More than 200 of the Air Force's most expensive and important aircraft were briefly grounded in February after it was discovered that the pins that hold the vertical stabilizer to the fuselages of most Air Force variants of the Boeing 707 were substandard. The five-inch pins are potentially a single point of failure since one of them bears 90 percent of the stress of keeping the tail on. KC-135 tankers along with highly specialized RC-135 and WC-135 surveillance planes were affected. The E-3 Sentry AWACS and E-8 JSTAR aircraft were not affected.
Well, good question as to how this company got themselves into the position of going down the financial drain. As far as this observer can tell, the products they produced are successful products in good demand, yet they are “cash strapped”…
If something like Bombardier’s divestment needs a trigger, the C Series (now A220) uncontained P&W engine malfunction during testing on May 29, 2014 might well have been that trigger. Having watched the aftermath of that event on location in the neighborhood as an outsider looking in, that’s the way it felt to me at the time.
It’s possible that we are seeing the bizjet market becoming saturated. How many “new” medium sized jets have hit the market in the past couple years? Even the 1% can only afford so many new planes. I foresee a shakeout in the industry and Bombardier is only the first victim.
At the risk of putting a political twist to this sad story. Bombardier is headquartered in the Province
of Quebec, Montreal to be exact. They are the epidemy of Liberal pork barrellers. Constantly
sucking on the hind tit of the Liberal government when in power. It is difficult to determine the total in subsidies over the years always disguised as a repayable loan never to happen. Suffice to say the internal
mob have sucked up likely in excess of 50 to 100 billion $$. Evert time they down size lay off employees
with more outsourcing. Surprising of recent past 5+ yrs after a $350Bil injection they unnoted the senior
cosa nostra execs with 50% salary and bonus increases. A beautiful product and world class aircraft to be
sold for the sake of corporate greed.
So the question is, how did this contractor get the job of supplying these parts when they didn’t meet ANY of the specifications of the bolts?..Oh yeah, they got the contract with kickbacks, payoffs and greed. There is no other explanation for the sub standard parts.
It would be interesting to know if the 25 faulty pins were found installed on the airplanes or found in the parts bins, or both. If the faulty pins were going into stock, I can understand a two-year timeframe of faulty manufacture before discovery. But why weren’t faulty parts caught in the mfr’s inspection process?
The current inspection philosophy in the industry is that the supplier self certify the incoming material or item as having met all requirement. this allows the contractor under this arrangement to forgo incoming inspection. The contractor may have qualified to the requisite specifications and have supplied compliant pars for a very long time.How this happened will have to be determined through a site records inspection. Assumption of illicit activities if not really fair at this point. it could be as usually is in these cases step were missed because work flow was not followed.
One of many problems we have in spite of all the certifications of people and plants and processes.
The people responsible will likely be working in the same industry at the same level of responsibility even if the corporation itself gets bankrupted by their failure. Just like all the execs at other bail outs and bankruptcies.