A United Airlines flight to Boston was diverted to Denver because of an issue with the plane's wing.
Passenger sees Boeing 757-200 “wing coming apart” mid-air — United flight from San Francisco to Boston makes emergency landing in Denver::A United Airlines flight to Boston was diverted to Denver because of an issue with the plane's wing.
A believe there have been quite a few articles published with interviews from former Boeing execs with who were around when the company went from engineer ran to finance ran. One of them I remember the former executive said part of why they will continue to not trust Boeing is they are only grounding planes to solve one problem at a time after it's caused massive failure and not trying to engineer and solve all the problems they can so these failures stop happening mid flight.
"Sitting right on the wing and the noise after reaching altitude was much louder than normal. I opened the window to see the wing looking like this," user octopus_hug wrote. "How panicked should I be? Do I need to tell a flight crew member?
Holy shit, redditors are a special breed. Yes, you should probably tell someone.
"hi sorry, I'm sitting in 20A, and, I don't want to make a fuss or anything, but I'd appreciate if you took a peek out of my window,... Put me at ease that something I noticed on the wing is normal."
This occurred on a 29 year old plane. This is almost certainly just a one-off issue. Unless it starts happening frequently with other 757s, it’s nothing to be overly concerned about. And in that case, the NTSB would figure out why it’s happening and issue a directive.
Planes are designed on a “Swiss cheese” model. Swiss cheese (as Americans call any variety resembling Emmental) is full of holes, but you can’t usually see all the way through a block of it. On a plane, something might fail and you can’t always prevent that, but you can make sure that there is enough redundancy that if something does go wrong you’re still covered. For something to cause a plane to crash, the “holes” have to line up so something could pass all the way through the “cheese.”
I wish the article said how old the plane is. A lot of Boeing jets are 50+ years old and at that point, you have to blame the airline. But this article doesn’t say.
At least in Europe, passengers jets are new because more fuel efficient at the "normal" speed. These old jets are then transformed in cargo where they go very slow so fuel efficiency goes up by other means (and the old jet is way cheaper).
This was a passenger plane so i doubt it was anywhere close to 50 years old
Where does it say that the airline didn't send the plane for maintenance?
Airlines don't do their own maintenance, they send them back to Boeing.
A plane isn't like a car, you don't just have a go at changing the oil or fixing the brakes yourself and then hope for the best, you send it to the approved place when scheduled or you don't fly.
Where did you get your information that airliners send planes back to Boeing for maintenance? My quick search tells me that they generally don't, and they either do it themselves, or rely on third parties called Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) providers for heavier maintenance. In the case of United airlines, their MRO provider is called United Technical Operations, their own division.
This is not true at all. You're right that planes aren't like cars, but airlines absolutely do their own maintenance. The maintenance program is initially provided by Boeing and modified by the airline based on statistical monitoring of issues.
The entire field of reliability-centered maintenance comes right out of aircraft maintenance in the 60s and 70s, term itself was penned by people working for united. It's responsible for massive improvements in aircraft reliability, there's a reason that you can point out specific events like this in the modern era.
On a different note, a lot of the guys I worked with out of uni were all aircraft mechanics who had served in the air force.
Eh, idk if plane age really matters. They are completely disassembled and reassembled per standard every year to ensure that they are good to go.
Student planes are like 1960s, give or take.
E: I'm being told by comments that they do not do teardowns. Idk. I fly planes, not work on them. My CFIs have told me they do annual teardowns. So.. Idk. Maybe, maybe not?
There are inspections and flight worthiness manuals. Nobody is going to complete tear down a fucking jet and bolt it together again, that's literally less secure.
You should read what's done in an annual. For GA, aopa had a good article recently talking about doing the right maintenance because doing everything your AP suggests may be more intrusive and less healthy for the plane. It's not as aggressive you're claiming.
Also as others note, age matters in determining where the issue came from. Eg this almost certainly isn't a Boeing issue.
As a new pilot I really recommend watching the show Mayday Aircraft Investigations, it's very informative. The accidents are for commercial aircraft, but still I think seeing all the details and the root causes and breakdown in process is enlightening even as a private pilot.
Still, it's old enough that problems like this should be attributed to lack of maintenance on the airline's part rather than an issue in the design or manufacture of the plane.
That said, commercial airliners can go for decades just fine as long as they are maintained properly. Newer planes will be more efficient and have some newer features, but a tried-and-true airframe that has been well maintained is worth keeping around.
Dear passangers, fasten your seatbelts and don't look on the left side. If you already did, don't worry, self-dissasembling bus from Saint Petesburg does not fly near us, in fact this is our left wing.
Holy cow. My sisters VW Beetle did this once, too. It was quite fresh out of inspection/repair, and whatever those guys did to the motor, they forgot to pull the screws tight again...
BOSTON - A United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Boston was diverted to Denver on Monday because of an issue with the plane's wing - and a worried passenger on board captured the apparent problem on video.
"Just about to land in Denver with the wing coming apart on the plane," Kevin Clarke says in a video shared with CBS News.
Clarke said the wing issue became apparent after takeoff from San Francisco.
The passengers were put on a different plane and landed in Boston early Tuesday morning.
Boeing has been under scrutiny since a door panel on a different kind of aircraft, a 737 Max 9, blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
Earlier this month, the head of the FAA pledged to use more people to monitor aircraft manufacturing and hold Boeing accountable for any safety rule violations.
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I was about to say. There's a million concerns over environmental and economic effects (that I'll own up to ignoring when visiting family or exploring), but safety is still wayyy down the list. The statistic about being 20x more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than the flight itself still holds very firmly true (and I'm being SUPER conservative about those numbers in case recent events tilt it, it's still a ~800x per-mile ratio).