287 – Statistical Engineering at the Boeing Company
Flowing Expectations for the Minimum Probability of Conformance Between Engineering and Operations
Dan K. Fitzsimmons
Boeing
Aerospace products, especially commercial aircraft, require exceptionally high reliability, with US Federal Aviation Administration instructions calling for failure probabilities in many cases less than 10^ -9. Even with extra margins and redundancies, requirements this tight can only be met by achieving adequate probability of conformance values for the product stream going into those aerospace products. This creates an interesting application of statistical engineering, as those adequate probability of conformance values in the design must be achieved by the operations community building the product. This also makes it necessary to communicate what is realistic for those operations to achieve back to the design community. This paper presents methods that have been used in the aerospace industry to accomplish this communication, without either set of participants being trained statisticians.
