A New York-bound Virgin Atlantic flight was canceled just moments before takeoff last week when an alarmed passenger said he spotted several screws missing from the plane’s wing.
While its likely true that the wing panel was both non-critical and secure, I’d be much more worried that if they missed something like that, that they could have missed any number of other things as well. Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of check-list run?
Pilots perform an inspection of the aircraft before every flight. Missing fasteners on the top of the wing would not be visible during a walkaround from the ground.
Planes are allowed to fly with many parts missing. A few missing fasteners on a non structural part is fine, but missing fasteners that the pilots are unaware of is a big issue.
Shouldn’t that inspection include looking at the top of the wing out the windows?
There isn’t much on top of the wing that is highly critical. Some planes you can’t even see the top from anywhere in the plane too. An actual issue like leaking fluids or damaged flight control surfaces are visible from the bottom. Something like a few missing fasteners really isn’t t that alarming. I’ve flown plenty of times with some missing, sometimes speed taped and sometimes both the first few times I asked the crew chief but eventually I became familiar with where and how many missing weren’t an issue.
I’ve flown plenty of times with some kissing
How about heavy petting?
Does it lead to ducking?
Trouble. And seat wetting.
Only for transonic people.
#MachTuck
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We’re going to have to start walking around the plane with the pilot before takeoff like a rental car dent check.
I knew software companies were offloading QA testing onto their paying users, but who would have guessed that passengers would start playing that role too?
Some big wig had to go to target one day and saw the self checkout line and was like “I have an idea!”
In return, he had a conversation with a big wig from Target where he taught them how many checkout stations you could actually cram into a tiny space.
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Early Access Airplane
Given how completely the airline industry disregards customer service and treats its customers like cattle, I don’t know why anyone would expect them to do a proper job of maintaining equipment. Furthermore, given how eager we are to gut regulation and dismantle the administrative state, all of this is going to just keep getting worse and worse.
“b-b-but taxes are theft!”
/s
They will scream as their plane that wasn’t regularly inspected by government bureaucrats plummets to the ground.
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This feels like the beginning to Nightmare at 20000 Feet
New York Post is a right wing shitrag like The Daily Mail.
What do you think the implications of that are for this article reporting a completely non-political incident?
Probably that they generally don’t care about getting a story right or corroborating sources. I agree that in this case that doesn’t matter for getting the high level facts across.
They get traffic and unless someone comments otherwise, a slight boost in perceived respectability
Everything is political, at least with them.
I imagine a lot of the passengers were pissed off when the flight was cancelled because one of their fellow passengers reported some non-critical bolts were missing.
It’s not like the passenger knew they were non-critical. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to stay silent only for it to turn out they were critical. They also wouldn’t unboard and inspect a plane just on the insistence of one passenger, they’d deplane that one passenger if anything. The fact that they did do an additional inspection implies that safe or not, those missing bolts were not noticed in the initial inspection, which leads one to wondering if they missed anything else.
Precisely correct.
I’d have been grateful.
I think it’s entirely reasonable to see something obviously missing on the wing of a plane, even something small, and wonder what else isn’t properly secured. I’m sure a plane with four missing allen head screws on that panel is fine. I wouldn’t fly on it without an assurance that it wasn’t a sign of other poor practices.
First think I look for when I get a system in from a fabricator. Are all the screws on the outside tight and orientationed the same way? If so I am probably going to have a good day. Anybody who takes the effort on something so tiny often is taking the effort in things that do matter.
I would have been fine with not dying in the event it ended up being a real problem. An inconvenience is better to deal with than a plane crash.
Planes have so much redundency that theres a lot that’s uncritical, until suddenly it is critical.
Ideas for a better world #233
Rename your phone hotspot to “I saw a loose bolt on the outside of the plane” and turn it on in the gate waiting area bar.
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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They do have a vested interest in the plane not ruining their whole day by falling apart at any point in the journey.
The pilot should’ve walked out onto the wing, slapped a couple lengths of duct tape on that section, then carefully and loudly exclaimed; “ YUP! That baby ain’t goin’ anywhere.” while patting the area firmly.
It’s called speed tape, and genuinely is a thing used in the industry.
