alt Hacker NewsBoeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says
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The headline is missing an important bit.
Boeing knew of the flaw, and sent a letter to airlines about it. In 2011.
Some are forgetting how risk in technology works: No technology is designed or operated without flaws; that's an absurd approach and impossible to implement.
To reduce negative outcomes, we use risk management: assessing the likely lifetime cost of the flaw, and taking cost-effective measures to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. As a familiar example, redundant mass storage drives are much more cost-effective than high-reliability mass storage drives.
I wonder on what basis Boeing thought that damage to a load-bearing part could be safely ignored? I hope it wasn't "nothing bad has happened for 50+ years, so it's unlikely to happen now"?
I’m guessing that manufacturers know of lots of flaws in the parts they make.
Alternative to paywall: https://archive.ph/8xF1w
Isn't it a mostly Boeing project that is going to go around the moon next month? I'm really afraid for that crew.
Every five years feels too infrequent. These are planes that are 30 years old and have done 100,000 hours of flying. Apparently UPS policy is to keep them around for about 35 years to maximize the ROI. But maybe once they hit a particular age they need to be inspected deeply every few months.
I am not an expert, however. Can metal fatigue be detected with such infrequent inspection?
Insane that we can have places like the skunk works create the sr71 and operate on shoe string budgets but the largest passenger plane company in the world can’t accurately assess risk on planes far under the former planes Mach 3 record
One thing that worries me about the current political climate is that everything can be politicized. Do we know that behind the scenes Boeing wasn't paying a bribe for better treatment in the report? Or do we know that this report is especially damning because they refused to bribe? I guess we never knew for sure but the level of corruption now is so high I just have no faith that there hasn't been meddling in these investigations. It's the pernicious effect of corruption in a society and I don't think we're ready for it.
I recall a lot of fingerpointing minutes after the crash by people blaming the presumably foreign maintenance crew.
Even now there is a lot of uncertainty around this crash, maintenance - or lack thereof - or even wrong maintenance could still be a factor. But given the location of the part asking for a 'visual inspection' is a pretty strange move, the part is all but inaccessible when it is in its normal position and even with an endoscope it would be pretty hard to determine whether or not the part had weakened. That's just not going to show up visually until it is way too late unless the part has been especially prepared to announce the presence of hairline cracks.
You'd have to disassemble a good chunk of the wing to gain access to the part based on the pictures I've seen of how it all holds together when assembled.