nourishing obscurity

3 Responses to “Boeing, Boeing … gone?”

1. Amfortas, on January 11th, 2013 at 10:19 Said:

   With the very best will and effort in the world, no highly complex machine is going to work perfectly all the time, and aircraft are amongst the most complex machines humanity has ever conceived of and built. ‘Parts’ number in the hundreds of thousands. They are subject to enormous forces. Even quite simple devices are likely to have instances of failure, especially in the ‘proving’ early use phase where problems are identified by ‘real’ usage, and corrected.

   I know, I know: the objection is that flying accidents and failures are/can be catastrophic. And the answer is that the effort put into aircraft safety is commensurate. But…. nothing is perfect. Diminishing returns and all that.

   
   
2. James Higham, on January 11th, 2013 at 13:06 Said:

   I suppose it’s just nice when the tail assembly doesn’t come adrift.

   
   
3. ivan, on January 11th, 2013 at 20:43 Said:

   It appears that there is now going to be a full airworthiness investigation because of cracks appearing in the cockpit windows.

   A lot of this could be down to too much flex in the airframe because of the structural material. What they need to do is flex testing to destruction as they did with the Comet when it started having problems.