NYC-bound flight canceled when passenger notices missing bolts on plane wing
nypost.com
nypost.com
Or is this genuinely a widescale reduction in maintenance frequency, care and engineering?
Could be a bit of both also I suppose
However increasingly I have been asking a question to determine something like this: “If the overall system is improving, would we see more or less of these kind of events?”
In my experience, it actually is that the level of responsibility that workers are taking for their jobs has plummeted since COVID. Understandably or not, a core backbone of our infrastructure - hope for the future - is basically gone.
So that’s why to me it’s not just availability bias, you can see it almost everywhere and it’s well documented that “give a shit” is not improving, and that means core infrastructure is going to start failing rapidly.
I have heard this repeated a ton. I see it too, but maybe I'm just being trained to see it. Is this an American thing, or do other people in other countries experience this too?
But I believe it's not due to Covid. While Covid was happening, it became blatantly obvious that wealthy investors can still make 40% appreciation from their housing investments even while the majority of the population was struggling just to get by (and pay their rent). Similarly, investors profited handsomely from stock price increases while the same companies (whose market cap went up) were abandoning their employees, in some cases slashing an entire division with just a prerecorded Zoom call.
In short, Covid showed everyone that there's 0 loyalty for the little man and that trickle down doesn't work.
And I can easily understand how the realisation that hard work will almost never earn you a good place in society will lead to people avoiding the hard work.
This isn't a problem with "trickle down". There's more demand than supply, so prices go up. Make your population grow more slowly, or build more houses, or pay more to live in smaller places. Those are your only options.
This is licence to do anything. That's far too broad. E.g. in this case: you're defining too much demand vs supply as a collective action problem, when it's really a political problem (net immigration to country), a state problem (net immigration to particular cities) and another state problem (too costly to build to make it worth people's while). Calling that a "collective action problem" is taking what's a pretty detailed picture and redrawing it in crayon, and then calling for a parent to "solve" it. Just fix the things that need fixing, and leave the things that you want left alone (but you accept the consequences of). Don't give power where it's not needed. Your parents weren't perfect, and the state is far less likely to get it right than your parents were.
1) “after a series of maintenance and inspection failures, a passenger noticed something unusual”; or,
2) “the bolts had been inspected on an appropriate schedule and had since gone missing, and a passenger noticed a new defect before the next inspection was scheduled to occur for this non-critical part”.
It matters whether it’s 1) or 2), or somewhere in between, and I don’t think we don’t know that yet. Public faith in airlines behaving safely is pretty low, and rightly so. I definitely support “treat as a process failure until determined otherwise” for airlines right now. Looking forward to that determination, regardless.
If the fastener is called out in part 21.31, then it would be a required part, but airplanes _never_ fly with 100% of their parts in working order... this one was not required, so under normal circumstances I would assume they'd fly the plane.
If they didn't notice the bolts missing it's a completely different story. If 4 bolts get loose, maybe 50 more go loose soon after. It's not impossible that all of them were not mounted correctly and the first 4 were only the beginning.
You don't know it was unnoticed. In my profession, I see plenty of flaws that don't need attention, sometimes not immediately, sometimes not ever.
I’d never considered it before but he goes into a level of depth in his incident breakdowns to reference the aircraft maintenance log, etc.
Perhaps unsurprisingly there’s always something “wrong” or “broken” on a machine as complex as a modern aircraft. He’ll often say “Oh this wasn’t working, this was broken, etc but that’s fine and it had nothing to do with this”.
There was a story recently where someone tweeted about a Delta aircraft with chipped paint, expressing alarm. While it’s good to be proactive (especially in light of recent incidents) you’d never hesitate to drive a car with chipped paint…
A bit more difficult to do if you're at 30.000 feet and 400 knots over the middle of the ocean.
That's one of the reasons we take issues with airplanes much more seriously.
