Live data from Hacker News

United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

theaircurrent.com

261–270 of 773 posts

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#261
post #131
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

" Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. " " Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wouldn't dismissing discussion of hiring practices on product quality be trampling curiosity for political or ideological battle?

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#262

How is Airbus doing meanwhile? I didn't hear about any production quality issues in their aircraft.

Half the A320neo fleet needs to be grounded for 250-300 days over the next year due to engine manufacturing issues affecting their wear (which tbf is entirely Pratt & Whitney's fault). Airbus settled a $2bn suit last year with Qatar Airways over A350 paint jobs so bad they grounded them and refused to take scheduled deliveries. You'll hear more about Boeing than the rest of the industry put together because this is H…

So Airbus has fault for a paint job? While they should do better, that sounds a lot safer than airplanes losing pieces or crashing down to me.

> You'll hear more about Boeing than the rest of the industry put together because this is HN...

That's not it.

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#263

I have a dumb question: why "plug" the doors at all? Why not burn a row of seats and have an extra safety door? Was this at request of the airlines to "meet" minimum safety standards or was there a reason why it's "better" to have less exit doors?

If the regulators don't require the extra exit door, then the airlines would rather put in an extra row for more profits. The extra safety door is only needed depending on seating configuration.

And this just blew every bit of profit you could make off those extra seats.

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The A320neo family has had four ground fatalities and one hull loss accident as of November 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320neo_family A320neo is the direct competitor to the MAX. So yeah, they're doing pretty well.

i'm not sure are you being sarcastic, there were no fatalities on the airplane. but once motorcycle and another time a firetruck crashed with the plane and people died.

I am not being sarcastic. Fatalities were unfortunate, but not due to the airplane design or manufacturing.

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#266

It seems there's a sense of malaise falling over everything and everyone in the USA. People at large simply cannot be bothered to care about anything, including torque specs for freakin' AIRLINERS

I know of a pretty famous car tuner in the US (I won't get too specific for various reasons) and despite most people in my community going to him for service over the years, multiple people have come out and proved he rarely if ever torques anything to spec. For the longest time he even allowed customers to watch in the shop space as he worked on their cars and he'd hand-torque many things that the car manual was ver…

I imagine at least part of this is that specs (and documentation generally) just suck now. It's nigh impossible to sort out which bits are CYA legalese, and which bits are "no, actually, do this or else ".

That obviously isn't the problem with airplane manufacturing, and maybe not for car mechanics either. But it's totally endemic in the consumer world.

"Do not operate while driving" on car HUDs. "Do not consume if pregnant" on perfectly safe OTC medications. "Do not continue to ride after a crash" on bike frames.

It's not surprising most of this is just ignored now -- there's no information content. The documentation is nothing more than a list of things for which the manufacturer would like not to be liable, and the marginal cost of adding to that list is ~0. It will grow until we run out of room in the manual / space on the packaging.

"Store between 68 and 75 F." Or what? Is that a "must follow or else death", or a "it may reduce efficacy 0.5%" or a "we've never run a sufficiently powerful study under any other conditions, but there's no theoretical reason it should matter"? It matters quite a bit to me which!

I don't see how we can hope to have good-faith communication under such a heavy threat of litigation. I would not be surprised if /that/ turns out to be relevant to the Boeing issue, even if the rest is unrelated.

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#267

Such a crappy aircraft - can we just get rid of these already?

Force it to develop actually new airplane, not rely on grandfathered type license from 60 years ago.

I don't know that they could. We're talking about Boeing, they're the sort of MBA hive that's embarrassed to have to employ engineers.

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this reassuring?! Are you sure you don't mean "vindicating" or similar? Hard to understand how anyone could feel reassured by this.

It's "reassuring" in the sense that I'm reassured I've been making the right decision... but yeah, "vindicating" is probably a more appropriate choice of word :)

What you're describing is validation.

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#269
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They generally don't disassemble the entire plane every time they get inspected...

They do disassemble the entire plane for heavy maintenance checks every 6-12 years. The MAX 9 has been in operation for just a few weeks though...

That’s pretty incredible. After a heavy maintenance breakdown, what percentage of the plane gets replaced? Or is everything already on a routine maintenance schedule so the intention is to visually identify unexpectedly failing parts?

Re: United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those don’t sound very reassuring either. What’s to say that this is the only bolt with incorrect torque spec, or if this part is bad why not others, and if bad parts are not being caught during quality control then what other parts will be next to fail prematurely? And if there are unexpected vibrations in that area, why wasn’t it discovered during test flights? What other vibration issues would they not have accoun…

To be fair, I read recently that another issue with MAX 7 was discovered through flight testing. The issue is that now Boeing wants to exempt plane from safety rules…

The de-icing button issue?
Post reply on HN