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.
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.
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.