How many times has that happened on a car? It has to be an exceedingly small number if it has ever happened. I wonder how much of the paint would have to chip off to clog an air filter to the point of interfering with operation. Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process.
Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. Alaska/Boeing/etc got lucky that there wasn't anyone seated in the two adjacent seats but even then two deaths in 14 years would be an extremely impressive record, and there's no way to know if it would have resulted in death anyway.
A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, just maybe, we should consider that tens of billions of people-flights (made up a metric) have taken place over the past 14 years without a single fatality so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously.
You can put that safety record up against anything and it comes out ahead by an extremely wide margin. 250k people in the US die every year from medical errors, as one example.
Even on a small airplane with only 2 seats maintenance is regulated a lot more than on cars (you can't use parts without the whole certification trail) and accidents are investigated very thorougly. At least here in Europe, not sure about US.
Yes turkeys but not paint chips. Remember when engines were catching ashes from the Iceland eruption that started to glassify inside the combustion chamber?
What happens with accumulated remains of paint chips, we just don't know. Because that's not something that's tested for. It'll have to be a lot of them to matter I'm sure, but some planes are pretty crazily chipping like the A350 was in Qatar.
But the paint chips were just an example. A plane was brought down just by hosing it down with water before takeoff a little bit too close: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/painted-into-a-corner-th...
> Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009.
The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators".
In fact the reason MCAS was hidden so much was the insistence of American operators that no new training should be necessary.
> A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe,
I do trust the authorities, as long as they don't delegate trust to the industry. Because I don't trust the industry.
> so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously.
Did you really not follow what Boeing did with MCAS?
The first accident was perhaps an oversight, perhaps they really didn't realise what could happen when a sensor failure brought MCAS to pitch down constantly. Not revealing this clearly which would have prevented the second crash was pretty criminal in my opinion.
You're able to specifically recall and cite these more-or-less freak occurrences /because/ they are so rare. You're talking about an incident from > 13 years ago[0] and again - no one died.
Show me deaths from paint chips, volcanos, or any other potential risk. How many times a day do you nearly get killed in a car - you're a split second roll of the dice away from getting killed in a car every single day - which is much more common of course. As they say "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades".
> The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators".
Of course I followed the MCAS debacle but again, zooming out we're still talking about 346 total fatalities (worldwide) across two incidents that were 3-4 years ago. Using my medical errors comparison that's equivalent to roughly nine hours of deaths due to medical errors - in the US alone. All day, every day. In the time since the MCAS incidents which were riveting, worldwide news roughly 1m people have died from medical errors in the US.
Look at any other category of accidental death where the risk applies to a broad population. Nothing comes close to commercial aviation.
I don't mean to sound callous and reduce these deaths to statistics. If it were a friend or family member of mine I would feel very different but the stats are what they are and commercial aviation has an extremely impressive safety record.
We can care about multiple things simultaneously and Boeing (along with increasingly misplaced "trust" in them on the part of regulators) needs to get it together but speaking personally I feel safer on a plane than I do walking the streets of large cities (the murder rate in Chicago alone was nearly 2x MAX crashes last year alone), driving a car, visiting a hospital, or any other number of activities because the stats show it to be.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_disruption_after_th...
If a plane crashes cause some guy forgot to tighten some bolts then I can't live with that because it basically means can't trust the plane.
A car crash is over in a split second, you mostly don't even realise it's happening. A plane crash takes excruciating long, no thanks.
SWA1380 was in 2018 and resulted in a passenger fatality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380
> where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience
The bird strike testing uses thawed birds. There's a joke where the punchline is they were using frozen birds.
I stand corrected: 1 single fatality from over five years ago across billions of people-flights. Doesn't change the point in the slightest and as I said elsewhere, these incidents are so rare people can recall and reference them specifically as you just did. Other than a major celebrity dying that doesn't happen with any other single death incident.
> The bird strike testing uses thawed birds.
Thanks, again corrected (not trying to be snarky, I like knowing when I'm wrong). Point still stands in replying to someone talking about paint chips.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage#Runway_d...
