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Boeing faces fresh safety questions after engine fire on flight from Scotland

Boeing faces fresh questions about the safety of its aircraft after an engine fire on a transatlantic flight from Edinburgh caused an emergency landing soon after takeoff.

Flames were seen by passengers briefly shooting from the engine of a Delta Air Lines 767 soon after it took off for New York in February last year, after a turbine blade broke off during takeoff.

The flames subsided while the plane was airborne but it made an emergency landing at Prestwick airport south of Glasgow, where ground crew noticed fuel leaking from the plane’s right wing.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the UK government agency that investigates aviation safety, has written to the Federal Aviation Administration in the US asking it to take action with Boeing, which has its headquarters in Virginia.

Wanderer ,

Asking the Americans to investigate Boeing is like when Fifa investigated itself.

Waste of fucking time. They will do everything they can to keep Boeing afloat even if its lying or letting them off the hook.

BlackLaZoR ,
@BlackLaZoR@kbin.run avatar

Expect safety inspectors suicides over this

kikutwo ,

Boeing doesn’t make engines.

pwnicholson ,
@pwnicholson@lemmy.world avatar

They technical don’t make airframes or doors either (and still don’t until their buyout of their supplier goes through).

TacticsConsort ,
@TacticsConsort@yiffit.net avatar

Yup, most engine manufacture is undertaken by specialists. As a good example, Rolls-Royce is an airplane engine company that sometimes makes cars as publicity stunts.

HOWEVER.

It’s not just about who makes engines. Aircraft are meant to last a good 30 years in service and you can’t just ask some schmuck to clean it for $7.50 an hour and call that maintenance. Maintenance is extremely skilled work that tends to be operating under horrible time crunches, especially if a part is suspect and needs to have a plane partially taken apart so it can be changed for a fresh one- a plane that might be due to fly again tomorrow. Maintenance that needs that sort of knowledge tends to have some involvement with the parent company who built the planes, or is even contract work for them.

Boeing is rather notorious for being willing to put the schedule before safety- we’ve seen that in a lot of other accidents. I would absolutely believe that a Boeing manager skimped on engine maintenance because someone in the chain of command said “Get that plane out of the maintenance hangar today or you’re fired, and damn the safety regulations.”

But, that’s just my industry knowledge. The actual circumstances could be way different, so let’s go read the article.

TacticsConsort ,
@TacticsConsort@yiffit.net avatar

OK, checking out the article, actually it seems totally innocent on the maintenance side of things- there was a turbine blade fracture during flight. Turbines are generally very reliable but it’s a gargantuan pain in the ass to test those blades because they’re crystalline structures, so a fracture goes from nanoscopic to taking out the whole blade all at once. I wouldn’t expect maintainers to catch that.

The criminal part is actually way more interesting and concerning.

Civilian aircraft are built to be safe. I mean REALLY safe. Every system has a redundant (backup) system you can switch to if that system goes down and a way to isolate a damaged system. Planes can fly on only one working engine, or even safely glide down to the ground if they have no engines. We literally blow some engines up in their final stages of testing to make sure they can’t blow up hard enough to take the wing out. Regulations demand it.

So that’s why this is a criminal case. Because after that engine blade came loose and hit the wing, it ruptured a fuel line…

In an aircraft that was designed in compliance with regulations, while this would still be be cause to turn around and land the plane, it shouldn’t actually be a safety problem at all. Just isolate the damaged system and switch to the redundant one. And they didn’t have the ability to do that. Meaning that their aircraft design itself is likely out of compliance with regulations and doesn’t meet the minimum safety requirements to have civilians on it. Which is… honesty way weirder, because who the hell signed off on this thing if it had a design issue like this?

catloaf ,

Boeing.

The FAA has been allowing them to self-certify some safety analyses. I don’t know if it was this model, or this kind of certification, but the FAA has definitely not been doing a thorough job.

acockworkorange ,

Turbines are […] crystalline structures

Are you implying they are not metal? Or that their heat treatment makes them brittle? If it’s the latter, that’s clearly a defect. Metals can achieve high rigidity and still retain great resistance through heat treatment.

HK65 ,

Metals are crystalline, and high stress loads associated with being rotated like crazy make things brittle. IDK how brittle though, steel normally is super stretchy if I remember my studies right.

acockworkorange ,

That’s why I asked for clarification. The line about them being crystalline makes no sense. Copper is crystalline, and can be super malleable or quite brittle depending on the grain structure. And you just don’t use brittle materials for high speed rotating equipment. And there are non destructive tests to check for embrittlement/fatigue.

Highstronaught ,

Metals are made of crystals, they usually defourm along the grain boundaries and fatigue cracks also grow along them. By eliminating those boundaries you reduce the chance for fatigue cracks and make the overall blade stronger.

erusuoyera , (edited )

Of the top of my head, IIRC the blades in a turbine are grown into a single crystal of titanium so there’s no weak points between the crystalline structure.

Edit. theengineer.co.uk/…/jewel-in-the-crown-rolls-royc…

Not titanium, nickel alloy.

acockworkorange ,

Christ on a cracker!

Emerald ,

Every system has a redundant (backup) system you can switch to if that system goes down

Well, except for the wings. And the cockpit. And the fuselage. And its accompanying door plugs

ByteJunk ,
@ByteJunk@lemmy.world avatar

Are you daft? Why do you think it has TWO wings and TWO doors? And clearly you’ve never been invited to the under cock pit, where they keep plugs fit for any hole.

(is joke don’t bite)

girlfreddy OP ,
@girlfreddy@lemmy.ca avatar

Nobody is accusing Boeing for the turbine failure. They are questioning Boeing’s drain tube track design failure. Source

According to the (Air Accidents Investigation Branch) AAIB, a high-pressure turbine blade had “fractured” in the 767’s right engine, damaging a further five blades.

Vibrations from the “out of balance” turbine led a section of the wing to rupture, causing fuel to leak out, which was then ignited by the engine’s exhaust.

The AAIB’s report questioned why the vibrations from a broken engine were sufficient to fracture the Boeing 767’s “slat track housing drain tube.”

At the end of its report, the AAIB said: “It is recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration requires the Boeing Airplane Company to demonstrate that following this serious incident, the design of the slat track housing drain tube on the Boeing 767 family of aircraft continues to comply with the certification requirements for large transport aircraft.”

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Stock buyback time, am I right?

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Boeing faces fresh questions about the safety of its aircraft after an engine fire on a transatlantic flight from Edinburgh caused an emergency landing soon after takeoff.

Flames were seen by passengers briefly shooting from the engine of a Delta Air Lines 767 soon after it took off for New York in February last year, after a turbine blade broke off during takeoff.

It said two members of the cabin crew had heard a rattling sound as the Boeing taxied for takeoff, which appeared to come from the cargo hold.

This is the latest in a series of safety incidents involving Boeing aircraft, which have contributed to company executives leaving in a management shake-up.

It has also been sanctioned after a 737 Max 9 cabin panel blew out in mid-air on an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon, in January this year.

In 2021, the UK government temporarily banned from British airspace Boeing 777 aircraft which used the same type of engine which caught fire over Denver, Colorado.

The original article contains 567 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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