While fighter jets escorting a plane into JFK got wall-to-wall coverage, somehow this more dangerous incident on Tuesday received less attention:
[…][P]assengers on a recent American Airlines flight from Miami to Boston experienced a much more vivid sense of airborne peril when a 2-foot hole opened up in the plane’s fuselage about 30 minutes after takeoff.The Boeing 757 was cruising at 31,000 feet Tuesday when the cabin began to decompress rapidly — a “super-terrifying” experience, a passenger told WSVN-TV in Miami. The flight was carrying 154 passengers and six crew members.
Last month, inspectors found similar cracks in another old 757 being flown by United, and last year an older Southwest 737 had to make an emergency landing after a cabin decompression caused by a crack that turned into a “football-sized hole”.
The depressing frequency of these occurrences makes me wonder why we’re spending billions to photograph every last hair on my nuts with full-body scanners, while the planes we’re actually flying are coming apart at the seams.
Blackfrancis
If you manscaped, you wouldn’t worry so much about those scanners.
Mike
Well, the free market will ground these planes one way or another.
Also, too, Our all-volunteer commercial airline industry is the best the world has ever seen, and these customers know what they’re getting into when they sign up.
wilfred
We can’t very well attack Miami, or American Airlines, or subject flight attendants and pilots to waterboading, can we.
But Yemen. Oh, boy!
Yemeni or your life. Forever war, again.
Derelict
This is what you get when the public demands cheap airfares at any cost.
But, as our glibertarian friends will quickly point out, the public will simply not fly on airlines that kill more than two or three thousand people a year. It’s the magic of the market!!
Southern Beale
LOL LOL LOL. Maybe it’s because the TSA is filled with perverts?
Southern Beale
LOL LOL LOL. Maybe it’s because the TSA is filled with perverts?
The Grand Panjandrum
The obligatory “Where there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller” link.
liberal
OT: +1 for you obots: “U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patents
Blackfrancis
@liberal: But I thought that adoption thing was changed in Florida.
Oh, that was horrible.
jon
If we take the wings off, we’d have us some really fast trains. No decompression issues, either.
Probably not much safer, however.
Nicole
Tax cuts will fix this problem right up. What’s the problem, again?
WyldPirate
Just how in the fuck are the CEO and board members of the airlines supposed to get their Galtian rewards without cutting fucking corners?
Geez..those fuckers landed safely, too. No one was hurt. No harm, no crash. So what if they all had to change their underwear and there was the fould stench of feces in the plane afterwards.
Now where are those CEO and upper management bonuses? Those fuckers are bound to have a tee time and second yacht payments to make,
Norbrook
@jon: That’s only if the tires don’t blow out. Or the landing gear doesn’t collapse. But maybe they could market it as a thrill ride.
Dennis SGMM
This incident is in no way a result of carriers offshoring aircraft maintenance to foreign companies that receive little to no FAA oversight.
Link
spudvol
Obviously, the planes are cracking up under the stress of excess regulation, if they were free market planes they would repair themselves.
WereBear
Deregulation will solve this problem. It’s only because it’s illegal to kill passengers that airline tickets cost anything at all!
BR
It’s all security theater. On that, and on how to think about security, Bruce Schneier has a nice recent talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGd_M_CpeDI
donquijoterocket
@WyldPirate:
Which could have been collected and sold for fertilizer thereby increasing profits.
PaulW
It’s the age of the planes that are scaring me. When were these things built, 15 years ago? 20? 25? And how patchwork have they become after years of repair?
Its sounds as though the airline companies haven’t updated their fleets for ages. There ought to be an aggressive weeding out of clearly out-of-date airplanes and a program of building (hey, new jobs!) replacement state-of-the-art machines.
WereBear
@PaulW: Well yes. I believe you have hit on the whole problem; now the airlines have to buy airplanes from some other country.
These business idiots will destroy us all.
Kryptik
Yeah, fuck infrastructure and maintenance. WHat the fuck good are they if we don’t make a profit?
Carol
That’s scary. How many planes are basically being held together with duct tape? Or even literally with duct tape, glue, wire and misplaced parts? This is what deregulation and the race to the bottom has brought us. And since planes are now our only real long distance transportation option, they can hold customers hostage to this.
Long distance high-speed trains, NOW!
BR
@Carol:
I had this idea a while back that maybe some of the resistance to high speed rail is that it mainly covers urban states. (PeakVT who posts here has made some great HSR maps.)
Maybe they should try for a 50-state high-speed rail plan. (Alaska is a little tough, but they might be able to connect Juneau, Anchorage, and Fairbanks; Hawaii they can build loop trains that go around each island super fast.) If it’s required that each state has at least one line running through it, it gives them some infrastructure money, creates some local jobs, etc.
