NewsWhats happening
Agency contends plane maker knowingly certified some 130 Boeing 737 jets despite installing suspect parts.
The proposed penalty doesn’t apply to any 737 MAX models, the latest version of Boeing’s best-selling workhorse jets that has been grounded for months. PHOTO: GARY HE/REUTERS
Boeing Co. was hit with a proposed $3.9 million penalty by U.S. air-safety officials who said the company installed defective parts inside the wings of around 130 737 NG aircraft and then knowingly vouched they met all federal safety requirements.
As part of Friday’s action by the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency indicated that the parts—designed to guide movable panels called slats on the front of wings—were used despite being identified as potentially substandard by a Boeing subcontractor in the fall of 2018. Over the next eight months, according to the FAA, the Chicago plane maker certified the affected jets as meeting all airworthiness requirements.
Excerpt from WSJ
Read the full article
Partnered up with Airbus, an innovative London design firm is fine-tuning app-controlled seats you can adjust on your smartphone
Four years ago, the London-based industrial designer Benjamin Hubert quietly closed down his namesake practice. “I kept getting approached to come up with yet another chair,” says Hubert, 35. “And I very much wanted to move beyond that.” He soon re-emerged as the founder and creative director of the strategic agency Layer Design.
The pivot paid off. Today, Layer is a firm of around 30 international creatives with expertise across industrial, experiential and digital design. The studio’s clients range from Vitra and Braun to Nike and Google.
Hubert explains that Layer’s work, which is both material focused and tech confident, sits at the intersection of two ends of the design spectrum: “On one end you have highly crafted, lifestyle-driven product and accessories, while on the other you have super-strategic industrial design or branding work. We bring together the softness of the former and the rigor of the latter.”
Excerpt from WSJ
Muilenburg won’t receive bonus compensation this year or stock grants until 737 MAX is flying again
Boeing Co. ’s newly installed chairman backed embattled Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg on Tuesday, while acknowledging a series of engineering missteps that led to two deadly crashes of the 737 MAX.
Boeing Chairman Dave Calhoun said Mr. Muilenburg wouldn’t receive bonus pay this year and wouldn’t receive stock grants until the grounded jet fully returns to service, a process that may unfold globally through all of next year. Mr. Calhoun said it was the CEO’s idea to reduce his compensation.
Excerpt from WSJ
European plane maker’s move comes as U.S. rival grapples with trade tensions, MAX grounding
Airbus SE EADSY 0.60% plans to boost jetliner production in China, bolstering its position in what is set to be the world’s biggest aviation market and piling further pressure on Boeing Co. as the U.S. company contends with trade tensions and the grounding of its 737 MAX plane.
The France-based plane maker is gaining market share while Boeing grapples with the global grounding of the MAX after two fatal crashes and a dearth of orders for larger aircraft. The U.S. aerospace giant’s efforts in China are also being hindered by the continuing trade dispute between the two countries.
Airbus said Wednesday that it would expand its A330 wide-body completion center in Tianjin to be able to handle its bigger A350 model. The company is also lifting local production of its A320neo, its 737 MAX competitor.
The agreement with the Chinese government was outlined during a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing.
The move comes weeks after Boeing was forced to cut back production rates for its 787 Dreamliner, citing U.S. trade tensions with China and a lack of demand from Chinese carriers. Boeing’s last China order was in November 2017.
Airbus has meanwhile been leveraging the fallout by boosting its production in China and winning orders for its own models. Its last order from China was as recent as March.
Excerpt from WSJ
Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC (RR.LN) on Thursday warned of a further earnings and cash-flow hit on the back of issues in its troubled Trent 1000 engines, as the company expects to book a charge of 1.4 billion pounds ($1.80 billion).
The British aircraft-engine maker said it now expects full-year operating profit and free cash-flow to be toward the lower end of its guidance ranges as a result of higher costs in fixing Trent 1000 engines used on Boeing Co. ’s (BA) 787 Dreamliner planes.
The company estimates in-service cash costs over the Trent 1000 issues will amount to GBP2.4 billion across the 2017-23 period. This includes GBP1.6 billion previously expected, a fresh GBP400 million hit and a further GBP400 million in costs previously included within the company’s normal program contingency, Rolls-Royce said.
Excerpt from WSJ
OPINION Section
Human beings and their machines find it hard to understand each other.
When congressional hearings were inaugurated, they were supposed to be information-seeking exercises. Not much information seeking went on at last week’s hearings on the Boeing 737 MAX. Senators gave speeches deploring plane crashes. Even when they asked questions, they seldom waited for answers. And if any legislation results, it will surely be written by staffers based on agendas long ago hashed out.
All in all, a display of institutional decadence not unlike the one that seems to have afflicted Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration in their implementation and approval of MCAS, the automatic software system blamed for two terrible crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
To the question of how such a system could find its way into a plane, the answer seems to be “by mistake.”
Excerpt from WSJ
Inflows of cash from the once-troublesome 787 Dreamliner are now sustaining the production of the grounded 737 MAX
In a twist of fate, Boeing’s BA +1.23% financial health through the 737 MAX crisis will rely heavily on what was once another problem child: the 787 Dreamliner.
During the release of its third-quarter results late in October, Boeing said the 787’s production rate would be lowered from 14 to 12 a month in late 2020 as a result of weakening demand for large jets. The model is now a key source of cash for Boeing, especially while the smaller MAX remains grounded by regulators world-wide.
Boeing spends roughly $3 billion a quarter to face debt payments and the dividend that has helped retain investors through the crisis. But producing MAX jets without selling them is creating a quarterly cash drain that seems to amount to between $4 billion and $7 billion, forcing the company to issue debt.
Excerpt from WSJ
A panel of international air-safety regulators is finishing a report expected to criticize the initial U.S. approval process for Boeing Co. BA -0.24% ’s 737 MAX jets, according to people briefed on the conclusions, while urging a wide-ranging reassessment of how complex automated systems should be certified on future airliners.
As part of roughly a dozen findings, these government and industry officials said, the task force is poised to call out the Federal Aviation Administration for what it describes as a lack of clarity and transparency in the way the FAA delegated authority to the plane maker to assess the safety of certain flight-control features. The upshot, according to some of these people, is that essential design changes didn’t receive adequate FAA attention.
The report, these officials said, also is expected to fault the agency for what it describes as inadequate data sharing with foreign authorities during its original certification of the MAX two years ago, along with relying on mistaken industrywide assumptions about how average pilots would react to certain flight-control emergencies. FAA officials have said they are devising new pilot-reaction guidelines after two fatal crashes.
Excerpt from WSJ