Is the FAA going to drag their feet again grounding this plane until the problem is root caused?
http://web.archive.org/web/20240106075153/https://news.alask...
These same exact exit plugs have been in service without issue since at least 2007.
> Each aircraft will be returned to service only after completion of full maintenance and safety inspections. We anticipate all inspections will be completed in the next few days.
What maintenance? The plane was barely two months old and the part that failed was meant to be something installed permanently, not an emergency exit door that would probably see regular inspections. It's probably "just" sloppy assembly from Boeing/Spirit, which, yes, merit a grounding and inspection.
A plane is not a car. They don’t go in once a year to tighten some bolts and replace your oil filter. You have no idea how much is taken apart and reassembled on a regular basis.
While emergency equipment like slides and doors are typically inspected with an "A" check, this wasn't an emergency door that failed. What failed was a permanently installed panel. To inspect it you'd have to pull off interior panels, something that doesn't typically happen on a 737 until a C check (roughly every couple of years or 5,000 hours).
So yeah. What maintenance on a nearly brand new plane would require pulling the interior apart and disturbing the emergency exit plug?
This wasn't a maintenance issue.
Edit: And, no, this plane was never at the Oklahoma City MRO.
Planes are complicated machines and the processes for inspecting them are highly detailed. Once they figure out what happened, the fix might be simply to include some simple check for whatever happened. Just another line item for a routine inspection. And probably the list of things to check for doors is quite long already.
In any case, flailing your arms and panicking is not part of the process. This incident seems completely unrelated to previous incidents and it happened many years after the first max flew. Which suggests it's an isolated incident. It's quite possible that the door has not been redesigned for the max (quite likely even, because why would they?) in which case they might have to look at all 737s going back 50 or so years.
Or maybe, just maybe, this is 1,000x more likely to be a maintenance issue than it is a faulty design.
If there were a genuine, ongoing safety issue worth worrying about pilots would stop flying them. People seem to entirely forget that the crew up in the cockpit are humans with an interest in self-preservation.
Planes are not cars. They don’t go in once a year to change the oil filter and tighten a few bolts.
Then you’re going to have to ground all the 737-900ERs (in service
since 2007) out there as well, since they use the exact same part.
a.) The -900ER has exit doors where the -9 has plugs blocking off the doors.
b.) If the problem was installation related then it would still make sense to ground the planes and inspect the potentially faulty aircraft.
The -900ER can and has come configured with the exact same plugs in those doors.
Both in terms of original certification and also doubling down on “no issue planes are fine” until it became incontrovertible that the planes were the problem and then all the collusion and shadiness about how the 737 came to be came out.
So with that history, even if it would be an overreaction, rebuilding trust would look like immediately grounding in a situation like this out of an abundance of caution. Btw the 737 has had other maintenance problems crop up since they put it back in service since the fleet was grounded to retrofit the part that was needed to fix the original fatal-causing defect. Honestly this just looks like an unsafe plane top to bottom that could sink Boeing (except they’re not allowed to sink because they’re critical partners to the national defense industry)
But perhaps pilots would be less likely to get rated for Max aircraft if (hypothetically) there's a perceived broad issue with their safety? This could cause those who have a choice (stronger pilots) to go airbus.
Not saying it's the case, just pondering here.
You'll forgive me if I find your assertion strains credulity.
If the MAX is as likely to fall out of the sky as the armchair experts at HN believe, pilots wouldn’t fly them.