exposing workers to dangerous conditions and withholding pay.

This problem persists in the present, and she reported that the Department of Labor is working to address it. For example, after three injuries at a plant outside Chicago, including the December 2022 death of a 29-year-old sanitation worker, the U.S. Department of Labor fined the company $2.8 million. And, earlier this year, the department recovered more than $1 million for 165 workers whose employer had cheated them of overtime pay, the largest settlement ever for California garment workers. 

The U.S. Department of Energy today announced it has selected 33 projects from more than 20 states that will be awarded up to $6 billion to jump-start the elimination of carbon dioxide emissions from industries that are hard to adapt to green technologies. The projects will match federal monies to invest more than $20 billion toward commercial-scale decarbonization solutions for cement and concrete, chemicals and refining, metals including iron and steel, pulp and paper mills, and so on. The projects are funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, and will create tens of thousands of jobs. The Department of Energy estimates that the funded projects will cut carbon emissions by an average of 77%.

All of these news items today—airplane safety, worker protection, and technologies to address climate change—reflect a government designed to protect the American people. The nonpartisan civil servants staffing the agencies responsible for that protection are the ones that MAGA Republicans call the Deep State and Trump has vowed to replace with his own loyalists.  

For his part, as he faced cases in two different New York courts, Trump’s focus today was on the rule of law. He does not appear to be a fan of it.  

March 25 was the deadline for Trump to produce a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York for fraud. But before New York attorney general Letitia James could begin to seize his assets this morning, a New York appeals court threw him a lifeline, cutting the size of the required bond to $175 million and giving him 10 more days to post it. The order also paused the enforcement of many of the penalties Judge Arthur Engoron had imposed. So, for the time being, Trump and his sons can continue to do business in New York, although their businesses remain under the supervision of an independent monitor. 

The court’s order does not change Engoron’s judgment in the case. It simply puts the execution of that judgment on hold as Trump appeals it, which he must do on time.

In a different courtroom today, Judge Juan Merchan rejected further delaying tactics by Trump’s lawyers and set April 15 as the date for jury selection in the criminal case of election interference. This is the case in which Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide payments to people with damaging information about him before the 2016 election. This scheme gave Trump “an illegal edge in a razor-thin race,” as legal reporter Adam Klasfeld of Just Security put it. 

Trump has said he will appeal. 

Last week, Brian Beutler of Off Message noted that “Trump is scarcely running a presidential campaign…. [H]is efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.”

Trump appeared angry today at a press conference after Judge Merchan set a date for the start of the election interference case. He blamed President Joe Biden for his legal troubles, although the case is in New York. He insisted that holding him accountable for his behavior is itself “election interference.” 

In a statement, the Biden camp replied: “Donald Trump is weak and desperate—both as a man and a candidate for President…. His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda.

“America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[panikking]

I don't normally make posts myself, but I haven't seen anyone talk about this on tumblr, I just wanna bring attention to what's going on with Boeing and what happened, but tl:dr I wouldn't recommend flying on a Boeing plane right now.

If you prefer video, here's a segment done by John Oliver on 'Last Week Tonight' a comedy news show, note that some of the jokes within could be considered nsfw.

[snailsnaps]

Blaming my fella @/west-brooke for introducing me to TF Prime so uhh, meet Fuselage, my son I'm out there acting like I didn't end up writing like 3 pages of lore, info, notes and trivia about him - like naw man the hyperfixation got me good

[hanzajesthanza]

@horsegirlcahir another “hanza on the road interaction” idea i had was cahir and angoulême when on their way to the mines (geralt disappeared somewhere)…

in which angoulême, having misjudged cahir as an imperial bootlicker, keeps trying to provoke him with anti-empire comments (honestly based). her usual modus operandi. like this meme

eventually she gets around to talking about her criminal activity and being like “well you wouldn’t know i guess because you’ve never been to jail 💅🏻” and cahir just says, reserving strong emotion, “i was imprisoned in the imperial citadel for a year”. so angoulême just

[gg-carboxylase]

All these people that aren't Thai making fun of Boeing's name kinda suck. Youse all should probably look into why and how Thai parents name their kids things. We do the same thing in the West, we're just used to hearing them. Also — Boeing is a name, champs.

So, not to be That Guy, but you're being ethnocentric. The sheer amount of Western Clowning I've seen surrounding Only Friends is astounding, tbh.

[nando161mando]

Second Boeing whistleblower dies in less than two months

[baejax-the-great]

The thing about the Boeing whistleblower is that the Boeing as a company has already demonstrated repeatedly that they value stock price over human life, so murdering a former employee seems in keeping with past behavior, whereas the former employee in his whistleblowing has shown a concern for human life, and thus seems less likely to end his own.

[whilomm]

these are claims from a different whistleblower than the one that was totally not murdered by boeing

(disclaimer, im not an expert and this article doesnt go into a ton of detail on the specific issues, so i could be a lil off, these are very much non-expert speculation rambles. anyone who understands better, feel free to correct me/add more deets).

if im reading it right these claims get into the way boeing has been outsourcing more and more manufacturing of parts to other companies, such as for the fuselage (the plane body as a whole, big tube u sit in). if those parts dont quite fit together right (and keep in mind the margins of error on these things can be VERY small in some cases, though im not sure exactly how much wiggle room they got here), that can lead to too much stress on certain parts.

like, for example, if one part of the fuselage is just baaaarely too big for the next part it connects to, it might all seem to fit together perfectly fine, but every time it takes off and lands or goes thru compression cycles (that is when they take off and land, going from low pressure-high pressure-low pressure), it just puts a BIT too much pressure on where they join. and over the years, that pressure just adds up until theres microscopic stress fractures, which become slightly larger stress fractures, until they get big enough that once a plane reaches a high enough altitude theres a midair disentegration, which is. exactly as bad as it sounds.

