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The Boeing 737 MAX, it turns out, is not the only thing the company has been dpong wrong. Not by a long shot.
If they gave out Academy Awards for Most Spectacular Industrial Crash of the Year, this year’s hands-down winner would be Boeing, Boeing. It’s not just that their code writers did a nifty update of the software in the 737 Max airliner that caused it to dive unpredictably, killing 346 people in two crashes, and grounding the entire fleet for a year or more. It’s not just that a new version of the 737 has started to show cracks in the attachments of wings to fuselage, causing 50 of them to be grounded for repairs. No, there’s more. Much more.
Boeing, Boeing, it turns out, has for six years been conducting one of the biggest experiments ever in automated manufacturing, spending untold millions of dollars on robots designed to assemble the fuselages of the 777. The machinery was designed to position the large curved panels that make up the cylindrical fuselage while other machines automatically drilled holes, inserted rivets and fastened them. It would do the work of hundreds of human mechanics, and do it better and faster.
The initiative was announced in 2014, incrementally deployed beginning the next year and revealed to be a total faceplant by 2016, when the Seattle Times (virtually the only publication paying any attention to this blockbuster story) reported serious production delays on the 777 line, hundreds of uncompleted jobs on each section of fuselage worked on the the robots, and massive amounts of overtime worked by overstressed humans to get the planes finished.
Boeing, Boeing executives denied the delays had anything to do with the robots, blaming them on suppliers, strikers in other plants, and their own employees. The employees who actually worked on the aircraft were blunt: the robots are “a horrible failure,” one mechanic told the Seattle Times back in 2016; another called it “a nightmare.”
But Boeing, Boeing soldiered on, firmly convinced of their own hype about robots working faster, better and cheaper than mere humans. For three more years they struggled with robots working slower, worse and far more expensive than humans. Instead of reducing the number of human mechanics, the company needed more of them to correct and redo the robots’ mistakes.
Not until last month did the company throw in the towel and abandon its robots, returning the the former, hand-labor-intensive method of assembling the aircraft. Boeing, Boeing executives congratulated themselves for finding a different approach that “has proven more reliable, requiring less work by hand and less rework, than what the robots were capable of.” Good for them.
This should have been one of the news stories of the year. CNN should have been doing wall-to-wall coverage of the robots screwing up, and pundits everywhere should have been writing thumbsuckers about the end of the automation dream. We should have seen pictures of the robots on the scrap heap next to Flippy, the robot that taught us they can’t flip hamburgers, either. (Flippy got far more news coverage than the massive Boeing, Boeing experiment until he screwed up. Then it all went dark.)
But the beat goes on, and the industrial media continue to alert us that robots are about to take over medicine, warehousing, package delivery, driving and sex work. It’s going to be very hard to decide on an academy award for best liar.
Sex work is it? I dont think id trust one of my more valuable parts to a robot after reading your article.Thanks for the heads up man. And if its Boeing Boeing I aint Going Going.
Still another reason to be happy that as a believer in AGW I do not fly. Between getting beat up when they overbook, being cramped, delayed, over charged and under served, the delights of not flying keep stacking up. The only thing is, this article makes me nervous about having a Boeing Boeing flying (or not) over our house and boinging us:-)
“CNN should have been doing wall-to-wall coverage of the robots screwing up …”
CNN is busy, Tom. Very, very busy. The Blue team and the Red team are packing the house down at the old Kabuki Theater, with their production of Impeachment!, which is proving even more successful than their recent, long-running smash success, RussiaGate!, and every able-bodied millionaire employee has to be at the Kabuki to cover it, 24/7.
Early feedback of the off-Beltway performance of Boeing Boeing! at the Reality Theater is indeed indicating it might be a classic, but with resources strained to the max, CNN will have to leave the reviewing of it to the Seattle Times.
Harking back to the theme of the last IMPACT article: Whatever happened to GRAPHINE or Graphene?
This Whizzkid product was going to build everything from space ladders to desalination filters and then just like that, it vanished off the ‘We are all saved’ technoscape.
Any updates on G technology Tom?
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2019/graphene-2d-materials
Being will not have to deal with the misbehavior of their robots much longer as the coming rapid decline in availability of jet fuel will result in the demise of the demand for their product.
The movie Ad Astra is worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. I just took it in. No review of it as art, other than it needed a pair of scissors, but what made it interesting, the tech is all recognizable, and that means; even though we a have colonized the Moon and established a firm outpost on Mars and are rocketing hither and yon in the near solar system, it’s clear we are stuck in this neighborhood for good.
Put it this way, midway to Mars duct tape is there to save the day(!), and -spoiler alert- only fails to do so, due to human incompetence.
No way in hell the MSM would go after a major MIC contractor like Boeing Boeing. Moreover, the techno utopian narrative is sacrosanct. Dust of the guillotines time draws near.
Agree(as I usually do), with all three sentiments.
Were I on the Boeing board, I wouldn’t let anyone without a decade in the trenches as an aerospace manufacturing engineer into the executive corner offices.
This all seems a symptom of the MBA lottery for entry into our economic elites. Perhaps fine for finance jobs or PR flacks, but terrible for companies that make safety-critical things. It may take Boeing decades to recover its reputation.
I’m sure everyone has heard about the most recent Boeing screw-up. Starliner failed to boost to an orbit that would permit a rendezvous with ISS because (drumroll) a software glitch in the mission elapsed timer caused it to expend too much fuel early in the flight.
Now here’s the NASA spokesperson explaining that *had there been crew aboard* they could have taken action to override the automation and the capsule would have been able to complete the rendezvous. We’ve already seen the outcome when pilots of Boeing vehicles find themselves in a fight to the death with the automation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ki8D36D9pg
They’re worried sick about getting the clunker back on the ground this morning (a week early). Think how worried they’d be “had there been a crew aboard.”