Factory That Built Doomed Jet Had Many Problems
The McDonnell Douglas aircraft factory in Long Beach was being assailed for lax quality control and inferior workmanship when it built the Alaska Airlines MD-83 jetliner that recently crashed in the Pacific Ocean, according to documents and interviews.
In the early 1990s, government auditors found that McDonnell Douglas employees performed slipshod work, used out-of-date blueprints and improperly inspected parts--all as the financially troubled company was scrambling to keep planes rolling off the assembly line.
The Federal Aviation Administration cited repeated and chronic breakdowns in manufacturing procedures, although the agency said the deficiencies posed no threat to flight safety. At one point, company officials feared the FAA might take the highly unusual step of shutting down the factory.
“While it may be human nature to err once, repeated errors are stupid since it jeopardizes our future,” said one senior executive in a 1991 memo to employees who made the MD-80 series jetliners. “If we fail . . . we can’t deliver airplanes, and they don’t need any of us.”
The reliability of the MD-80 series is comparable to that of its key competitors, The Times found in analyzing reports of service difficulties experienced by the nation’s largest airlines.
There also is no indication that poor quality control in the manufacturing process played a role in the crash that killed 88 people on Jan. 31. Federal safety officials are focusing on the plane’s tail, where a horizontal stabilizer appears to have malfunctioned.
But the problems at the Long Beach plant--which was facing stiff competition and defense cutbacks in the early ‘90s--illustrate how economic pressures potentially can compromise the quality of aircraft construction and threaten the very existence of a respected manufacturer.
Former Douglas executives say overall quality control was sound. Bill Skibbe, former vice president in charge of the MD-80 program, said the company made improvements in response to the FAA audit.
Still, he acknowledged that flaws uncovered by federal regulators in 1991 ultimately could be tied to the crash of the Alaska Airlines plane, which was delivered the following year.
“There’s always the possibility that something [in the manufacturing process] was missed,” Skibbe said. “For me to dismiss that is foolhardy.”
The MD-80 series debuted in 1980 and production was discontinued two months ago. It has a track record as one of the safest airplanes, according to FAA data. But mechanical troubles with its horizontal stabilizer have prompted the FAA to order mandatory inspections five times since 1988.
After the crash, investigators found stripping on the jackscrew of Flight 261’s stabilizer, which changes the up and down pitch of the airplane. Inspections later ordered by the FAA found that at least 22 other passenger jets had problems such as excessive wear or inadequate lubrication on their jackscrews. Alaska decided to replace jackscrews on six planes.
After McDonnell Douglas delivered the ill-fated MD-83 to Alaska Airlines in May 1992, that aircraft had no abnormal history of mechanical problems, according to the airline.
“We don’t deliver an airplane unless it meets all of our quality standards,” said John Thom, a spokesman for Boeing Co., which acquired McDonnell Douglas in 1997. “We have processes in place and there are checks along the way. It is in our own self-interest to produce quality and safe airplanes.”
The Times analyzed “service difficulty reports” that airlines are required to file with the FAA when planes experience problems ranging from aborted takeoffs and unscheduled landings to worn parts and burned-out lightbulbs. The study covered MD-80s and three popular Boeing models--the 737, 757 and 767--built from 1980 through 1994.
Comparing the frequency of problems on each plane during its first five years of operation, the study found only slight differences among the four models. Overall, the fleets averaged roughly one incident involving service problems every year and a half per aircraft.
In its lifetime, the MD-80 program at Long Beach delivered 1,167 airplanes to domestic and foreign carriers.
Five days a week and often on Saturdays, workers in massive hangars swarmed over the aircraft frames with rivet guns, installing noses, tails, wings, engines and up to 3 million component parts.
Every week, like clockwork, shiny new airplanes were wheeled outside the factory, and customers flew them away.
To assemble the complex flying machines, McDonnell Douglas devised an equally complex supply chain, drawing parts from far-flung corners of the globe. Nose sections came from Chengdu, China. Cabin doors came from Spain. The stabilizers came from Shanghai and Tulsa, Okla. The jackscrew assembly came from now-defunct Peacock Aerospace of Norwalk.
Those parts and more flowed to Building 80, the sprawling hangar known as the Bird Farm.
Firm Had Severe Financial Woes
But Douglas Aircraft Co., the Long Beach-based subsidiary of McDonnell Douglas, was struggling to overcome years of severe financial problems.
The company--then one of the largest in California, with 53,000 employees--posted a $222-million operating loss for 1989, citing training costs and parts shortages. Within two years the factory was straining to fill orders for its MD-80 and MD-90 jetliners, even as it ramped up to produce two new airplanes: the commercial MD-11 and the military C-17 cargo plane.
By 1991, the Pentagon’s top auditor was suggesting the entire firm would have to cease operations because it was close to bankruptcy. Four years later, the company counted fewer than 13,000 workers in its hangars.
“There was a lot of confusion, and the quality was suffering,” recalled Timothy Dean, a 20-year Douglas factory mechanic, now an electrical systems tester at Boeing. “Things were not as smooth as they could be, and we had to overcome a lot of constraints.”
Supervisors and workers routinely violated the company’s and the FAA’s quality standards, documents and interviews show.
In January 1991, shortly before a team of federal auditors visited the plant, Douglas supervisors urged employees to improve their work. One memo to MD-80 workers warned that “consequences for failure are heavy fines, and in the extreme, loss of our production certificate.”
But they were unable to correct the shortcomings in time.
The FAA audit several weeks later found serious quality-control problems up and down the production line.
Auditors said the company displayed a “lack of discipline” in assembling and inspecting its airplanes, according to a company memo outlining the FAA’s criticisms.
