​OMG, I Was Right!, I Was Snubbed!, And the Daily Report Quote 

​OMG, I Was Right!

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​OMG! It turns out I was right about the Deliverance thing! I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Even though it was a pure guess that Deliverance was set close to Charleston, South Carolina, and Banjo picking hillbillies might be working at the 787 plants there, it turns out I was about as close as you could get. From Wikipedia: 

Deliverance was shot in the Tallulah Gorge in Tallulah Falls, Georgia and on the Chattooga River, dividing the states of Georgia and South Carolina. Additional scenes were shot as well in Clemson, South Carolina. Since the film's release, more than thirty people have drowned attempting to recreate the canoe trip along the section of the river where the film was shot.

It turns out it was shot only 250 miles from Charleston! Perhaps if the union ran ads with banjo picking inbred albinos from Deliverance building 787s, they could have prevented the significant work that went there from being sited there by sheer public pressure. Such advertising would be about as fair as those 2004 Swift Boat ads, and should therefore have been allowed on TV. I guess the union just needs to be thankful that they clutched 787 final assembly and delivery out of Charleston's hands courtesy of moi (per Boeing).

O.K., so I was right about a somewhat tasteless comment. Nothing of great import there. In fact, there probably isn't a great amount of pickups with shotguns hanging in the back windows with confederate flag bumper stickers in the 787 Charleston plant parking lots. Probably not even any hillbillies working there. Or inbred albinos. Or people that can pick banjo that well. 

Come to think of it, I worked with a guy on the military side of Boeing up here in Seattle that looked and acted remarkably like Jethro from "Beverly Hillbillies;" I think he even used a rope instead of a belt to hold up his jeans. He was a nice guy, and a friend. Not sure what happened to him. I bumped into him years later at a fair near here. He was obviously from the South with his drawl, but I never remember asking him where he was from, specifically. 

Just because someone that reminded me of Jethro worked at Boeing up here doesn't necessarily mean any such people like that work on the 787 in Charleston. I hate to stereotype people, and I apologize if I offended anyone. I think I was just voicing my displeasure with Boeing's outsourcing decisions by bringing that unfortunate but not probably true analogy up. As Boeing blames me for 787 final assembly being here in Washington State, I guess we got as much of the 787 work in Washington that Boeing was unwilling to give us.

There are still deep stereotypes of Southern people in these Northern climes. Inbreeding is a frequent stereotype I hear. So is the Deliverance banjo boy as a model of people in the South. I'm sorry I let myself use those stereotypes.

People in the South are probably not any more racist than us in the North this far after the Civil War. They probably also don't fly the Confederate flag any more than anybody else in the country, as that is equally tasteless and racist everywhere in the country. That Senator that kept a noose and a Civil War flag in his office was likely an aberration (I don't think he was even born in the South). Southern people don't vote Republican because they are one issue bible thumping voters or are afraid Democrats will take their guns away or because they are racist. They likely just do so for the only reason sensible people vote Republican--they earn six figures and Republicans keep their taxes lower than Democrats would, and they believe people should stand or fall by themselves in life, with no help from the government. It must be a prosperous place, indeed, where all races of people get along just as well as they do here. At least that's as optimistic of a view of the South as I can muster. Maybe its not entirely accurate, but certainly more accurate than the Deliverance thing.

So, even though I was geographically correct, that doesn't mean I was culturally correct. So, Southerners, please accept my apologies. I know there are good people down there, as well as bad, just like here. You don't have to look farther than this website to see we have our problems up here with corruption. I hope that is not an issue down there, and all inspectors down there are actually allowed to do their critical jobs and are appreciated for doing so. That would be a refreshing thing, indeed, to see for once.

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​I Was Snubbed!

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​I was snubbed for the big rollout event in Everett on Sunday for the 787. I patiently waited for the limo to pick me up and take me there so I could sit next to Gary Locke.

A Limo never came. It seems Boeing has not forgiven me for making them site the 787 in Everett against their wishes (per Boeing's statements to me). As I (per Boeing) had more to do with siting the 787 in Washington than Gary Locke, and so saved the entire future of final assembly of "Boeing" airplanes that Gary Locke takes credit for wrongly, I should have at least had his seat in the front row. Oh well, I just watched it on TV instead. Mad I was snubbed? No. I don't hold grudges like Boeing apparently does.

