"Across the five aircraft, there is little consistency in the locations of the errant parts..."
Gulp- loose fasteners all over the place in the door, surely all the others are tight {engine falls off}
One product was melting DIN-rail terminal blocks which used a copper busbar to feed power to a group.
I was given a melted, burned section and at my desk, taking a screwdriver found some of the screws were loose.
Manufacturing manager insisted it was bad engineering, not rated for the load, redesign it etc. I think it was 20-30A.
I gave him a screwdriver and yelled "here, check for yourself!" because it was his underlings that obviously couldn't tighten screws properly. I think they get lazy and suffer fatigue because all they do all day is tighten screws. Some were tight, others loose so that inconsistency told me it was a manufacturing problem.
He would not take the screwdriver and check the torque, he just kept blaming engineering instead. It was quite a fiasco in front of all his staff, because I didn't back down.
"Across thefive{it's now ten} aircraft, there is little consistency in the locations of the errant parts..."
Gulp- loose fasteners all over the place in the door, surely all the others are tight {engine falls off}
Lower hinge mount to door, upper bolts found loose as well but not on this aircraft.
Lower hinge mount to door, upper bolts found loose as well but not on this aircraft.
A colleague pointed out to me that there are witness marks all over the bolts, which suggests the possibility of overtightening by someone, and then later loosening.
Well fingers will be pointed at assembler, the integrator and the manufacturer, plus the suppliers of the sub assemblies. But the blame from the FAA will land on the one who stuck the nameplate on the fuselage, because they are the ones who signed off on it. Loose bolts, missing ones, are not something you want to find on an airframe that is still under warranty, though there are still way too many instances of poor assembly, especially electrical wiring, where IIRC one instance was a mistake in the fire suppression wiring, where firing the bottles resulted in the working engine being snuffed, because the wiring was crossed to the bottles, and another where the fire indicators showed the wrong engine being on fire.
The NTSB update today was very well done, professional despite journalists clearly not understanding how the door plug (or a bolt lol) works, and bombarding them with stupid questions, cockamamie theories as to why this happened.
The penny drops "these investigations take 12-18 months to complete".
Could this accident become a “Comet” moment for Boeing, for which De Havilland never recovered?
I am NOT saying that the failures are similar or related. What I mean is that Boeing, which was already lagging behind Airbus, will see its commercial passenger business eroding further to the point of no return?