New build quality

[nod]

5 hours ago, JSHarris said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47826166

 

This line caused me to raise my eyebrows:

 

 

The implication is that having 93% of customers reporting snags with their new home was OK, but that 99% isn't.  What the heck do these people do in terms of pre-completion inspections and de-snagging?  It would seem that the answer to that is sod all, which then rather begs the question as to what hidden defects there may be, if they can't even be bothered to do visual inspections.

Just sat whatching the news 

Taylor whimpy  named and shamed 

Shocking quality issues 

TW have responded by blaming subcontractors That old chestnut 

All is well now as 70% of trades will now be directly employed by TW 

I wonder if the managers that where responsible for checking the subcontractors work Will also be tasked with checking the new employed trades work  

 

Edited April 6, 2019 by nod

[Jeremy Harris]

Why do these firms think it's OK to just blame their subbies, as if that resolves them of any responsibility for the quality of their product?

 

Imagine the outcry if Boeing tried to claim that they weren't responsible for their aircraft crashing due to a design defect, by blaming their subcontractors and refusing to accept that Boeing were at fault.

[Ferdinand]

12 minutes ago, nod said:

Just sat whatching the news 

Taylor whimpy  named and shamed 

Shocking quality issues 

TW have responded by blaming subcontractors That old chestnut 

All is well now as 70% of trades will now be directly employed by TW 

I wonder if the managers that where responsible for checking the subcontractors work Will also be tasked with checking the new employed trades work  

 

 

Interesting,

 

Taylor Wimpy are the only construction company I have seen try to engage online via social media with those ranting on about hedge netting and how evil developers are. There may be others.

 

F

[Oz07]

16 hours ago, JSHarris said:

Why do these firms think it's OK to just blame their subbies, as if that resolves them of any responsibility for the quality of their product?

 

Imagine the outcry if Boeing tried to claim that they weren't responsible for their aircraft crashing due to a design defect, by blaming their subcontractors and refusing to accept that Boeing were at fault.

Are boeing going to end up getting done for corporate manslaughter? It's a bit of a state when a pilot can't turn off all auto pilot or similar controls and just pull up manually. 

 

Agree about some of the snags being too much. People maybe don't expect nail pops and settlement now?

[Sue B]

How long till Boeing going into administration?  I give it a month.

[Triassic]

I find that build quality is as good as the sub contractors on site. A friend works for a plumbing company who regularly install the plumbing and heating systems on new build site. The company owner stopped employing time served and trained plumbers years ago and now simply employs minimum wage staff to do the installation work. The only qualified tradesmen is the supervisor, he’s supposed to do the commissioning and signs off their work. In most cases the work is never checked and the work quality is just about adequate with plenty of snags.

 

Pd. I’ve just been reminded that the same company has gone onto administration three times in ten years. So customers would be hard pressed to get problems sorted out.

 

 

Edited April 7, 2019 by Triassic
Ps added

[Jeremy Harris]

54 minutes ago, Oz07 said:

Are boeing going to end up getting done for corporate manslaughter? It's a bit of a state when a pilot can't turn off all auto pilot or similar controls and just pull up manually.

 

14 minutes ago, Sue B said:

How long till Boeing going into administration?  I give it a month.

 

The real issue here is whether or not the FAA continue to stand by the principle of "grandfathering", as that's the root cause of the issues with the 737 MAX range.  The basic 737 airframe is now well over 50 years old, and because of the way the FAA airworthiness certification rules work, Boeing were not required to certify the MAX range wholly against the standards that apply today, so we have a "new" aircraft that's certified in large part to mid-1960s standards, long before the advent of fly-by-wire*** (FBW) in commercial aircraft. 

 

This is key, because the changes made to the 737 MAX range really needed the flight envelope protection measures that FBW provides, as by moving the new, larger, engines forward they created a potential handling problem with the effect of thrust on attitude, so needed to provide enhanced stall protection.  They were allowed to do this using a single sensor FBW stall protection system, which they euphemistically called MCAS (manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system), something that would be prohibited under normal FBW certification requirements, which usually need at least double redundancy.  Most FBW systems use three separate sensor systems, where practical, for flight safety critical tasks, with a "majority vote" scheme to try and remove the impact of a single sensor failure.  Because the 737 was really a 1966 aeroplane, Boeing chose to just fit MCAS without being fully transparent as to how much flight control authority it had.  As we seem to have discovered, rather tragically, MCAS has a great deal of flight control authority, as it turns out that it moves the whole horizontal stabiliser in order to try and prevent the wings reaching the critical angle of attack, and this is an extremely powerful control, more powerful than the manual trim wheels in the cockpit at speeds over ~300kts, and these manual trim wheels are really the only way the crew had to try and trim the aircraft nose down, especially as MCAS seems to have falsely triggered at the same time as the stick shaker operated.  The latter would have contributed to the high cockpit workload, I'm sure, as I know from personal experience that trying to fly an aeroplane with the stick shaker on raises a heck of a sweat in itself, especially in an aircraft type that cannot recover from a deep stall.