I was pleasantly surprised by some things in the ceremony. There was no talk of quality I heard of (my TV blacked out for a few minutes when my microwave and air conditioner were turned on at the same time and flipped the breaker, which also powers the TV), and safety was also not mentioned, except for once, when the word "safer" was used. The light and nonexistent use of those terms during what was in effect just a huge sales pitch for the 787 made it much less hypocritical to me than it would have been otherwise.

I did find Michael Bair having different customer, government, and manufacturing site groups stand up for recognition offensive. The groups were recognized in order of importance to Boeing, with customers asked to stand first. Who was asked to stand up last after all the partner representatives stood up that Boeing outsourced most of the work to? You guessed it--actual Boeing employees. Truly getting the recognition Boeing has always seemed to treat them with--dead last in order of importance.

Also I didn't like Bair's padding the numbers of Boeing employees who work on the program. It seemed they were at least doubled by the family members they brought (perhaps just to make the Boeing employees seem more numerous to the cameras?).

Also, I suppose the vast majority who stood up did not currently work on the program, or will not within the next year or so. The vast majority likely were engineers, who will be kept on the payroll not one day longer than Boeing has to keep them, no doubt.

Once 787 R&D is over, they're history, literally, if they don't find a place on a new program at Boeing. It would have been much more genuine if Bair had recognized 787 temp employees (engineers) separately from the actual production employees. But apparently he didn't want to recognize the mechanics and inspectors separately. Could it have been because their numbers were so few?

I hope the sound at the event wasn't as bad as it was on the TV broadcast. That truly would have been embarrassing for Boeing.

Apparently Boeing didn't want the South Carolina employee's faces on camera, so they gave them cards to hold over their heads to make a huge poster. I've posted before about my lack of knowledge of where in the South that boy from "Deliverance" with the banjo was from, but my suspicions may have been correct, judging by most of them hiding behind poster boards. They did pretty well, considering. You could almost make out what the individual poster boards were meant to say when they were flipped.

Also done well at the event was the map of the globe that moved to each partner site. Fittingly, the globe rotated first straight from Everett to where the 787 is really mostly built--Japan. I truly appreciated Boeing's difficulties in getting the partners up to speed when I saw the Japanese representatives of the three Japanese sites try to speak English. You'd think they would be the ones that spoke the best English at their sites. If so, that's scary. Obviously they couldn't read English very well if they couldn't speak it. I hope whomever translates the Boeing production data to Japanese and back doesn't screw up at all.

It was interesting seeing who Boeing placed in the front row. I noticed Seattle's Mayor there. I wonder why Boeing was thusly pandering to him?

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Today's Daily Report Quote

This quote is also from my addendum (supplement) to my first report. (Continued from previous day's quote):
 
Before my banishment to the office (for the "crime" of inspecting, with the approval of the PSD QA director of the time, now the leader of the 787 quality department), I attempted to inspect the tubing installation jobs I stamped in on to the PI clearance requirements--not with "calibrated eyeballs," but with actual "tools" of sufficient accuracy to perform the clearance inspections with the same high accuracy every time.

Most of our tubing clearances are minimums of .XX", .XX", and .XX" clearance to adjacent tubing and structures. We have a tool, (tool number), available at PSD, which is a tool designed just for tubing clearances, except, I believe, that I was the only inspector to use it for that purpose.

Most, if not all inspectors, only used it to do the in-process inspection on the 747 strut fuel tube alignment prior to Wiggins fitting installation, for which purpose it is perfect, and is what it was probably actually designed for, not just tube to tube or tube to structure clearance checks.

It has only the three dimensions you need when doing these fuel tube alignment checks, .XXX", .XXX", and .XXX", and no extraneous dimensions to the task on it. So I used that tool for the common .XX" minimum tube to anything clearance checks.

But no tool existed at PSD for the .XX" and .XX" clearance checks (I found out just a few days ago, in doing research for this, that a tool, (tool number), exists that would work for .XX" clearance checks, but, to my knowledge, it is not available in the PSD tool room--but I could find no tool designed to check .XX" tube clearances in the...ST Tool Catalog).

​Anyway, that did not stop me, the "thorough" inspector. I simply did the obvious, and got long .XXXX" and .XXXX" bolts and did the clearance checks with them. That even gave shop a half a thousandth pad, as if that would matter. I was no fool, and did not check all clearances between tubes with these "tools." I only used them when my "calibrated eyeballs" detected the need to check the clearances with them.

​I thought this was the way the clearance inspections should be done, as opposed to the way I described above that other inspectors did it (except for probably (name), who also writes NCRs on clearance problems) using only their calibrated eyeballs, and no "tools" to check the "calibration" of them.