More adventures in aviation with Boeing
If it's not the stuck landing pedal in Newark, it's the falling tire in San Francisco (pictured) or the toxic fumes in Portland. Another great week! But they're hard at work on their EBITDA, so there's that.
UPDATE, 4:10 p.m.: And here's another one!
How much of this is on the airlines cutting maintenance vs. original manufacturing defects? I would bet both are to blame depending on the incidents.
ReplyDeleteJohn Oliver did a good segment on Boeing's incompetence (negligence?).
Stop blaming Boeing for every single incident without doing a little research.
ReplyDeleteThe tire on the SFO-KIX was from registration #N226UA which is a 22-year old 777. The Houston B38M registration #N27290 is a 4-year old 737-800 MAX. Blaming Boeing for these incidents would be like blaming Ford for the tires coming off years after you bought the car. These are maintenance issues.
AS 1437 cargo door involved registration #N402AS which is an 11-year old B739. This plane, like the others has undergone regular maintenance by the airline and pointing a finger at Boeing for these incidents is ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteThe Alaska cargo door appears to have been a bad spring which apparently broke upon landing.
I'm old enough to remember when sanctions meant a bunch of Russian airliners were going to start falling from the sky. Turns out it was capitalism.
ReplyDeleteFatuous
DeleteAll seem to be airline maintenance issues or pilot goof ups, and not direct Boeing issues. But I know it’s cool to bash Boeing right now, and blame anything and everything on Boeing…so whatever.
ReplyDeleteBoeing is a lousy corporation like any other; cut rate labor in the dirty south & ship stuff all over, especially since the 2011 machinist strike.
ReplyDeleteProfits are low, nationalization like the railroads for WW1 (not exactly a worthy cause, but the feds nationalizing because the railroads couldn’t get their act together then (or now, although, like air, things have been considerably safer for some time) was real) in the 21st century isn’t happening.
That said, I expect various things to get a lot jankier that are maintenance related with our crumbling infrastructure & times of low profits & stagflation malaise that it’s hard to blame Boeing singularly for.
Those little Embraer E-175 jets are nice; but they’re getting old/long in the tooth by now too.
No middle seat & more cabin storage space, get up & down quicker, quieter (flies a little slower at cruise, but so what?), faster to board a smaller plane, fly direct between smaller cities with smaller/somewhat less awful airports (some of us hate airports & flying/aren’t lizards) since the airlines will make you so miserable these days with layovers & delays anyway?
The railroads are rushing everything on safety & maintenance too these days.
Even in the Europe where road & rail safety is often objectively a ton better than here (I’m no fan of Europe, for the most part, either) , they still have the Gotthard base tunnel partially closed from a missed hot wheel bearing that’ll take years to finish repairing.
Imagine that much lost commerce, even sans injuries?
30-40+ years of deregulation of airlines & consolidation + thin margins & cutting anything they can & being lucky/fortunate in the meantime, why the surprise?
Airlines are so deregulated & have such awful service + banned short flights in Europe where the high speed rail is getting built out.
Passenger Airplane manufacturers guessed wrong that big planes would sell.
More small planes that are old with more cycles on them with more direct flights with airlines /maintenance crews spread real thin?
Turns out, people have so little time off & don’t want to be risk delay that they’ll just pay the ~20-30% more to just fly direct (and many working age younger people can’t afford to have kids even if they want to anyway, so they’re often flying alone or with only one person, anyway, not with a whole family vacation with their brats (although ‘therapy dogs,’ maybe (which I’m becoming a complete republican about (although, if I had my way, short of private jet, I’d say only the responsible & healthy childless/petless age ~30-55 who aren’t total animals/won’t sneeze on me should be allowed to share a plane with me at all?), so the ‘fly on a somewhat smaller plane direct’ makes sense.
It’s a bleak picture.