Comment by toomuchtodo
21 hours ago
Likely no impact. It was departing with ~75 tonnes of fuel and suffered an unrecoverable mechanical failure.
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/flight-tracking-news/majo...
21 hours ago
Likely no impact. It was departing with ~75 tonnes of fuel and suffered an unrecoverable mechanical failure.
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/flight-tracking-news/majo...
> suffered an unrecoverable mechanical failure
But was un-discoverable? Or un-preventable? Seems plane inspectors and safety-related roles were affected and have been furloughed:
> But for the people involved in inspecting our planes to ensure they follow Federal Aviation Administration safety standards, the situation is more complicated. While principal aviation inspectors were told to keep working, assistant-level inspectors and other support staff were sent home and then had to be recalled.
https://archive.ph/rEpTx
Of course it was not unpreventable, though it might turn out that preventing it would have been unreasonably expensive.
But, the FAA inspectors are not responsible for making sure planes are safe to fly. They are responsible for making sure the people whose job that actually is, are doing their jobs effectively. That’s a critical difference.
It’s UPS maintenance personnel who are responsible for making sure that UPS planes are safe to fly. Yes, it’s possible that there is some institutional failure at UPS, that could have been caught if FAA inspectors were working in the past 30 days, but this isn’t the most likely scenario, and the root cause and responsibility (in this hypothetical) would still lie with UPS and not the FAA and the shutdown.
Aviation regulations are updated in FAFO basis("written in blood" is the more common version).
Thats kind of insincere given how much safer flying is compared to driving a car. Modern flight is not dangerous, its just more spectacular when failures happen.
7 replies →
The maintenance and inspection tends to be done by MROs, and any institutional issue within UPS's MRO would have been identified before the shutdown by the FAA and other regulators.
But based on your comment history, you aren't from the US, have not ever visited America, do not care to visit America, and haven't interacted with Americans, so I doubt you have on the ground experience with the US. But that also leads to the question of why you even care to comment on our affairs if you dislike us to such a degree.