United Airlines Jet Loses Wheel in Repeat of March Incident

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-08/united-plane-loses-wheel-after-takeoff-in-repeat-of-march-flight

by rntn • 2 years ago

26 30 2 years ago

rntn• 2 years ago

taylodl3• 2 years ago

Dang! Boeing airplanes are literally falling apart in normal operation! I'm not an aviation expert by any means, but are all these "little problems" indicative of a bigger problem at Boeing? Are we just getting lucky that so far the things that have been failing haven't had disastrous consequences? Can someone who knows about these things enlighten me?

kelseyfrog• 2 years ago

are all these "little problems" indicative of a bigger problem at Boeing?

It depends on the exact way you phrase the question, but if it were "Is the rate of accidents per flight for Boeing aircraft significantly different between 2004-2014 and 2014-2024?" then you could run for example a one-sample poisson test against the data. The accident data is available from https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/AviationQueryv2.aspx and I'm sure you could find a source for number of Boeing flights for each time period.

taylodl3• 2 years ago

Thank you for enlightening me instead of downvoting like some others did.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

a Boeing 757-200

From a peek at Wikipedia, the airplane involved is probably 2+ decades old.

However tempting it might be to blame Boeing...it sounds far more like the techs at LoBidCo or Slipshod Maintenance Ltd. need to re-certify in Basic Lug Nut Tightening. Again.

10u152• 2 years ago

Realistically it’s a united flight and they’re ultimately responsible for maintenance.

pylua3• 2 years ago

I wonder if employees across the board are silently reciprocating the lack of support from businesses by doing subpar work, given that corporations have started to run down employees in the name of expanding profits.

It feels like a new phenomenon , and it feels very wide spread.

nullindividual• 2 years ago

Obligatory VAS Aviation:

https://youtu.be/iPkPHR1KoF0

And when the plane landed at it's destination, another United jet sucked in a bird on take off. At least there's no mechanic to blame for that.

t0mas883• 2 years ago

Probably only hit that bird with the wing.

Tower asked "are you going to continue" and they replied. That sounds like low speed (high speed you wouldn't reply that quickly, focus on takeoff first). And at low speed if it went through the engine you would abort the takeoff.

With most airlines the rule is "below 80kt stop for any warning or caution, above 80kt only abort for engine failure, fire, or unable to fly"

damiankennedy• 2 years ago

When a plane reaches V1 (which depends on the model, weight, runway length, temperature etc) the pilot has 2 seconds to abort takeoff or they are too fast to stop before the end of the runway. At V1 a multi-engine plane will take-off even with one engine out. The pilot will normally wait until Vr or V2 to rotate as this ensures a climb rate of 2.4 degrees. If the runway is long enough V1 will be higher than V2 but commercial aircraft will de-rate the engines and make use of the available runway to avoid running the engines at maximum.

throwway120385• 2 years ago

The bird was a mechanic.

exabrial• 2 years ago

blows my mind people post boeing after boeing problem online and all over reddit... but literally this stuff happens _every day_ to all manufacturers.

autoexec2• 2 years ago

Which other manufacturers recently had a huge hole open up in the plane mid-flight? Which other manufacturers are guilty of conspiring to defraud the FAA? Which other manufacturers installed software that resulted in deadly crashes because pilots weren't even aware it existed and/or weren't trained on it?

It's possible that there really are other manufacturers with these exact same problems, but either way it looks like Boeing has more than earned all the scrutiny and criticism they're getting. I'm all for naming and shaming other manufacturers that make deliberate choices to routinely put profits over human life though.

jryle702• 2 years ago

He said "this stuff happens _every day_ to all manufacturers". That's unquestionably true - [0], since this was an operational issue handled by the airlines. You then rebuffed his post with your rant about manufacturing issues at Boeing, which is completely different.

I'm all for naming and shaming other manufacturers that make deliberate choices to routinely put profits over human life though.

Empty and cringeworthy. There is a saying "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands". Doing something in the most efficient manner and cost effective is the tenet of great engineering. The trick is doing it while still prioritizing safety. That's what Boeing failed at. Not because they tried to save money. HN of all place should be well aware of that. No wonder populism is in vogue.

[0] https://avherald.com/

__m• 2 years ago

killing a lot of people or putting them in danger kind of attracts that scrutiny. It sucks in cases where it's clearly the maintenance's or pilot's fault, but even in those cases you wonder if boeing left something out of their handbooks.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

This is what the labor shortage feels like.

mindslight• 2 years ago

Labor shortage caused by the decades-long capital-manager strike against skilled labor. Invest in educating employees, pay them enough to remain engaged in their job, empower them with some authority, cost of living increases to keep up with inflation plus their own growing value, etc? Nah, keep clipping coins from the productive part of the business so line go up, even though the MBA spreadsheet automatons doing this end up embezzling most of the savings as their own salaries/bonuses.

It's endemic across the whole economy. Workers who are essentially nothing more than flesh peripherals for the computer. Commoditize your complement, where the complement of middle management was competent workers. The consequences are just finally hitting industries with traditionally larger margins. If this were about automobiles I'd guess manufacturers would add two more wheels for redundancy (paying the mechanics a dollar an hour more to get the kind of people who care whether nuts are properly torqued would be capitulating). But you can't really do that with airplanes now, can you?

United Airlines Jet Loses Wheel in Repeat of March Incident

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