Made in USA Worse than Made in China - Don't Buy Boeing. Buy Airbus.

[Parts of this report are from a Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/11/faa-boeing-investigation-737-max/]

The Boeing 737 Max continues to expose serious deficiencies in US manufacturing quality. If a critical machine like a plane suffers from repetitive failures, imagine the scope and depth of problems that go unreported with other American products. Is the problem limited to Boeing? Or is it systemic in the American industry culture?

Americans used to mock the Made in Japan brand back in the 1950s and 1960s. Then beginning in the 1970s the Japanese automobile industry overtook the world markets, defeated the monstrous gas-guzzling behemoths the US was making, and today it builds some of the best cars in the world. 

For years Americans laughed at front-wheel drive cars because to build them required some ingenuity and efficient use of space under the hood. They were too complicated for the dense American makers who don't like change. Change means a temporary slowdown in the money-raking enterprise because you have to invest in R&D and retrofit your manufacturing proces.. But it didn't take long for front-wheel drive-cars to prove their safety and worth, and American car makers reluctantly followed the trend.

"Always follow" seems to be the motto of American technology. The world adopted the metric system, but the US thought it was better than everyone and refused to do so. Until one day a couple of decades ago, when NASA lost a $500 million spacecraft because of confusion between the international metric system and the old antiquated English system still in use in the US. In September of 1999, after almost 10 months of travel to Mars, the Mars Climate Orbiter burned and broke into pieces because someone failed to use the right units, i.e., the metric units! It was launched by NASA on December 11, 1998, to study the Martian climate, atmosphere and surface changes, and to act as a communications relay in the Mars Surveyor ’98 program for the Mars Polar Lander. While the navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the metric system in its calculations, the very "patriotic" Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, which designed and built the spacecraft, did not use the metric system and instead provided crucial acceleration data in inches, feet, and pounds. 

The American system of measuring distance in inches, feet, and yards is based upon the units brought by the English settlers who arrived to the US on the Mayflower in the 1600s. While much of the rest of the world uses the metric system of centimeters, meters, and kilometers, the US has stubbornly continued to use the English units out of a deranged sense of patriotism - something straight out of a Donald Trump megalomania book. One foot is the same as 12 inches, and a yard is 36 inches—and the confusion continues. In metric, 1 meter is 100 centimeters, and a kilometer is 1000 meters. However, it is undeniable today that a large number of multinationals and international businesses work in cooperation with US companies. This makes it even more important to be able to use common units of measurement.

Comprehending the overwhelming advantages of the metric system, the US Congress adopted SI units as the preferred measurement system in 1975 through the “Metric Conversion Act” which was signed by US President Gerald Ford. However, the act also allowed the use of US customary units. Further on, in the 1980s, the federal government tried to introduce metric in the United States. Speedometers on the cars from that time showed both miles per hour and kilometers per hour. However, these attempts at changing to metric were not successful. Road signaling is still in miles and feet, temperatures are still reported in Fahrenheit degrees, etc.

The Mars Orbiter disaster was not the only one in US history that was directly caused by stubborn and dumb "USA is best" conversion errors.

Now, with a portion of a Boeing 737 Max jet coming detached in mid-air from an Air Alaska flight last week, there are serious concerns about the American aviation industry. In fact, before that incident, the near-monopoly that Boeing is had admitted in the recent past to loosing bolts in the rudder-control system of 737 Max planes, holes being drilled in the wrong places by a supplier, and a defect in the anti-icing system that could cause severe structural damage if pilots failed to manually switch it off.

The more dramatic failures of the Boeing Max aircraft occurred in 2019 and 2020 when 346 passangers died in two nearly identical crashes. According to Wikipedia, the Boeing 737 MAX passenger airliner was grounded after these two crashes: Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29, 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019. As is always the case when American protectionism prevails, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) resisted grounding the aircraft until March 13, 2019, when it received evidence of accident similarities.

When problems keep coming up with Max planes, "people start to have questions about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with the culture or process within the company," said Nick Cunningham, an aerospace and defense analyst at the London-based Agency Partners. FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said in an interview that the goal of the investigation and audit of Boeing's manufacturing, in addition to finding out what happened to the jet, is "to really understand how after several years of production problems that this issue has not been rectified."

Investigators are still trying to determine what caused the door plug on an Alaska Airlines flight to fail, leaving a gaping hole in the fuselage that terrified passengers at 16,000 feet. But they are examining whether bolts were properly installed on the hardware that holds the panel to the plane.

Boeing has over the years made pledges to revamp its organization's culture in a bid to restore trust with regulators, airlines, pilots and the flying public after its role in the crashes - revealed through congressional hearings, document leaks and federal probes - tarnished its image as a trusted American icon.

Federal investigators found Boeing made a series of flawed assumptions in designing a flight-control software system for the 737 Max and concealed key details about the system to regulators, contributing to the two crashes in 2018 and 2019. Hundreds of the jets were grounded for nearly two years, hurting the company's finances.

Boeing fixed the flawed 737 Max components and said it would create a new product safety organization within the company, expand an anonymous safety reporting system, and clean up a company culture in which Calhoun acknowledged people were "having a hard time being honest with one another."

"The proof is in the pudding," said Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing's 737 factory in Renton, Wash., who left in 2018 after warning that poor factory conditions posed threats to production quality. "You're still building unsafe airplanes."

Analysts say the one bright spot in Boeing's business - growing orders for its commercial jetliners - is now threatened by renewed doubts about the 737 Max's safety and reliability. The jets accounted for about two-thirds of the company's commercial plane orders last year.

Some of Boeing's production problems trace to Spirit AeroSystems, a Wichita-based supplier that builds huge portions of 737 Max jets before shipping them to Boeing for final assembly. Spirit initially installed the plug that blew off the Alaska Airlines flight, the supplier said. In April, Spirit said it discovered problems with fittings on the vertical fins of 737 planes, and in August, Boeing and Spirit found improperly drilled holes on a key component called the rear bulkhead, according to statements by Spirit. Both problems were uncovered before the planes carried passengers but delayed plane deliveries, according to investor filings.

In August, the FAA warned of a newly discovered defect with the anti-icing system on all 737 Max jets. After a pilot engages this system to protect the engines from icy clouds, they must turn it back off within five minutes or risk deterioration to the plane that could be hazardous to passengers or force an emergency landing, the FAA said in a written notice. The system is built by a different supplier.

In some ways, aviation experts see this design flaw as reminiscent of the problems that led to the 2018 and 2019 crashes. A new Max operated by Lion Air crashed in Indonesia in October 2018; a second new jet, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed in Ethiopia less than five months later. In both disasters, a flawed software system was triggered by a single malfunctioning sensor - a design problem known as a "single point of failure." Engineers prefer to design multiple, redundant safety components that can override one malfunction.

The continued failures of the Boeing aircraft are likely to push carriers the world over to choose the better-made, safer, and less noisy planes made by the European maker Airbus. I have personally flown millions of miles over a career, and flying Airbus was always a much more comfortable experience than flying a Boeing aircraft.