LEAKS, DRIPS AND BODGED BOEINGS

Fears about aircraft safety reveal the fault-line between Eastern culture

Tokyo JUST ABOUT everyone who flies recog- nises and trusts the name Boeing, and no one goes Boeing with more enthusiasm than the businesslike Japanese. Few travellers in fact arrive or depart these energetic sceptered isles except in one of the American firm's huge four-engined Jumbo jets. Boeing is, in a manner of speaking, Japan's main link with the out- side world, which owes the Japanese banks so much. And other offshore islands' too, come to think of it.

Conversely, Boeing owes a great deal to Japan. The Seattle, Washington, company was just another struggling aircraft manu- facturer until 1943, when its factories started delivering the first Boeing B-29 bombers, built with the proclaimed mission of bombing Japan back into the Stone Age, or surrender, and thus ending the second world war. 'B-San' as the Japanese respect- fully called their uncompromising visitors, the B-29s were the world's first successful all-pressurised aircraft, flying at the high altitudes where the air is thin, the weather calm, and fuel therefore goes a lot further — the prototype of all our modern airlin- ers, in fact.

In a campaign barely six months long, the B-29 punctured Japanese confidence that they could not be attacked from the air, incinerated their wooden-built cities, the capital included, and finally delivered `We're being cared for in the community.' the atom bombs which levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, as now, just about every aircraft to be seen in smoky Japanese skies was a Boeing. On the ground, the survivors noted the odd, euphonious name.

The Americans' war won, the B-29 was fitted with a bar in a new pot-bellied fuselage and became the Boeing Strato- cruiser, which led on to the 707, the plane that launched the jet set, and then the mighty 747, the strongest and therefore the safest passenger aircraft ever built. The Boeing 747 is the first passenger transport since the immortal Douglas DC3 to estab- lish something like a world monopoly of its type, the culmination of the adventure that began with the Wright Brothers and laun- ched what was forecast to be the century of American technological mastery — and, as it happens, the Boeing is now the last product made in the United States that the ordinary moderately-heeled person, East- ern or Western is likely to encounter in an average nice day. If you don't trust Boeing, in a word, stay home.

Safety is not a matter most airlines choose to dwell on, preferring to base their sales appeal on the width of their seats or the looks of their hostesses. This is prob- ably for the best; the lay passenger is not equipped to judge rival claims about en- gineering, and commercial flying remains the safest mode of getting about. There is no call for cancelled bookings or white knuckles in the window seat, but just the same something odd seems to be going on in the normally secretive world of the big jets, and, as it concerns rival philosophies of how to make things it has surfaced, appropriately, in Japan, these days by far Boeing's biggest foreign customer.

After the memorable visits of B-San it was not until the 1960s that Japan managed to scrape up the dollars for its first, very own Boeing. But these were the years of astonishing economic growth, and when the 747 appeared in 1970 Japan Air Lines was one of its first buyers. JAL now has 63 Boeing 747s, the world's largest fleet, a dozen more on order, and plans to have 100 of them by the end of the century. The prosperous Japanese airline is, in fact, the biggest foreign corporate customer of American industry, and Seattle has re- ciprocated graciously with 'Japan Air Lines Day', with the streets decked with inter- twined Stars and Stripes and Rising Suns, illustrating the old Japanese saying, 'The Customer is God'.

Boeing and JAL had, as one of the airline's executives put it, 'something like a marriage' until the summer's evening three years ago when a JAL 747 on a domestic flight crashed into a mountainside near Tokyo, killing all but four of the 524 people on board. It was the worst single- plane accident in aviation history, and a notably horrendous one; the 747 lurched through the sky for 28 minutes after a pressure bulkhead in the passenger corn-

partment ruptured, blowing off most of the tail fin and cutting the hydraulic lines to the tail assembly, while the pilots wrestled with useless controls and passengers scribbled last messages on their 'Welcome aboard' cards.

