Comment by aunty_helen
3 years ago
My first job was working at a mro that overhauled engines a bit smaller than the Trent 900s but same principles apply.
I built qa software to digitize the forms and signature process like what’s mentioned in the article as having not correctly been signed off on.
I ate lunch with repair engineers that had dark wells of knowledge about the engines they worked on. They could talk so deep on a subject that lunch break was over and we’d resume conversation over weeks.
There’s a paragraph in this post that hits a few points that are very subtle. The missing sign offs and engineers not knowing the process and and and. I think the criticism of RR is valid here. The qa manager at the mro I worked at was a force of nature. He was feared and uncompromising. He was also the signature that could cause an engine shutdown in flight. I admired this person and still do.
There’s small issues like this that go on every day on every engine model all over the world. There’s thousands of engines flying right now that have little defects that could cause a shutdown. There’s issues that have been identified, signed off as low risk and will be checked next time the engine comes in for overhaul.
There’s engineers out there that see the same fault, a premature cracked pipe, carbon buildup, abnormal corrosion, after a while of seeing this problem, they’ll raise the paperwork which will go up the chain and sit. It may be ignored, taken for information for future designs, identified as something that should be fixed or monitored or the frequency of monitoring increased. Maybe the part life will be reduced or you will be forced to NDT the part at each overhaul.
The cheese wheel concept is great as these systems are so complex there’s always going to be some issues.
As for Qantas, near the end it mentions the plane was repaired at great cost. It’s a source of company pride that they’ve never lost an airframe. They repair planes which are BER (beyond economic repair) just to keep this record.
> As for Qantas, near the end it mentions the plane was repaired at great cost
Indeed. Qantas has been ranked the safest airline int he world almost every year since forever [1]
I clearly remember when QF32 happened and everyone was utterly shocked. That simply DOES NOT happen to Qantas.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2023/01/03/ran...
QANTAS has, for the last 10+, had a CEO who was not part of this culture and did everything he could to drive costs down. He laid off huge swaths of engineers, outsourced key maintenance contracts to the lowest bidder and left the airline with an aging fleet that needs billions spent to replenish. He was recently fired by the board for essentially destroying the reputation of the airline within Australia, with their practice of cancelling flights at short notice, illegally sacking thousands of staff during COVID and taking 100's of millions of dollars from the Australian government to keep staff employed during the airline's grounding during COVID and handing it all to shareholders.
It is a situation very similar to the downfall of Boeing.
The destruction of Qantas as a quality airline is entirely driven by exactly the same MBA/shareholder-value bullshit that destroyed Boeing and others.
Financial engineers should be banned from operating businesses. They are not focused on the quality of the business, from which profits are derived. They work backwards from their financially engineered results to drive down "costs", even if those "costs" are entirely essential to the operation of the business.
Qantas (and its subsidiary Jetstar) are having to recover their engineering, customer service, and other "costs" to actually achieve the operating business that their expensive tickets require. Currently they are being priced out of operating in Asia, not because they have too expensive operations, but because their board and CxOs were entirely driven by shareholders, not the ongoing operation of the business.
Agreed. I've worked in a company that was AS9001 certified, and pretty much the first things a quality auditor would have wanted to look at would be non-conformances and concessions. With than number of missing signatures we'd have been skinned alive, and it would likely have prompted the auditor to then turn the place upside down looking for more problems.
That would then have produced major failings in the audit, if not the outright revocation of the quality accreditation, which I would then expect to be followed up on by an audit from the customer (which in the case of TFA would be Rolls Royce), asking some rather uncomfortable questions of the management, examining whether the inter-company concession process was being adhered to, and perhaps reflecting internally (i.e. within RR) - "Do we think these folks are the right people to be making these parts for us?"
From what I've read here it seems to me that Rolls Royce were astonishingly lax in not riding their subcontractors nearly hard enough, quality wise.
I had a small experience with RR as a company through a contract. Including some time spent in Derby.
The things I saw left me question how any innovation could happen at all in there or why we did not have a much higher rate of fuck-you-shima per year or how the hell plane engines are not exploding daily.
IIRC the B777 engine controllers are still m68k. Discontinued in 1995.
> IIRC the B777 engine controllers are still m68k. Discontinued in 1995.
That seems sensible? You’d need a really compelling reason to rewrite the entire control software and recertify the engine to match. Especially for an engine which has seen no order in 15 years.
The planes are still in service and need new engines and even existing engines require spare parts.
What I heard was that there was quite a scramble to buy up all existing supply and also talk some alternate manufacturers into continuing production at a low rate.
B777 was introduced in 1995. Having an engine controller that is obsolete and not available any more at the moment it is launched, seems a bit shortsighted to me.
Then again it works, the planes are flying in the end it's fine.
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