This is just the typical news cycle that happens after a large scale aviation incident gets swept up by the public.
Things break on airplanes all of the time, that’s why there are redundancies built into aircraft.
From the article: “The crack was not something that affected the flight’s control or pressurisation,” the ANA spokesperson said.
The pilots identified an issue with the plane, and landed safely, the problem gets fixed and everyone moves on.
Every single airline MELs equipment on tons of flights and defer maintenance to heavy checks all of the time. It’s unlikely you have flown on a plane where every single component on the plane was in perfect working order. Even coming out of heavy checks, things get deferred due to parts availability and time constraints.
Oh dear god that is not a thing you want to have happen in an aircraft.
I wonder if Boeings massive, pervasive and systemic quality control issues, well known by the industry for at least half a decade at this point will finally actually have some actual consequences, or if we really need more and more people to die.
In this case it was an older aircraft, not a MAX 8 or 9. That probably means it’s a maintenance or fatigue problem, rather than a manufacturing quality problem.
Airbus is having record orders.
The thing is that Airbus had an issue recently too.
Though it is starting to feel that after Max had an issue recently, the media now writes articles about every little thing. Either that, or suddenly all aircrafts started breaking right now.
If you’re referring to the Japan Air crash, yes, it was an Airbus hull loss, but the plane literally landed on another plane and nobody (in the landing plane) was seriously injured or killed. That’s pretty incredible.
Aircraft Maintenance Tech here, this is not a Boeing QA problem, nor did it cause an unsafe scenario, but did prompt a return to gate. On these aircraft the windows are a laminated tempered glass/polycarbonate sandwich almost 3/4in thick and are designed to survive impacts at high speed with large birds, ice and hail. I have personally shattered one once and the window was still perfectly structurally sound. The most common fault with the windows is either a delamination of the layers that causes a warped area of vision or the electrical heating elements go bad/start arcing inside the pane. Both scenarios happen say once every 6-8 months in a 15 plane fleet, so not very often but it does happen. The maintenance limits are surprising too,only need to be replaced if it limits the pilots vision(their call) or if the heater doesn’t work or is arcing. I’ve also seen pilots call small things “cracks” or other imaginative language and it was a small thing, still needs to be fixed but not worth the drama. Long story long, things wear out, things fail but don’t worry about the windows, they are gonna hold.
Thanks for the expert analysis of this specific situation, I genuinely love learning new technical details you can only get from an experienced expert!
My comment was more generally aimed at the state of Boeing and many of its issues that certainly are the result of egregious QA lapses and corporate malfeasance in the last 5 to 10 years.
