Oh no, not again! Plane leaves with parts exposed
After revelations that an American Airlines plane flew from Dallas to Paris, even though a “large panel” fell off the underside as the flight took off, passengers might be forgiven for asking if their plane is operating without a critical piece of equipment.
On April 20, an American Airlines Boeing 767, lost a panel from the plane’s underbelly that was approximately three feet wide and four to five feet in length. This happened approximately 10-14 minutes after take-off yet proceeded all the way to its final destination in spite of crew members “feeling a very strong vibration in the back” and then “hearing a loud explosion”.
The quoted excerpts are taken from an internal email circulating among American employees.
The email continues:
Cockpit was notified and apparently, the Capt. deemed it not worth returning to DFW and continued onto CDG and well, surprise surprise in CDG!
99.999 % of the cockpit’s we all fly with and are friends with would have gone back in a heart beat and never questioned it, but this MIA based Capt. decided that the eyes and ears of this cabin crew were not reliable enough. Sad! Happy trails everyone!
To be fair, there are no mirrors or video cameras that would allow for monitoring of the bottom panels on the plane and reportedly the captain assumed that whatever the crew heard must have been in some way related to a cargo shift because there were no other warning signs indicating a problem.
Except some of the crew on the 10 hour flight reported afterwards that it was “unusually hot and a little shaky from time to time”. (You can read the full email exchange between employees here.)
This incident begs the question: exactly how often does something like this happen?
In a report on the fatal crash of an Indonesian flight, it was determined that the Boeing 737’s tail was missing a variety of parts.
In March of this year, somewhere over Maryland, a wing panel blew off a US Airways plane. Investigators later said they found cracked wing clips on the aircraft — and on seven of the airline’s 18 older Boeing 757s.
A fatal Concorde crash in Paris in 2000 was apparently caused by a metal strip from another aircraft that damaged the Concorde on takeoff.
SriLankan Airlines customers staged a “minor revolt” when they were re-boarded on Airbus A340 which they had been on a day earlier when it sliced through a wing of a stationary British Airways 747 at Heathrow, delaying departure by 24 hours. The next day, they were amazed to find themselves boarding the same plane for their ten-hour flight from London to Colombo. A passenger said of the cabin crew: “They assured us it didn’t matter.”
I believe that I also would have staged a “minor revolt”.
With airfares reaching into record territory, the least we can expect is to fly with an airworthy plane.
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