- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Because Boeing were on such a good streak already…
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the front fell off, you say?
It’s not supposed to do that?
Oh it’s very unusual!
1 in a million chance?
Hopefully they towed it out of the environment.
Freddie said he would have it up and running by tomorrow. He might need to do a quick repair and fly it to Seattle for parts for a final fix, but he’ll be here by tomorrow. He’s gonna be checking for alignment and camber.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
some of them are built so that the front doesn’t fall off at all.
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To shreds, you say?
Working for Boeings PR department must be absolute madness right now… imagine having to somehow excuse all those fuck ups and every week there is a new one
Except this one isn’t even a Boeing issue - this is a plane Delta has operated since 1992. This is entirely Delta’s maintenance’s fault. Boeing will still get blamed for it, of course.
I know, but no one cares who’s responsible at the moment. What people care about is that they read a new article about Boeings planes endangering passengers every 3 days. So while Delta is most likely at fault, Boeing is gonna take the hit to the company image. That’s why I was specifically speaking about the Boeing PR team. Those guys and the crisis managers won’t be able to catch a break for a loooong time.
45,000 commercial flights a day in the U.S. 35 deaths in the last 10 years. Thats about 164 million flights.
~115 people dying by car daily, and those numbers have been rising every year…
If planes get their kill ratio up high enough people will stop caring and start saying it is expected/needed.
Clearly more plane crashes are the answer.
how many car trips per day in the us? must be billions. deaths per mile* per traveler should be the metric, not number of trips.
ps: safest method of transportation is the elevator.
edit:*mile traveled
Elevators don’t travel any distance so if anyone is hurt by one they immediately lose by your metrics
are you 100% sure that elevators don’t travel any distance? or are we going to argue semantics over what distance is or isn’t.
Just throwing this out - do we include the altitude the plane climbs in its distance traveled?
You would need to keep track of how high airplanes fly if you did argue semantics
“Next up: are Grandma’s visits killing her? Investigation finds Boeing builds airframes out of aluminum, which may or may not be linked to alzheimers. More at 11.”
I don’t think we have enough information to say whether it’s a Boeing thing or not. The reason I say that is, that my understanding is some maintenance and repair operations will be performed by Boeing, or Boeing appointed subcontractors. What we may never find out is whether there was any work done on, or requiring access via the nose wheel area, and whether it was performed by Boeing/Boeing subcontracted technicians.
But, as I said in my other comment. This will be an ongoing problem where every Boeing plane issue will be reported now and unless announced by the operator or Boeing themselves, we’ll never know whether it was a Boeing maintenance problem or just neglect by the operator.
I would expect this to be a maintenance fail.
They didn’t say why it fell off yet. It might be a fatigue issue.
The thing is, every Boeing plane that has any problem is going to make it to the news right now. So it’s very hard to see what is relevant and what is just “one of those things”. So, this will make them look worse than they really are.
Having said that, they have problems. My opinion is that cost-cutting has created all their recent actual problems (MCAS, missing bolts, loose bolts etc) and I’d argue that unless the actual location(s) responsible for these problems is identified, the safest thing to do would be to recall ALL aircraft recently (last 3 years AT LEAST) serviced, repaired or had their configuration changed at a Boeing owned or subcontracted location should be reviewed for substandard work.
My reasoning here is that if we have loose/missing bolts on the 737 Max 8/9 and -900ER. It won’t stop there, it is going to almost certainly be an institutionalised problem of quality control slippage that could affect any aircraft maintenance, repair, or adjustment operation.
But, I’m not an aviation expert, so my opinion is worth very little.
I agree with your comment, even though I have no idea on the technical aspects. What I can weigh in on is crisis management, especially communication.
Boeing needs to take control of the situation and actively start communicating and showing that they are working on fixing this thing. In Situational Crisis Communication Theory you would call it a rebuild approach. They tried denial, they tried downplaying, it’s not working. A rebuild strategy is usually the last resort, as things like admitting your mistakes and fixing them are rarely appreciated by investors. Furthermore it’s usually a huuuuge cost to do a recall on that scale. But Boeing need to show the public that they are actively working on improving the situation, to earn back their trust. So at least a partial recall should be considered.
