"counterfeit" can mean many things, and in this instance it doesn't necessarily mean "the material was wrong" so much as "they lied about where they got it on the provenance paperwork"
In an industry where you are supposed to use QA and one of the most basic things is your material then it’s only common sense that you would randomly batch test the metallurgy on a supposed titanium shipment when it takes minutes to hours to check and “trust but verify” should be the basic SOP. I’m sure the details will come out. It’s a batch of 10 versus 10000 “widgets”. I’m not saying that’s what happened but if it becomes clear they skip critical QA tests like this then they are criminally negligent.
"So depending on the incentives and short term nature of the person deciding, there are a lot of incentives to not look too hard."
This gets at what has been reported as the fundamental problem at Boeing: It used to have a safety culture, when it was run by engineers. Now it's run by finance people, and it has a short-term profit culture. Instead of asking "will this plane be safe to operate for the next 30 years" it becomes "will this plane be slightly more profitable to sell next quarter". This is a major problem where safety is paramount.
Though in this case it was discovered because of corrosion problems on the parts that should not have been possible if they were made correctly. And they probably looked okay enough to not trigger any obvious ‘someone bought this off alibaba’ gut check.
To your point though, the material itself was correct to a rough level at least chemically. So most likely it was a problem with the forgings being contaminated or the forging process itself being slightly wrong (assuming it was a forged part, which it seems to be).
There is an old saw in manufacturing that “the only way to guarantee quality is to do it from the very start”.
The challenge is if you do that it is usually expensive.
Aerospace does all that paperwork nominally to try to guarantee that, and point the finger at anyone who tries to game the system.
But it is also eventually impossible to actually optimize cost without compromising the quality. So it has actual (usually visible) limitations in scale from a cost perspective. And if someone knows that what they are doing is wrong, of course they are going to try to stop a finger from pointing back to them.
so it’s inevitable when there is a lot of competition that suppliers run out of room to legitimately optimize, and they try to cut corners.
Shitty suppliers will try to cut corners right off the bat of course. Chinese manufacturers are notorious for almost immediately starting to put fake or out of spec components into things they make for folks once the initial ‘proof’ run is done and people stop paying as much attention. That is why Apple watches their manufacturers like hawks, including folks who work for them being onsite.
And there are a nearly infinite number of non-obvious ways to screw up the quality of something if someone is trying to cut corners, and from personal experience - Chinese manufacturers are uncommonly clever at it.
Same with wholesalers, subcontractors, and any other middlemen.
If the buyer is under similar pressure, they try to make up for it with ‘QA’. After all, even if the bag might be fake Gucci, if no one can tell, does it matter? Especially if it is half the cost?
Really lazy post-facto inspections or performatively checking paperwork are also a part of it, instead of actually verifying everything was done correctly from the start of course. Because having others believe it too is important for everyone.
That is inevitable in a ‘race to the bottom’, enshittification, etc. type scenario. As actually verifying quality is expensive.
As things get crazier, inevitably that QA gets looser and looser, and more and more corners get cut - until something breaks.
This is all due to the excessive low interest rate environment going on for so long, and the rising rates combined with a need to keep increasing stock prices causing a huge squeeze. Plus corporate idiocy and incompetence.
It’s no surprise the larger corporations are more visibly being screwed here, due to scale.
They aren’t allowed to be smart in the same way that small companies can, because they have to comply with all the other rules too even when they’re dumb.
In many cases a smaller company can actually produce a higher quality product for less, because they can hire people who are very competent but couldn’t pass a corporate hiring filter, or that hates the corp world, or that wants/needs something that the corp world can’t handle (like a competent boss, or flexible vacation).
They can also have folks like anal retentive asshole supervisors that would never make it in a Corp world, but could produce a better product. Or a chill supervisor that can enable creativity that the Corp world is currently squashing with anal retentive asshole supervisors.
Made worse by massive BS being normalized (political + advertising situation right) emboldening predators and scammers, and post COVID burnout.
Not that small companies are panaceas, they suffer from their own problems. But they do tend to be different - like capitalization issues.
It’s quite the perfect storm of factors. It’s actually pretty amazing Boeing is going through this - though this is a repeated pattern for them frankly - because they already have such a well protected and near monopoly position. Near as I can tell, they don’t really need to be shaving pennies.
And to answer the prior post - I doubt Boeing ‘knew’ (as documented) about the counterfeit parts, because that would require exceptional corporate stupidity. So definitely not impossible.
But there were definitely folks in key positions that knew it was a risk and was likely going on at some level, and chose to ignore the risk due to other pressures/concerns. Good luck nailing them on it, however, as I’m sure some scapegoats are being found as we speak. That’s why they’re going after whistleblowers too.
Personally, I imagine it’s even worse elsewhere, it just isn’t getting the press because it is at a smaller scale.
This is all part of so many folks doing the wil-e-coyote run off the cliff but don’t look down maneuver. Boeing is being forced to look down.
Others will too, sooner or later. No one wants to.