A Japanese inquiry found that the cause was a faulty repair to the bulkhead made by a party of Boeing engineers sent to Japan after the same aircraft had been damaged in a hard landing seven years previously. The defect in the repair, a missed line of rivets, was invisible, and the bulkhead subsequently passed five 3,000- hour checks in which the entire interior of the aircraft was stripped to bare metal. The Japanese transport ministry official who certified the defective repair on the assur- ance of the Boeing engineers, harshly interrogated by the local police, killed himself.

Boeing has publicly accepted responsi- bility for the 1985 crash and is paying 90 per cent of the compensation settlements currently being negotiated with the victims' families (as of last week, 273 bereaved families had settled). Both JAL and Boeing are insured with the aviation pool at Lloyd's, who are actually doing the paying, but Boeing's acceptance of blame has done something to restore confidence in the airline among its Japanese custom- ers. The Japanese nation is, however, in theory one big happy family, and 520 family deaths call for much more than a payout, no matter how generous. JAL has therefore been at great pains to do, and be seen doing the decent thing, Well, you look like the sort of captain we're looking for.' Japanese-style. The company has 20 offi- cials who still work full-time consoling the victims' relatives and arranging things like jobs, houses and schools. Once a month a party from JAL scrambles up to the shrine the airline has built at the crash site, places offerings on it, and returns with photo- graphs for the families. Although JAL has had its problems, like a pilot who went mad and dived his aircraft into Tokyo Bay (see 'Confucius in the cockpit', The Specta- tor, 6 March 1982) maintenance has never, until the 1985 crash, been among them. Nevertheless the maintenance system has been changed in ways that go straight back to the Imperial Japanese Navy, of Pearl Harbour fame, in which a former chairman of the airline served with distinction.

Before 1985, JAL serviced its planes the way other airlines do. The 'line mainte- nance' engineers who keep the aircraft flying between major overhauls attended to their charges on a first come, first serviced basis. They have now been reorganised into what the airline calls (in English) 'dedicated maintenance' teams. Each engineer is assigned to a specific plane for his whole career or the life of the aircraft. He is expected to meet it at whatever time it returns to Japan, to travel anywhere in the world to supervise major maintenance, such as an engine change, to fly with his aircraft looking for persistent problems that cannot be located on the ground, and to join, in person, the first flight after a major component replace- ment or repair, such as the one Boeing bungled on the bulkhead. So that .everyone in Japan will know who is expected to make the appropriate amend if anything goes wrong, the names of the dedicated maintenance crews are prominently dis- played in every JAL airliner, in both Japanese and Western script.

These strenuous confidence-restoring steps were showing results, judging by the droves, of Japanese taking trips abroad, when a new plague began to afflict the airline last year. JAL's business, like Japan's, has been growing so fast that the airline has been taking delivery of a new Boeing every six weeks. Scarcely had one of the new jets, resplendent with Rising Suns and JAL's Japanese crane crest, the symbol of longevity, touched expensive Japanese soil than a report would un- failingly appear in the Tokyo press; there was something wrong with it.

Last Christmas Day, for instance, the maiden flight of a brand-new 747-300 from Tokyo had to be abandoned on a cockpit warning of oil pressure failure in an engine, traced to an untightened nut on a pressure sensor. On another 747 a cable to the thrust control of the No. 3 engine had been faultily installed, leading to a runaway engine during a training flight. On newly delivered 767s, Boeing's answer to the Airbus, the airline found that the fire- extinguishers had been connected back-to- front, so that pushing the button which should have dowsed the cargo compart- ment with foam, on a test smothered a different compartment instead.

With Japanese thoroughness all of these faults were picked up, and none of them in itself was a life-and-death matter. There are more than a million parts in a 747, which costs $120 million, and airlines everywhere understandably don't rush into print every time they find a screw, or even a fire-extinguisher loose in a new aircraft. Still, the public don't know that, and the six-weekly news reports, written with im- pressive engineering detail, have been doing less than nothing for the reputation of the airline and its favourite manufactur- er. How, JAL wondered, was the Asahi Shimbun getting the bad news SO regularly, and accurately? Did some old-timer, re- membering B-San bear a grudge against Boeing?

