Shot:
Investigators Find Metal Fatigue in UAL 777’s Failed Engine
National Transportation Safety Board investigators have found evidence of fan blade metal fatigue in the Pratt & Whitney PW4000-112 engine that failed in flight on February 20, raining nacelle debris over a mile-long area of a Denver suburb and leading to the grounding of 69 Boeing 777-200s still in service.
Briefing reporters Monday night from Washington, D.C., NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said that one of the blades that fractured at its root contained what he called beach marks or crack arrest marks, visible to the naked eye, that can indicate how many cycles the airplane flew before the fatal crack finally propagated to the point of the blade breaking off. The NTSB has flown the piece to Pratt & Whitney headquarters in Connecticut, where engineers began a more detailed inspection on Tuesday.
That’s bad, very bad.
This has caused Boeing to release an Airworthiness Directive on all these planes and ground the Pratt & Whitney powered 777 fleet.
Chaser:
Now, I’m not going to say that LGBT people cannot be good engineers. I have a friend who is a lesbian rocket scientist and is very good at her job.
What I’m saying is that a company cannot serve two masters.
If your company culture is embodied in the tag line of “dependable engines,” then you focus on a culture of excellence in making dependable engines.
If you focus on changing the company culture to something else, don’t be surprised when your engines fatigue and come apart in the sky.
For the people who fly, I suspect they would rather the company that makes their aircraft engines focus on dead-nuts reliability and not the preferred pronouns of the people who make the engines.
Go Woke, go broke is an absolute law of economics.
It doesn’t matter if you sell sporting goods or make jet engines, when you take the eye off of the ball of doing your job to indulge the Woke mob, your business goes to shit.
Listing your preferred pronouns is nothing more than saying you are a child who will get insulted if someone makes a mistake and accidentally calls you by the wrong pronoun.
My preferred pronouns: My name is Mike, and I have a beard. Take a guess. I will not get offended if you get it wrong.
Embraer, Airbus, and Bombardier eagerly await the further adoption of identity politics in the US commercial aerospace industry.
oy vey…I feel safer flying now…
Ah yes, beach marks, the classic indication of fatigue induced brittle fracture. Either poor material selection, possible but not likely, improper installation, again possible but not particularly likely, or more likely, precursor cracks not discovered during routine inspection(s). If it is found to be a problem with the inspections, I think the airline is the entity that is responsible unless the inspection procedures from Pratt and Whitney were incorrect.
In any event, if you are in the business of providing a product that affects public safety, you damn sure need to make sure safety is your overriding focus, not whether your workforce meets an arbitrary “diversity” criteria.
Inspections — yes, I was thinking that too. Fatigue failure isn’t unheard of in highly stressed parts. What matters is whether you have a design and an associated inspection regimen that, with very high probability, takes parts out of service before fatigue damage can grow to the point of failure.
It is not about wokeness.
It is about outsourcing plane maintenance to China.
I wonder, with all the speculations about the cause of the engine failure in the press, why this tiny detail is never mentioned…..
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-08-31-0508310156-story,amp.html
Wow. Looking at this article, I assumed that the bosses thought, “Hey, let’s skimp on safety inspections. What could possibly go wrong?”