You’re exactly right in your first paragraph about the news. The media and the public are very sensitive to Boeing quality issues rn. These articles won’t stop unless one of three things happen. Either Boeing gets their shit together and gets some effective crisis management and communication done, the company goes bust, or something else turns up in the news that replaces this. The third option will be the most likely, but it will also haunt them forever. It’s like that exploding galaxy note 7 situation. There were articles about that for every new generation of Galaxy Note, despite Samsung doing pretty well in investigating the issues. And while the following Note phones sold alright, the whole thing was a significant loss of trust and money for Samsung and enabled competitors like Huawai to catch up.
Can’t have a PR department if you laid them off.
The company is still worth over 100 billions. They do something right.
Otherwise I agree with you. It’s almost hilarious to see fail after fail (as long as you are not in the plane).
What they do right is having a duopoly with Airbus, and great military contracts. So investors know that even if things are shit rn, they will probably get better again.
Furthermore, while I agree that Boeing probably will not go bankrupt over this, the valuation sometimes is not a great indicator of what’s going on internally. Enron was worth over 60 billion. Half a year later they were at zero. Now I’m not saying Boeing is nearly that bad, but they are in some trouble for sure.
It’s call “military contracts”
Amd cruising on past reputation.
Military contracts.
Well they were not doing so hot just 4 years ago when they said they were short a cool 60billion…
Nestle is worth billions. Sure, a bunch of kids die and we use slavery, but they must be doing something right.
Google’s worth billions, and they can go probably about 6 years doing nothing right before that changes. It took Yahoo! a while, you’ll catch on.
How is this Boeings issue? This is a maintenance problem with the airline. Tires get replaced by maintenance staff. That plane isn’t brand new.
Well, if proper maintenance was done and the part still failed due to a design or quality issue that was improperly QC’d (missed, skipped, etc) then yeah it could be Boeings fault.
They’re getting extra scrutiny right now because of all the incidents recently, and all the anecdotal stories of former employees talking about how a bunch of suits are destroying it from the inside to make a quick buck.
And frankly, they fucking deserve it.
Sure, but the 757 is a 40 year old design that has been out of production for 20 years.
And frankly, they fucking deserve it.
Except the suits aren’t going to be the ones hurt by the company going down in flames.
It never is, but it prevents them from continuing to build new planes were profit has priority over security and “accidentally” killing 100s of people
Boeing: “We hear your concerns. We plan to squash problems by firing all the employees who raised problems.”
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Careful. Boeing already tried the “but it’s not our job” excuse on a few major incidences with an executive now locked behind bars after pushing bribes to cover it up . They’d be best backing off on taking an attitude about where to assign blame. They got a lot of red spots that will never come out.
If I recall correctly, the aircraft manufacturer writes the maintenance guidelines.
This could be a Boeing issue, if it’s due to something that happened at the time the aircraft was built, or due to a foreseeable gap in the maintenance guidelines.
It could be a Delta issue, if they weren’t following the maintenance guidelines, or a maintenance contractor working for them wasn’t following them and they didn’t catch it.
It could also have been (very small but nonzero chance) the result of physical trauma to the plane that wasn’t foreseen, back in the 1990s when it was built, as something that might cause an issue of this magnitude. I haven’t yet seen any information on whether this particular aircraft has a history of hard landings or running over debris on the runway. Freak accidents do happen.
All of those have precedents in aviation history.
I remember watching this PBS Frontline segment on plane maintenance 10 years or so ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0b020OFj4
I imagine we still have those problems and the recent news of counterfeit parts entering the market is scary.
Good thing these recent incidents ended up with no serious injuries or death. Perhaps this timing is good in some really weird way as the Supreme Court starts considering powers of regulatory agencies and concerns around government funding to highlight the importance and need for this government role.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=sw0b020OFj4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think the first two repliers have never heard of Ockham’s razor. I mean a micro meteorite could have struck some part of the wheel and knocked it off too, but probably not. Though that would be boeing’s fault to, because they didn’t make it micro meteorite tolerant.
Is it not Ocam’s razor?
It can be Occam or Ockham. It’s named after William of Ockham, but it was the fashion at that time for scholars to “Latinise” their names, hence the alternative spelling.
Truly one of the english language moments of all time.
Occam’s*
No worries, it has been towed outside of the environment.
Into a different environment, right?
No, no, no, no, it’s being towed BEYOND the environment. It’s not in the environment.
There’s nothing out there. There’s nothing but leaves and grass and rocks.
And?
And a tire.