It seems not. JAL has an almost British complexity of labour unions, and has been over the years at loggerheads with most of them. (Such things are, contrary to what you may read, not unknown in Japan.) Somewhere in this twittering industrial aviary, it appears, someone has been squawking. Inside JAL, suspicion favoured the cockpit unions, who are in dispute with the management over flight crew levels for the forthcoming Boeing 747-400s with fully-automated cockpits designed for only two pilots. The unions say that a flight engineer should also be carried, for safety reasons. The management say that the unions are trying to save the job .of flight engineer, a calling, they say, destined to join that of navigator in the museum of aviation. Flight engineers are, of course, well-placed to spot defects in new aircraft, and Japanese airports have many public, and private telephones. Or, possibly, Asa- hi reporters have good contact-books. The airline tried an in-house appeal, a Japanese version of fair do's, chaps, with- out result. The JAL teams of inspectors at' the Boeing factory (all the big airlines send them, to keep an eye on the progress of their purchases) were strengthened, but the defects in the new planes, the trips to the telephone and the alarming press leaks continued. JAL, privatised last year, has a new management, which called for action to staunch the bad publicity at the ultimate and only feasible source, Boeing.

Last month the president of JAL, Susu- mu Yamaji, composed a letter to his opposite number at Boeing, Frank A. Shrontz. Recalling their long and happy partnership, the letter listed the latest crop of defects, and concluded:

It would be much appreciated if you would advise me of the details of the various measures now being taken — including the quality improvement program — to prevent these occurrences in future. With best per- sonal regards, etc, S. Yamaji.

In a scene that would play well in a Japanese film, this blame-shifting letter was itself counter-leaked to the Asahi Shimbun, by a source that must have been close to, if not deep inside the airline's management.

Up to now, all this may sound like a modernised Mikado, a tiff between orien- tal parties doing their best to recover, or profit from a tragedy that was none of their making. The Seattle Times thought dif- ferently. Boeing employs 45,000 people in and around Seattle, which is for practical purposes a one-company town. Yamaji's letter was splashed in the local Times, casting quite a pall over 'Lufthansa Day' being planned with the traditional display of red-black-gold flags and frequent radio playing of 'Deutschland Ober Alles'. The news of Japanese public discontent led to more leaks, this time from inside Boeing itself, and this time couched, not with the silky politeness of the Orient, but the unmistakeable gruff tone of a North British executive who thinks he is not getting his company's money's worth — at least What the Papers Say are bound to quote it in a Scottish accent.

`My quality inspectors can only properly inspect a very small proportion of each aircraft,' D. K. Craig, British Airways' chief engineer for technical and quality services wrote to Boeing last February, in what was supposed to be a private man-to- man dressing-down. 'They should never ever come across . . . missing fasteners, missing parts, cracks, bodged rivets, fasteners fitted the wrong way round. Yet we find instances of some of these on every aircraft.' BA recently placed the biggest order Boeing has ever had, $4.1 billion's worth of 747s and 767s. With 'British Airways Day' coming up, anxious Le tout Seattle read on.

`All of these mistakes and the rework that you have to carry out must be costing Boeing a king's ransom,' Craig's letter continued. What the BA inspectors had seen, he wrote, 'underscores our fears that the underlying reason for the Boeing Co's poor quality record is that the production work force are in general inadequately trained, possess a low level of basic work- ing skills, and, of paramount concern, seem oblivious that they are building air- craft where any mistake not properly cor- rected or hidden represents a direct com- promise with safety.' One such mistake, said Craig, 'left no doubt that the integrity of the aircraft structure had been com- promised'. One factory-new plane, in short, had been at one point possibly unsafe.

The Seattle papers thereupon began ringing other airlines, long distance. American Airlines reported the back-to- front fire-extinguisher problem, All Nip- pon complained that a Boeing's wing flap had disintegrated on its first flight. Aero- lineas Argentinas, Lufthansa, Northwest, Air India and others had reported inci- dents; in one of them, fuel had dripped into the cargo compartment of a 747; the cause, according to Boeing, corrosion in sub-standard bolts supplied by a sub-sub- contractor. The last problem caused the US.Federal Aviation Authority in Seattle to issue an 'airworthiness directive' requir- ing the bolts of 317 currently operating 747-200s to be checked 'before further flight'.

