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Boeing 737 Max 9: United Airlines finds loose bolts during inspections (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 8 months ago by nekandro@lemmy.ml to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

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[-] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 101 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is leading an investigation into the incident, said pilots had reported pressurisation warning lights on three previous flights made by the specific Alaska Airlines Max 9 involved in the incident.

As bad as it is if a manufacturing issue caused a piece to fall off an airplane, there's a huge amount of negligence in an airline continuing to fly an airplane that has triggered pressure warnings multiple times without investigating and resolving the issue.

[-] JillyB@beehaw.org 15 points 8 months ago

Agreed. This is a multi-layered fuckup. The manufacturer probably didn't tighten things down all the way, their QA didn't catch the critical defect, the plane inspectors didn't catch it during inspection, the airline didn't ground it after a pressurization warning, the pilot flew a plane with a known issue. There are several cultures of complacency at play. Hopefully the FAA can scare everyone into flying right.

[-] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The reason I added the "if" is because I didn't see any information about age and don't know the specifics of the engineering/specs. Bolts needing the be checked annually and tightened every 5 on average could be perfectly reasonable with how much stress is on airplanes. There's a reason frequent inspection is enforced more heavily on airplanes, and it's not just because failures mean potentially falling out of the sky.

But yeah, it's entirely possible they fucked up, but it's for sure ~~United~~ Alaska did.