Boeing jet loses parts of the wing in flight!

[MT]

[watchmaker]

Juliette Foxtrot Charlie!

[coromonadalix]

just funny how news from elsewhere ends up here  ...

[tom66]

Boeing's death by 1000 quality cuts is becoming more and more clear...

[gabiz_ro]

If no frost forming it may be OK I may be wrong but that part is for some kind of ice removing, don't know term in english
edit
deicing boots

[MT]

Looks like "leading edge slats" made out of plywood!

[tggzzz]

F15 loses entire wing - and lands safely, albeit a little "hot".

[Neilm]

I am looking forward to the full incident report. It looks as if there is damage behind the slat which might have been caused when it failed but could imply it collided with something.  Has anyone lost a drone?

[MT]

https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-787-klm-returned-amsterdam-eight-bathrooms-stopped-working-2024-2?r=US&IR=T

then last April, 300 Austrian Airlines(Boeing 787) passengers had to rebook their flights after five of the eight toilets wouldn't flush properly.

And in 2018, a Norwegian flight (Boeing 737), which ironically had 85 plumbers on board, had to return to the airport due to malfunctioning toilets.

[SiliconWizard]

I'm surprised Boeing haven't tried buying Airbus yet.

[SeanB]

I'm surprised Boeing haven't tried buying Airbus yet.

Pesky laws about monopolies.........

[MT]

[SiliconWizard]

Right, that's not the way it would happen.
They would not buy the whole Airbus group. Maybe just a key company from the group that would get them some technology/patents they don't have, to bring them some edge back and leave Airbus in a more difficult position.
Maybe they could manage to pull some strings to trigger the acquisition.
Any resemblance to actual events would be purely coincidental.

[Alex Eisenhut]

F15 loses entire wing - and lands safely, albeit a little "hot".

Sure but there you have a 2:1 engine:human ratio...

[hans]

If no frost forming it may be OK I may be wrong but that part is for some kind of ice removing, don't know term in english
edit
deicing boots

This is the slat of the wing, which is part of the flap system to allow the plane to fly slower. Slats are the first flap setting to extend, as they generate significant lift with minor drag increase. For (many) Boeing airplanes this is usually the first flap settings (often denoted as 1 or 5). The back of the wing contains the extendable airfoils we typically call flaps, which in (many) Boeing airplanes will extend at e.g. flaps 10, 15, up to 40. Its obviously not nice to see such a defect on a piece of airfoil.. then again if a plane has a hydraulic problem, they may have to fly and land without any flaps at all. Its possible to do that safely but it restricts runway allocations and has more wear&tear on brakes, tyres, etc.

So this problem on its own is not that dangerous, certainly not as dangerous as a door flying off.. then again if a pilot decides to push the plane towards the edge of its flight envelope then maybe you could get in some unexpectedly early nasty stalls (which in a Boeing usually means a rollover plunge to the ground). But I doubt any airline pilot would ever knowingly do that.

I don't see an airliner is going to fly with only 1 wing. Jet fighters use delta wings which can handle much extremer AOA before stalling. The wings on a typical plane/airliner simply don't allow for such extreme air aerobatics to handle such imbalance, as a 10-20degree pitch up would already drastically offset its stall speed.

[tggzzz]

F15 loses entire wing - and lands safely, albeit a little "hot".

Sure but there you have a 2:1 engine:human ratio...

More a case of "with enough thrust you can get a brick to fly".

Helps that the fuselage also gives lift

[jpanhalt]

Fuselage or not, what that pilot did was pretty amazing.  Another contributing factor was the near centerline thrust.  Had the engines been on the wings, I doubt it would have been controllable.

Now back to Boeing, does that mean the 727 with centerline thrust is safer than the 737/757 in the event a wing comes off?

[hans]

Even with centerline thrust.. if you lose 1 wing, the engine is still outbound on either side of your plane. The center of gravity and lift will shift, but the center of thrust won't. So it will require some big corrections to keep it flying at all.

However, having engines on the rudder and wing does allow more options for balancing this offset. So I agree losing a wing on a 727 is probably safer than on e.g. a 737, but it still sounds unsafe In particular, if the complete wing falls off... so does the main landing gear on that side. But I guess nothing is left to set fire to (e.g. the fuel in the tanks) during the inevitable crash-type landing, so thats a plus in all cases.

[schmitt trigger]

Reminds me of The Twilight’s Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 feet”.
BTW, one of the best episodes of an excellent show.

Besides being a B&W film, the episode shows it’s age with 20,000 feet. Nowadays it would be renamed Nightmare at 35,000 feet.

https://youtu.be/fXHKDb0CNjA?si=JAJGhHaPLuFQfq9x

[Alex Eisenhut]

More a case of "with enough thrust you can get a brick to fly".

