Boeing habit behind the Alaska blowout
Months before a piece of a Boeing 737 blew out midflight, leaving a door-sized hole in its side, the plane spent nearly three weeks shuffling down an assembly line with faulty rivets in need of repair.
Workers had spotted the bad parts almost immediately after the plane’ s fuselage arrived at the factory. But they didn’t make the fix right away and the 737 continued onto the next workstation. When crews completed the repair 19 days later, they failed to replace four critical bolts on a plug door they had opened to do the job, leading to the Jan .5 accident on an Alaska Airlines flight.
At Boeing, there is a term for situations such as this one, when work is completed out of the production line’s ordinary sequence: traveled work.
“The folks on the line, they know what it is,” Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun said in a Wednesday address to employees .“It’ s uncomfortable. It creates opportunities for failure .”
“And at this moment in time, in light of what happened with Alaska,” Calhoun said ,“we’ ve got to make a step change on this one.”
Boeing and federal investigators probing the Alaska Air incident have said the practice of completing work out of sequence is a liability when it comes to airplane quality. Boeing leaders, as they canvass factory workers for insight on where safety is falling short, have said traveled work tops employees’ lists of concerns. The company has said it believes documentation required in the opening of the plug door was never created.
Last week, Boeing told staff it was changing how it determines pay for tens of thousands of nonunion employees—from mechanics in South Carolina to its top brass. Quality measures, such as reducing traveled work, will now determine 60% of the annual bonuses for those working on its commercial aircraft.
For years, Boeing executives have tried and failed to break the habit. Four years ago, in the aftermath of a pair of fatal MAX crashes, Boeing laid out five values central to improving safety. Number three on the list: eliminate traveled work.
That is because doing work out of order further complicates the already intricate, often-taxing process of putting together an airplane. In Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory where 737s are built, each plane moves its way through a series of stations, where crews are tasked with