12mo ago

NYC-bound flight canceled when passenger notices missing bolts on plane wing

nypost.com NYC-bound flight canceled when passenger notices missing bolts on plane wing

“I’m a good flyer, but my partner was not loving the information I was telling her and starting to panic,” British traveler Phil Hardy said of the moment he spotted the missing fi…

A New York-bound Virgin Atlantic flight was canceled just moments before takeoff last week when an alarmed passenger said he spotted several screws missing from the plane’s wing.

85 comments

While its likely true that the wing panel was both non-critical and secure, I'd be much more worried that if they missed something like that, that they could have missed any number of other things as well. Isn't there supposed to be some sort of check-list run?
- Pilots perform an inspection of the aircraft before every flight. Missing fasteners on the top of the wing would not be visible during a walkaround from the ground.
  Planes are allowed to fly with many parts missing. A few missing fasteners on a non structural part is fine, but missing fasteners that the pilots are unaware of is a big issue.
  
  Shouldn't that inspection include looking at the top of the wing out the windows?

We're going to have to start walking around the plane with the pilot before takeoff like a rental car dent check.

I knew software companies were offloading QA testing onto their paying users, but who would have guessed that passengers would start playing that role too?
- Some big wig had to go to target one day and saw the self checkout line and was like "I have an idea!"
  
  In return, he had a conversation with a big wig from Target where he taught them how many checkout stations you could actually cram into a tiny space.
- Early Access Airplane

Given how completely the airline industry disregards customer service and treats its customers like cattle, I don’t know why anyone would expect them to do a proper job of maintaining equipment. Furthermore, given how eager we are to gut regulation and dismantle the administrative state, all of this is going to just keep getting worse and worse.
- "b-b-but taxes are theft!"
  /s
  
  They will scream as their plane that wasn’t regularly inspected by government bureaucrats plummets to the ground.

British traveler Phil Hardy, 41, was onboard Flight VS127 at Manchester Airport in the UK on Jan. 15 when he noticed the four missing fasteners during a safety briefing for passengers and decided to alert the cabin crew.
“I thought it was best to mention it to a flight attendant to be on the safe side.”
Neil Firth, the Airbus local chief wing engineer for A330, added that the affected panel was a secondary structure used to improve the aerodynamics of the plane.
Hardy said airline staff repeatedly reassured him there was no safety issue with the wing, but his fear was heightened given the recent ordeal in which an Alaska Airlines plane lost its door plug and a chunk of its fuselage flew off mid-flight.
“Each of these panels has 119 fasteners, so there was no impact to the structural integrity or load capability of the wing, and the aircraft was safe to operate,” he said.
“As a precautionary measure, the aircraft underwent an additional maintenance check, and the fasteners were replaced.”
Noteable comments:
The fasteners were not "replaced"....they were now properly included, as per the design. The public is not reassured if you cannot use precise or non-ambiguous language. It's better to state that it was an oversight or be specific: i.e. the design calls for a maximum of 119 fasteners, but allows for a minimum number (x), and thus it was allowed to fly. - tyrionsBeard
Great! So not only do you have to pay extra for a seat, checked bags but you have to check the wings before take off. That man should be credited for their flaw. - Mabel
- Well those comments are just silly.
  
  Second one is, hahaha!
- This feels like the beginning to Nightmare at 20000 Feet

New York Post is a right wing shitrag like The Daily Mail.
- What do you think the implications of that are for this article reporting a completely non-political incident?
  
  Probably that they generally don't care about getting a story right or corroborating sources. I agree that in this case that doesn't matter for getting the high level facts across.
  
  They get traffic and unless someone comments otherwise, a slight boost in perceived respectability
  
  Everything is political, at least with them.

The pilot should’ve walked out onto the wing, slapped a couple lengths of duct tape on that section, then carefully and loudly exclaimed; “ YUP! That baby ain’t goin’ anywhere.” while patting the area firmly.
- It's called speed tape, and genuinely is a thing used in the industry.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_tape

I imagine a lot of the passengers were pissed off when the flight was cancelled because one of their fellow passengers reported some non-critical bolts were missing.
- I'd have been grateful.
  I think it's entirely reasonable to see something obviously missing on the wing of a plane, even something small, and wonder what else isn't properly secured. I'm sure a plane with four missing allen head screws on that panel is fine. I wouldn't fly on it without an assurance that it wasn't a sign of other poor practices.
  
  First think I look for when I get a system in from a fabricator. Are all the screws on the outside tight and orientationed the same way? If so I am probably going to have a good day. Anybody who takes the effort on something so tiny often is taking the effort in things that do matter.
- It's not like the passenger knew they were non-critical. I certainly wouldn't have wanted him to stay silent only for it to turn out they were critical. They also wouldn't unboard and inspect a plane just on the insistence of one passenger, they'd deplane that one passenger if anything. The fact that they did do an additional inspection implies that safe or not, those missing bolts were not noticed in the initial inspection, which leads one to wondering if they missed anything else.
  
