Thread regarding Boeing Co. layoffs

@1te+1jrnxv66s
So far, I have only worked on 5 military projects, with most of these job assignments lasting multi-year. Not once have I ever seen, interacted, spoken to an in-person auditor. I agree that there should be more in-person auditors on defense projects. Also, I hope DOGE audits cost-plus projects - past, present, future.

@1tb+1jrnxv66s
BA has had a lot of problems with management, engineering, and quality since the MacDac takeover in the late 90s. For 25 years, BA has experienced malfeasance on their EVA contract, refueling tanker, Max planes, 787, airforce one contract, and other projects that have not been reported in the news/to authorities yet. If you were working at BA at the time, are you a part of the problem. BAs problems are internal and can not be blamed on anyone else but themselves. Were you a part of the cultural problem at BA that led to its demise.

@1tb+1jrnxv66s
You are incorrect. The work on the drawing then erase the work at the end of the day instruction occurred 20 years ago in catia not on a drafting board. I have worked on 3 defense projects where timecard fraud took place with 2 of those projects being BA projects. If you did not witness an event, stop gaslighting others by telling them that it did not occur. So long as someone is telling the truth, they are entitled to their narrative. We should not co-sign corruption by being silent.

Oh, my first time at Boeing, I worked on military & defense contracts. When I came back ten years later, I worked on at NASA's MSFC, on the ISS program, for Boeing. At several defense contractors that I have worked for, there were Government Auditors who came around unannounced to check our time cards from time-to-time, to verify that our work was billed to the correct government program. At Boeing, on the NASA ISS program, we had Industrial Engineers on staff who came around at least weekly to check our design work assignment completion status, find out our concerns, & what we needed to complete our tasks.

I have around 40 yrs. of design, checking, and engineering experience, most of it in aerospace. If this really happened, I don't think this was a standard Boeing practice, nor was this done recently. Boeing is a huge company with many employees. That drawing being drawn, erased and redrawn over and over again sounds like it may have been done 35-40 yrs. ago. This may have happened during the days when drawings were created on the drafting board from ideas or sketches. This was long before Computer Aided Design (CAD) became widely available and today, a standard industry practice. I started on the drafting boards & started using AutoCAD 2D around 1982. Boeing has used powerful CATIA & CADAM, and a few other CAD workstations for Aircraft design work for a very long time before then. Today, Boeing mainly uses CATIA, which is one of the most capable CAD packages available. CATIA allows many engineers, designers, & drafters to work on the same master model, at the same time. I last worked at Boeing Space & Defense from 1996 to 2001, about 24 yrs. ago on the International Space Station. All of our drawings were based on 3D models created on Intergragh EMS CAD workstations. For a long time engineers, designers & drafters have had to check in and check out CAD models and 3D drawings into a data vault. The vault keeps track of it's status, prevents overwritting work, it keeps up with whether it's a work-in-progress or released & under revision control. A decade before, in the mid 1980s, I had worked for Boeing Military Airplane Co.. We had a few ComputerVision CV-4X CAD workstations, but many drawings were still being drawn on drafting boards like they were decades before then. I worked at both Boeing and McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing). I was at Boeing when the two companies merged. I did once make a drawing on the drafting board once that was to an ISO standard scale, but not to American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards and had to redraw it to the correct ANSI scale. It was in ink on mylar, so it required a complete redraw on a large drawing sheet size. This was in 1990, about 35 years ago. I had to explain this to my section chief. This only happened once! He didn't fire me, he said, because he had once did the same thing himself many years before! CAD models are created full size. Drawing are made from these 3D models. Scaling comes in for priming drawings. Now, no drawings should to be scaled (measured).

I also worked for several MROs, companies that completes aircraft maintenance, repairs, and overhauls, and a small aircraft manufacturer. Often they used 2D CAD for creating drawings. Some of them were more freewheeling with drawings. But now they are also using data vaults to track progress, review work-in-progress, maintain revision status/configuration control and for planning.

Future trends point our industry towards model based design and model based engineering (MBD & MBE). Drawings are being eliminated. 3D CAD models will be used to create parts without the need for drawings. This reduces misinterpretation, guess work, mistakes, use of the wrong drawing revision, and the need for as many manual machinist , drafters, & designers. I have seen several drawings at 1/5 scale since, but they had "do not scale" or " not-to-scale" or NTS in the title blocks or someplace in the field of the drawing.

On one of my BA defense jobs, an engineering manager told his staff to work on a drawing for 8 hours, then at the end of the day erase his work, and to repeat this. These cost-plus contracts are too tempting for certain companies to commit waste fraud and abuse. I forecast egregious overruns with the F47.

I must agree.