It’s very common to get comments here about car sensors failing. Especially for passenger airplanes, it seems like that sort of failure has to be very carefully analyzed, and fully anticipated it will occur from time to time, with a complete fair-safe plan to accommodate such a failure built into the design.
I believe it is called multiple redundancies for critical systems but some are missed until a failure. Like the hydraulic lines in the tail that were severed when the rear engine blew apart. Don’t recall which plane that was. Gonna happen. Even on a ride at the fair you can have a bolt or pin come apart and off you go. Life is a risk and a lot of things come down to a failure by a low level employee. That’s why I like to see everyone make money and pilots that have been shot at before.
True enough, sometimes there’s no way to anticipate this sort of failure. But even with engines breaking up and damaging the steering hydraulics, the reason the engine breaks up may be pilot error, rather than engine failure. That occurred on one airplane flying through a hailstorm, the engine got clogged with ice. The proper procedure when that happens — according to the tv show Mayday – is to to reduce power and fly to a lower elevation, then do a de-clog procedure. The pilot may instead panic and try to increase engine power, usually not the right thing to do in that situation.
Heh heh, when I was in ground school, the big issue was carb icing. Long time ago.
Show me one example when the government forced a safety recall from a broken window crank. I’ll wait.
Oh, and your understanding of the 737MAX issue is woefully short of reality. Boeing was catering to air carriers who wanted to avoid having to recertify existing 737 pilots and who didn’t want to pay what they’d have to pay for a from-scratch designed new plane. The real safety problem was that Boeing was essentially allowed to regulate itself. Had the government done its job and regulated Boeing appropriately, the MAX would never have gotten off the drawing board as it did.
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The aircraft that Bing mentioned which suffered a rear engine explosion and severed hydraulic lines was the DC-10 that hit the Iowa corn field.
The cause was not the much maligned DC-10 itself but a far too common maintenance issue. A turbine disc with an existing fracture was not checked during the dye process.
Same goes for the DC-10 which crashed at O’Hare. Poor maintenance procedure which killed everyone on a board plus some on the ground.
Or the Alaska Airlines plane which crashed off shore near Los Angeles. Failure to grease the jackscrew on the horizontal elevator led to the deaths of everyone. All because of a missing handful of grease due to maintenance shortcuts.
Way too much of this kind of thing and very few are ever punished.
Instead, another advisory is issued and on to the next crash…
It’s amazing how many airline crashes are due to failure to follow simple common sense maintenance and proper procedures. There are usually at least two problems. One example is the passenger airplane that completely ran out of gas at 30,000 + feet, midway between Toronto and Edmonton Canada. According to the “Mayday” tv show, they elected to take off even though they knew the fuel gauge wasn’t working, add to that the back-up fail-safe procedure which verifies the amount of fuel pumped is the proper amount, well that failed to detect the problem too. On the positive side, using heroic flying almost beyond belief, the pilot was able to safely land the plane. On a drag strip believe it or not.
The infamous Gimli Glider. A case study in making sure your unit conversions are correct. They dipped the tank because of the non-working gauge. The dip reading was in centimeters, which the captain converted to kilograms using the density figure for pounds. Oops.
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