Fired engineer calls 787's plastic fuselage unsafe

[nick2007]

Re: Damage assessment/detection
I imagine significant events (tail strike) would trigger a thorough Non Destructive Testing programme for surrounding structure to look for delaminations etc. I don't know much about NDT in composites, but as far as I know, acoustic methods are the most effective (there may be others). I know of one method used for quality control in the manufacture of CFRP flight control surfaces that involves passing running water over the part, and then elsewhere on the part monitoring the sound waves generated by the running water - thus irregularities can be detected this way.
In the field I imagine conventional ultrasonic testing would be used. Though this is only one NDT procedure, and it has its limitations. Anyone have some more details about composite NDT?

Re: Carbon fibre ship masts
As far as I know - these are generally constructed with a lot of unidirectional material. I am guessing that unidirectional material would not be used to so great an extent in 787 fuselage primary structure, thus the failure modes can't really be compared.