The Mechanic Who Heard What the Engineers Couldn't

In 2019, a team of aerospace engineers at a Boeing supplier in Wichita, Kansas, spent three weeks trying to diagnose a persistent vibration in a turbine assembly. They ran computer simulations, analyzed frequency data, and debated competing theories in conference rooms lined with whiteboards full of equations. Nothing worked. Then a veteran mechanic named Dale Gunderson — a man with no engineering degree and grease permanently embedded under his fingernails — walked onto the shop floor, placed his palm flat against the housing, closed his eyes, and listened.…