So lucky they spotted it. Really makes you think, wouldn’t it be good to implement a system of regular professional inspections to deal with stuff like that? /s
Regular Inspections fix small issues before greater problems arise from them –> some economist with no technical knowledge or common sense goes: hurp de durp our inspections never fix any relevant defects. Better cut back on them to be more economic. –> surprisedPikachu.jpeg
Well no. Those are the accountants. Economists have studied survivorship bias. It’s the MBAs and accountants looking to cut costs that do that stupid shit.
Regular inspections are already mandate by the FAA, no economist, accountant or MBA has any say on it.
you can’t just screwdriver those things in there man you have to torque them in to the proper spec holy balls
I think they were checking how loose the others were rather than tightening them.
Well they are Phillips has so I can’t imagine you can even torque them that much.
Interestingly enough they are not Phillips it is a very similar looking standard called Torq-set. The lines of the cross are off set a little which make it much easier to put a higher torque into them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#/media/File%3AScrew_Head_-_Torq-set.svg
Is there any advantage to those over square (Robertson)? I still see 4 contact points when applying torque. So about on par with square and inferior to 6-lobed torx.
Well… It comes down to what material is used, as well as requirements and geometry for the screw.
I love Robertson, but with enough over-torque, you shear the head off the threads or worse, round the hole if there isn’t enough rigid material around the square hole.
Failure modes are: stretching the material outwards until the bit slips. For the torq-set, you would need to shear the screw head material in front of each of the driver’s tips off and out, much less likely than shearing the head off the threads, or shearing the bit itself.
Both have the great feature that screws placed on the head stay in place, making installation much easier.
Aerodynamically, the torq-set has a much smaller ‘opening’ than does Robertson or torx.
Engineering is all about solving a problem in a quality way now, and ideally, considering issues for the future. A downside could be ice/grit getting stuck inside the smaller opening, as an example.
NY Post? Be serious, don’t post that drama rag here.
At some point, that part was taken off the plane and it was replaced, or maintenance was done on it, or maintenance was done on something underneath it. It was then replaced. There is a documentation trail that says all of this was fully completed. The documentation was signed off on by someone who was qualified in this task, and/ or by a supervisor who checked it off.
If there is no documentation, or if the documentation indicates something was done that was in fact not done, the CAA/ FAA is going to have a big problem with this. They are sort of interested in how maintenance is done and documented. If they didn’t do this right, what else are they/ have they been “pencil whipping?”
I can see a pretty thorough inspection of their maintenance practices and documentation in the near future. If they find a pattern of this, the maintenance gets decertified and the airline can’t fly until they are cleared.
There’s a massive failure in maintenance and Operations’ culture here. This isn’t the exact sort of situation where you’d use LOTO, but you need something similar. Lock the engine in the off position until the removed part is properly reinstalled.
I want to call maintenance errors like this rookie… But they really aren’t. There’s plenty of plant incidents where people either don’t have a proper procedure or don’t follow it, and a welder tries to work on a live gas line. Or someone opens a valve without realizing it needs to be closed.
I still say we fine the companies and hold the CEOs personally responsible, because the buck stops there, and these mistakes are more likely to happen in an organization that doesn’t have a robust safety culture.
TL;DR Someone dun goofed
Don’t worry! There were 119 fasteners being used. Ignore the fact that 4 were missing. The plane was designed to use whatever number of fasteners we want. The amount is just a suggestion
/s
For what it’s worth, just about every panel like this is certified to have a specific number of fasteners missing. A lot of the time there will be some other qualifiers such as not missing the leading fastener or not missing adjacent fasteners. Having a bunch in a row like this incident would probably not be ok, but I couldn’t say without the maintenence manual.
Right, these are usually spec’d so that there’s some leeway, and I don’t believe they’re lying when they say it would’ve been safe to fly. But after the recent plane debacles I don’t blame those passengers to bringing it up.
It’s just that if you know that it would be ok to miss a few and deliberately don’t install them you’re walking a very thin ice. It must be a reserve of fasteners, not a discount in fasteners used
Planes are designed to have very high tolerances so yeah, they have more fasteners than necessary for exactly this reason. Of course you still want to fix it, but they are absolutely designed to not need them all.