Now it was Boeing's turn for public relations damage control. Phil M. Condit, vice-president of Boeing, told a surprised local press conference in Seattle that the British Airways letter was nothing out of the ordinary. Boeing gets many critical letters from customers, he said. 'Some are polite, and others pull our chain reason- ably hard.' British Airways, he said, uses the same John Bull-ish tone to all its suppliers, 'open and direct', adding, 'I would hate to see BA inhibited because what they said appears in the press.' Condit himself, it emerged, had circulated the Craig letter inside Boeing in an effort to 'improve corporate communications', and from there it somehow dripped to the local press.

An airliner like the 747 said Dean Thornton, another top Boeing boss trying his hand at reassuring the nervous, 'is a big and complicated piece of machinery and sometimes it seems like Murphy's Law takes over'. The complaints were, he said, `isolated incidents that shouldn't happen. We're gonna bust our butts to make sure they don't happen again.' Shrontz, Condit and other Boeing bosses have been travell- ing world-wide in recent weeks, visiting airlines in London, Tokyo, and other centres of customer disaffection, sipping unsweetened tea and assuring everyone that while Boeing is certainly busy, all is basically well.

Is it? The recent incident in Hawaii in which the roof of a Boeing 737 belonging to the unfortunately named. Aloha Airlines blew off in midair, killing a stewardess, is not relevant here. That aircraft was 19 years old, while the current chorus of complaints is about brand-new planes. No accidents have so far been caused by faulty work at the Boeing factories, as far as anyone knows. Boeing is, in fact, the world leader in commercial aircraft, dazzlingly successful in commercial terms. Apart from the huge BA order, three more whoppers have been placed in as many weeks; American Airlines is buying 50 Boeing 757s with options on 50 more (all with Rolls-Royce RB211 engines, which are alone worth $1.86 billion), a Los Angeles leasing firm has ordered 100 assorted Boeings with options on 20 more, while United is leasing 30 new 757s with options to buy 30 more. The company now has nearly 300 big new aircraft on order, or the meaty end of $20 billion worth. Our planet's skies are going to be black with Boeings to the end of the century, and well beyond.

New business on this scale would strain the human resources of any manufacturer, east or west. Simply to fill the orders from BA and other airlines for the automated 747-400, Boeing has hired 3,000 new work- ers, in an attempt to get the production rate up to five a month. Every six days when a new one is started, according to Condit, 'a bubble of overtime walks through the factory'. The company, he said, was trying to get overtime down and at the same time raise standards of work- manship by cycling employees as fast as possible through a newly-opened Skills Process Centre, where they get 200 hours of additional training. Most of them, he said, came to Boeing with years of military or other experience in aircraft work.

The comments and complaints from airlines, Condit went on, were part of the process by which Boeing sought constant improvement in its planes, and the com- pany encouraged its customers to be frank. After the fire-extinguisher problem sur- faced in the 767s, he said, the design had been changed and the misconnection is now impossible. If the airlines were seeing problems, Condit conceded reasonably, then there was indeed a problem. But Boeing had never before, he acknow- ledged (with a 'heavy sigh', according to the transcript of his Seattle press confer- ence) gotten a public rebuke like the one from the Japanese airline.

What are thoughtful passengers to make of all this? One interpretation sees Boeing as a victim of its own enormous success, heroically trying to satisfy loyal airline customers who are rushing it with orders in order to meet the demands of their custom- ers who are queuing up to fly Boeing. A line of commentary that has emerged in Japan, however, sees the rash of com- plaints as yet another symptom of the clash between Eastern and Western philosophies of work, ultimately an argument about what life is all about, which is going to be

with us even longer than the current crop of brand-new jets.

The airlines' hunger for Boeings certain- ly demonstrates that, at the highest level of aircraft technology, no Asian country can come anywhere near American design, development and engineering. Rolls- Royce and Airbus are doing us proud to offer serious competition from Europe. Boeing's present trouble is with quality control's the actual making of the jets. The need is for zero defect workmanship, that is, doing the job right the first time, every time. It is here that Asian industry, parti- cularly Japanese seems, from experience of cars and electronics, to have the best of it — an advantage which is, if anything, widening over the United States and Europe, with the possible and significant exception of Japan's old hero, (West) Germany.