  Precisely correct.
- I would have been fine with not dying in the event it ended up being a real problem. An inconvenience is better to deal with than a plane crash.
- Planes have so much redundency that theres a lot that's uncritical, until suddenly it is critical.
- Ideas for a better world #233
  Rename your phone hotspot to "I saw a loose bolt on the outside of the plane" and turn it on in the gate waiting area bar.

you can't just screwdriver those things in there man you have to torque them in to the proper spec holy balls
- I think they were checking how loose the others were rather than tightening them.
- Well they are Phillips has so I can't imagine you can even torque them that much.
  
  Interestingly enough they are not Phillips it is a very similar looking standard called Torq-set. The lines of the cross are off set a little which make it much easier to put a higher torque into them.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#/media/File%3AScrew_Head_-_Torq-set.svg

At some point, that part was taken off the plane and it was replaced, or maintenance was done on it, or maintenance was done on something underneath it. It was then replaced. There is a documentation trail that says all of this was fully completed. The documentation was signed off on by someone who was qualified in this task, and/ or by a supervisor who checked it off.
If there is no documentation, or if the documentation indicates something was done that was in fact not done, the CAA/ FAA is going to have a big problem with this. They are sort of interested in how maintenance is done and documented. If they didn't do this right, what else are they/ have they been "pencil whipping?"
I can see a pretty thorough inspection of their maintenance practices and documentation in the near future. If they find a pattern of this, the maintenance gets decertified and the airline can't fly until they are cleared.
- TL;DR Someone dun goofed
- There's a massive failure in maintenance and Operations' culture here. This isn't the exact sort of situation where you'd use LOTO, but you need something similar. Lock the engine in the off position until the removed part is properly reinstalled.
  I want to call maintenance errors like this rookie... But they really aren't. There's plenty of plant incidents where people either don't have a proper procedure or don't follow it, and a welder tries to work on a live gas line. Or someone opens a valve without realizing it needs to be closed.
  I still say we fine the companies and hold the CEOs personally responsible, because the buck stops there, and these mistakes are more likely to happen in an organization that doesn't have a robust safety culture.

So lucky they spotted it. Really makes you think, wouldn't it be good to implement a system of regular professional inspections to deal with stuff like that? /s
- Regular Inspections fix small issues before greater problems arise from them --> some economist with no technical knowledge or common sense goes: hurp de durp our inspections never fix any relevant defects. Better cut back on them to be more economic. --> surprisedPikachu.jpeg
  
  Well no. Those are the accountants. Economists have studied survivorship bias. It's the MBAs and accountants looking to cut costs that do that stupid shit.
  
  Regular inspections are already mandate by the FAA, no economist, accountant or MBA has any say on it.

Speed holes

NY Post? Be serious, don't post that drama rag here.

Don't worry! There were 119 fasteners being used. Ignore the fact that 4 were missing. The plane was designed to use whatever number of fasteners we want. The amount is just a suggestion
/s
- For what it's worth, just about every panel like this is certified to have a specific number of fasteners missing. A lot of the time there will be some other qualifiers such as not missing the leading fastener or not missing adjacent fasteners. Having a bunch in a row like this incident would probably not be ok, but I couldn't say without the maintenence manual.
  
  Right, these are usually spec'd so that there's some leeway, and I don't believe they're lying when they say it would've been safe to fly. But after the recent plane debacles I don't blame those passengers to bringing it up.
  
  It's just that if you know that it would be ok to miss a few and deliberately don't install them you're walking a very thin ice. It must be a reserve of fasteners, not a discount in fasteners used
- Planes are designed to have very high tolerances so yeah, they have more fasteners than necessary for exactly this reason. Of course you still want to fix it, but they are absolutely designed to not need them all.

~~Stealing catalitic converters for money~~
Stealing bigass phillips screws from planes
--petty theift criminals

If Benny Hill wasn't playing in the background an opportunity was missed.

Seeing how disorganized and chaotic airports are, I'm not surprised.

I sympathise with the airline because it’s always a pain when you’ve nearly completed the flatpack before you realise that one screw is missing. Hopefully it’ll hold together without it.

Lol, "the Virgin Representative"

I would have been fine flying on that plane.
Highly unlikely that panel was critical to keeping the plane in the air even if it did come off during flight.
- You don’t think it’s possible that missing bolts in a non critical part of the plane is reflective of poor inspection and maintenance and that would increase the risk of missing or loose bolts in, say, a door?
  
  Yep, any number of reasons why it could have been left like that.
  I’ve been on planes where I’ve seen duct tape on the wings, it’s really not an issue other than psychological.
  
  In the end I recognize that I am not the expert on these matters in any way. I have no idea what a properly maintained aircraft looks like and pretty much have to trust the people who are paid to know these things. If you're uncomfortable with something, by all means mention it, but it's folly to assume you know better or can make even decent assumptions about the maintenance of a plane unless you are an aircraft mechanic.
- Panels coming off during flight is still not ideal, even if they're not critical to flying. They can hit things that are more essential.
  
  The chances of that panel actually coming off are vanishingly small.

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