Sci-Tech

How Boeing Favored Speed Over Quality for the 737 Max

Published

2 months ago

March 29, 2024

Niraj Chokshi, Sydney Ember and Santul Nerkar

In February last year, a new Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 Max plane was on one of its first flights when an automated stabilizing system appeared to malfunction, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing soon after they took off.

Less than two months later, an Alaska Airlines 737 Max plane with eight hours of total flight time was briefly grounded until mechanics resolved a problem with a fire detection system. And in November, an engine on a just-delivered United Airlines 737 Max failed at 37,000 feet.

These incidents, which the airlines disclosed to the Federal Aviation Administration, were not widely reported. There were no indications that anyone was in danger, and it was not clear who was ultimately responsible for those problems. But since Jan. 5, when a panel on a two-month-old Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 jet blew off in midair, episodes like these have taken on new resonance, raising further questions about the quality of the planes Boeing is producing.

“There’s a lot of areas where things don’t seem to be put together right in the first place,” said Joe Jacobsen, an engineer and aviation safety expert who spent more than a decade at Boeing and more than 25 years at the F.A.A.

“The theme is shortcuts everywhere — not doing the job right,” he added.

Such reports, and interviews with aviation safety experts and more than two dozen current and former Boeing employees, paint a worrying picture about a company long considered to be at the pinnacle of American engineering. They suggest that Boeing is struggling to improve quality years after two crashes of Max 8 planes in 2018 and 2019 killed nearly 350 people.

Some of the crucial layers of redundancies that are supposed to ensure that Boeing’s planes are safe appear to be strained, the people said. The experience level of Boeing’s work force has dropped since the start of the pandemic. The inspection process intended to provide a vital check on work done by its mechanics has been weakened over the years. And some suppliers have struggled to adhere to quality standards while producing parts at the pace Boeing wanted them.

Under pressure to show regulators, airlines and passengers that the company is taking its latest crisis seriously, Boeing announced sweeping changes to its leadership on Monday. The chief executive, Dave Calhoun, will leave at the end of the year, and Stan Deal, the head of the commercial planes division, which makes the 737 Max, retired immediately. The company’s chairman, Larry Kellner, stepped down from that position and will not seek re-election to the board.

When he took the top job in January 2020, Mr. Calhoun said he was determined to improve the company’s safety culture. It added directors with engineering and safety expertise and created a safety committee on its board. Boeing said that it had increased the number of quality inspectors for commercial planes by 20 percent since 2019 and that inspections per plane had also risen.

After the Max 8 crashes, Boeing and its regulators focused most on the cause of those accidents: flawed design and software. Yet some current and former employees say problems with manufacturing quality were also apparent to them at the time and should have been to executives and regulators as well.

After the Jan. 5 mishap, a six-week F.A.A. audit of Boeing’s 737 Max production documented dozens of lapses in Boeing’s quality-control practices. The agency has given the company three months, or until about late May, to address quality-control issues.

Federal officials have traced the panel blowout to Boeing’s factory in Renton, Wash., where the 737 Max is assembled. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the panel was removed but appeared to have been reinstalled without bolts that secured it in place. That panel is known as a “door plug” and is used to cover the gap left by an unneeded emergency exit.

Current and former Boeing employees said the incident reflected longstanding problems. Several said employees often faced intense pressure to meet production deadlines, sometimes leading to questionable practices that they feared could compromise quality and safety.

Davin Fischer, a former mechanic in Renton, who also spoke to the Seattle TV station KIRO 7, said he noticed a cultural shift starting around 2017, when the company introduced the Max.

“They were trying to get the plane rate up and then just kept crunching, crunching and crunching to go faster, faster, faster,” he said.

The Max was introduced in response to a new fuel-efficient plane from the European manufacturer Airbus. Boeing increased production from about 42 Max jets a month in early 2017 to about 52 the next year. That pace collapsed to virtually zero soon after the second crash, in Ethiopia, when regulators around the world grounded the plane. Flights aboard the Max resumed in late 2020, and the company began to increase production again to avoid falling further behind Airbus.

Now, some Boeing executives admit that they made mistakes.

“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference last week.

Mr. Calhoun has also acknowledged that Boeing must improve but has defended the company’s approach to production. “Over the last several years, we’ve taken close care not to push the system too fast, and we have never hesitated to slow down, to halt production or to stop deliveries to take the time we need to get things right,” he said in January.

Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respected the company and its employees and wanted Boeing to succeed.