 

 

***With the exception of Concorde, which was, at the time, pretty much a one-off FBW aircraft and the first to enter commercial operation.  The first mass production commercial FBW aircraft was the Airbus A320, more than 20 years after the non-FBW Boeing 737 started mass production.

[joe90]

Do I remember correctly that a fly by wire plane (first?) crashed when the test pilots tried to do a “fake” landing I.e wheels down then open the throttles and fly on but the “computer” said “no, we are landing” and the plane crashed into woodlands killing the crew. I think they then changed it to “pilots have the last word not the computer.”.

 

please correct the above if I remember it wrong.

[Jeremy Harris]

33 minutes ago, joe90 said:

Do I remember correctly that a fly by wire plane (first?) crashed when the test pilots tried to do a “fake” landing I.e wheels down then open the throttles and fly on but the “computer” said “no, we are landing” and the plane crashed into woodlands killing the crew. I think they then changed it to “pilots have the last word not the computer.”.

 

please correct the above if I remember it wrong.

 

The accident was the Air France Flight 296 one at Mulhouse, involving an Airbus A320.  The cause was pilot error, rather than a defect in the FBW system, notably the failure of the crew to spool up the engines to TO power sufficiently early, following a very low pass with the gear down (the low pass was illegally low, below the height of nearby obstacles).  The crew disputed the cause, and claimed (wrongly) that the engines failed to respond, when in reality they were responding exactly as designed, the crew just hadn't taken into account the time taken for them to spin up to TO power.  Had the crew started to apply power earlier they wouldn't have found themselves on the back of the drag curve and would have been able to climb OK.  If you look at video of the accident you can see the aeroplane doing all it could to help the crew, including going to maximum pitch attitude in an attempt to climb as soon as the engines spooled up enough.

 

Part of the problem was that the crew erroneously believed that the FBW system would get them out of any trouble.  It allows the pilot flying to pull back hard on the side stick with no risk of stalling the aeroplane, which is what they did.  Sadly, this put the aeroplane into an irrecoverable position, where with insufficient power to climb the aircraft, plus the high drag (from being pitched to maximum nose up) their problems were exacerbated and caused the virtually zero climb rate just before the aeroplane impacted the trees.

 

If the crew had applied maximum TO power a few seconds earlier the aeroplane would have got them out of trouble OK.  Following this accident there was a lot of controversy about the authority of FBW systems, largely driven by crews who failed to fully appreciate what they could and could not do.  The flight crew of AF296 were convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

 

 

[epsilonGreedy]

28 minutes ago, joe90 said:

Do I remember correctly that a fly by wire plane (first?) crashed when the test pilots tried to do a “fake” landing I.e wheels down then open the throttles and fly on but the “computer” said “no, we are landing” and the plane crashed into woodlands killing the crew. I think they then changed it to “pilots have the last word not the computer.”.

 

 

I think some of the speculation was debunked with the later elementary observation that the sound of the engines winding back up was delayed by a few seconds due to the speed of sound. It was not the computer denying the power request until too late, as it first appeared. 

[Jeremy Harris]

13 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

I think some of the speculation was debunked with the later elementary observation that the sound of the engines winding back up was delayed by a few seconds due to the speed of sound. It was not the computer denying the power request until too late, as it first appeared. 

 

FWIW, the FBW system didn't have control of autothrottle for the low pass, as the gear was down and throttle control was manual.  The crew throttled up too late, not appreciating that the relatively large turbofans took a few seconds to spool up from the low power setting for their descent to TO power.  I can't recall whether they pushed the TOGA button or not, but even if they had it seems to have been too late to allow the engines to spool up in time.

 

Edited to add:

 

Just checked, the crew selected TOGA, but it was too late, and the pilot flying then accidentally cancelled the TOGA switch by pulling the power back to flight idle and then pushing the power levers fully forward again, as he apparently didn't believe that the engines were spooling up (they were, until he pulled the power off...).  It's not clear if he engaged TOGA again when he reapplied full power, but I suspect he may have done, as IIRC the TOGA switch on an Airbus is detent operated at the forward end of the power lever range of movement.

