Years ago I read a wonderful book titled Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation’s Glory Years. The book details what were undoubtedly the golden years of air travel that began in late 1958 with the introduction of the first 707 service operated by Pan Am between New York and Paris. Air travel was luxurious and exciting. There was, so to speak, optimism in the air – Pan Am ran a two-page ad showing the exciting new airliners they would soon be flying, including the Boeing SST. The Boeing SST never happened, of course, and today Pan Am itself is but a memory.
And air travel has been on a downward spiral ever since, until today we have passengers punching flight attendants and each other and farting for amusement, sometimes maybe all at the same time.
Listen up, kids! When I tell you that things were better back in the days of my youth, believe me.
They were the ‘golden years of air travel’ for people who could afford it. The rest of us rode the bus.
If you ever had to travel across the country in a Greyhound full of smokers because you couldn’t afford a months’ pay for an airline ticket, they were far from the golden years. Also, safety was worse back then.
Agreed, it absolutely was. A fascinating if morbid confluence of the golden age of jet-setters and the relatively greater danger of flight in those days was Air France flight 007. It was especially notable for the fact that the Atlanta Art Association had organized a month-long tour of the art treasures of Europe, and 106 members of this elite club were returning home on this flight when it failed to leave the ground on takeoff at Paris Orly airport in June, 1962. All 122 passengers and eight crew members perished; two flight attendants somehow survived.
I’m not entirely sure about “nothing wrong with the design” but more in an academic way (personal opinions on door vs plug, certification basis questions) and I agree it does appear that the design was, likely, “compliant” to the applicable standards and the root cause of this event is a manufacturing quality issue. That’s why I mentioned both type certificate holder and manufacturing certificate holder. They are two different processes with different responsibilities and oversight but in this case Boeing holds both.
I just stated it in response to the idea of “the supplier’s fault”, to say that it wouldn’t absolve Boeing unless the supplier was actually hiding data or something like that. The nature of those certificates is that the holder is ultimately responsible for the final product, so oversight and enforcement of quality standards is part of the holder’s responsibility.
I absolutely agree this is on Boeing. Even if they use outside suppliers the final product is Boeing’s responsibility. Boeing should bear all the blame. It’s up to Boeing to sort out who makes parts for them and ensure they are building to high standards.
My first flight was in the mid 60’s as a kid and was probably on a DC-7. Everybody dressed up.
Skip 20 years and people were wearing shorts and sandals with feet sticking out in the aisle complete with gross looking toe nails.
I rode a Greyhound across the country and back about the same time as the mid 80’s flight I described. The people on the bus were better behaved. It’s not about money.
Pan Am was the reason behind the 747. They wanted something spectacular to enter the market while the SST was designed. Both the 747 and the Concord first flew in 1969 as well as the 1st landing on the Moon. It’s been downhill ever since.
The Federal prosecutors don’t care about anything but drug crimes. Some FA got insulted and punched a couple times? That’s as important to a Federal prosecutor as a jaywalking ticket is to your local county prosecutor. IOW, not at all.
The airlines’ have their individual no-fly lists subject only to their own discretion. That’s good enough for the Feds.
No. That would run afoul of anti-monopoly anti-collusion laws. Right now each carrier has their own separate list with no sharing.
The industry spokes-agency About A4A | Airlines For America has been clamoring for DOT/DOJ to either carve out a limited anti-trust exception for this purpose only, or for the Feds to create an official bad behavior no-fly list of their own that all airlines could contribute to and subscribe to.
So far they’re pleading into deaf ears.
More completely, the Alaska jet was assembled correctly at Spirit, then partly disassembled in an unapproved manner at Boeing, then reassembled badly, then paperwork about the disassembly / reassembly was fumbled or skipped deliberately so an inspection was never performed of the shoddy work. Which then got out into public.
They certainly were. OTOH, a coach flight NYC to London cost the equivalent of $5000 one way back then. Only “nice” people could afford to travel. And those folks had not yet been converted into Chads / Karens.
any info that you can share with us concerning how the no flight list practically works?
Let’s assume I was the person who sucker punched the FA … and buy another ticket - say - via a concentrator (booking.com or whatnot) one month before the flight…
I assume at one moment of time I’d receive an email revoking the ticket and reverse-charging my CC.
If there was a universal ban the notice would be at the time of the the person’s ban. But if for some reason they missed it the unpleasantness at the gate wouldn’t delay the plane.
