Faa/boeing 787 Safety Stitch-up
 

Can anyone suggest a reason why:

The FAA has quietly decide to loosen the stringent
fuel-tank safety regulations written after the fuel
tank explosion of TWA800.

Ex employees of Boeing now working for the FAA
are not happy.

YES,

Maybe to hurry up the orders!!;)

WTDWL.

quietly :confused:

I thought that the FAA coulld not relax any regulation without public comment from knowlegeable folks like yourself.

Have you checked the Federal Register to see if they are asking for comment before deciding what is in the best interests of the public?

Or is it possible that what you are refering is not a regulation?

could you post more specifics and sources about what you are refering?

Hmmm, rather than there actually being a defined problem, it appears to me that more than a few personal egos are the problem...:}

from the Seattle Times reference

Well there are regulations and then there are FAA ideas for acceptable compliance (policy).

If you want to relax the regulation then you need to put forth a reason for equivalent safety being provided and let the world see what you propose and comment.

OTOH if you realize that later on that your preferred method of compliance won't cut it, then you can change it and still show that you meet the intent of the rule. There are many subjective arguments to be made here and one does need to see both sides before forming a defensible opinion.

In my view there are plenty of safety experts around having to do with aircraft certification standards to weigh in on something in the public domain. So I'm not very interested in abreviated arguments cited in a news article.

A comic was fired from "Saturday Night Live" after he said they had found the ignition source of TWA-800 - a missile.

There have been a lot of people, including TWA workers and maintenance and engineering at other airlines, who did not and do not believe the FBI/FAA conclusions.

Replacement with nitrogen can't hurt.

GB

I'm not up to speed on how the airframe is composed ref carbon composites and fasteners on the 787 and it maybe totally different to todays aircraft.... But whenever inspections are carried out on todays aircraft post lightning strikes, there's more often than not damage to fasteners/skin on the fuselage and sometimes damage to carbon composite structure such as thrust reverser halves which normally requires them to be changed. Sometimes the belly fairing glass fibre panels have damage around fastener heads where the aluminium flash coating has been previuosly damaged.

I'm sure Boeing have done there sums and will fully test the airframe in high static/ lightning conditions but i can't help but think that no airframe bonding is 100% and hidden damage caused by static build up/ lightning strikes may cause structural failures, all be it minor, in the future.

As for composite wing structure, it would be interesting to see how the bonding is carried out between fasteners and structure and what precautions are required during manufacture and maintenace to allow correct bonding during fastener installation and replacement.

As heavy maintenance check intervals are increased and less intensive will there be more stringent checks post lghtning strikes than todays aircraft as i would imagine composite failure would tend to propogate from minor damage far quicker than aluminum alloys, specially in primary structure exposed to not only dynamic and pressurisation loads but also all kinds of contaminents from de-icing fluid to toilet sewage?

My 5p worths not a lot!
 

Nothing to do with the fact that boeing's fix infringed a patent owned by Airbus then????

So forgetting the fuel, what about the flying controls located in/on the wings? The carbon structure's integrity post strike?? At least it's not FBW so that's out of the equation.

The more you look at the companies history, Grandfather rules bypassing decades of safety legislation etc, etc it starts to look less than appealing.