United Airlines Jet Loses Wheel in Repeat of March Incident | Hacker News Reader

United Airlines Jet Loses Wheel in Repeat of March Incident

bloomberg.com

26 pointsrntn30 comments

> a Boeing 757-200

From a peek at Wikipedia, the airplane involved is probably 2+ decades old.

However tempting it might be to blame Boeing...it sounds far more like the techs at LoBidCo or Slipshod Maintenance Ltd. need to re-certify in Basic Lug Nut Tightening. Again.

Realistically it’s a united flight and they’re ultimately responsible for maintenance.

I wonder if employees across the board are silently reciprocating the lack of support from businesses by doing subpar work, given that corporations have started to run down employees in the name of expanding profits.

It feels like a new phenomenon , and it feels very wide spread.

Either that, or tired, stressed, overworked, understaffed employees just naturally do worse work.

That’s a better way to look at it. I wonder what the average tenure of people at Boeing / maintenance techs is.

So basically "I don't like the company so I'll not do my job and if people die they die"?

Wait til you hear about hospitals

Or cost cutting of essential services

Actually , no. More like the environment is so toxic people are just rushed and forced to do what they can do instead of what they should. Too much work demanded to be done in too little time so naturally the work is poor. People have families to feed so they try their best, but are ultimately overwhelmed.

Good people leave because it is toxic and stressful. The people that stay are miserable and do what they can. People may complain to management that it is not possible but everything is swept under the rug.

Work may get outsourced to other countries where there a language barriers or no way to hold the firm accountable. However, the firm promises everything at half the price, and will refuse to deliver bad news. All the ceo sees is that the profits are up.

It is a consequence of demanding growth over people. Since it takes years for the negatives to manifest itself the causes listed above are obfuscated. People that have only worked behind a desk but never in a warehouse are probably wondering what went wrong.

Obligatory VAS Aviation:

https://youtu.be/iPkPHR1KoF0

And when the plane landed at it's destination, another United jet sucked in a bird on take off. At least there's no mechanic to blame for that.

Probably only hit that bird with the wing.

Tower asked "are you going to continue" and they replied. That sounds like low speed (high speed you wouldn't reply that quickly, focus on takeoff first). And at low speed if it went through the engine you would abort the takeoff.

With most airlines the rule is "below 80kt stop for any warning or caution, above 80kt only abort for engine failure, fire, or unable to fly"

When a plane reaches V1 (which depends on the model, weight, runway length, temperature etc) the pilot has 2 seconds to abort takeoff or they are too fast to stop before the end of the runway. At V1 a multi-engine plane will take-off even with one engine out. The pilot will normally wait until Vr or V2 to rotate as this ensures a climb rate of 2.4 degrees. If the runway is long enough V1 will be higher than V2 but commercial aircraft will de-rate the engines and make use of the available runway to avoid running the engines at maximum.

That doesn't sound exactly correct per the definitions I'm familiar with -- a multi-engine plane with a failure will not safely climb at V1, that's what V2 defines (the speed at which an engine-out aircraft can climb at 200ft/s, with at least 35ft of altitude at the end of the runway). Vr should be when the pilot begins rotation unless an engine is out; I don't believe there's any guidance to wait until V2.

This two second number is not found in Part 25 of the Federal Aviation Regulations, what is your source? Is this a non-US definition, or is it specific to a carrier?

Also in Part 25, V2 cannot be less than Vr which cannot be less than V1. They call all be equal, but V2 cannot be less than V1 by definition.

Pilots will wait until at least Vr but not before making sure the airplane is tracking straight down the runway before lifting the nose wheel off the runway. At least that's how my airline teaches it...

They may be thinking about CS 25.109 in EASA? It specifies how the accelerate stop distance is calculated. That calculation assumes: "the pilot takes the first action to reject the take-off at the V1" so there is no 2 seconds to decide later. However it does add a distance equal to 2 seconds at V1 speed to the total.

That's a safety margin in the calculation, because you still need to move the thrustlevers and in some cases manually hit the brakes. Can't do that in a millisecond.

I know. Except that V1 by definition cannot be higher than Vr. You can't decide to abort (which you have to do for an engine failure below V1) after you've started rotation. Same for V2, it cannot be lower than V1 or Vr. So if that would theoretically be the case, you get a lower V1.

But that's all in the high speed regime. What I was commenting is that from the radio calls you can deduce that this bird did not go through the engine as claimed. They just hit the bird.

The bird was a mechanic.

https://archive.ph/UK0E7

This is what the labor shortage feels like.

