Fly Biden Airlines! Where Diversity comes first!
No project is too stupid for the Biden administration.
The Federal Aviation Administration–subordinate to a Dept. of Transportation run by an idiot–has launched a recruiting drive pitched to persons with “severe intellectual disabilities” (!), plus hearing and vision impairments, missing limbs, and “partial or complete paralysis” (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12962801/FAA-recruit-workers-severe-intellectual-psychiatric-disabilities.html). The goal is More Diversity, No Matter What. Who ever said you have to be as fit as a fiddle to be an airline pilot or an air traffic controller?
Meanwhile, a door flew off a Boeing 737 in flight, narrowly averting a disaster. Which raises the point that whoever is inspecting the airplane before it takes off had better be very good at his or her job. “Diversity” must not be a consideration.
New slogan for the airlines and their passengers: “Do you feel lucky today?”
Branch Rickey wisely said, “Luck is the residue of design.” That is, persons who are thorough in their preparations, conscientious, painstaking, and careful, tend to be a lot “luckier” than those who aren’t.
Well, hell, the plain crashed… but at least we had a lot of Diversity up there.
Good one, Lee. Oh, how we need Trump back in the White House. Pray the Deep State does not assassinate him.
The buzz today was about them staging a military coup. To save Democracy, dontcha know.
The 737 door plug incident is shameful. I believe it was a simple mistake, retaining bolts left out, but that should have been caught in inspection. This appears to be a manufacturing issue, that aircraft was quite new, certain,y too new to have had a C check, so it’s unlikely that the interior panel covering that door plug had been removed, since delivery.
Just an opinion, but I doubt that the earlier pressurization errors were related to the door plug problem. As I understand it, the pressurization errors were caused by one of the redundant computers going offline. Besides that, if that plug was leaking, the interior panels would have been deformed, and in all likelihood, it would have blown out at altitude. Depressurization events are not usually subtle.
So, the question is whether Spirit left out tne retaining bolts, or if the door plug was removed after Boeing received the fuselage. In either case, someone signed off on that door plug without verifying that the bolts were installed, torqued, and that the Cotter Pins were installed.
When there are maintenance and inspection errors, it can be issues of incompetence on the part of the workers, but it can also be a reflection of management problems.
I remember a situation where some very non-critical nuts were left off a passenger seat assembly. It wasn’t a safety of flight item, but it happened because the tech was being rushed due to, of all things, a company barbecue, and the inspector didn’t catch the omission. A few months later, that same inspector was fired for failing a drug test.
This was a minor, minor problem, but it points up how failures develop, in complex systems. Airplanes are complex collections of simpler subassemblies and systems. Every part of flying, or maintaining an aircraft, is carefully laid out in detailed manuals, and these manuals must be present while the work is being done, even if the tech has done this same task hundreds of times.
One task I was assigned involved overhauling a fuel to oil heat exchanger for a JT8D engine. It was a housing where fuel entering the engine was run through tubes which were surrounded by engine oil, so the fuel got warmer and the oil got cooler. It was very simple, and I could do the work blindfolded, but I had to have the manual pages present, whenever I worked on one of these, and when I had disassembled the units, sent the internals off to be cleaned, and had gone through all the steps, it had to be signed off by an inspector, before it could be put into inventory as a serviceable component. It was very regimented, but I’d much rather deal with some regimentation than make a mistake which could become a safety of flight item.
So, from the information currently available, it appears that two mistakes happened: a tech left out some critical bolts and an inspector didn’t do a thorough check before signing off.
If unqualified people are being used to perform these jobs, that is a violation of FARs (Federal Aviation Regulations) and should be corrected. If there are too few qualified people available, then they need to up the incentives, in order to attract talented and skilled people.
Yeahbut, yeahbut! What about Diversity?
Here’s diversity. Anyone, of any ethnicity, or what have you, can work in aviation, so long as they have the required licenses, and that they perform work that is up to spec and promotes aviation safety. It’s called equality, which is fine, but in critical fields, you can’t lower the standards of safety.
The standard should be, “Either you can do the job or you can’t. Nothing else matters. Especially your race.” But that would put the Democrat Party and probably 95% of our college profs and public schoolteachers out of business.