Next time you fly, if it says under equipment "A3__", just remember, you'll be flying on a plane built by several different countries, all who speak different languages and don't particularly have a history of working well together.
If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.
While I love Boeing product, prefer riding on it whenever I'm forced to fly commercial these days, and I enjoyed my years working there a lot, do not think for a minute that even at the final assembly plants in the pacific northwest Boeing doesn't have the same kind of language barriers screwing things up.
I worked with the Liaison Engineering Group in Everett; this means that when the line had a problem putting something together, It was my job to grab the relevant drawings, go down to the problem point on the line, and orchestrate a fix. In one case, my - recurring - problem was that a group of machinists who assembled wing center sections for 747s were all immigrants - legal, properly documented - from the Philippines, and all spoke ONLY Tagalog (at least on the line). Their supervisor was of Nordic extraction, and spoke not one lick of Tagalog. Invariably, the wing boxes put together by this crew were assembled wrong, because their Super couldn't communicate with them, and vice versa. Invariably, it was left to the night shift crew to damage control everything the Filipino crew touched, because upper management was too hamstrung by political correctness to either send the Super out for language training in Tagalog, send the crew out for training in English, or in any other way ameliorate this giant cluster****.