One quality manager in Washington State who left Boeing last year said workers assembling planes would sometimes try to install parts that had not been logged or inspected, an attempt to save time by circumventing quality procedures intended to weed out defective or substandard components.

In one case, the employee said, a worker sent parts from a receiving area straight to the factory floor before a required inspection.

A worker currently at Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner factory in North Charleston, S.C., described seeing numerous problems on planes being assembled, including wires being routed incorrectly, raising the risk that they could rub against one another, resulting in damage.

Employees would also sometimes go “inspector shopping” to find someone who would approve work, the worker said.

Some of the concerns echoed accusations of quality lapses by several whistle-blowers at Boeing’s South Carolina factory who spoke to The Times in 2019.

Several current and former employees in South Carolina and in Washington State said mechanics building planes were allowed in some instances to sign off on their own work. Such “self-verification” removes a crucial layer of quality control, they said.

Boeing said in a statement on Wednesday that it had eliminated self-inspections in South Carolina in 2021 and that the practice accounted for less than 10 percent of inspections at other sites. The company inspects each plane before delivery to make sure that wire bundles are appropriately spaced, the statement said, and it does not allow inspector shopping.

Another factor at play in recent years has been that Boeing’s workers have less experience than they did before the pandemic.

When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, air travel plummeted, and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began to cut jobs and encouraged workers to take buyouts or retire early. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees companywide — including some with decades of experience.

In late 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in bigger monthly pension payments, which were tied to interest rates, according to the union that represents them, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace. More than 1,700 union members left the company that year, up from around 1,000 the year before. The members who left had been at the company for more than 23 years on average.

“We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise, and we proposed some workarounds, but the company blew us off,” Ray Goforth, executive director of the union, said in a statement, adding that he thought the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower-paid entry-level engineers and technical workers.”

Boeing now employs 171,000 people, including in its commercial plane, defense, services and other divisions. That figure is up about 20 percent from the end of 2020. But many new workers are less seasoned, current and former employees said.

One Boeing employee who conducted quality inspections in Washington State until last year said the company did not always provide new employees with sufficient training, sometimes leaving them to learn crucial skills from more experienced colleagues.

Boeing said that since Jan. 5, employees had asked for more training and that it was working on meeting those needs, including by adding training on the factory floor this month.

District 751 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members had dropped sharply in recent years. The proportion of its members who have less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.

After the Jan. 5 incident, Boeing announced changes to improve quality, including adding inspections at its factory in Renton and at the plant in Wichita, Kan., owned by a supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, that makes the bodies of Max planes.

Boeing recently said it would no longer accept Max bodies from Spirit that still needed substantial work. It previously tolerated flaws that could be fixed later in the interest of keeping production on schedule.

Addressing its problems could take Boeing time, aviation experts said, frustrating airlines that need new planes.

Some carriers said recently that they were rejiggering their growth plans because they expected fewer planes from Boeing. Airlines may try to buy more from Airbus.

“They need to go slow to go fast,” Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, told investors this month, referring to Boeing. “I think they’re doing that.”

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Sci-Tech

Few Chinese Electric Cars Are Sold in U.S., but Industry Fears a Flood

Published

5 hours ago

May 15, 2024

Neal E. Boudette

The Biden administration’s new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles won’t have a huge immediate impact on American consumers or the car market because very few such cars are sold in the United States.

But the decision reflects deep concern within the American automotive industry, which has grown increasingly worried about China’s ability to churn out cheap electric vehicles. American automakers welcomed the decision by the Biden administration on Tuesday to impose a 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles from China, saying those vehicles would undercut billions of dollars of investment in electric vehicle and battery factories in the United States.

“Today’s announcement is a necessary response to combat the Chinese government’s unfair trade practices that endanger the future of our auto industry,” Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said in a statement. “It will help level the playing field, keep our auto industry competitive and support good-paying, union jobs here at home.”

On Tuesday, President Biden announced a series of new and increased tariffs on certain Chinese-made goods, including a 25 percent duty on steel and aluminum and 50 percent levies on semiconductors and solar panels. The tariff on electric vehicles made in China was quadrupled from 25 percent. Chinese lithium-ion batteries for electric cars will now face a 25 percent tariff, up from 7.5 percent.

The United States imports only a few makes — electric or gasoline — from China. One is the Polestar 2, an electric vehicle made in China by a Swedish automaker in which the Chinese company Zhejiang Geely has a controlling stake. In a statement, Polestar said it was evaluating the impact of Mr. Biden’s announcement.

