Bumble Bee wrote:
This morning I read that the door blew off because someone at Boeing forgot to install some bolts.
Of course true engineers or scientists would never claim to have "no" quality issues. Per the "six sigma" doctrine, you just try to drive it to vanishingly low levels. Where humans are involved, there will be error.
The bolt part surprises me. Because on some similarly critical systems I've seen worked on, there's the guy who does the bolts, and then there's a different guy with a checklist that includes inspection of every single bolt. You've got to have two guys completely screw up to miss a bolt. I will say it's very easy as the checklist guy to start just jamming down the checklist as stupid bureaucratic busywork when you go through months and months of the first guy never making a mistake. But in my case, you had to write your name on the checklist. I wonder if Boeing has a checklist with some dude's name on it for the missing bolts.
My similar moment was when some Chevron engineers came to my high school class. Some "woke" (for circa 1990) classmate of mine asked if they could make engines any more efficient to use less oil. The engineers scoffed and said that the thermodynamics of engines was a "solved" issue, and nothing more could be done.
This was, of course, before widespread modern improvements in variable valve timing, direct injection, cylinder deactivation, higher compression ratios, and truly good turbos, etc, have made engines much more efficient since then. I knew they were full of it even at the time.