NSF Grant IRI-96-31952 Data Warehousing and Decision Support

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Project Impact

The 1998 Report mentioned several achievements of the PI and students supported by previous NSF grants.

Duration: 9/1/96--8/31/1999

Title: Data Warehousing and Decision Support

Last year, we mentioned two startups that developed from research under this and predecesor grants, Junglee Corp., bought by Amazon.com in 1998, applied information-integration technology to the Web. Google is a search engine company whose growth has brought it to the first rank, and that is growing faster than any of its competitors. Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant.

Current Boeing employee here – I will save you waiting two years for the NTSB report to come out and give it to you for free: the reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeings own records. It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business.

With that out of the way why did the left hand (LH) mid-exit door plug blow off of the 737-9 registered as N704AL? Simple- as has been covered in a number of articles and videos across aviation channels, there are 4 bolts that prevent the mid-exit door plug from sliding up off of the door stop fittings that take the actual pressurization loads in flight, and these 4 bolts were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane, our own records reflect this.

As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances.

Now, on the incident aircraft this check job was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH side door, not the LH that actually failed. I could blame the team for missing certain details, but given the enormous volume of defects they were already finding and fixing, it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did. I know what you are thinking at this point, but grab some popcorn because there is a plot twist coming up.

The next day on 1 September 2023 a different team (remember 737s flow through the factory quite quickly, 24 hours completely changes who is working on the plane) wrote up a finding for damaged and improperly installed rivets on the LH mid-exit door of the incident aircraft.

Because there are so many problems with the Spirit build in the 737, Spirit has teams on site in Renton performing warranty work for all of their shoddy quality, and this SAT promptly gets shunted into their queue as a warranty item. Lots of bickering ensues in the SAT messages, and it takes a bit for Spirit to get to the work package. Once they have finished, they send it back to a Boeing QA for final acceptance, but then Malicious Stupid Happens! The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating (with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they *just painted over the defects*. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”.

finally we get to the damning entry which reads something along the lines of “coordinating with the doors team to determine if the door will have to be removed entirely, or just opened. If it is removed then a Removal will have to be written.” Note: a Removal is a type of record in CMES that requires formal sign off from QA that the airplane been restored to drawing requirements.

If you have been paying attention to this situation closely, you may be able to spot the critical error: regardless of whether the door is simply opened or removed entirely, the 4 retaining bolts that keep it from sliding off of the door stops have to be pulled out. A removal should be written in either case for QA to verify install, but as it turns out, someone (exactly who will be a fun question for investigators) decides that the door only needs to be opened, and no formal Removal is generated in CMES (the reason for which is unclear, and a major process failure). Therefore, in the official build records of the airplane, a pressure seal that cannot be accessed without opening the door (and thereby removing retaining bolts) is documented as being replaced, but the door is never officially opened and thus no QA inspection is required.

According to a review of publicly available loan data by the strategy consulting firm Horizon Advisory, $192 million to $419 million has gone to more than 125 companies that Chinese entities own or invest in. Many of the loans were quite sizable; at least 32 Chinese companies received loans worth more than $1 million, with those totaling as much as $180 million. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...

According to The New York Times, about 600 businesses, including dozens of national chains, got $10 million loans, the maximum amount available under the $525 billion program. Only 1% of borrowers received more than a quarter of the total funds given out -- around $143 billion in loans of $1.4 million or more.

The Washington Post reports that even though Treasury Department and SBA officials said the PPP mostly helped small businesses because over 87% of the loans were for less than $150,000 as of August, the data shows more than half of the money in the same window of time went to bigger businesses. Just 28% was loaned in amounts less than $150,000. https://www.wcnc.com/article/n...

The economists estimated that $115 billion to $175 billion in PPP loans went toward paychecks, meaning that only 23% to 34% of PPP funds went directly to workers who would otherwise have lost jobs.

Where did the rest go? The remaining 66% to 77% went to business owners and stakeholders, including shareholders, creditors, and suppliers.

The authors also estimated that the program spent $170,000 to $257,000 per job-year saved.

"PPP's breakneck scale-up, its high cost per job saved, and its regressive incidence have a common origin: PPP was essentially untargeted because the United States lacked the administrative infrastructure to do otherwise," reads the working paper, shared by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The picture gets more stark when the authors traced how PPP dollars flowed to households. The study estimated that $365.9 billion, or 72%, of the PPP dollars ultimately flowed to the top-fifth of high-earners, who make up a disproportionate amount of the country's income and business owners. The bottom quintile got $13.2 billion, or 2.6% of the $510 billion. https://www.businessinsider.co...