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