Posted on 09/18/2007 10:46:46 AM PDT by skeptoid
Thanks, I haven’t laughed this hard in days!
Honestly, as a well credentialed aircraft manufacturing guru my opinion is:
1. The engineer in question seems to have been fired for other legitimate reasons.
2. If I were the engineer in question and I actually thought I was working on a project that would result in a deadlier than normal aircraft I would have quit. There is a serious shortage of aircraft engineers right now with the industry booming and positions are open at every airframe manufacturer. However bitching to the news media and racial threats will not be a plus on his resume. Aviation manufacturing is a small world.
3. Your spine will not survive a 15 foot vertical drop onto a runway if you land in a seated position.
4. The disgruntled engineer is asking for certainty with regard to every hypothetical crash scenario and he of all people should know that you never know everything about how a new aircraft will perform out in the field. If we had to make vehicles that didn’t crash or burn on occasion we would all still be walking everywhere.
5. Boeing and the FAA will do their best to make sure that the aircraft is as safe or safer than the current level of safety expected in their class of aircraft. That being said, one must remember that Boeing and the FAA are both run by humans, mistakes will be made. It is my personal opinion that the FAA is largely run by people who lack the technical skills to be good at airframe manufacturing, from the skirt who runs the place on down, and Boeing and other US airframe manufacturers are too beholden to “day-trading” shareholders who aren’t in it for the next thirty years. Accountants, lawyers, marketing folks, union bosses and etc., all get a say in how the aircraft gets designed and built, and now Dan Rather wants to add himself and America’s TV watching soccer moms to the certification process. Great!
6. If the engineers questions had merit(I believe they don't, he is grasping at straws and playing on safety concerns every person shares) he did the right thing by going to the media and going public. The only place better at sweeping things under the rug than a large corporation(Boeing) is the government(FAA). Now this will get looked at further and result in many levels of CYA(Cover Your A$$) on everybody’s part by folks who don’t know their A$$ from their aileron, while those who performed the crash simulation and testing will try to still do their jobs as usual with all the suits running around them like disoriented chickens. From past experience I have had my licenses threatened more than once for reporting safety violations to the FAA(I kid you not). One time when I called the FAA’s Anonymous safety tip line the operators first question was could you give me your full name, place of employment, license #s and Etc.. I was told that they could not investigate a complaint without knowing who was making it. At the end of it I got a letter from the FAA stating that they had contacted the guilty party and been told by them that they were not in fact violating the regs and without further grounds they could not justify investigating further. When I went to the FAA Wichita ACO/MIDO to complain that my complaint had not been properly investigated I was told that if I didn’t drop it they could take action against my certificate(license). Nice to know you’re appreciated! Another time at Oshkosh I had to literally outrun an FAA guy after I Pointed out cracked stringers in the aft equipment bay of the FAA’s King Air they had on public display. There was an Airworthiness Directive which had just come out from the FAA with regard to those stringer cracks earlier that year. When I pointed out to the FAA guy that his aircraft was in obvious violation of their own AD and as such was unairworthy he informed me that the FAA’s aircraft are government owned and as such are not subject to the civil aviation regulations that they make for the rest of us to follow(hypocrisy knows no bounds). After pointing out I could go to jail for signing off an aircraft safer than theirs the FAA guy assumed his god attitude and told me that I was not to be opening their aft equipment bay and he wanted my license#. To make a long story short I didn’t tell it to him, which he claimed I was required to do(so he could dick with me), he tried to physically grab me, and then I outran his donut fed a$$. Funny thing was that he didn’t seem to have a problem with me opening their aft equipment bay(hell hole) hatch until I exposed their gross hypocrisy. I could write a good kiss and tell book with all the aviation industry crap I've survived so far.
anyway, my highly educated and experienced guess is that the Boeing aircraft will be quite safe as usual. The engineer is asking the impossible. You can't make crashing a jumbo jet entirely as safe, enjoyable, and environmentally beneficial as he implies it should be. I am glad that most aerospace engineers are focused on making aircraft not fail rather than just fail well. This punk needs to go live in a bubble where he will be safer from all the composite aircraft flying around waiting to explode into toxic fumes. If he wants the plane to be safer why not ask for a ballistic recovery shoot or something helpful instead of bitching about "what if carbon fiber epoxy composites(some of the strongest lightweight materials known to man) disintegrate from the crushing impact of a crash might passengers be harmed less if they got juiced and baked in an aluminum can fuselage?".
That was a failure of the means of attaching the tail and/or the rudder-actuating mechanism, not the composite material itself.
Not quite. One of my students - a wash out, mind you - was an A&P at UA in NYC at that time and he said in no uncertain terms that is was impossible to perform any meaningful tests unless the tail was removed, and to remove it would mean destroying it.
Therefore, it was never removed, just visually inspected.
So, who really knows why that particular part failed, other than to do after the fact testing and theorizing?
“3. Your spine will not survive a 15 foot vertical drop onto a runway if you land in a seated position.”
Most of the people in the Minnesota bridge collapse survived the drop from 60 ft. Any comments?
I’ll have to say it must’ve been a tempered fall. Not free. And also, cars are much better handled to survive it than the completely flimsy construction of the plane interiors. Those seats will come off and crush everyone very easily.
The bridge fell from one end,
the structure fell into water,
the vehicles have squishy tires,
they have springs in the suspensions,
the seats have more padding,
most had a steering wheel to hold onto...
And they hit what? Water? The bridge trusses also undoubtedly absorbed considerable shock as they collapsed and unless the bridge hit perfectly flat with the water the gradual shock as the collision spread across the span would also absorb shock. Remember the comedian Red Skelton? One of his gags was to fall down, but despite the fact that he was 60+ years old, he never hurt himself. The reason was that he bent his body into the fall, so he "rolled" onto the ground, rather than hitting it flat, as he appeared to do. That's almost certianly how the bridge hit, first on one end or side, spreading the collision in time and dramatically reducing the shock.
The G load experienced is highly dependent on how much cushion exists. I don't know current aircraft certification standards, but I seem to remember that an aircraft I owned, certified under the old system was only tested at a 13 foot drop, and that was with tires and existing shock absorbers in place. Work the numbers for the rate of descent of an aircraft, and that is about the limit that an aircraft can withstand without breaking something. A fuselage hitting the ground would be even worse because it has no shock absorption.
Here's an experiment. Get up on your kitchen table and jump off onto a solid concrete floor (no carpet), with bare feet held flat with the ground, while holding your legs rigidly straight. That's maybe only 3 feet.
I take no responsibility for anything broken.
Dan Rather Expected to Report Boeing 787 Unsafe
Fox News
Posted on 09/18/2007 7:33:53 PM EDT by Sub-Driver
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1898626/posts
Rather chokes up, and hunkers down
examiner.com | Sept 26,2007 | Patrick Gavin and Jeff Dufour
Posted on 09/26/2007 4:23:34 PM EDT by AmericanMade1776
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1902624/posts
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