Sounds like DEI has moved into the Maintenance Bays now.
The price of DEI.
DEI (read: affirmative action) in aviation and medicine, two high risk fields in which incompetence causes death. Thanks, Marxists.
Well, that's comforting. Bolts are missing but the stewardess says its OK.
(when an alarmed passenger said he spotted several screws missing from the plane’s wing.)
Good thing they’re pushing 50+ year old white men out of the work force.
How’d that work out for Richard Stockton Rush III?
SNL actually had a pretty funny “ad” by Alaska Airlines in which a happy spokesman said, “You know those loose bolts on our wings? We’re going to tighten some of them!”
Sounds like dzus fasteners. They are often used to secure access panels and fairings. They may have been no safety issue, but someone didn’t finish the job.
Returning to the gate for maintenance is the right move.
EC
The holes make it lighter. The ejected window too.
Go sit down.
Were those bolts important?
one of the engineers climbing onto the plane’s wing before using a screwdriver to tinker with some of the fasteners.
= = =
I thought that work was for Union Members only.
That engineer is in BIG trouble!
Better than getting to 20,000 feet and then seeing a creature out there on the wing messing with the fasteners.
“Both Virgin and Airbus stressed there was no impact to the safety of last week’s aircraft despite the missing fixings.”
Four missing? No problem.
When do they begin to worry? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Hundreds?
The wings are ‘fastened’ to the plane using bolts. The wing is one continuous structure that passes through the body of the plane. But I understand his cause for panic.
So much with airlines today is handled by third party contractors and not the airline company itself.
“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.
What stupid reasoning. Those fastening points are there for a reason. Otherwise they wouldn’t be there in the first place.
Nothing to see here. Those extra bolts were totally unnecessary to the safety of the aircraft. Some dorky engineer just put them in the plans to show off his white supremacy. Besides, the mechanic doesn’t have time to go around fastening bolts all day! Sheesh!
Pretty soon, they’ll have to stick a red metal plate in the cockpit that says, “experimental”. That fixes everything.