“We believe that free trade is essential to speed up the transition to more sustainable mobility through increased E.V. adoption,” the company said.

In the first quarter of this year, Polestar sold just 2,200 vehicles in the United States. Later this year, however, it is scheduled to start producing a new model, the Polestar 3, at a South Carolina plant operated by Volvo Cars, which Geely owns.

Volvo sells a Chinese-made plug-in hybrid sedan, the S90 Recharge, in the United States, and plans to start importing a new small sport utility vehicle, the EX30, to the United States from China this year. The car is expected to start at $35,000, making it one of the most affordable battery-powered models available in the country. The model has quickly become Volvo’s top-selling vehicle in Europe.

Volvo said on Tuesday that it was evaluating the potential impact of Mr. Biden’s new tariffs on its plans.

Internal combustion models that are made in China and sold in the United States include the Buick Envision S.U.V. made by General Motors, and Ford Motors’ Lincoln Nautilus. They are unaffected by the tariffs.

Tesla, G.M., Ford, Volkswagen, Hyundai and several other automakers have invested tens of billions of dollars in battery and electric vehicle factories in the United States. But with the exception of Tesla, automakers in the United States, Europe and Japan trail Chinese companies in scale, raw materials production and key technologies.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited, or CATL, the Chinese manufacturer that is the world’s largest producer of electric car batteries, said last month that it had developed a battery that could charge up enough in 10 minutes to allow a car to travel about 370 miles — a major leap compared with the batteries used by established Western and Asian automakers, including Tesla.

China’s lead in electric vehicles, which are seen as central to the auto industry’s future, has spurred concerns that Chinese cars could hit the U.S. market at prices that G.M., Ford and other traditional automakers wouldn’t be able to compete with.

BYD, a leading and fast-growing Chinese car and battery company, already sells a compact electric car, the Seagull, for less than $15,000 in China. And on Tuesday, it said it would begin selling a plug-in hybrid pickup truck in Mexico, although it added that it did not yet plan to sell the vehicle in the United States.

Chinese automakers like BYD, Geely and SAIC have been increasing car exports to Europe, Latin America and various Asian countries. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is investigating Chinese state subsidies to electric carmakers.

Some representatives of the U.S. auto industry have said the Chinese government’s support of its automakers has left factories there with the capacity to make vastly more cars than can be sold in the country.

“They’ve got a major E.V. overcapacity problem,” said John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the main lobbying arm for U.S. automakers.

“They’re building too many E.V.s — too many heavily subsidized E.V.s — for the domestic market and have no choice but to look abroad to offload those vehicles at budget prices,” Mr. Bozzella added. “The competitiveness of the auto industry in the U.S. will be harmed if heavily subsidized Chinese E.V.s can be sold at below-market prices to U.S. consumers”

Chinese officials have denied that the country is overproducing electric vehicles, solar panels and other products targeted by the Biden administration. “We hope the U.S. can take a positive view of China’s development and stop using overcapacity as an excuse for trade protectionism,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said on Tuesday.

Automakers have already had a taste of how price competition can disrupt their electric vehicle plans. Over the last year, Tesla has cut prices on its models several times, reducing the costs of some models by more than 20 percent in total. Those cuts, combined with a slowdown in the growth of electric car sales, have made it extremely hard for G.M. and Ford to make money on battery-powered models.

In the first three months of the year, Ford’s electric vehicle division lost $1.3 billion before taking into account some expenses. Both Ford and G.M. have slowed electric vehicle production and delayed the introduction of new models. While G.M. is losing money on electric cars, the company has said it expects those vehicles to begin generating profits later this year.

The Biden administration has sought to support and encourage the production of batteries and electric vehicles in the United States to address climate change and encourage more domestic manufacturing.

China isn’t the only obstacle in the way. Americans’ enthusiasm for electric cars has waned over the past year, mainly because such vehicles sell for relatively high prices. Some buyers are also reluctant to buy because they are not sure there will be enough places to charge those cars easily and quickly.

In the first quarter of this year, 269,000 E.V.s were sold in the U.S. market, according to Kelley Blue Book. That was an increase of just 2.6 percent from a year earlier. Total sales of cars and light trucks grew more than 5 percent to 3.8 million vehicles.

“In a lot of ways, buying an E.V. requires a lifestyle change,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds, a market researcher. “A lot of people just say, ‘I don’t want the hassle of an E.V.’”

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.

