Rip, any truth to this?

[CyranoAH]

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1231468,00.html?f=rss

Boeing Jet Parts Scare

Families are flying off on their summer holidays on potentially dangerous aircraft, Sky News has learned.

In an exclusive report our US correspondent Andrew Wilson examines claims by two former auditors of Boeing that the aircraft manufacturer built some of its aircraft in the knowledge that certain parts were defective.

Wilson's six-month investigation has unearthed allegations that parts were wrongly made, had holes drilled in the wrong positions or did not fit properly on the aircraft.

The parts were used in assembling the Boeing 737NG between 1994 and 2002.

EasyJet is among the British airlines who have bought the 737, without knowing of the claims.

Boeing said the allegations were "without merit" and stressed a multi-tiered control process in place for decades has been effective in maintaining quality and safety.

Former auditors Taylor Smith and Jeannine Prewitt told Sky that Boeing accepted defective parts for 737s and other jets from Ducommun, a Californian supplier, and installed them even though they knew them to be faulty and potentially dangerous.

The components - which are crucial to the safety of an aircraft's fuselages - are alleged to have had incorrectly drilled holes and other physical defects that make them more likely to fail.

Ms Prewitt said safety was compromised by "so many manufacturing and quality discrepancies", building the planes should have stopped immediately but did not.

Ducommun did not return any calls to Sky.

[AquaShrimp]

Of course theres truth to it.  

TWA 800 was a Boeing 747 that just exploded in mid-air on its own.

Remember all the Boeing 737s that were crashing during the 90s?  Defective rudders.

Heres how simple mistakes can multiply quickly in the aerospace industry.

Chuck Yeager, the famed test pilot, was flying an F-86 Sabre over a lake in the Sierras when he decided to buzz a friend's house near the edge of the lake. During a slow roll, he suddenly felt his aileron lock. Says Yeager, "It was a hairy moment, flying about 150 feet off the ground and upside down." A lesser pilot might have panicked with fatal results, but Yeager let off on the G's, pushed up the nose, and sure enough, the aileron unlocked. Climbing to 15,000 feet, where it was safer, Yeager tried the manoeuvre again. Every time that he rolled, the problem reoccurred.

Yeager knew three or four pilots had died under similar circumstances, but to date, investigators were puzzled as to the source of the Sabre's fatal flaw. Yeager went to his superior with a report, and the inspectors went to work. They found that a bolt on the aileron cylinder was installed upside down. Eventually, the culprit was found in a North American plant. He was an older man on the assembly line who ignored instructions about how to insert that bolt, because, by golly, he knew that bolts were supposed to be placed head up, not head down. In a sad commentary, Yeager says that nobody ever told the man how many pilots he had killed.

[Reynolds]

Well, out here in hawaii, all of our 737s are soooo old, theyd have fallen apart right now... actually, whule on deffective 737s, anyone hear about the Aloha Convertable? The first 1/3 of a 737s roof just ripped off mid-flight. They were about 10,000 up. It just ripped off, but only one person died. They landed it just fine. That was the last accident to happen out here with a '37, and that was like 10 years ago. We havnt got a new A/C since then...

[Ripsnort]

Not sure, as I'm not in the Spares division..however I do know that all of our aircraft are FAA certified.

[nirvana]

Car manufacturers do it all the time....

[Masherbrum]

Originally posted by nirvana
Car manufacturers do it all the time....

shhhhhhhhhhh.  

[Reynolds]

Originally posted by Ripsnort
Not sure, as I'm not in the Spares division..however I do know that all of our aircraft are FAA certified.

The Aloha convertable had JUST undergone a safety check.

[Furball]

such a disgrace would never happen at Airbus.

[CyranoAH]

It may already happened, but this time, the whistleblowers are Boeing's