Me, standing in the Backrooms, watching as a busted up 757 goes past:
No, no, no, no, it’s being towed BEYOND the environment. It’s not in the environment.
Real life wall clip hack, any% boeing speedrun, impossible?
Edit: Quoted the wrong comment
The front usually isn’t supposed to fall off
It’s not very typical, let me make that point.
Some are even designed so the front doesn’t fall off.
Which, as we know, is not supposed to happen.
Wasn’t it built so that the nose wheel wouldn’t fall off?
The front fell off, so just tow it outside the environment
That design choice was revolutionary at the time.
I don’t know where to put it but here’s about MCAS anyway, the cost-cutting system meant to keep Boeing in the game, but also took over flight controls sometimes and nose dived planes straight into the ground, causing hundreds (some say thousands!) of fatalities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) is a flight stabilizing feature developed by Boeing that became notorious for its role in two fatal accidents of the 737 MAX, which killed all 346 passengers and crew among both flights. Systems similar to the Boeing 737 MCAS were previously included on the Boeing 707 and Boeing KC-46, a 767 variant. On the 737 MAX, MCAS was intended to mimic the flight behavior of the previous generation of the series, the Boeing 737 NG. During MAX flight tests, Boeing discovered that the position and larger size of the engines tended to push the nose up during certain maneuvers. Engineers decided to use MCAS to counter that tendency, since major structural redesign would have been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
I’m starting to think Boeing is under bad management.
Well obviously not… Because the nose wheel fell off.
Yes but probably management saw that as a problem limiting the future wheel assembly purchases. I mean you can land without the wheel right?
deleted by creator
Clickbait. The FAA lists the plane number as N672DL and a quick flight registry check says that plane was made in 1992. This is a maintenance issue with Delta.
i work in aerospace, and that’s not delta’s fault. delta is trying to save money according to boeings maintenance guidelines.
(although i’m not 100% sure about that either)
Could you elaborate? Why would maintenance guidelines havee clauses for money-making?
i don’t work directly with these guidelines, but i’m told that whoever does maintenance has to follow the maintenance intervals dictated by boeing alone.
if a plane doesn’t experience much wear, the intervals can be elongated. in addition, the maintenance company can change certain parts of the maintenance if they have the right qualifications.
but no one really checks every single nut and bolt, so delta could’ve also been sloppy.
So, you’re saying that the intervals set by Boeing are too long?
He does and he is pretty much talking out of his arse. Every thing that is written down In aviation usually has a really solid foundation, on why it is written down in that way.
I don’t say that a plainly wrong maintenance guide is not to blame here. I’m saying that the much more likely reason, lies in less definable areas. Like bad maintenance crew training or undiscovered faults in the maintance processes, like storing badly labeled bolts with similar threading but different tolerances near each other.
may be, it could also mean that boeing didn’t adequately specify the kind and amount of maintenance that has to be done. it could also mean that delta changed the maintenance procedure so much that this failure could occur.
there have been many cases where either has led to catastrophic failure
Because otherwise airlines buy different planes. All airplane models have extremely detailed maintenance schemas with alternative procedures described where possible. And minimum equipment lists that describes exactly what must work and what is “okay” to be broken to still fly. And it’s on FAA to make sure Delta is following these manuals. So in the end the blame is on Boeing for either bad parts, lasting shorter than required or prescribing insufficient maintenance procedures. Or it’s on FAA for not doing ther duty in making sure the procedures are followed. Of course if Delta hasn’t followed the procedures, blame is on them too, but only ever in combination with either Boeing or FAA.
Isn’t Boeing QA supposed to inspect the plane and sign it off after maintenance?
No, they make the guides but don’t monitor them, which would be too costly (so much employees needed) and bureaucratic
I thought that there were specific “critical” operations that would require them (Delta, Boeing, or both) to record an entry in Boeing’s Collaborative Manufacturing Execution Systems (CMES) database. But I’m discovering this field, so I don’t know if they make a difference in this context between before and after delivery, and if the normal plane maintenance is covered by the same processes or not, and that’s why I’m asking, and not stating.
However, if one doesn’t know more than me, stating isn’t more correct.
Well, they probably register repairs in databases, but they definitely don’t send people to check every single thing. Airlines also might contract Boeing to do some bigger repairs.