I do not know anything for certain about how this stuff functions internally. Here are some surmises …
Airline X has a list of names they will not sell their product to. Probably including whatever identifying numbers (passport, SSN, DL, credit cards, etc) and addresses the airline was able to gather from these yahoos purchase record and their later interaction with the police and courts.
The existing travel security laws require a positive ID check of every passenger before boarding. Somehow and someway along the line.
Put those together and I’ll suggest many attempts to buy a ticket will be stopped. The harder the troublemaker tries to disguise the purchase (e.g. have a friend buy the ticket, use a different CC, etc.) the later in the process the fact he’s on airline X’s no-fly list will come to light. Worst case when they’re about to be issued a boarding pass.
In your specific example of using www.booking.com to buy the ticket, that will probably fail at the purchase attempt; that website is directly talking to Airline X’s ticket sales engine in real time and if the troublemaker is using the same identity info, the airline’s computer will probably make the connection right then.
Given the number of airlines in the USA, if I was banned from airline X, I’d find it far easier to fly on airlines Y & Z & A & B with no hassle or risk than to try to fool X again and perhaps get turned away at the gate.
Boeing had applied for a temporary exemption to allow a the -7 to be certified with the engine inlet issue " while they worked on a fix" over the next 18 months.
They just withdrew the application.
I suspect their communication with the FAA resulted in them being volun-told to withdraw before the FAA had to publicly deny the request (exemptions are public data) but we will never know.
This will delay certification of the -7 into at least mid 2025, apparently.
Loving the quote from Senator Duckworth in her communication to the FAA to deny the exemption:
“Boeing forfeited the benefit of doubt a long time ago when it comes to trusting its promises about the safety of the 737 MAX.”
As an airworthiness nerd, this story is like a soap opera. What will happen next? Will the -7 get certified? Is -10 an evil twin with a few loose screws? (Too soon?)
I saw that in my morning feed. Unsurprising in terms of political optics, but still illogical.
If the cowling design is that unsafe, the MAX-8 & MAX-9 should be grounded until they can the fixed. At a minimum, no more -8s & -9s should be delivered until they’re fixed. OTOH, if it’s not that unsafe, the MAX-7 and MAX-10 certification should not be held up on this particular basis.
Given that Boeing & FAA know that the very different NG cowling is not robust enough and is now undergoing redesign and eventual fleet-wide retrofit, and given that the MAX cowling was designed more robust from the git-go, it would be verrry interesting to have the engineering data to know whether a heat-damaged MAX cowling is more or less robust than an intact NG cowling.
I think this is more a case of optics than any different safety assessment. The new and old planes are equally safe (or equally unsafe) but the idea of delivering a “brand new” variant with a hazardous or catastrophic categorized noncompliance issue with only an interim fix is unpalatable, especially in light of the recent other issues. Boeing clearly had to get their ass kicked into actually addressing this problem as it’s dragged on for years, and it seems to finally have happened.
With a better safety record on the program and no active investigations and audits, the exemption possibly would have been granted.
I have zero access to the engineering data, but am I understanding correctly that it’s up to the crew to notice 5 minute intervals? You’d think an interim fix would at least have included a relay timer …! Though I’m pretty useless at anything pertaining to electrical and avionics stuff, definitely not my wheelhouse!
The “interim fix” is just a procedural reminder to do the same thing you were always supposed to do. Zero hardware. The “terminating fix” is the cowling that doesn’t delaminate under the heat load.
There is no existing mechanism within the system that could be leveraged automatically switch the anti-ice off in higher-than-permitted temperatures. So you’re talking about inventing new black boxes, certifying those, installing new control panels with different momentary switches, etc.
All of these things are more difficult because the 737 cockpit UI and below-decks control systems are 1960s stuff: discrete toggle switches, directly wired light bulbs, and relays. If the airplane and cockpit was already mostly computerized, it’d be a LOT simpler to retrofit more and better “brains” into the existing muscles.
Oh I have a good sense of the scope of work required, having participated (though not deeply) in an icing project on old aircraft types, but it “feels like” a “turn switch off after 5 minutes” relay would be simple, though I assume you actually want it to stay on longer if you are in icing conditions? That’s definitely more complicated to detect and design.
I really haven’t thought about it much, but I know the issue has gone on for a while and I’m curious about what’s holding it back.
I don’t know enough about the aircraft to speculate more, I just have idle thoughts on the lines of design and investigation I’d consider given a vague topic summary.
As a lay observer with no particular expertise, this seems to be to be a simple, broad statement: “You can no longer be trusted to decide on your own whether your aircraft are safe.”
It’s not an analysis of the specific airplane, it’s a blunt diagnosis of organizational failure.
