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While it’s comforting to know that the ultimate outcome of this going unnoticed would have been non-fatal, we don’t yet know whether this was: 1) “after a seri

While it’s comforting to know that the ultimate outcome of this going unnoticed would have been non-fatal, we don’t yet know whether this was: 1) “after a series of maintenance and inspection failures, a passenger noticed something unusual”; or, 2) “the bolts had been inspected on an appropriate schedule and had since gone missing, and a passenger noticed a new defect before the next inspection was scheduled to occur for this non-critical part”. It matters whether it’s 1) or 2), or somewhere in between, and I don’t think we don’t know that yet. Public faith in airlines behaving safely is pretty low, and rightly so. I definitely support “treat as a process failure until determined otherwise” for airlines right now. Looking forward to that determination, regardless.

chris_va 3y ago
It's also possible that the A&P looked at it and decided it could wait, but then after the passengers noticed someone higher up decided it was not worth the brand risk. If the fastener is called out in part 21.31, then it would be a required part, but airplanes _never_ fly with 100% of their parts in working order... this one was not required, so under normal circumstances I would assume they'd fly the plane.
- andix 3y ago
  Yes, this sounds plausible. Maybe the airline did know about the missing bolts and didn't want publicly admit it. If they didn't notice the bolts missing it's a completely different story. If 4 bolts get loose, maybe 50 more go loose soon after. It's not impossible that all of them were not mounted correctly and the first 4 were only the beginning.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wolverine876 3y ago
> this going unnoticed You don't know it was unnoticed. In my profession, I see plenty of flaws that don't need attention, sometimes not immediately, sometimes not ever.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  I’ve been watching a lot of Mentour Pilot on YT lately. I’d never considered it before but he goes into a level of depth in his incident breakdowns to reference the aircraft maintenance log, etc. Perhaps unsurprisingly there’s always something “wrong” or “broken” on a machine as complex as a modern aircraft. He’ll often say “Oh this wasn’t working, this was broken, etc but that’s fine and it had nothing to do with this”. There was a story recently where someone tweeted about a Delta aircraft with chipped paint, expressing alarm. While it’s good to be proactive (especially in light of recent incidents) you’d never hesitate to drive a car with chipped paint…
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    You can stop a car when paint chips clog your air intake and clean it out. A bit more difficult to do if you're at 30.000 feet and 400 knots over the middle of the ocean. That's one of the reasons we take issues with airplanes much more seriously.
    - kkielhofner 3y ago
      Come on... How many times has that happened on a car? It has to be an exceedingly small number if it has ever happened. I wonder how much of the paint would have to chip off to clog an air filter to the point of interfering with operation. Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process. Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. Alaska/Boeing/etc got lucky that there wasn't anyone seated in the two adjacent seats but even then two deaths in 14 years would be an extremely impressive record, and there's no way to know if it would have resulted in death anyway. A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, just maybe, we should consider that tens of billions of people-flights (made up a metric) have taken place over the past 14 years without a single fatality so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously. You can put that safety record up against anything and it comes out ahead by an extremely wide margin. 250k people in the US die every year from medical errors, as one example.

chris_va 3y ago

It's also possible that the A&P looked at it and decided it could wait, but then after the passengers noticed someone higher up decided it was not worth the brand risk. If the fastener is called out in part 21.31, then it would be a required part, but airplanes _never_ fly with 100% of their parts in working order... this one was not required, so under normal circumstances I would assume they'd fly the plane.

andix 3y ago
Yes, this sounds plausible. Maybe the airline did know about the missing bolts and didn't want publicly admit it. If they didn't notice the bolts missing it's a completely different story. If 4 bolts get loose, maybe 50 more go loose soon after. It's not impossible that all of them were not mounted correctly and the first 4 were only the beginning.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wolverine876 3y ago

> this going unnoticed You don't know it was unnoticed. In my profession, I see plenty of flaws that don't need attention, sometimes not immediately, sometimes not ever.

kkielhofner 3y ago
I’ve been watching a lot of Mentour Pilot on YT lately. I’d never considered it before but he goes into a level of depth in his incident breakdowns to reference the aircraft maintenance log, etc. Perhaps unsurprisingly there’s always something “wrong” or “broken” on a machine as complex as a modern aircraft. He’ll often say “Oh this wasn’t working, this was broken, etc but that’s fine and it had nothing to do with this”. There was a story recently where someone tweeted about a Delta aircraft with chipped paint, expressing alarm. While it’s good to be proactive (especially in light of recent incidents) you’d never hesitate to drive a car with chipped paint…
- wkat4242 3y ago
  You can stop a car when paint chips clog your air intake and clean it out. A bit more difficult to do if you're at 30.000 feet and 400 knots over the middle of the ocean. That's one of the reasons we take issues with airplanes much more seriously.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    Come on... How many times has that happened on a car? It has to be an exceedingly small number if it has ever happened. I wonder how much of the paint would have to chip off to clog an air filter to the point of interfering with operation. Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process. Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. Alaska/Boeing/etc got lucky that there wasn't anyone seated in the two adjacent seats but even then two deaths in 14 years would be an extremely impressive record, and there's no way to know if it would have resulted in death anyway. A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, just maybe, we should consider that tens of billions of people-flights (made up a metric) have taken place over the past 14 years without a single fatality so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously. You can put that safety record up against anything and it comes out ahead by an extremely wide margin. 250k people in the US die every year from medical errors, as one example.