Edited April 8, 2019 by JSHarris
added TOGA info

[epsilonGreedy]

2 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

FWIW, the FBW system didn't have control of autothrottle for the low pass, as the gear was down and throttle control was manual.  The crew throttled up too late, not appreciating that the relatively large turbofans took a few seconds to spool up from the low power setting for their descent to TO power.  I can't recall whether they pushed the TOGA button or not, but even if they had it seems to have been too late to allow the engines to spool up in time.

 

 

No doubt this is all correct. I was commenting from the perspective of public speculation, people heard the engines power up as the wheels hit the tree tops and then there were claims no pilot would leave powering up that late, hence the computers were blamed. Once the speed of sound to the video camera had been factored in it helped change lay interpretation of the crash.

[joe90]

Ah, I stand corrected, as @JSHarris says above:-

On 07/04/2019 at 10:15, JSHarris said:

They were allowed to do this using a single sensor FBW stall protection system, which they euphemistically called MCAS (manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system), something that would be prohibited under normal FBW certification requirements, which usually need at least double redundancy. 

 

[Triassic]

I see that Taylor Wimpey are in the news for building houses with weak mortar. Rather a sobering read. Is your mortar up to scratch? Interestingly gagging clauses were used to try and stop the affected families from talking about this experiences.

 

The estate where neighbours began to ‘vanish’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47816530

 

 

Edited April 11, 2019 by Triassic

[Declan52]

All that motar would have been mixed in a silo so they have messed with the mix. 

Not exactly sure what "there was far more sand in the mix than you would expect for a home in that area"  means.  It's either there is enough cement or there isn't.  Doesn't matter if your mixing it in  the skye or Isle of Wight the mix should be the same.

[epsilonGreedy]

3 hours ago, Triassic said:

The estate where neighbours began to ‘vanish’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47816530

 

 

When the home owners complained and protested this is how they were treated by Taylor Wimpy...

Quote

 

The families' solicitors received a letter back saying they had decided not to report the group to the authorities under the Proceeds of Crime legislation.

"It was accusing us of bribery, effectively," said Pete. "It took me about 10 minutes to stop laughing. But it was intimidation, a threat."

 

 

What a grotesque corporate culture exists at Taylor Wimpy, customers who complain about their shoddy houses are branded as criminals.

[Bri44]

I would never buy a new build again, totally ripped off by the developer.  LABC is so so. Helpful but seem to back down when the developer puts up a fight. 

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

24 minutes ago, Bri44 said:

I would never buy a new build again, totally ripped off by the developer.  LABC is so so. Helpful but seem to back down when the developer puts up a fight. 

 

 

 

LABC aren't to blame for build defects that aren't building regs related, which may be part of the problem you've been having in seeking redress.  In the first case your case is against the builder, not LABC, for selling a house with unacceptable defects; the house seems to not have been of "merchantable quality", and that's a requirement in law, I believe.

 

[Oz07]

On 11/04/2019 at 10:07, Declan52 said:

All that motar would have been mixed in a silo so they have messed with the mix. 

Not exactly sure what "there was far more sand in the mix than you would expect for a home in that area"  means.  It's either there is enough cement or there isn't.  Doesn't matter if your mixing it in  the skye or Isle of Wight the mix should be the same.

I thought we discussed this previously. It's less to do with cement content it's more that big mortar suppliers are substituting cement with ash or something at much higher than recommended levels

[Declan52]

1 hour ago, Oz07 said:

I thought we discussed this previously. It's less to do with cement content it's more that big mortar suppliers are substituting cement with ash or something at much higher than recommended levels

So the cement content isn't correct. It doesn't matter what they substitute it with if it doesn't have the correct amount of cement it won't set. 

[Oz07]

Yeh sorry that makes sense

[newhome]

It makes you wonder why people keep buying houses from this developer! 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-49460864

 

[Jeremy Harris]

11 minutes ago, newhome said:

It makes you wonder why people keep buying houses from this developer! 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-49460864

 

 

 

I think it's just lack of choice.  If someone wishes to live in a particular area they pretty much have to take what they can get when it comes to a new house. 

[ProDave]

33 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

I think it's just lack of choice.  If someone wishes to live in a particular area they pretty much have to take what they can get when it comes to a new house. 

And most are first time buyers and might not have heard about the "issues"

[Simplysimon]

i thought that this was gone, i went to the waybackmachine and found it, though without the photos. not new build but a 'renovation'

https://web.archive.org/web/20090416142132/http://www.pfi-islington.co.uk/180.html#top

https://www.youtube.com/user/no2pfi