People, perceptions being what they will, draw conclusions even though they are totally unrelated. The FAA review will begin December 2 and continue through February at the company's three manufacturing plants in Seattle, Everett and Renton, Washington. The agency will be studying everything from aircraft engineering to parts receiving and the manufacturing process, including how engineering changes are incorporated. Boeing will focus on its quality-control procedures. Erickson said that fixes already made to the assembly line have corrected the recent problems.
Commercial aircraft are among the most regulated of products.
In the older, classic version of the Boeing 737, which just went out of production, there were 357,000 parts held together by 600,000 bolts and rivets. The government, mostly through the FAA, must approve an airplane's design, manufacture, inspections, testing and certification, along with its materials and parts and the way they are used. Boeing periodically conducts internal audits of its quality controls, and the FAA has workers within Boeing plants to check that airplanes are being built correctly. In addition, every two years FAA specialists conduct a major evaluation of how well Boeing's quality assurance systems are working. The most recent major inspection occurred in May 1998 in Renton, where Boeing builds its single-aisle models like the 737 and 757.