I tried to find other details, but had no luck.

Was the gun that was used registered to him?

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Louisiana to SC would be quite a long drive. Was it his own truck that he was in, or a rental?

Or did he fly. And more telling, did he fly on a Boeing? (somewhat poor attempt at humor)

BBC says “his truck.”

Can you rent guns after arriving at the airport in SC? Do you pre-pay for the bullets or just return the gun and pay for the ones you used?

my parents do louisiana to sc regularly. it's not that long. especially if you don't believe the planes available to fly commercially are particularly safe.

That's a great business plan idea. Gun rental vending machine like the cell phone charger battery thing - where you can return it later.

Just have to have a ton of click-through waivers about how the gun is used after it pops out of the vending machine.

Trademarked name ideas?

iStrappin' (tm)
uCarry (tm)
QuickFreedom (tm)

This thread got off track and then died. Yesterday Boeing and federal investigators concluded that they can't determine who worked on the door.

Give me and my Director of Quality unrestricted access to Boeings systems and we could figure it out in a couple of hours. These people are lying idiots. The news is also reporting that Boeing has big problems and no one can figure out what to do. Give us a week.

I'm not the only one, either. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of industry professionals that could figure out what went wrong and start to fix it.

Boeing is a government contractor, just like us. There are rules that you can not break, and safe guard after safe guard, record after record that has to be completed and retained. The fact that the floor monitoring video is overwritten after 30 days is standard practice. It isn't for this type of investigation. It is there for safety and security - when someone gets hurt, something is dropped, or something is missing/stolen. It is not there to document processes. The MRP system does that. The QMS records the inspections. The direct labor tracking system tells you who was working. The tool crib log tells you who had the equipment. There are a lot more records, all electronic in this day and age, and all retained for years, if not forever.

The only way there are no records is if a group of employees when in on their own time, violated all the rules, and did the work off the books, not getting paid. Even then there would be access logs and tool logs.

I call BS on the entire story. Given the opportunity, I would do the investigation on contingency - I only get paid if I figure it out.

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"...the street finds its own uses for things"

I'm in full agreement AJ. I too am a govt contractor, we are hounded with annual training about required record keeping. If Boeing "can't find" the records, it's because they don't want to find it or someone committed a federal crime by destroying required records. Regardless, as you state, there are other avenues to figure out who worked on the door plug that day.

The coverup is always worse than the crime. This could seriously damage Boeing. Airbus must be giddy and if smart quadruple-checking all their maintenance procedures and record keeping protocols.

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

All day this^

When I was working in the aerospace industry, I couldn't even have my own measuring tools if they weren't logged and calibrated with the company. The company had online storage and everything was scanned and saved. Now, everything is paperless and to do anything and report, the individual has to log into the system.

Even if they truly couldn't find the paperwork, they would know exactly where that broke down and who was responsible.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

The work on the door was done at Spirit, wonder what else they work on and what their overall record keeping looks like, wow, just wow.

Spirit is a government contractor, just like Boeing, so my statements about Boeing stands for Spirit.

From that regard, that makes Spirit a sub-contractor of Boeing, and that puts Boeing on the hook to audit their QMS prior to issuing work, and on a recurring basis, depending on some criteria. That means that not only is the government inspectors on the hook for Spirit's performance, so is Boeing.

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"...the street finds its own uses for things"

Just to be clear though government contractors on other work, this work was likely not under government contract. There could be various FAA regulatipn, though.

Though some practices are shared between Federal and commercial arms at big defense contractors, there are also big differences.

One thing that is the same throughout all of these processes, whether it is government or commercial is documentation, documentation, documentation.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

You have a point, but in this industry there are too many overlaps to have 2 separate systems for quality control. Unless the operation is under 2 different roofs, with 2 different management teams, and material sourcing coming from different vendors, most if not all contractors will follow the defense spec for all work. It just makes it easier to control, and the added cost is worth the potential quality concerns.

If Boeing was doing what you are suggesting, then that was the problem, plain (plane) and simple.

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"...the street finds its own uses for things"

Having worked more in commercial (with some defense) but now in defense (with some commercial), both companies have set up their systems with the most rigorous standards required and used that for everything. As Automatic states, trying to run two different systems is not worth the potential issues and is more cost effective.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

I my company made the office chair you are sitting in, I can tell you when and where it was made.

Absolutely true. And then cloud backup and offsite backup. A-jack is correct. I 100% smell BS.

Yes and no. Parts of Federal system, by contract law, have to have a hard firewall from the commercial side. People on the commercial side cannot view it. There are different management structures. So differences emerge. Also some parts of the Federal stuff is more expensive, and can be deemed unnecessary for the commercial side.

