Passenger sees Boeing 757-200 “wing coming apart” mid-air — United flight from San Francisco to Boston makes emergency landing in Denver::A United Airlines flight to Boston was diverted to Denver because of an issue with the plane’s wing.
Passenger sees Boeing 757-200 “wing coming apart” mid-air — United flight from San Francisco to Boston makes emergency landing in Denver::A United Airlines flight to Boston was diverted to Denver because of an issue with the plane’s wing.
What the fuck is going on at Boeing? Are they cutting that many corners?
This occurred on a 29 year old plane. This is almost certainly just a one-off issue. Unless it starts happening frequently with other 757s, it’s nothing to be overly concerned about. And in that case, the NTSB would figure out why it’s happening and issue a directive.
Planes are designed on a “Swiss cheese” model. Swiss cheese (as Americans call any variety resembling Emmental) is full of holes, but you can’t usually see all the way through a block of it. On a plane, something might fail and you can’t always prevent that, but you can make sure that there is enough redundancy that if something does go wrong you’re still covered. For something to cause a plane to crash, the “holes” have to line up so something could pass all the way through the “cheese.”
Very nice explanation of industry safety without getting too caught up in the details!
I wish the article said how old the plane is. A lot of Boeing jets are 50+ years old and at that point, you have to blame the airline. But this article doesn’t say.
At least in Europe, passengers jets are new because more fuel efficient at the “normal” speed. These old jets are then transformed in cargo where they go very slow so fuel efficiency goes up by other means (and the old jet is way cheaper).
This was a passenger plane so i doubt it was anywhere close to 50 years old
A 757 can be between 20 and 40 years old
This is the plane, I believe. 29 years old.
If you’ve got like 24 minutes this video gives a pretty solid explanation.
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Didn’t they fire like half their QA staff a couple years ago?
Nothing for this case at least.
It’s completely unrelated to Boeing per se. Likely a maintenance issue, maybe repair done wrong.