Labor shortage caused by the decades-long capital-manager strike against skilled labor. Invest in educating employees, pay them enough to remain engaged in their job, empower them with some authority, cost of living increases to keep up with inflation plus their own growing value, etc? Nah, keep clipping coins from the productive part of the business so line go up, even though the MBA spreadsheet automatons doing this end up embezzling most of the savings as their own salaries/bonuses.

It's endemic across the whole economy. Workers who are essentially nothing more than flesh peripherals for the computer. Commoditize your complement, where the complement of middle management was competent workers. The consequences are just finally hitting industries with traditionally larger margins. If this were about automobiles I'd guess manufacturers would add two more wheels for redundancy (paying the mechanics a dollar an hour more to get the kind of people who care whether nuts are properly torqued would be capitulating). But you can't really do that with airplanes now, can you?

Dang! Boeing airplanes are literally falling apart in normal operation! I'm not an aviation expert by any means, but are all these "little problems" indicative of a bigger problem at Boeing? Are we just getting lucky that so far the things that have been failing haven't had disastrous consequences? Can someone who knows about these things enlighten me?

> are all these "little problems" indicative of a bigger problem at Boeing?

It depends on the exact way you phrase the question, but if it were "Is the rate of accidents per flight for Boeing aircraft significantly different between 2004-2014 and 2014-2024?" then you could run for example a one-sample poisson test against the data. The accident data is available from https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/AviationQueryv2.aspx and I'm sure you could find a source for number of Boeing flights for each time period.

Thank you for enlightening me instead of downvoting like some others did.

So what did you learn from going through that list? do you still think "all these little problems indicative of a bigger problem at Boeing"?

It's hard to say. Boeing has had 3.8x times the number of flights resulting in fatalities since 2010 than has Airbus, for example. Therefore, Airbus is safer, right? Well, hold on - we need to know the number of miles flown by each type of plane in that interval and scale these numbers appropriately.

In short, this is going to take some digging and I haven't had the time to do the serious digging this requires. A cursory search reveals that nobody else has done this kind of research either. While I'm sure this statement isn't true, it's not easy to find, either.

blows my mind people post boeing after boeing problem online and all over reddit... but literally this stuff happens _every day_ to all manufacturers.

Which other manufacturers recently had a huge hole open up in the plane mid-flight? Which other manufacturers are guilty of conspiring to defraud the FAA? Which other manufacturers installed software that resulted in deadly crashes because pilots weren't even aware it existed and/or weren't trained on it?

It's possible that there really are other manufacturers with these exact same problems, but either way it looks like Boeing has more than earned all the scrutiny and criticism they're getting. I'm all for naming and shaming other manufacturers that make deliberate choices to routinely put profits over human life though.

He said "this stuff happens _every day_ to all manufacturers". That's unquestionably true - [0], since this was an operational issue handled by the airlines. You then rebuffed his post with your rant about manufacturing issues at Boeing, which is completely different.

> I'm all for naming and shaming other manufacturers that make deliberate choices to routinely put profits over human life though.

Empty and cringeworthy. There is a saying "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands". Doing something in the most efficient manner and cost effective is the tenet of great engineering. The trick is doing it while still prioritizing safety. That's what Boeing failed at. Not because they tried to save money. HN of all place should be well aware of that. No wonder populism is in vogue.

[0] - https://avherald.com/

> He said "this stuff happens _every day_ to all manufacturers". That's unquestionably true - [0],

Specifically he said, "blows my mind people post boeing after boeing problem online and all over reddit... but literally this stuff happens _every day_ to all manufacturers."

My reply highlighted only a few of the many reasons why it shouldn't be surprising that so many of Boeing's problems are being frequently talked about both in the news and on social media while also demonstrating that Boeing's problems are not always things that happen to "all manufacturers"

Even if we look only at the problem in this specific instance (and I'd argue that "this stuff" means we shouldn't), while it is true that over the many 10s of thousands of commercial flights that take place every single day in the US mechanical problems happen frequently (even daily), it is not true that losing a landing gear wheel while taking off is a daily occurrence.

> Doing something in the most efficient manner and cost effective is the tenet of great engineering. The trick is doing it while still prioritizing safety. That's what Boeing failed at. Not because they tried to save money.

According to the lawsuit against them and their own internal communications it is exactly because they tried to save money. Greed was the motivation for their actions which undermined safety and even when they knew about the dangers they actively hid those dangers from regulators for that same reason.

For more information see:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/beyon...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-fifth-estate-costs-s...

killing a lot of people or putting them in danger kind of attracts that scrutiny. It sucks in cases where it's clearly the maintenance's or pilot's fault, but even in those cases you wonder if boeing left something out of their handbooks.

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