For some military planes it's such a big deal they have service members walk the runways.
This feels a bit off. It's implying that 119 fasteners are more than enough, but, if that's the case, why have more fasteners than necessary? How many are "just enough", and how many are too few?
If it was "just enough" to complete the mission anything going wrong would become a major issue
On my next flight, maybe a week later, the pilot announced that passengers may see this thing and that it's fine.
Culture and history matter. Aviation in America is as safe as it is because the culture of piloting tends to put safety first. As long as there is general aviation and a forward-leaning FAA, I don't see a problem with automating more of air transport.
> 'it only has to match the injury rate of in-person pilots!'
If it does, it does. I don't see the problem.
You did! You brought up the thing you're disparaging discussing!
> it's not even on the horizon
Literally in alpha [1][2][3]. Would be shocked if it isn't in service by 2030 on regional routes.
[1] https://www.thedronegirl.com/2023/08/18/pilotless-passenger-...
[2] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-m...
[3] https://www.jobyaviation.com/news/joby-flies-quiet-electric-...
You really took it that way? I thought it was sufficiently absurd. Apparently not to you and the people in those links.
Yes, that IS an structural repair manual approved temporary repair for certain kinds of damage on the flap trailing edge for the 737NG.
I have had a small screw go through a plane propeller before. 1 missing screw, let alone 4, would terrify me.
well, obviously you are screwed.
edit: to be more constructive "Felipe Massa's life-threatening crash "( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEt5pbyiIdM )
It may be the case that some failures are expected and tolerated between periodic inspections, and the period is designed to catch anything before it gets too far.
There are clearly deep quality problems that have gone on beyond the door plug. Something is just off in the culture that it's completely normal to just have a lot of bolts missing, because it's within tolerance. If bolts come loose in non-visible places, that's what inspections are for.
The culture is apparently "eh there's missing bolts and it's too big of a pain to schedule and order them" for something that, in this plane's case, took minutes to fix.
That's a symptom of a very broken culture
I guess my main point is that it is very difficult for outside amateurs to judge quality culture. They dont know the risks, severities, and existing controls. Therefore they dont know if something is completely typical and acceptable, or outrageous.
Without knowing the risk caused by it, it may signal nothing of the sort. The mechanics already had cleared the plane to fly. Very, very few planes have any sort of in-flight issue like that. Those facts, rather than our ignorant speculation, signal the state of the 'maintenance pipeline' (if such a thing exists).
Aircraft are usually built with a factor of safety of 1.5-2 or so - meaning it's probably only in the design spec for one screw to be missing in a row...
As a passenger you have no idea what is dangerous and what isn't. And the cabin crew is trained to take every report serious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
> During an interview, passenger Gayle Yamamoto told investigators that she had noticed a crack in the fuselage upon boarding, but did not notify anyone.[3]: 5
If this were true, there’d be no point in paying attention to what passengers reported. I think people do have some idea what’s dangerous.
The problem is the airline is in a CYA/image situation and will tend to do a fix they otherwise wouldn’t at that moment. But those fixes are expensive and cause delays.
Maybe what people need to keep in mind is “speak up about things that matter”. In general, it seems like someone’s willingness to say something has more to do with their personality than the severity of the problem. Some people will flag an FA for a paint chip. Some wouldn’t if an aileron was dangling off the wing.
The phrase “the old chestnut” to refer to a story about American history springs to mind…
One of the crowning achievements of the FAA has been resisting the American penchant for retribution. If a missing bolt triggers a $1mm fine for a senior manager, you won't find missing bolts.
That stuff is INSANE.
It's common for people to complain enough to get free or comped stuff they did not deserve at any point. As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, that doesn't mean that's where the maintenance should go.
I don’t know how much a typical canceled flight is in lost revenue but I suspect it’s much lower than what Alaska Airlines and others are dealing with now.