Then again, with GOPers being as stupid as they are, the only way we can convince them that this is worthwhile is to say that it’s for national security, as the military may need to be able to move large numbers of troops / national guard units in the event of an oil embargo. (Come to think of it, Eisenhower argued for the interstate highway system that way.)
Anonymous At Work
The system to scan every hair on your sac costed as much to set up, nation-wide, as 2-3 of those planes.
WyldPirate
@Carol:
This may not be as far-fetched as you might think.
This may be a military “urban legend”, but when I was in back in the mid-80s, I had more than one old-timer tell me that they used the OD-green high strength “duct tape”–which is essentially the “Gorilla Tape” that can be bought at your local Home Depot—to make temporary repairs to small cracks in helicopter rotors.
The Army jargon name for it at the time? “Hundred mile an hour” tape.
I always wondered if I was a victim of the constant “leg-pulling” that goes on in the military. I never got around to asking anyone in Aviation units that I trusted.
MikeJ
@WereBear: They don’t have to buy planes from another country. There’s a little mom & pop operation just up the road in Everett that builds a few planes.
Peter
@The Grand Panjandrum: Anyone who advises you to shave your ‘underbrush’ with a regular razor is either stupid, or maliciously lying to you. Doable, yes, pleasant, in no way.
asiangrrlMN
I was with ya until the last paragraph. Now, I have an unpleasant visual in my head. Pass me the brain bleach.
P.S. Yes. Planes actually coming apart do seem a bit worrying.
Roger Moore
@Southern Beale:
I thought it was filled with TSA gangstaz.
Carol
@WyldPirate: Maybe once it was leg -pulling, but these days between the foreign repair operations, budget-cutting and overall lowering of standards, who really knows anymore? Duct tape is cheap and can be painted over and then covered with some other substance if necessary to fool folks. And it’s available everywhere unlike some parts that can take a while to get, especially if they are no longer making the plane anymore. Think about how hard it is to get a part for a car that nobody is making anymore, and there are millions of junkers and still-puttering used models often around. What about an airplane that was built back in 1965, and the few remaining that still fly are in Ubeckistan? Ubeckistan can’t spare any planes, the models for the parts are now gone or in storage, and anyone who knows anything are retired or dead. In the old days of regulation these planes would now be recycled scrap or museum pieces.
But scrapping an ancient plane that could do super-saver routes is uneconomic to the Galtian airline lords, so people are flying Bondo airlines.
Carol
@BR: It would be a winner for Alaska. It would really open up the interior to both tourism and development. Right now Alaska tourism seems to be mostly cruise ships and bush planes that serve hunters. If there was a high-speed route from Vancouver or Seattle to Juneau or Anchorage, people could take a scenic route along the way through Canada to the end of the line. Trains can go more often than cruises, so people can enjoy Alaska in winter as well as summer. Think of train trips going north to enjoy the American equivalent of the Midnight Sun, Native villages, stunning mountains, and all of it from the window of your train.
The Dangerman
The good news for flyers is that the airlines could give a shit about passengers getting to their destination; what is really important to them is not losing the plane. Loss of that future revenue stream would be the disaster.
Basilisc
It’s this terrible anti-business attitude of the Obama administration, which is making airline executives very sad, leading them to neglect maintenance etc. Spudvol #15 is right – the solution is to remove the terrible burdensome regulations that are hampering economic growth. Oh, and cut taxes.
max
The depressing frequency of these occurrences makes me wonder why we’re spending billions to photograph every last hair on my nuts with full-body scanners
But the reason for these old planes is the full body scanners. Airlines haven’t made money in years, ever since 9/11, (before that actually but definately afterwards) absent the subsidies they receive. The security costs are tremendously expensive in time and money. So even if they updated their fleets they wouldn’t be profitable even with the subsidies. Therefore the Bush administration just let them fly older planes as long as they liked!
You could force them to stop flying so many older planes, but then they’d be forced to raise rates and/or cut back routes, and Congress wouldn’t stand for that. Lawmakers like those cheap seats.
max
[‘Our country is getting older and more worn out, and that’s just fine with the rich.’]
Sasha
Because selling new but mostly useless security apparati is more profitable to corporations than repairing the things that actually serve a purpose.
El Cid
If we didn’t have a deficit quintupled by Obama, this wouldn’t be happening. These airlines are unsure of what the future taxes and Robert Mugabe inflation might be, so they can’t invest in reinforcing or buying new planes.
sven
Ye Gods, ABCNews is stupid. After the the Shirley Sherrod incident some people hoped teh MSM had learned something about propagandists like Andrew Breitbart. It turns out they didn’t even learn anything about Andrew Breitbart himself.
stuckinred
DA RALLY IS IN DA HOUZE!!!
Davis X. Machina
Is the 757 the first generation of aircraft to rely more on modern adhesives than mechanical fasteners like rivets?