I did an internship at Boeing Commercial back before they bought McDonald. They documented everything along with all sorts of other QA processes. I smell BS as well, but it is possible that they don't have it because they have just become so lax. Unlike the government programs it doesn't sound like they had their feet to the fire to maintain QA. The FAA gave up a long time ago.

This is not true in my [limited] experience. One QMS, one management team, one machine shop, etc., with everything flowing side by side through the processes. Sure, some of the drawings may be classified to various extents, but those are not out in the open for the general workers even if they are cleared. Those are "need to see" only, normally just a few engineers, inspectors, and maybe a planner or buyer. The work instructions are at the most NOFORN, and we have facility wide NOFORN controls. Others do as well.

The only real difference is material certification, and even that is normally running in the same system at the highest controls. The difference is the material itself. The certification process stays the same.

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"...the street finds its own uses for things"

It varies quite a bit, and depends on the project. But I've worked on somet projects (from the gov side) where the company had a nearly identical product on the commercial side. On that commercial side a new feature rolled out that the government wanted, so we asked for it. And got told, "No, we had to fork the software for the Federal contract, the source code is no longer shared, is in a different system, and we are not allowed talk to the people on the commercial side without requesting permission and documenting the conversation. Lots of reasons for that. One of which is companies that work both Federal and commercial sides are very, very careful that the government does not get any rights to work done on the commercial side without paying dearly for it.

I not sure AJ is saying there may not be two systems, but in reality, they are run the same, or very, very closely. I know we have NOFORN computers on sight, but the systems within those computers are the same, it's just controlled tighter, for security reasons. They systems, whether it be commercial or government are the same, potentially run separately.

When I was on a shop floor, there were protocols for who could look at certain information, and it was contained on different servers, but it still ran through the same process.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

fyi, Boeing has become almost unrecognizable after the merger. After you read this, none of the current Boeing news will surprise you. Incompetence, stupidity, corruption, and short-sightedness at all of the highest levels. It's all about the f*cking stock price and worrying only about the next quarter, and not focusing on the product and on the long-term future of the company. If aviation interests you, highly recommended, it's one a hell of read ...

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Advanced Aero TopTube Storage for Road, Gravel, & Tri...ZeroSlip & Direct-mount, made in the USA.
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So during the nominal build of course ok this stuff would be recorded and there would be all the records being discussed in this thread.

But the reason they don’t have the records, is the same reason the bolts were not installed.

So as everyone knows spirit builds most of the fuselage. Their quality has been so bad they have spirit employees in Renton to do rework when Boeing identifies issues with Spirit work. This is due to contract reasons and possibly some intellectual property reasons.

So Boeing found an issue with spirit’s work and reported it. This is good, spirit’s quality system missed it and Boeing’s quality system identified it. But this where it breaks down. Boeing’s quality system and checks are all driven by Boeing system, but spirit employees don’t have access to their system. So this issue is tracked with a different system. Spirit “fixed” the problem, but Boeing QA inspected it and saw they didn’t and just lied. So spirit then damaged the door seal and says work completed, but the door seal is damaged.

So now the big fuck up and why this is not in the record system. Since this wasn’t a Boeing issue, it still wasn’t in the Boeing quality system. To replace the seal, the door needed to be opened. Now opening and closing a door does not normally require any quality inspection, just think many of the doors are opened and closed frequently and are not inspected each and every time during build. Think about it, airlines don’t have quality inspections every time you close a cabin door. But this door has the bolts. So there was no work order that drove the correct removal and installation of the bolts and the quality inspection, since they were just opening and closing a door. So spirit replaced the seal and I bet that is all recorded and inspected. But they didn’t treat closing the door like rework, which would have resulted in all the paper work and the bolts being installed, because they were just closing a door, which normally doesn’t require that work.


So if Boeing was doing all the work, it would have gone into the right system where this would have all been part of one job that would have been all recorded. But because they couldn’t use the Boeing system to drive the work, they didn’t use it for the Boeing portion, so it wasn’t recorded.

The problem here is Boeing should have fixed it so spirit work going on at Boeing should have been using the Boeing system, so that everyone is on the same page. But instead of fixing the process they had to create a make shift system that failed. When there was enough work to have a bunch of spirit employees stationed there, they should have all been using the same system.

Something that hasn't been mentioned is Spirit also does work for Airbus, how does Airbus quality control compare to Boeings? To me this is looking more like a coverup by Spirit, there's no way they don't know who installed that plug.