Boeing has had a rough couple of weeks

Things were looking slightly up for them when they announced the possible acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems (I may have called it Spirit Aerospace in previous posts), the maker of their fuselages. Spirit was formerly their own company, but in a brilliant move they spun it off into its own company, leaving them with zero control to remediate manufacturing defects before the tubes were shipped from Kansas to Seattle/Tacoma for assembly, requiring a "warranty crew" to be permanently stationed at the Boeing plant to fix them up.

Not a smart move.

In the last couple of weeks we've seen these Boeing jet lovelies:
--A wheel fall off one of its rear landing wheel assemblies on take-off, causing a lot of damage to parked cars. Fortunately no one was injured. A similar thing happened a month or two ago where a jet was waiting to taxi for take-off, and a nose wheel decided to roll away.
--Another jet, on landing, lost function of its rudder, greatly affecting its ability to steer. The front wheel, while steerable, is not intended to steer the plane at speed, but in an emergency - as this kinda was - it can be used as such and the plane made it safely to the gate. Later testing found a failed component

Now, as terrible as a wheel falling off is, those aren't Boeing's fault. That's problems with the individual airline's maintenance. The failure of the rudder system? Same thing. Part failure, maintenance not noticing it. Not Boeing's fault. Not good optics, but that's just bad luck.

But that isn't the biggie. The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the January 5th Alaska Airlines door blowout incident.

Here is a particularly damning line in the article: "Boeing has acknowledged in a letter to Congress that it cannot find records for work done on the door panel of the Alaska Airlines plane." They cannot find records for work done on the door panel. What the ever-loving fuck. Aircraft repairs have log after log after log. Individual parts have logs noting how many hours are on them. Well, maybe not parts, but certainly assemblies. Boeing's computer systems REQUIRE that this stuff be logged! And they can't find the records.

This might be a good time to short Boeing stock

https://apnews.com/article/boeing-ntsb-door-plug-emergency-landing-2d23408a25eff999579c88071836dbec

Slightly big news: Boeing Whistleblower found dead, "self-inflicted" gunshot wound to the head

Wow. Words absolutely fail me.

John Barnett had worked for Boeing for thirty years before retiring in 2017 for medical reasons. He was a senior quality control engineer on the 787 program. He became a whistleblower when he saw sub-standard parts being installed and later discovered a 25% failure rate in the passenger breathing mask system for the 787.

He was in Charleston as part of a long-running legal battle against Boeing. When he failed to appear as part of this on Saturday, they searched for him at his hotel and he was found dead in his truck in the parking lot.

Of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

I really, REALLY hope the FBI steps in on this one. It might have been a clean suicide, it might not have been. But there's too much going on with Boeing without there being a VERY serious investigation into this!

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68534703