In the last quarter of 2018, Boeing failed one element of its quality control audit on the 747, 767 and 777 legacy airplane programs in Everett, a setback in its plan to shift its quality system to one that relies on fewer inspectors overseeing the work of mechanics.

Quality inspectors at Boeing, angry at management’s plan to streamline and automate some quality-control processes with fewer inspectors overseeing the work of mechanics, point to a recent quality-control audit that missed one of its targets as evidence that the company’s effort is unwise.

Boeing plans to eliminate up to 900 quality- inspector positions as part of a sweeping transformation of its manufacturing system over the next two years. The idea is to move away from reliance on inspections by a second set of eyes to find any defects after a mechanic does a job. Instead, Boeing is redesigning tasks to make it easier for mechanics to get things right first time, and deploying smart tools and digital technology to track and monitor quality.

There is a rule for dealing with computers: garbage in, garbage out. Put the wrong number of zeroes in your Excel spreadsheet and it will unthinkingly pay your staff pennies on the pound; train a self-driving car to recognise human figures by showing it millions of pictures of white people, and it might struggle to identify pedestrians of other races.

That was the finding of researchers from Georgia Tech, who analysed how effective various “machine vision” systems were at recognising pedestrians with different skin tones. The results were alarming: AI systems were consistently better at identifying pedestrians with lighter skin tones than darker. And not by a little bit: one headline comparison suggests that a white person was 10% more likely to be correctly identified as a pedestrian than a black person.

However, once everyone had gotten a seat, the captain came on the PA system to alert passengers that a spoiler indicator light had illuminated in the cockpit. It needed to be solved before we could take off.

Not too long thereafter around 9:40am, the issue was corrected. A round of applause followed the captain’s announcement and we thought we were on our way. But the spoiler indicator had other plans. After we had pulled away from the gate and begun taxiing to the runway, the indicator illuminated again and we were forced to turn around and head back to the gate.

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Roughly 20 minutes into this third and final delay, the crew informed us that the carrier would be swapping aircraft. Passengers were asked to deplane and wait in the terminal. Disappointing, but something that was out of the control of many of those on board.

Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, who had been along for the duration of the day’s activities until that point, remained on board and talked to passengers throughout the delays. After we’d returned to the gate on the second go-around, I asked him if he planned on staying on board. He said it depended on the aircraft and whether it was operable. He added that the issues were likely due to the fact that crew and maintenance are getting used to the new plane.