I don’t see how a repair that causes the nose of a plane to “fall off” would not be considered a “bigger repair”…
I’m not saying that Boeing would be involved in the replacement of a tire from the landing gear. But something major enough to make the actual nose of the plane to literally fall off? That sounds important enough to me.
The wheel near the nose fell off, not the nose itself smh
OK I’m officially too tired to actually contribute to Lemmy. I’ll be on my way… 😭
Why would they?
Required by law? I dunno, im guessing here.
How many Boeing planes are out there vs number of employees?
Because of regulations, because of contracts, because of a myriad reasons I won’t waste my time listing here.
The point is that they have been in business for over a century, that the aerospace industry is heavily regulated, and so I somewhat expect them to have processes in place and responsibilities to make sure the planes are delivered and remain according to their design specification.
And you don’t strike me as someone who knows more than me (a total newbie) on the matter, so maybe we stop wasting each other’s time on a pointless argument about shit that is absolutely beyond us both. Yeah?
If it’s Boeing, I’m not going.
Your trip is going to get complicated
It’s annoying, sure. But not that difficult. I’ve adjusted my flights coming up recently after the “door” issue to swap to airlines using Airbus.
Have you seriously made flight changes because of a single incident? Golly, I hope you walked to the airport instead of driving. Those cars are death traps.
Live and let live. Their choice doesn’t have any impact on you
Yes I did.
Between door bolts missing, virgin airlines missing wing bolts, this nose wheel, etc
It almost feels like some kind of related systemic error in the very thorough maintenance documentation required for aircrafts, or a large scale sabotage of some sort.
Any regulatory agencies that enforce this sort of stuff being defunded, understaffed, or de-toothed in the last 4-8 years?
That’s what this smells like, and we should really be getting ourselves ready for more of this in other industries.
I don’t know about the regulatory side, but Boeing gutted their experienced engineering corps starting about 10 years ago. In the pursuit of profit of course. I think we’re seeing the effects of that finally coming to the fore.
My understanding of the role of the regulatory agencies for stuff like this is that they can ground a model of plane if they believe there’s a systemic issue. Like we saw with the MAX.
It feels like they’re using the Lego sorting robots to assemble the kit for a plane…
Maybe Delta should’ve gotten the input of the focus group from I Think You Should Leave when trying to determine what they should do with their maintenance dollars.
No space for mother in law.
Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
Then what is typical, I wonder?
I think the nose not falling off is typical
Tip-ical.
Not during maintenance but while it was waiting for takeoff…
The old saying, “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going”, it just needs slightly tweaked to be accurate today XD
In fairness, the 757 was designed when Boeing was still engineering focused and is one of the best commercial aircraft ever produced. This airframe, N672DL, is 32 years old, so it was almost certainly an issue with Delta’s maintenance. It was also quickly repaired and returned to service the next day.
No one was criticizing Airbus when one of their aircraft was found the other day missing fasteners before a flight: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/nyc-bound-flight-canceled-passenger-31941807.amp
If its Boeing I ain’t landing doesn’t have the same ring.
If it’s Boeing, I’m not going.
Now make like a tree, and get the heck outta here.
McFly! Hello!
And, every Boeing ever has landed. Some in suboptimal approaches.
“If its Airbus, its the best bus”
All kidding aside, the passenger experience is a lot better anyway. Overhead storage bins on the newer airbus planes is a hell of a lot better, not to mention the infotainment systems that airlines seem to opt for. The way they integrate and function vs the Boeing dreamliners is a pretty stark contrast.
I dunno, the 777ER is a great long distance plane, but the A320 is also a good experience. I really think Boeing fucked up with keeping that old workhorse the 737 around at the behest of pilots and customers. Especially since the 777 is (knocking on wood) as safe as it gets, no hull losses from internal factors as of today.
Boeing’s mismanagement is not just a 737 problem: It’s a USA problem, they are the ones that make our jets, missiles, and manage our first strike capacity. These are things that much like our planes, cannot fail. EVER.
Boeing laid off about 900 QA people back in 2019. Now they are reaping the rewards
On some Boeing aircraft, the nose wheel will actually come off when the autopilot system overcompensates during takeoff and crashes the plane straight into the ground. There were aome small news stories about it a few years back.
It’s even known that the nose itself can come off if the autopilot overcompensates while in flight and crashes the plane into the ground.
Are you sure? This makes it sound like every time the plane crashes into the ground because of autopilot overcompensation, its a good bet to assume the nose itself has already come off.
