Workmanship

[Michael]

What's wrong with todays work ethics? The FAA has issued an emergency AD for brand new cessnas 172s and 182s for what appears to be shoddy workmanship. Don't these kids working on these planes have an idea of the consequences their actions would be? Don't they have supervisors to check? My opinion is the whole factory that was producing these planes needs to be fired. Period.
From the article :"According to the AD, Cessna found misrigged and misaligned control surfaces, a missing bolt on a flap push/pull rod, cables chafing fuel lines (resulting in damaged fuel lines), cables routed outside cotter pins, crossed cables, cables routed outside of pulleys, cables rubbing on bulkheads and center consoles, unpinned or improperly pinned barrels on control cables and a bent flap bell crank. These are new aircraft"

The full story is available Here.

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

There were similar ADs out on the new Cessnas when they first started the most recent production runs 6? yrs ago... I had hoped they had worked out the bugs but apparently not. The thinking at the time was this was a new workforce, had never assembled before. The old guys who could do it in their sleep had moved onto something else.
Goofups will happen; my question would be who is in charge of Q/A, why is there not a top to bottom inspection and test of everything if not at least the killer items. You know there has to be several places on the line where these things are easily visible.

 

[Ken Ibold]

What's wrong with todays work ethics? The FAA has issued an emergency AD for brand new cessnas 172s and 182s for what appears to be shoddy workmanship. Don't these kids working on these planes have an idea of the consequences their actions would be? Don't they have supervisors to check? My opinion is the whole factory that was producing these planes needs to be fired. Period.

A friend of mine used to own a flight school that ordered a steady stream of new airplanes in the heydays of the late 1970s. They would schedule all new Cessnas for one week of downtime immediately following delivery so they could fix all the stuff that was wrong when the airplane left the factory. They didn't have to do the same thing with Pipers.

 

[Tom-D]

It isn't a resent problem, it has been going on since the invention of the assembly line, and it does not stop with aircraft.

1958/9 I was a student at Teterboro School of Aeronautics and we found a whole row of rivets that looked odd, upon inspection they were not rivets, but a row of Cleco Fasteners that were never removed and the holes filled with rivets. but it had been painted, and flown for 2 years on the school rental line.

 

[fgcason]

Goofups will happen; my question would be who is in charge of Q/A, why is there not a top to bottom inspection and test of everything if not at least the killer items. You know there has to be several places on the line where these things are easily visible.

I'm not sure how Cessna does it but most assembly lines keep the people pinned in one place doing nearly the same exact thing over and over and over and over... That's all great for profit and efficiency but the human brain isn't a repetetive cookie cutter machine. Eventually the worker gets brain damage seeing the same thing every day and forgets to put a screw in or routes a cable wrong. They look to make sure the job is complete and correct and see what they expect based on the last 10,000 they did, not what is. The QA guy comes along to look at the same part he looked at 163 times a day for the last 5 years straight. He sees what he expects to see, not what is. Since the worker didn't get feedback on his screwup, so obviously it's done right and business as usual on the next piece that rolls past on the line. The next week someone notices and the worker and QA guy says nope, it's ok, that's how we always done it. End result, a defective pile of junk goes out the door and no one realizes it.

IMO: It's just an inherent problem with the whole concept of having a person put in auto repeat mode indefinitely. The software driving the hardware isn't programmed for it.

I'm actually surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often with far more catastrophic results.