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.

  • arefx@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    What the fuck is going on at Boeing? Are they cutting that many corners?

    • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.”

        • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          This “one-off” issue was spotted on dozens of 737s.

          This issue with a damaged wing slat on this particular 29-year-old 757 was spotted on dozens of 737s? Do you have a source for that?

          Unless you’re confusing this with the 737 MAX 9 door plug issue. That is not a one-off, that is a manufacturing/assembly issue. And that’s my point. The door plug situation is a systemic problem on many brand new planes, whereas this story is about a relatively small issue on a 29-year-old plane.

          Something being damaged on a 757 shouldn’t shake people’s confidence in Boeing. Shit going wrong in the design and manufacturing of the 737 MAX series should.

    • pulaskiwasright@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • diffusive@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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

    • supercriticalcheese@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Nothing for this case at least.

      It’s completely unrelated to Boeing per se. Likely a maintenance issue, maybe repair done wrong.