Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight::Why are so many flights getting canceled or delayed? Blame a mysterious British supplier accused of falsified documents for plane components.
My father has been designing and building bespoke aircraft for 45 years, was an FAA test pilot, inspector, and trainer for most of that time, and was in the US Air Force during the Korean War. He has more aviation experience than most.
His license plate reads GO RAIL and he won’t fly commercial if he can avoid it.
e: I am not surprised.
Most planes in general don’t crash, fwiw. Most trains and cars don’t, either.
But would you rather your Uber was a Camry or a Lada Niva?
Planes are vastly safer than trains.
“Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 20 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 595 times higher than for scheduled airlines.”
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Most planes in general don’t crash, fwiw.
That’s a bit of a myth. Large commercial planes are very save, that’s true. Small planes and helicopters on the other side can be very dangerous, as they fly around in far less controlled situations. They are so dangerous in fact that being a pilot is one of the most dangerous jobs around, only behind logging.
After all of the high profile train derailments in recent history, primarily caused by decaying infrastructure, bad standards, and cutting corners, makes me wonder if there’s someone with an extensive background in rail out there with a license plate that says “FLY AIR”.
I guess it’s really just a question of whether you take the risk you know or the one you don’t.
I am an Aerospace Engineer (I was an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer by trade prior to going to University) and I have spent the last 30 years in the airline industry….it isn’t as bad as you are allegedly making it out to be….pilots are not engineers either……
Experience from the 60’s and 70’s isn’t really relevant to today’s industry- I started in the early 90’s and it’s massively different today from back then….so your point is?
I am also based in Australia so that might also make a bit of a difference because we have had no airline crashes in this country and we have a very strict Potentially Unwanted Parts (PUP’s) system and other checks and balances that because we are under EASA based regulations and not FAA ones (who, by the way allowed the PMA part system….where parts are no longer required to be manufactured by the OEM for aircraft….and I’ve got plenty of stories about that nonsense…)
So yeah…. I quite happily still fly everywhere around the world….
My dad is both a pilot and engineer. I’m aware not all pilots are. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear. If you’re in the industry, this will dox me, but my dad designed the Taylorcraft tri-gear (the F-22; there are still Taylorcrafts out there with rivets I put in them in the early 80s, because I basically grew up in the factory), and converted the original WACO biplane blueprints from the Smithsonian to modern specs so they could be manufactured again. He also designed the WACO Super class and their conversion to sea floats about ten years ago or so (the YMF-5; as an aerospace engineer, I’m sure you know that’s not a simple engineering task). He designed and engineered all the features this video from last year talks about; I don’t mean ancient history.
He’s currently 88 and still works full-time at WACO. He knows what he’s talking about. He still travels to the EU about every year for WACO. His knowledge is not outdated.
My point is just to relay what I’ve heard from my dad on this topic for US airlines specifically, and that I trust his opinion personally. Nothing more.
e: sorry for all the edits, my Lemmy client hates me. FWIW, one of my dad’s current titles at WACO is ‘Airworthiness Manager’. You can find him on LinkedIn. Just search ‘waco classic airworthiness manager’.
Yikes.
For a while I hated flying. Freaked me out even though I knew statistically it is a safe form of travel. Then I watched a bunch of Air Disasters shows and realized how many fixes they have put in place and I felt a lot better about flying.
Then I subbed to /r/AviationMaintenance. I really don’t want to fly anymore.
Flying is still safer than driving, FWIW. Not sure if that makes you feel better about flying or worse about driving (for me it’s the latter).
The first time I went skydiving, my instructor was a retired aircraft mechanic. He said something along the lines of “People always ask me why I’d want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I tell them that I worked on planes for 30 years, and there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.”
Sounds like my dad, who after working as a computer programmer consultant since the early 70s, has become a Luddite, to the point that he won’t even wear a digital watch. I wonder what a railroad engineer would tell your father.
It would not take much for a boiler on a train to blow, I’m sure there were all sorts of corners cut.
Do Diesel engines even use boilers? I know electric ones don’t. You don’t see a whole lot of functioning steam engines these days. They are neat though. Noisy AF.
The FRA (federal railway administration) is scary. I would trust a train for sure.
That’s freight rail. Freight rail is a full blown late-stage capitalist hellscape. Aging infrastructure that hasn’t seen maintenance since the New Deal, companies that refuse to update equipment because paying out lawsuits when it breaks is cheaper, overworked employees who aren’t even allowed to call out sick, etc…
Compared to that, passenger rail is a fucking pipedream.
Perhaps, but you don’t have as far to fall.
(e: oh, I mistook your comment for sarcasm. Ignore my reply; I agree.)
Earlier this year a bunch of people got stuck on a 4 hour Amtrak ride for like 18+ hours, without power, toilets or water. Were told they couldn’t leave and not allowed/able to transfer to another train.
I’d rather just die in an incredibly rare plane crash than trust AmTrak to get me across the country in days versus a flight which can get me there in hours.
That’s happened multiple times with planes, not just once last year.
It happened as recently as last month
Here are more:
I could keep going, but this is hard on mobile.
Point is, that happens with planes, too. That’s a logistics issue, not about the method of transport.
I remember watching an American 60 Minutes episode about commercial airlines buying fake plane parts, maybe 20+ years ago. Depressing to see it still happens.
I remember that one. They also discussed how most large airports had the ability to fully service aircraft and how there were only a few depots such as Texas and hiring skilled illegals as mechanics to service the majority of aircraft to cut costs and take advantage of those workers.
There are several carriers who only perform maintenence in Mexico and South America to save money and avoid unexpected FAA peeks at the maintenance records.
There are many places things get done for refurbishment of seats and interiors - lots in China.
All places doing heavy C and D checks are FAA certified, for US registered airlines regardless of where they do the work.
https://airwaysmag.com/abcds-aircraft-maintenance/
Delta Techops does lots of work on their own planes and others.
Small airlines won’t be able to afford to run their own heavy check facilities and will certainly outsource.
So what happened to the whole “every part is tracked from production to installation and through maintenance checks?”
It sounds like it is and that’s how they were able to catch on to this fake parts company.
You’ve tracked them, but that doesn’t mean you’ve followed up at every second of every day to see if the company still exists.
It’s called outsourcing. You outsource the risk and it magically goes away….
Or does it.
It sort of does. “Our vendor signed legally binding documents that they were responsible for vetting and verifying all parts. Sue them, not us.”
Unless by risk you mean an airplane falling out of the sky…
Risk impact comes in all forms from: it did nothing, to it destroyed our reputation, or even we killed people. Measuring risk impact and understanding the risks are incredibly important and outsourcing & hiding the risks behind a contract can’t protect your company’s reputation or the people killed at the end of the day
Non-paywall link for anyone: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/escalating-scandal-grips-airlines-including-190553757.html
You wouldn’t download a jet engine…
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/qsvpU7G5IJg?si=YalJq9VGyxQ6JIYF
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
