Part of the wall fell off of an airplane. While it was flying. I would have assumed that would be hard. Like I would have assumed the wall of the plane is stuck on there pretty good
@mcc while I was reading in bed last night I came across an aviation nerd who pointed out that this blanking panel was put there for Alaska Airlines' specific flight config, and normally there's a whole emergency exit there. and the process for swapping the panel was done in a way that avoids requiring aircraft recertification. hmm, now where have I heard Boeing say that before?
(note: I'm paraphrasing as a layman here; I don't know the aviation industry specific terminology)
(This is me linking something else, which you are clearly fully aware of, so I can boost it, in case someone else somewhere is not already aware of it: https://mstdn.ca/@UrbanEdm/111711262904589026 )
@mcc if folks want to learn more about MCAS without reading a thousand pages of FAA incident reports, I found "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing" to be a pretty good documentary on the 737 MAX debacle. It avoids a lot of the silly over-dramatic presentation you would usually expect from an American-made documentary, and focuses heavily on the organisational, political, and financial factors that led to the disasters, with just enough broad technical explanation to back it up.
@gsuberland@mcc As a long time Seattle resident, Boeing’s global scale failures have always been evident on a local basis. They had multiple strikes that they had to settle on the union’s terms because they are terrible at strategy. They sent work to states without union requirements to save money and guess where tons of problems across many aircraft happened? They moved their HQ for SOCIAL REASONS: leadership didn’t want to feel awkward in Seattle.
@gsuberland This is very common, and it wasn't specific to Alaska. These kinds of augmented configurations are very common, and not some nefarious Boeing plot. Airbus does it too, and it has nothing to do with recertification. It has to do with not creating a dangerous situation during an emergency in a lower density passenger seating config. If this were an operable emergency exit it would have created a choke point during evac due to the seats blocking it.
@robert the point they were making is not that the practice of changing the exit count was bad, but that Boeing's implementation of it was done in a way that avoided having the exit-deleted configuration certified.
@gsuberland It literally isn't about airframe certifications. That is a complete misunderstanding of what requires a certification. Passenger compartment changes aren't part of airworthiness certificates, it has to do with the pilot interfaces and flight control systems.
@robert yikes. if they're free to make arbitrary changes to safety-critical panels in the passenger compartment without review, then there's a serious gap in regulatory oversight.
@gsuberland I mean this very respectfully, but you just don't know what you are talking about. These configurations are vetted and certified, they just have nothing to do with what you are implying. This is almost certainly a manufacturing defect, not a systemic issue with some imagined willy-nilly "arbitrary" changes you seem to be implying. Talk to a pilot, not a layman in the media or YouTube, please.
@robert you're right, I don't know! which is why I was clear about the source being someone else. but you've made two mistakes in your response:
assuming that the words I used were intended to read as their strict definitions in aviation industry jargon, rather than the popular meaning.
rather presumptiously assuming that I didn't check that the person who said it worked in the aviation industry, which they do. they wrote a thread on here, not YouTube comments.
@gsuberland The comment of yours that I replied to tried to equate a serious lapse of protocol (the issues with MCAS on the MAX 737s) with a completely different situation entirely, one that ALL airliner manufacturers do, worldwide. You were trying to get a cheap dunk but you were simply wrong. It's not a problem, but your defense just sounds ignorant to anyone who actually understands the industry and the process. You clearly just have a problem with Boeing, and that's fair...
@robert I don't have any axe to grind with Boeing, beyond the same passing distaste any random person would have over the 737 MAX thing.
you're still misunderstanding what the original person was saying though. they were very clearly not saying "Boeing removed an emergency exit and that's bad"; they actually explained why that is done, and I even mentioned it elsewhere in this thread. their assertion was specifically that Boeing cut regulatory corners while doing that.
@robert you seem to be interpreting this as "Boeing cut corners by removing an emergency exit" which is very much not what I'm saying, or what the original person was saying.
@robert so please, kindly, stop shouting at me because you misunderstood the content of the post.
idk what your background is (your bio doesn't say anything about aviation) but if you do have any actual insight into the processes involved I'd be happy to hear them. I'm 100% happy to cede that I don't have a single clue about aviation certification processes and am just repeating what more qualified people said on the matter. the more informed opinions, the merrier.
@mcc also, to be clear, since it came up a few times in the replies: removing an emergency exit is 100% normal and not the issue here. the number of emergency exit rows is set by the seating arrangement, so for all-economy configs you want more exit rows, and for less dense (eco+ / business class) seating you want fewer.
the specific allegation being made was that Boeing cut regulatory corners while making that (otherwise entirely normal) exit-deleted configuration change.
@gsuberland@mcc this guy has just published a 25-minute deep dive into 737 mid-cabin exit door configurations. Skip to 21:51 for specific details of this incident:
Basically, the door was replaced with a "plug" - effectively a door which is bolted shut. Except it looks like it wasn't bolted shut very well in this aircraft, which was only certified for flight in October...
@russss@mcc yup. the person I saw talking about it described it as standard procedure for changing the emergency exit count to match seat configuration, just gone very wrong in this case (and, allegedly, because Boeing cut corners to avoid certain regulatory procedures that are normally required when doing this kind of thing)
@gsuberland@mcc if I had to guess, someone at the factory forgot to torque the bolts up. But the pattern of incidents does not reflect well for Boeing's overall safety culture.
looking through news reports, it looks like they laid off 2100 people in 2012, 700 engineers in 2013, 600 factory workers in December 2014, 1300+ engineers and technicians in 2017 (short while before the first MCAS incident), between 7000 and 13000 people in late 2020 and early 2021, and another 2000-ish in Feb 2023. they had around 75k people working under the commercial airplanes division in 2015-16 so that's 20-25% of the workforce cut since then.
@gsuberland@mcc he's just released another video (!) which makes it pretty clear that they forgot to install the bolts which held the door plug on. There's no way it would have come off so cleanly otherwise.
I think it's more that the number of emergency doors is dictated by the number of seats, which are fitted by the air carrier rather than Boeing.
So if you have ordered one of these planes but do not plan to max out the number of seats, you can order that door as a plug rather than a door. It is possible to switch it to a proper door later if you need to change the number of seats.
@mcc before i clicked the link i was like 'well i assumed that too but i guess it depends on the size of the part' and then the article loaded and. wow. that's a big part
@mcc I've read that in a few stories and I'm just hoping that it was, like, draped loosely around them or something because the logistics otherwise are too weird for me.
@mcc it's not the most important component of justice in this case but boeing should have to pay for the therapy of that kid and everyone else on that plane for the rest of their lives
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