It calls into question Boeing's entire portfolio because it's all a product of the same management culture.

It's a door design that dates back to the 707.

If this turns out to be the assembly issue it seems to be, it hints at a deeper, potentially cultural, issue at Boeing. One that could affect all their planes, because why would only be the B737 MAX FAL be sloppy?

Sure, but Boeing’s current awful cost cutting management does not date back that far.

Only the max-9 has the door plug, the smaller airframes don't have that door, and the larger airframes always have the door fitted

It's not really about the door plug per se, it's about how Boeing's entire manufacturing, design and QA process could allow such an elementary mistake to escape notice in the first place.

If they got this wrong, what other bolts didn't they tighten properly? This question is especially relevant since just a few weeks ago, Boeing issued an airworthiness directive about loose bolts in the rudder system.

In any reasonable aerospace organization, the discovery of a systematic problem with the rudder system assembly should have prompted an audit of other processes. Why did that audit not uncover this issue with the plug door?

Presumably, the answer is that Boeing's processes are so incomplete or and/or unreliable so that, even when being given a hint at what kind of a problem to look for, they can't find other instances of the same problem themselves.

It raises the question of what other systems on the plane have problems, and whether Boeing is even capable of confidently answering this question at this point, or whether we just have to wait and see what other parts start falling off.

The crazy thing is that since the old Max fiasco several of us believed that the priorities of the Boeing company were completely wrong: they had decided to cut so many corners to increase profit to the point of negligence. Doing That, in an airplane is just crazy.

Their manufacturing process is just kaput. And there is no force that will make them fix it until their planes start falling mid flight in pieces.

I find it unfathomable that the FAA is basically sitting watching with their arms crossed. They should fine the heck out of Boeing and ground all their planes. But american protectionism is strong in this one.

All the 737 Max of the same type in the incident have been grounded.

Grounding every plane Boeing has ever built would be quite an overreaction and would be disastrous for both passenger and cargo transportation.

Boeing already warned airlines on january 5 (before the door issue) to check for lose bolts in a different section of the plane (the rudder). This is not a door plug issue.

Maybe Boeing will rethink their plan to claim all variants of the 737 are basically equal.

If a guy holding the drill CAN cause this issue, that means there's ALSO a drill calibration issue, a bolt inspection issue, an inspection recordkeeping and doublechecking issue, etc.

Humans make mistakes. The whole point of modern manufacturing is to make products better than any human can make them, by layering processes and procedures to catch those mistakes before they get out the door, and continually improve the processes to catch ever more.

Spot on, this is exactly the problem: you can't have 'just loose bolts', it's a whole raft of other issues.

In The Design of Everyday Things Donald Norman mentions the swiss-cheese model, whereby multiple layers in a process need to align correctly for a mistake to lead all the way to an incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Keep seeing this take (just an installation issue), over and over and over again.

I think it's much worse than a design flaw.

Even very carefully-engineered systems can have flaws. Engineering flaws, once identified, can be engineered around, managed, or corrected.

I'm much less comfortable with the idea that the assembly plant for these planes could be a random-critical-failure generator based on how the employees handle a torque wrench.

A guy holding an inspection report issue