CHICAGO—Quality standdowns that began within Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) are also extending across the OEM’s Global Services (BGS) segment, a senior company executive said.
“Whether that’s in our MRO facilities or in our digital software development teams, we’re doing it across the entire enterprise,” Dan Abraham, BGS VP-Commercial Sales and Marketing, told Aviation Week Network’s MRO Americas conference attendees here. “We’re stopping, we’re pausing, we’re asking questions, we’re meeting with employees, we’re looking at what we’re doing every day and how we do it, so we can get better.”
The sessions come as the OEM faces scrutiny from the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines 737-9 door plug blowout. Focused on quality and improvement, the first of Boeing’s series of work pauses was held Jan. 25 at the 737 MAX production facilities in Renton, Seattle, and Moses Lake, Washington.
Boeing’s enhanced surveillance on its own facilities joins an FAA review of all three 737 MAX production lines as well as fuselage supplier Spirit AeroSystems’ work in Wichita. A six-week audit by the agency found “noncompliance issues in Boeing’s manufacturing process control, parts handling and storage, and product control,” FAA said in early March.
Describing an “enterprise refocus on safety” Abraham noted, “whether it’s the Alaska incident or any other incident, we’ve been reminded recently that it’s a continual process and effort. It’s something that we have to remain committed to every day, and when you have something like that Alaska incident, it just reminds all of us that we can never stop.”
BCA has described the standdown sessions as including “hands-on learning, reflection, and collaboration to identify where quality and compliance can be improved and create actionable plans that will be tracked to closure."