Many Japanese believe that their 'fami- ly' or 'village' outlook lies at the heart of their success in adopting and improving on the Western-invented concept of quality control. The argument is that the shared feeling of we're-all-in-this-together makes a worker ultimately responsible for mis- takes not to company, country or conscien- ce, but to the group he or she works with, the very same group who supply the indispensible emotional prop and security of Japanese life. Such an attitude makes group reward and its obverse, group punishment socially acceptable, even desir- able. The result is a single-minded concen- tration on the work in hand matched, in the West, only by mountaineering teams or military units that stick together, united in sacrifice to the bitter end.

To achieve this regimented cohesion everyone in the society has to think the same way, an ideal that Japan's theoreti- cally single race and mono-culture has come near to achieving. Yasuhiro Naka- sone, Japan's garrulous last Prime Minis- ter, expressed the idea in crude terms last year, when he claimed that the Japanese were more intelligent (or, as he later amended the remark, better educated) than Amer- icans because the United States has too many blacks and Mexicans. This slur can be restated more positively: the generous cultural and ethnic diversity of the United States is one of its more attractive features, which Boeing as a defence contractor by law must follow. And, while we can doubt that Boeing's workers regularly hum `La Cuceracha' or 'De Camptown Races' as they bolt the fire-extinguishers on back- wards, it is highly possible that they occa- sionally think of things other than work, as the long hours of overtime grind by. Let us hope so, anyway.

The American labour problem is, on this reading, particularly acute in the aircraft industry. The jets are too big to fit on an assembly line or go under a robot's ham- mer, so they are essentially built by men and women walking around them with a bag of tools in hand, getting on with their

own specialities. Short of the world's air- lines sending 45,000 inspectors to Seattle — and who is going to supervise them? — the work has to be, in large part, self- checked. And then again, being independent-minded, Jack's-as-good-as- his-master Americans, it is unlikely that Boeing's workers would react well to a Japanese-style compulsory first flight on every new plane, although many of them in fact happily join delivery flights for their holidays. 'Take This Job and Shove It', the masterpiece of Johnny Paycheck, the troubadour of American labour is a poss- ible or even likely reaction.

Boeing's up-and-down recent history shows the advantages, as well as some of the disadvantages of the industrial and social flexibility that was ultimately deci- sive in the war against Japan. By the early 1970s, when the first oil crisis hit commer- cial aviation, the workers who had built the B-29 were mostly out to pasture, and few new ones were taken on. Then in the late 1970s the airline business picked up and new workers were hired, but they were different people. The old labour aristocra- cy of self-improving, apprenticed manual workers is disappearing all over the English-speaking world where everyone now wants to be a yuppie, a pop star or an asset-stripper, and the new ones who con- sent to work with their hands take life much more as it comes, not hesitating to change companies, or even occupations. every ten or twenty years — rootless drifters, by austere Japanese notions. But then they have to learn the job anew, and this is partly, and inevitably on the job. 'Untrained people are turned loose on real live airplanes,' a nameless Boeing inspec- tor, doubtless himself a disgruntled old- timer, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer during the recent flap.

I find myself torn on this issue. Much as I respect Japanese skill and diligence, I know where I would rather work — I quite fancy, in fact, carrying the baritone part of `La Paloma' along with Rosita the Riveter. The silent, frowning concentration of the Japanese engineers, the names, Japanese to a man, permanently up in the planes, the life-threatening shame of a mistake all this suggests, to the Western observer anyway, personalities shaped for by work, the narrowing of the possibilities of life, even the dehumanising bondage of man to machine out of Marx's nightmare. On the other hand, when the time comes to extinguish our cigarettes, fasten our seat- belts and hope for the best, the thought of mechanics who take their jobs seriously, even too seriously, begins to be distinctly appealing, even to the flightiest among us.

What we need here is a friendly meeting of East and West, a marriage of zero defect work and manly or womanly independence of mind. Maybe booming, bodging, butt- busting Boeing will, once again, find us a way over the stormy Pacific.

© Murray Sayle