Oh, and a good read here on older aircraft lifespan
morzer
I saw a Black Panther getting on a plane once. Near a polling station.
Omnes Omnibus
@morzer:I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
walkin through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was lookin’ for the place called Lee Ho Fooks, gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: The Rally appears to be a John Legend concert right now!
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: Yeah, I saw that. Has anyone seen any estimate of the numbers currently there? The crowd looks pretty good to me.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: It really does, let’s put it at “Million Merry Pranksters”!
Lupin
Re: old planes falling apart
Another similarity between the US and the old Soviet Union. Amazing.
Still remember a bumpy flight from Helsinki to Sheremetyevo in the middle of winter over 20 years ago. I thought we were that close to death. And the smoking. Argh.
morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
You’re an excitable boy today, aintcha?
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: So you are saying that a good McEstimate would be Eleventy billion and five people?
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: FUKIN A!
Moonbatting Average
OT: The Roots and John Legend are TEARING IT UP at the Stewart/Colbert rally
stuckinred
The Myth Busters are up!
J sub D
And yet, even factoring in the passenger deaths from 9-11, flying remains far, far safer than driving the same distance.
It’s metal fatigue, caused by the flexing of the aircraft skin due to changing pressure differences between the cabin and the atmosphere as the aircraft changes altitude. It’s not new and the self interest of airlines (backed up by our altruistic, superiorly educated regulators) will ensure testing for the condition and addressing the problem is done.
MikeJ
Birthers for Hawaii statehood! Nice sign.
stuckinred
150,000 from the Mythbusters
Studly Pantload
If it please our blogging overlords, we totes could use Sanity+Fear Rally op’ thread.
Robertdsc-iphone
I can’t begin to imagine the whining if a law was passes barring offshoring of repair efforts.
Studly Pantload
Is it possible for 150,000 moderates to simultaneously behave as both a wave and a particle?
stuckinred
Studly Pantload: We’ll just take this one. The other day it was car wrecks, today planes. Lighten the fuck up!
stuckinred
Laugh like a mad scientist!
J sub D
FAA budget history 2000-2010.
Never, ever let facts get in the way of a meme.
stuckinred
Change the name of this thread to
Stuff that will RALLY hurt you!
Mike in NC
Where’s the surprise? It’s Halloween weekend and a few days before a national election, so the media is working overtime to whip up the hysteria factor.
Decrepit airplanes = boring. Scary Yemeni terrorists = we’re all gonna die!
ruemara
Dude, you got terrorist nuts.
Besides, angels will keep us aloft, as long Saint Sarah Grifter is our Sparkly President for Life.
Mnemosyne
@Mike in NC:
Also, too, al-Qaeda doesn’t spend millions of dollars on TV advertising like United and American do.
Joshua
A couple of years back, I was on a Delta flight out of LAX where, also about 30 minutes after takeoff, a 5-foot or so panel on the leading edge of the left wing flipped up and got stuck in place. The plane was able to turn back around and land safely, and we all got transferred to a different flight, but still.
Chris
Napoleon had the right idea about this sort of thing. (He forced the owners of ammunitions factories to live on the grounds. Amazingly, the explosions that had been regular events, stopped happening.)
In this case, we just need to require that the CEOs and their families fly on their own airlines, rather than private corporate jets. The safety records of the planes will magically improve, even though “absolutely nothing” will change in corporate policy (they will claim).
mclaren
The answer is obvious: when sadistic conscienceless corporations willfully murder thousands of people by scrimping on safety to boost profits, that’s capitalism.
But when a lone nutjob blows up a plane, that’s terrorism.
In fact, capitalism in increasingly turning into terrorism, courtesy of terrorist corporations run amok. Instead of sending jets to bomb Iran, we should be sending jets to bomb Boeing and SAIC and AIG and Citigroup.
mclaren
@WyldPirate:
This is no urban legend. The Apache helicopter rotors were infamous for delaminating. The problem first showed up in the first Gulf War and has since appeared in Robinson Aircraft helicopters. In fact, the FAA issued a binding airworthiness directive requiring owners of Robinson helicopters to check for and fix the problem. Replacing the rotors costs $16,000 to $47,000 per rotor — but the FAA approved an alternative fix: duct-taping the rotor blades with special milspec duct tape.
Here’s the letter by the FAA approving the duct-tape fix.
Unbelievable.
FAA actually stands for “Felonious Abdication of Authority.”
Triassic Sands
Because even if these planes crash and kill everyone on board, they won’t cost sitting politicians their seats. One successful terrorist attack could end quite a few political careers, beginning with the president, ten crashed airliners won’t matter at all politically as long as they’re the fault of the airlines and not Homeland Security.
With the Republicans in charge of the House, I’d expect instantaneous impeachment of Obama in the event a major terrorist attack on a US target succeeds. Wouldn’t that prove he’s a Muslim/Communist/Socialist/Nazi ?