Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight
Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight
fortune.com
Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, wreaking havoc on flight delays as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company that vanished overnight
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.
Sure, but... commercial airliners almost never crash?
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?
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.
That's cargo rail tho. Fatal passenger rail accidents are very rare and involve multiple human and system failures.
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.
The whole Boeing Max shitshow is why flying makes me nervous now.
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.”
Used to think it was statistically safe, then 737MAX crashes happened. Not trusting any airplane manufacturer any more.
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.
My dad is the opposite of a Luddite. At 88, he still works for the airplane manufacturer, builds his own computers, and is getting into VR.
The FRA (federal railway administration) is scary. I would trust a train for sure.
Wasn't everybody saying the opposite like 3 months ago?
Perhaps, but you don’t have as far to fall.
(e: oh, I mistook your comment for sarcasm. Ignore my reply; I agree.)
Once you've seen the sausage made it's hard to love sausage. Doesn't mean the sausage is terrible, it just makes you think of watching it get made.
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.
They need budget to actually upgrade their fleet.
That’s happened multiple times with planes, not just once last year.
It happened as recently as last month
Here are more:
July 2023
June 2023
December 2022
May 2022.
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.
Story may have a bit of “then everyone clapped” vibes, but I can definitely get down with more trains.