Defective Boeing flight catches fire, hospitalizing 10 victims on board (video)

Ha. Yes.
Though that is also another problem. I hope Delta doesn’t have to send all its Airbus planes to France (or Senegal) to find repair crews that can read the French manuals.

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The Boeing Starliner is just the capsule. The rocket is an Atlas/Centaur, made by Lockheed (since the 50s).

Issues with the Lockheed rocket.

If you’re going to criticize Boeing, I would recommend criticizing them for something they actually did wrong… for example, falsifying data from manufacturing quality tests.

That is my take on this as well.

Yes. If you look at (for example) the Aviation Herald, you’ll see that almost every day, some airliner somewhere has a minor problem that requires it to return to its departure airport or make a precautionary landing before reaching its destination: an engine shuts down, the airplane is hit by hail or birds, the fuselage doesn’t pressurize, an instrument shows funny numbers, a cockpit window cracks, there is smoke or a burning smell on board, or the airplane is damaged on the ground from taxiing into a runway light or whatever… Literally every day. There are thousands and thousands of jetliners out there, making thousands and thousands of flights per day. Just the A320 and 737 fleets add up to about 17,000 airplanes, which fly about 120,000 flights each day. So, if you’re looking for a story about a minor problem on a Boeing airliner on any given day, you will find it.

Injuries are very rare, though.

Boeing designs the airplanes for a certain number of flights. That number is equivalent to about 25 years of flying on average (so, the number of flights is higher for the smaller airplanes that do several flights a day, and lower for the bigger airplanes that do only one or two flights per day)… but if an airliner flies fewer flights per day than Boeing’s estimate/average, then it can easily take 30 or 40 years to get to that number of flights. By that point, increased maintenance requirements and the availability of new airplanes that burn much less fuel causes the older airplanes to be retired for economic reasons (with some exceptions).

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Technical translation is highly specialised work that requires appropriate scientific and engineering knowledge as well as language fluency, which means that it is expensive. Manufacturers are not going to pay to translate thousands of pages of documentation if they can instead pass the costs onto airlines by obliging them to employ English-speaking technicians.

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They are required to do so in medical devices. I doubt regulations are less stringent in commercial aviation. And I have experience contracting out technical translation services. They are expensive to average people but would cost less than one flight’s worth of fuel for an airline.

This stinks of avgaslighting. I noticed your list did not include bursting into flame.

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55k flight hours or 90k cycles

This is, of course, irrelevant, unless there is any evidence of it being a manufacturing defect instead of maintenance issues. The age of the plane would tend to indicate that manufacturing defects are unlikely in this case.

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Boeing doesn’t make the engines, so the engine fire was caused by either poor maintenance or a defect in the engine itself like a cracked fan or turbine blade. (edit) inspection of engine parts is the responsibility of the airline’s maintenance department or contractor.

Boeing doesn’t make the tires, either. They outsource that work to a company called Goodyear. Tire failures are usually, once again poor maintenance (including end of life), manufacturing defects, or they ran over something sharp on the runway.

Landing gear failures happen on all makes of aircraft (edit) and are a result of systems failures or defective parts or poor maintenance, so to pin it on Boeing exclusively, you’d need data showing an inordinate number of failures on Boeing aircraft.

Oh, and f*** you Boing Boing for forcing me to drop back into the comments to defend Boeing from your pronounced ignorance of all things related to aviation. I don’t want to defend Boeing ffs.

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If it makes you feel any better:

The decision to outsource essential functions and to keep cutting corners to the detriment of overall life safety is 100% on the head honchoes at Boeing.

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Well at least the FAA passed Remote ID for quadcopter/drone hobbyists, which has never caused a human death. That’s good for something, right? Yeah, overregulation…

In the meantime they let Boeing regulate themselves and that does have deaths involved. I think they’ve got their priorities wrong. :thinking:

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That completely ignores design defects, which spec’ ing the engine and it’s control and fuel systems would involve. In my industry, most failures are due to improper instructions (which are the manufacturer’s fault, by default) and design defects. A distant third are manufacturing related.

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But is there any evidence of design defects? That would surely be even bigger news. I thought all the fuss was about cutting corners in manufacturing and maintenance.

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How do you think design defects manifest? Some are observed immediately and lead to redesigns. Others take years or decades to be discovered. And, definitely no, most of Boeing’s problems have been with design, which includes spec’ing and sourcing parts and assemblies. The 737 Max problems are 100% design (and failure to mitigate design flaws with training).

What people seem to miss is that specifying a substandard part IS design. Failing to account for wear over use is a design flaw. Subsystems that don’t work together is a design flaw.

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I’m sure that’s comfort to the people who suffered injuries… /s

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Manufacturing defects were not the reason the Max was grounded you know.

The plane was a death trap, but it wasn’t manufacturing defects.

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I hope all the airlines in the world don’t have to send the planes to America to find repair crews that can read the American manuals…

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The tire bursting is not Boeing’s fault, that is the airline’s fault for poor maintenance.

The MAX was a new (kind of) design and the fatal flaws became clear within a very short time of its introduction. The 737 NG and the 767 are decades old designs with untold millions of flight hours on their clocks - serious design issues would have been identified by now.

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It’s not a “Boeing” flight, it’s an Air Sénégal flight.

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And it’s not the flight that was defective and caught fire either.

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