Factory workers, the audit found, were using out-of-date blueprints, performing unauthorized repairs on aircraft and failing to track parts on the factory floor. Employees also were signing off on work that was partially complete, removing parts from production airplanes without authorization, and using unapproved tools.
Before the airplanes were delivered, mechanics routinely reworked the planes to make them comply with FAA standards.
During the same period in 1991, FAA auditors found deficiencies in a Shanghai plant that produced some MD-80s and MD-90s and certain components, including horizontal stabilizers for MD-80s built in Long Beach. Boeing officials said recently that the stabilizer on the Alaska Airlines plane that crashed last month was built in Tulsa.
Even McDonnell Douglas’ own employees and its airline customers were raising concerns about the quality of the MD-80s, MD-90s and MD-11s rolling out of the Long Beach factory, the company noted in an April 1991 memo.
Skibbe, who was formerly in charge of the MD-80 program, told his workers the FAA had uncovered some “noncompliance to our procedures and processes,” and he called the violations “unacceptable.”
The FAA findings resonated with those who were monitoring Douglas’ military aircraft production.
Air Force Col. Ken Tollefson, who oversaw the development of the C-17 cargo plane, said that Douglas’ quality control system was the same for military and commercial aircraft programs--and that both sides of the plant had major deficiencies.
“There was great pressure to figure out a way to make it fit or find the most expedient solution to keep the line moving despite parts shortages and quality issues,” Tollefson said in an interview.
Douglas inspectors, he said, were forced “to pass things along, to avoid fixing the problems. . . . The company had extreme cash-flow problems.”
Boeing spokesman Thom said, “If supervisors behaved that way, I’m hopeful the company found them out and dismissed them. Our company does not tolerate anyone who does not abide by the rules, who does not put quality first.
“We’ve come a long way from those days,” he said, adding that the Long Beach factory passed two FAA audits last year.
Union Protested Procedures
To ensure aircraft quality, the FAA relies not only on its own inspectors but also on self-policing by the manufacturers. Company inspectors check the parts after they are assembled; then the FAA designates company employees to conduct random quality checks throughout the factory.
In the early 1990s, the union representing factory workers accused Douglas of trying to cut back on quality-control work by hourly inspectors who check assembled parts.
Eddie Ball, a former Douglas mechanical inspector with nearly 30 years of aerospace experience, said employees who tried to adhere to quality standards often were overruled by management and sometimes threatened with retaliation.
Ball inspected the tail sections of MD-80 jetliners and the wings on the C-17 military transport and said he was pressured to approve some work that he was unqualified to approve. He formally complained to the company.
“I was shocked . . . because I knew the procedures,” recalled Ball, who says he was laid off in 1993 and now is working as a security guard. “I grew up in an industry where quality was paramount. But by 1990 there was a cultural shift, and quality took a back seat.”
Joe Shapely, then general manager for Douglas’ quality systems, said his inspectors sometimes approved work that didn’t meet FAA specifications. But he said the violations were not flight-safety issues.
“None of the deficiencies were earth-shattering stuff,” Shapley said. “There were instances where people would stamp something that didn’t meet specs, but that doesn’t mean [the plane] was unsafe. Was it fit for use? That’s how I looked at it.”
Despite intense company pressure to meet production schedules, Shapely said, Douglas turned out high-quality airplanes. “I never had an issue with safety,” he said. “I fly MD-80s and MD-90s all the time” as a passenger.
Quality issues also plagued Douglas’ C-17 program, which was housed in an adjacent hangar at the Long Beach facility.
Defense Department and congressional investigators discovered serious defects in the C-17 wings. In one test, the wings buckled about 20% short of their required strength. Later, investigators found that some rivets were improperly installed in the first four aircraft turned out by the factory.
Federal investigators also found that quality-control documents may have been altered or destroyed to cover up the deficiencies, according to congressional records.
By 1991, McDonnell Douglas faced investigations involving cost-mischarging, product substitutions, payments for uncompleted work and poor-quality work.
Two House subcommittees conducted lengthy hearings in 1991 and 1992 on the troubled C-17 program, turning the huge military cargo plane into a symbol for defense company waste and mismanagement. The problems later were rectified, and the program continues today.
Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), then chairman of the House subcommittee on legislation and national security that investigated the C-17, said “it was hard to imagine how a program could evolve into such a deplorable state.”
Tollefson, the Air Force colonel who saw it close up for five years, observed: “We were sitting there watching what we knew was the collapse of an aerospace giant. They were overwhelmed.”
The company limped along until 1997, when it was swallowed by its major competitor, Boeing.
Times Director of Computer Analysis Richard O’Reilly, data analyst Sandra Poindexter and researchers Lynn Marshall in Seattle and Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this article.
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Quality Issues Beset Aircraft Plant
The Alaska Airlines MD-80 series jetliner that plunged into the Pacific on Jan. 31 was built by McDonnell Douglas using some parts from far-flung corners of the world. The maker’s Long Beach plant was criticized for poor quality control by federal auditors in the early 1990s. Company officials defended the quality of workmanship and their air-safety record.
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Sources: FAA, Alaska Airlines, Boeing officials and documents
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Quality Control Notice
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McDonnell Douglas executives warned MD-80 series mechanics in 1991 to improve their
workmanship as the Federal Aviation Administration conducted an audit of the company’s Long Beach factory.
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Reliability of Popular Jetliners
The MD-8C and three other jetliners used by the 10 largest airlines experiences problems at roughly the same rate, a Times analysis found. Fifty-eight percent of the problems had no impact on flight operations, but 23% forced unscheduled landings. This chart shows average intervals between service difficulties.
Sources: Federal Aviation Administration data compiled by Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis.
Note: Study was based on first five years of operation of planes built between 1980 and 1994.