(sidenote: compression cycles can be more important for determining an airplanes lifespan than flight hours. the usual metaphor is bending a paperclip back and forth until it breaks, how many times can you bend it before metal fatigue sets in and it just snaps. holding it in a more bent position however will take a lot longer to snap it generally.)

now to be clear, every single plane has an intended service life, and its well known that planes can only take so many compression cycles before they start to get really hard to maintain without going kablooey. a plane may be rated for like, idk, 50k compression cycles (so, taking off and landing 50k times before its retired, because after that its no longer worth the maintenance vs just making a new plane). but if it turns out that plane has some flaw in its build that means itll develop fatal stress factures at only 20k cycles, well. thats bad. not sure exactly how the schedule on looking for stress factures looks like for maintenece crews (do they do it regularly for all planes on a set schedule? do they only do it occasionally for new planes, and start to ramp up checks as the plane gets older? dunno!) but well. generally speaking, a plane having a fatal flaw that gives it an explosive midlife crisis is Bad. i would hope theyd catch it! but i dont know enough about the deets of fuselage maintenence to know the specifics.

and OH YAY COMPOSITE MATERIALS. now, before anyone gets too freaked out thinking about the uh. submarine. use of composite materials is actually far more common on planes than on subs for a buncha reasons. one, planes just generally undergo a lot less in terms of pressure (that futurama joke, "this spaceship can handle between one and zero atmospheres", vs subs that have to deal with tens to potentially hundreds of atmospheres) but also because apparently, for complicated material engineering reasons, composite materials work much better under tension (high pressure INSIDE pushing OUT, like airplane) than under compression (high pressure OUTSIDE pushing IN, like submarine). heres a vid from someone who wrote their masters on composite materials under compression if you wanna hear from someone slightly smarter on the subject. im not gonna pretend like i understand the full deets, but "composites do OKAY with tension" is enough for me, go read the fancy scientific papers if you want more.

now, so that people do freak out at least a little bit: hm. dont like that they are using Way More Composite Than Usual on this plane. how much is the usual? idk, i assume composites are much more popular with low altitude small aircraft (bc well, weight and less pressure worries), dunno whats considered normal for high altitude longhaul crafts. but, apparently, the dreamliner is "more than usual". which, yeah cool, lighter weight airplanes use less fuel which is better for longhaul flights. is it. well tested enough though???

...anyway. im not an engineer, idk the full Deets, but well. havin lotsa fun hearing the engineers talk about how the parts of the giant metal skybirds dont fit together quite right and theyre using materials that fail more catastrophically than metal with less warning, experimentally, and we dont quiiiite have the data to know if. its a problem. thats really fun! LOVE hearing about how much theyre outsourcing parts, given how bad quality control of things as tiny as the titanium in some bolts or a little bit of the engine blades being not properly vacuum forged has lead to catastrophic failure in the past, and knowing how important sourcing of parts in airplanes is. all VERY yay!

[usafphantom2]

HU009376 by manhhai Via Flickr: 2 November, 1965, Arizona, United States --- CF-5 Freedom Fighter aircraft refuel en route to Vietnam. --- Image by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

[stone-cold-groove]

Two types of models: Lucille Ball and the Boeing 247-D.

[actionyak]

oh is the company that pushed my dad to either quit or be fired because they didn't want to pay him retirement benefits in trouble? is the company that had my mom doing secretary work for every incompetent in the department and perpetually kept her on "technically still a temp" status because they didn't want to pay her employee wages in trouble? this is so shocking, how could this possibly have happened

[feralnumberfive]

[featuresofinterest]

reading the latest horrible boeing-related headline and i might be biased coming from a company town but. i don't know what boeing could possibly stand to gain by assassinating a whistleblower who already blew said whistles years ago. like the stuff he had to say is out there and HAS BEEN out there for a long time. and their every move is very much in the news right now anyway? seems way more likely that the stress of the years-long legal battle (and what i assume must be a large about of legal debt) got to him

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Corporate PACs affiliated with Fortune 500 companies and their trade associations donated $36.3 million to lawmakers who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

That’s the total figure for the 2022 election cycle, which began in January 2021, according to an analysis of year-end campaign finance filings by liberal advocacy group Accountable.US.

Those donations make up a relatively small percentage of the fundraising for the 147 Republicans who objected to the 2020 election results. But they reveal that many companies reversed course on their initial decision to pause donations to these lawmakers following the insurrection.

AT&T was the top company donor to the 147 Republicans in the 2022 election cycle, giving roughly $630,000, according to the analysis. The telecom giant briefly suspended donations to the election objectors in response to the Capitol attack.

It’s followed by Home Depot ($478,000), Lockheed Martin ($440,000), UPS ($411,000) and Boeing ($392,000). Comcast, which previously paused donations to the election objectors to review its “political giving policies and practices,” donated $382,000.

Corporate donations accelerated when it became clear that Republicans were favored to take the House. Corporations rely on PAC donations, which are mostly funded by company executives, to gain access to elected officials.

While companies were under intense scrutiny in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, public interest in the issue slowly faded, giving them an opportunity to resume their political giving.

“Workers, customers, and shareholders want to work for, buy from and invest in companies that share their values and democratic ideals. So many corporations risked their reputations to reward millions to MAGA extremists in Congress that obstructed the democratic process even after a violent insurrection,” Accountable.US spokesperson Jeremy Funk said.

Most companies continued to cut off donations to extreme Republicans who frequently spread election lies, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), adopting the view that not all election objectors are created equal.

Of the 147 Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) received the largest donations from corporate America, bringing in $1.1 million. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) received $1 million, while Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, brought in $794,000.