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Sci-Tech

'Chinese social media turned me from Ukrainian to Russian'

Published

9 hours ago

May 14, 2024

Fan Wang

As generative AI develops so quickly, regulating it and protecting people has become a challenge.

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Sci-Tech

OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, Is Leaving the Company

Published

9 hours ago

May 14, 2024

Cade Metz

Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who in November joined three other board members to force out Sam Altman, the company’s high-profile chief executive, before saying he regretted the move, is leaving the San Francisco A.I. company.

Dr. Sutskever’s departure, which the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday, closes another chapter in a story that stunned Silicon Valley and that raised questions about whether Mr. Altman and his company were prepared to lead the tech industry into the age of artificial intelligence.

After returning to OpenAI just five days after he was ousted, Mr. Altman reasserted his control and continued its push toward increasingly powerful technologies that worried some of his critics. Dr. Sutskever remained an OpenAI employee, but he never returned to work.

“This is an emotional day for all of us,” Mr. Altman said in an interview. “OpenAI would not exist without him and certainly was shaped by him.”

In a statement, Dr. Sutskever said: “I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build A.G.I. that is both safe and beneficial.” A.G.I., or artificial general intelligence, is an as-yet-unbuilt technology that can do anything the brain can do.

Dr. Sutskever, 38, added that he was starting a new project, but did not elaborate.

A key OpenAI researcher, Jakub Pachocki, will replace Dr. Sutskever as chief scientist at the company, which is valued at more than $80 billion, according to a recent fund-raising deal.

On Monday, OpenAI unveiled a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot that can receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos, joining tech giants like Google and Apple in a race toward a new kind of talking digital assistant.

Founded in 2015 by Mr. Altman, Elon Musk and several young researchers, including Dr. Sutskever, OpenAI has long been at the forefront of A.I. research. Dr. Sutskever’s involvement provided the company with instant credibility. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, he had been part of an A.I. breakthrough involving neural networks — the technology that has driven the field’s progress over the last decade.

In late 2022, OpenAI wowed the world with the release of ChatGPT, an online chatbot that could answer questions, write poetry, generate computer code and chat a lot like people. The tech industry quickly embraced what is called generative artificial intelligence — technologies that can generate text, images and other media on their own.

The result of more than a decade of research inside companies like OpenAI and Google, generative A.I. is poised to remake everything from email programs to internet search engines and digital assistants.

Mr. Altman became a spokesman for the shift toward generative A.I., testifying before Congress and meeting with lawmakers, regulators and investors around the world. In November, OpenAI’s board of directors unexpectedly ousted him, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s plan to eventually create artificial general intelligence.

The OpenAI board had six people: three founders and three independent members. Dr. Sutskever voted with the three outsiders to remove Mr. Altman as chief executive and chairman of the board, saying — without providing specifics — that Mr. Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications.”

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s chief operating officer and another co-founder, resigned from the company in protest. So did Dr. Pachocki.

Days later, as hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Dr. Sutskever said he regretted his decision to remove Mr. Altman and effectively stepped down from the board, leaving three independent members in opposition to Mr. Altman.

Mr. Altman returned as chief executive after he and the board agreed to replace two members with Bret Taylor, a former Salesforce executive, and Lawrence Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary. Mr. Altman regained his board seat several months later, as the board expanded to seven people.

Last year, Dr. Sutskever helped create a Super Alignment team inside OpenAI to explore ways of ensuring that future versions of the technology would not do harm. Like others in the field, he had grown increasingly concerned that A.I. could become dangerous and perhaps even destroy humanity.

In the weeks leading up to Mr. Altman’s ouster, Dr. Pachocki, who helped oversee the creation of GPT-4, the technology at the heart of ChatGPT, was promoted to director of research at the company. After occupying a position below Dr. Sutskever, he was elevated to a position alongside him, two people familiar with the moves said.

After Mr. Altman was reinstated, Dr. Sutskever did not return to work. Mr. Altman indicated that he was hoping to negotiate his return, but ultimately that was not possible.

Dr. Pachocki has effectively served as chief scientist since November. After Dr. Sutskever recruited him and others to join OpenAI, he was among the key researchers on several of the company’s most important projects, including, most notably, GPT-4.

“I am grateful to Ilya,” Dr. Pachocki said in an interview. “We have different and in many ways complementary styles of leadership.”

Mr. Altman said he talked with Dr. Sutskever on Tuesday. “He has pushed us — and will continue to push us — to, as he says, feel the A.G.I.,” Mr. Altman said.

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