Hacker News Reader

Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

I have been wondering how dangerous flying is going to be when when / if it comes back and all these planes come out of storage. Mechanical things just sitting around is some times far worse than them being in constant use.

View on HN

Luckily, this is already pretty standard practice for airplanes.

I worry a little more about theme parks that don't do winter shutdowns or might not have done the full shut it down for the winter procedure with sudden lockdown orders. The regulatory environment is also sketchier.

Luckily for theme parks, the pandemic hit right as winter maintenance was wrapping up for seasonal parks so it shouldn't have many adverse effects if any. And since then, maintenance workers have been on site running and getting the rides ready to reopen. Actually, it seems like this might be a good things for parks since the extra time has given them a lot more time to do more long term projects and refurbishment they never had time for in the past.

There are manufacturer approved procedures for putting aircraft into long-term storage, as well as returning them back to service.

Yes, there is absolutely additional wear that happens just from sitting around. Repairing this (if necessary) is part of the return-to-service procedure.

You still have to keep the aircraft's normal maintenance schedule even when it's in storage.

Though, if the maintenance schedule items are mostly of the form "W needs to be inspected after X flight hours, Y landings, or Z days since last inspection", there's probably significantly less experience backing up the Z parameter.

There are three guidelines. Some are per flight, some are per operating hour, and some are per calendar time.

I wonder what effect will dominate:

1. BAD: The degradation of airplanes in storage (seems that's fairly well understood, though)

2. BAD: The loss of proficiency and currency by the crews

3. GOOD (maybe?): Less traffic?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com