Boeing doors held in place by a single cable tie

The preliminary accident investigation report has come up with a picture taken after closing the plug door that afterwards departed from a Alaska 737 MAx 9 in the air. It shows it being held down by a a cable tie. THere is speculation that this would be enough to stop the door from sliding up and being able to eject for a number of flights sine there woud be litle presure on it as oon as the plane takes off and outside air pressure locks it onto its stopping pads.

It could also be that the cable tie held the bag of roller stopper bolts that was to be installed by a later shift but that the last part never happened.

There is a case for ripping out the floor of that particular Alaska 737 Max9 and see if anything that the investigation has so far not found have slipped down along the wall and is now laying in a hidden area that can't be checked otherwise. 

Another worrying picture is of a stopper bolt installed but with 2 washers. This is proably so the castelated nut can lign up with the hole in the bolt and the split pin secured in such a way that the castellated nut can grip it. But what it really means is the bolt used was too long. Again that the bolt was not ordered to specific spec. 

When a bolt is used as a stopper and not holding 2 pieces together for the first a clevis pin should really have ben used instead. But if that is not the case the bolt should have been very specific in how much unthreaded part it should have to avoid overtightening and weaken the material it goes through. In addition the lenght of thread to the hole for the split pin should have been exact so only 1 one washer was needed. 

All these shortcuts and probably cost saving practices are very worrying. What else is done in a shoddy way that we haven't heard about yet. Or only halve done because of constant rotation of the people actually building the planes. 

1 measly day of safety briefings instead of actual production came up with 1 whistleblower and wrongly drilled holes. What would 2 days have come up with. It is a worry that more and more ex Boeing manufacturing managers come out and ay they would no longer feel safe in flying with the planes their ex employer now produce

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FareAutoCalc for calculating airline seat prices for a profitable result

Helpfull for airline pricing teams, actually just one person needed now, FareAutoCalc is an Android app that helps you set prices to rech profit on all your routes.  In its simplest form you enter the costs per flight, number of seats, how many fare classes (different price levels) you would like and at what load in percent you want to break even. Then it calculates the prices for each fareclass and the number of seats in same. You can manually enter the price rise scale for how much in percent you want the fare to rise between each fare clas. Or the app can do this for you using an even step in percent scale. It also has a Cost Detail page where you can enter detailed costs. This allows you to enter a number of set costs that could be the same for all flights, and some variable costs that varies by example flight distance. In principle its for a low cost carrier that don't have different seat classses and only differs in fare classes with different price levels where the price go
Read more

Flyr aftermath

The cleanup after Flyr has brought to the front a number of ways the airline wasted its investors money. A number of staff had fancifull titles whcih point to an overflow of staff that wasn't completely necessary for a small startup company. Lots of VP's under the Chief level. Maybe some of the urge to comit to more planes was due to an overhiring of well titled staff that needed someone to manage which could only be justified by becoming a larger airline.  Where the ex-Norwegian managmenet building the backoffice of the new airline Flyr based on what the much larger airline Norwegian had. An airline that also went under unable to manage its debt or comitments, before being resurrected. A plane needs sa certain amount of pilots and cabinstaff to fly a certain schedule. It is the backoffice saving are to be had. Just as many staff in the back as flying staff seems excessive. Specially when one knows large parts of its ground handling and maintenance were outsourced A lot of effo
Read more

SAS management have sold the company out under the shareholders for next to nothing, or even less

SAS went out to 200 potential investors and all but a small handfull turned them down. They where eventually grouped into 2 constellations and the one chosen consisted of one airline with no money and pretty much no profit plus a couple of financiers offering loans on bad terms.  One day it could come out that the only ones ponying up actual cash for refinancing SAS is the danish state, that was investing no matter who else was in the buying group. That percentage of the upfront cash should leave the danes feeling very shortchanged when it comes to what they get in percentage of ownership. The problems with the consortium chosen came to the surface pretty much on day 1 when they wanted 3 million to flow the wrong way for SAS.  Anybody that asks for 3 million to consider coffing up 5 billion is as unserious as it gets. The actual buying airline Air France KLM comes up with no cash and the rest of the winning bidders group are just loan givers on generous terms for themselves. Obviously
Read more