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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There is a very good reason why the aircraft industry is very conservative when it comes to introducing new materials, and their testing procedures are about as rigid as it gets.

Good thing they caught this on the ground, there have been way too many accidents with passenger aircraft lately. Losing a plane this big would be a tremendous disaster.

This is going to affect Boeing financially quite a bit as well.

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But didn't they outsource a lot of the work (~70%), including wing design? Not very conservative if you ask me.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/787family/dev_team.html

They'll test it to the hilt on integration, you can literally depend on that.

Conservative wrt to testing, documentation and procedures as well as a healthy dose of skepticism about new technology.

Just try adding a new piece of avionics to an existing plane or changing something after the airworthiness certificate has been issued.

Apparently this is largely the result of new management. After Alan Mulaly left for Ford, their culture shifted dramatically from the engineering/conservative mindset to a bottom-line-driven outsourcing model.

"Bottom-line-driven" and "aerospace-engineering" don't mix very well...

I hope Boeing gets its act together. It would be a shame to have only one company designing and building big passenger planes...

It definitely seems like your notion is being borne out. Personally, I think it's indicative of a larger cultural problem in the US, so I don't have particular optimism that it will be corrected in time at Boeing, but I certainly hope that it is. It seems unlikely to me that the federal government will allow such a strategic supplier to simply fade away, I just hope they don't end up turning into zombie Boeing.

Boeing is, effectively, "too strategic to fail".

I too find it unlikely that it gets corrected in time, mostly because those who drove Boeing into this mess will keep their bonuses intact while grinding Boeing to a thin shell.

Sad.

But there could be hope. The engineers will end up working somewhere else. And the money to design and build planes will still exist, somewhere. This and maintenance contracts for all those 7*7s around will keep some money flowing.

They say right in the article that this flaw would have been unlikely to bring down a plane. The most likely outcome would have been increased maintenance costs for owners.

Right. A normal wing will never bend 150% beyond it's limits in even the worst flight conditions. But it's a testament to how strict the FAA is about engineering new planes.

Watch the similar test done on the 777:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe9PVaFGl3o

Remember the smug responses from Boeing and the number of US media reports when the Airbus A380 wing failed at 149% and they had to add (gasp) 30kg of extra stiffening.

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