Gliding risk....

On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 8:43:39 PM UTC-8, 5Z wrote:
On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 7:53:57 PM UTC-8, son_of_flubber wrote:
On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 4:54:08 PM UTC-5, 2G wrote:

Before I purchased any glider manufactured by either of these subcontractors I would insist on a full-blown ultrasonic NDT test.

This relevant accident happened in 2003.

Before I get my nickers in a twist, I'd like to know whether the manufacturing deficiencies have been addressed in the intervening 16 years.

Sounds like a recent story about Boeing...
https://boingboing.net/2019/12/02/ra...-shavings.html

"...Barnett says the 787 facility was run by a new leadership team that had been transferred in from St Louis, MO, with a background in overseeing military contracts, and that they prioritized production speed over airworthiness and safety.

He says that the culture of poor safety began in 2011 or 2012, with top management ordering employees not to document defects, but that this graduated to "ignoring safety issues and the defective parts." Barnett pursued this internally, exhausting every internal process and facing workplace retaliation before going to federal regulators like the FAA and OSHA, which resulted in even more retaliation, and, eventually, blackballing across the aviation industry."

Yeah, Boeing used to be run be engineers in Seattle. That changed when they moved their headquarters to Chicago in 2001. Now, engineers became a necessary nuisance and profit became king. When they tried to farm out most subsections of the 787, with only final assembly being done in Seattle, they ran into major problems: the subs really didn't know how to make aircraft. These are the kind of blunders bean-counters make, with no sense of what made the company great. The 737 Max is just the latest, if not the worst, blunder. They didn't even designate the MCAS as flight critical, so it didn't get the attention it deserved. And then they charged extra for it to operate off of both AOA sensors that were on the plane anyhow - a colossal bean-counter screw-up: charge extra for basic safety! Heads need to roll in top management, although they will wait until after the current crisis is over.