No doubt, given Alaska grounded all their MAX9 since Jan 5, and the FAA grounded all other MAX9 fleets the next day, they are still grounded to this day as far as I know (United has extended their cancellations to the 26th so far). That's some 170 planes not flying their routes or earning money.
Although the FAA has apparently completed their inspection of the initial batch of 40 MAX9s.
Just humans(meat) and a highly flammable jet fuel in a tube.
But hey, to be fair, a negative story about Airbus actually made it onto a prominent position on HN, so that's good at least. Usually it would just be completely ignored and not mentioned.
Passengers should be concerned about shoddy bear straps on Boeing 737 NGs they can't see that were passed off as approved parts to make the production schedule. Boeing had the DOJ in their pocket making false statements about an ongoing NTSB investigation into AA 331 that broke up, likely due to substandard parts, when a 737 Classic would've likely remained intact in similar circumstances. 737 NGs are at variable unknown risk of breaking up on hard landings, runway overruns, and possibly even extreme turbulence. See also: Ducommun scandal.
There's an engineered threshold at which an aircraft is deemed not airworthy. On airliners, this is managed through a Minimum Equipment List (MEL), which is a formal checklist that tells the crew which equipment is allowed to be broken (and for how long).
This threshold is less than 100% by design, because little things break all the time. It can take days/weeks in the shop to fix issues, so you need to batch up all the maintenance. (Can you imagine if you had to take every aircraft offline for several days after every flight?) And that's okay, because there's still a large safety margin built in as long as the MEL is followed.
That's exactly what the air force does. Most of their jets require tens of hours of maintenance for every flight hour!
Who has done that? One plane lost a plug, with no injuries. Who else has gotten even injured in a commercial US flight in the last year?
Some of them matter, and the pilots keep a close eye on those during the preflight checks. Others, matter less so. (A single missing screw on a prop spinner - big problem. A missing screw on a non-structural plastic aerodynamic fairing - okay to defer, literally zero risk.)
Are they on the ramp waiting to get ingested into an engine?
Are they jammed in the flap tracks?
Are they embedded into the leading edge of tail surface after flying off in flight at cruise speed?
Its one thing to say that you can fly without those screws on the MEL. Its a whole other thing for parts to be falling off of an airplane in operation, even if they aren't required.
A single piece of metal that fell off of a different airplane is what caused Concorde to crash.
A non-required screw that backs itself off and falls off in flight is a maintenance procedures failure (torque or locking compound was ignored). Screws don’t just fall off. Ignoring it because it is non-required is dangerous because it could possibly indicate that screws are being installed incorrectly, including required ones.
Qualified mechanics certify every single non-experimental plane as safe. Yet somehow, planes still crash for mechanical reasons.
What kind of risk are we talking about? When did that last happen on a commercial airliner? How many people have been injured that I should be 'very concerned'?
It’s a big enough issue that every airport is required to have a debris management program, and runways and taxiways are regularly swept by specialized equipment.
FOD is estimated to be a multibillion dollar problem by more than one study.
If I was going to be 'very concerned' about potential risks without considering mitigation, there's fuel tanks exploding, running out of fuel, drunk pilots, hitting mountains, runway collisions, etc. etc. Pieces of FOD don't seem to rate ...
My point is about risk, of course. FOD is not an effective risk to me.
Concorde had decades of documented tyre problems. That was a flawed design (tyre and fuel tank) that allowed this crazy outcome.
It was a strip of metal that had fallen off of another airplane a few minutes before.
Concorde did have a higher risk due to its higher takeoff speed, but the only fatal accident in the airframes history was directly caused by a piece of metal that fell off a different plane.
They wouldn't. That's why passengers aren't tasked with being safety inspectors.
And now here you are smugly telling us to ignore a bunch of missing bolts and that we're idiots for possibly thinking they could be indicative of a problem. Do you see how this is a big part of the answer to that perpetual question of "the signs were all there, why wasn't anything done?"