Helps that the fuselage also gives lift

My late Dad, who almost made it to 100, was alive just after the dawn of aviation and saw a lot of changes in aircraft. One day he told me he thinks fighter planes aren't planes, they're rockets... (He was much more of a glider guy really) He was only half joking, the F-15, and some others, can have >1:1 thrust to weight ratio.

Ever watch the videos about the Streak Eagle breaking various records in the '70s?

And a required meme

[SeanB]

Can attest to the fighter thing. He almost made the runway, only deciding that it was time to eject when he looked up, and, despite being at the best glide angle of 35 degrees nose up, the scrub trees were visible above the front of the aircraft. Then put his trust in messrs Martin and Baker, and pulled his legs in, and kissed his ass goodbye. He felt, due to the way the ejection system has a half second delay to allow the canopy clearing charges to operate, the aircraft impact the dry river bed he was in, before he left. 200m from the runway threshold, but there was a small rise, and a rather impressive wall, before he would have landed. Nobody believed he could have gotten 12km from the point that the vulture got ingested, especially as at that time he was doing an air show.

[tom66]

Even with centerline thrust.. if you lose 1 wing, the engine is still outbound on either side of your plane. The center of gravity and lift will shift, but the center of thrust won't. So it will require some big corrections to keep it flying at all.

However, having engines on the rudder and wing does allow more options for balancing this offset. So I agree losing a wing on a 727 is probably safer than on e.g. a 737, but it still sounds unsafe In particular, if the complete wing falls off... so does the main landing gear on that side. But I guess nothing is left to set fire to (e.g. the fuel in the tanks) during the inevitable crash-type landing, so thats a plus in all cases.

I think the reality is if you do manage to lose an entire wing structure you probably lost most if not all of your hydraulic systems and electrical systems are badly damaged.  Assuming the fuselage doesn't immediately tear itself apart from the aerodynamic forces, you are really going to struggle to control the plane.  It is catastrophic.  It only took the blown bulkhead on a 747 to down JAL123, as all hydraulic systems were lost once the damage occurred to the vertical stabiliser/bulkhead.

I couldn't find a diagram for a 737, but it looks like in e.g. an A320 all three hydraulic systems pass through each of the wing structures so it would quickly render the plane uncontrollable... The redundancies are built for the assumption of something like an uncontained engine failure knocking out one or perhaps two hydraulic systems, not the aerodynamic failure of the wing.

https://scontent.flhr3-4.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/66368584_392278834735550_949041885261856768_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=jrqkKpHPrcAAX8uLq7r&_nc_ht=scontent.flhr3-4.fna&oh=00_AfAKdFCaT7pZcdCfRVimffW3H4sD7WaPjIp5aMWm2OvDpg&oe=66111F96

[tggzzz]

I think the reality is if you do manage to lose an entire wing structure you probably lost most if not all of your hydraulic systems and electrical systems are badly damaged.  Assuming the fuselage doesn't immediately tear itself apart from the aerodynamic forces, you are really going to struggle to control the plane.  It is catastrophic.  It only took the blown bulkhead on a 747 to down JAL123, as all hydraulic systems were lost once the damage occurred to the vertical stabiliser/bulkhead.

Lest we forget... UA232, which lost all hydraulic power so the only operating flying controls were the wing engines' thrust. Amazingly, the pilots kept it in the air for 40 minutes and managed to hit an airfield.

I first saw this transcript on usenet in '91, and occasionally re-read it.

Forget the movie starring James Coburn, since that focussed on the airport ground staff (and is mildly interesting and useful). Al Haynes' description of what happened on board and afterwards is far more interesting - and viscerally gripping.

NASA Ames Research Center, Dryden Flight Research Facility, Edwards, California
                             presents
                           The Crash of
                        United Flight 232
                               by
                         Capt. Al Haynes
                           May 24, 1991
https://www.iamcraig.com/files/2010/11/al_haynes_united_232.txt

[tom66]

And of course, this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_shootdown_incident

Total loss of hydraulic control, aircraft landed more or less intact with a hole in the wing (they went off the edge of the runway due to a slight loss of control at the end, but it's close enough!)

But, that said, I suspect if you combined hydraulic loss with a significant change to the aircraft's handling/aerodynamics, it's a goner, no matter how skilled your pilots are. Especially because any wing structure failure is likely to lead to loss of an engine or at least the control of that engine.

[MT]

At the time there was videos on both of them incidents.

DHL the shoot and hit and flyover with wing on fire, landing video YT buried somewhere.


UA232 was unlucky due to a slight sudden side wind they say else they likely would have settled down fine.